Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Mountains of material
The Literature of the Ozarks anthology offers entry point to trove of regional writing
Sure, we could talk about Donald Harington, John Fletcher Gould, Daniel Woodrell, Miller Williams and even the always divisive Harold Bell Wright of the 1907 novel Shepherd of the
Hills. But there are other ways of getting into The Literature of the
Ozarks, a new anthology edited by Philip Douglas Howerton, a professor of English at Missouri State University, that has just been published under the Brooks Blevins-edited Ozark Studies aegis by the University of Arkansas Press.
Let’s just dive in and imagine the scene on the Texas (Mexican)
banks of the Red River on Feb. 5, 1831.
Two young men, 20 paces apart, face each other with pistols. They have traveled more than 200 miles to be here, for dueling has been outlawed in the Arkansas Territory for a decade. They had been fussing at each other in the newspapers, through vituperative columns that in those days were known as “cards.”
Writing under the name Devereux, 21-year-old Whig lawyer Charles Fenton “Fent” Mercer Noland had accused John Pope, the territorial governor appointed by Democrat Andrew Jackson, of abusing his position by selling liquor on the side.
The governor’s nephew and secretary, 21-year-old William Fontaine Pope, would not have it. Because his uncle was in his 60s and had lost an arm in a childhood accident, he assumed the role of champion. He answered Noland’s slurs, which were published in the Arkansas Advocate, a Whig newspaper founded by the governor’s chief political rival Robert Crittenden, with a column of his own in the Arkansas Intelligencer, a newspaper established by the governor “as a government organ.” Back and forth they went.
Despite the attempted intervention of cooler heads — including Crittenden, who had killed a one-time friend in a duel a few years before — Noland and Fontaine Pope found themselves staring at each others’ pistols.
Had anyone been laying odds, Fontaine might have been the favorite. He had survived a duel a few months before when he’d exchanged three ineffective rounds with Dr. John Cocke, another newspaper critic of his uncle. (After all that missing, it’s said the two men repaired to a tavern for some convivial conversation.)
Noland, on the other hand, wasn’t much of a physical specimen. He was tubercular and frail. His father had been instrumental in writing Virginia’s anti-dueling statute. His heart wasn’t in it, but Fontaine had publicly called him a coward.
The guns fired simultaneously. Noland was left standing. Fontaine was struck in the hip and fell to the ground. Still he called for another round of firing and struggled to his feet. While their seconds were reloading the dueling pistols, Fontaine fell. They carried him back to Little Rock where he lived another four months before succumbing to his wounds. (Noland visited the wounded man and became friendly with him — in letters to his father he criticized Gov. Pope for “not being near him or sending him any money” and bemoaned that Fontaine’s “Sunshine friends had all deserted him.”)
Killing the governor’s nephew probably contributed to Noland’s leaving Arkansas for a while. Though he’d been dismissed from West Point in 1826 for “deficiency in mathematics and drawing” he decided to try his hand at a military career. When he failed to get a promotion, he declined Sam Houston’s offer to accompany him to Texas and came back to Arkansas where he served in the 1836 constitutional convention and was one of the pallbearers of J.J. Anthony, who was stabbed to death by a fellow legislator during a debate in the Arkansas House of Representatives in 1837.
Around the same time, Noland began to write for a weekly newspaper based in New York City, William T. Porter’s Spirit of the Times: A Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature and the Stage. It was a much different assignment than the cards Noland had written as Devereux; the editorial guidelines specifically forbade any discussion of politics in the paper. Which was fine with Noland, a horse-racing aficionado who still managed to lampoon identifiable politicians and issues in his work for the newspaper.
Noland’s most famous creation was a character named Col. Pete Whetstone, a rollicking, amiable cad who brawled and gambled and boasted his way through north-central Arkansas. From 1837 to 1856, more than 40 of Whetstone’s letters were published in Spirit of the Times; Howerton reprints a typical letter from 1839 in which “Kurnel Whetstone” cures a lady’s cold with a tall tale, has a wardrobe malfunction and gets over on a snob by telling him “if you don’t like the smell of fresh bread, you better quit the bakery.”
Noland (along with A.B. Longstreet, George Washington Harris, Joseph Glover Baldwin, William Tappan Thompson, et al.) was part of a cadre of humorists published by the Spirit that effectively founded a school of American humor writing — sometimes called the Big Bear School of Humor — which Mark Twain might be seen to epitomize.
They captured the early 1800s zeitgeist to such a degree that their efforts have been dubbed an “Unofficial American Literature.”
While the value of Noland’s Pete Whetstone’s letters might seem obscure to modern readers (it’s sometimes difficult to tell what exactly Ol’ Pete is going on about) the cultural importance of Noland’s work shouldn’t be overlooked.
We ought to know about this fascinating man.
