Morning Thanks--an old friend

People who love Wendell Berry--and they are legion--don't read him for his masterful plots. Often as not, Berry's love is only secondarily for what happens in a story; his love is making characters live. When he's good, and he's always good in my book, what he adds to your library (and your world!) is real live human beings, each of whom are worth knowing. In his novels, you discover their marvelous humanity. 

That "marvelous humanity" is in short supply it seems, so stumbling on a Wendell Berry novel means stumbling on characters who, through thick and thin, in some perfectly fallen way, show you truly rich--that very "image of God" that Berry would say dwells in us all. Few writers create such characters--another, by the way, is Marilyn Robinson.

For me, reading Jayber Crow was a long-standing obligation. I'd promised, long ago, to read it, when a friend told me he thought Jayber Crow was the very best book he'd ever read--and that man, Terry Vanden Berg, was a librarian. His praise overflowed with religious conviction. Jayber Crow was simply overwhelmingly good--"You have to read it--you'll love it."

Those weren't his last words by any means, but they were, if I'm not mistaken, his last words to me. He died on the street, when a heart attack took him long before it might have. He was out jogging.  It may well be that his untimely death makes me think his great reverence for Jayber Crow were Terry's last words to me.

No matter. It took me a quarter of a century to read the book this librarian told me was the very best novel he'd ever written. No piece of fiction could possibly live up to that kind of billing. We all suffer similarly: someone says, "you HAVE TO see" a movie; so you do, and you can't help thinking it didn't rate that kind of praise.

But then, to say I expected more glory from Jayber Crow is off the mark too. It's a fine book, a beautiful book, by all means worth reading. But the fact of the matter is, I enjoyed Hannah Coulter more. It's hard to decipher why, I suppose, and maybe I should simply say there's no accounting for taste.

But let me wander into this a bit. Jayber Crow tests the limits of what I might call "presentational theater," of listening to a chorus or an observor or a stage manager guide you through a story. The undeniable beauty of Jayber Crow is Jayber Crow, the man, in large part because he possesses what I'd call heavenly wisdom. He is an orphan, someone educated by his own passion for ideas and books, a kind of stranger in the world, a man whose lifeblood appears to flow only when in the presence of a woman who is unequally yoked. Jayber Crow spends most of his adult life quietly and passionately in love with a woman already married. The novel's surprise resolution is perfectly sad, which is to say, perfectly beautiful. I liked the novel greatly, but I loved Hannah Coulter.  

After a fashion, the novels are brother and sister. They all grow up around a small community fictionalized as Port William, Kentucky, a very small town surrounded by the kind of blessed countryside where a fully-fledged agrarian like Wendell Berry can grow. If you've never read Wendell Berry, it may be difficult to believe that he actually builds a community, but that's what he does--and in a series of novels all titled by characters' names. 

Berry loves flourishing community, and therefore loves the people who create it--people like Hannah Coulter and Jayber Crow, as well as the men, women, and children around them. His concerns are with the soul really, the human soul, and his conviction is that men and women who live in community have separate lives that can, in that community, truly flourish. He doesn't write cartoons; his characters fall into deep valleys and wander into dark shadows, but finally their lives are rich. They flourish. 

Terry Vanden Berg couldn't have been wrong--Jayber Crow was the best novel he ever read. It was right up there for me. I can sing its praises, just not as convincingly as he did.

Once upon a time, sitting in a dorm lounge at Dordt College, Terry was reading over a paper of mine. I was a freshman. I'm quite sure I'd asked him to proof. He was an English major, two years my elder. He likely drew out a red pen. "Not knew here--you have to say knows. All the way through, you've got to correct your verb tense," he told me. "Always remember, when you write about a story or a poem, 'literature lives'--it's present tense, always present tense. Literature lives."

That's what he told me, years earlier, when I needed to understand what I was myself feeling--somehow literature lives. Always present tense. 

That too I've never forgotten. 

This morning's thanks are for a librarian and a reader, a man named Terry Vander Berg. 

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Here's a fine 10-minute talk on Jayber Crow by Russell Moore.