johnbyronkuhner.com

http://theygotodie.com/press-and-info/ Several years ago, when I took it in mind to write a book, I reasoned with myself thus: “Young writers go astray by trying to write ‘the Great American Novel.’  Don’t try.  Write the best book you can about the county where you live.”  That county happened to be Richmond County, or Staten Island, and that was the origin of the Staten Island book.

http://e17arttrail.co.uk/index.php?page=101 This is merely following in the footsteps of a good few dozen American writers who have followed a similar course, though America also has two thousand counties and there is plenty more to do to create anything like coverage of the literary map of the continent.  Several of them followed this counsel not just with one book but with their entire lives, and really made something great of it – Faulkner is the most famous, of course, but quite a few of the writers considered great in our literature have put their writing-desk on some particular point of the map and chosen to see the world from there: Irving in the Hudson Valley, Hawthorne in New England villages, Thoreau in Concord, Twain on the Mississippi in Missouri, Steinbeck in the Salinas Valley, and so on.  The exceptions, like Melville and Kerouac and Hemingway, prove the most interesting of all, but the rule in general holds, that in this country much of the best literature is rooted to a place.

Of the modern crop of “local writers,” Wendell Berry is often mentioned as perhaps the best, though like most living literary figures he is more likely to be known by his name than by his work.  But he is significant and his significance is likely to grow, because his life itself seems like a cure for the disease we now suffer from.  In this respect he is excelled only by Thoreau, who was a much better writer of sentences and who was far more intellectual and extreme, but for the latter reason Berry will be a much finer source of life wisdom for most people.

Berry’s form of localness is emphatically not that of someone who has decided, say, that the rich of Dallas, or Birmingham, or Reno need a chronicler and he will step into the gap.  Berry is a rural farmer, and has been a defender of local farms and local food production and a staunch opponent of agribusiness for his entire life, and now that Berry is old (born in 1934) the intelligentsia have more or less come around to his position.  The life he chronicles in Jayber Crow – and if he has better novels they must be very very good – is the simple life of small-town people whom he loves but does not romanticize.  The general effect is Norm MacLean (of A River Runs Through It, another excellent local novel) combined with Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, A Defense of Food).  You have the old-fashioned warmth, the local flavor, and the sense that this is a literary description of a type of life we need more of in the coming centuries if we are to survive at all.  He combines nostalgia for the past with a sense that this may be the only workable future as well.

In the novel, before he has generated sufficient affection for his characters, he keeps you reading with a quick-moving plot (a war, a major flood, two moves, and four major deaths in the first 28 pages, and as he describes it, “I was a little past ten years old, and I was the survivor of two stories completely ended.”) and with some well-deployed Little House on the Prairie-type humor.  Here is the picture of Dark Tom, not a black man but a blind man who said of his blindness, “I’m dark,” and so was named (the time is early 1920s, the place rural Kentucky):

A long wire had been anchored in the river and stretched tight to a post in the yard.  For wash water, when his well was low, Dark Tom hooked a weighted bucket onto the wire, let it slide down into the river, and hauled it up again by a rope tied to the bail.  Other wires led from the back porch to the privy, the coal pile, and the barn where he milked his cow and fed his hens and fattened his hog.  When he got beyond the wires, he felt his way along with a stick.    Sometimes he would feel his way clear down to the landing and spend half a day talking.  When he got drunk, he said, he got around by falling: ‘I’ve surveyed the whole geography hereabouts in man-lengths.’  He had been in the Spanish-American War, and had a pension.  The neighbors, of course, helped him out, but he did pretty well on his own.

He sent his [grocery] list one day, as he usually did, by somebody coming down to the landing.  Uncle Othy boxed up his order, and that evening we took it up to him in the buggy.  Dark Tom was in the kitchen, frying corn batter cakes on a griddle.  Uncle Othy set the box down inside the door and then stood, leaning against the jamb, and talked a while with Dark Tom.  I didn’t hear what they said because I was too taken up with what was happening there in the kitchen.  It is another of those moments long past that is as present to my mind as if it is still happening.

