To take just one recent example, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has always taken great delight in denigrating anyone from the country as ignorant, racist, and expendable, looked at social spending and concluded that since (Republican) rural America receives far more federal aid than it pays, all of us who live among woods and farm fields are lucky that our urban (Democratic) benefactors subsidize our lives at all. They are actually profoundly revolutionary., Berry distrusts political movements, which, he writes, soon decline from any possibility of reasonable discourse to slogans, shouts, and a merely hateful contention in the capitols and streets. Still, he is a lifelong protester. As comfortable with a hoe as with a pen, he has been one of the few intellectuals reminding us that country life is far more complex than its caricature, that industrial progress is nothing of the sort, that living in the country and working with the land can be a path to redemption, that living in the country and working with the land is the path to redemption. The University of Notre Dame has awarded its 2022 Richard H. Driehaus Prize to architect Rob Krier. In 1977, Berry quoted Howard, his defining guide on the topic, as treating the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal, and man as one great subject., I confessed that Id never read Howard. Hes in his eighties. he Wendell Berry Farming Program, a tuition-free college degree program that started in 2019 graduated its inaugural cohort of 12 students on May 15, 2021 at. And as he has done in many essays over the years, Berry convincingly shows how attempts to modernize agriculture, driven, since the 1970s, by the federal governments policy of get big or get out, has led to the devastation of a once more or less independent rural culture. But between his introduction and concluding two chapters, theres a revisionist history of slavery and its legacy that is largely unburdened by historical fact, laced with resentment about verbal slights flung at both the South and the rural U.S., and utterly incurious as to why, for instance, masses of Americans might find statues of Confederate generals objectionable and so be inspired to pull them down (Berry dismisses statue removal, as well as much of liberal politics, as simple political correctness). Wendell spotted her standing beside the newel post of a staircase in Miller Hall. I really loved taking this for a three-week joyride in my backpack., Cartoon by Sophie Lucido Johnson and Sammi Skolmoski, The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Womens Rights. 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. Gaines was one of twelve children from a sharecropping family who lived in former slave quarters on a sugar plantation in Louisiana. Researchers have studied how much of our personality is set from childhood, but what youre like isnt who you are. The cultural critic bell hooks, another Kentuckian, began reading Berry in college, finding his work fundamentally radical and eclectic. Decades later, she visited him at his farm to talk about the importance of home and community and the complexities of Americas racial divide. The Realm of the Gigantic Follow Us Books One of Our Most Beloved Environmental Writers Has Taken a Surprising Turn The Trump era has messed. It enabled farmers to free themselves from the grip of the trust by establishing production controls and parity prices, and by selling their tobacco directly to manufacturers. The Berrys live barely a mile from the town of Port Royal, which has not prospered over the years. My literary hero. He writes, My friends, I think, were afraid, now that I am old, that I am at risk of some dire breach of political etiquette by feebleness of mind or some fit of ill-advised candor. He listened, and fretted, but kept going. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.. The Kentucky and Ohio Rivers wind through hills dotted with sheep, cows, horses, and handsome old tobacco barns. In Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy, a book of photographs that Berrys college friend James Baker Hall took in 1973 at a neighbors farm, Berry writes about the cultivation of tobacco as a sort of agrarian passion, because of its beauty at nearly every stage of production and because of the artistry required to produce it. At harvest time, neighbors swapped work, as they did when putting up hay or killing hogs, undertakings that took days and required intense collective labor. Several of Berrys friends urged him to abandon the book, anticipating Twitter eruptions and withering reviews., My friends, I think, were afraid, now that I am old, that I am at risk of some dire breach of political etiquette by feebleness of mind or some fit of ill-advised candor, Berry writes. By his definition, a corporation is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. Objecting to Supreme Court rulings that treat corporations as persons, Berry argues that the limitless destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person. In other words, It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. . On Sundays, he sometimes accompanies Tanya to the Port Royal Baptist Church (not Southern Baptist), where they worship with neighbors and four generations of Berrys. It cant be hostile, or gossipy. She suggested that Berrys storytelling grew naturally from long hours of working with other farmers: Stripping tobacco, for instance, is hard, tedious labor, and a group gets through it by telling jokes and stories., When Wendell and his three siblings were young, Henry County was famous for a light-leafed, unusually fragrant crop known as burley tobacco. Mary and her husband, Steve Smith, own a steep, heavily wooded three-hundred-acre farm in Trimble County. They are asking me to lay aside my old effort to tell the truth, as it is given to me by my own knowledge and judgment, in order to take up another art, which is that of public relations., Berrys politically incorrect truth-telling does not extend to his Trump-voting neighbors, 30 miles northeast of Metro Louisville, because that wouldnt be neighborly. Seeking Clarity: Wendell Berry's New Book on Race By Katherine Dalton - October 5, 2022 1 Louisville, KY. Wendell Berry is 88, and age has not blurred the beauty of his prose or diminished his ability to take enormous pains on a topic on which he wants to speak clearly. His latest book, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, is the culmination of a lifetime of thinking and writing, and it is by turns infuriating, brilliant, lazy, startlingly radical, deeply disappointing, and filled with love, even as it seethes with resentment. For me, that was a happy return, Wendell wrote. 