Michael Pollan and Alice Waters say that he changed their lives with five words: Eating is an agricultural act. Pollan became a scourge of the meat industry, genetically modified food, and factory farms; Waters launched the farm-to-table movement. It was some instinctive love of wilderness that would always bring me back here, he wrote, but it was by the instincts of a farmer that I established myself., He turned himself around at the University of Kentucky, where he earned undergraduate and masters degrees in English. When I asked about his process, he replied with a parable. Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker. At Stanford, Berry attended seminars with Ken Kesey, and, improbably, they became lasting friends. So I hope to do the right things today.. Wendell Berry, a quiet and humble man, has become an outspoken advocate for revolution. Gaines was one of twelve children from a sharecropping family who lived in former slave quarters on a sugar plantation in Louisiana. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and was given The National Humanities Medal. He presents Lee as a white supremacist and a slaveholder, but also as a reluctant soldier who opposed secession and was forced to choose between conflicting loyalties: his country and his people. She quotes from the book: Lee said, I cannot raise my hand against my birthplace, my home, my children. For him, the words birthplace and home and even children had a complexity and vibrance of meaning that at present most of us have lost., Wickenden writes, If readers were incredulous about Berrys [1977] claim that a pencil was a better tool than a computer, its not hard to imagine how many will react to his plea that we extend sympathy to a general whose army fought to perpetuate slavery in America. I remembered a line from The Long-Legged House: One bright warm day in November it was so quiet that I could hear the fallen leaves ticking, like a light rain, as they dried and contracted, scraping their points and edges against each other., The place was so inviting, I wondered if anyone had ever broken inseeking, perhaps, a little food and a furtive nights rest. You need a very settled team, because when it rose up, if you didnt look out, it would break your legor your neck.. The novelist Colum McCann told The Atlantic in 2017 that Berrys poems have a real twinkle in their eyes in the face of a dark world. He recited The Mad Farmers Love Song, which features one of his favorite figures in the canon: O when the worlds at peaceand every man is freethen will I go down unto my love.O and I may go downseveral times before that. There were a million of them in 1920; today, there are fewer than fifty thousand. Wendell said to her, It sounds like youre starting a center. Mary had no idea how to run a nonprofit, but, she told me, I had what was left of a pretty good farm culture and a well-watered landscape.. The Fords used a team of horses or mules to pull a jumper plow, with a vertical blade called a coulter. Wendell Berry was born in 1934 into the tobacco country of Henry County, Kentucky. Hidden in the woods on a slope above the Kentucky River, just south of the Ohio border, is a twelve-by-sixteen-foot cabin with a long front porch. Seven years ago, the Monroes moved onto a hundred and sixteen acres, about ten miles from Port Royal, which they named Valley Spirit Farm. Berry observes, The deal we are being offered appears to be that we can change the world without changing ourselves. This kind of thinking enables us to continue using too much energy of whatever color, hoping that fields of solar panels and ranks of gigantic wind machines will absolve us of guilt as consumers. Ultimately, were using the curriculum as a way for farmers to make decisions informed by poetry, history, and literature, as well as the hard sciences.. Slate receives a commission when you purchase items using the links on this page. One evening in 1964, my father, Dan Wickenden, came home from his editorial office at Harcourt Brace, in midtown Manhattan, and described his new author: a lanky youth of thirty, who sat with his elbows on his knees, talking in a slow Kentucky cadence and gesturing with large, expressive hands. Bayens said that everyone in the program worried about the risks: We are in a terrible situation. Thinking that the elderly Berry might like to reacquaint himself with the young Berry, I mailed a letter to introduce myself. As of 2022, Wendell Berry's net worth is $100,000 - $1M. Ptolemy, known as Tol, is a tall, dishevelled, three-hundred-pound farmer. It is all one piece, impossible for the strongest man (or of course woman) to break. He scrawled at the bottom of the page, There is a kind of genius in that maul, that belongs to a placed people: to make of what is at hand a fine, durable tool at the cost only of skill and work.. But it has become such a pleasure., In the early sixties, the Berrys seemed to be launched on a very different life. and Home Place take so much of the burden off a small farmer. Not bluejeans.), I remembered this encounter not long ago when I pulled from a bookshelf A Continuous Harmony, a collection of Berrys essays that my father edited in 1971. Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter (Shoemaker and Hoard, 2004) 1-59376-078-7 $16.95 190. As he drove into Kentucky for the first time, he said, I felt like the air pressure changed. Taking a walk one day with his foxhound, he was stopped by a white man: He gives me the third degreeWho are you? The second point is that the horrors of exploitation dont need to be weighed against one another. It consists of about sixty residents, Parker Farm Supply and Restaurant, a Baptist church and a Methodist church, a fire station, and a post office, where Berry drops off and picks up his mail six days a week. Mary complained to her father, Why do we always have to do things the hardest way? But she never considered moving away. The exploiters only ever stick around in one place as long as theres easy profit to be made, but the nurturers stay put. Another way to describe what Berry is doing is that hes casting American history as a conflict between capitalism and something more social, communal, and rooted in the earthwhat he calls agrarianism. Wendell Berry laments his "lack of simple things" in 'The Want of Peace,' asking about our collective trade-"selling the world to buy fire." . As I got out of the car, three dogs bounded up, followed by Abbie and Joseph. Back at Lanes Landing Farm, Berry said that it was time to feed the sheep, so we set out in his battered pickup. Smith told me that in the past half century, as coal jobs have disappeared, Appalshop has grown. The small farmers of the burley beltincluding parts of Kentucky, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginiasaw themselves as part of a centuries-old culture that produced the most labor-intensive agricultural product in the world. His New York friends, imagining him surrounded by moonshine-swilling hillbillies and feuding clans, were sure he had consigned himself to intellectual death. OK. As we climbed a steep rise, Wendell talked about how the Fords had felled trees and extracted rocks, so that the hill could be plowed for tobacco. As he explained in his essay by that name, he built the cabin in the summer of 1963a place where he could write, read, and contemplate the legacies of his forebears, and what inheritance he might leave behind. The immediate villain was President Nixons Agriculture Secretary, Earl Butz, who warned small farmers to adapt or die. But Berry had a bigger target, which he came to call technological fundamentalism: If we have built towering cities, we have raised even higher the cloud of megadeath. He urges immediate action as he mourns how America has turned its back on . Several of Berrys friends urged him to abandon the book, anticipating Twitter eruptions and withering reviews., My friends, I think, were afraid, now that I am old, that I am at risk of some dire breach of political etiquette by feebleness of mind or some fit of ill-advised candor, Berry writes. A properly educated conservative, who has neither approved of abortion nor supported a tax or a regulation, can destroy a mountain or poison a river and sleep like a baby, he writes. We get the old myth of Robert E. Lee as a tragic gentleman soldier who hated slavery but fought for his love of Virginia, and the canard that however bad Southern chattel slavery was, the true horror of America came into view only after the war, when capitalism made slaves of us all, turned us all against one another, and ravaged the earth. ', Wickenden says the book contains something to offend almost everyone, and her major example is a man Berry calls one of the great tragic figures of our history, Robert E. Lee. I wrote him a noteDear Thief, if youre in trouble, dont tear this place up. According to a study by the University of Iowa, the suicide rate for farmers is three and a half times that for the general population. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. Wendell Erdman Berry (born 1934) is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. Pouring feed for the animals, he shouted, Liz, bring em on! She quickly rounded up a flock of thirtywhite-faced, bare-legged, their torsos wrapped in shaggy fleece. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.. The American Tobacco Company, a trust run by the tycoon JamesB. Duke, had forced the price of tobacco below the cost of production and transport. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, and . Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. Appearances, scheduling, live and virtual event fees to book Wendell Berry and other motivational speakers. In Hueysville, a resident named Ricky Handshoe took him to Raccoon Creek, which had turned a fluorescent orange. February 26, 2022. Wendell Berry's Advice for a Cataclysmic Age Sixty years after renouncing modernity, the writer is still contemplating a better way forward. It was work. Wendell explained that they were Cheviot sheep, a breed from the border of England and Scotland. At first, he wanted to become a pastor, but his father asked him, You want to live off the plate, and be dependent on others hard work? Joseph and Abbie decided that he was right about the value of producing something on your own. It was a subsistence farm, she said. From the very beginning, Berry had farming in his blood: Both sides of his family had been cultivating the same land for generations. If you came to a root or a rock, Wendell said, the coulter would raise the plow. Now he has tried again. He wanted to write an ambitious regional novel, but he was just stuck and depressed. At one point, Tanya suggested, Maybe you need to mature