374 - Practicing Resurrection: Community and Continuity in Wendell Berry's A Place on Earth

Practicing Resurrection: Community and Continuity in Wendell Berry's A Place on Earth
By John E. McEntyre

Farmer, husband, father, environmentalist, essayist, poet, and novelist, Wendell Berry offers a vision of how individuals can live in community so that the community not only survives but lives in   harmony with itself and with the earth. His longest novel, A Place on Earth, describes how a beloved community lives through tragedy into celebration and joy. In this tale that spans several generations in the rural town of Port William, Kentucky, tensions between individual and social freedom are successfully resolved. Young men die in war; a flash flood takes a life; a suicide occurs; the community celebrates the end of World War II; a child is born; and nature nurtures body and spirit. This community was built by "common experience and common effort on a common ground to which one willingly belongs." ¹ The maturing of American society depends in part upon the visions of our artists: What we are unable to imagine we are unable to enact. If we cannot imagine a healthy life in community, we will not have one. Berry's prescription for the ills of individualism requires a particular form of tragic imagination that "through communal form or ceremony, permits great loss to be recognized, suffered, and borne, and that makes possible some sort of consolation and renewal."   ²

Berry sees tragedy and suffering as necessary dimensions of the beloved community. This is, in Christian terms, to point to the cross as the locus of transformation. A Place on Earth reads like a parable: Elegantly simple in its unified vision of fidelity to community life, it speaks in ordinary language and points to a way of life in which the author believes.

John E. McEntyre, formerly Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at St. Mary's College in Moraga, California, and author of essays in various periodicals, is a student at Princeton Theological Seminary.
¹ Wendell Berry, "Writer and Region," The Hudson Review, 40 (1987), p. 20.
² Ibid., p. 21.

375 - Practicing Resurrection: Community and Continuity in Wendell Berry's A Place on Earth

Berry's prose asks to be read slowly; his language is the tongue of a particular place and people-language of the kind Willa Cather described as the authentic idiom of regional writing:

No writer can invent it. It is made ... in communities where language has been undisturbed long enough to take on color and character from the nature and experiences of the people. The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world, and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have. ³

In Berry's Port William, language rooted in "the nature and experiences of the people"-fundamentally different from media language-takes on

"Berry records and poetically transforms the inherited language of a people who belong to each other and to the land."

"color and character." Once Berry reflected, "The most complete speech is that of conversation in a settled community of some age, where what is said refers to and evokes things, people, places, and events that are commonly known. In such a community to speak is to hear and to hear is to remember. "⁴ Thus the community embodies a history and expresses a way of accepting life in the terms given. In one of his lesser-known volumes Berry records a series of proverb-poems drawn from the speech of the Kentucky farmers. He says of these poems,

I have had many of them in mind for a long time, some of them for most of my life; they were overheard and learned in my native part of the country; many of them had been told and retold, had passed through the memories of numerous other people before they came to me. ⁵

Berry records and poetically transforms the inherited language of a people who belong to each other and to the land.

Land and character are intimately connected in A Place on Earth, as near the end of the novel, Berry writes,

As always, it was finally the land that they spoke of, fascinated as they have been all their lives by what has happened to it, their own ties to it, the wife of their race, more lovely and bountiful and kind than they have usually deserved, more demanding than they have often been able to bear. ⁶

The relationship of the community to the land is like that of two partners in marriage. Berry speaks of the "sacred bonds between man and land, of

³ Willa Cather, introduction to The Country of the Pointed Firs, by Sarah Orne Jewett (New York: Doubleday, 1956), p. 10.
⁴ Quoted in Mindy Weinreb, "A Question a Day: A Written Conversation with Wendell Berry," in Wendell Berry, edited by Paul Merchant (Lewiston, ID: Confluence, 1991), p. 3 1.
⁵ Wendell Berry, Sayings and Doings (n.p.: Gnomon, 1975), no page number.
⁶ Wendell Berry, A Place on Earth (San Francisco: North Point, 1983), p. 298.

376 - Practicing Resurrection: Community and Continuity in Wendell Berry's A Place on Earth

the marriage of husband to his literal and mystic wife." ⁷ A partner in relationship, the land-like wife-is "kind" and "demanding." Land shares in the sacramental quality of life-mysterious, holy, forgiving, and sustaining. Berry's concluding chapter describes Mat Feltner's joy in the land after the death of his son in the Second World War. Six active verbs describe the solacing movements of the earth:

He comes to where a stream has cut its way into the hill. The ground tilts sharply as the bluffs turn in to the crease of the ravine, and here the woods is old. In the face of the bluff on the far side of the ravine there is a sort of amphitheater, its floor, relatively flat, affording a gathering place for a stand of great beeches, whose silver trunks branch into the gold masses of their leaves. Their brilliance, as Mat comes around the hill's shoulder, stops him for a moment before he crosses over and goes in under them. ⁸

Interspersed among the action are simple forms of the verb "to be." The succeeding paragraph crescendoes to a threefold use of the title noun "place," concluding in rest and happiness:

Mat sits on the ground with his back against the tree, his hat on the ground beside him, sorting out and examining one by one all the aspects and attractions of the place. It is one of those places that, many times in his life, he has thought would be a good place to rest , and now to be resting there makes me happy. ⁹

In such contentment the dichotomy between inner and outer worlds disappears. But Berry's is no Rousseauistic innocence; Feltner's joy occurs only after tragic loss.