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. 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. I sat in the front row and when Wendell Berry came in and sat just down the way from me, I couldn't stop grinning. All contents 2023 The Slate Group LLC. When the rain let up, Berry and I drove south from Port Royal toward New Castle, to see his native land, where he and his brother, John, rambled as boys. But it also offers glimpses of his next book and looks at his legacy, which includes The Berry Center, which promotes prosperous, well-tended farms serving and supporting healthy local communities and the Wendell Berry Farming Program of Vermonts Sterling College, which offers a tuition-free college degree in sustainable family farming. They ought to keep it ready to hand, like a fire extinguisher. Without this, we risk conflagration: A society with an absurdly attenuated sense of sin starts talking then of civil war or holy war., If readers were incredulous about Berrys claim that a pencil was a better tool than a computer, its not hard to imagine how many will react to his plea that we extend sympathy to a general whose army fought to perpetuate slavery in America. She admits that growing up on her parents farm wasnt easy: the outdoor composting privy, the absence of vacations, the mandatory chores that pulled her out of bed each morning before dawn. 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. Berry summons writers, from Homer to Twain, who extended understanding and sympathy to enemies, sinners, and outcasts: sometimes to people who happen to be on the other side or the wrong side, sometimes to people who have done really terrible things. In this spirit, he offers an assessment of RobertE. Lee, whom he calls one of the great tragic figures of our history. He presents Lee as a white supremacist and a slaveholder, but also as a reluctant soldier who opposed secession and was forced to choose between conflicting loyalties: his country and his people. This is all old ground for Berry, delivered in the moralistic voice that readers are either thrilled or bored by, but what gives The Need to Be Whole its freshness is that he joins this critique of modern agriculture to the analysis of racism that he began in The Hidden Wound, a comparatively lesser-known book in the Berry canon. But why pay any attention to the Krugmans, let alone the fetid Twitter swamp? An image lodged in my mindbusy men in dark suits, their secretaries typing and taking dictation, while Berry told amusing stories in bluejeans and scuffed shoes. I read the exchange to him, and he listened thoughtfully. LEO: The bluegrass world lost another legend recently. She was also, in mechanical terms, his typist, a fact that outraged feminists when Berry mentioned it in his Harpers essay. Previously aired October 4, 2013. By a long persistence of human choosing, not of human life but of the worlds life, which is both its and ours, everything would be changed: how we would live, how we would live together, how we would earn our living, how we would work. And like any good utopian, Berry also sees that the promised land is already at our feet: If we worked for the worlds life, in good faith, with sufficient love [i]t would make us happy as soon as we began to do it.. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. Miss Minnie is a neat, ninety-pound schoolteacher. February 26, 2022. Thank you for your support. Instead, he returned empty-handed. On a summer night near the end of the war, Lucinda saw men in uniform making off with her husband on horseback, and set out behind them on foot, in her nightgown. 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. Tanya, who grew up in a bohemian, academic family in Lexington, is the pianist for the choir. In one story, Andy Catlett, Wendells fictional counterpart, tells a young helper, If you dont have people, a lot of people, whose hands can make order of whatever they pick up, youre going to be shit out of luck., I had always associated tobacco with lung cancer. The single room, containing an antique woodstove against the back wall and a neatly made cot in one corner, was dominated by his worktable, set before a forty-paned windowthe eye of the housethat looks out onto the porch, the woods, and the river below. At the old Ford acreage, he showed me where the tobacco was taken after the harvest. The Rural Blog is a publication of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues based at the University of Kentucky. With its homely brown jacket and yellowing pages, it looked its age, yet it spoke urgently to our current compounding crises. In that unity lies Berrys despair, but also his hope. Hardcover, 222 pages, $45. With it, he told me, you can deliver a blow of tremendous force to a stake or a splitting wedge. Thinking about a modern sledgehammer, I asked how the handle was inserted into the head. We recently caught up with founding member CJ Cain to discuss his love for J.D. Hed long since forgotten his prickly response to my fathers insistence that he cut those final hundred pages. They put a down payment on the farm, using money that Josephs grandparents had left him. The first is that, contrary to Berrys assumption, the North and the South, the factory and the plantation, were never mutually exclusive systems, but intricately linked, as much recent scholarship has shown. Someone took out a few panes and tried to get