A storyteller’s salute

GENEROUS WOMEN: AN APPRECIATION

By Earl Hamner

Cumberland House Publishing, $19.95, 236 pages

REVIEWED BY JAMES E. PERSON JR.

Novelist and screenwriter Earl Hamner is best known as the creator and narrator of the long-running television series “The Waltons,” though he has many more accomplishments to his credit.

The real-life John-Boy Walton first came to fame with his 1961 novel “Spencer’s Mountain,” a forerunner of the Walton family’s story that was made into a successful motion picture starring Henry Fonda and Maureen O’Hara. He wrote the scripts for eight widely admired episodes of Rod Serling’s TV series “The Twilight Zone.” Several generations of children have enjoyed the 1973 animated version of E. B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web,” for which Mr. Hamner wrote the screenplay.

And many fans of “Mister Walton” have been a bit shocked to learn that he created the very un-Waltonesque nighttime drama “Falcon Crest,” a long-running chronicle of greed, betrayal and lust within a wealthy family of California vintners.

With Mr. Hamner having been raised in the village of Schuyler, Va. — the model for Walton’s Mountain — within a family and community that boasted many strong, gracious women, it is not surprising that all his works portray girls and women in an honest, true-to-life manner. In his latest work, “Generous Women,” he salutes a great number of the women who have shaped his life in some way, from the day of his birth to the present day, during the author’s 83rd year.

“Some of these ladies have been famous, their names and faces known all over the world,” notes Mr. Hamner in his introduction. “Others are known only through their own communities, but their gifts have been many and varied, and each has enriched my life,” helping make him the man he is today: kind, tolerant, warm-hearted, a shrewd judge of character, honest and nobody’s fool.

The “generous women” he salutes include two First Ladies of our country, several distinguished actresses (one of them a fairly notorious vamp), a blue-blooded novelist, a distinguished literary agent, and a helpful editor, as well as a housekeeper, a neighbor, a trio of aunts, the author’s mother, his wife and his daughter.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Hamner’s warmest words are found in chapters devoted to his mother, Doris Giannini Hamner, a woman of kindly firmness; his wife, Jane, who was and is the greatest love of his life; and his daughter, Caroline, who possesses the gift of self-giving helpfulness.

Mr. Hamner waxes eloquent in speaking of his daughter. He laments that we live today in a world in which “fine old customs like courtesy and gratitude and sacrifice and respect and kindness seem in short supply,” but is heartened by Caroline’s example, noting “that every action has a ripple effect, and I wonder what might happen if each of us threw aside our suspicions and prejudices and hatreds and our smug self-importance and called out to someone who seems to be in need, ‘Are you lost? Can I help you?’”

He adds, “Caroline still does that, and in so doing she makes this a better world for us all.”

This passage gives a strong clue to the thematic thread running throughout “Generous Women.” Lives are changed, families are changed, communities are changed, a nation is changed, not by grand political programs designed to reshape human nature or create Heaven on Earth, but by individuals going quietly about the task of brightening their own corners within their small circles of influence.

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