Joseph grew up in Dupont, Indiana (population three hundred and forty), where his parents ran two small farms and his father worked full time for the Department of Natural Resources. If not for the concrete pilings that raise the building high off the ground, it would seem almost a living part of the forest. When Laura Dunn decided to make a film about America's foremost farmer-philosopher, Wendell Berry, she ran into one . On top of one stack was a note Berry had made, and crossed out, about Marianne Moores poem What Are Years? Above a small safe, curling photographs were taped to a wall: Wallace Stegner, Ernest Gaines, Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, Thomas Merton. He was heading for the annual tobacco auction, in Louisville. Lucinda, a tall, lean, no-nonsense woman married to JohnJ. Berry, was a young mother during the Civil War. Hes in his eighties. Berry knows thishe knows that the racial issue could never have been resolved by the plantation system, just as it cannot be rectified by todays market economybut he keeps getting distracted by resentment. Once, Meb told Wendell, his father carried in a sack on his back fifty rabbits and a big possum up the slope we were climbing, and across the ridge to the road to Port Royal, where he sold the animals at the farm store. For her, it completes a cycle of nearly 60 years. Nor were enslaved people taken care of in order to complete their work more efficiently. The ducks, I learned, belong to their partners, Caleb and Kelly Fiechter, who live across the road. Ever since, he has attracted an ecumenical flock of devoted readers: organic farmers and homebrewers, picklers, and canners; rural DIY punks, writers of a pastoral bent, Christians who take stewardship seriously. It sounded impossibly idealistic, given the number of family-farm foreclosures. Wendell Berry. I remembered a line from The Long-Legged House: One bright warm day in November it was so quiet that I could hear the fallen leaves ticking, like a light rain, as they dried and contracted, scraping their points and edges against each other., The place was so inviting, I wondered if anyone had ever broken inseeking, perhaps, a little food and a furtive nights rest. When the time came to harvest tobacco, Berry and his neighbors swapped work, in what he called a sort of agrarian passion.. Mr. Arthur Ford was famous for his feats of strength. He has written many novels, short stories, poems, and essays.. Slate receives a commission when you purchase items using the links on this page. As he drove into Kentucky for the first time, he said, I felt like the air pressure changed. Taking a walk one day with his foxhound, he was stopped by a white man: He gives me the third degreeWho are you? It is all one piece, impossible for the strongest man (or of course woman) to break. He scrawled at the bottom of the page, There is a kind of genius in that maul, that belongs to a placed people: to make of what is at hand a fine, durable tool at the cost only of skill and work.. Wendell maintained that the purpose of the Burley Association was to achieve fair prices, fairly determined, and with minimal help from the government., Berry often writes of trying to nurture a human economythe antithesis of Americas total economy, run by latter-day robber barons and the politicians who count on their donations. Kentucky was a border state, and civilians were subject to routine acts of lawlessness by bands of soldiers, Confederate and Union. She sums up what we know: Berrys admirers call him an Isaiah-like prophet. He replied on the pages of a yellow legal pad: Dear Dorothy, Im hurrying to answer, and I hope you dont mind being written to with a pencil. It seems as if the only point to his revisionist history is to try to beat the thoughtless trolls at their own game, flinging back in their face the truism that the urban North has never been pure and virtuous. One of the people at the sit-in was his friend HerbE. Smith, from a family of miners in Whitesburg. If people are as grass before God, they are as nothing before their machines.. So I hope to do the right things today.. Berry, who is eighty-seven, has written fifty-two books thereessays, poetry, short stories, and novelsmost of them while also running a farm, teaching English at the University of Kentucky, and engaging in political protests. And this one practically lived right down the road from you. As Liz ran into the pasture, Wendell and I went into the barn. The best of movies, TV, books, music, and more, delivered to your inbox. Leah Bayens, the programs dean, told me that the students spend much of their time working outside. War, he suggests, begins in a failure of acceptance. When he learned afterward that the building was being remodelled, he told a workman, Look, when you tear that post out, I want it. Wendell and Tanya were married a year and a half later, and they spent their first summer together at the camp. Why are you here? Ashland replied, Actually, sir, Im a member of the Wendell Berry Farming Program., In 2017, Mary started Our Home Place Meat, a beef program inspired by the Burley Association. ". Though we have thoroughly rejected