The Carver's Art

Crafting Meaning from Wood

Simon J. Bronner

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813108636
• eBook ISBN: 9780813187297
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Chains carved from a single block of wood, cages whittled with wooden balls rattling inside—all "made with just a pocketknife"—are among our most enduring folk designs. Who makes them and why? what is their history? what do they mean for their makers, for their viewers, for our society? Simon J. Bronner portrays four wood carvers in southern Indiana, men who had been transplanted from the rural landscapes of their youth to industrial towns. After retiring, they took up a skill they remembered from childhood. Bronner discusses how creativity helped these men adjust to change and how viewers' responses to carving reflect their own backgrounds. By recording the narratives of these men's lives, the stories and anecdotes that laced their conversation, Bronner finds new insight into the functions and symbolism of traditional craft. Including anew illustrated afterword in which the author discusses recent developments in the carver's art, this new edition will appeal to carvers, scholars, and anyone interested in traditional woodworking.

CHAPTER ONE

Part of You
Is in a Carving

“WHERE had the time gone?” I thought. My watch ticked impatiently. It was late, but I didn’t want to leave. George Blume was speaking fast, in his usual staccato fashion, of a time he remembered when a man had to make everything from tools to toys, for himself. Suddenly, George noticed the dark around us. With disappointment in his voice, he said, “Well, I guess you’d best be going.”

I nodded and began packing my gear. I had my arms full when I heard him think aloud to himself.

“Yeah, that reminds me, yes sir, when I would make them things. I did a lot of baloney, all right. I went through a lot of bull and I made a lot of bull . . . yeah, a lot of bull.”

I stopped and listened.

In no chronological order and in no apparent logical pattern, out cascaded a verbal stream of past incidents that marked for him the flow of his life. Looking back more than eighty years, he ordered his experiences and accomplishments by talking to me. I had asked him to unveil his past the way no friend or relative had. Doing so brought out much of his inner self, more than he had ever revealed before. He said he was glad for that, but I thought it made him anxious too. When I said we would talk again tomorrow, he chuckled and responded, “Yeah, I’ll have more lies for you by then.”

His laughter suggested to me that, indeed, the truthfulness of what he told me surprised him, maybe disturbed him too. His life was subtly etched into his creations, and I had brought his creations and life back into view. Knowing what came to his mind when he recounted the connections between his experience and his creativity let me into his world and the world he tried to make in wood.

Floyd Bennington and I were talking in his living room, he having spread photos of his pioneering ancestors and their houses before me. Then came the shots of one-room schoolhouses where he had begun teaching and the sprawling central school where he had ended his career. The continuity of his life with families past and future emerged. I photographed him in front of his “family wall,” a whole side of a den bragging of family portraits. He held up a Wooden chain and caged ball from a table below the portraits for the camera to preserve.

“Can you get them?” Floyd said with concern, motioning to the wooden creations in his outstretched palms.

Floyd showed me his latest project in the garage-turned-wood-working shop. Here he was lord; the tools and paints answered only to him. We returned to the living room where he sat back on the sofa and reminisced. His wife seemed amused by the scene. Floyd’s fingers moved over his pocketknife as we talked. He placed a wooden chain he was completing on the table between us, and I could sense his past surging before me.

Floyd spoke more deliberately than the other carvers. His eyes drifted off when he talked. He punctuated his thoughts with broad smiles and smooth waves of the hand. When he drew on his memory, he sought order. He sorted the jumble of events in his life into a successive line. Just when I thought he was engrossed in his own thoughts, he would cock his head and look deep into my eyes. He spoke with directness, but deeper within were many stray thoughts looking for definition.

Wandley Burch spent much time talking to me in his basement workshop. He would frequently pick up wooden chains or pliers and bounce them in his hand.

“Here, take that,” he would say as he put the thing in my hand.

“But . . . ,” I would object.

“Go ahead, put it in your pocket.”

There was no arguing. The objects were part of the conversation. They told him that he reached me, and they reminded me that I was there and had listened. Wandley spoke softly in a hard Hoosier mumble. He was often most serious when he was trying to kid. He would cackle ever so briefly, as if taking it back, when he realized that a joking remark rubbed hard at the truth. His voice lacked much variation, but it showed mood easily. He talked most fluidly when around his things strewn in the basement: old books, machinery, carvings, tools, and lots of wood.

“That anvil over there is my dad’s, you know.”