into my safe. And this one practically lived right down the road from you. Late in the book, Berry writes that one of the results of Donald Trumps win in 2016 was his discovery of just how much urban, liberal America disdains (as he would have it) those of us who live in the country. He noted a few years ago, That insight has instructed and amused me very much, because she is right and so forthrightly right. In his new book, he has a characteristically bittersweet message: Because the age of global search and discovery now is endingbecause by now we have so thoroughly ransacked, appropriated, and diminished the globes original wealthwe can see how generous and abounding is the commonwealth of life. But he has never suggested that everyone flee the city and the suburbs and take up farming. Smith told me that in the past half century, as coal jobs have disappeared, Appalshop has grown. Wendell recalled, He did me the great service of never allowing me to be satisfied with any work I showed him., Among the students at the university was Tanya Amyx, the daughter of an art professor and a textile artist, who was studying French and music. With renunciative discipline, he tilled his fields as his father and grandfather had, using a team of horses and a plow. A recent article in The New Yorker describes Kentucky author Wendell Berry as one of America's most loved and yet also scoffed-at writers. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, and . Second-grade teachers gave boys knives for perfect attendance, but he spurned the bribe, and by the eighth grade was earning Fs in conduct. The novelist Colum McCann told The Atlantic in 2017 that Berrys poems have a real twinkle in their eyes in the face of a dark world. He recited The Mad Farmers Love Song, which features one of his favorite figures in the canon: O when the worlds at peaceand every man is freethen will I go down unto my love.O and I may go downseveral times before that. According to a study by the University of Iowa, the suicide rate for farmers is three and a half times that for the general population. Finding their camp, she reached for Johns hand and took him home. One of the people at the sit-in was his friend HerbE. Smith, from a family of miners in Whitesburg. It is a scene from the Book of Revelation. 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. The brothers stopped going to school after the eighth grade, but Wendell considers them among his most knowledgeable teachers. After visiting Berry at his Kentucky farm, Wickenden wrote, From this sliver of vanishing America, Berry cultivates the unfashionable virtues of neighborliness and compassion. In 1933, as prices plummeted during the Great Depression, the FranklinD. Roosevelt Administration passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act, to save farmers from ruin. Wendellrangy, with a slight writers stoopstood on the porch, holding the door open with a wide smile. He was also a fervent advocate of a new organization, the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association. Lee said, I cannot raise my hand against my birthplace, my home, my children, Berry writes. Which is not to say that Berry renounces the use of green energy. . And Berry grew up working alongside hired Black laborers on his grandparents farm, learning from them many of the pleasures and skills and responsibilities of farm work. In 1974, someone threw a firebomb into its offices. Several of Berrys friends urged him to abandon the book, anticipating Twitter eruptions and withering reviews. Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker. By Dorothy Wickenden February 21, 2022 Berry has. 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. An intelligent analysis might point out that every bite of Krugmans food, every sip of water he drinks, every bit of wood and stone and gravel and sand and metal and oil and cotton and wool and leather and rubber, every material aspect of his life came from the country and from those who live out here. Mary complained to her father, Why do we always have to do things the hardest way? But she never considered moving away. Wendell and Tanya share the house with their amiable sheepdog, Liz, who greeted me in a light rain as I climbed a set of steep stairs from the road. A beautiful poem of suffering, anxiety about the future, and ultimately-finally-love. A book by the celebrated author, poet, and farmer that takes on racism, the Civil War, and his life's work. We get the old myth of Robert E. Lee as a tragic gentleman soldier who hated slavery but fought for his love of Virginia, and the canard that however bad Southern chattel slavery was, the true horror of America came into view only after the war, when capitalism made slaves of us all, turned us all against one another, and ravaged the earth. He divides his time between writing and farmwork, continuing his vocation of championing sustainable agriculture in a country fuelled by industrial behemoths, while striving to insure that rural Americansa mocked, despised, and ever-dwindling minoritydo not perish altogether. A French Villages Radical Vision of a Good Life with Alzheimers. Thanks for signing up! "It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work. Liz jumped onto the cargo bed. But it has become such a pleasure., In the early sixties, the Berrys seemed to be launched on a very different life. And if there is one overriding theme that has always defined Berrys thinking (and has, to his critics, marked him as a dour Luddite), it is the sanctity and obligation to work with ones own hands, no matter how lowly the task. So I hope to do the right things today.. Berry pointed out a youthful shot of his wife, Tanya, with cropped, wavy hair, striding along a hillside by their house. Wendell picked up a maul, which Meb had made from a hickory tree. . She replied, In a small community, humorous banter has to affirm energy and purpose. Although he has laid bare his entire life in print, he tightly guards his privacy. And it named Wendell Berry the recipient of its 2022 Henry Hope Reed