That’s how anthologies like this are supposed to work — to serve as entry points into oceanic subjects. Maybe you’ve never heard of Noland or Dennis Murphy. Maybe you had heard Albert Pike wrote poetry, but had never read anything but “The Old Canoe” (which Pike didn’t write and always denied writing). Howerton offers “Sunset in Arkansas,” which the editor calls “an early example of the ornate and stilted verse that the Ozarks landscape has so often inspired”: … The leaf-robed branches, as hopes intervene Amid gray cares.
The western sky is wallen With shadowy mountains, built upon the marge
Of the horizon, from Eve’s purple sheen And thin, gray clouds, that insolently lean Their silver cones upon the crimson verge …
While The Literature of the Ozarks is not a greatest-hits album, it hints at a quality of depth that might surprise casual observers.
Thames Williamson’s 1933 novel The Woods Colt divided opinions when it was published. While at least one critic suggested it might be in line for a Pulitzer Prize, a contemporary review in Kirkus Reviews called it a “story of the Ozarks, with the seemingly unavoidable component parts: bootleggers, moonshiners, revenue officers, sheriffs, blood feuds, the hero of the piece and the villain. There is a girl who ‘two times’ her lover. There is another girl who sacrifices everything to protect him, and goes into hiding with him. There are fine bits of descriptive writing, but much of the text is marred by an almost arbitrary introduction of the vernacular, even where it is not essential … simply hard-headed, modern realism. The title refers to the illegitimate birth of the mountain boy who is the central figure.”
Like Noland, Williamson’s biography might be of as much interest as his work — he ran away from home in Idaho when he was 14 and spent time as a tramp, circus hand, sailor, shepherd, newspaper reporter and prison officer. He still managed to graduate from the University of Iowa and obtain an advanced degree from Harvard. In addition to writing a slew of novels (often under pseudonyms) he wrote college texts on sociology and economics, 10 screenplays that were made into movies and juvenile fiction under the pen name Waldo Fleming. He reportedly spoke 10 languages and considered himself a master of regional dialects.
Howerton takes care to point out the novel’s “significant flaws” and reprints an early section of the novel leading up to the title character’s murder of a federal marshal that, while containing some cringe-worthy dialogue, is effectively suspenseful, reminiscent of the streamlined noir of Jim Thompson. In his two-volume 1999 work Arkansas, Arkansas: Writers and Writings from the Delta to the Ozarks, University of Arkansas professor John Caldwell Guilds notes that Williamson dedicated The Woods Colt to folklorist Vance Randolph “because he is an acknowledged authority on the Ozark dialect, and because we traveled them thar hills together, and because he went over this story in the painstaking effort to make it regionally perfect.”
Randolph is also represented in The Literature of the Ozarks by his excellent 1933 short story “The Chore Boy.”
Guilds has quite a high opinion of The Woods Colt, writing that Williamson, “perhaps second only to Randolph … seems to have succeeded in writing a story that was ‘regionally perfect.’”
The task Howerton has set out for himself with this relatively slim — 317 page, excepting notes — volume is “to explore and confront the culture from within, and to help define that culture for outsiders.” By those lights, The Literature of
the Ozarks does a reasonably good job of balancing the obvious expressions of Ozarks literary culture with more obscure ones, and rightly pays particular attention to voices that have traditionally been overlooked.
The first selection in the volume, “Finding of the Four Colors,” is sacred Osage teaching as recounted by a priest named Hlu-ah-wah-tah; later John Rollins Ridge — widely considered the first Native American novelist (1854’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta) — is represented by the comic poem “The Arkansas Roots Doctor.” One of Howerton’s best choices is “What the Negro Must Do” a remarkable essay by Benjamin F. Adams, who was born a slave in Arkansas, published in the Springfield Republican in 1906.
Robert Heinlein makes it in, not just because he’s from Butler, Mo., but because his 1953 young adult sci-fi novel Starman Jones starts out on an
Ozark farm.
Constance Wagner — a New Yorker writer who lived in Fayetteville for a time — painted a withering portrait of an Arkansas resort town that bore a close resemblance to Eureka Springs in her 1950 novel Sycamore; Howerton smartly excerpts it for this collection.
The usuals are not stunted here, though if you’re looking to explore the undiscovered country that is Donald Harington or Miller Williams’ plain-sung ballads, or for that matter the volcanic poems of Frank Stanford, it’s not that difficult to find their work. The best way to use this book is to thumb through it looking for unfamiliar names. Then read Howerton’s concise, informative introduction and the excerpt. Then, if you’re moved to, dive down whatever Internet rabbit hole is suggested.
The idea is not to make a case for the region as equal or superior. The idea is to describe and offer entree into the intellectual tradition of a recognizable, definable region. This is what we are, because this is what we’ve done.