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Certain things in life surprise me, though I suppose they shouldn’t. Two days ago I visited a large New York City Barnes and Noble – one of those multiple-level bookshops where thousands upon thousands of titles are on the shelves – and I asked if they had any Wendell Berry books. Berry has written more than fifty. He is also old, getting awards, and publisher-darling authors give him great press all the time – a lion, in other words. Barnes and Noble didn’t have any of his books, not a one. I went to the Strand. Not one. The Richmond Hill Library had none, and for that matter the Woodstock Library up in the Catskills – an unusually good library – didn’t have any either. I wasn’t looking for a complete collection – though I have no problems saying that a truly good bookstore would have such – I was just looking for one. And I came up completely empty.

I keep suspecting that Berry’s anonymity in the civilized world will change relatively soon, but perhaps I think this merely because I occasionally am a victim of that last and most intriguing woe in the famed box of Pandora, hope. If the civilized world does not adopt Berry’s values – an economy based on ecology, and a life that turns on knowledge and affection rather than disposability and exploitation (“experiences”) – then it will surely destroy itself. But perhaps for that very reason he will continue to dwell in the shadows while folly will dance in the lights. The difference between physical and psychological sickness is that the sick psyche has a principled aversion to anything that might cure it.

In the meantime Berry will remain one of those authors whose books the Good Friends (to use a Rumi term) give to each other, and borrow from each others’ bookshelves. Awhile ago I saw on a friend’s bookshelf several Berry books – which are like a kind of secret handshake for one of the few societies worth being a member of – and I ended up going home with her copy of The Memory of Old Jack. It’s now time to return it, so I finally finished this essay.

I am always amazed when I pass through rural American towns, to see the fine houses that were erected in them a century or more ago: they are evidence of a culture where the countryside produced rather than consumed wealth. In the Catskills and elsewhere in America today if you see a prosperous house it is because its owners are in some way linked to the urban economy. The countryside is now entirely dependent, economically and culturally, on the metropolis.

But it was not always so, and Berry’s artistic and intellectual effort has been to explain how this tragedy occurred, as well as lovingly write the epitaphs of the sort of lives which have passed away with that older society. The Memory of Old Jack focuses on creating a picture of what that older rural America was like.

The novel follows Old Jack Beechum – a broken-down, half-senile old man, who lived from about 1860 to 1950 – as he goes through his day. He is only barely aware of what is around him: he is taken up in his memories. The jumping-off points for his long reminiscences – seeing a young man and remembering what he was like when he was that age, that sort of thing – are artfully and plausibly rendered, and in general the book’s structure functions very well. Old Jack was a farmer, staid and dependable but hardly brilliant, and so the book lacks some of the wit and intelligence which so enlivens Jayber Crow (which is very welcome in Berry’s prose, which can be so relentlessly wise that you feel at times you are sitting at the feet of a coon-hunting backwoods-Appalachian Confucius). But what the book lacks in wit it gains in robust physicality. Here is the beginning of the scene where the hero meets his future wife:

He is going on horseback down the driveway. It is a Sunday morning early in the May of 1889. The weather is clear and warm. There has been rain, and the littlest streams are brimming and shining. The spring is at its height. The grass of the yard and pastures is lush, the green of it so new that it gleams in the sun. The trees are heavily leafed, their new growth still tender, unblemished. The whole country lies beneath an intricate tapestry of bird song. He is on his way to church – one of the pilgrimages that he occasionally makes in uneasy compensation for the extravagances of Saturday night.

But he hardly feels penitent. He feels good, as much wrought upon by the joyousness of that morning as a bird or a tree. He is wearing a black suit, fairly new, so made that he keeps a continuous awareness in his waist and shoulders of the perfection of its fit. And he is riding as fine a saddle horse as he ever owned – a big red sorrel gelding, groomed until the light melts and flows over his neck and shoulders as he moves…. Under him the horse moves powerfully and lightly, his every move suggestive of an abounding energy suppressed by the rider’s hand. And Jack feels that same checked and conserved abundance in himself, his shoulders pressing against the good broadcloth of his suit. The whole country around him, in fact, is full of it, the abounding of energy and desire, threatening to overwhelm the forms of growth and song that provide for its release; to accommodate it, the birds must repeat their songs over and over so that the air around his head seems swollen with music. (32-3)