a bit. But his cussedness prevailed, and year by year the novel grew. And so youve made your maul. He writes of exchanging friendly talk with Trump voters at Port Royals farm-supply store, a kind of tolerance that is necessary in a small town: If two neighbors know that they may seriously disagree, but that either of them, given even a small change of circumstances, may desperately need the other, should they not keep between them a sort of pre-paid forgiveness? He opened the barn doors onto a cavernous space, where light filtered through the siding boards. With support from government agencies and foundations, it runs a radio station, a theatre program, an art gallery, a filmmaking institute, and a record label. Tann said that his studies in New Castle were transformative, but he was sometimes made to feel out of place. In the early winter, he takes some ewes to the steep lots near the house, where they serve as lawnmowers, then brings them back to the barn for lambing. The headquarters of the Berry Center occupy a capacious white brick Federal-style house on South Main Street. There he was. Thats the pinch of the hourglass., Two years ago, in The New York Review of Books, Verlyn Klinkenborg complained about Berrys habit of pointing out our hollow lives, our degenerate bodies, our feelings of dislocation and spiritual bankruptcy. True enough. By. And it named Wendell Berry the recipient of its 2022 Henry Hope Reed Award. The sticks were jobbed upright into the ground at even intervals in stickrows between rows of tobacco. If that were it, an analysis of exploitation that united race and agriculture, drawn from a lifetime of thinking on the subjects and delivered as a homiletic fire-and-brimstone sermon calling us all to work, a style which Berry has perfected, The Need to Be Whole would have done its work faithfully and well. His father, Leonard Wickenden, a chemist, had been writing for decades about the dangers of fertilizers and pesticides. It means the mouse isnt in my pantry.. They do get excited early in the morning, she replied. He studied creative writing with Robert Hazel, a charismatic poet and novelist with a gift for shaping raw talents, including Ed McClanahan, James Baker Hall, Gurney Norman, and Bobbie Ann Mason. It cannot humble itself. She sums up what we know: Berrys admirers call him an Isaiah-like prophet. 0. Someone took out a few panes and tried to get into my safe. The family had sat around the fire earlier, speculating about how much he would get for the years crop, and how they would use the money to pay down their debts. Kentucky was a border state, and civilians were subject to routine acts of lawlessness by bands of soldiers, Confederate and Union. It was dangerous and a polluter, he acknowledged, but also handy and fast. On the dashboard were two lengths of wood, sharpened at one end, which he identified as tobacco sticks. Indeed, he frames the whole book around hooks challenge that the true work of love is to repair what the artificial boundaries of race, class, gender, and (Berry adds) the human/natural has split apart. Wickenden probably didnt realize it, but for some readers those lines will echo in another part of her story, about Berrys connections to Appalachia and the town of Whitesburg, including Tom and Pat Gish, who published The Mountain Eagle every week for 52 years, even after their office was firebombed by a local policeman who state police said was hired by coal operators. A Twitter feed called @WendellDaily recently circulated one of his maxims: Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.. I was among the people who warned him. Reviewed by Robert Grano. John Berry served as the associations president from 1957 until 1975, and insisted that the programs were not handouts but the equivalent of a minimum wage. On Sundays, he sometimes accompanies Tanya to the Port Royal Baptist Church (not Southern Baptist), where they worship with neighbors and four generations of Berrys. But even as the Gishes revealed the Tennessee Valley Authoritys role in strip mining and helped visiting journalists explore the regions ills, they were always careful not to publish demeaning pictures of local residents like those that typically illustrate such national stories. Like any good anarchist, Berry knows that all we have is one another; like any good farmer, he knows that change takes time. Currently, a dozen farming families participate. After Wendell received a Guggenheim Fellowship, they lived for a year in Tuscany and southern France, then moved with their children, Mary and Den, to New York, where Wendell taught at New York University. On a bitterly cold winter day, he had to leave the comfort of the house: his livestock was out, and a fence had to be mended. Miss Minnie is a neat, ninety-pound schoolteacher. