I was not surprised when I heard that Wendell Berry had died. I’d had the opportunity of spending some time with him a couple decades ago, and I know his family and a number of people close to him now and had heard he was failing in health. He made it to the age of 92 and, as I understand it, was writing until the end.
One of the ironic things about this man who gained such a zealous following was that it was really the last thing he wanted. The fame really did not seem to please him. He shunned the personal attention but appreciated the attention to his work. Wendell Berry was one of those people who was so normal that he seemed abnormal in a world in which the normal itself is being besieged.
If you had met him on the street you could be forgiven for mistaking him for what he actually was: an old farmer. He was tall and big-boned, but thin. He had large hands and a hearty laugh. His verbal expressions were filled with country similes. At first you might mistake him for someone you might meet at the tractor show at the county fair. And yet, if you listened a little longer it would dawn on you that underneath the earthiness was a depth seldom encountered in this world.
“So far as I have discovered, life itself has never been isolated or captured or confined. The most principled materialist is a living creature who has never seen or heard or tasted or touched or smelled, let alone weighed or measured or priced, apart from the body, the life that so far has animated his body. He can only be amazed, like all his kind from the beginning until now, that life is something that in one moment creatures have, and in the next have had.”—Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole, p. 481
Every word that came out of his mouth, even in casual conversation, was exactly the right word. You could see him weighing each syllable as he uttered it. He wanted you to know his thought precisely and unambiguously. To this day I have never met a person with Berry’s penchant for verbal exactitude. He never spoke a word amiss.
And this meticulousness of speech was accompanied by an integrity of expression I have never encountered in anyone else. He spoke often of our obligation to take responsibility for things. As modern people, many of us speak carelessly and pay little attention to the effects our words might have on others. Berry took painstaking responsibility for everything he said. In fact, the word “responsibility” appears again and again in his writings. NBC’s Bill Moyers once called him, correctly, I think, the “prophet of responsibility.”
One of his collections of essays is called Standing by Words. This could well have served as the theme for his life. Another of his collections of short stories is titled Fidelity, but any collection of his essays could easily have borne that title. His words were faithful—not only in the sense of being faithful to the world, but in the sense of being faithful to the Word.
It was this fidelity to the Word and the world that is, I think, behind the fact that disingenuousness was utterly alien to him. I think he was simply incapable of it. There is a sense of integrity that leaps from every line he wrote. There is a word, “cant,” that is seldom used today (although examples abound). It means insincere, hypocritical, or platitudinous speech. I find myself falling into it on occasion. But I can’t remember ever encountering a word of cant in anything Wendell Berry ever wrote.
To many people this will make him sound humorless. But that’s not it at all. While he was always serious, he loved a good joke. I think he subscribed to Chesterton’s dictum that “funny is not the opposite of serious; funny is the opposite of not funny and nothing else.” In conversation he could be deadly serious one moment and then become suddenly amused the next and break out into a big laugh. His writing is the same. Like Chesterton’s Man Who Was Thursday, Berry was intensely solemn—and he was jolly.
I believe that the world can be divided between those who love Wendell Berry and those who have not read him. I have heard that there are, somehow, somewhere, a few people who have read his books and found them wanting, but I persist in the belief that such people only think they have read him but really haven’t. And I would say to such people what I would say to those who have read Shakespeare and don’t like him either: His works are a wonder—read again!
Most admirers of Wendell Berry’s works are not fans—they are converts. One of the most common sentiments I hear from these devotees is that they didn’t like his writing at first, carried along by a story that seemed mundane, until they inevitably came across some vagrant observation or deep reflection and were suddenly stricken down as by a vision. They are never the same again.
Berry is one of those writers who commands unambiguous loyalty in his readers. If you meet a new person and find out that he or she is also an admirer of Berry, there is an immediate bond. You are co-laborers in the Port William Membership.
If I had to come up with one central principle that underlies everything Wendell Berry wrote, it would be this: He possessed a deep humility standing in the presence of the world. He was Jayber Crow, the titular character from his novel of the same name, cutting the hair of his customers in his barbershop as if it were a ministry, tending the gravestones in the cemetery of Port William and praying for the dead, a custodian of the community—past, present, and future—taking care of the things that need tending and remembering the things that need to be remembered.
Berry was the most completely unassuming man I have ever met. Impatient with his popularity, he wanted only to have a candid conversation about something important, which to him was this year’s tobacco crop, or the condition of the Kentucky River that flowed near his farm, or the donkeys he raised. The universal was always secondary to the particular. He did not like abstractions that took our minds away from things as they really are.
He seemed to view his popularity as both a blessing and a burden. He enjoyed signing his books for those people who lined up to buy them, but mostly he wanted your conscious attention, not your personal adulation. He had something to say, and he wanted you to listen.
He wanted to be heard, not seen.
Berry inhabited a peculiar position in modern literature. His books never appeared on a bestseller list and yet, among those who paid attention to books, he was tremendously loved and admired. I was tempted to say there that he was “insanely” popular but checked myself because if Berry’s writings are characterized by anything, it is a fundamental sanity.
Unlike the vast majority of social critics, Berry did not exempt himself from his own critique. When he talked about the abuse of land and the obligation we all had to conserve what God has given us on this earth, his constant refrain was: “We are all complicit.”
His public mourners will refer to him as a contemporary writer. But what about him was contemporary? If he was contemporary, we would expect that there would be other writers like him perhaps still in this living world, or maybe other, similar writers whose lives overlap with his own. But we would search for them in vain.
We are tempted, then, to think that maybe his writing must fit into some older mold and look for “contemporaries” in the past. But here, too, we would come up short. So then, surely his writings can be characterized as part of some literary movement or another—but no one can name it. He was not a transcendentalist or a modernist or a realist or even a regionalist. And I think this is one reason his reputation will endure: It is not dependent upon any transient or fashionable movement or genre.
Like all great writers he makes you see things about reality you haven’t seen before. When I introduced him several years ago at the CiRCE National Conference, where he was being given the Paideia Prize, I said this:
I met Wendell before I had ever read any of his books. He had come to teach a class at Highlands Latin School. I had heard that his books were pretty good, and soon I fell to reading his novels. It was a bit like going through the wardrobe and entering another world.
The world I entered was a world of life and death and joy and sorrow and peace and far-off war and laughter and weeping and charity and violence; it was a world of work and play and friendship and love. There was something striking about this world, and for a long time I couldn’t put my finger on it.
And then one day I realized what it was: It was not another world that I had entered through his books. The world that I had entered was this world.
