Tag Archives: wendell berry

Revisiting Wendell Berry’s “Fidelity”

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Yesterday, we buried my daughter’s hamster. She was injured a week ago, then endured a trip to the vet and a week of pain medication before quietly slipping away.

Did she die of her injuries — or of starvation because the medications so drugged her that she couldn’t eat? Did we help her feel more comfortable, as we so longed to do — or did we increase her pain? Did the trip to the vet help or hurt? Bad enough that she was injured. Worse still if in the longing to help, we were complicit in further injury.

I don’t mean to trivialize the many large tragedies of the world, but the truth is there are no small deaths. Death, especially where any degree of love is involved, always brings us face to face with difficulties and mysteries.

For the Christian, this is a week when the questions of suffering and death and mystery are in the air anyway. I wish I could say that my reading of the Bible has been enough, but this year my threadbare imagination has needed help weaving together the different strands that trouble my mind and heart with the familiar yet enduring mystery of the gospel story. I remembered that Wendell Berry’s short story “Fidelity,” from the collection of the same title, dealt with some of the things I’m thinking about, so I returned to it yesterday.

There will be spoilers here, so, fair warning.

“Fidelity” concerns the last days of Burley Coulter, a beloved member of the Port William community of Berry’s fiction. He is 82 years old and failing, and all those who love him are troubled with the feeling that they need to do something to help. So they take him to a doctor, who checks him into a hospital. Before long Burley is an unrecognizable wraith on a hospital bed, hooked up to needles and tubes under the glare of the institutional lights. How truly Berry writes the response of Burley’s friends and family:

When they returned on yet another visit and found the old body still as it had been, a mere passive addition to the complicated machines that kept it minimally alive, they saw finally that in their attempt to help they had not helped but only complicated his disease beyond their power to help. And they thought with regret of the time when the thing that had been wrong with him had been simply unknown, and there had been only it and him and him and them in the place they had known together. Loving him, wanting to help him, they had given him over to “the best of modern medical care” — which meant, as they now saw, that they had abandoned him.

So Danny Branch, Burley’s son, stages a rescue. I’m not sure why they don’t simply check him out of the hospital, but within the fictional situation Berry creates they are completely powerless. Danny goes to the hospital in the dead of night and takes Burley away with him to a place he knows, and the two spend his final hours together. Meanwhile, a detective questions Danny’s wife Lyda, lawyers Wheeler and Henry Catlett, and eventually the whole Port William membership as they gather in the Catlett offices — a conversation that lays bare the contrasts between the world of technology and organization and institution, and the world of Port William.

The plot borrows some of the ingredients of the Easter story, but made more immanent and less theological. There are several allusions, such as when the janitors at the hospital, watching as Danny wheels Burley away on a gurney, are “as stupefied, apparently, as the soldiers at the Tomb.” There are also two resurrections. Danny, who has hidden the unconscious Burley in a barn while he prepares to dig his grave, returns to check on Burley and is startled to find him awake, eyes open, looking at him. The second resurrection takes place just after Burley dies. As Danny goes back to digging the grave,

Burley returned to his mind, and he knew him again as he had been when his life was full. He saw again the stance and demeanor of the man, the amused eyes, the lips pressed together while speech waited upon thought, an almost inviolable patience in the set of his shoulders. It was as though Burley stood in full view nearby, at ease and well at home — as though Danny could see him, but only on condition that he not look.

One other notable reminder to me of the story’s resonance with Easter is the way Burley’s friends come together in Wheeler’s offices. It’s an upper room experience like those of the disciples after Jesus’ death, first when the Lord himself appears to them, then when the Holy Spirit comes. In this story, it’s Danny who comes into the assembly, bringing with him a spirit of peace: “The room was all ashimmer now with its quiet.” (This scene is beautiful for its contrast to the funeral scene in The Memory of Old Jack too. But I can’t write about everything…)

I love so many things about this story. I love the way Berry weaves his tale in with this larger one. I love the way he works out themes about the right purposes of law and medicine and technology (a theme that’s always percolating in my own thoughts). I love the characters he draws with such exact detail and affection.

