Wendell Berry at 90

The last Luddite in America, Wendell Berry, turned 90 last month. He 'reminds us that communities with ties to the land and to our place in the world are essential for a good life.'

From The European Conservative

By Jonathon Van Maren

Wendell Berry reminds us that communities with ties to the land and to our place in the world are essential for a good life.

On August 5, the greatest living American writer turned 90. I’ve always thought that Wendell Berry is precisely the sort of American of whom the Founding Fathers were thinking when they drafted the documents that created a new nation and considered who would inherit the land. Berry is a farmer philosopher and a countryman novelist who has farmed his ancestral lands in Kentucky with his wife Tanya for decades. During that time, he has written more than two dozen volumes of poetry, almost 40 works of non-fiction, 12 novels, and dozens of short stories detailing life in the fictional town of Port William, based on his hometown of Port Royal.

I readily admit that I am not a literary critic, and I am a fan rather than a scholar of Berry’s work. When I first discovered his Port William stories, I ploughed through them all inside of a year. I plan to reread them all. Berry’s fiction is not only a record of rural life and the slow death of agricultural America, but also a record of the interior lives of Americans before we outsourced our thinking to digital devices and absorbed our worldviews from screens. His novels lack the frantic pace of so many of his contemporaries; reading them, I had to slow my own mind and detach from the mile-a-minute culture wars to match the pace of the men and women of Port William. Always, his stories left me feeling refreshed.

The best description of Berry’s work comes from his friend Wallace Stegner, the historian, environmentalist, and novelist under whom Berry studied in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Stegner noted that Berry, if he had learned from his contemporaries, had not followed their “self-destructive examples.” In a letter to Berry written on July 25, 1990—it is included in his 2002 essay collection Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West—Stegner captured what sets Berry apart:

You never had a drinking problem or a drug problem; you have been as apparently immune to the Angst of your times as you have been indifferent to contemporary hedonism and the lust for kicks.

By every stereotypical rule of the twentieth century you should be dull, and I suppose there are some people, especially people who have not read you, who think you are. By upbringing and by choice you are a countryman, and therefore a sort of anachronism. The lives you write about are not lives that challenge or defy the universe, or despair of it, but lives that accept it and make the best of it and are in sober ways fulfilled.

We have grown used to the image of the artist as a person more notable for his sensibility than his balance. We might go to that artist for the flash of insight, often achieved at terrible cost to himself, but not for sober wisdom. I don’t disparage these Dionysian writers; they have lighted dark corners for all of us, and will continue to. But I find your example comforting because it restores a lost balance—one doesn’t have to be crazy, or alcoholic, or suicidal, or manic, to be a legitimate spokesman to the world, and there is more to literature, as there clearly is to life, than aberration and sadomasochism. Your books seem conservative. They are actually profoundly revolutionary, and I have watched them gain you an increasingly devoted following over the years. Readers respond to them as lost dogs in hope of rescue turn toward some friendly stranger. The thought in your essays is so clear and unrattled that it reassures us. Your stories and poems are good like bread.

I say that your books are revolutionary. They are. They fly in the face of accepted opinion and approved fashion. They reassert values so commonly forgotten or repudiated that, reasserted, they have the force of novelty.

I would make only one slight amendment to that near-perfect description: Berry’s work is counter-revolutionary. He rejected the myth of progress long before most writers who self-identify as conservative did so. Famously, he penned an essay in 1988 titled “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” in which he detailed his resolute—most called it stubborn and fundamentalist—refusal to adapt his work to the new technology. “Like almost everybody else, I am hooked to the energy corporations, which I do not admire,” he wrote. “I hope to become less hooked to them. In my work, I try to be as little hooked to them as possible. As a farmer, I do almost all of my work with horses. As a writer, I work with a pencil or pen and a piece of paper.”

I am writing this, of course, on a computer. I would have to entirely retrain my mind in order to emulate Berry’s method. He writes everything by hand and he wrote his books in a little cabin in the forest on the outskirts of his farm, correcting and amending his work on the blank opposite page of his notebooks. I have written to Berry several times—most recently to wish him a happy birthday—and he has always generously written back, in pencil (and has always answered my incessant questions about his Port William stories). I was born in the year in which his essay rejecting the computer was published, but it has become clear in recent years that everyone will, eventually, need to draw their line in the sand when it comes to technology, even if we draw our line further out than he did.

The computer—and I include the smartphone—has been a tremendously helpful tool. It has also, through the internet, created tens of millions of porn addicts, leveled traditional cultures, rewired the minds of several generations, and created a crisis of disinformation and social balkanization. The computer and the internet have created a disembodied world in which many people spend the bulk of their lives in digital habitats removed from the people, cultures, and places around them. Berry was one of the first to recognize that the phrase “digital community” would replace the physical, embodied communities he has spent his life defending. Few, if any, of us will follow Berry’s example. Few, if any, of us can. But was the ‘convenience’ worth the cost? Reasonable people may disagree. From my vantage point, as someone who witnesses the daily destruction of digital pornography and the hopeless, mind-transforming internet addictions afflicting multiple generations, I am increasingly certain that the answer is no. As Berry wrote, in this excerpt from a long poem, in 2013:

Looking at screens,
listening to voices
in nonexistent distance,
seeing, hearing nothing
present, we pass into
the age of disembodiment.

If Wendell Berry means anything to you, he is likely to mean quite a lot. His stories always remind me of what it is like to have a rich, interior life, unclouded by the omnipresent digital buzz that is the background noise of our online age. He reminds us of why physical, embodied communities with ties to the land and to our place in the world are essential for a good life. And he forces me to ask myself why I so often find that online influencers occupy more space in my malleable mind than friends, family, and neighbours. Unlike Berry, I am a digital native. But his stories give me a nostalgia for a world that I glimpsed during my childhood, just before the internet arrived, and they make me determined to give such a life to my own children.

Happy 90th birthday, Wendell Berry. And thanks for everything. 

Pictured: Wendell Berry in 2011