His mind raced back. “Yeah, you know I came to Indiana in a covered wagon. My dad, he. . . .”

We moved back to the living room, and his wife, always in good cheer despite a bad hip that gave her pain, would join in with memories and encouragement for Wandley.

As I made my goodbyes with nods and handshakes, I was left awed by Wandley’s large, commanding hands. I thought back to the assured way he grasped his carvings in those rough palms and the gentle, expressive way he put them in mine. The carvings often spoke for him. At the door, Wandley arched his back, curled his brow, and smiled.

“I’ll be here when you get back, uh huh. I’ll be doing more whittling. . . .”

As I drove to Earnest Bennett’s home on the outskirts of Indianapolis, I could see old barns fighting for life in the shadow of the highway. In Earnest’s mind, this was farm country lost to the city. Earnest’s house, like Floyd Bennington’s, was a one-story, modern, suburban affair. Yet inside was a man who spent much of his time carving tiny replicas of old tools and things in rustic woods.

A quiet, peaceful man, Earnest wouldn’t stand out in a crowd, unless, of course, he had his carvings. His carvings have color, spirit, flair. He kept them in his bedroom where they greeted him and his wife when they awoke and sent them to sleep at night. Outside the window was a lush garden, more evidence of Earnest’s handiwork.

I told Earnest that I had tried to carve a chain from his instructions but that I had little to show for it except cuts in my hands. He took me to his workshop and went through the subtleties of chain carving again. Behind him was a wall full of neatly hung old tools and instruments—a reminder of old values and old times, of past places and pioneers. In this setting, he reflected on his life. His manner of speech was terse; his comments wise. Of all the carvers, he said the least, but I often thought he conveyed the most. He pulled from the wall a fretless, homemade banjo made by an elder relative from his old Kentucky home, and asked me to play it. I gingerly fingered the neck, while Earnest looked eagerly on. When I played it, the instrument resounded with back porches and times past. Earnest recorded it, and said, “Well, now we have tapes of each other!” It was his way of exchanging skills and sharing bonds with another generation.

When the carvers talked, I tried to draw out experiences that would help me interpret their carvings. “Part of you is in a carving,” Floyd Bennington stressed, and his words rang true for the other carvers. To give some structure to the men’s narratives, I specified dates and places: When were you born? Where? When did you move? Where again? When did you retire? When did you start carving? The answers gave bare outlines, but the picture started to get filled in when they rambled about themselves.

Even as I came to understand what was unique about each of the men, I recognized that George Blume, Floyd Bennington, Wandley Burch, and Earnest Bennett were not unlike the other carvers I met. I spotlight these four because they are the chaincarvers I know best, they live in the same general locale, and their experiences exemplify both the similar and diverse motives and conditions that can spark chain carving. Elderly, usually retired, and originally from the country, each tells of passing time by carving chains and other objects. They typically never sold their chains, but rather gave them to friends and relatives. They learned how to carve chains in childhood from a neighbor, uncle, father, or grandfather but picked it up again only after retirement or in old age. At some point they spent most of their time carving.

The rest of this chapter presents their stories. They are similar and different, joyful and tragic. The stories unfold in the order I met these men. I open with George too because his story extends more than the others, and he sets the stage more fully for the other dramas in the chapter. George’s story is also the one most set in the past. On the other end Earnest’s is most set in the present. Earnest is the most publicly active carver, although Wandley is probably the most productive. Floyd’s tale bridges the others because he is more active now than George, but less so than Wandley and Earnest. He is the most reserved carver, but he also is the most philosophical.

Every man is his own historian, although often unintentionally. A man recalls incidents and lore that strike him as telling. When I came along I recorded those incidents and lore couched in running narratives of men’s lives. I wasn’t producing the often deceiving objectivity of biography, but the personal, subjective document of experience. The occasional folklore lacing the men’s conversation—conspicuous stories, anecdotes, and sayings—offered autobiography in code. When the men couldn’t talk about what values and visions they had, their folklore did. When surface facts of places and dates failed to order their personal history, elaborated accounts of events brought out hidden messages with the profoundness of feeling and involvement. What I present here, then, is a narrative embroidery framing the lives of the men. You’ll find experiences and expressions weaving together values and creativity.

GEORGE’S STORY

Witches, Old-Timers, and Machines

George Blume has not carved for several years. Now in his eighties, he gardens in the morning and in the afternoon sits on his small front porch. Stationed in his favorite chair, he observes events in his quiet Huntingburg neighborhood, reads the paper, and occasionally talks to visitors.