I always have objections to Berry’s prose when I look closely at it – I don’t think too much of him as a stylist – but I always love what he depicts. One may quibble with the brushstrokes, but this artist knew where to put his canvas. To what devotee of nature is the feeling he depicts here unknown? The exultation and vanity of desire is so powerful and fulfilling that it seems hard to believe, when we feel it, that it could ever be wrong. Jack ends up standing in the back of the church, scanning the backs of the heads of the women, and his eyes light on an unfamiliar head – “the hair heavy and rich, the color of honey and butter” – and the courtship begins. Again, what man does not know this pastime? In high school we would all have stories of girls we saw on our commutes, and so often it would begin with the glimpse of a head of hair, and lead to all kinds of efforts to catch a glimpse of the face, and earnest prayers to God that we would see the same girl again and find some way to talk to her. (This was how I got my first date, in fact). In rural Kentucky it was a little easier to find out who the girl was and cross paths with her again, and the woman, after a typical courtship in which the man behaves quite a bit better than he probably should, becomes Jack’s wife.

But with characteristic wisdom Berry does not allow a man known for his “Saturday-night extravagances” to form a happy marriage with a woman he meets in church on Sunday morning. Jayber Crow shows some criticism of contemporary Christianity, but it feels through and through like a Christian profession of faith; this novel has almost nothing good to say about Christianity at all. Jack Beechum was natural, hardworking, a child of the land and of nature, a farmer through and through – and the implication is that the church therefore has nothing to offer him beyond a few good verses from a Scripture it probably doesn’t even understand. Jack’s wife Ruth, on the other hand, was a good churchgoing woman, and consequently – a logical conclusion which is a terrible indictment of Christianity – unable to relate to nature and the earth.

And consequently unable to relate to sex. Berry does not reflect very much on the social double standards that presumably help produce bad marriages of the sort he is describing, but it is clear that Jack was all nature and Ruth thought of nature as something to sweep out of the house, and so that became their life together, from the very beginning all the way to the bitter end. The courtship reads sadly because you know that Jack at least believed that marriage would solve its problems: the coldness and judgement would vanish as soon as the sexual relationship had been baptized with the respectable names of husband and wife. I don’t know if it ever does work that way, but certainly that hope often fails:

She took to lecturing him, in a way that he loved to indulge and humor, on the sort of prosperous, churchly, respectable man she wanted him to be. That was the curious, nearly obsessive fantasy of their courtship: the sort of man that she would have him become. It delighted him to be thought worthy of her redemption; he half believed in it himself. And all the time he had before him her eyes, her innocent beautiful eyes, and the wonder it would be when they acknowledged his desire. (39)

Of course that never comes – she cannot accept the earthiness and sinfulness of such desire.

He won her with his vices, she accepted him as a sort of “mission field,” and it was the great disaster of both their lives. He bound her to him by disavowing the very energy that bound him to her. She was bound to him by a vision of him that she held above him – that he, in fact, neither understood nor aspired to; and he was bound to her by a vision of her that she would discover, by her own lights, to be beneath her. Her ambition [to move up in the world and not be mere farmers] would be forever as strange and estranging to him as the great heat and strength of his desire would be to her. It is a cruel thing for him now, looking back, to see the two of them working out the terms of their agony. He was a fool – a simpleton and a fool – to have loved so to see the extravagance and grace of his youth reflected in a woman’s gray eyes, not by straightforward love or desire, but by what he now knows to have been fear – fear of what she even then instinctively knew to be her opposite, even her enemy. (39-40)

Their marriage, and in particular their marriage-bed, becomes merely a place of solitude without meeting:

There remained some prize, some vital gift that she withheld. She hid her eyes from him. As much as before their marriage, she remained to him an unknown continent. She offered him no welcome, afforded him no prepared ways. Each time he made his way to her, he came upon her as if by chance, a newcomer, blundering in the dark. He returned each time more fearfully, and at greater expense. Held by him, overtaken and held in the delayed and violent gusts of his desire, she felt betrayed, victimized… He was her cross, and she bore him with a submission that, afterwards, chilled him to the bone. They lay beside each other in solitude, rigid and open-eyed as effigies. (45)

Marriage makes the whole thing even more tragic, because for orthodox Christians it is a mistake that cannot be undone. Berry does an excellent job showing the horrible confinement of it, the hopelessness of it, the tragedy of two people poorly suited and forever lonely together. The key scene is after the birth of their only child, a daughter (there was also one stillborn son):

This time her eyes are open and she is looking at him. He crosses the room and stands as before at the foot of the bed. She shows the exhaustion of her labor, her hair in disarray as she has seldom allowed him to see it, her face pale. But now she has found the strength of her anger and she is looking at him. The baby lies on the bed beside her, hidden from him by a fold of the counterpane.

“I’ll not go through this again,” she says. “Do you understand?”

