Wendell Berry: The Blessing and Bounty of Intactness
"You don't miss your water til the well runs dry," sings soul songster William Bell. Wendell Berry's short novel, "Andy Catlett: Early Travels," is a taste of water from a deep, pure well gone dry; a sweet, profound refreshment that exists now only in memory and which, by dint of his Bodhisattva vows as a writer and Christian, must nonetheless be shared. Maybe that's why I spend most of my readings of Berry's novels on the verge of tears.
The time of the book is post-Christmas December 1943. It lasts four days and 140 pages. Nine-year-old Andy Catlett, Wendell's alter-ego, takes his first-ever trips to both sets of his grandparents alone. The reader accompanies him through the rounds of duties and pasttimes over those four days. Nothing happens that isn't normal, routine or expected. The book has a conspicuous lack of drama or tension. It reads more like an essay than a piece of fiction. It's insights are usually, but not always, the product of reverie rather than revelation. Nothing or no one is lost, except the entirety of the world those places and people belonged to.
Tolstoy's later fictions are allegories and parables. They have a flat, primitive beauty of didacticism. Similarly, Wendell's last two novels read like memoirs. Or you could look at their reduction of scale in terms of a painter's shift from oils to ink, brush to pen. But to lament the lack of dramatic tension is to miss the particular purpose and giftings of these books.
Most of all, for me, "Andy Catlett: Early Travels" is about intactness, a profound cohrence possible only in a world of small places where the art of living revolves around greater self-sufficiency than our world asks of us.
One especially difficult personal consequence of reading Wendell Berry is to realize my own lack of manual competence and my utter lifelong disdain for physical labor. That, perforce, makes Wendell, in all candor, a romantic for me; his books are romances since they take me to situations and sensibilities rarely known in my life. Sadly, ironically, his books are as much Arthurian legends to me as an adult as the books Andy takes refuge in as a child.
So I am handicapped by having to read this book as a legend. But maybe I am also rewarded for having to read it as such. For legends are stories that deserve telling no matter what world in which they are told. In my case, the legend runs like this: Since Andy is, at book's end, initiated into a vast competence possible in an agrarian world of self-subsistence, the book is a kind of American Paradise Found and Lost. Andy as a young boy finds the paradise of place by reliving the day he found it during a later time when it is lost forever and has given way to nothing that is comparable to, or compatible with, itself.
The book is also a war novel--not in the sense of a depiction of war, or a series of letters from the fronts on which it is fought, but a letter from the homefront for which it is being fought. Wendell, whom I think a pacificst, reminds us that there are no winners in war. America will become, he intimates, a war economy. It will never again be a peace economy. So the America of Andy's childhood is present and accounted for in an elder's adulthood during which it has gone missing. The small town of Hargrave, Kentucky, which in 1943 is the basic unit of democracy that is fighting for itself, is not to survive long into the peace that war brings. The wartime industrialization America will marshal to win the war will take root in the peacetime that follows.
Wendell does not spare us this outcome. But, out of compassion, he sequesters it in the distant future in which the book is created. The world of this wonderful short novel is allowed to exist confidently and rightfully in Andy's nurtured and nurturing innocence. This isn't Frank Baum's Kansas of fragilely facaded desolation. This is Wendell Berry's Kentucky of deep, resonant comfort.
So each of the book's three chapters is a ladleful of sweet well water. This is water for both drinking and ablution. Andy finds--and thus attains--on his own what T.S. Eliot describes as "the still point of the turning world." That still point here is a core intactness that spreads from home to field and street, everywhere a resident of that place might find him or her self. Wendell calls that intactness "quiet."
"When I was out of the house, standing on the walk in front, the quiet seemed still to be unbroken. I had come out of a smaller quiet into the one that contained it. The wind had laid. Every tree was standing still. The overcast had thinned, and under it the light had brightened. Down in town the road was empty. There was not a soul in sight. The fronts of all the buildings looked permanently shut.
"In the other direction, out toward the river valley, the country was as quiet, as still, as the town. One trance held everything. Under the gray sky, the light was strong. Every detail, every fencepost and tree, every door and window in every building, was steady and clear, luminous, as if the things of the earth had absorbed the light of the sky. On the farthest ridge, this side of the valley, I could see Uncle Virgil's cattle lying down. The whole country seemed to be meditating on itself, as if consciously submitted to whatever was to come. I remembered it was New Year's Eve. It was only another day, though already a little longer than yesterday, but I felt as if a great page was about to turn.
"Suspended in that rapt light at the edge of time, so that my footfalls made no sound, I crossed the road and went down to Jasper Lathrop's store. In spite of Granny's assurance, I was a little surprised when the latch gave and the door opened. I went in and shut the door as carefully as I had opened it.