Dark Tom was frying the batter cakes one at a time, feeling at the edges with the spatula to tell when to turn them.  When they were done, he laid them on a plate on the seat of a chair at the end of the stove.  His black-and-brown-spotted foxhound, Old Ed, was sitting by the chair, and every time Dark Tom laid down a batter cake Old Ed promptly ate it, all in one bite, and then sat and licked his chops until Dark Tom laid down another batter cake.  I should have said something, I suppose, but I didn’t think of it.  At the time, and for years afterward, I thought that Old Ed was eating Dark Tom’s supper, taking advantage of his blindness, and that Dark Tom and Uncle Othy were too occupied by their talk to notice.  Later it occurred to me to wonder if that was merely Dark Tom’s way of feeding his dog.  It is a question with me still, and the answer has altogether disappeared from the world. (25-6)

Besides being a neat portrait of old-time life, it has also the perspective of childhood, fascinated as it is by the spectacle of another little animal “getting away with something,” and acting as a silent accomplice to it.  You can see why Berry’s narrator would remember this moment for the rest of his life.  Still, I will note that Berry never leaves the narrative voice of a wise old man, and does not attempt – as say in David Copperfield – to use his prose to get inside childhood, adolescence, dissipation, marriage, despair, or the like.  But Dickens was a master of the art, whereas Berry is more of a wise man writing.  Occasionally you can see the prose veer into awkwardness or repetition or vagueness, but it never seems anything other than wise.

Back there at the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory.  Though I knew early of death, it still seemed to be something that happened only to other people, and I stood in an unending river of time that would go on making the same changes and the same returns forever.

And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time.  Toward the end of my life at Squires Landing I began to understand that whenever death happened, it happened to me.  That is knowledge that takes a long time to wear in.  Finally it wears in.  Finally I realized and fully accepted that one day I would belong entirely to memory, and it would then not be my memory that I belonged to, and I went over to Goforth to see if there was room left beside my parents’ graves.  I learned that there was room for one more; if it belonged to anybody, it belonged to me.  I went down to the Tacker Funeral Home at Hargrave and made my arrangements.

Some days, sitting here on my porch over the river, my memory seems to enclose me entirely; I wander back in my reckoning among all of my own that have lived and died until I no longer remember where I am.  And then I lift my head and look about me at the river and the valley, the great, unearned beauty of this place, and I feel the memoryless joy of a man just risen from the grave. (24-5)

The structure of the novel allows for the “wise man writing” theme: it is the life story of the barber (and gravedigger, and church janitor; if you think this is unrealistic take a look at this) of a small town, told from the perspective of the end of his life.  Not only do you get all of his reflections on his own life, including his time in an orphanage, his attempt to train for the ministry, and his life as the town gravedigger, but also his position as barber gives him access to the gossip of the entire town.  This is deployed to full effect, without ever seeming stretched: it is a nice blend of narrative perspective and omniscience.  He describes the limits of his knowledge of the life of Port William:

I told nobody.  Nobody knew of it but me.  That alone was a revelation.  I had always made it a rule of thumb that there were no real secrets in Port William, but now I knew that this was not so.  It was the secrets between people that got out.  The secrets that people knew alone were the ones that were kept, the knowledge too painful or too dear to speak of.  If so urging a thing as I now knew was known only to me, then what must other people know that they had never told?  I felt a strange new respect for the heads I barbered.  I knew that the dead carried with them out of this world things they could not give away. (192-3)

The humanity of the above passage is characteristic of his style.  And it is this kind of wise and broad compassion which a reader is most likely to gain from time spent with Berry, mixed of course with some Abe-Lincoln-style economy of diction:

People generally suppose that they don’t understand one another very well, and that is true; they don’t.  But some things they communicate easily and fully.  Anger and contempt and hatred leap from one heart to another like fire in dry grass.  The revelations of love are never complete or clear, not in this world.  Love is slow and accumulating, and no matter how large or high it grows, it falls short.  Love comprehends the world, though we don’t comprehend it.  But hate comes off in slices, clear and whole – self-explanatory, you might say. (208)

Looking back now, after so long a time, the hardest knowledge I have is of the people I have known who have been most lonely: Troy Chatham and Cecelia Overhold, the one made lonely by ambition, the other by anger, and both by pride clambering upward over its rubble. (210)

His brand of wisdom fits in well with the work of Richard Rohr, Helen Luke, Thomas Merton, and other modern American writers who preach simplicity and self-knowledge.  I am consistently interested by the fact that though these writers probably don’t know each other’s work, they appear to be describing precisely the same spiritual phenomena.  This passage is an excellent explanation of what Rohr calls “the dualistic mind,” the tendency to see one thing always in opposition to – often merely in comparison with – something else:

