[In the following essay, Bode offers a mixed review of Plowshare in Heaven.]

Jesse Stuart is a goodhearted writer. A writer is not to be judged by good intentions; but, nevertheless, Stuart's desire to communicate the look and feel of his country, to tell of his people's needs, griefs, joys, and pretensions—this remains after one has got through worrying about his anecdotal superficiality, mannered lyricism, or Al Capp crudity of stroke. And one must admit that by main strength and enthusiasm, if not always by artistic mobility, Stuart does get a message on humanity across, does hew out, sometimes with woodcut broadness (and with some of the woodcut's effectiveness) a picture of his Appalachian hills and the people inhabiting them.

Stuart continues to stretch his Kentucky tapestry with publication of Plowshare in Heaven, a pleasant collection of his stories, nearly all of which appeared first in magazines. The magazines are of striking range—from Country Gentleman to the Atlantic Monthly, from Fantasy Magazine, which ran the title piece, to Progressive Farmer. Two of the stories appeared in Southwest Review: "Walk in the Moon Shadows" and "Before the Grand Jury."

This makes the twentieth book, including three juveniles, for the poet-novelist-lecturer-storyteller from Greenup County, Kentucky. Unlike Wolfe, Stuart is a "tight" writer, who deals in short, economically-worded blocks. But he just keeps a-writin' and a-writin'.

The latest crop is varied and a little confusing. A story like "Zeke Hammertight," which tells of the running down by a posse of a cracked old head-clansman, seems to be a display of the things that are dubious in Stuart. Like twenty of the twenty-one stories in the book, it is told in the first person singular. The style here is a free-wheeling, simile-slinging, heightened colloquialism which smacks of that muscular, formulized literary rusticity so fervently embraced through the years by various literary forces in America:

Old Zeke Hammertight—you ought to see him. . . . You ought to see his steady blue eyes that the years cannot dim any more than they can the eternal Kentucky rocks—wear a little, tear a little—just a little by the wind, the sun, the rain, the sleet and the snow. Freeze a little, thaw a little, and fade a little as the years go by.

It is this kind of sophomoric incantation, with its rocking rhythms, maddening repetitions, and doubling back, its stagy diction, choppy declarative sentences, and parade of bucolic speech figures, not to mention vagueness of effect, that constitutes something of a blight on the whole body of our indigenous literature.

At its worst, this Sing-of-America style simply obtrudes like a bumpkin in the parlor. It comprises an essentially egoistic performance, a stylized manhandling of material and lack of artistic humility (and the effectiveness that goes with it). The chanter-narrator doesn't listen to nature with all her nuances of rhythm; he is too busy talking. Humanity is not depicted in all its interior convolutions, its intricacy of relationship; the storyteller is too busy trying to startle with giants and heroic deeds. And there is a kind of lack of civility: the narrator comes on like thunder, spouting idiom and dropping g's, without so much as a howdy.

It seems to this reviewer that Stuart, in his tales-from-the-hills version of this American genre, never satisfactorily handles the broad content and the broad effect. It is, to repeat, partially a matter of improper preparation of the reader; and the material seems to shift in the course of a story from a context of relative realism to a framework somewhere beyond, not shocking or amusing, but simply straining credulity.

There is certainly nothing wrong with grotesque or exaggerated material, and Washington Irving, to name an easy example, handled it beautifully. But when Stuart has members of the Old and New Faiths fighting at a gravesite, or the boys of Carver College falling out of a towering tree, he simply seems to deteriorate into Li'l Abner or Barney Google. Giant men knock each other through the air and shoot at each other and plunge great distances with a tree branch in tow, but about all that happens is that they're "knocked cuckoo."

Prepared as we are by the tradition of Bunyanesque mountain men, we can be made to accept, possibly, men who are routinely six feet six, weigh from 240 to 300 pounds, have hands like shovels, chop trees in zero weather without shirts on, eat two dozen eggs, drink a gallon of moonshine while plowing and then dance all night; or sleep in eight inches of snow, melt it four and five feet around them in all directions, and get up the next morning without even a stopped nostril.

But you can't mix these in with mortal surroundings and events without a rather choppy effect.

