What Wendell Berry Saw

The first thing I saw was a poem. A friend posted Wendell Berry’s “How to Be a Poet (to remind myself),” and at first, it only registered as someone sharing a familiar title. Then, a few seconds later, the fine print hit me. Wendell Berry had died, and, for a moment, I lost my breath.

I never met Wendell Berry. I never sat at his kitchen table or walked his Kentucky farm. My first encounter with his work came in seminary, when I believe Terry York, a poet and hymn writer, assigned What Are People For?

In the years after, Berry kept turning up. Eugene Peterson, whose writing continues to shape me, said he’d learned much of his pastoral theology from Berry. When Berry wrote about a farm, Peterson could often substitute the word “parish” and discover something true about the work of staying with a congregation.

Inevitably, I’d find Berry had impacted just about every modern writer or theologian I admired. The pattern was repetitive: I could pull on almost any thread I cared about, and Berry was somewhere upstream of it. And I’ve now read enough of his work to understand why. Even today, A Place on Earth is beside my chair with a bookmark somewhere near the middle.

I grew up in rural northeast Texas, on and around my grandparents’ land. My grandfather worked cows and kept a large garden. He had an eighth-grade education and ran a wholesale business selling candy and tobacco and notions, driving from one little store to another stocking the shelves himself. He smoked like a chimney. His life story was not the kind to make headlines.

When I began reading Berry’s Port William stories I never thought, this character is my grandfather. The people were Kentuckians, after all, and fully themselves. What startled me, though, was Berry’s attention. Berry saw people like my grandfather.

The people of Port William worked fields and cut hair. They cooked, gossiped, fought, got sick, and lost loved ones. They never forget who once owned that particular farm or why those two families still walk past each other at the post office without saying a word. Their bodies age, they make their mistakes, and Berry slowly gets the point across to readers: each life only looks small when viewed from far away.

I think I understood something about that before I had words for it. Most of the people who’ve loved me best are ones the wider world has little reason to notice. I notice because I belong to them, something Wendell learned quite early. As a boy in Henry County, Kentucky, he spent time with two neighboring farmers, Melvin and Marvin Ford, known as Meb and Mob to him. Both left school after the eighth grade, though Berry remembered them as some of his greatest teachers. Meb could take a boy through the countryside and tell him about animals and crops, about who’d lived where and what happened on a particular piece of ground.

Berry was born in 1934 into a family already bound up with Kentucky agriculture. His father, John Marshall Berry Sr., was a lawyer who spent much of his working life trying to organize tobacco farmers so they’d have some power against the companies who were setting the terms of their livelihood.

Berry did leave Kentucky. He studied with Wallace Stegner at Stanford, traveled in Europe and taught at New York University. A literary career was opening up for him. But then he and Tanya went home. They eventually settled at Lanes Landing near Port Royal, along the Kentucky River. They went back because they wanted to. Berry later said that somewhere around then he realized he didn’t have to become a professional writer. He could be an amateur in the older sense of the word and “work for love.” Whatever the decision ultimately came to mean would be worked out over the decades that followed.

He and Tanya raised their children there while Berry farmed the land, wrote, and watched the countryside change all around them. Port Royal had once supported sixteen businesses in a town of scarcely a hundred people, even a millinery shop. Berry lived long enough to watch the local economies that sustained places like it grow thin.

One of the first essays in What Are People For? begins with Berry admitting he’d damaged his own land. He’d wanted a pond for livestock, so he had a bulldozer brought in. Berry didn’t understand the hillside well enough, the ground slipped, and a visible scar was left behind. There was a lesson in all of that Wendell never forgot.

Later in the same book Berry noticed an old, galvanized bucket hanging on a fence post. Rain got in. Leaves fell. Shells, feathers, insects and the remains of small things accumulated. The contents began to rot, and slowly, at the bottom of the bucket, dark humus formed.

That bucket was Berry’s picture of local culture: A remembered name, a retold story, a trade passed down. He’d watched the opposite happen. Young people left for cities and didn’t come back. Parents died, and home places were sold. Down the hill from his house stood an old store that had long since closed, and Berry could still tell you the exact day it closed, the name of the man who ran it, and stories about the people who once did business there. In one of his later conversations about agriculture, Berry pointed to the absurdity of a dairy farmer having to go to a grocery store to buy milk. You can almost hear his incredulity.

Berry asked hard questions partly because agricultural economists were talking about America having too many farmers. Fewer people on the land meant greater efficiency. But Berry wondered what else would vanish along with them. A farm might contain a household, a history and neighbors who needed one another in ways for which no ledger could account. Then there was the local knowledge, like how water moved across a field after a hard rain or how much a place could yield without being used up. Berry worried over these questions in his essays, and in his novels, these were also the concerns that entered the lives of Port William.

