Wendell Berry, in 2017

What is it like to read a Wendell Berry novel (or short story)?

     It's stopping every six paragraphs of so, or after a full page of dialogue, because you start to feel lonesome and guilty for something you haven't necessarily done and it's that not having done it that makes you lonely and culpable, implicated in the worst way before people, family usually, who are unfortunately dead.  This is what Mr. Berry knows about you.  About me. 

Photo by Guy Mendes

     Whenever I read his books, I get the sentimental self-conscious (and any other S-word you can think of) sensation that he's tilting his head and mentioning you in his words.  No other writer, besides Iris Murdoch or maybe William Goyen, or maybe John Powys, has ever made me feel so self-conscious, so simultaneously engaged and distracted from the page, because of the page.  I should probably add John Gardner, Dawn Powell, and maybe Saul Bellow to that encomium triad.  Maybe Alice Munro, Larry Brown; maybe C.P. Snow, John Le Carre, Camus, Gide.  See what happens? I'm already getting sentimental, self-conscious (about making sure who I'm including, so as not to offend), and sad again.

Mr. Berry, many years ago in his writing studio

                                                                                                                

                                                                                                                                                    Photo by James Baker Hall

"...and in the shade where we rested the water darkened, rippling a little as it passed the boat. The whole calm of the river moved down and past us and on, as if it slept and remembered its direction in its sleep."

          (Nathan Coulter from Three Short Novels, Washington, DC: Counterpoint Books, 2002, p. 76)

"He had become a special case, and he knew what he thought of that.  He raged, and he raged at his rage, and nothing that he had was what he wanted.  He remained devoted to his lost hand, to his body as it had been, to his life as he had wanted it to be; he could not give them up.  That he had lost them and they were gone did not persuade him.  The fact had no power with him.  The powerlessness of the fact made him lonely, and he held to his loneliness to protect his absurdity.  But it was as though his soul had withdrawn from his life, refusing any longer to live in it."

[Andy Catlett, dealing with the depression and anger after losing his hand in an agricultural (machine) accident, crushed inside a corn thresher.]

                        (Remembering, op cit., p. 147)

"What have I done with the time?  Remembering as if far back, he knows what he did with it.  He stood up there in the room like a graven image of himself, telling over the catalogue of his complaints.  There is a country inside of him where his complaints live and do their work, where they invite him to come, offering their enticements and tidbits, the self-justification of anger, the self-justifications of self-humiliation, the coddled griefs.  This is happening to my soul.  This is part of the life history of my soul."

                        (Remembering, op cit., p. 152)

"But he reminds himself of himself.  Something else is raging at him....  Yes, you sorry fool., be still.  For the flaw in all that dream is himself, the little hell of himself."

(A World Lost, op cit., p. 277)

[I love that phrase, "...the little hell of himself."]

The excerpts above are but a blink, a minuscule sampling of Mr. Berry's beautiful, engaging writings.  Of the 50+ books written by him, I have read the following: Nathan Coulter, A Place on Earth, The Memory of Old Jack, Jayber Crow, Andy Catlett Early Travels, Remembering, A World Lost, and currently am reading That Distant Land (a book of short stories).  Of them all, so far, my favorite is The Memory of Old Jack, followed by Jayber Crow.

I so encourage you, Reader, to check him out.