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An Introduction to Wendell Berry
BY I was first introduced to Wendell Berry by my father, who read Berry's
novel, Jayber Crow, and then called all of his children to
insist that we read it. “It's a novel,” he said over the phone.
“It's a good novel.” My father uses 'good' sparingly when
talking about books and movies: reserving it for something that changes
the way he views the world. He had only called everyone in this fashion
twice before: once for the film Spitfire Grill and after he
had finished John Hassler's novel, Simon's Night. My sister
sent the book to me and my husband and I read it out loud while driving
from Texas to Rhode Island. I was intrigued. All I had known about Wendell
Berry was his strange politics: a right-wing agrarian plus a left-wing
ecologist equals what? That is a shallow view of politics, though: Berry's
love of the land transcends categories and is fundamental to his world-view
and writing. Wendell Berry--farmer, poet, essayist, and novelist--was born in Kentucky
in 1934. He studied at the University of Kentucky and taught at Georgetown
College, Stanford University, and New York University before returning
to Kentucky to take a teaching position and farm the same land that
his family lived on for five generations. He has published more than
thirty books. Berry's prose is expansive and spiritual, often times
tapping into mythic strains while remaining convincing and sparse. He
has Dostoevsky's intense love of the earth, Faulkner's grasp of the
complexity of history, and Frost's terror and awe of a world that Berry
says “exacts a terrible toll on all of us who live in it.”
When an interviewer once commented to Berry that readers love his work
because it is “connected to the world,” Berry replied, “Well,
I like the world, so far I am not a bit sorry that I've had the experience
and the privilege.” Berry's work is in part a response to the hectic movement that accompanies
technological developments and an expanding global economy. His ideas
about the importance of place (often introduced by the words 'Stop somewhere;
just stop.') are conveyed through the Port William short stories and
novels, which he began writing in 1955. Port William, Kentucky, like
Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, is gradually revealed through various
narrators and their stories. Jack Beechum, Nathan Coulter, Andy Catlett,
Jayber Crow, Hannah Coulter, and others are written about and narrate
in turn, weaving a substantial history that is adequate to the task
of presenting the lives of an entire town full of people. Berry's works explore through intense scrutiny of personal stories
the relationships between people and an examination of the land as a
integral aspect of existence. Berry’s narratives convey a sacramental
vision of nature and mankind. Port William is rural, backwater, provincial--
but Berry reveals its shining substance. Every relationship, story,
gesture, and thought implies that the world is filled with meaning.
Berry transforms daily routine into poetry, a routine he believes is
so charged with meaning that we cannot know the extent of it. In an
essay about scientific categorization, Berry writes, “We have more
than we can know. We know more than we can say.” This superabundance
of possessions--what the earth gives us and what we can give each other--is
not fully knowable. It cannot be named and reduced to scientific data;
neither can we express all that we do know about it. Life is essentially
mystery, Berry contends, and his work gives credit to that mystery.
Like Dostoevsky's novels, all of Wendell Berry's works bear out the
strong conviction that love for the earth is essential to healthy communities,
whether those communities consist of two people or all mankind. Berry's
particular brand of agrarianism posits that mankind cannot save itself
from self-destruction unless there is a turn toward small, ecological,
and largely self-sufficient agrarian communities. His work, however,
is not politically or economically reductive. It posits an encompassing
vision of the good that mankind is capable of when brought into a proper
relationship with nature and each other--Berry deals with politics and
economics on a grand scale. The effects of love for the earth are far
reaching: it is the physical and spiritual basis for every other kind
of love, human and divine. Love, for Berry, is the ultimate reality,
as the reader gradually comes to understand through Jayber Crow's narration
of his life. The following passage is from Jayber's novel:
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