Before the Appalachian Literary Renaissance, There Was Davis Grubb's The Voices of Glory

APPALACHIAN BOOKS—REVIEW ESSAY Before the Appalachian Literary Renaissance, There Was Davis Grubb's The Voices of Glory_______________________ Thomas E. Douglass Before there was an Appalachian Literary Renaissance, before the Appalachian Studies Association, before Henry Shapiro's Appalachia on My Mind, even before the term "Appalachia" was in common use referring to a particular cultural region, there was the work of Davis Grubb. Between 1953 and 1971 he had written nine published novels set in Appalachia all published by nationally prominent houses— Viking, Random House, Simon and Schuster, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Charles Scribner's Sons, Harper & Brothers—two of which were made into films The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Fools' Parade (1971). He had entered into a legendary film adaptation of The Night of the Hunter (1953) with Charles Laughton, and he had rubbed elbows with the nation's literati and the famous—Jim Jones, James Baldwin, Clifford Odetts, John Steinbeck, John Carradine, Thomas Mitchell, Robert Mitchum, Mort Sahl, Miles Davis, Lenny Bruce, Ruth Gordon, and others. Yet for all this ephemeral glory and real accomplishment, he has been left out of the Appalachian Literature canon, remembered more for his contributions to the horror/fantasy/mystery genre than anything else. To this day, Stephen King heralds the work of Grubb and acknowledges Grubb's influence on his own work. Perhaps, because of this mis-recognition, he has been passed over in the making up of Appalachian literary anthologies and cultural critiques. Perhaps, too, because Grubb came of age as a writer through the rough apprenticeship of radio and tv and weekly magazines like Colliers and Ellery Queen, rather than through university writing programs, his experiment with fiction insisted on the pleasure of a tale and thereby the selling of a tale, rather than the literary cachet of cultural consciousness, which has been the trend of the last quarter century. Grubb was noticed in the national press, and he was read throughout the country and well-read in his home state of West Virginia, and before the emergence of the current Appalachian literary scene, he had been putting scenes of Appalachian life before a national reading audience in a consistently non-exotic, "non-regional way," unlike the Appalachian grit lit crazes of the 1980s and 90s which emphasized the bizarrely esoteric. 83 Grubb's consciousness, as it was expressed through his fiction, was in part defined by the lofty assumption that the patchwork of fiction had to be scrapped together from the matter of a writer's native soil, much like Faulkner whom he admired, yet for Grubb, the art of fiction could not be peculiarly exclusive to that soil. In 1980, Ron Havern asked him if a writer could only write about his native land and his experience. Grubb vehemently disagreed as quoted in an unpublished manuscript located at the Clarksburg Public Library, "I don't believe that at all! You have to have inspiration and experience. The inspiration comes from anywhere and everywhere. You can write about anything and everything, but you have to translate it back into your own experience to make it real when you write about it, to make it real to yourself first, so you can then make it real to others. You have to transplant your own experience and everybody else's experience and insight from all over the world back into your native soil to make it grow!" Furthermore, Grubb believed the American quilt to be multi-various, yet suffering the same ills, in spite of the particulars of place and time. This human understanding of fiction rather than that of the culturally specific, comes from Grubb's admiration of Blake, Balzac, Zola, Hugo and Dickens, writers who influenced both his desire to be a writer and his conception of what a writer must be. "I think this great democratic ideal in Dickens's work, and the works of men like Balzac, Zola, Robert Louis Stevenson, Barrie," Grubb said in a 1978 interview located at the West Virginia Library Commission, "I think this shred of humanism has gotten tangled in the mesh of certain liberal ideas that have their basis more in economics and politics of our time than they...