“He loves to talk,” Lil Blemker told me, but few visitors come around these days, because his friends, in George’s words, “all kicked the bucket and went to heaven.” He smiles as he says it, but the euphemism barely hides his thoughts.

He would lecture me on staying healthy. “You take these vitamins, you hear? Chew your pills, don’t swallow them. Take an aspirin every day. Don’t listen to them doctors. You’re young yet.” I was less than one-third his age when I began visiting George. He seemed eager to have company and to teach me about the “old stuff.”

George Blume was born on a farm outside Schnellville, Dubois County, Indiana, on January 21, 1898, into a German-Catholic family of ten children. A year later, his father moved off the farm to open a general store six miles south in tiny Siberia. As a youth, George learned woodworking and farming from his father and grandfather.

George married in 1917. He worked his own farm near Siberia for five years. Drawn by the promise of higher wages, he settled in industrializing Huntingburg to work in a furniture factory. He stayed in Huntingburg, working at the same furniture factory almost forty years, and raised several children.

Around the time of his wife’s death in 1959 he began carving chains and caged balls, forms familiar to him from his childhood. In the next few years he made carvings of tools, toys, buildings, and characters reminiscent of his rural experience. Failing eyesight and arthritis forced him to give up his carving around 1972, and shortly afterward he moved to his daughter’s home. To give him extra money his daughter sold his carvings, numbering almost a thousand pieces, to a dealer in Adyeville.

That’s the outline of his story, but what were the influences on him, the memories he had that fill in the picture?

George’s German background was important, for one. The area around Schnellville and Siberia where he grew up had a strong German-Catholic stamp. George’s parents and neighbors spoke German exclusively. Priests held church services in German, and residents maintained German customs that George remembered well, such as “shooting in the New Year.” On New Year’s Eve, young bachelors from the town would ride to farmhouses and shoot off guns and create a ruckus. The farmer would obligingly come out to invite the bachelors in for a snack and toddy. Sometimes the young men would recite a verse or perform a skit in exchange. Then they would be off to the next farmhouse, and the next, until fatigue or drink would force them home. “Now, of course,” George said slowly, “you don’t have that anymore.”

George’s grandparents, born and bred in Germany, lived with the family. George’s grandfather, Casper Blume, had a strong influence on George, although he died in 1906, when George was only eight years old. Casper spent long hours with George telling him stories about life in Germany. Casper trained George’s hand in farming and old-time music making.

George’s eyes glistened when he talked about his grandfather. When I asked George to give me an example of grandfather’s stories, he responded with a dramatic narrative of witches and unusual events.

“My grandpa had a piece of ground in the bottom, and one day they had five hundred dollars laying in the house. In those days that was a lot of money.

“They were working one day in the bottom and Grandma says, ‘Say Grandpa, there’s somebody up at the house. You hear that dog barking up there? He don’t bark unless there’s somebody around.’

“Grandpa says, ‘Don’t worry about it. We can’t go up there now. They know we’re down here now. If they need us that badly they’ll come down here.’

“And in the evening when they went home, the window in the kitchen was open. They got suspicious.

“ ‘How that window got open? We had it shut,’ Grandma says. Grandma she went to the safe where the five hundred dollars was at. The five hundred dollars was gone. Grandpa said, ‘Well, I’ll be doggone, where’s the five hundred dollars?!’

“So he went over to a neighbor who was one of these witchcraft people you know—help people get stuff back like that.

“Grandpa told the man, ‘We were over there in the bottom yesterday. By golly, we heard our dog barking by the house, but we never made nothing out of it. Yesterday evening our window was laying open back in the kitchen and our five hundred dollars that had lain in the safe was gone. Can you do anything about it?’

“ ‘Sure,’ the man said. ‘I can get that money back for you if you want it.’

“Grandpa said, ‘I sure would like to get it back.’

“ ‘Do you want to see the man to bring it back or do you just want your money back?’

“Grandpa said, ‘I just want that money back, ‘cause if I see...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Author’s Note to Paperback Edition
• Preface
• Illustration Credits
• Prologue
• Chapter One: Part of You Is in a Carving
• Chapter Two: Bet You Don’t Know How I Made This
• Chapter Three: How Do You Figure It, That Darn Stuff?
• Epilogue
• Ten Years Later
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index