The problem, you see, is that Cecelia had some reason on her side; she had an argument.  I don’t think she could be proved right; on the other hand, you can’t  prove her wrong. Theoretically, there is always a better place for a person to live, better work to do, a better spouse to wed, better friends to have.  But then this person must meet herself coming back: Theoretically, there always is a better inhabitant of this place, a better member of this community, a better worker, spouse, and friend than she is.  This surely describes one of the circles of Hell, and who hasn’t traveled around it a time or two? (210)

Indeed, who has not?  One of the terrible tasks of life is to see things as they are, and not measure them constantly, finding them excessive or defective, against some standard in our minds.

One of the prime motivators of this clear seeing is love, which is a constant preoccupation of Berry’s, though there is nothing passionate and possessing about this old man’s vision of love.  Jayber Crow is a bachelor, and humble one; he has desires, but love, in the end, because it leads to self-knowledge, sometimes precludes marriage:

If you love somebody enough, and long enough, finally you must see yourself.  What I saw was a barber and grave digger and church janitor making half a living, a bachelor, a man about town, a friendly fellow.  And this was perhaps acceptable, perhaps even creditable in its way, but to my newly chastened sight I was nobody’s husband. (197)

Berry is constantly meditating on love, and always in a fruitful way; I have long ruminated on the line, “If you love somebody enough, and long enough, finally you must see yourself,” with all the sorrow the sentence holds for someone who not long ago was young.

Berry is a Christian, a real one; he believes in love, in mercy, in community; he is opposed to law and opposed to war.  It would be easy to write a whole essay on Berry’s Christianity; the easiest thing to say is that he has had the experience, and is obviously not just reading from a manual of dogmatic theology.  I will quote only one passage, which brings together anti-Vietnam rhetoric with “we are all guilty before all” theology, and an ultimate praise of Christianity as the religion of freedom and incarnation (all worthy of and related to Dostoevksy):

In the most secret place of my soul I wanted to beg the Lord to reveal Himself in power.  I wanted to tell Him that it was time for His coming.  If there was anything at all to what he promised, why didn’t He come in glory with angels and lay his hands on the hurt children and awaken the dead soldiers and restore the burned villages and the blasted and poisoned land?  Why didn’t He cow our arrogance?…

But thinking such things was as dangerous as praying them.  I knew who had thought such thoughts before: ‘Let Christ the King of Israel descend now from the cross, that we may see and believe.’…

Christ did not descend from the cross except into the grave.  And why not otherwise?  Wouldn’t it have put fine comical expressions on the faces of the scribes and the chief priests and the soldiers if at that moment He had come down in power and glory?  Why didn’t He do it?  Why hasn’t He done it at any one of a thousand good times between then and now?

I knew the answer.  I knew it a long time before I could admit it, for all the suffering of the world is in it.  He didn’t, He hasn’t, because from the moment He did, He would be the absolute tyrant of the world and we would be His slaves.  Even those who hated Him and hated one another and hated their own souls would have to believe in Him then.  From that moment the possibility that we might be bound to Him and He to us and us to one another by love forever would be ended.

And so, I thought, he must forebear to reveal His power and glory by presenting Himself as Himself, and must be present only in the ordinary miracle of the existence of His creatures. Those who wish to see Him must see Him in the poor, the hungry, the hurt, the wordless creatures, the groaning and travailing beautiful world.

I would sometimes be horrified in every moment I was alone.  I could see no escape.  We are too tightly tangled together to be able to separate ourselves from one another either by good or by evil.  We are all involved in all and any good, and in all and any evil.  For any sin, we all suffer.  That is why our suffering is endless. It is why God grieves and Christ’s wounds still are bleeding. (294-5)

The other great teacher, of course, is Death, another preoccupation of Berry’s.  (This is not an author afraid to tackle the big issues).

