A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of Port William
by
Wendell Berry
Berkeley,
California: Counterpoint
368
pp.; $28
Reviewed
by Katherine Dalton
Entire
contents are copyright © 2013 Katherine Dalton. All rights reserved.
Some
of these stories are so funny. I
thought I had better say that before I say anything else, because Wendell
Berry, being a serious-minded man much occupied with justice, is often elegiac. But if a lot of his fiction is occupied
with loss, there is always gain in it, and a lot of that gain comes in the form
of both love and humor.
I
defy any of you to read the story “Down in the Valley Where the Green Grass
Grows” and not laugh out loud. And I feel sure that in a notebook somewhere, or
in the back of Mr. Berry's extensive memory, is every single funny turn of
phrase he has heard in his long life.
He is a man deeply in love both with his place and the language of his
place; and where there is language, there is a joke with a kick in it.
The
last previous collection of short stories (complete to that point) came out in
2004, and the last novel was Andy Catlett, published in 2007; Mr.
Berry is 78 now, so this new collection is not just a pleasure but an
event. When I read the collected
stories several years back, I was struck with their continuity, not just of
character, but of theme and style. Wendell Berry has been a remarkably
consistent writer. Apparently, at
some point when he was in his twenties, the imagined community of Port William
jumped full grown out of his head.
But
then Port William has its roots in a real place, though it is not a real
place. It is the small towns of
Henry County, Kentucky, distilled through the mind and memory of this native
son, and through the mind and memory of his parents and grandparents and
brother and neighbors too. Mr.
Berry said once in an interview (and I am paraphrasing from what I hope is an
accurate memory) that Port William was his own community as it would have been
if it were able to know itself articulately, and speak of itself to
itself. That self-knowledge and
self-descriptive speech is not realistic in the real-world sense, but it is
truthful.
Some
of that truth is sorrowful, because living is always going to be significantly
about loss; and if a writer's job is to witness to life as he sees it, Mr.
Berry has never been one to duck a hard task. But then again he can be so joyfully funny. In the story about Big Ellis's
courtship, Berry writes: “Big was
late getting married. Marriage was
a precaution he didn't think of until his mother died and left him alone to
cook and housekeep for himself. And then he really began to hear the call of matrimony.”
The
story of “Burley Coulter's Fortunate Fall” begins, “It has been a long, long
time since old Uncle Bub Levers was called on to pray at the Bird's Branch
church for the first and last time in his life, and he stood up and said, 'O
Lord, bless me and my son Jasper. Amen.'”
But
humorous or poignant or both, all the Port William stories are about relationships
knitting together a world that is constantly unraveling in our fingers. They are often most optimistic in their
sorrow, because few writers know better than sorrow is the Siamese twin of
joy: that whatever is dearest to
us we fear most to lose, and will lose – and yet we had it. No writer is more sensitive to the
gratitude of having had.
A
Place in Time is full of wonderful lines. Among the passages I have marked is this one, said by Burley Coulter
about his young nephews: “At first
they believed everything I said, and then they didn't believe anything I said,
and then they believed some of the things I said. That was the best of their education right there, and they
got it from me.” We are getting
it, too.
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