Wendell Berry’s Advice for a Cataclysmic Age

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. If not for the concrete pilings that raise the building high off the ground, it would seem almost a living part of the forest. Readers around the world know the “long-legged house” as the place where Wendell Berry, as a twenty-nine-year-old married man with two young children, found his voice. As he explained in his essay by that name, he built the cabin in the summer of 1963—a place where he could write, read, and contemplate the legacies of his forebears, and what inheritance he might leave behind.

The cabin began as a log house built by Berry’s great-great-great-grandfather Ben Perry, one of the area’s first settlers, and it lived on as a multigenerational salvage operation. In the nineteen-twenties, with the original house in disrepair, Wendell’s bachelor great-uncle Curran Mathews painstakingly took apart what remained and used the lumber to make a camp along the Kentucky River, where he could escape “the bounds of the accepted.” Wendell, “a melancholic and rebellious boy,” found peace in the tumbledown camp, even though it flooded every time the river overflowed. Eventually, it became uninhabitable, and he pried off some poplar and walnut boards to use in building his own cabin, on higher ground—a “satisfactory nutshell of a house,” he wrote. Standing on its long legs, it had “a peering, aerial look, as though built under the influence of trees.”

Berry, who is eighty-seven, has written fifty-two books there—essays, poetry, short stories, and novels—most of them while also running a farm, teaching English at the University of Kentucky, and engaging in political protests. This summer, he’ll publish a sprawling nonfiction book, “The Need to Be Whole,” followed by a short-story collection in the fall.

Last October, Berry showed me the camp, asking only that I not say where it is. Although he has laid bare his entire life in print, he tightly guards his privacy. The single room, containing an antique woodstove against the back wall and a neatly made cot in one corner, was dominated by his worktable, set before a forty-paned window—“the eye of the house”—that looks out onto the porch, the woods, and the river below.

The camp has no plumbing or electricity. Half a dozen well-sharpened pencils were lined up on the worktable, alongside small stacks of paper. On top of one stack was a note Berry had made, and crossed out, about Marianne Moore’s poem “What Are Years?” Above a small safe, curling photographs were taped to a wall: Wallace Stegner, Ernest Gaines, Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, Thomas Merton. Berry pointed out a youthful shot of his wife, Tanya, with cropped, wavy hair, striding along a hillside by their house. He had made a bird feeder and fastened it to the porch railing, so he could watch the comings and goings of chickadees, titmice, juncos, and jays. 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 in—seeking, perhaps, a little food and a furtive night’s rest. “Yes, once,” Berry said. He was pretty sure he knew the culprit. “Someone took out a few panes and tried to get into my safe. I wrote him a note—‘Dear Thief, if you’re in trouble, don’t tear this place up. Come to the house, and I’ll give you what you need.’ ”

From this sliver of vanishing America, Berry cultivates the unfashionable virtues of neighborliness and compassion. He divides his time between writing and farmwork, continuing his vocation of championing sustainable agriculture in a country fuelled by industrial behemoths, while striving to insure that rural Americans—a mocked, despised, and ever-dwindling minority—do not perish altogether. Whenever the country struggles with a new man-made emergency, Berry is rediscovered. 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.”

Berry’s admirers call him an Isaiah-like prophet. 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. The cultural critic bell hooks, another Kentuckian, began reading Berry in college, finding his work “fundamentally radical and eclectic.” Decades later, she visited him at his farm to talk about the importance of home and community and the complexities of America’s racial divide.

Berry’s critics see him as a utopian or a crank, a Luddite who never met a technological innovation he admired. In “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” an infamous 1987 essay that ran in Harper’s, he announced, “I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.” When indignant readers sent a blizzard of letters to the editor, Berry noted in reply that one man, who called him “a fool” and “doubly a fool,” had “fortunately misspelled my name, leaving me a speck of hope that I am not the ‘Wendell Barry’ he was talking about.”

I first heard of Wendell Berry when I was ten years old. 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. An image lodged in my mind—busy men in dark suits, their secretaries typing and taking dictation, while Berry told amusing stories in bluejeans and scuffed shoes. (Tanya disabused me of that part of the memory: “Khakis, maybe. Not bluejeans.”)

I remembered this encounter not long ago when I pulled from a bookshelf “A Continuous Harmony,” a collection of Berry’s essays that my father edited in 1971. With its homely brown jacket and yellowing pages, it looked its age, yet it spoke urgently to our current compounding crises. One of the pieces, “Think Little,” announced, “Nearly every one of us, nearly every day of his life, is contributing directly to the ruin of this planet.” Berry went on to say that he was “ashamed and deeply distressed that American government should have become the chief cause of disillusionment with American principles.”

I was curious about Berry’s evolution from a self-described “small writer” into an internationally acclaimed man of letters. After my father died, my mother xeroxed his correspondence with Berry and gave it to me—a pile of letters that covered the years they worked together, 1964 to 1977. The two were well matched. My family lived rather austerely in what Dan called “exurban” Connecticut, where he chopped wood for our fireplace and tended an organic vegetable garden. His father, Leonard Wickenden, a chemist, had been writing for decades about the dangers of fertilizers and pesticides. Dan and Wendell shared a love of the land, a droll wit, and a punctilious commitment to proper usage. Dan wrote to Wendell about a load of horse manure that had just been delivered for his garden. Wendell tutored Dan in the mating habits of toads: “Sometimes the male is found still clinging to the dead female who has perished in his embrace.”

There were moments of tension, as there always are between writer and editor. In July, 1966, as Berry entered the seventh year of trying to tame his unwieldy novel “A Place on Earth,” my father presented him with “extensive suggestions” for excision, notifying him that, “unless further and fairly drastic cuts are made, the book in print will be some 672 closely set pages.” Wendell replied, “Let me make myself perfectly clear. I am damned doubtful that I’ll cut anything like a hundred more pages out of this book.” Yet, he added, “if I keep finding so much to agree with in your complaints I ought to get the MS back and rewrite it from one end to the other.”