Remembering Wendell Berry: Friendship, Faith, and a Love of the Land

When my parents thought we were old enough to benefit from it, my parents switched our family’s summer vacation from a little rented cottage at the Jersey shore to traveling the American West, highlighting the great parks. They later sent me on to a traveling camp in which we climbed Half-Dome and Mt. Whitney and canoed for three days through the Boundary Waters among other outdoor activities.

As a result, completely in love with America’s natural wonders, I was a sucker for the Sierra Club, which I signed up for as a college freshman, and took advantage of a bonus they offered: a book about the destruction of nature and communities in the Appalachian coal fields. The book was beautifully written. For all that it was taking a political stand, its primary driver was a love of the land and the people, and I loved it. I had never heard of its author before, a man named Wendell Berry.

More than anything else, Berry showed the world to be as Scripture described it, the manifest word of God.

My other interests in college centered around author Ken Kesey and his various enterprises. I loved his novels and Tom Wolfe’s chronicle of his further endeavors. I was a great fan of Kesey’s favorite band, whom I followed from 1967 on.

At a certain point, I learned that Kesey and Berry had together been a part of the Creative Writing Seminar at Stanford in the early Sixties, along with Larry McMurtry of Lonesome Dove fame. It enabled a smooth transfer of interests as I turned towards intensive study of religion and philosophy, as Berry, I found, had a great deal to say on those topics. I began to read all he had written, in the various forms which he had mastered: essay, fiction, and poetry.

And “mastered” is the word. His command of the language feels effortless, which is the sign of a whole-life dedication to his craft. And what feels transcendent in his writing is that he is not worshipping art, and certainly not selling his own achievements. Rather, his art is at one with his life, and his life is at one with the place that he lived in and the people and the creatures with whom he lived and worked.

Berry chose to return from academe to work the land, his response to a culture and a country he believed was squandering its greatest assets — the people who knew how to live generously with each other and the land upon which they lived. The culture of heedless disruption was to him a surrender to the worst in human character, excused by rationalizations that abused the language he cherished and so bled our conversations of meaning.

Writing my doctoral dissertation on the thought of a late medieval philosopher, Rabbi Levi ben Gerson (Gersonides), I was making a point about the bad rap taken by matter. A simple duality has been common in the culture in which matter is deemed essentially evil, its very existence a contradiction of the spirituality that religion teaches us to value. In addressing that issue, I sought to clarify that many great thinkers disagreed. I cited Berry to make my point:

Apparently because it is so manifestly unconcerned with the life of the spirit, many people conclude that our age places an undue value on material things. But that cannot be so, for people who valued material things would take care of them and would care for the sources of them. It could be said that an age that properly valued and cared for material things would be an age properly spiritual …

In my part of the country, the Shakers, “unworldly” as they were, were the true materialists, for they valued materials. And they valued them in the only way they can be valued in practice: by good workmanship, both elegant and sound.

Shortly after I completed my dissertation, I moved to Ohio. I took the time to write Berry a note, thanking him for his insight and that I had quoted him in my writing. He replied in his own hand and invited our family to come visit him at his farm, as he lived about a two-hour drive from my new Dayton home.

It was a January visit. We baked an apple cake to bring. Ten miles off the Interstate heading to Louisville, there was his house on a hill looking down to the Kentucky River. He and his wife Tanya welcomed us into the home, cheerily heated by an old wood stove. We soon went out again to look in the barn and walk about the farm, then returned for conversation over cake and hot drinks. The children were engrossed in all that was going on and in the easy conversation that Wendell would sometimes direct their way with a smile. That smile at times could seem playfully dangerous and disarming, but it always resolved into benevolence.

For the next few years, we had an invitation to come visit. Wendell suggested we wait a little later, into February, when it was lambing time, and then the kids could see the newborn lambs in the barn. This we did, always bringing the apple cake, and always being received with warmth and friendship as steady and real as the river and the hill beside it on which the house is built.

I think of the time shared there in his home when I read about the homes and lives of the characters in his novels. They are a part of that land. His poems reflect his life there more openly. And in his essays, in which he entered into the many controversies of our days, I feel the context of friendship behind his arguments. He would quote Forster for a starting point: “It all turns on affection now,” said Margaret. “Affection. Don’t you see?”

As much as I would disagree with Berry on political and social issues, I knew that he meant his essays and his lectures to try out the issues and test positions in the light of our deepest convictions. This meant, in the end, the love of each other and the love of God, which serve well as the kind of aims that can direct a lifetime of work towards the highest and most lasting things, the only things that are worth a full lifetime of effort. Our national illness, our dis-ease (for it should make us uneasy) stems not from differing in argument but from giving up on love. Disaffection is our illness, not difference, for affection brings opposition together in productive love, the love that alone guarantees our physical and spiritual continuity.

When our children went off to school and then to their own lives, we stopped our lambing season visits. My daughter majored in English and creative writing and asked Berry for his suggestions for her. “Keep reading, as much as you can,” was his solid suggestion.

From time to time, I would send him an article in which I had mentioned him or a poem that I thought he would enjoy. We found common political ground in a common distrust of government or large organizations having a better idea of how to run our lives than we do. Better: as love is central, the very idea of distant people wielding large power over things they had no feelings for is absurd. On this we agreed.

What is our country, what are our lives within it, if love of our neighbor is not the driving force?

It is only a small extension, a small act of the imagination, to understand, as we both read Genesis, that God loves this world he has made and calls us to care for it and work it well. God has generously distributed His infinity into each part of existence so that, in knowing itself truly, each part sees the infinite in every other part as well as in the whole. Thus, we come to be imbued with the unalienable rights whose recognition called this nation into being.

This last year, Wendell wrote of how his family was taking up the tasks of the farm that he had discharged himself for so many decades. His last letter to me, handwritten as were most, was dated a week before his passing. His hand was still unwavering and strong.

He wrote to thank me for the article I had written that had mentioned at length his last novel, Marce Catlett (READ MORE: Wendell Berry Shows Us How To Love in Loss). He thanked me as well for a poem I had recently written, distilled from my memories of visiting his home. I remember having seen Tolkien on his bookshelf in an early visit, and a phrase from The Hobbit seemed then so appropriate to Wendell’s home: the name given to Elrond’s home in Rivendale, on the edge of the Wild: The Last Homely House. I thought then that name applied exactly to Wendell’s home by the river. And remembering that, I wrote that as the title of my poem.

Wendell signed off, calling me “my old friend.” That is an honor that I cherish.

I don’t know about America returning to be mostly agrarian, which Wendell held out as a living possibility. But I do know that if we lose forever that affection for the land and for community that was the soul and heart of most of America, we will not easily find a way forward together. The loss of that leaves us wandering among abstractions and angry at each other for the loss of the ground beneath our feet.

More than anything else, Berry showed the world to be as Scripture described it, the manifest word of God. Living within those words is what makes our own conversations possible and the lives together that those words build.

Wendell is still a living part of the conversation.

——

Leaving the Last Homely House

Hear it talk —
the hill lapping to the river, stopping briefly,
in standing waves —
one, a place for a home,
another, for a long-legged perch
by the riverbank.

Words spoken in this home
Speak within the talk of hill and river
and the ewes and lambs in the barn.

Within their several cadences,
the music in which they flow,
now placid, now flecked with white,
on its long way to the sea
that gathers all in at last:
the music sets its time
to our thoughts and its melody
to our body and soul.

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It is Sunday afternoon.
Time to say goodbye,
gather the children,
and go home.