I have written often here of my love of Wendell Berry's fiction. I was pointed this week to an article written by his daughter, Mary Berry, in which she offers a stirring reflection upon who he is and what his life and work is about and in which she also writes so well of the kinds of meaningful gifts a father may offer his children. All that she writes here speaks to things that are continually spinning their way around my own mind. You can find the article here and I hope you will take a quick moment to read what is a relatively short piece because there is so much more than a mere three or four thoughts with which I am left. So much, in fact, that I hardly know where to begin, so I will just do what I can. First off, though, what is treasure enough are the pictures that Mary Berry has shared from her family's life. But then, there are these things, too:
"Daddy was encouraged to seek his fame and fortune elsewhere; in fact, he was told that coming home would ruin his career. I don't have to imagine, however, the great happiness that was his when he knew that he could come home because I experienced that . . . Coming home was not encouraged by any influential person in my life except my family."
This in particular is something that has been on my mind of late. As I daily grapple with the frustration brought by the intolerance and woeful ignorance that seemingly abound in the place where I live -- especially in what feels like such a politically divisive time in our country, I cannot help but wonder about a life elsewhere. I am old enough to know, of course, that intolerance and ignorance exist everywhere. But those of us who are born and raised in mountains and in the rural parts of the world never really cease to feel distinctly the struggle between an ambitious longing for something more and a need to remain anchored in the place that makes us who we are and that gives us a landscape and a voice felt deep within our bones. We are told from early on in so many direct and indirect ways that success is something that does not happen here. It happens away from here. It is made known to us over and over again that our place is bereft of jobs and opportunity and culture. These are all things that are to be found in other places. If we are lucky, like Mary Berry, we come to understand that things are maybe not quite so clear as that. There are deliberate choices to be made about the life we want to live and the kind of community of which we want to be a part. Happiness and success are the sorts of ethereal things that can be defined in a host of ways and in a host of places. Perhaps they can be dug out of grimy, fertile soil just as they may also be found among the glistening towers and hustling din of the urban. Either choice is both difficult and incomplete. This is not just the story of my place, though. It is the story of America -- the unyielding pull from both directions to either claim a destiny that lies always just over the next horizon or to hold tight to all that we know as everything we are. Wendell Berry's fiction, among other things, is an exploration of that choice and its effects on both the people and the place.
"My brother and I grew up with stories, both oral and written. The stories were so compelling to me as a child that I thought, until I was pretty close to adulthood, that I could remember things that happened before I was born. This gave me the sense that I have never lost, of living partly in the past and of loving men and women that I did not know."
How well I also know such feelings. It might even be said by those who know me best that I live partly in the past. I grew up hearing stories of people who had gone on before me but who, nevertheless, I came to feel I knew as well as anyone living and walking beside me. They were stories that connected me to a place and to a people. I must credit my close friend, Tal Stanley, for bringing this article by Berry to my attention. Because it was also Tal who, over so many conversations through the years in his office, or over meals, or in cars as we wandered -- sometimes knowing exactly where we were and sometimes not -- over many a winding mountain road, first helped me to begin to see the importance of the stories that are our own. His book, The Poco Field: An American Story of Place, which you should seek out and read for yourself, actually calls us to leverage the power of our own stories to create a new paradigm of education and of citizenship. Likewise, Wendell Berry's fiction helps us ask important questions about what it means to be a citizen of a place, something he calls membership, which includes, as Mary Berry so beautifully puts it, that "unbroken line of stories."
I found surprising Berry's confession that she had read next to nothing of her father's writing until going off to college. Then again, being a father myself, maybe this makes complete sense. Imagine, though, discovering in this way that the man about whose existence you know the most mundane and ordinary details is of such prominence in certain circles. The book she writes of reading as a student, The Memory of Old Jack, is a favorite book of my own. In fact, I wrote about it in my very first post here, even quoting some of the same portions Mary Berry does. What she says the book did for her in terms of providing clarity helps me further sort through what I have also written about, that what we are given by Wendell Berry through his stories about a world that is fading utterly from our view is, in the end, hope. As his daughter says,
". . . that if we actively choose it over and over everyday, we can indeed live in the world of affection and membership that he honors in his life and in his stories."
Even after all this, though, what strikes me most each time I read her article is what Mary Berry has to say about Wendell Berry as a father.
