From Wendell Berry With More Love Than I Can Bear
Wendell Berry is trying to save America again, this time by reconstructing the childhood of his alter ego, Andy Catlett, in the Port William saga that is his large number of novels, novellas, short stories and, lately, poems. By now, Berry knows that the present is largely unsalvageable; so he has preserved the past where another world is still intact, although receding quickly.
In his just-published novella, "Andy Catlett: Early Travels," it is three days past Christmas 1943, and Andy is to travel by bus, alone, to stay with his grandfather, Marce Catlett, and hired hand< Dick Watson. It is pre-dawn, and the world is both in suspension, struggling to recognize itself in the feeble light, and serenity, still able to count on its emergence it has always known. Andy will be met by the two elders who are driving a mule-drawn buckboard. It is a world where people can believe in a seventh day, a sabbath for rest, with stubborn evidences of itself to be found and taken for granted every day.
Andy is 9 years old, still the innocent of "A World Lost" (1996), on the morning of a day like the one that opens that book--only in the earlier book it is shattered by news of the murder of his most beloved uncle who is also his father's brother. I have no idea if the day of this new novella will be similarly sundered by death or tragedy. So far, this book is a pastoral. But Wendell has increasingly allowed himself a more bifocal vision in his narratives to indulge one of his deepest motives for writing: mourning.
On this morning at the tail end of 1943, Port William has sent sons to fight in World War II, but the one that matters most to Andy--his mother's youngest brother, Virgil--is not yet MIA and so, like everything else, to be hoped and prayed for as some day returned and restored. Wendell as Andy imagines the coming bifurcated present, and with the innocence of childhood is able to broker a reality able to stay co-existent with the already impinging post-war world. It is an understandable outcome to expect, but the future will prove too uncompromising.
Here is the first of many retrospections as Andy remembers the world he will lose but has not yet lost and can still savor as one beyond endangerment. This is the best writing being done on our planet and I wish I could forge a reader's debt to make right and equal, even though other, the world we have exchanged for the world Wendell knew:
It was a though a curtain had fallen on a stage and the credulous audience (I, that is to say) was now in a different world from the one I had waked up in only a short time ago. The world I was in now was an older one that had been in existence a long time, though it would last only a few more years. The time was about over when a boy traveling into the Port William community night be met by a team of mules and a wagon. Dick Watson would die in the fall of 1945 and Grandpa Catlett in the late winter of 1946. By 1950 or so most of the horse and mule teams would have departed from the country. The men and women who had known only the old ways were departing fast. I knew well at that time that the two worlds existed and that I lived in both. During the school year I lived mostly in Hargrave, the country seat at the confluence of the rivers. Hargave, though it seemed large to me, was a small town that loved its connections with the greater world, had always aspired to be bigger, richer, and grander than it was, and had always apologized to itself for being only what it was. When school was out, I lived mostly in the orbit of the tiny village of Port William, which, so long as it remained at the center of its own attention, was entirely satisfied to be what it was.
That those two worlds were inmortal contention had never occured to me. When in a few years one had entirely consumed the other, so that no place anywhere would ever again be satisfied to be what it was, I was surprised, and I am more surprised now by the rapidity of the change than I was then. In only a few years the world of pavement, speed, and universal dissatisfaction had extended into nearly every place and nearly every mind, and the old world of the mule team and wagon was simply gone, leaving behind it a scatter of less and less intelligible relics.
* * * *
But on that morning in 1943 I had no premonition of such an ending. In my innocence, I thought only that the world the mules were drawing us into was a truer world than the world of Hargrave, and I liked it better. It was a world placed unforgettably within the weather, in the unqualified daylight and darkness. I thought it had always been and would always be pretty much as it was.
--Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels, Shoemaker & Hoard, Emeryville, California, 2006, pages 17-19
In his just-published novella, "Andy Catlett: Early Travels," it is three days past Christmas 1943, and Andy is to travel by bus, alone, to stay with his grandfather, Marce Catlett, and hired hand< Dick Watson. It is pre-dawn, and the world is both in suspension, struggling to recognize itself in the feeble light, and serenity, still able to count on its emergence it has always known. Andy will be met by the two elders who are driving a mule-drawn buckboard. It is a world where people can believe in a seventh day, a sabbath for rest, with stubborn evidences of itself to be found and taken for granted every day.
Andy is 9 years old, still the innocent of "A World Lost" (1996), on the morning of a day like the one that opens that book--only in the earlier book it is shattered by news of the murder of his most beloved uncle who is also his father's brother. I have no idea if the day of this new novella will be similarly sundered by death or tragedy. So far, this book is a pastoral. But Wendell has increasingly allowed himself a more bifocal vision in his narratives to indulge one of his deepest motives for writing: mourning.
On this morning at the tail end of 1943, Port William has sent sons to fight in World War II, but the one that matters most to Andy--his mother's youngest brother, Virgil--is not yet MIA and so, like everything else, to be hoped and prayed for as some day returned and restored. Wendell as Andy imagines the coming bifurcated present, and with the innocence of childhood is able to broker a reality able to stay co-existent with the already impinging post-war world. It is an understandable outcome to expect, but the future will prove too uncompromising.
Here is the first of many retrospections as Andy remembers the world he will lose but has not yet lost and can still savor as one beyond endangerment. This is the best writing being done on our planet and I wish I could forge a reader's debt to make right and equal, even though other, the world we have exchanged for the world Wendell knew:
It was a though a curtain had fallen on a stage and the credulous audience (I, that is to say) was now in a different world from the one I had waked up in only a short time ago. The world I was in now was an older one that had been in existence a long time, though it would last only a few more years. The time was about over when a boy traveling into the Port William community night be met by a team of mules and a wagon. Dick Watson would die in the fall of 1945 and Grandpa Catlett in the late winter of 1946. By 1950 or so most of the horse and mule teams would have departed from the country. The men and women who had known only the old ways were departing fast. I knew well at that time that the two worlds existed and that I lived in both. During the school year I lived mostly in Hargrave, the country seat at the confluence of the rivers. Hargave, though it seemed large to me, was a small town that loved its connections with the greater world, had always aspired to be bigger, richer, and grander than it was, and had always apologized to itself for being only what it was. When school was out, I lived mostly in the orbit of the tiny village of Port William, which, so long as it remained at the center of its own attention, was entirely satisfied to be what it was.
That those two worlds were inmortal contention had never occured to me. When in a few years one had entirely consumed the other, so that no place anywhere would ever again be satisfied to be what it was, I was surprised, and I am more surprised now by the rapidity of the change than I was then. In only a few years the world of pavement, speed, and universal dissatisfaction had extended into nearly every place and nearly every mind, and the old world of the mule team and wagon was simply gone, leaving behind it a scatter of less and less intelligible relics.
* * * *
But on that morning in 1943 I had no premonition of such an ending. In my innocence, I thought only that the world the mules were drawing us into was a truer world than the world of Hargrave, and I liked it better. It was a world placed unforgettably within the weather, in the unqualified daylight and darkness. I thought it had always been and would always be pretty much as it was.
--Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels, Shoemaker & Hoard, Emeryville, California, 2006, pages 17-19
posted by David Federman @ 4:50 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home