Wendell Berry, who died on August 31 at the age of 92, was nationally known for being local. His great theme was community, yet he was singular, an outsider to any camp or tendency that tried to claim him. The decisive event in his life was his return to Port Royal, Kentucky, in 1965 from a young writer’s life that had taken him to Stanford, Europe, and New York, where he was teaching at NYU. Yet in deciding to farm—in the traditional way, with draft horses and his own muscles, manure and cover crops rather than fertilizer and pesticide—he chose a life in which, he wrote in 1971, “in the place I love more than any other … I am more painfully divided within myself than I could be in any other place.”
This was because, farming where his family had lived and worked for at least five generations—his father was a tobacco farmer and lawyer—Berry saw how the life of the place stitched together the best and the worst of human possibility. The land was a record of his people’s farming practices, new to the place and ignorant of its limits, which had sent topsoil downstream to silt up the Kentucky River, leaving eroded slopes and gullies whose fertility would take centuries to restore. He was raised amid a racial caste system, the son of a white boss who sometimes worked in the fields alongside Black laborers, thought of them as beloved elders, but came to understand the uneven gap between them, which he explored in a 1970 meditation on racism and community, The Hidden Would. “My people’s errors have become the features of my country,” he concluded, and he wrote to understand those. A writer’s responsibility was to reckon with “the destructive forces in his own history.”
Berry was a moralist, but he was not usually a scold, and he tried not to be. (He had an underappreciated and somewhat broad sense of humor, including a fair dose of self-irony; he titled one collection of essays Another Turn of the Crank.) He came home not to do penance, but because the repair that could begin a place was full of pleasure and even joy. He contended that the American economy, and the culture that it fostered, destroys the satisfaction of good work, which the doer can understand and see all the way through, and which serves some real human need. Instead of finding our wealth in good work and the relationships and places it serves, we have been enchanted by profit, getting and spending, using and discarding, moving fast and breaking things. To live differently would require new, or renewed, kinds of affection, attachment, and pleasure, which put less value on what you have acquired, more on what you have kept whole or helped to heal. In his reclaimed homeplace, Berry took on a life’s work: to approach his own life as “a thing decent in possibility.”
He hoped for the same for his country. A pacifist shaped by revulsion against the Vietnam War and the others that followed, who saw the same indifference to life in bombing abroad and strip-mining at home, he saw much of the country’s life as lost in violence and bewilderment. But he always called himself a patriot and invoked the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as parts of his creed, along with the Gospels. He belonged to that tradition of American dissent that believes that the country’s spirit belongs, in some deep way, to its dissenters.
He belonged, also, to the tradition of essentially ethical writers who make their lives their topic because writing can push back confusion and lay line lines of accountability. Words abstracted from living, labor, relationships, seemed to him to become either trivial or manipulative, the language of demagogues and salesmen. He worked to get the words right because he experienced this effort, in his nerves, as inseparable from getting the life right.
The proof is in what he leaves. Tens of thousands of people, maybe more live differently, or understand what they are doing differently, because of Wendell Berry’s words. They agree, in the most practical way, that the arrangement of the words has helped them to arrange their lives. Maybe you know them—eat some of the food they grow, watch how they work alongside their kids, have meant to ask why they moved back to, or stayed in, the place where they live.
On the day after his death, I think of a line that captures his emphatic joy in labor. It comes from “Work Song,” an elegy for old farmers now dead, remembered from the standpoint of the child who worked with them in the fields. Reading it, I think of throwing haybales to my father and my grandfather, and of their pleasure in seeing a new, young body pick up the work they had learned in the same way:
They claim
In the brevity of their strength an ancient joy.
“Make me know it! Hand it to me, boy!”