"And then I had to stop and look. I had not been in there since Jasper got his call and went off to the army. I had not, I think, even looked in the windows. I remembered it fully stocked
with groceries and hardware, all the varied merchandise of a general store in those days, and occupied by shoppers and loafers and Jasper himself. Now it was empty. Completely empty. Every shelf and bin and counter was as bare of goods as Mother Hubbard's cupboard. The store contained only its share of the surrounding stillness, and the light starkly shaped and shadowed by the deserted furnishings." (pages 136-7)
It is in the back room, formerly the office, of this empty store waiting for, pun intended, restoration to itself after the war, that select elders of the community have gathered to pass their leisure time together in a communal waiting for war's end. Andy is admitted into their waiting midst which conjoined makes the space a waiting room of, pun intended, his most beautiful ruminations. As I read this section, and felt myself, as usual with Wendell, on the verge of tears, I asked my tear ducts to stay clear for a change so I could accompany Andy into the company of men. I'm glad I did because there, yesterday on my 65th birthday, Wendell gave me a clear-eyed gift I will cherish for the rest of this segment of forever in which I find myself. It would not be fair to quote any farther into this chapter. I invite you to travel there yourself. I promise replenishment.
Let me, however, as further inducement to reading this book, quote something 18 pages prior. This is possibly one of the most tender and triumphant passages in all of Wendell's writings. And what is said here is possibly a more common outcome, in terms of understanding, for people who were born of Andy's time and place. As soon as I read this, I knew it to be true and trustowrthy; I felt it a reward for accompanying Andy on his journey. I realize now I waited all night to share this with you:
"Time is told by death, who doubts it? But time is always halved--for all we know, it is halved--by the eye blink, the synapse, the immeasurable moment of the present. Time is only the past and maybe the future; the present moment, dividing and connecting them, is eternal. The time of the past is there, somewhat, but only somewhat, to be remembered and examined. We believe the future is there too, for it keeps arriving, though we know nothing about it. But try to stop the present for your patient scrutiny, or to measure its length with your most advanced chronometer. It exists, so far as I can tell, only as a leak in time, through which. if we are quiet enough, eternity falls upon us and makes its claim. And here I am, an old man, traveling as child among the dead." (page 119)
--Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels, Shoemaker and Hoard, Emeryville, CA, 2006
The book ends with Andy's initiation into a complete, layered belonging to his family, community, place and time--first during a morning of work, and, then, as reward, during an afternoon of leisure with men in a general store whose owner is fighting overseas and which is converted now, temporarily, into a congregating place where fathers and friends of men serving overseas wait for news of their loved ones at war. They say, "In dreams begins responsibility." But for Wendell Berry, the converse is just as true, and maybe even more sustaining: "In responsibility begins dreaming." Nine bows, dear friend. Thank you for the foster home of Hargrave, Kentucky.
The time of the book is post-Christmas December 1943. It lasts four days and 140 pages. Nine-year-old Andy Catlett, Wendell's alter-ego, takes his first-ever trips to both sets of his grandparents alone. The reader accompanies him through the rounds of duties and pasttimes over those four days. Nothing happens that isn't normal, routine or expected. The book has a conspicuous lack of drama or tension. It reads more like an essay than a piece of fiction. It's insights are usually, but not always, the product of reverie rather than revelation. Nothing or no one is lost, except the entirety of the world those places and people belonged to.
Tolstoy's later fictions are allegories and parables. They have a flat, primitive beauty of didacticism. Similarly, Wendell's last two novels read like memoirs. Or you could look at their reduction of scale in terms of a painter's shift from oils to ink, brush to pen. But to lament the lack of dramatic tension is to miss the particular purpose and giftings of these books.
Most of all, for me, "Andy Catlett: Early Travels" is about intactness, a profound cohrence possible only in a world of small places where the art of living revolves around greater self-sufficiency than our world asks of us.
One especially difficult personal consequence of reading Wendell Berry is to realize my own lack of manual competence and my utter lifelong disdain for physical labor. That, perforce, makes Wendell, in all candor, a romantic for me; his books are romances since they take me to situations and sensibilities rarely known in my life. Sadly, ironically, his books are as much Arthurian legends to me as an adult as the books Andy takes refuge in as a child.
So I am handicapped by having to read this book as a legend. But maybe I am also rewarded for having to read it as such. For legends are stories that deserve telling no matter what world in which they are told. In my case, the legend runs like this: Since Andy is, at book's end, initiated into a vast competence possible in an agrarian world of self-subsistence, the book is a kind of American Paradise Found and Lost. Andy as a young boy finds the paradise of place by reliving the day he found it during a later time when it is lost forever and has given way to nothing that is comparable to, or compatible with, itself.
The book is also a war novel--not in the sense of a depiction of war, or a series of letters from the fronts on which it is fought, but a letter from the homefront for which it is being fought. Wendell, whom I think a pacificst, reminds us that there are no winners in war. America will become, he intimates, a war economy. It will never again be a peace economy. So the America of Andy's childhood is present and accounted for in an elder's adulthood during which it has gone missing. The small town of Hargrave, Kentucky, which in 1943 is the basic unit of democracy that is fighting for itself, is not to survive long into the peace that war brings. The wartime industrialization America will marshal to win the war will take root in the peacetime that follows.