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. Instead, he returned empty-handed. and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. Wendell Berry (born August 5, 1934) is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. Thank you for your support. And so much has gathered there and kept on right in the presence of the permanent destruction of the world., In the kitchen at Lanes Landing Farm, I heard a tap at the door and saw a dark-haired young woman with a blond toddler in her arms: the Berrys granddaughter Virginia and her daughter Lucinda. The cabin began as a log house built by Berrys great-great-great-grandfather Ben Perry, one of the areas first settlers, and it lived on as a multigenerational salvage operation. I sat in the front row and when Wendell Berry came in and sat just down the way from me, I couldn't stop grinning. This elemental conflict between capitalism and agrarianism is also the driving tension in The Need to Be Whole, and Berry again recounts how capitalism has devastated the countryside (he is careful to distinguish country, the land on which we live, from nation, an imaginary thing for which he has little use): the staggering loss of topsoil; the concentration of farming by agribusiness; the increased reliance on heavily polluting, toxic fertilizers and pesticides; deforestation; mountaintop removal; climate changethe whole litany of environmental costs. He writes, My friends, I think, were afraid, now that I am old, that I am at risk of some dire breach of political etiquette by feebleness of mind or some fit of ill-advised candor. He listened, and fretted, but kept going. He writes, If two neighbors know that they may seriously disagree, but that either of them, given even a small change of circumstances, may desperately need the other, should they not keep between them a sort of pre-paid forgiveness? Publication of his first novel, Nathan Coulter, which was inspired by his experiences in Henry County, was followed by a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed Berry and his wife, Tanya, to spend a few years living the expat writers life in Europe. Come to the house, and Ill give you what you need., From this sliver of vanishing America, Berry cultivates the unfashionable virtues of neighborliness and compassion. Wendell invited Nick. Hardcover, 222 pages, $45. ". That bitter resentment winds up turning comrades into competitors, and it will turn away anyone who is thoughtful but not already familiar with Berrys writing. hooks, who taught The Hidden Wound at Berea College, told Berry how moved she was by the image of a little boy intervening in a scene charged with the hidden violence of racism. Berry, though, wrote almost twenty years later that he considered it perhaps the least satisfying book hed ever writtenhed barely begun to make sense of the subject. Once, Meb told Wendell, his father carried in a sack on his back fifty rabbits and a big possum up the slope we were climbing, and across the ridge to the road to Port Royal, where he sold the animals at the farm store. Thats community journalism. You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. I read the exchange to him, and he listened thoughtfully. Shoemaker, who now edits Berry at Counterpoint Press, told me that his books were popular with environmentalists, hippies, and civil-rights advocates: Wendell was a hero to those people, saying the unsayable out loud. His ideas about the virtues of agrarian societies had sweeping implicationsto solve the problems of the modern world required thoroughly reconceiving how we live. (Tanya disabused me of that part of the memory: Khakis, maybe. Critics see him as a utopian or a crank, a Luddite who never met a technological innovation he admired. But this is not just history; it offers insight into the land, culture and neighbors that made Wendell Berry, now 87, who he is and why he is what he is. Philanthropy gives us time to work out the problems. Tom Grissom, the tobacco historian, is affiliated with the center, but he doesnt think that Home Place is comparable to the Burley Association: Price supports and parity worked with tobacco because the product was addictive.. Researchers have studied how much of our personality is set from childhood, but what youre like isnt who you are. And since, in his view, the Civil War was a battle between industrialism and agrarianism, and since he has long held that agrarianism is the path to a virtuous human place on earth, the history he ends up telling feels uncomfortably like Gone With the Wind. Mary put me in touch with two members of the program, Abbie and Joseph Monroe, a couple in their thirties with two young children and another expected this April. Another nonprofit in town provides health care to the uninsured. According to Tom Grissom, who is writing a book about the local history of tobacco, Berry was a member of his towns bank board, a trustee of his college, and a Sunday-school teacher at the Baptist church. Equal parts The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (1977), a scathing indictment of big agribusiness and factory farms, and The Hidden Wound (1970), his pathbreaking book-length essay on farming, American culture, and racism, The Need to Be Whole once again considers the question that Berry has spent his entire life contemplating: How can we live among our fellow creatures in a way that is honorable, just, and as sustaining of our souls as of our material needs? We recently caught up with founding member CJ Cain to discuss his love for J.D. Leah Bayens, the programs dean, told me that the students spend much of their time working outside. (After they departed, Tanya told me that Lucie had asked excitedly to say goodbye to Dorothy. I was charmed, until she said, Our donkey is named Dorothy.). And he took up organic gardening. She was also, in mechanical terms, his typist, a fact that outraged feminists when Berry mentioned it in his Harpers essay.