Joy consists, in part, in knowing the land and one's neighbors. In the novel's opening scene, as three old men wait for a fourth to take his turn at cards, their conversation alludes to a web of common references the reader must intuitively grasp:

"Jayber, it's your play, ain't it?" Frank Lathrop says finally. "Let a man think."

"Hell," Old Jack Beechum says, "a mule could've thought by now."   ¹⁰

In only this much conversation the writer conveys a sense of the relationships among the men, their tolerance of and freedom with one another, the patience and impatience that inform a gathering of old friends who know each other's ways. It is an intimate glimpse into a moment of community life that gives the whole in microcosm. Imagining wholeness requires a generous intuition.

But intuition and imagination are not in themselves either revelatory or revitalizing without love. The deepest and most pervasive theme in Berry's story is love-the force that animates and sustains the beloved

⁷ Quoted in Jack Hicks, "Wendell Berry's Husband to the World: A Place on Earth," in Wendell Berry, edited by Merchant, p. 121.
⁸ Berry, A Place on Earth, p. 316, italics added.
⁹ Ibid.
¹⁰ Ibid., p. 5.

377 - Practicing Resurrection: Community and Continuity in Wendell Berry's A Place on Earth

community. Love is difficult to write about convincingly; it is hard to find language adequate to its immensity, subtlety, and variety. As Flannery O'Connor said of her own attempts to represent Christian love to a modern audience, the result is shocking. ¹¹ Berry avoids the pitfalls of romanticism and sentimentality by his fidelity to the particularities of love in ordinary moments among ordinary people. A letter Burley Coulter writes to his nephew, for instance, makes a powerful statement about love:

Half a hundred years I've been alive. And it's a mystery where they've gone. I used to think that when I got to be a man I'd do what I pleased. And what I aimed to please to do was hunt and fish, and breed as far and wide as a tomcat. But there's a great many pretty girls that I've gone by, and a lot of good hunting nights, and a lot of fishing weather. It has happened that that wasn't so much what I was called to as I thought. What it has been, I reckon you would say, is love, for Jarrat and you boys. I realize now that if my calling hasn't been that, I haven't had one. ¹²

Berry's images harmonize with Martin Luther King's ideal of the beloved community, understood as "the mutually cooperative and voluntary venture of man to assume a semblance of responsibility for his brother." ¹³ Berry brings his readers into a world where such responsibility is daily enacted in interdependence.

We understand Berry's beloved community, then, through its language, its relationship to the land, the mutual understanding of its members, and the love that informs and binds them. Other themes emerge from this portrait of community life: the capacity to transform tragedy into celebration and joy; the importance of conversation in weaving the common life; the acceptance of loss as an aspect of the mystery that defines human life; a healthy skepticism toward organized religion; the restoration of propriety in the relationship of culture to nature.

"Sustaining conversation need not be witty; at its best it is simple and profound. Even in the presence of death, conversation restores life, sometimes in the form of humor."

Berry's attention to personal and social tragedy preserves his depiction of community life from romanticism or utopianism. The situations of personal and social tragedy in A Place on Earth evoke profound, complicated sadness, as when Gideon Crop, after watching a flash flood drown

¹¹ Flannery O'Connor, Three by Flannery O'Connor- Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, Everything that Rises Must Converge (New York: New American Library, 1983), p. xxi.
¹² Berry, A Place on Earth, pp. 153-154.
¹³ Martin Luther King, Jr., "The Ethical Demands of Integration," Religion and Labor (May, 1963), p. 7; cited in Kenneth L. Smith and Ira G. Zepp, Search for the Beloved Community: The Thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Valley Forge: Judson, 1974), p. 119.