Most of all I love the tenderness with which he writes of death and loss and love. Somehow at Easter we can get so focused on the theological import of what Christ has done that we miss the very human story of death and loss and love and confusion. “Fidelity” comforted me without tearing the veil from any of the mysteries, affirming the essential goodness of my longings for understanding and fellowship and meaning. It underlines not only the bewilderments and sorrows of our earthly experience, but the joys. It manages to weave together the strands of so many things I struggle with and hope for.

Sometimes we need the coherence that only poetry can provide. “Fidelity,” as well as the other stories in this collection, lends us the eyes of a poet who can glimpse an underlying unity, and capture in words those shimmers of meaning that go far beyond words.

Life onscreen

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I wanted to pause in my reading of The Next Story and reflect on this passage, where Tim Challies speaks of

our insistence that the Internet is there, that it is a place. We never referred to the space between my mailbox and my friend’s mailbox as a place (letterspace?). Letters were in transit. They were in trucks or on trains, but they were not in a place. When I wrote a letter, I was not entering “letter world.” Similarly, when I watched TV, an inherently non-participatory act, I was still in my living room, not in some strange place between my home and the cable company. But when it comes to the Internet, we talk about entering cyberspace, a place that is really no “place” at all… We take our sense of self, our sense of presence, and transport it into the ethereal world of bits and bytes. Suddenly we are here and there, at a desk in body but in soul or spirit somehow present in cyberspace. And this is new to the human experience. When we venture into this world, this mediated world, we leave our bodies behind. And more and more of us are finding that we actually like it this way, that being able to experience a space free from the limitations of real presence brings a kind of joy.

(I’d cite a page number here, but I’m reading the book on my Kindle. :-/ Yes, I appreciate the irony…)

Even though my screen time is more limited than some, I feel the truth of these words. As I read them, I think about some of the contrasts:

Offline, I make sure I’m showered and groomed before I go out the door and into the world of (non-family) people. Online, I often blog in my bathrobe, typing with one hand, holding the coffee cup in the other.

Offline, I am self-conscious. Am I talking too much? Do I look fat in these jeans? What are they thinking of me? “They” are present and visible. Online, I feel more freedom. “They” (or “you”?) are invisible, though I feel a real acquaintance through their (your) writing voice. I don’t worry about how I look with them (you).

Offline, I often feel disconnected. A conversation may be going on around me, and I may put in my oar here and there. But most of me is still beneath the surface. Only a small percentage of what I think and feel about something ever gets out of my mouth. Online this is probably just as true, but if I write a post about something it feels somehow more complete — maybe because it’s self-originating rather than responsive?

Oh yeah. Self. Offline, it’s not all about me. Online, it can be.

Offline I fumble for words and speak in fragments. Online, I revise.

Offline I often feel like the outsider in the group. Online the walls between cliques aren’t as defined. (It’s weird that I feel this way, because things like “friend connect” and friend counts seem designed to broadcast cliques a person is in. Why don’t these things have the same impact on me as offline cliques?)

There are probably so many more things I could write, but my offline life is calling. So I’ll just leave the question open. How do you experience this contrast between offscreen and onscreen life?

 

Poetry Friday: Finishing Well

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One never knows, but I’ve been thinking lately that I’m probably about halfway through my life. Maybe a little over.

What do I have to show for it?

I look back over my story so far and see an odd jumble of ingredients that don’t seem to have resolved themselves yet into a definite direction. If I were reading it in a book, some episodes would make me sad or worried, but nevertheless I like my story. I wouldn’t want to trade it for someone else’s; I’ve grown attached to it. But… where is it leading? What impact will it have?

Many good stories don’t really gain momentum till after they pass the halfway point. Then all the threads are gathered together and the total picture comes clear. I’m hoping mine will be in that class.