But you could not be where I was without experiencing many such transformations.  One of your customers, one of your neighbors (let us say), is a man known to be more or less a fool, a big talker, and one day he comes into your shop and you have heard and you see that he is dying even as he is standing there looking at you, and you can see in his eyes that (whether or not he admits it) he knows it, and all of a sudden everything is changed.  You seem no longer to be standing together in the center of time.  Now you are on time’s edge, looking off into eternity.  And this man, your foolish neighbor, your friend and brother, has shed somehow the laughter that has followed him through the world, and has assumed the dignity and the strangeness of a traveler departing forever. (129)

He is not sentimental about it; death truncates life and breaks it, rather than finishing and perfecting it.  The idea of death without regrets is for sports equipment advertising, but not much else.  This is from the death of a good, old woman, who speaks to the protagonist: “There are leftovers, Jayber. There are things I did or said that I wish I hadn’t, and things I didn’t do or say that I wish I had” (268).

And there are men of the world who simply cannot handle intimacy with death: all they can do is try to find a problem to fix, without looking death in the eye:

Sometimes Troy would be there, but not often and not for long.  He was coming by dutifully, keeping up appearances.  He didn’t want to be there.  Troy didn’t want Athey to matter to him, didn’t want to be bound to an old man dying, couldn’t bear to be enclosed by a house where death had come as a patient guest.  He shrugged it off like an ill-fitting jacket, calling over his shoulder without turning his head as he went out, ‘Well, if you need anything, let me know.’ (264-5)

The contrast between the two above men, Athey and Troy, is for Berry the contrast between the old agrarian society and the new mechanized one.  Berry puts into superb narrative form the tale of what went wrong with American farming – how “the unsettling of America” proceeded.  You can tell that Berry is deeply committed to the old ways, and he bears the wounds of watching rural America unravel before his eyes.

Buying a tractor at that time was not unusual.  A lot of people were doing it.  The young men who had been in the war were used to motor-driven machinery.  The government was teaching a new way of farming in night courses for the veterans.  Tractors and other farm machines were all of a sudden available as never before, and farmhands were scarcer than before.  And so we began a process of cause-and-effect that is hard to understand clearly, even looking back.  Did the machines displace the people from the farms, or were the machines drawn onto the farms because the people already were leaving to take up wage work in factories and the building trades and such?  Both, I think.

You couldn’t see, back then, that this process would build up and go ever faster, until finally it would ravel out the entire old fabric of family work and exchanges of work among neighbors.  The new way of farming was a way of dependence, not on land and creatures and neighbors but on machines and fuel and chemicals of all sorts, bought things, and on the sellers of bought things – which made it finally a dependence on credit.  The odd thing was, people just assumed that all the purchasing and borrowing would merely make life easier and better on all the little farms.  Most people didn’t dream, then, that before long a lot of little farmers would buy and borrow their way out of farming, and bigger and bigger farmers would be competing with their neighbors (or with doctors from the city) for the available land.  The time was going to come – it is clear enough now – when there would not be enough farmers left and the farms of Port William would be as dependent as the farms of California on the seasonal labor of migrant workers. (183)

Athey Keith is basically Baltus van Tassel from Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”:

They were a sight to see, Della and Athey were, in their vigorous years.  They had about them a sort of intimation of abundance, as though, like magicians, they might suddenly fill the room with potatoes, onions, turnips, summer squashes, and ears of corn drawn from their pockets.  Their place had about it that quality of bottomless fecundity, its richness both in evidence and in reserve. (181)

His daughter, Mattie, is Katrina; and Troy is Brom Bones, the local sports hero who gets the girl and the most prosperous property in town with her.  But he does not understand it; “His question was what his equipment could do, not what his farm could stand” (338).  He destroys the organic system (very well described, in more scientific form, by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, when analyzing the farm of Joel Salatin, a farmer who is a devotee of Wendell Berry):

In coming to the Keith place, he had come into an order that perhaps he did not even recognize.  Over a long time, the coming and passing of several generations, the old farm had settled into its patterns and cycles of work – its annual plowing moving from field to field; its animals arriving by birth or purchase, feeding and growing, thriving and departing.  Its patterns and cycles were virtually the farm’s own understanding of what it was doing, of what it could do without diminishment.  This order was not unintelligent or rigid.  It tightened and slackened, shifted and changed in response to the markets and the weather.  The Depression had changed it somewhat, and so had the war.  But through all changes so far, the farm had endured.  Its cycles of cropping and grazing, thought and work, were articulations of its wish to cohere and to last.  The farm, so to speak, desired all of its lives to flourish.

