Forgotten Memoir is a Treasure
“O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.”Asheville’s Thomas Wolfe wrote those words in his introduction to Look Homeward, Angel.
Wolfe’s novels inspired a generation of writers, with authors as disparate as Ray Bradbury, Norman Mailer, and Pat Conroy pointing to him as a major influence, yet today many readers have consigned Wolfe to the dustbin of literature, finding him too long-winded, too full of adjectives, too romantic for our age of twitter, text, and compressed online articles. Even many Western North Carolinians with an interest in literature steer away from Wolfe.
This same neglect, this preference for living authors over those who are lying in their graves, holds true for certain other Appalachian writers. Occasionally, however, those wind-grieved ghosts lamented by Wolfe rise from the grave, tug us by the sleeve, and remind us of who we are and who they were.
In Family of Earth: A Southern Mountain Childhood, Wilma Dykeman, who died in 2006, chronicles the early years of her life in the Beaverdam and Asheville communities. A young woman in her mid-twenties, she wrote Family of Earth during World War II. When she failed to find a publisher, she tucked the book away into a shirt box, where it lay unvisited for the next 60 years.
After her death, Dykeman’s son, Jim Stokely, who along with his brother, Dykeman, had taken a keen interest in his mother’s writing and legacy, was going through her papers when he came across the manuscript. He pursued publication, and the result is this fine autobiography graced by an instructive “Foreword” written by Robert Morgan, North Carolina poet and novelist.
In retrospect, it is easy to see, perhaps, why publishers 60 years ago steered away from Family of Earth. Dykeman was then an unknown writer, and as she herself says in the “Introduction”, it may appear “presumptuous to write a book about one’s life, especially when that life has been so unimportant…”
Moreover, the memoir was in some respects ahead of its time, with the author paying close attention to the natural world, the mountains, streams, springs, plants and flowers in which she took such great delight. Some other reviewers have compared the book to Eudora Welty’s memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings, a valid comparison to be sure, but while reading Family of Earth, I kept thinking of Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which, though stylistically quite different from Dykeman’s autobiography, nonetheless shares the same blend of philosophy and the beauty and mystery of the natural world.
In Family of Earth, we find the seeds that would blossom in Dykeman’s later writing. Her love for the mountains, her concern for the environment (years before environmentalism became a cause, Dykeman was battling the pollution of the French Broad River), her concerns regarding social justice and her ability to treat as equals people from varying backgrounds. In her memoir, she also gives us a loving portrait of her parents—her wise father, much older than her mother, was 60 when Wilma was born—as well as sketches of some of her relatives and neighbors: Preachers, farmers, salesmen, and a few crazed loners. Here, too, is her account of a terrible forest fire, the day the banks crashed in Asheville, her life in the local church, and much more.
But the most impressive feature of Family of Earth is the fact that so young a writer could forge such magnificent prose. First, there is Dykeman’s style. Open this book to any page, and the rhythm of many sentences reads like poetry. Then we notice her eye for detail. Perhaps because she is so close in age to the girl she was, she describes everything from the changes of the season to the furniture in her home with the wonderment of a child. Here, for example, is a paragraph about her father’s woodworking:
“The table my father made was a graceful thing—dainty, with curving thin legs and finely polished surface. Somehow, though, once inside the house, it looked out of place. It stood like an elegant jungle bird might have stood among our plain catbirds and brown thrashers. When it was finished, my father returned to the walnut, building a Mission-style piece or two, making the rare golden lights in the dark walnut glow with a lustre which only sure hands could have drawn to the surface.”
Her father created art and beauty from wood. Fortunately for those who love writing and books, Wilma Dykeman created beauty and art from words.