He understood. There had already been times when, having no words for her silence, unable to bear it, he had slept alone in the room above the kitchen. He had, in fact, been sleeping there since early in the winter. Now it was confirmed and final. He knew that he would sleep alone the rest of his life. Lying in the bare room whose curtainless windows admitted the bright, implacable gaze of the stars, he knew that he had become the incarnation of his solitude. He bore it in silence and with a bitterness that began to drive him. (65)

I found this terribly difficult to read, but Berry gives Jack a way out – the traditional one, in fact: adultery. Jack finds his way to the arms of the town doctor’s young widow. Berry in his own way celebrates this adultery, and in such a circumstance it seems absolutely necessary. It comes as a great relief, not only to the reader but interestingly Berry claims it comes as a relief of sorts to the gossiping town too:

The town’s ever-vigilant curiosity, which saw in the dark, found them out. And he did not care. The talk went around under cover of righteousness. Need was the cause of it. The little groups that the talk stirred in the stores and the kitchens and the street were like people lighting torches at a fire. It was as if Jack and Rose, like other lovers before and after them, had been elected to stir from the ashes of pretense and fear the light of a vital flame. While it condemned them the town needed them and praised them in the darkness of its heart. The town talked and looked askance, and waited eagerly for more news out of the dark and fragrant garden from which it felt itself in exile. And so this coupling went into the town’s mind, to belong to its history and its hope, even against its will. Even as the knowledge of it fades, it remains, an inflection of the heart, troubling and consoling the night watches of lonely husbands and wives like a phrase from a forgotten song.

Jack knew all that, and he did not care. He knew that Ruth knew, or would sooner or later know, and he did not care. He would not let himself care. He knew that he might come to care, that he might, later, have to care. But he would not care yet. For the flame that the town desired and envied and secretly praised he had now turned openly toward. He knew that Rose had restored his life, that she had reached with her honest, eager hands and touched and revived that energy, that wild joy in him, that Ruth had all but destroyed with her fastidiousness and her shame. (100-1)

None of this turns out well, but it is lived – there is need and suffering and the paying of the cost. It is tragic, and hard to watch, but looking at it through Berry’s wise eyes, it seems it could hardly have been any other way.

As the narrative progresses, Jack’s relatives are described, and among them is a middle-aged woman named Hannah Coulter, who is described with such love and reverence that she really does steal the show. I don’t quite know if women can really be like this – so entirely without insecurity – but it is beautiful to read:

As she works her face is preoccupied, deliberative, lighted as if from beneath the skin by a serenity that lives upon her sense of being equal not just to what she is doing but to whatever she has imagined she may have to do. It is a beautiful face, wreathed by dark, heavy hair, radiant from the touch of the sun and her strong blood, the features clear. She is some years past the simple prettiness of her girlhood. Her beauty no longer has its source merely in her physical presence, though that is pleasing enough; it comes, rather, from some deep equanimity with which it has accepted the marks of an extraordinary knowledge of herself, her powers as a person and as a woman, her mortality. That understanding of mortality has been Hannah Coulter’s great suffering, as now it is her peculiar gift; she has known and borne and accepted it upon the terms of her womanhood and her flesh. Before she became the wife of Nathan Coulter she had been for three and half years the widow of Virgil Feltner, Mat’s son, who, like Nathan’s brother Tom, was killed in the second of the World Wars. And so she has learned by loss what it is she has. Her beauty now is the grace of her knowledge, a moving, level candor in her eyes. She has accepted the gift of mortality, loving a man’s mortal love and her own given in return, her womb filled with a life that the earth will inherit. (72-3)

Not surprisingly Berry returned to this character and gave her her own novel (Hannah Coulter) – the only thing that surprises me is that it took him thirty years to do so. This is the kind of character we want to hear more about.

Jack’s inattentive senility provides a good vehicle for all his memories, and Berry is able to create a convincing linear narrative, but the novel is better than a linear narrative, because the senility of Old Jack stands as a perfect symbol of what Berry is describing: a dying way of life, now arrived at a kind of pathetic debility, but once strong and beautiful and flawed and vital. This is what Berry is trying to say about rural life in general, and in general the tone is despair. The only ray of hope is in those few – too few – who see in all these things the beauty which truly is there, and who will try, against an uncaring majority, to build that culture, which Berry so exemplifies, of knowledge and affection. Such efforts, while they remain largely ignored by Barnes and Noble and all the other vehicles of our larger culture, are not in vain for the people who live with them day in and day out. They become the only kind of life really worth living. For as Berry says, “In the long term, knowledge and affection accumulate, and in the long term, knowledge and affection pay.”