At Home With James Still On Dead Mare

At Home WHh James Still On Dead Mare By Albert Stewart About a year after James Still resigned as librarian at Hindman Settlement School and moved to Dead Mare on Burgey's Branch of Little Carr Creek to spend his time in writing and pastoral living, I made my first visit there, walking the fifteen or more miles across country from my home on Ball's Fork of Troublesome Creek to Dead Mare during a school vacation. Although it was not uncustomary for one in the hills to decide upon the whim of the moment to go to take a night with a friend or kin, or to not even go on purpose but to just "happen by" as Robert Frost's characters sometimes do, it was not customary to visit a stranger out of curiosity - although this, too, was often done. So, if some pattern of friendship, based on common interests and sustained by intermittent correspondence and visits had not been established long before, I would never have made that first journey to Dead Mare - and someone else would be writing this paper. Perhaps, both pride and reticence have prevented my making pilgrimages to shrines or cultivating first contacts with artists or noted people. Perhaps, too, I felt some wordless respect for the right to privacy of the individual. Even then I think there was some fear of being accused of borrowing prestige. Whatever the reasons might have been, I think they were no longer to be considered with James Still and myself - if they ever were. There was, beneath the common interest in literature and writing and the almost inchoate longing for statement, the genuine liking for the quality of the person. It is true that James Still had the role of the initiated and I that of the uninitiated. Fame is a young man's fancy, and James Still already had a fair-pretty measure of fame. As for me, I was famous to myself. I was famous because all of the world reflected in me became fabulous, and I was yet too naive to know and separate the inner and outer worlds. And, too, I was in the process of discovering a world, new and quite different from the simple and marvelous world of childhood. And it is quite natural that I should have been often cast in the role of stranger to myself during this time. So, I don't know what I was to James Still then. Certainly there must have been something entertaining, even amusing, in my naivete, in my seriousness; and if I was all but inarticulate word-wise, the deep longing to speak the passion aroused in me by the world of experience must have come through in a kind of intensity of being that could eventually provide the power for writing. Of these things, I felt James Still was intimately aware; and if my talk of myself doesn't reveal how he looked at me, it at least reveals what he was to me. I do not remember when I first met James Still. It was sometime during the school year of 1932-33. He had come to Hindman as a recreational worker in the summer of 1932 and remained to become librarian of the Hindman Settlement School and, for a while, teacher of typing. Now, it doesn't seem that I ever met him at all. It is as if this was a great area of my life that was there all the time, but which came into conscious perception only when the time was ripe for it. All things are present in memory, and time is a great pool in which a myriad of fishes swim. So, although I met James Still on a vacation during my first year of college in 1932, and though this seems timeless in my memory, and though I had read his poems in magazines and had brief talks with him during other vacations, it was not until I graduated from college in 1936 that anything like a permanent friendship began to develop. In 1937 and 1938 we kept running into each other as observers wherever the human comedy or tragedy gathered about...