Lost & Found: Tin House Generously Remembers My Horace Kephart Essay

It was thrilling to hear from Emma Komlos-Hrobsky last week that my Lost & Found essay, originally published in the pages of that terrific literary magazine, Tin House, had been, well, found, and would be replayed on the Tin House blog today.  I include the opening lines of the essay here.  I hope you will follow the full trail here.

Beth Kephart brings us a tale of Appalachian wanderlust in this Lost & Found on her great grandfather Horace Kephart’s book, Our Southern Highlanders.
Growing up, we understood that we’d been entrusted with a name.  ”You go down south to Bryson City and you say ‘Kephart’ and you let them tell you who you are,” our father’s father would instruct us solemnly.  My sister, my brother, and I would sit in stiff obedience on his plastic-protected chairs, watching each other beneath raised eyebrows.  We might have had a storied name, but we could not imagine how it mattered.  We were northerners and not soon headed for a town called Bryson City.

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Ron Rash, Serena, and the Horace Kephart Legacy, continued

I have just finished reading Ron Rash's novel, Serena, a book I referenced yesterday in this blog, and I feel less anxious about the whole matter now. To begin with, as a few other critics have noted, it's not entirely clear what Rash is up to here, for this is a book full of extreme and, therefore, nearly one-dimensional characters.

Take the title character, Serena, a Lady MacBeth (save that she suffers no guilt), who rides a white Arabian horse with a snake-fetching eagle perched on one arm and a one-handed ruffian at her side; she's married Pemberton following a three-month courtship and now rules, with him, his logging lands in the Great Smoky Mountains. Pemberton, for his part, climbs off a train in the first pages of the book and slays the father of the young teen he impregnated before marrying Serena. Thinks nothing of it. Never looks back. Next plot point. Next murder.

Against this backdrop is the making of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and hence the introduction of my great-grandfather, who is referred to, by Rash's characters, as "a Harvard man turned Natty Bumppo," as "stubborn and cranky," as "overly fond of the bottle and not nearly the saint the newspapers and politicians make of him," as "the hermit fellow," and in one scene, "Kephart sat beside the newspaperman, looking badly hungover, his eyes bloodshot, hair uncombed. He huddled inside a frayed mackinaw, a pair of soggy boots in his lap. Kephart stared straight ahead, no doubt envying his companion's expensive wool Ultser overcoat."

Kephart's work on behalf of the making of the national park is also cited here, and toward the end of Rash's novel, there's a touching scene in which Kephart reaches out to the young teen who has given birth to Pemberton's son. But Kephart as a person, even a fictional one, never fully emerges, and having read Rash's book through, I'm not sure that it was the author's intention to create the sort of nuanced personalities that Waugh, for example, enlivens in Brideshead. Perhaps Rash's intention was to write more in the manner of myth, while using people who actually lived, on land that stands today, as integral to his tale.

(In his acknowledgments, Rash writes: "Although some of the minor characters in this novel actually existed historically, they are fictional representations." Which I squinted at, didn't entirely comprehend.)

When one sees one's ancestor in a book, the hope, of course, is for a fully nuanced account, even if that character is, as Kephart is here, a secondary one. It's a hope fueled by ego, perhaps, or for a desire to set things right on the page, for Kephart was so many things to so many people, and I've often struggled to understand him myself in essays on, for example, his book, Our Southern Highlanders (a book Rash clearly draws from but never cites in the acknowledgments). For those of you who may be reading Rash's book and may be wondering about this enigmatic man, Kephart, I'd like to share with you this passage from the writings of one Karl Brown, who interviewed Kephart during the course of a movie shot in 1927 in Graham County:

“He was a small man, something below medium height, but chunky and intrinsically formidable. But the one feature that distinguished him from all other human beings I have ever met was that one of his eyes was a bright blue while the other was a deep brown. …

Kephart leaned back in his creaky-springed swivel chair and said, as a sort of cue, ‘Well?’ … I decided then and there that this was no man to fool with. There was something so direct and honest in his bearing that he reminded me of others of his kind … and so, even though I knew in advance it would be an uphill job, I decided to be as honest as I could manage, considering that I was somewhat out of practice …

Kephart advised Brown, “to be a gentleman and you’ll be treated like one” and that “honesty is not only the best policy: it is the only one.”

And here, for the record, is Kephart himself, in his own melodious, soulful, fully three-dimensional voice:

When I went south into the mountains I was seeking a Back of Beyond. This for more reasons than one. With an inborn taste for the wild and romantic, I yearned for a strange land and a people that had the charm of originality. Again, I had a passion for early American history; and in Far Appalachia, it seemed that I might realize the past in the present, seeing with my own eyes what life must have been to my pioneer ancestors of a century or two ago. Besides, I wanted to enjoy a free life in the open air, the thrill of exploring new ground, the joys of the chase, and the man’s game of matching my woodcraft against the forces of nature, with no help from servants or hired guides.

