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The River Down Home:
James Wright and My Hillbilly Father
An essay by Maggie Anderson
Reprinted from the Spring 2001 Ohioana Quarterly
April 1981. I attend the first James Wright Poetry Festival in Martins Ferry,
Ohio. The featured guests are Robert Bly and Dave Smith, and it is just one
year after Wright’s death. I leave the events of the festival for awhile and walk
around town in the bright sun. Down Fourth Street to Short Street, up Fifth
Street to Hanover, and then back inside the cool dark of the Martins Ferry
Public Library where they are showing a video of James Wright, who looks so
much like my father it takes my breath away.
My father was born in Rowlesburg, West Virginia, several hundred miles
east of the Ohio River Valley. Like James Wright, my father, who taught
Greek and Latin, loved the poems of Catullus. And it is a Catullus poem that
Wright is reciting on the tape. He loves the sounds of
the Latin words as much as the poem itself, and he
reads with his head tilted back, as if he is addressing
an invisible audience above him and slightly to the
right. He takes his glasses off and puts them back on
just like my father did. He picks up a book with one
hand, holds it half-opened for awhile, then puts it
down. In his other hand, he holds a cigarette. These
are my father’s gestures, but it is also, eerily, my
father’s voice. As Wright speaks I can hear my father’s
unbridled delight at knowing the Latin phrases, at
knowing these poems by heart. And I can hear the
first generation student’s strict allegiance to accuracy
in pronunciation and translation.
Wright’s accent, like my father’s, contains a barely audible trace of his
native Appalachian twang. He has been gone from Ohio more than thirty
years, so it is also greased by the glib rhythms of the well-read. My father
was a smart hillbilly who wanted out of the low ceilings and the smoky
factories, the winding rivers and the steep West Virginia hills. Escape was
his first ambition, as it was James Wright’s: “I have crawled along the edges
of plenty/Of scars./All I wanted to do/Was get out” (“Son of Judas”).1
When I read James Wright’s poems it is obvious that he could never have
become the great poet he was if he had not left Martins Ferry and, through
the luck of the G.I. Bill, attended Kenyon College. This biographical turn was
the gift that allowed him to evade his predictable
future in the mills. He was not Bud Romick, nor
Joe Shunk the diver, nor “that good man Ralph
Neal.” But James Wright was one smart hillbilly,
and he had good teachers in Martins Ferry. He
honored his Latin teacher, Miss Helen McNeely
Sheriff, all his life: “ . . I have never written anything
without wondering sooner or later, whether
or not Miss Sheriff would find it worthy.”2 As I
watch James Wright’s face on the video, I see the
scars of desire and achievement that have brought
him to this lectern where he stands reciting the
poems of Catullus. In “Two Postures Beside a
Fire,” Wright recounts a visit to his father down
home: “He is proud of me, believing/I have done
strong things among men and become a man/Of place among men of place in
the large cities./I will not waken him.” Lonely for my own father, who died in
1971, I am also sad for him, and for James Wright, and for all of us who must
leave our homes to become our fullest, most possible selves. When my father
left West Virginia to teach in New York City, he carried his hillbilly shadow
with him.
Critics have always been quick to note that James Wright survived his
origins. This is one of our good American stories, but much as we like it, it
leaves out a few things. So much gets left behind and can never be reclaimed;
success is never uncompromised joy. I study Wright’s face and know this most
of all: he could never have become the poet he was if he had not been born in
Martins Ferry, Ohio, which followed him everywhere.
* * * * *
There are many different Ohios and the one James Wright came from is
more like West Virginia than it is like Findlay. James Wright wrote in a letter
to Leslie Marmon Silko that “[his] family goes very deep and very far back
into West Virginia and Ohio.”3
And, in “A Childhood Sketch,” Wright says,
“My mother’s family . . . were honest-to-God hillbillies to fare-thee-well.”4
Wright’s feelings for Ohio were loyal, ambiguous, and contradictory. In a 1970
interview, he spoke of these complexities with a bemused affection: “. . . Ohio
has its own rhythm. It’s a strange place, Ohio . . . all kinds of people live there.
It’s literally covered with good small colleges; and yet the people who live in
Ohio seem very uneducated, in many ways brutal. I like Ohioans very much.”5
In 1969, James Wright had been teaching at Hunter College in New York
for three years and had published five award-winning books of poetry and
four books of translations. He had recently married his second wife, Annie.
When he was asked to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa poem at the College of
William and Mary, he read a long, multi-voiced piece called “Many of Our
Waters: Variations on a Poem by a Black Child.” It seems that he had come far
enough and long enough away from Martins Ferry that he could now write
about it more openly and directly than he had before. The final section of this
poem addresses Wright’s brother Jack, to whom the poem is dedicated:
I have a little time left, Jack.
I don’t know what you want.
But I know what I want.
I want to live my life. . . . .
All this time I’ve been slicking into my own words
The beautiful language of my friends.
I have to use my own now.
With this poem Wright scraped off some of his worldly veneer and allowed
the ghost of his hillbilly voice to emerge from time to time, complicating
and implicating “the beautiful language of [his] friends.” Within two years,
Wright’s father and mother had both died, he had won the Pulitzer Prize for
poetry for his Collected Poems, and he had published Two Citizens, the book he
was later to call “obscure and selfindulgent,”
“a bust.”6 It is also his
most experimental and his most
Appalachian book.
Among the identifiable characteristics
of the literature of the
Appalachian region are these: a
deep connection to place; a
strong affinity with animals,
plants, and the seasonal rhythms
of the natural world; adherence to the primacy of kinship and neighborhood
networks; and an acute sensitivity to “insiders” and “outsiders” of place and
culture. These characteristics can be observed to some extent in all of James
Wright’s poems, but “insider”/“outsider” contrasts become increasingly
important with each of his books. In “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,”
for example, the speaker stands at several removes from the scene he describes.
