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The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry
By Mark T. Mitchell, Nathan Schlueter ISI Books
Copyright © 2015 Mark T. Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-3641-5
CHAPTER 1
Wendell Berry, a Placed Person
Wallace Stegner
In the 1958–59 academic year, Berry received a fellowship to study creative writing at Stanford University under the American novelist and essayist Wallace Stegner. This open letter from Stegner to Berry, written in 1990, captures well the integrity of Berry the artist and Berry the man.
Greensboro, Vermont
July 25, 1990
Dear Wendell,
It has taken me a long time to write you about your latest book [What Are People For?], and I know exactly why. I want to praise not only the book but the man who wrote it, and it embarrasses my post-Protestant sensibilities to tell a man to his face that I admire him. If I know you, what I want to say will embarrass you too, but we will both have to stand it.
Obviously I have not got through a long life without praising people — their houses, their gardens, their wives, their children, their political opinions, quite often their writing. But though I have liked a lot of people and loved a few, I have never been much good at telling them so, or telling them why. The more my admiration goes out to a man or woman personally, and not to some performance or accomplishment, the harder it is for me to express. The closer I come to fundamental values and beliefs, the closer I come to reticence. It is a more naked act for me to tell someone I am impressed by his principles and his integrity than to say that I like his book or his necktie.
Nevertheless, though I admire this book as I have admired all of yours since you read the last chapters of Nathan Coulter in my Stanford classroom more than thirty years ago, and though I am touched by the inclusion of a friendly essay on myself, I want to say something further, whether it embarrasses us both or not. I acknowledge you as a splendid poet, novelist, and short story writer, and as one of the most provocative and thoughtful essayists alive, and I am not unaware that as a writer you make me, one of your "teachers," look good. My problem is that I can't look upon your books simply as books, literary artifacts. Without your ever intending it, without the slightest taint of self-promotion, they are substantial chunks of yourself, the expression of qualities and beliefs that are fundamental, profound, and rare, things that not even your gift of words can out-dazzle.
That gift, as Conrad says somewhere, is not such great matter: a man is not a hunter or warrior just because he owns a gun. When I quote you, as I often do, I am paying tribute to your verbal felicity, which is always there, but I am really quoting you for qualities of thoughtfulness, character, integrity, and responsibility to which I respond, and to which I would probably respond if they were expressed in pidgin.
Those qualities inform every page of What Are People For? They are fleshed out in the people you approve, such as Nate Shaw, Harry Caudill, and Ed Abbey. They are documented in your stout preference for the natural over the artificial or industrial, the simple over the complex, the labor-intensive over the laborsaving, a team of Belgians over a tractor, manure over chemical fertilizers, natural variety over man-managed monocultures. You reaffirm, in "Writer and Region," the respect for place that was evident in A Place on Earth, The Unsettling of America, A Continuous Harmony, The Long-Legged House, and other books. In humorously repudiating the speed and ease of the word processor you repeat your lifelong distaste for technical innovations that elevate the mechanical and reduce the human. In "The Pleasures of Eating" you carry your belief in natural wholesomeness from the production to the consumption of foods, and emphasize your sense of the relatedness of the agricultural and the cultural.
Some people have compared you with Thoreau, probably because you use your own head to think with and because you have a reverence for the natural earth. I am not sure the comparison can be carried too far, though it is meant to be flattering. Thoreau seems to me a far colder article than you have ever been or could ever be. He was a triumphant and somewhat chilly consummation of New England intellectualism and Emersonian self-reliance. Emerson himself said he would as like take hold of an oak limb as Henry's arm. You are something else. The nature you love is not wild but humanized, disciplined to the support of human families but not overused, not exploited. Your province is not the wilderness, where the individual makes contact with the universe, but the farm, the neighborhood, the community, the town, the memory of the past, and the hope of the future — everything that is subsumed for you under the word "place." Your "ruminations," as you call them, most often deal with matters that did not engage Thoreau's mind: human relations, love, marriage, parenthood, neighborliness, shared pleasures, shared sorrow, shared work and responsibility. Your natural move is not inward toward transcendental consciousness, but outward toward membership, toward family and community and human cohesion. Though you share with Thoreau a delight in the natural world and the pleasures of thought, I think you do not share his austerity, and I doubt that you will end, as he did, as a surveyor of town lots.
What has always struck me as remarkable about you, and hence about your writing, is how little you have been influenced either by the fads of Tendenzliteratur or by the haunted and self-destructive examples of many contemporary writers. You may well have learned from the Delmore Schwartzes, the John Berrymans, the Randall Jarrells, the Sylvia Plaths, but I can't conceive of a time, even in your most erratic youth, when you were in danger of following them down.... You never had a drinking problem or a drug problem; you have been as apparently immune to the Angst of your times as you have been indifferent to contemporary hedonism and the lust for kicks.