slavery, Berry writes that the nations dominant ambition, to never dirty our hands, increasingly from the Civil War until now, was set by the slaveowner. The results have been ruinous: For the sake of freedom from certain kinds of work, we have seriously degraded the creaturely commonwealth of earth, water, and air, and ourselves along with it., This is damage, Berry writes, that cannot be legislated away (though enlightened agricultural policy favoring small farmers and redistributing land to Black agrarians would help). Wendell and Tanya bought the tract after Melvin died, in 1984. He and Tanya packed their things and three-month-old Mary in their Plymouth and drove across the country. A few hours west of the decapitated mountains of Appalachia is the part of Kentucky known as the Bluegrass region. For instance, he writes early on that slavery would have been a relationship of mutual affection between owner and owned, that an enslaved person would emerge from the abstraction of market value to become a known person, known moreover as a member of the farms community of humans and other creatures. He posits that abuse and cruelty must have been rare, because such treatment would have wasted time and that, after the days work was done, enslaved people were relatively free to venture as they wished. They want to know how to belong to a place, Mary told me. That year, Berry began writing The Hidden Wound, a book that examines racism as an emotional dynamics which has disordered both the heart of the society as a whole and of every person in the society. The title refers to an ugly story handed down through generations of Berrys, in which JohnJ. Berry sold a slave who, the story went, was too defiant and rebellious to do anything with. Although it showed the innate violence of the slave system, it was relayed as a bit of interesting history. Berry admitted, I have told it that way many times myself. She was also, in mechanical terms, his typist, a fact that outraged feminists when Berry mentioned it in his Harpers essay. For me, that was a happy return, Wendell wrote. In the early winter, he takes some ewes to the steep lots near the house, where they serve as lawnmowers, then brings them back to the barn for lambing. The Kentucky and Ohio Rivers wind through hills dotted with sheep, cows, horses, and handsome old tobacco barns. Most readers first discovered his fiction and poetry, then his essays, where they found a lyrically rendered view of a peril-stricken world. and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. He had made a bird feeder and fastened it to the porch railing, so he could watch the comings and goings of chickadees, titmice, juncos, and jays. We can take our stand either on the side of life or on the side of death. What he means is that each of us needs to decide if were going to live according to the rules of nurture or exploitation. But Berry understood that the degradation ran deeper, was more than just an issue of where one dumped ones trash. The Monroes cattle were grazing on seventy acres that they lease from a neighbor. He was pretty sure he knew the culprit. Please try again. Berry prized his seminars with Stegner, whom he considers the Wests foremost storyteller, historian, critic, conservator and loyal citizen. In a Jefferson Lecture in 2012, he quoted Stegners description of Americans as one of two basic types, boomers and stickers. Boomers are those who pillage and run, who make a killing and end up on Easy Street. Stickers are those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in. They are placed people, in Berrys termforever attached to the look of the sky, the smell of native plants, and the vernacular of home. And it named Wendell Berry the recipient of its 2022 Henry Hope Reed Award. In 1974, someone threw a firebomb into its offices. John Berry served as the associations president from 1957 until 1975, and insisted that the programs were not handouts but the equivalent of a minimum wage. The tobacco stalks were cut down with a hatchet, pierced with a spear, then slid onto a stick, before being hung in a tobacco barn to dry. In his great poem The Peace of Wild Things, he wrote: When despair for the world grows in me I go and lie down where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. Publication of his first novel, Nathan Coulter, which was inspired by his experiences in Henry County, was followed by a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed Berry and his wife, Tanya, to spend a few years living the expat writers life in Europe. He wrote to Dan that hed like to forgo an author photo, and asked that the flap copy, if there must be any at all, be kept to a description of the book, objective as possible. As for author interviews: Why, before I have come to any coherent understanding myself of what Im doing here, should I admit some journalist to render it all in the obvious clichs? He finally relented about the photo, after Dan pleaded, Perhaps absurdly, it can help to persuade people to read the book it adorns, and we do want people to read your book, and I dare say even you wont mind too much if people read your book., In those days, the best-seller lists were filled with novels by Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, and Saul Bellownot to mention Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbinsand it wasnt clear that Berry would ever find an audience. I didnt like confinement, he said. OK. The Crowood Press, 2019. And since, in his view, the Civil War was a battle between industrialism and agrarianism, and since he has long held that agrarianism is the path to a virtuous human place on earth, the history he ends up telling feels uncomfortably like Gone With the Wind. She was outside, and one of the roosters was crowing raucously. Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. This extended synthesis of the history of agriculture, the history of race, and the history of work is something new for Berry, and The Need to Be Whole is at its best when Berry, who often sounds like a homegrown, Christ-quoting mix of Karl Marx and the founder of anarchism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, argues that violence is so far our historys dominant theme, that the willingness to exploit people is never distinguishable from the willingness to destroy the land and that our race problem is intertangled with our land and land use problem, our farm and forest problem, our water and waterways problem, our food problem, our air problem, our health problem. Everything is connected, and what connects it is exploitation. He writes of exchanging friendly talk with Trump voters at Port Royals farm-supply store, a kind of tolerance that is necessary in a small town: If two neighbors know that they may seriously disagree, but that either of them, given even a small change of circumstances, may desperately need the other, should they not keep between them a sort of pre-paid forgiveness? A properly educated conservative, who has neither approved of abortion nor supported a tax or a regulation, can destroy a mountain or poison a river and sleep like a baby, he writes. Seven years ago, the Monroes moved onto a hundred and sixteen acres, about ten miles from Port Royal, which they named Valley Spirit Farm. A well-instructed liberal, who has behaved with the prescribed delicacy toward women and people of color, can consent to the plunder of the land and people of rural America and sleep like a conservative.. At Stanford, Berry attended seminars with Ken Kesey, and, improbably, they became lasting friends. Its not worth continuing to enumerate Berrys historical errors, nor is ones time well spent rebutting them. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.. But for the past decade Mary has spent most of her time as the executive director of the Berry Center, a nonprofit in New Castle, which promotes prosperous, well-tended farms serving and supporting healthy local communities. Next door, Marys daughter Virginia runs the Agrarian Culture Center and Bookstore, and a literary league that sponsors a county-wide reading program. With support from government agencies and foundations, it runs a radio station, a theatre program, an art gallery, a filmmaking institute, and a record label. Wendell invited Nick. In January, 1907, when John was six, he woke up in what he called the black of midnight to the sound of his fathers horse on the gravel driveway. We encountered an issue signing you up. From the Civil War to the present, Port William has been home to a dozen families and to an entertaining supporting cast. They ought to keep it ready to hand, like a fire extinguisher. He set out to prove them wrong, even as he admitted, I seem to have been born with an aptitude for a way of life that was doomed., He found a kind of salvation, and a subject, in stewardship of the land. . One of the pieces, Think Little, announced, Nearly every one of us, nearly every day of his life, is contributing directly to the ruin of this planet. Berry went on to say that he was ashamed and deeply distressed that American government should have become the chief cause of disillusionment with American principles., I was curious about Berrys evolution from a self-described small writer into an internationally acclaimed man of letters. It's the use of the word abandon that puzzles me. With renunciative discipline, he tilled his fields as his father and grandfather had, using a team of horses and a plow. Wendell wrote to Dan in June, 1969, about The Long-Legged House: Im glad you told me the book hasnt yet sold 2,000 copies. May 19th 2022 W endell berry was almost 30 when he packed up his life as a New York intellectual and decamped to Port Royal, a tiny community in Kentucky where generations of his forebears had. In the centers library, Mary said that the project began a decade ago, when she went to talk with her father about how the local-food movement, so popular among urbanites, wasnt doing enough to support small farmers in their region. Which is why the imperialistic Mexican-American War was fought: Slavery needed new lands, preferably in a cotton-growing climate, like Texas, so that the plantation owners could become ever richer. But why pay any attention to the Krugmans, let alone the fetid Twitter swamp? When he was fourteen, his