Discovering Wendell Berry through
Imagination in Place
Written by Dan McDonald
This
quote is not from the book I am reading – but goes with the writing I’m doing.
When, last week, I began reading
Wendell Berry’s Imagination in Place I did not realize Sunday August 5,
1934 was his birthdate, and this Sunday his 84th birthday. I have read
only a few of his works, but each book I have read has made me think for a
longer time than it took me to read. Today I write of what I’ve been learning about
Wendell Berry and his message as I approaching the midway part of this 2010
published book.
The first essays in this book are mostly
about people who have been mentors and friends in Berry’s life. They come from
different places than Berry does, but share an appreciation of their lives
being connected to place and community.
I’ve often classified Wendell Berry
as a Southern Agrarian writer. However appropriate that classification might
be, I am discovering how his writing as a Southerner and as an Agrarian is for
Berry something of a starting point in his relationship to place and a broader
more universal culture. I am learning that he recognizes an importance in
discovering specific local connections if one is to learn how to interact with
others in broader abstract universal matters.
In Imagination in Place,
Wendell Berry spends a good part of the book expressing gratitude for the
mentors and friends who helped shape his perspective. Neither of the two I have
so far most encountered are Southerners. But they can be described as writers
connected to their local places. One mentor for whom Berry expresses his
gratitude is Wallace Stegner (1909-1993), a man of the West. Berry tells of
studying under Stegner, while only later growing to find Stegner’s impact on
his life grew in the years following his studies, while not being a dramatic
recognized influence when he studied under Stegner’s supervision. In a chapter
entitled The Momentum of Clarity ,
Berry notices the sort of writer Stegner had become, that would eventually have
an impact on him. He reflects on Stegner in the following paragraph:
“[Eventually I thought there must
have been a moment when he decided that he would not be the kind of writer who
would look on his native country as “raw material” for his art, and leave it
otherwise to take care of itself or to be cared for by other people, but that
he would be a kind of writer who would be devoted to his country for its own
sake, and do what he could to protect it. And then I thought that perhaps he
had not decided – that perhaps there had come a moment, simply, when he
realized that he had become that kind of writer. Whenever and however that
moment occurred, it was a significant moment; so far as I know, no American
writer had been that kind of writer before.]”[i]
Berry’s use of country in this
paragraph intrigues me. “Country” here doesn’t seem to me to equate nation, and
yet there is a relationship it seems between the loving of his country and
nation. It seems as though country is representative of a more specific, localized
place that then is also connected to one’s commitments to life in a broader,
more universal manner. I have to think on how I learned love of country in my
own childhood way of understanding. I grew up in a north central Illinois farm
region. My first thoughts of living in a great America, was to look over the neighboring
Prairie farmland horizon and seeing a grain elevator with its peak visible over
the plots of land filled with corn and soybeans. That is how I first understood
I lived in a great nation. I had this specific localized vision of greatness
that served as my understanding of the abstraction of a great nation named The
United States of America. Seeing Berry’s debt to Stegner helps me realize that
while Berry can be described as a Southern Agrarian, is certainly not one inclined
to say to us “You must become a Southern man to discover truth.” He certainly
did not see Stegner that way. Stegner was for Wendell Berry a fellow companion
connected to place and a localized cultural way of life.
A second writer, mentor, and friend
Berry recognizes, is poet Hayden Carruth (1921-2008). Carruth’s roots were
planted in a small Vermont community. In Berry’s essay on Carruth, he quotes a
piece of writing Carruth did in honoring a neighbor who operated a small dairy
farm. When Berry had visited Carruth in Vermont, Carruth had taken time to
introduce Wendell Berry to his dairy farm operating neighbor. Berry selects
Carruth’s eulogy for this dairy farmer as a sample of Carruth’s connection to
his Vermont place and community:
Notice how
many times
I have said
“manure”?
It is serious
business.
It breaks the
farmers’ backs.
It makes their
land.
It is the link
eternal,
binding man
and beast and earth.[ii]
Berry made his own profound remark
regarding the poem, saying “[“Cowshit,” then has an eternal value. A “cowshit
farmer” is an artist whose art makes of cowshit “the link eternal.”]”[iii]
Imagination in Place has
given me a new appreciation for Wendell Berry. He is a man who understands that
perhaps the best way to be a man capable of understanding universal truths is
to be a man who has learned to receive from and return to his own specific
local place and community. That is why he can be a Southern man who would not
expect you to be southern man unless you are a man and a Southerner. He would
understand paradoxically but also logically that to understand the universals
of life we perhaps need to learn to be preoccupied with the local that we can
see with our own eyes. I remember an associate pastor named Robert Haling,
where I was once a member of the church. He would often tell us his favorite
saying “Bloom where you are planted.” The universal characteristics of life are
expressed in thousands of thousands of specific offerings of localized reality.
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