"Writing Another Kind of Poetry": James Norman Hall as "Fern Gravel" in Oh Millersville!

Abstract

The gentlest of hoaxes, James Norman Hall’s Oh Millersville! (1940) is in danger of lapsing from our attention the moment we finish any of its poems. Central to his hoax is Hall’s impersonation of the voice of a girl in her ninth, tenth and eleventh years who chose for herself the less-than-fortunate nom de plume of “Fern Gravel” for writing about small town Iowa in the 1900s. Since her voice was scripted to be barely audible, it is not altogether surprising that her poetry has fallen into obscurity.1 (That Hall has no reputation as a poet and is known primarily as the collaborator, with James Nordhoff, of the best-selling trilogy Mutiny on the Bounty (1932), Pitcairn’s Island (1934) and Men Against the Sea (1934) has also not enabled its circulation.) And judging from individual poems, Fern Gravel’s poetry is—it’s the only word—abysmal. No anthologist would touch “Iowa,” whose concluding lines appear above, and which begins: “Of all the states in our country so grand / Iowa is the best, and that is my land” (Oh 49). Over a three-year apprenticeship Fern im“Writing Another Kind of Poetry”: James Norman Hall as “Fern Gravel” in Oh Millersville!