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Serena and the Horace Kephart Legacy

And so I finished reading Brideshead Revisited, and I stand, with so many of you, in awe of it: the miracle of its structure, its graceful folding in and out of time and perspective, its flawless sentences and interesting words. A masterpiece, as countless many before me have said.

I turned, then, to Serena, the new Ron Rash novel that is getting such play on best of the year lists, and what do I find but a fictional recreation of my great-grandfather, Horace Kephart, of whom I have written in this blog before. A troubled soul, a brilliant librarian, who left his wife and children following a calamitous breakdown and who never truly returned to them. Went off, instead, to the Great Smoky Mountains, where he studied the people and wrote books about them, where he refined his campcraft and wrote books on that, too, where he became a mayor, where he loved nature with supreme erudition. Toward the end of his life, my great-grandfather fought with others to create the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and whatever else you might wish to say or think about him, he helped save part of the world for the rest of us.

In any case, Kephart is here in Rash's book, and from what I can tell, Rash has not made a pretty figure of him—attributed thoughts and deeds to him that might be hard for a Kephart such as myself to swallow. An interesting choice, I think, to use Kephart's name and work while fictionalizing his character.

But I'll read on and report more fully when I'm done.

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The Aura of Loneliness: Horace Kephart Revisited

Horace Kephart, my great-grandfather, was one of the country's greatest librarians in his time—an iconoclast who ultimately helped pave the way for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. But what I could never forget, as I grew up with his name, is that he'd abandoned his wife and six children at the age of 42 to live the outpost life—among bears, among the Appalachians, among the tall trees against which he sometimes rested his narrow, beautiful head.

Horace Kephart has inspired song cycles (the glorious Ways That are Dark by Daniel Gore) and theater and library collections; he proved so irresistible and ineluctable to me that I once spent some six months researching and writing my own version of his tale (with my brother's help, with the help of my father's cousin, with the help of librarians, too). Because his story can't be known wholly, it can get told again and again, which is something my talented cousin Libby Kephart Hargrave is poised to do later this month at the Calhoun Inn, in Bryson City, NC, where the Horace Kephart library is located. I know she'll do a bang-up job at an event that will be filmed by West Carolina University and will unite those whom Kephart continues to intrigue.

I post a few words from my 6000-word essay here, the skimmed-down beginning, an introduction to a man.

In July 1959, Clarence E. Miller, by then retired from his post at the St. Louis Mercantile Library, sat down to remember Horace Kephart, the most brilliant man, Miller claimed, that he had ever known and “almost, as a matter of course, the least assuming.” Miller was a young job applicant when he first encountered Kephart. Kephart was a man of some repute—born in 1862, a college graduate by 1879, an ambitious bilingual librarian whose career had taken him from Cornell to Florence to Yale and, in 1890, to the top spot in St. Louis, where he had notoriously begun to build the largest standing collection of “Western Americana.” Following “perhaps the briefest interview on record,” eighteen-year-old Miller was given employment at the Mercantile.

Hoping for mentoring and encouragement from this married father of six, Miller realized soon enough that he wouldn’t be getting much of either. Concise and efficient, his memory perfectly photographic, his demeanor cordial enough despite a predilection for solitude, Kephart, recalled Miller, "lived almost exclusively in a world of his own, guarded most securely by his constant activity. He had no secretary and spent most of his day beating a two-fingered tattoo on a Smith-Premier typewriter."

As the years went by, Miller noted, Kephart, a “crack shot with a rifle” who once tried but failed to raise a small corps of volunteer sharpshooters on behalf of the Spanish American War, spent more and more time in the woods. He would camp alone in the Ozarks on the weekends, Miller said, and then return to the library early each Monday, renewed, invigorated. Once back in the civilized world, he’d burrow deep in the card catalogue, pound his Smith-Premier, buy up a few more books for his beloved special collection. He’d consult with a growing band of western writers who hungered after the knowledge Kephart singularly possessed.

Nearly thirty years after Miller began making his sly observations of Kephart, F.A. Behymer, a star reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, journeyed to a tiny town in western North Carolina to spend an afternoon with the former librarian. The year was 1926. Kephart was sixty-four years old. He had lived alone in the Appalachians since scandalously abandoning all that had ever seemed to matter—his library, his reputation, his Ozarks, his wife, his six young children—at the age of forty-two. At the Cooper House in Bryson City, Behymer sat with Kephart in his modest writers’ workshop and noted how the window opened out on the Tuckaseegee and “the Big Smokies beyond.” It was a glorious view. It gave the illusion of freedom. It enabled Kephart—still sprightly, still fine-featured—to:

… raise his eyes and look through his window and see the swiftly-flowing water and the mountains that rise, ridge on ridge. And, if the day’s toll irks and the outdoors calls, there’s a packed knapsack hanging on the wall and within two hours he can be out in the wide spaces and the high places where he likes best to be.

My great-grandfather’s knapsack weighed just twenty-seven pounds. In the long, strange last chapter of his life, it was all he ever needed to feel the most alive. He had an “aura of loneliness,” Miller would later recall. It was the legacy he would leave with us, the mystery of a man.

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