Berry called the people of Port William its “membership.” Burley Coulter, one of its less respectable citizens and one of its clearest voices, put it plainly: they are “members of each other,” the real difference is who knows it and who doesn’t. Even the dead remain part of the conversation. Hannah Coulter can sit in an empty house and discover that the people she has lost are still somehow involved in the life she is living.

Berry once said, “I don’t make any sense as an individual.” He was testifying about community, speaking of Tanya, his parents, his teachers and friends, his family, and his place. Take them away and the individual called Wendell Berry disappears.

This was one of those places where Eugene Peterson heard pastoral theology. It takes years to really know a congregation. You learn names and bury the dead and baptize the children, and eventually you discover which old story explains the tension nobody mentions aloud at the business meeting. Some people become dear to you while others remain difficult. And if you stay, the place begins to know you too.

Many of Berry’s Sabbath poems began as he walked on Sundays, even as pastors in pulpits elsewhere were reading Berry’s words to help their congregations. His relationship with institutional Christianity was, at times, uneasy, though the words and rhythms of scripture were rooted deep within him. He simply couldn’t understand a Christianity that praised the Creator while remaining incurious about damaged creation.

For Berry, the command to love our neighbor included the farmer, the land, and the laborer, the people who grew the food and the ones who ate it. Christ’s incarnation made it difficult to treat the body as only a temporary container for a soul headed somewhere better. Jesus, as Berry understood him, kept returning us to this world, to seeds and bread, laborers and landowners, meals and money. In “The Man Born to Farming,” Berry sees “the light lie down / in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.” Berry made some of that earthiness harder to overlook.

As young adults, my wife Christy and I spent a year serving in northern Thailand with the Upland Holistic Development Project, founded by our friends Rick and Ellen Burnette. The Burnettes’ work involved serving Palaung, Lahu, Karen, Akha, and Kachin communities as they navigated soil, crops, agroforestry, food security, and the practical work of helping people learn how to live from the land available to them without exhausting it.

Rick has invested much of his life in that kind of work, and after Berry died, Rick wrote that “no other writer, philosopher, and agrarian had as much influence and common sense as Wendell Berry.” He hoped Berry’s legacy would “help heal our broken land and expose the good that remains throughout creation.” I read those words and thought about the distance between Port Royal, Kentucky, and the hills of northern Thailand.

And all the while, Berry kept on writing from his place in Kentucky. The wider Berry’s influence grew, the more familiar his image became: white hair, weathered face, broad-brimmed hat, the old Kentucky farmer-writer looking out over the country he’d spent decades defending. There was something true in the image. The life he’d chosen had been worn into him. Still, a face, even a worn and weathered one, can only tell so much.

Berry knew some of this about himself. In “A Warning to My Readers,” he tells readers not to assume he was gentle simply because he praised gentleness. He described himself instead as “full / of fits and furies.” He could be stubborn and defensive with his editors. He wrote by hand and famously refused to buy a computer. Tanya typed his manuscripts on a Royal Standard typewriter, which prompted his critics to emphasize an obvious tension: Berry could reject a labor-saving machine in part because his wife was doing the typing.

Berry bristled at this. They knew almost nothing about his marriage, he argued, and even less about Tanya. He understood this as their shared work. Berry read the work aloud while Tanya listened, questioned, corrected and edited. She was his first reader and best critic. Her judgment shaped his writing.

Race is one of the places where Berry’s legacy is difficult to understand. With his book, The Hidden Wound, he offered an unusually candid effort by a white Southern writer to reckon with his own family’s slaveholding past. In later years, however, readers who had valued that effort sometimes struggled with Berry’s reflections on Confederate memory and his resistance to removing some Confederate monuments. The scar of those tensions remains. I don’t know that there is any clean way to resolve that part of Berry’s story. It’s simply one of the particulars of the life Wendell actually lived.

His letters sometimes arrived in pencil on torn sheets from a yellow legal pad. There were horses on his farm. He worked in a little writing house above the Kentucky River. People came by their house, sat at the table with he and Tanya, and stayed awhile. For all he’s been to readers far beyond Kentucky, there were still people there who simply knew him as Wendell.

I love the story of the journalist who encountered a local boy near Berry’s place and asked what it was like living beside the famous author Wendell Berry. The boy objected. Wendell Berry was not a famous author. He was his neighbor.

Berry loved that story. He told it grinning and said he’d never been paid a finer compliment.

That old, galvanized bucket still hangs on its fence post in my memory. I think I have a better understanding of why now. Long before I knew his name, I’d already lived inside what Berry tried to name: my grandparents were there, on their land, with all the people who made up that world.

Wendell Berry helped me see more clearly what had been there all along.

And I am still learning to look.