Stuart has considerably more success with the grotesque when its intent is not so pointedly humorous, or not humorous at all. "Walk in the Moon Shadows" is effective because of the strong sense of the pregnant mother's mystic, ritual communion with the dead couple in the moonlight at their old home. "Sylvania Is Dead," telling of the death of a 650-pound woman moonshiner, seems to grow naturally out of the country. (Sylvania could not be arrested by revenue men because they could neither get her out of the house nor down the mountain to the jail; to bury her, the men must tear down the chimney wall.) The grandma who comes back from death during the "settin' up," and has a good report on her wayward deceased son; and Bird-Neck, who cheats the hospital he has sold his body to by seeing that his bones bleach from the top of a tall hickory tree in his field—these also are examples of gothic material handled without strain.

As one moves forward in Plowshare in Heaven, it becomes harder to make generalizations about the author. The clamorous monologue of Zeke Hammertight gives way to the controlled, eloquently idiomatic narrative of the grandpa telling about the Roman-holiday Sunday afternoon hangings they used to have in Blakesburg.

The doubtful humor of the college boys in "How Sportsmanship Came to Carver College" is relieved by a smiling portrayal of a smitten youth in "Love in the Spring," and by the lighthearted "The Devil and Television," which tells of the deacon who is "churched" for installing a "worldly device"—TV. ("Brothers and Sisters, the devil has pulled a fast one.")

The broad brush is put aside as we swing from an epic paean to the river and river men, "Land Beyond the River," with its stereotyped, quickly sketched characters, to the more intimate pictures of "Alec's Cabin," the story of a squatter with a strong claim to the cabin he takes over; "Old Dick," a telling sketch of men mourning a good mule; and a sharp, inside account of a rustic grand jury.

One becomes aware that, in the over-all, Stuart's first person narrative device is used with vividness and impact; that the pacing is good and the structure tight; the dialogue rips along. There are sharp images: "Soon, after we had staggered and stumbled along," says the boy in "Walk in the Moon Shadows," "I looked ahead and saw a vast opening beyond the trees. It was like leaving the night and walking into the day to leave the woods and walk into a vast space where only waist-high bushes grew."

It gets October, and they can't find Bird-Neck's body. "I started shuckin' Bird-Neck's corn. . . . The great sweeps o' fall-time winds would whip like a buggy-whip through the trees. Then the leaves would fall in swarms, jist like birds gettin' ready for the South. The treetops got bare."

The only thing is that, as you go along, the stories don't get more complex. One enters the genial warmth of "Love in the Spring," and says, "Ah, now we're going to get a little psychological subtlety, a little involvement for a change." And the whole episode is resolved into naught with a knock on the boy's head. One is swept along with the promise of the tale of burying the patriarchal timber-cutter, with its complications of two sets of relatives with opposing faiths ("Death and Decision"). But we leave the story by way of a boring, unconvincing free-for-all in the graveyard, told with what seems much gusto.

It becomes apparent at the end that some of the best stories have been pure anecdote or sketch; that virtually none of the stories goes past the anecdotal level. There are in the volume few, if any, short stories, which work out character revelation in a systematized fashion.

One begins to conjecture as to what effect Stuart's love affair with Kentucky has had on his vision as he reads the final, title piece, in which the boy-narrator sorrows for a departed woman who will have to leave Kentucky ("the pink crab-apple blossoms, and the wild plum blossoms . . . the white listing sails of the dogwood blossoms . . .") for heaven. "How will she feel among strangers from all lands and in a great multitude of people? How will she feel among many tongues when she has only heard one?"

"Surely," he says, "for a hill Kentuckian God would let us have our Heaven here in Kentucky! We have lived in it so long, shut away from the outer rim of the hills, that we do not know it is Heaven until we get away."

Has this infatuation with, attachment to, a single region involved not only a not looking beyond the hills, but an insular adjustment that does not permit looking too far beneath the surface? What psychic drag is reflected in the boy's inability to leave home in "Love in the Spring"? What crippling ancestor worship is reflected in a preoccupation with family giants and their heroic deeds? The consistent device of using a family-oriented narrator, frequently a boy or young man, and the superficiality of treatment—not necessarily theme—suggest a reluctance to go beyond the anecdotal framework, past folklore, beyond the traditional tongue of the people.

The hearthstone is not the proper framework for the artist, who must be brutal and hypercritical, as well as loving.

Stuart is productive, but is he furrowing deep enough?