Hannah Coulter

I read Hannah Coulter (2004) when it first came out, before my blogging days. Recently my book club (is that too grand a term for three people?) decided to read it again. We are all mothers at different stages of the journey. This novel promised to make for some interesting learning and discussion together.

It is a beautiful, and terribly sad, book. It is beautiful in the same way all Wendell Berry’s novels are: it sets forth an elegiac vision of of a pre-World War II “membership” of skilled farm people. Then it shows us its deterioration in ways that force us to reflect on the soullessness of much of modern life.

Hannah Coulter tells her own story, looking back on her life from 1922 till around the year 2000. Those who have read Berry’s fiction about the Port William community have met Hannah in other stories. She appeared in the first Berry novel I read, The Memory of Old Jack, a similar book in its recounting of a life from the perspective of an elderly Port William farmer. There are some differences. But first, I want to list a few of the book’s concerns that we might discuss at book club:

• Education. Is Hannah correct that “the big idea of education, from first to last, is the idea of a better place… In order to move up, you have to move on”? Hannah sets forth the Branches, most of whom leave school at 16 and don’t go on to college, as a sort of ideal. Is she right?
• Is the educational system responsible — by implying that farming is a job for hicks, and not worth much — for the decisions Hannah’s children make not to return to Port William to farm? (When my grandmother, who was born on a small farm in Pennsylvania, learned that I liked Wendell Berry, she read Old Jack. She felt that he idealized the life of the women. And when it came to farming, I asked her if her memories matched the vision laid out in the novel. “I couldn’t wait to get out of it,” she said. This was before the post-war education system Berry describes. She felt this way because the work was hard and relentless and her mother was a widow with four mouths to feed.)
• Marriage. There are several marriages in this book: the Feltners’, the Branches, Hannah and Virgil, Hannah and Nathan, Margaret and Marcus. How do they compare? How do they illuminate our understanding of marriage?
• Parenting. What kind of parents are Hannah and Nathan? Mat and Margaret Feltner? Burley Coulter? How much can we relate to Hannah’s perspective? How do we instill the story’s desirable values in our families?
• What makes Port William life so attractive to us? What’s nourishing about it?
• Sometimes Berry is accused of being merely nostalgic. Is there anything that rings false or seems overly idealized?
• What makes a character admirable in this book — or not?
• How successfully does Mr. Berry tell a story from a woman’s perspective?

That question brings me to my only criticism. I so wish the narrative was not written in the first person, from Hannah’s perspective. Old Jack, a similar novel to Hannah Coulter, is written in the third person and is to my mind a far better book.

Here is why: the level of abstraction, and especially the language, put into Hannah’s narrative don’t seem to belong. They don’t match up with her life experience or her own reports of things she actually says, which are always simple and direct and concrete.  An omniscient narrator, or even Andy Catlett as narrator, reporting on his knowledge of Hannah’s life, would make the poetic language more plausible. Hannah tells us that Andy has listened to her story, and this gives him the credibility to tell it. But he doesn’t. Hannah does. There are so many passages that illustrate what I mean, so I’ll just pick one at random:

The room of love is another world. You go there wearing no watch, watching no clock. It is the world without end, so small that two people can hold it in their arms, and yet it is bigger than worlds on worlds, for it contains the longing of all things to be together, and to be at rest together.

That’s mystical and utterly lovely, but it sounds more like Berry than Hannah. If only we weren’t asked to accept that it comes from her mouth. Same with the chapter on Okinawa at the end. Or with any number of other descriptive passages that either take flight as poetry or lurch toward a preaching tone.

The same thing happens in Jayber Crow, another book in which the narrator tells his life story. To me, the character from whose perspective Berry can write most convincingly in the first person is Andy Catlett. I think Andy, who goes away to school and returns to Port William to “farm in his one-handed fashion,” as Hannah says, is Berry’s most transparently personal narrator. We get to experience this in Remembering, A World Lost, Andy Catlett: Early Travels, and in some of Berry’s short stories.

Be that as it may, there is something true and sustaining and uplifting — and tragic — about this novel. We’re led into a perspective on modern life — its isolation, its dependency, its lost inheritance of practical knowledge and skill, its disconnection from the natural world — that can be productive if it inspires us to make some personal changes. It doesn’t unseat Old Jack from its throne as the king of Berry’s books. But it provides another foray into Port William’s history and fills in the details in the life of a beloved character. I’m looking forward to the chance to discuss it with some other readers.