378 - Practicing Resurrection: Community and Continuity in Wendell Berry's A Place on Earth

his daughter Annie, desperately searches for her:

... he fixes on the thought of the sound of Annie's voice calling to him over the water. And though he can hardly bear the smallness and loneliness of his voice he does not stop calling to her-at times calling in answer only to the silence, only because silence may mean anything.... He is running now, plunging through the darkness with as much abandon as if it were daylight, running into the corn shocks and bushes and fences, cursing the darkness and everything in it, telling it to do its God-damndest and be God-damned.... It is as though his mind, which like his body has begun to work apart from his will, is gambling that absurdity will be more bearable than reasonableness. ¹⁴

Berry balances this vision of the father's loss with that of the mother, Ida. In an understatement that may be the only adequate way to suggest the immensity of her grief, he describes her entering Annie's room, now empty:

She goes through the hall door and down the hall and through the other door and starts up. She walks in great haste, hurrying ahead of the oncoming of her pain. She reaches the top of the stairs and goes through the door into Annie's room. Closing the door, she stands just inside it a moment, looking around her. It is a wide low room, the ceiling taking the slant of the roof. There are windows in three of the walls and now the strong morning light floods into it -The floor is littered with playthings. She walks over to a chair near the bed and, holding to the back of it, lets herself down onto her knees beside it. Her outcry begins deep in her, and rises, and breaks out.

At last the sound of her weeping leaves her more easily, and then it quits. She grows quiet, letting her head rest on the seat of the chair. And then, lightened, able again, she gets up, and straightens the room, and leaves it. ¹⁵

This measured, precise description testifies to Berry's familiarity with tragedy. Ada tries to hurry "ahead of her pain." The details help the reader to imagine her grief, which finds expression and healing in ordinary things. Morning light surrounds her. She dwells in it, not completely comforted but finally lightened, relieved, and "able again."

The tragedy of World War II hangs like a backdrop behind the narrative. Scars of war are visible to the community in the wounds of Ernest Finley, a carpenter, who returned from the previous war a cripple. Finley marvels at "the implausibility of the fact that something so vast as a war had picked out and defeated so small a thing as one man, himself. "¹⁶ Elsewhere Mat Feltner reflects on the bombing of Hiroshima: "It has seemed to him that the years of violence have at last arrived at what, without his knowing it, they had been headed for, not by any human reason or motive or wish but by the logic of violence itself. " ¹⁷ Berry's beloved community is no Eden; global, historical forces penetrate its borders.

Conversation is the flowering of community life. In "Writer and Region," Berry reminds us that "conversation wells up out of memory and in a sense is the community, the presence of its past and its hope,

¹⁴ Berry, A Place on Earth, pp. 118-119.
¹⁵ Ibid., pp. 127-128.
¹⁶ Ibid., p. 32.
¹⁷ Ibid., pp. 254-255.

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speaking in the dumb abyss."   ¹⁸ Sustaining conversation need not be witty; at its best it is simple and profound. Even in the presence of death, conversation restores life, sometimes in the form of humor. Like the two clowns digging Ophelia's grave in Act V of Hamlet, two gravediggers dominate the opening episode of the fifth chapter in A Place on Earth. Uncle Stanley and Jayber Crow reflect in amazement at Finley's suicide: " 'Dang tootin!' Uncle Stanley says. 'Man just up and put a end to hisself that way! Crazy. Bound to been!' "¹⁹ They reassert common sense in the face of death:

"Six feet is a lot deeper than I thought it was," [Jayber] confessed to Uncle Stan from the bottom of the first one he dug.

"By grab," Uncle Stanley said, "Things look different from down there, don't they, son?"

And that is the truth.  ²⁰

Through conversation, members of the community begin to make sense of tragedy. While the gravediggers quarrel about whether or not to finish the job the same day, they recall the power of universal forces:

"He said," Uncle Stanley says, with a downward backhanded wave in Jayber's direction, "he said he thought we'd just as well quit after the sun got hot, and finish up early tomorrow morning in the cool. But I told him, dad whack it, that ain't no way to do. In this work you're dealing with the Powers, by grab, and you can't diddle around with them. Why, what if somebody else dies tonight? And somebody's liable to."

"It could be you," Jayber says, "you old joint of sewer pipe." ²¹

The banter concludes with a dispute about whether or not a person has a right to take his own life and the recollection of the power of death.

Inner conversation occurs in solitude. A counterpoint to Jayber and Stanley's banter is Mat Feltner's search for meaning in the tragedy of Finley's suicide. Feltner reasons with himself, Job-like, retracing arguments, searching for understanding and acceptance. He is led to consider complex relationships between pain and suffering, finitude, death, mystery, and life by means of an inner dialogue that culminates in paradox:

A man gets used to pain, he thinks. He learns it. It gets to be familiar to him, a part of what his life is and feels like. And what good does it do him? It teaches him to make light of the pains that are less, and to respect those that are greater. It teaches him what he can stand. And what good does that do him? He needs to know what he can stand because the chances are he will have to stand as much as he is able. That is what is ahead of him-to suffer and to stand it. And so is there virtue in standing it? Maybe. Surely. But there are limits too, and suffering kills. Ernest stood a great deal, and kept quiet, until there came a greatness of it that he could not stand. And that-what it takes to kill a man, what his limit is-is his mystery. The mystery of his death that becomes the mystery of his life.  ²²

 ¹⁸ Berry, "Writer and Region," p. 30.
 ¹⁹ Berry, A Place on Earth, p. 270.
 ²⁰ Ibid.
 ²¹ Ibid., p. 272.
 ²² Ibid., pp. 297-298.

