Notes on Wendell Berry

I met Wendell Berry in prison. He was a writer I had heard of and put him on my interlibrary loan list. I received one of his book of essays - I forget the title and my notes are upstairs, I did not come to the VOA's computer lab intending to write about him - and I also read one of his short stories. I like him as story teller and as an essayist. 

You have not heard of him? A Shared Place; Wendell Berry’s lifelong dissent from The Nation begins this way:

At a time when political conflict runs deep and erects high walls, the Kentucky essayist, novelist, and poet Wendell Berry maintains an arresting mix of admirers. Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal in 2011. The following year, the socialist-feminist writer and editor Sarah Leonard published a friendly interview with him in Dissent. Yet he also gets respectful attention in the pages of The American Conservative and First Things, a right-leaning, traditionalist Christian journal.

The Point's When Losing is Likely; Wendell Berry's Conservative radicalism has this to say

 Still, I was irked by something he wrote last year, in the January issue of the Baffler. There Scialabba reviewed the Library of America’s two-volume publication of Wendell Berry’s collected essays. Berry, a Kentuckian farmer and author of novels, poems and essays (and set to turn 87 later this summer), is among the most influential and acclaimed members of a durable but persistently marginal group in our culture: American agrarian writers. Scialabba’s review is an openhanded exposition of Berry’s thought, indwelling the unfamiliar in order to understand and represent the author on his own terms. As ever, though, appreciation does not preclude judgment. Consistent with his evaluation of other winsome, wistful antimodernists—Lasch and Illich, Kolakowski and MacIntyre, Morris and Ruskin—Scialabba’s appraisal of Berry’s agrarian vision may be summarized succinctly: close, but not quite.

And Wendell Berry on Ideas over Ideology by Gracy Olmstead and from The American Conservative prefacing its interview with Berry has:

A native Kentuckian, Wendell Berry is a farmer and philosopher, essayist and poet, environmental activist, and localist. He has written over 40 works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, on topics ranging from sustainable farming to biographical novels to cultural commentary. Over the years, Berry has been the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, and the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award—given for works that “advance peace through literature.”

Berry doesn’t easily fit political boxes: Though many of his views on community and culture are traditional, his views on the environment and pacifism are more often associated with the politics and policies of the left. He often angers people on both left and right with his stances. Yet despite this, there is a marked consistency to Berry’s thought. He is concerned, first and foremost, with representing and defending his home: Port Royal, Kentucky.

Here may be his appeal for me, a Hoosier, his dedication to community. Margaret Thatcher ought have made a trip to Moonville or Milan or Argos before pronouncing there was no civil society. This quote is from The Nation's article.

Reviewing The Unsettling of America in The New York Times, the poet Donald Hall called Berry “a prophet of our healing, a utopian poet-legislator like William Blake.” But the poetic utopia was fading fast, and the healing had come too late. Soon Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan would establish themselves as the poet-legislators of the age. Thatcher’s claim that “there is no such thing as society” and Reagan’s praise of “an America in which people can still get rich” were the antithesis of Berry’s thought...

This I found in the Ideas over Ideology interview:

TAC: What are your biggest objections to conservatism?

Berry: Often, as with Jayber, a political labeling never occurs to me. But often too I am conscious of a need to avoid all the names of political sides.

“Liberal” now names a lot of people who thought the election of President Obama put an end to American racism, which was a kind of good-heartedness but also a kind of silliness. “Conservative” names at least a significant number of people who know that Obama’s election is the best thing that has happened to American racism since the “Southern strategy,” for it set up a man partly of African descent whom they could entirely hate and totally oppose while being politically correct.

But both of those political sides evidently accept war as a part of human normality. Both evidently suppose that the only effective limit of human conduct is technological capability: whatever is possible must be done. And both evidently assume that nature, the land communities, and the economies of land use can be safely exploited or ignored.

And so I prefer to get along without political labels. They don’t help thought, or my version of thought. Since I’m self-employed and not running for office, I’m free to notice that those political names don’t mean much of anything, and so am free to do without them. I’m free, in short, to be an amateur. Jayber to me is Jayber unclassified.

The same for Edmund Burke, whose writings and speeches I have read eagerly and at considerable length. As an amateur, I don’t need to be waylaid by wondering how he, a Whig, comes now to be counted a conservative, the sire of “Burkean conservatism,” not the least bit liberal. I can object to some things he said, but that is not remarkable, and it doesn’t matter much.

I don’t read him to be confirmed in a party allegiance. I read him for his steadfast affirmation of qualities I see as, in a high sense, human. I read him for his decency, the luster of his intelligence and character, his patience and endurance in thinking, his willingness to take a principled stand, the happiness of his prose.

He was a peacemaker, a lover of “order and beauty,” of “the amiable and conciliatory virtues of lenity, moderation, and tenderness.” As a man in politics should do, he preferred reason to the passions. He thought that “the separation of fame and virtue is a harsh divorce.” He said, “I do not like to see anything destroyed…” He said that a person “has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favor.” He said, “The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from injustice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man.” A useful exercise for an American is to ask which of our holders of office has ever spoken publicly in favor of beauty or the “virtue” of tenderness.

Read these articles in their fullness. And if all that doesn't make you more interested in reading Wendell Berry, I do not what more I can say or do.