Wendell does not spare us this outcome. But, out of compassion, he sequesters it in the distant future in which the book is created. The world of this wonderful short novel is allowed to exist confidently and rightfully in Andy's nurtured and nurturing innocence. This isn't Frank Baum's Kansas of fragilely facaded desolation. This is Wendell Berry's Kentucky of deep, resonant comfort.
So each of the book's three chapters is a ladleful of sweet well water. This is water for both drinking and ablution. Andy finds--and thus attains--on his own what T.S. Eliot describes as "the still point of the turning world." That still point here is a core intactness that spreads from home to field and street, everywhere a resident of that place might find him or her self. Wendell calls that intactness "quiet."
"When I was out of the house, standing on the walk in front, the quiet seemed still to be unbroken. I had come out of a smaller quiet into the one that contained it. The wind had laid. Every tree was standing still. The overcast had thinned, and under it the light had brightened. Down in town the road was empty. There was not a soul in sight. The fronts of all the buildings looked permanently shut.
"In the other direction, out toward the river valley, the country was as quiet, as still, as the town. One trance held everything. Under the gray sky, the light was strong. Every detail, every fencepost and tree, every door and window in every building, was steady and clear, luminous, as if the things of the earth had absorbed the light of the sky. On the farthest ridge, this side of the valley, I could see Uncle Virgil's cattle lying down. The whole country seemed to be meditating on itself, as if consciously submitted to whatever was to come. I remembered it was New Year's Eve. It was only another day, though already a little longer than yesterday, but I felt as if a great page was about to turn.
"Suspended in that rapt light at the edge of time, so that my footfalls made no sound, I crossed the road and went down to Jasper Lathrop's store. In spite of Granny's assurance, I was a little surprised when the latch gave and the door opened. I went in and shut the door as carefully as I had opened it.
"And then I had to stop and look. I had not been in there since Jasper got his call and went off to the army. I had not, I think, even looked in the windows. I remembered it fully stocked
with groceries and hardware, all the varied merchandise of a general store in those days, and occupied by shoppers and loafers and Jasper himself. Now it was empty. Completely empty. Every shelf and bin and counter was as bare of goods as Mother Hubbard's cupboard. The store contained only its share of the surrounding stillness, and the light starkly shaped and shadowed by the deserted furnishings." (pages 136-7)
It is in the back room, formerly the office, of this empty store waiting for, pun intended, restoration to itself after the war, that select elders of the community have gathered to pass their leisure time together in a communal waiting for war's end. Andy is admitted into their waiting midst which conjoined makes the space a waiting room of, pun intended, his most beautiful ruminations. As I read this section, and felt myself, as usual with Wendell, on the verge of tears, I asked my tear ducts to stay clear for a change so I could accompany Andy into the company of men. I'm glad I did because there, yesterday on my 65th birthday, Wendell gave me a clear-eyed gift I will cherish for the rest of this segment of forever in which I find myself. It would not be fair to quote any farther into this chapter. I invite you to travel there yourself. I promise replenishment.
Let me, however, as further inducement to reading this book, quote something 18 pages prior. This is possibly one of the most tender and triumphant passages in all of Wendell's writings. And what is said here is possibly a more common outcome, in terms of understanding, for people who were born of Andy's time and place. As soon as I read this, I knew it to be true and trustowrthy; I felt it a reward for accompanying Andy on his journey. I realize now I waited all night to share this with you:
"Time is told by death, who doubts it? But time is always halved--for all we know, it is halved--by the eye blink, the synapse, the immeasurable moment of the present. Time is only the past and maybe the future; the present moment, dividing and connecting them, is eternal. The time of the past is there, somewhat, but only somewhat, to be remembered and examined. We believe the future is there too, for it keeps arriving, though we know nothing about it. But try to stop the present for your patient scrutiny, or to measure its length with your most advanced chronometer. It exists, so far as I can tell, only as a leak in time, through which. if we are quiet enough, eternity falls upon us and makes its claim. And here I am, an old man, traveling as child among the dead." (page 119)
--Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels, Shoemaker and Hoard, Emeryville, CA, 2006
The book ends with Andy's initiation into a complete, layered belonging to his family, community, place and time--first during a morning of work, and, then, as reward, during an afternoon of leisure with men in a general store whose owner is fighting overseas and which is converted now, temporarily, into a congregating place where fathers and friends of men serving overseas wait for news of their loved ones at war. They say, "In dreams begins responsibility." But for Wendell Berry, the converse is just as true, and maybe even more sustaining: "In responsibility begins dreaming." Nine bows, dear friend. Thank you for the foster home of Hargrave, Kentucky.
posted by David Federman @ 3:38 AM
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