"The gift that my father gave me so many years ago was the knowledge that I live in his love, and if forgiveness is needed it has already been given. What greater gift could a parent give a child?"
Indeed.
Every now and again I get a bit overzealous in my reading life and bite off a little more than I can chew. I had thus far been successful in avoiding such a situation since the calendar turned, but I fear I have allowed it to happen once again. There is a giant stack of big books piled high on my bedside table. There are enough that as I lug them about the house to grab a few minutes here and there for chipping away at one or another, I sometimes lose track of one or forget which it was that I was last enjoying. I suppose it speaks to some sort of compulsion I carry, this gathering of books, but I am not qualified nor am I inclined to try and sort that out. No one ever said a reading life was an easy one.
The pile -- to which I swear I have stopped adding -- currently includes Talking Appalachian: Voice, Identity and Community, edited by Amy Clark and Nancy Hayward, Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, a collection of stories called Fire and Forget (more on that one below), Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, and the novel I have not yet started but could not bring myself to abandon to the wilds of the library's new book shelf, Dina Nayeri's A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea. Then, of course, there are the magazines, the newspapers, the most recent issue of Ploughshares that came in the mail and seems to be teeming with really good stories, and even mentioning that pile over there in the corner of books that I would like to read makes me anxious. I am surrounded by piles. You can imagine it makes my wife happy.
Anyhow, I have managed of late to actually complete one book and it was a dandy. Just when I felt like I had slipped into a bit of a reading slump, I picked up one of the better stories I have read in a long time, a novel by Liz Moore called Heft. Liz Moore is a new discovery for me and someone whose work I feel I should get to know. It also happens that I am especially fond of her publisher. This is her second book and her first, The Words of Every Song, is, of course, now on the reading list. Once again, I am amazed at the skill and artistry of a very young writer. Heft is a novel about a lot of things and brings together two characters seemingly from opposite poles who allow us to explore those all too human feelings of emptiness and loneliness. The immense tragedies of the two lives Moore has rendered here end up giving us a deep sense of hope and a clearer understanding of the power of choosing to be a part of a community. She reminds us of the good in the world. As is said often here at ToFGT in one form or another, one of the most important things good fiction does is give us room to process and think through realities that are nearly impossible to make sense of. Sometimes the only way to see clearly through the messiness that life gives us is to share the story.
Now and then I pick up a book that I want to savor and so I do not feel nearly as bad for taking my time to finish an anthology edited by Roy Scranton and Matt Gallagher called Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. I owe my discovery of this one to Bob Edwards, on whose radio show I heard an interview with Scranton and Gallagher and one or two of the authors in the collection. The book is the product of a writing workshop sponsored by New York University for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I cannot begin to adequately convey the quality and power of these pieces, so I will not try. They are quite simply gut punches of reality. I have a penchant for war stories for a number of different reasons. Colum McCann, in his introduction to Fire and Forget that is in itself compelling enough for you to seek out this book, expresses some of the more important ones.
"All stories are war stories somehow. Every one of us has stepped from one war or another. Our grandfathers were there when the stench of Dresden hung over the world, and our fathers were there when Vietnam sent its children running napalmed down the dirt road. Our grandmothers were there when Belfast fell into rubble, and our mothers were there when Cambodia became a crucible of bones. Our sisters in South Africa, our brothers in Gaza. And, God forbid, our sons and daughters will have stories to tell too. We are scripted by war."
"We are drawn to war because we are, in the words of William Faulkner, drawn to 'the human heart in conflict with itself.' We all know that happiness throws white ink against a white page. What we need is darkness for the meaning to come clear. We discover ourselves through our battles -- our awful revelations, our highest dreams, our basest instincts are all on display."
As the saying goes, if you are reading this, you can thank a teacher. And I, of course, can thank one for being able to write it. We owe much to the teachers in our lives for our abilities to do these things. It is fitting to have a National Teacher Day and a Teacher Appreciation Week. We fail to consider fully the power of our own literacy and of the startling halt our lives would come to on a daily basis without it. Of course, it is more than just reading and writing for which we are grateful. Somewhere along the way someone taught us something that remains a part of who we are today. And we are better for it.
It seems particularly important here on a blog devoted to the reading life to mark the occasion. To do so, I direct you to this post from last year.