By every stereotypical rule of the twentieth century you should be dull, and I suppose there are some people, especially people who have not read you, who think you are. By upbringing and by choice you are a countryman, and therefore a sort of anachronism. The lives you write about are not lives that challenge or defy the universe, or despair of it, but lives that accept it and make the best of it and are in sober ways fulfilled.
We have grown used to the image of the artist as a person more notable for his sensibility than his balance. We might go to that artist for the flash of insight, often achieved at terrible cost to himself, but not for sober wisdom. I don't disparage those Dionysian writers; they have lighted dark corners for all of us, and will continue to. But I find your example comforting because it restores a lost balance — one doesn't have to be crazy, or alcoholic, or suicidal, or manic, to be a legitimate spokesman to the world, and there is more to literature, as there clearly is to life, than aberration and sadomasochism. Your books seem conservative. They are actually profoundly revolutionary, and I have watched them gain you an increasingly devoted following over the years. Readers respond to them as lost dogs in hope of rescue turn toward some friendly stranger. The thought in your essays is so clear and unrattled that it reassures us. Your stories and poems are good like bread.
I say that your books are revolutionary. They are. They fly in the face of accepted opinion and approved fashion. They reassert values so commonly forgotten or repudiated that, reasserted, they have the force of novelty. In What Are People For? you quote some correspondents who are dumbstruck at your refusal to use a word processor, and your explanation of your refusal is as revolutionary as it is sane: you don't want the speed and ease of a word processor. You already, you say, write too fast and too easily. (You don't, but that is partly because you understand that a degree of difficulty is as necessary to prose as a scythe stone is to a scythe.) You don't want very many of the speed-and-ease facilitators of industrial life. You want, as many others of us do, to be able to work even if the power is down. You understand such things as word processors as the fences and walls that can collectively imprison us. You prefer to be free and at large, with your pad and pencil. But you want to be free in the place you have chosen, in the society of which you are a voluntary member.
From the time when you first appeared as a Fellow in the writing program at Stanford in 1958, I recognized you as one who knew where he was from and who he was. Your career since has given not only me but a large public the spectacle of an entirely principled literary life, a life not merely observant and thoughtful and eloquent but highly responsible, a life in which aesthetics and ethics do not have to be kept apart to prevent their quarreling, but live together in harmony. During the thirty-two years since we first met, plenty of people have consciously or unconsciously tried to influence the direction of your life. You tried the wider world for a few years, at Stanford, in New York, on a year's Guggenheim in Italy, and eventually you concluded that you belonged back in Kentucky, where you had come from.
That was a move as radical as Thoreau's retreat to Walden, and much more permanent. I am sure that people told you you were burying yourself, that you couldn't come into the literary world with manure on your barn boots and expect to be welcomed, that you owed it to yourself and your gift to stay out where the action was. I was myself guilty of trying to persuade you against your decision, for some time in the 1960s I alighted at your Kentucky River farm and tried to talk you into coming to Stanford on some permanent basis. Fortunately, I got nowhere. And you and I both know of a more dramatic instance when you refused an opportunity that many writers would sell their souls for. You refused it because you felt that it might obligate you or impede your freedom of mind. Some might have called you stubborn, or perhaps too timid to risk yourself in deep water. I learned to think of you as simply steadfast.
It has been a robust satisfaction to me that, incongruous as you are in post–World War II America, little as you reflect the homogenized and hyperventilated lives of termite Americans, stoutly as you rebuff the blandishments of technology and progress and the efforts to make life effortless, you have won a large and respectful audience. You have established yourself as a major figure in the environmental movement, even though the environmentalism you promote is really stewardship in land use, and has less popular appeal than the preservation of wilderness, parks, and recreational land. You look upon the earth not mystically but practically, as a responsible husbandman, but your very practicality has made you one of the strongest voices against land abuse.
Those who read you devoutly — and this letter is an indication that I am one of them — find something else in you that their world too much lacks: the value, the real physical and spiritual satisfaction, of hard human work. We respond to your pages as victims of pellagra or scurvy respond to vitamins. You may lack readers among agribusinessmen and among those whose computers have already made unnecessary both the multiplication tables and the brains that once learned them, but you are a hero among those who have been wounded and offended by industrial living and yearn for a simpler and more natural and more feeling relation to the natural world.
