Bevin wrong to defund curator of Ky. culture, intellectualism

Thanks to the efforts of the University Press of Kentucky, James Still’s singular novel, “River of Earth,” has never been out of print since it was first published in 1940.

The original publisher of the novel was the big-time New York firm, Viking Press. Never before had a novelist writing from remote Knott County been published by such a revered firm. And never before had any writer, focused on the lives and circumstances of desperately poor families in eastern Kentucky, been taken seriously by a major national publisher.

“River of Earth” received excellent reviews in The New York Times, The Saturday Evening Post and many other publications that had an ear and mind open to the plight and the resilience of common Americans, especially Kentuckians.

Thanks to the novel, people living far beyond Kentucky learned about Kentucky and Kentuckians, our history, our culture, our politics, our economics, our eccentricities — and Still delivered it all with humor and compassion.

I re-read this moving novel every year, and each time I am personally renewed and my love for Kentucky deepens.

The citizens of our commonwealth — today and far into the future — deserve to have our cultural and intellectual heritage enriched, expanded, and preserved. That is the great work the University Press of Kentucky has done for 75 years.

Yet, Gov. Matt Bevin’s plan is to eliminate its state funding, which means books like “River of Earth” will go out of print, and will therefore not be available to future Kentuckians.

On one hand, Still’s novel is about survival. A young family manages to prevail, or hopes to prevail, against every imaginable hardship economic, cultural and familial.

The family is rooted in the 19th century, in terms of experience, values and ambition. But all of a sudden, it’s the 20th century and a version of American industrialization is visiting formerly remote and subsistence regions. The form this industrialization takes is coal mining, and the introduction of the almighty dollar to the local economy. The family is understandably torn.

Wisely, and rightly, Still does not choose sides in this familiar debate. Instead, he realizes that average Americans and local Kentuckians are snared in a dilemma set up by outsiders. The common people are the pawns of bigger players.

There isn’t a correct outcome, though various forces plead for such. There is simply the ambiguous reality of a family merely going on, hoping the next decision they make will have purpose and lasting value.

And isn’t that the circumstance of so many of our families today, here in the 21st century? Don’t many of us, now, find ourselves on a similar precipice? Wouldn’t most of us rather not feel forced to take sides on any issue and simply make decisions we hope are wise for our families and our future, and hope for the best?

As Brother Sim Mobberly, the preacher in the novel, wonders, referring to Psalm 114, “The sea saw it and fled: Jordan was driven back. The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs. Tremble, thou earth ...”

Moments later in the sermon, Brother Mobberly reflects, “Till I come on the Word in this good Book, I used to think a mountain was the standingest object in the sight o’ God. Hit says here they go skipping and hopping like sheep, a-rising and a-falling. ... Oh, my children, where air we going on this mighty river of earth, a-borning, and begetting, and a-dying — the living and the dead riding the waters? Where air it sweeping us?”

Brother Mobberly asks a big question, knowing, of course, it doesn’t have a firm answer. That is the rich and confounding outcome of a novel that places its characters in dire and pathetic circumstances, yet does not offer any of them an easy outcome.

And so, there is wisdom in this novel — wisdom, notably, coming from uneducated characters. It is wisdom that has now benefited generations of Kentuckians, and hard-earned, human wisdom future Kentuckians deserve to have.

Clearly, our governor, who is not from Kentucky and who has had limited contact with real Kentucky and real Kentuckians, cannot appreciate such wisdom, which is why he so recklessly is inclined to do away with it.

Such an action would effectively tear out the roots of our culture. And our culture is what it is — it is history and fact, it is expression and vitality, it is our shared imagination and experience — which cannot take political sides, because our culture, including its warts, is what we hold in common.

Our culture defines us, and now our governor seeks to un-define us, obviously for some ulterior motive he is too much of a coward to disclose.

I hope our legislators are wise to this chicanery. Our people deserve better, much better. And may all of us of various political perspectives agree, we have a shared culture, and for that we’re all on the same side.

This story was originally published January 29, 2018 at 8:06 PM with the headline "Bevin wrong to defund curator of Ky. culture, intellectualism."