parents, determined to see their bright children buckle down, sent him and John to Millersburg Military Institute; their younger sisters, Mary Jo and Markie, later went to a private school in Virginia. Thats the pinch of the hourglass., Two years ago, in The New York Review of Books, Verlyn Klinkenborg complained about Berrys habit of pointing out our hollow lives, our degenerate bodies, our feelings of dislocation and spiritual bankruptcy. True enough. He was named to be the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. After my father died, my mother xeroxed his correspondence with Berry and gave it to mea pile of letters that covered the years they worked together, 1964 to 1977. It means the mouse isnt in my pantry.. Wendell tutored Dan in the mating habits of toads: Sometimes the male is found still clinging to the dead female who has perished in his embrace., There were moments of tension, as there always are between writer and editor. When the Berrys children were growing up, the family had two milk cows, two hogs, chickens, a vegetable garden, and a team of draft horses. The daughter of Berrys first commercial editor, Wickenden draws on his and Berrys correspondence from 1964 to 1977, when the writer, as he acknowledged then, was still discovering himself. A beautiful poem of suffering, anxiety about the future, and ultimately-finally-love. C.S.A. Wendell Berry's Advice for a Cataclysmic Age Sixty years after renouncing modernity, the writer is still contemplating a better way forward. Eventually, it became uninhabitable, and he pried off some poplar and walnut boards to use in building his own cabin, on higher grounda satisfactory nutshell of a house, he wrote. Tanya, petite and cordial, led me into their kitchen, where I sat with Wendell at a round wooden table by a wall of books and a window overlooking a grapevine. Youre not responsible for solving the whole problemyou just do what you can do., Four years ago, the Berry Center and Sterling College, an experiential learning school in Craftsbury, Vermont, started the Wendell Berry Farming Program, which provides twelve students tuition-free study on Henry County farms. Equal parts The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (1977), a scathing indictment of big agribusiness and factory farms, and The Hidden Wound (1970), his pathbreaking book-length essay on farming, American culture, and racism, The Need to Be Whole once again considers the question that Berry has spent his entire life contemplating: How can we live among our fellow creatures in a way that is honorable, just, and as sustaining of our souls as of our material needs? Berry, turning professorial, retrieved An Agricultural Testament and read aloud, enunciating each word: Mother Earth never attempts to farm without livestock; she always raises mixed crops; great pains are taken to preserve the soil and to prevent erosion; the mixed vegetable and animal wastes are converted into humus; there is no waste. Berry closed the book. The offices here in New Castle will be closed from today through January 6th, when we will reopen with our normal hours. Like Port Royal, it is a vest-pocket farm town on the west side of the Kentucky River. Too much of the book is befogged with such resentment, which is a great loss because resentment is cheap and mean. Berrys critics see him as a utopian or a crank, a Luddite who never met a technological innovation he admired. Berrys writing, like the seasons, has a cyclical quality, returning again and again to the same ideas. Wendell Berry, America's foremost farmer-philosopher, with horses on his farm. They were known for the quality of their wool, but hed found it too costly to have them shorn. It consists of about sixty residents, Parker Farm Supply and Restaurant, a Baptist church and a Methodist church, a fire station, and a post office, where Berry drops off and picks up his mail six days a week. I called Abbie after I got back to New York. (Tanya disabused me of that part of the memory: Khakis, maybe. After visiting Berry at his Kentucky farm, Wickenden wrote, From this sliver of vanishing America, Berry cultivates the unfashionable virtues of neighborliness and compassion. Republican gubernatorial candidate Quarles calls for medical cannabis in Kentucky, Ky. lawmakers advance bill to keep coal on power grid, citing reliability concerns, Hopkinsville women appointed to state boards, Christian County sewing group donates quilts to foster care children, 2022 Hoptown Chronicle | All rights reserved, New farmers come closer to fulfilling their dreams at Wendell Berry program in Kentucky, New compendium of Kentucky writer Wendell Berrys essays published, Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues. Before the advent of commercial fertilizers, hill farmers needed the highly fertile fresh-cleared soil. When they express alarm about climate change, she tells them, You cant throw up your hands in despair. The University of Notre Dame has awarded its 2022 Richard H. Driehaus Prize to architect Rob Krier. Although he has laid bare his entire life in print, he tightly guards his privacy. 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