Neighbor with each other and get along: localism in the literature of Wendell Berry
Kahryn Riley and Bruce Edward Walker
And so Andy had the old place in mind, as it was and as it might be made, long before it ever occurred to him that he might be the one to live there and attempt to make it as it might be.
For that to happen required, in fact, the right girl, but also many miles, many happenings, and several years.
From: “Remembering,” Wendell Berry, Counterpoint Books, 2008.
…to him that is joined to all the living there is hope. …
Ecclesiastes 9:14, used as an epigraph to Berry’s novel cited above.
Either despite or because the setting of his fiction is firmly rooted in the fictitious Port William, Kentucky., readers of Wendell Berry will find the dual consistent threads of community and localism throughout his body of work.
Berry is a multi-hyphenate writer, responsible for brilliant poetry, short stories, and novels. He’s also shown himself over the years to be an anti-industrialist firebrand deeply suspicious of free-market capitalism and a fierce opponent of materialism.
However, if the definition of a “conservative” is someone standing athwart history and yelling, “Stop!” as defined by William F. Buckley, then Berry is also a conservative.
Not for Berry the new-fangled geegaws and gizmos of modern technology. In fact, the correspondence one of us conducted with him long after personal computers became commonplace was written on what was obviously a manual typewriter. Additionally, it’s uncertain whether he conducted the typing himself or farmed it out to his beloved wife and secretary Tanya.
But it’s not politics or economics that prompts discussion of Berry and Port William in this space. It’s his love of place and the creation of a fictional community as well as the people with whom he lovingly populates it. The characters created by Berry either love the land or eventually learn or relearn to love it and the people who populate it.
For example, in his short story “A Jonquil for Mary Penn,” Berry creates a portrait of a young wife struggling to accept her lot in life as the wife of a farmer who leaves her alone for long stretches of time during the planting and harvesting seasons. She wakes up one morning in ill health, feeling unappreciated by her departing husband, and bemoans her outcast state. The spoiled daughter of a wealthy businessman, she begins to doubt whether her husband truly loves her. The story climaxes as Mary awakens from her sick bed to witness her house populated by farmers’ wives who have come to check on her after Mary’s husband told them he was concerned.
As noted by the University of Louisville’s Leon V. Driskell in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale Research, 1980: Berry’s “work is of a place, and whether he writes poems, novels, or essays, he reveals his preoccupation with the land and his sense of culture as derived from his acceptance of a way of life many people today regard as ‘alternative.’”
The Membership
It’s fashionable lately to favor “experiences, not things.” And, as beneficiaries of the many invigorating and soul-nourishing experiences derived from life in collegium with fellow classical liberals, we heart it.
As noted above, Berry penned a collection of novels and short stories set in the fictional Port William, Ky., where he traces the lives of a handful of families through the Civil War to the present day. These families – the Beechum, Catlett, Coulter, and Feltner clans – are the main characters among others that make up the Membership.
This membership is an association more formal in name than in fact, but no less meaningful. It schedules no meetings – only the unfailing course of planned and unplanned social visits, labor trades, and caretaking missions that continually share its news and reinforce its values. It charges no dues – only a life lived in a spirit of community, with grace and conscious commitment extended to each of the other members and to their place (itself also a member – or at least a primary character).
The quote that’s always drawn from The Wild Birds to describe the Port William Membership is articulated by Burley Coulter, who says that “[t]he difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.” But better still might be one from Jayber Crow: “There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows for better or worse our lives are woven together here, one with another and with the place and all the living things.”
Berry exhorts readers across his works to reject the hubristic certainty characteristic of modern cosmopolitanism that we’re meant for “more.” The urban lure of income, influence, and independence gradually siphoned off most of the Membership’s next generation. They venture out of Port William to pursue something better, but Berry cautions, in Hannah Coulter, that this is an ill-fated journey: “There is no ‘better place’ than this, not in this world.” Rejecting our place and its people in pursuit of something “better” misses the obvious conclusion that we could just as easily be passed over on the same grounds, Berry argues.
Berry cushions this harsh truth with a plaintive call to stay. Embrace your place, its people, and your shared history. Don’t fall for the narrative – louder now in the social media age with TikTok influencers run amok – than Berry likely ever had reason to dread it would become, which assumes old, small, tight-knit, and agrarian towns are bad and backward places to live.
In fact, Berry asserts they’re life-giving, life-affirming, and life-sustaining. “It is by the place we’ve got,” he urges, “and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.”
In “Hannah Coulter,” a young woman who is the daughter of a widower and herself recently widowed during World War II, enters the Membership when she remarries. Her new husband, Nathan, fought in and survived the war, and together they marry, have a daughter, and buy a run-down farm. As they restore it, Hannah recalls, “a whole company of other people, at different times, in different combinations, might be at work on our place, or we might be at work on theirs.”
It’s difficult for most to imagine now what this lifestyle would have been like, but something in even the modern suburban soul leaps in recognition of its essential goodness:
“The work was freely given in exchange for work freely given.… Every account was paid in full by the understanding that when we were needed we would go, and when we had need the others, or enough of them, would come.”
The same themes are reworked in the short novel Remembering, in which Andy Catlett reenters the Port William community after a period of exile prompted by the bitterness of losing his right hand in a farming accident (as one of our grandfathers once nearly lost a foot in a corn harvester and his father nearly lost an arm in hay baler).
After abandoning his career as an agricultural journalist, Andy returns to the farm and family he has emotionally abandoned. He recalls a conversation with Elton Penn, who introduced him years ago to the rundown property Andy and his wife Flora sought to renovate. Elton tells him:
‘Listen, Andy,’ he said, ‘if you could find the right girl, a little smarter than you, and willing to work and take care of things, here’s where you could get started and amount to something. Pust some sheep here. A few cows. I’d help you, and the rest of them would, we’d neighbor with each other and get along.’
The recent pandemic stay-at-home and shelter-in-place orders exacerbated what can be perceived as our nation’s overwhelming drought of loneliness. Nearly 60% of U.S. citizens, by some estimates, report regular pangs of loneliness, which could be remediated by realigning priorities from what the poet William Wordsworth identified as little more than “Getting and spending” by which “we lay waste our powers.”
To those in pursuit of a greater balance of better experiences, we wholeheartedly recommend the luminous American author Wendell Berry and his notions of localism and membership.
Kahryn Riley is an attorney and works in the energy sector.
Bruce Edward Walker is a freelance writer on culture, pop culture and public policy.