He speaks from the outside with the insider’s intimate knowledge:
In the Shreve High football stadium
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And the gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.
In this poem, first published in 1963, the speaker develops a cool, two-part
argument separated from the conclusion by the one-word line, “Therefore.”
The tone of this poem is familiar to me. It is the tone my father used when he
talked about West Virginia in public, among strangers.
There is a very different tone in nearly all the poems in Wright’s Two Citizens
(1973). The two “citizens” of the book’s title are two James Wrights. He has
earned dual citizenship in his river town back home and “among men of place
in the large cities.” In these poems, Wright speaks most often as an insider to
Ohio addressing an imagined outsider who does not know the place Wright
comes from and does not understand the idiom of his people. Here, Wright
assumes for the first time a kind of “down home” voice: “No I ain’t much./
The one tongue I can write in/Is my Ohioan” (“To the Creature of Creation”).
In these poems, the urbane, ironic voice is restrained and ghostly. The title,
“Ars Poetica: Some Recent Criticism,” for example, is erudite and self-referential,
but the first stanza introduces a speaker who is wholly of his community,
who speaks in the “flat voice” of the local vernacular:
I loved my country
When I was a little boy.
Agnes is my aunt,
And she doesn’t even know
If I love any thing
On this God’s
Green little apple.
Wright described the project of Two Citizens this way: “[It] begins with a curse
on America. There are some severe poems about Ohio, my home, in that
book…in the middle . . . between the curse and the final expression of grief,
there is a whole sequence of love poems.”7
Wright wonders aloud about his
Aunt Agnes: “Why do I care for her,/That slob,/So fat and stupid?” (“Ars
Poetica . . .”). These are strange love poems! They declare the love of the insider
for what the outsider cannot possibly understand. There is some self-parody in
“Ars Poetica…,” but there is also some baiting of the outsider, an archness
about the ugliness and crudeness of this world. Archness, as a strategy, is
highly dependent on audience. Wright must create the outsider he baits.
“Unless you were born here,” he seems to say, “you couldn’t possibly stand it. ”
This is the voice my father sometimes used with his New York friends and
colleagues. He liked to sing, and I remember he took particular delight in
hamming up a song like “The Wreck of the Old Ninety-Seven” in which the
poor engineer is “scalded to death by the steam.” For James Wright, there is
delight in the abrupt juxtapositions of dictions:
I gather my Aunt Agnes
into my veins.
I could tell you,
If you have read this far,
That the nut house in Cambridge
Where Agnes is dying
Is no more Harvard
Than you could ever be.
“Ars Poetica . . . ” builds to anger, and the two voices are pushed even closer
together. The outsider speaks, of course, in Latin: “Ense petit placidam/Sub
libertate quietem.” Then the hillbilly voice interrupts with an astonishing
dictional shift: “Hell, I ain’t got nothing./Ah, you bastards,//How I hate you.”
In his autobiography, Hunger of Memory, Richard Rodriguez describes the
separation from his family that the child of the working class feels when he
comes home from college full of knowledge of the new world his education
has given him access to: “Some people have told me how wonderful it is that I
am the first in my family to write a book. But I do not give voice to my
parents by writing their lives. I distinguish myself from them by writing about
the life we shared.”8 It is a mixed blessing. James Wright articulates a similar
pride mixed with sorrow in one of his early poems, “At the Executed
Murderer’s Grave”:
My name is James A. Wright, and I was born
Twenty-five miles from this infected grave
In Martins Ferry, Ohio, where one slave
To Hazel-Atlas Glass became my father.
He tried to teach me kindness. I return
Only in memory now, aloof, unhurried
To dead Ohio where I might lie buried
Had I not run away before my time.
* * * * *
Spring 1997. I drive from Kent to Martins Ferry to hear my friend Maj
Ragain read and to see Annie Wright. It is one of the early warm spring days
that seem always to arrive on the weekend of the James Wright Poetry Festival.
The redbuds are coming out along Route 2, and the dogwood and the
sumac have just begun to bloom. There are crocuses and irises in the little
yards of Martins Ferry. After the readings, some of us drive to the cemetery at
the top of the hill. Down below, the river is a shimmer of light and movement
from the wind off the mountains. Did James Wright ever see his Ohio Valley
bright and clear? The factories and mills that were working when Wright lived
here as a boy are closed now. The valley is free of smoke and we can see several
miles downriver. We sit on the soft grass among the gravestones and take
turns reading some of James Wright’s poems. I choose two characteristic
pieces in which anger and love, rage and tenderness, are all mixed up. The
prose piece “Honey” ends with one of my favorite phrases from southern
Ohio and West Virginia:
They were both determined to live their lives, and so they glared
and said they were going to live, come hell or high water. High
water is not trite in southern Ohio. Nothing is trite along a river.
My father died a good death. To die a good death means to live
one’s life. I don’t say a good life.
I say a life.
I am looking off (“back” I think) toward my own beautiful West Virginia,
when I read Wright’s “Beautiful Ohio.” The poet is down home again and has
gone to sit beside the open sewer main that empties into the river. For once,
Wright does not call it that “dark ditch of river,” nor “my rotted Ohio,” nor
even “my back-broken beloved Ohio.” He names clearly his devotion to this
place, which is at once unclean and beautiful:
Sixteen thousand and five hundred more or less people
In Martins Ferry, my home, my native country,
Quickened the river
With the speed of light.
And the light caught there
The solid speed of their lives
In the instant of that waterfall.
I know what we call it
Most of the time.
But I have my own song for it,
And sometimes, even today,
I call it beauty.
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Maggie Anderson
is a professor at Kent State University.