In this mood, Wendell Berry’s “From the Crest” comes to mind. It’s a long poem, but these lines from the third section lend a voice to my mid-life ruminations:

From the crest of the wave
the grave is in sight,
the soul’s last deep track
in the known…

I am trying to teach
my mind to accept the finish
that all good work must have:
of hands touching me,
days and weathers passing
over me, the smooth of love,
the wearing of the earth.
At the final stroke
I will be a finished man.

Or, in my case — a finished woman.

Poetry Friday is at Read Write Believe today.

Hannah Coulter

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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.

Poetry potpourri

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Anyone else hear this story on NPR this morning? It discusses the state of poets and poetry in a suffering economy, and includes a link to its Planet Money blog, where readers have contributed original recession haiku. It’s worth a visit!

In addition, I discovered through Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky that Mr. Berry has a new short story here, at Threepenny Review. I read it earlier this week and it’s a delight — I found myself laughing out loud in spots. It recounts an episode in the life of young Andy Catlett, a familiar character for any who’ve read any of Berry’s Port William fiction, in which he gains a new glimpse of his mother. I won’t give away any more than that… but in honor of the story, I’m including a link to this Berry poem, “To My Mother,” which begins this way:

I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,

and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back…

Whitefoot

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Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World is Wendell Berry’s first foray into children’s books. Davis TeSelle’s wonderfully delicate and detailed illustrations in black and white enhance the tale. Judging from my children’s response, it’s a success. Judging from my own, it’s a story for children of all ages.

Its scope is modest, relating the life of a mouse living near Port William (the Kentucky town of Berry’s fiction) over a period of a few days. An adventure begins when Whitefoot’s territory near the Kentucky River is flooded. Will she survive, scrambling aboard a small log and riding the river’s current?

Several of Berry’s themes surface in this short tale: the “peace of wild things” who “live at the center of their world always” without being burdened by rational thought; the economy of nature; the modesty of a life made to scale; the gift and goodness of life.

We own a few of Thornton Burgess’s Bedtime Stories, but I’ve never read his Whitefoot the Wood Mouse. Surely Berry must know of it, and perhaps this tale converses with that one in its perspective and style. Berry’s Whitefoot is written more simply, and in the hands of this fine poet more beautifully, than Burgess’s stories. Most noticably, it’s without the personification.

The Bedtime Classics are the work of an observant naturalist. Burgess’s accounts of animal behavior are often spot-on. But Berry’s story, equally the work of a keen observer of nature, is of a different species. Here we learn not by getting inside the heads of animals thinking human thoughts, but by sympathetic observation of a creature moved by instinct in a setting the details of which are sketched out in far more exact detail than any of the Burgess books I can remember. We learn of several species of birds feeding in the river, several varieties of nuts that Whitefoot eats, items of debris floating on the river, how the currents behave.

As I read, I was reminded of two other flood stories that are part of the incidental furniture of my mind. One was “The Rise,” an essay from Berry’s Recollected Essays that describes a boat ride down the Kentucky River in flood. The other was Noah’s Ark. There was something in the description of Whitefoot’s creation of a nest exactly to the specifications of her size that reminded me of the careful construction of the ark in the Genesis account. And there was something about her faith as she “went about the still unfinished task of surviving” without knowing what the outcome of her catastrophe would be that made me more able to imagine what Noah might have felt.

The vocabulary, though it’s not showy or complicated, is not simplified either. On the first two pages alone are “brindly,” “fastidious” and “profound.” I wasn’t sure whether my daughters, 7 and 5, would be drawn in. But whenever I paused, they urged me to keep reading, and ventured guesses now and then as to what was about to happen. They were obviously tuned in and very interested in Whitefoot’s plight. The illustrations, too, are captivating — the kind that beg to be revisited, studied, and thought about. They’re the perfect visual counterpart for Berry’s narrative.

It was for me a moving experience to introduce my children to this author who’s meant so much to me personally. Whether this tale is eventually followed by others, or whether it will stand alone as the single children’s book in Berry’s canon, I’m delighted and grateful to have this beautiful story.