And you give us all this with such directness and grace. "Grace" is a word that in fact I borrow from you, and it is the only word that fits. In an essay you comment on two fishing stories, Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River" and Norman Maclean's "A River Runs Through It," the one "a feat of style" that deals with mystery and complication by refusing to deal with it, the other a work of art that ultimately "subjects itself to its subject." I like that distinction, for it helps to clarify your own performance. None of your writings that I know, and I think I must know almost all, can be dismissed as a feat of style. Everything you write subjects itself to its subject, grapples with the difficult and perhaps inexpressible, confronts mystery, conveys real and observed and felt life, and does so modestly and with grace. In the best sense of the word, your writing is a byproduct of your living.
I should add that you wouldn't be as good a man as you are if you were not a member of Tanya, and she of you.
Yours,
Wallace Stegner
CHAPTER 2
Marriage in the Membership
Anne Husted Burleigh
In the year 2007, on May 29, Wendell and Tanya Berry marked their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Wendell protested against a party, but, as Tanya said, their children announced they were having one anyway — and a fine party it was, hosted at the Smith-Berry Vineyard and Winery on a beautiful evening in June.
It was a joy to congratulate Wendell and Tanya, my friends and Kentucky neighbors, on their fifty years of marriage. A half century of marriage is a great accomplishment for any couple — but in the case of Wendell and Tanya, it meant even more. Tanya is the reason, Wendell undoubtedly would say, that he has been able to write what he has written. Without Tanya, Wendell would have written things, but they would be different from and less than the essays, stories, and poems he has given us.
The theme of marriage is utterly central to Wendell Berry's work. Whether we address Berry's fiction, his poetry, or his essays, the same theme is pivotal and fundamental: the mysterious love and life of a man and woman in marriage.
Because Wendell Berry respects the profound mystery that both absorbs and transcends a man and woman in marriage, he treats marriage with delicacy and reverence. He also treats it as the foundation stone of community, the means by which we become members of a community and stewards of the place where we are, the place we are given.
In the order of the gifts of Creation bestowed upon Adam and Eve, marriage is basic in its capacity to unite man and woman in friendship, in membership. To begin human life in right order is to begin with marriage — and so, consequently, in the order of Berry's novels, stories, essays, and poetry, to begin at the beginning is to begin with marriage.
Marriage is also to acknowledge that we are looking at a connection between two people that is not private. This relationship that begins with a mere glance in one another's direction or an unseen flutter of the heart, this relationship that one assumed was a private bond between two people, turns out to be a vastly open connection that impacts the children who come from it, the community that both arises from it and supports it, the country that builds upon it, and the civilization that springs from it. Even as a marriage appears to be mostly a private affair, it has ramifications that are political, economic, and cultural. Although marriage is a domestic relationship, it is also an institution that is distinctly civil and, as such, is ratified and witnessed by the community. In Berry's writing, there is no such thing as a marriage that is solely private; it always is related to the community; it always is responsible to the community, just as the community is responsible to it. The reader who seeks a pair of romantic lovers who hold themselves apart from or above responsibility to the community will almost never find them in Wendell Berry's fiction. The enduring romantic pair in Berry's stories are sure to be loyal to the commonwealth. Appropriately for a writer who lives in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, Berry often uses this rich medieval term commonwealth, by which he means a community united for the purpose of the common good.
Whether he is writing a story, a poem, or an essay, Wendell Berry addresses three elements of marriage: fidelity, incarnation, and memory.
The first of these themes is crucial to the other two — that is, marriage is based on fidelity, and fidelity is the foundation of all relationships, civil and domestic. Fidelity is the foundation of order, order in the soul, order in the family, order in the community. Fidelity is the foundation of all law, moral law and civil law. Even more, fidelity is the signature, the guarantor, the seal, the very essence of love. Fidelity is the word of love, the promise that enables love to last, to stretch across time and distance and between generations. Fidelity makes us better, nobler, greater, wiser, stronger than we are or could be without it. Fidelity is the word of love without which none of us would find life worth living.
As Andy Catlett says in Berry's story "Pray Without Ceasing," "You work your way down, or not so much down as within, into the interior of the present, until finally you come to that beginning in which all things, the world and the light itself, at a word welled up into being out of their absence." Andy is talking about God's word, which, once given, wells up into life itself. God's word when uttered becomes the very reality that God speaks. We can give our word because God first gives his. His faithfulness to us is the reality of which our fidelity — to him and to each other — is the reflection. God's word, which is faithfulness itself, stands behind our words and makes possible both our capacity and our duty to stand by our words.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry by Mark T. Mitchell, Nathan Schlueter. Copyright © 2015 Mark T. Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter. Excerpted by permission of ISI Books.
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