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Forty Acres and a Muse
| Article
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10487 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1993 |
3,170 Words |
| Author
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Stephen Goodwin
Stephen Goodwin teaches English literature at George Mason
University and is the author of Kin and The Blood of Paradise.
He has published essays about rural Virginia in Country
Journal and other publications. |
FIDELITY
Wendell Berry
New York: Pantheon Books, 1992
201 pp., $20.00
In the photograph on the dust jacket of Fidelity, a collection of five stories, Wendell Berry is shown with a broad smile on his face, his arm around the shoulders of his smiling wife, Tanya. They are standing outdoors, in front of an open barn door, and they look as if they have just received wonderful news. Berry is wearing a farmer's coveralls, the kind with zipper pockets on the chest, and a billed cap sits just a bit crookedly on his head. For a man nearing sixty, he looks remarkably trim and fit, as does his wife. Their pose might be American Gothic, but the pitchfork is missing, and there is no trace of bitterness. This farmer and his wife appear to be blessedly happy, brimming over with health and contentment.
I have described this photograph at length because it differs so sharply from most pictures of American writers, and because it yields so much that is essential about Wendell Berry. If the picture weren't on a book jacket--if you came across it in a rural newspaper, where it seems to belong--you would never imagine that you were looking at a writer. That is as it should be, for Berry always has defined himself first as a farmer and family man. His first loyalties are to his native place and local community. From these commitments--from place, family, and community--his writing has flowed, and it has flowed abundantly. Berry is the author of twenty-five books of poetry, essays, and fiction. As for his open smile, Berry always has challenged the wrongheaded idea that farming is a life of drudgery, insisting--and proving by his own example--that it offers a satisfaction and fulfillment not to be found elsewhere.
This, of course, is hard for many people to believe, and Berry has earned a certain notoriety as an enemy of progress," a sort of hopeless throwback who plows with horses, detests machines, sings the praises of manure, and generally all complexities are reduced to slogans and sound bites, it seems exactly right that Berry is best known for a one page essay on why he refuses to use a word processor. In this little essay, he notes that his writing became a shared enterprise when Tanya typed his manuscripts--and thus incensed feminists. To his critics, Berry came across as stubborn, anachronistic, and chauvinist to boot.
There is no denying that Berry has lived by his own lights, or that he has taken
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