Reconsidering Wendell Berry

The Drinking & Reading Society is doing the unusual this month; we’re reading only our second work of fiction, in this case Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. That was taking a bit of a chance because, honestly, we didn’t have much to say about Berry’s essays when we read What Are People For? It was kind of inspiring to read; I found myself marking passages and saying, “yeah, that’s right!” But when we discussed the book and asked, “so what should we do about the problems?” nobody could say what solution Berry actually had in mind. It was a most unsatisfying discussion because the topic seemed to elude us whenever we tried to address it in practical terms.

That may have given me a jaundiced view of Jayber Crow, but my opinion so far (I haven’t finished yet) is decidedly minority (90% of Amazon reviews give it 5 stars). While the writing is lyrical and the observations keen, the book is suffused with a golden-hued nostalgia for the small-town life of the early 20th Century that reminds me of a former high school jock looking back on his glory days. As someone who has lived in a small town, I have to say it just ain’t that great. Sure, modern life can and does lead to alienation and worse, as Berry and others have pointed out. But how many people have been squelched by the ironclad expectations that small town society so often fixes upon its natives and which only the most determined seem to be able to transcend? Berry’s narrator is looking back from his old age so I would expect him to have acquired a little wisdom and perspective over the years. He sees and reports the damaged characters – himself included – but never asks why or how they were damaged. Never lays the blame on the small time environment or asks how things might have been different.

That’s a fundamentally conservative point of view – the belief that the rules of the game are - ought to be - pretty much fixed, that problems come from people failing to accept those rules, and that the solutions lie in individual action. A liberal believes that problems may be exacerbated or perpetuated by the environment. As we rediscover Wendell Berry and his undoubted insight into the virtues of a life that’s whole, fresh and local, it’s also good to remember that we don’t have to accept Berry’s whole value system. We should be looking at ways to keep the best of both.