Wendell Berry’s Eternal Story

Ten years ago, an editor at Penguin approached me to ask if I would like to edit a collection of essays by Wendell Berry for a British audience. Berry’s essays had never been published in book form in the U.K.; the editor had only recently discovered his writing and decided to remedy that deficit. He approached me because an internet search had turned up an essay of mine about Berry. Not too many British people, then as now, knew his name or wrote about him. I hope that will change now.

Wendell Berry’s principal literary talent, according to his own wife, Tanya, was “to repeat himself for seventy years.” This observation was intended as a compliment rather than a criticism, and understanding why that might be is perhaps the key to understanding Berry. Often presented as a straightforward “southern agrarian” writer, or as a holdover from another time, he was a good deal more complex than either of these labels might suggest.

For a start, Berry was not a “simple farmer” who had never left his homeplace. He was a writer, with a writer’s mind, who had initially set out for New York City in the 1960s to work on his literary ambitions. Only on arriving did he come to see that the city had no stories for him; that his work, in fact, was to tell the stories of the place he had left behind in small-town Kentucky.

The story that Berry told and re-told for so long was the story of the decline of the human-scale world he grew up in, its replacement by a world of technology and bureaucracy, and the need to restore the human spirit again before it is too late. By rooting himself in one place and calling it home, Berry found what he needed to become the writer he wanted to be. In looking to the past—his own, and his land’s—he found the materials he needed to write about the present and its endless attacks on the things he valued, whether those attacks came in the form of mountaintop removal coal mining or from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s war on small farmers, in the service of the agribusiness lobbies that had purchased it wholesale.

Berry, though, like any true writer—really, like any honest human—did not easily find a simple contentment in the life he had chosen. He had to work for it. His poem “The Want of Peace” explores the tension that he must have felt as he plowed his land with draft horses and continued writing with pencil and paper, even as the tyranny of the silicon chip enveloped the world around him:

All goes back to the earth,
and so I do not desire
pride of excess or power,
but the contentments made
by men who have had little:
the fisherman’s silence
receiving the river’s grace,
the gardener’s musing on rows.

This sounds nice, even platitudinous. But note that Berry “desires” this contentment: He does not claim to have found it, at least not yet, or not all of the time. In the second verse, he is quite open about the gap between desire and attainment:

I lack the peace of simple things.
I am never wholly in place.
I find no peace or grace.
We sell the world to buy fire,
our way lighted by burning men,
and that has bent my mind
and made me think of darkness
and wish for the dumb life of roots.

The quest for the simple life doesn’t come easily for any of us in the age of runaway technology, and Berry’s novels, poems, and essays all delve into that same tension. He was always an activist as well as a writer, and his activism was grounded in the eternal things that he stood for: the land, his local community, his faith, his family. None of these became flags for him to wave, or weapons he used to attack others. All of them were employed instead with keen passion in opposition to the thing he always stood against: the modern monoculture, which destroyed small farms and small towns from Kentucky to Kerala to make way for the globalized blandishments of “free” market capitalism—the extractive corporate economy, which “sell[s] the world to buy fire.”

Berry’s struggle, in other words, was a particular manifestation of a universal battle. This explains, perhaps, why people like myself, a boy from the English suburbs with no knowledge of farming, would find a kindred soul in his writings. I first came across Berry’s work as a young environmental writer and activist back in the 1990s, and though I could not have found Kentucky on a map (and probably still can’t), I found in this writer a calm yet passionate moral certainty that I lacked myself, because I had no grounding in any of the places it came from.

That moral certainty is perhaps the keenest taste left by Berry’s multitudinous writings. It was never self-righteous—Berry was often self-deprecating, self-questioning, or drily funny—and neither did it pretend that “going back to the past” was any kind of easy solution to the complex mess of the present. His enemies liked to pretend that both of these things were true, but what they probably disliked most about him was that he actually practiced what he preached. Berry never bought a computer or used a smartphone; he wouldn’t use air travel; and he lived and worked in the small rural community he brought to life with his words. Unable to call him a hypocrite, his critics had to content themselves instead with calling him an unrealistic fossil, wedded to a dead past. But there was nothing simple about Wendell Berry, and he was not committed to some Romantic fantasy. He was committed to real human lives and real human work, in real, living communities. The ongoing destruction of all of these things was the fire lit under his words.

Berry always saw in humanity’s relationship with its land, and with the wider creation, a litmus test of what kind of people we were, or were becoming. “I have made myself its follower and its apprentice,” he wrote of his own farm in his 1968 essay “A Native Hill.” If we wanted to begin living better lives, he wrote in 2011, we should also apprentice ourselves to something local and particular, in whatever form we found it. “We must not work or think on a heroic scale,” he insisted, because heroes “too lightly risk the lives of people, places, and things they do not see.” Instead, “we must work on a scale proper to our limited abilities. We must not break things we cannot fix.” A better world would not come through more grand plans, tech fixes, or centralized, ideological impositions. It would not come through “wage slavery or by enslaving nature.” It would come from the place it had always come from: “locally adapted economies, based on local nature, local sunlight, local intelligence, and local work.”

In those few proposals, we can see both Wendell Berry’s prophetic genius and the reason he was so widely ignored by those with influence and power. Both of these legacies, I’m sure, will continue for a while. In the end, though, Berry will be proven right. Perhaps it will take the tragedy of collapse and overreach before we come to our senses. We must hope otherwise, but the signs do not look good.

In the meantime, Wendell Berry’s beautiful poems, questing novels, and steadily passionate essays offer us all a legacy we can engage with. Those of us who are more flawed as human beings than he undoubtedly was, or less able to practice what we preach, can find a way in through the many doorways he built with words, backed up by decades of energetic practice. May he rest in peace.