State

December 30, 1933 THE STATE Page Eleven THE LIFE OF A POET IS NOT A BED OF ROSES In the mountains of North Caro¬ lina lives a man who has experi¬ enced poverty and wealth — fame and ridicule. His works today are esteemed both at home and abroad. By LULA M. WEIR ★ POETS и ro born, not i undo, ap¬ plies to James Larkin Pearson, the backwoods mountain poet of Wilkes County, who, long unhonored and unsung in his native state, has pushed his way to fame abroad in the face of obstacles, the like of which few mortals ever have been forced to encounter. Hack of Pearson’s achievements and successes is the most pathetic story of struggles, heartaches and disappoint ments to which T have ever listened. He recited it to me the other day from (Jcnesis to the Revelation of the pres¬ ent. A story of punishment and chas t i semen t in childhood by ignorant, un¬ lettered parents of the mountains, who. unable to understand the yearnings of a youthful poet's soul, had no patience with a lad disposed to idle away pre eious time in Mich useless nonsense as writing rhymes. James Larkin Pearson was not ex¬ actly born writing poetry but at the tender age of four years, lie astonished himself by replying in rhyme to a • I next i on of his father as they drove along the mountainside near their cabin in the sticks on an ox cart. Ques¬ tioned bv his father as to whether he was cold, this was his reply: “My lingers nn’ my toes, my feet an' my hands. Are jist as cold ns ye over seed a man’s.” The above furnished a forceful con¬ trast to the finished lyrics he was writ¬ ing at the age of twelve, one of which, “A Vision," appears in Pearson’s Poems, a big 344-page two- pound vol¬ ume, printed and bound by himself in his own little print shop, in 1924. JAMES LARKIN PEARSON The bockwoods poet of Wilkes County - ★ - Admitting that poets are sometimes honored even in their own country (although the Wilkes poet had to wait nnd hope a long time for honor) this does not alter the fact that they must have food and clothing. Pearson has faced the fate common to bards of old, and even worse. Unlike the univer¬ sally beloved John Charles Mac Neill, Pearson — said to be a distant kinsman on the maternal side— has never known the blessings of happy environment, educational advantages, nor the leisure to journey to the beauty spot* of which he has learned to sing through sheer imagination. Other poets have sung of mountains. He was born on one, in a log cabin on Berry’s mountain in a remote section of Wilkes County, in 1879. His parents were constantly in destitute circumstances and he was forced to slave from dawn until dark, six days in the week, on an unfertile, rented farm until he reached his ma¬ jority. He attended school hardly as much as twelve months, all told, and this by piece-meal, in a little log school house. UThe education he has attained ★ has been through rending at night after all-day slavish toil, and corrc«|Kmdena* with literary lights. Many of hi« early poems were composed as he trod the long furrows under a scorching sun. At the end of a furrow, ho would stop nnd pencil the lines on his ovor-con- venient note 1км»к. At the age of eighteen, the thrill of his young life came in the acceptance by the New York Independent of one of his poems, "The Song of the Star of Bethlehem,” nn effort which netted him the staggering sum of eight dol¬ lar*. The sight of a check so huge sent him into a dead faint, he recall*. Obtaining a position in the office of an obscure country weekly, nt the age of 21, he advanced tq a daily, then to Washington. I>. <’.,*to do hack-writing nnd make the aopinintance of national lenders and literary notables, enjoying his first Contact with the world of his dreams. The bad health of his wife, whom he married after his return from Wash¬ ington, at the age of 2S, has served to envelop their lives in a certain at¬ mosphere of tragedy and hopelessness. In the interest of her health, he re¬ turned to the mountains, procured a time-worn job-press and began pub¬ lication of a sensational monthly sheet, “The Fool-Killer,” a bread and butter proposition solely, whose motto was “Make a man laugh — then cram the truth down his throat while his mouth is wide open.” At fifteen cent* a year, the circulation mounted to 50,000. The business outgrow the job press. A hank account expanded into a sizable nest eg g. James Larkin Pearson, for the first time in life was able to step out in good clothes. He had always coveted to build in the village of Moravian Fulls the pretty home of bin dreams. No longer was lie a “Hayseed" in ap¬ pearance but a well -dressed gentleman and newspaper publisher whose- writ¬ ings in prose and verse were being read from coast to coast. There was cash to purchase a library that ho had always hoped for and there was spare time between issues for poetry compo¬ sition and correspondence with authors. (Continued on рчде twenty-tu o)