Athey was not exactly, or not only, what is called a ‘landowner.’  He was the farm’s farmer, but also its creature and belonging.  He lived its life, and it lived his; he knew that, of the two lives, his was meant to be the smaller and the shorter. (182)

Troy, on the other hand, wants modern specialization, and in particular to grow corn, America’s cash crop; and Berry does an excellent job, as said above, in explaining how corn silos became known as “bankruptcy tubes” across America:

Troy’s sole response to that winter afternoon’s walk with Athey was: ‘We need to grow more corn.’

This brought Athey to a stop.  The law of the farm was in the balance between crops (including hay and pasture) and livestock.  The farm would have no more livestock on it than it could carry without strain.  No more land would be plowed for grain crops than could be fertilized with manure from the animals.  No more grain would be grown than the animals could eat.  Except in case of unexpected surpluses or deficiencies, the farm did not sell or buy livestock feed.  ‘I mean my grain and hay to leave my place on foot,’ Athey liked to say.  This was a conserving principle; it strictly limited both the amount of land that would be plowed and the amount of supplies that would have to be bought.  Athey did not save money at the expense of his farm or his family, but he looked upon spending it as a last resort; he spent no more than was necessary, and he hated debt.  You can see where my sympathies were.  He was, in his son-in-law’s opinion, ‘tight’ and unwilling to take the necessary risks.  ‘Risk is necessary in this farming game,’ Troy said.  He meant extraordinary financial risk – as if the risk of hail, wind, flood, drouth, pests and diseases, injury and death were not enough.  ‘You’ve got to spend money to make money.’

Troy’s demand to grow more corn was a challenge, Athey knew, not only or even mainly to himself but to the farm and its established order; he felt a shudder fall through him, and he knew that he was being changed; he was being pushed toward something he had not imagined, let alone intended.  He looked down at his feet and thought, his right wrist caught as usual in his left hand under the tail of his jacket.  And then he looked away and thought.

‘If you raise more corn, he said, ‘you’ll have to buy fertilizer.’  He said ‘you,’ for he had determined that he himself would not grow the corn or pay for the fertilizer, and he knew that Troy would have to borrow against the crop for the fertilizer. (184-5)

Official agricultural policy and university “experts,” which led to the destruction of the small farm, comes in for some attack from Berry:

All the way along – from his first adventures into the postwar mechanization, to the installation of the dairy, to the installation of the confinement hog-raising barn that replaced the dairy, to the final wrack and ruin – he was under the influence of expert advice, first in the form of magazine articles and leaflets and pamphlets, and then in the persons of the writers of the articles and leaflets and pamphlets, who instructed him, gave him their language and point of view, took photographs of the results, spoke of him in public talks as an innovator and a man of the new age of agribusiness, and who had simply nothing to say when their recommendations only drew him deeper and deeper into debt. (339)

The summation of the two views:

Athey said, ‘Wherever I look, I want to see more than I need.’  Troy said, in effect, ‘Whatever I see, I want.’  What he asked of the land was all it had. (181)

I know too that his principle was always to maintain a generous margin of surplus between his livestock and the available feed, just as between the fertility of his land and his demands upon it.  ‘Wherever I look,’ he said, ‘I want to see more than I need, and have more than I use.’  And this is a principle very different from what would be the principle of his son-in-law, often voiced in his heyday: ‘Never let a quarter’s worth of equity stand idle.  Use it or borrow against it.’ (179)

The small farm, which had been the foundation of society, producing rather than consuming, began instead to import almost everything: its fertility, its seed, its equipment, its ideas, even its food (besides its specialty crops).  This transformed rural American society; its center was elsewhere, and its young people, of course, headed for the center where the life was (the machine factory, the large agro conglomerate, the universities).  Of course now we are looking for ways to reverse this process, as agribusiness, as opposed to the old ways of organic farming, looks less and less sustainable by the year.  The difficulty, of course, is that we may not be able to reverse the damage; and on this point Berry is not sentimental or sanguine.  “I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful.  To know it’s being ruined is hard.” (363)

I have read only one book of Berry’s – the subject of this essay – but a glance at the titles of some of his 39 other books (alas, modern fecundity) reveals much that looks to be of real interest: who wouldn’t want to know the contents of a book entitled Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community?  Or What Are People For?  And I do believe that this is a man who knows something about Home Economics.