"Not Bad for a Brier"

"Not Bad for a Brier" Robert Martin I was asked to write this piece about Jim Wayne's career as a teacher ofthe German language and its literature at Western Kentucky University from 1963 to 1996 because our hoes rang together over twenty-five years in the department where German is taught. Tom Baldwin with roots in knobby north Georgia, I, Ozark Bob, and mountain man Jim Wayne did yeoman work in the kraut field long years together. All three ofus Briers ofsorts, we taught, talked, fished, andchopped firewoodtogether. Good hills make good neighbors. How any of us got from where we were to where we went and why are questions requiring troublesome presumptions for their answer. In addressing the question howJimWayne came to German studies and why, I'm reminded ofa line from his poem "Sharing": "I'm afraid I may be found in someone else's car trying to start it with my office key." When asked last September at WKU what advice he would offer an aspiring poet, Wendell Berry answered: "First, get a job!" This is not why Jim Wayne hired on to teach German at WKU. He stated once in an interview: "I just like to hang around words." Hanging around German just doubled his fun. Actually, it tripled his fun, for he met his future wife Mary Ellen in his first German class at Berea, where he minored in German . She was his teacher. Moreover, his best offer of financial aid for graduate studies came not from departments ofEnglish literature but from the foreign language department at Vanderbilt University. He accepted this offer also because he felt that working in an unrelated field would interfere less with his own literary projects and plans. An effort perhaps to keep at arm's length pressures on his own themes and style. He mentioned once, too, that his parents' surnames Miller and Smith were anglicized from German Müller and Schmidt. Maybe his German studies were motivated then in part by his need to know that man in the faded unidentified photo in the family album alluded to in Newfound. But what were the particular features ofGerman literature that he found appealing? First he found in German literature traditions longer and more varied than those ofhis own, and an inclination to dog the questions ofcultural destiny and the human condition. He also felt, I'm sure, that a study ofsuch a literaDr . RobertMartin taught German at Western Kentucky University untilhe retired. He writes, aI wasJim Wayne'sfriend, colleague, and reader." 14 ture was a powerful corrective to overstating the case for a national literature , i.e., the approach which emphasizes overarching, sweeping national (versus regional) themes and styles ofa chance political entity, an antidote to cultural nationalism. German studies enabled him to compare and discover a relativism in the conventions and regularities ofliterary expression. German literature in the 1950s and 1960s was sifting through its ruins, searching for old-new starting blocks. Jim Wayne selected the works ofa woman writer ofthe nineteenth century, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, as his dissertation topic. She was a regionalist, a writer with a sense ofplace. His translation of Emil Lerperger, a twentieth century Austrian regional poet, sprang from the same concern for the level ofminute particularwhere affection for people and places can be expressed. This rather than the abstract (national) level of the general and homogeneous, where people are cut offfrom their roots and "floated like logs down to the mainstream." German studies, then, helped him sharpen his sense ofplace, helped him look to the places where people are most real, to answer how we recover ouridentities afterthe holocaustofmodernityand nationalism. Jim Wayne concentrated on those writers and genres in German literature for which he felt affinities. He did notjoin the ranks oftheprofessional Germanisten, those who cultivate the field as a science or discipline. As boundless as his genius and energies were, he did not venture into the deceptively deep pools ofGerman studies to be "floated right offhis feet," like the outsiders who fished the streams near his home in North Carolina. He had other fish to fry. In his teaching of German as in his fishing, he was after something...