Stray thoughts on war and pacifism

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I wanted to gather a few comments from thinkers I respect, and see what comparisons emerge.

First, Wendell Berry. Here’s a brief excerpt from “The Failure of War“:

What could be more absurd, to begin with, than our attitude of high moral outrage against other nations for manufacturing the selfsame weapons that we manufacture? The difference, as our leaders say, is that we will use these weapons virtuously, whereas our enemies will use them maliciously—a proposition that too readily conforms to a proposition of much less dignity: we will use them in our interest, whereas our enemies will use them in theirs.

This seems to suggest that there’s no moral difference between “our interest,” and the interest of a dictator like the president of Iran, who has publicly announced his intent to wipe Israel off the map, calling it by turns a “tumor” and a “little Satan” (America, of course, being the “great Satan”). Is there really no difference? Is it really hypocritical to oppose the acquisition of nuclear arms in such hands?

I think of C.S. Lewis’s dry commentary in “Why I Am Not a Pacifist” (in The Weight of Glory):

Only liberal societies tolerate Pacifists. In the liberal society, the number of Pacifists will either be large enough to cripple the state as a belligerent, or not. If not, you have done nothing. If it is large enough, then you have handed over the state which does tolerate Pacifists to its totalitarian neighbor who does not. Pacifism of this kind is taking the straight road to a world in which there will be no Pacifists.

There is another central contention Berry makes, one that’s obvious from his title. War always does more harm than good:

That many have considered the increasing unacceptability of modern warfare is shown by the language of the propaganda surrounding it. Modern wars have characteristically been fought to end war; they have been fought in the name of peace. Our most terrible weapons have been made, ostensibly, to preserve and assure the peace of the world. “All we want is peace,” we say as we increase relentlessly our capacity to make war.

Lewis contends,

How is one to find out whether this is true? It belongs to a class of historical generalisations which involve a comparison between the actual consequences of some actual event and a consequence which might have followed if that event had not occurred… That wars do no good is then so far far from being a fact that it hardly ranks as a historical opinion. Nor is the matter mended by saying “modern wars”; how are we to decide whether the total effect would have been better or worse if Europe had submitted to Germany in 1914? It is, of course, true that wars never do half the good which the leaders of the belligerents say they are going to do. Nothing ever does half the good — perhaps nothing ever does half the evil — which is expected of it. And that may be a sound argument for not pitching one’s propaganda too high. But it is no argument against war. If a Germanised Europe in 1914 would have been evil, then the war which prevented that evil is, so far, justified. To call it useless because it did not also cure slums and unemployment is like coming up to a man who has just succeeded in defending himself from a man-eating tiger and saying, “It’s no good, old chap. This hasn’t really cured your rheumatism!”

Last, and perhaps most weighty, comes the argument that life is the supreme value. Berry writes,

In a modern war, fought with modern weapons and on the modern scale, neither side can limit to “the enemy” the damage that it does. These wars damage the world. We know enough by now to know that you cannot damage a part of the world without damaging all of it. Modern war has not only made it impossible to kill “combatants” without killing “noncombatants,” it has made it impossible to damage your enemy without damaging yourself.

There is no satisfactory answer to the way war brutalizes not just “combatants,” but “noncombatants.” There’s no arguing with the truth that war damages the world.

Are there evils greater than that?

Here’s Lewis:

It is arguable that a criminal can always be satisfactorily dealt with without the death penalty. It is certain that a whole nation cannot be prevented from taking what it wants except by war. It is almost equally certain that the absorption of certain societies by certain other societies is a great evil. The doctrine that war is always a greater evil seems to imply a materialist ethic, a belief that death and pain are the greatest evils. But I do not think they are. I think the suppression of a higher religion by a lower, or even a higher secular culture by a lower, a much greater evil.

Cicero, writing before the time of Christ, agrees: “The name of peace is sweet, and the thing itself is beneficial, but there is a great difference between peace and servitude. Peace is freedom in tranquillity, servitude is the worst of all evils, to be resisted not only by war, but even by death.”

Who’s right?