Award. For Berry, as for hooks, love was more than a feeling. Wendell Berry laments his "lack of simple things" in 'The Want of Peace,' asking about our collective trade-"selling the world to buy fire." . Sometimes I dont believe I can stand it another day, but then Im working at problems I know how to deal with, to an extent., In 1960, as he embarked on A Place on Earth, he felt lost. For a time / I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. I hope Berry gets his rest and returns to his good work. Then he said, Your father must have known what an ass I was making of myself., When it came time to design the books jacket, Berry refused anything that might be construed as self-promotion. I very much hope that this is not Berrys last missive from Henry Countythat, having taken hundreds of pages to vent his resentment, he can clear his mind, can air out his prose and return to what I understand to be his calling: caring for the land, caring for the community of life, caring for the integrity and clarity of his thought. Thinking that the elderly Berry might like to reacquaint himself with the young Berry, I mailed a letter to introduce myself. School held little interest for Wendell. From the Civil War to the present, Port William has been home to a dozen families and to an entertaining supporting cast. Read more . Thats community journalism. And The Need to Be Whole is too often a lazy book, with little of the generosity that has always marked Berrys prose. Id learned from the letters that it was my father who introduced Berry to the practice, sending him Leonards book Gardening with Nature, and recommending the works of Sir Albert Howard. A few hours west of the decapitated mountains of Appalachia is the part of Kentucky known as the Bluegrass region. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. ". . It is a geologic upheaval. Entire mountaintops were torn off and cast into the valleys, he added. The highest aim of the school was to produce a perfectly obedient, militarist, puritanical moron who could play football, Berry writes in The Long-Legged House. His greatest lesson from those years: Take a simpleton and give him power and confront him with intelligenceand you have a tyrant. Each year, when school let out for the summer, Wendell headed to his great-uncle Currans camp with an axe and a scythe, to mow the wild grass and horseweed. In the nineteen-twenties, with the original house in disrepair, Wendells bachelor great-uncle Curran Mathews painstakingly took apart what remained and used the lumber to make a camp along the Kentucky River, where he could escape the bounds of the accepted. Wendell, a melancholic and rebellious boy, found peace in the tumbledown camp, even though it flooded every time the river overflowed. 2023 Cond Nast. Last October, Berry showed me the camp, asking only that I not say where it is. A society with an absurdly attenuated sense of sin starts talking then of civil war or holy war.. When they express alarm about climate change, she tells them, You cant throw up your hands in despair. Seeing that I needed help understanding it as a cultural touchstone, Berry said, Id better tell you about my daddy. His father, John Marshall Berry, had a searing early experience that shaped his life, as well as the lives of his children and grandchildren. Critics see him as a utopian or a crank, a Luddite who never met a technological innovation he admired. But this is not just history; it offers insight into the land, culture and neighbors that made Wendell Berry, now 87, who he is and why he is what he is. Despite Berrys veneration of his ancestors, he can be unsparing about their sins. Renowned author Wendell Berry has been named the winner of the 2022 Henry Hope Reed Award. In Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer, an infamous 1987 essay that ran in Harpers, he announced, I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work. When indignant readers sent a blizzard of letters to the editor, Berry noted in reply that one man, who called him a fool and doubly a fool, had fortunately misspelled my name, leaving me a speck of hope that I am not the Wendell Barry he was talking about., I first heard of Wendell Berry when I was ten years old. 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). The following year, he marched against the Vietnam War in Lexington, where he told the crowd that, as a member of the human race, he was in the worst possible company: communists, fascists and totalitarians of all sorts, militarists and tyrants, exploiters, vandals, gluttons, ignoramuses, murderers. But, he insisted, he was given hope by people who through all the sad destructive centuries of our history have kept alive the vision of peace and kindness and generosity and humility and freedom., On Valentines Day weekend, 2011, Berry joined a small group of activists to occupy Governor Steve Beshears office in Frankfort, as hundreds more marched outside with I Love Mountains placards. But even as the Gishes revealed the Tennessee Valley Authoritys role in strip mining and helped visiting journalists explore the regions ills, they were always careful not to publish demeaning pictures of local residents like those that typically illustrate such national stories. When Berry moved to the country with his wife, Tanya, he gave her a privy that never aspired so high as to have a door.. When I was back home, he sent me a diagram and explained how the strength of the wood came from the trees immersion in the soil: The growth of roots makes the grain gnarly, gnurly, snurly: unsplittable. After you cut the tree, you square off the root end. Hidden in the woods on a slope above the Kentucky River, just south of the Ohio border, is a twelve-by-sixteen-foot cabin with a long front porch. Their first decision was to replace its anodyne motto, A Friendly Non-Partisan Weekly Newspaper, with It Screams. Not everyone welcomed the papers candor about the hazards of mining and the misdeeds of corrupt officials. The two were well matched. 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