380 - Practicing Resurrection: Community and Continuity in Wendell Berry's A Place on Earth

To say that pain "gets to be familiar" is to say that suffering is as much a part of our lives as family: We can ignore it or respond extravagantly to it, yet it is bound to be present one way or another. Suffering and death call us out of ourselves into a larger consciousness of being.

Much conversation in community life turns to religious questions. Berry's obvious respect for those questions allows him to poke fun at some of the superficial aspects of organized religion. In the chapter entitled "A Knack for the Here," Burley Coulter writes his nephew to describe the new young preacher, Brother Piston, who informed the family about their son's death in war. This professionally religious person seems oddly estranged from his own humanity, unable to reach out to his congregation from his heart. In a denunciation of hypocrisy like Jesus' "Woe to you, Pharisees and hypocrites," Burley rejects the preacher's claim to authority among those whose knowledge of one another drives so much deeper than his own:

You could say that he didn't have too good of an idea who he was talking to.... He never did stand up in his ache and sweat and go down the row with us. He never tasted any of our sweat in the water jug. And I was thinking: Preacher, who are you to speak of Tom to me, who knew him, and knew the very smell of him ?

And there he sat in your grandaddy's chair, with his consolations and his old speech. Just putting our names in the blanks. And I thought: Preacher, he's dead, he's not here, and you'll never know what it is that's gone.   ²³

This alienation, however, is tolerated, and modified in community. In the same letter Burley comments sympathetically that Brother Piston has a "knack for the Hereafter," yet it is a "knack for the here and now" that sustains the beloved community.

In addition to suffering and conversation, Berry reflects on the natural order as the context within which the community remembers and shapes itself. In scenes of celebration natural light infuses and surrounds people singing, dancing, and taking delight in one another. Light revitalizes those suffering, like Ida finding renewal by dwelling in the light:

When she woke on the Saturday morning at the end of the flood, a brilliant pool of sunshine lay across the kitchen floor. She sat still for a while, wrapped in the old quilt in the rocking chair, and looked at the light. It changed her. Before she moved at all, she understood that she was no longer the same. The weather and the place, changing, had changed her.   ²⁴

Like light and earth, dancing and song help heal the community. When the war is over, Port William breaks forth in celebration. Burley is transported. Intoxicated, he and Jayber reaffirm change as part of the natural order:

"What we're celebrating is celebration," he says. That started out to be clear, but did not wind up clear. Somewhere before the end his statement

 ²³ Ibid., p. 100.
 ²⁴ Ibid., p. 127.

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came apart like a flimsy basket and let most of his meaning spill out. "We're not celebrating any happening or anything," he says, "but just celebrating."

"We're not shellerbating any thing, " he says, "because of how things have of being what they are. They ain't apt to stay celebrate-able. Because they ain't."

"Which is to say," Jayber says, "as aforesaid. And to wit."

"Because, " Burley says, "to cellarbreak things ain't hardly barrelable because they won't always stay cellerellable." ²⁵

Humor testifies to joy, and Berry praises celebration after tragedy. The community's renewed peace reaffirms the social order and its intricate patterns, simple as the lilies of the field, subtle as the shades and shapes of leaves, and self-renewing as it passes through its seasons.

Nature sustains those willing to love and care for it and to use its resources wisely. A Place on Earth ends with a scene in which harmony with nature resolves the perplexing paradoxes of life and death. The final chapter, "Into the Woods," concludes with Mat Feltner experiencing what Berry calls in his best-known and loved poem "the peace of wild things"-a peace that bespeaks the divine presence in the most ordinary moment.   ²⁶

[T]here comes to Mat the sense of a lost and dead past, a past perfect, without even the force of meaning.... There in the presence of woods, in the sounds of the water and the leaves falling, he does not feel the loss of what is past.

He feels the great restfulness of that place, its casual perfect order. It is the restfulness of a place where the merest or most improbable accident is made a necessity and a part of a design, where death can only give into life.   ²⁷

In this place on earth is rest for Mat Feltner and for the readers who have traveled through these tragedies and joys; after struggling with meaning, we are renewed in the conviction that one sparrow cannot fall apart from divine design. In the beloved community-the going forth and coming home of individuals within it, their love for one another, and their sharing of losses-Berry persuades us that virtue is possible, that in the deepest sense "death can only give into life," and that a community can live through tragedy into celebration and joy.

 ²⁵ Ibid., p. 286.
 ²⁶ Wendell Berry, The Collected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1957-1982 (San Francisco: North Point, 1987), p. 69.
 ²⁷ Berry, A Place on Earth, pp. 316-317.