Dispatch No. 4: Jayber Crow

On reading Wendell Berry in Kentucky

Dear Jack,

I apologize for the radio silence. It’s not that I didn’t have anything to say; on the contrary, I have as much as ever to say and as much desire as ever to tell you all about it. But occasionally people ask me to help them say things better than they know how to say by themselves; sometimes they even pay me to write the things they don’t have time to say—the upshot being that I can support my gardening habit for another year but have less time for the writing that I want to do.

And, let’s face it. Sometimes I want to write but don’t know the words to say, myself.

However, here I am again, landing with a thwack in your mailbox and bringing you all kinds of unexpected insights that you didn’t know you needed to know.

I think I told you, another lifetime ago, that my family and I were making a trip to Kentucky and that I had decided to finally dip my toes into Wendell Berry’s novels, starting with Jayber Crow. Packing books for a trip always gives me a little bit of anxiety. How do I know what I’ll feel like reading once we’re underway? What if I bring something super-serious and then desperately need something lighthearted? What if I pack the first installment of a series only to tear through it and find myself stranded without the next volume? (I was able to find The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at the bookshop in historic Williamsburg, Virginia, sure, but what about when I devoured the first Harry Potter while in Edinburgh and then we somehow visited absolutely no bookstores on that trip?)

To be honest, I almost didn’t pack Jayber Crow. I love Berry’s poetry, and I’d read some of his essays, but I had no idea what to expect from his fiction. I’d heard a lot about the wee town of Port William and its Membership, and it all sounded a bit idyllic-bucolic and charming, like a Cotswold village transplanted into the American South or a more ruralized version of Jan Karon’s Mitford, with a male author. (As if either of those were bad things. I can only conclude that I was in a funk at the time.) But I’d told you I was going to read Jayber Crow, and was I going to report back to you that I’d chickened out?

I was not. Into my book bag it went—along with Berry’s poetry collection The Country of Marriage, which I’d also never read, and James Thurber’s Lanterns & Lances, a perennial favorite. (Thurber, in addition to being witty, irreverent, anxiety-ridden and hilarious, also happens to be from Ohio. And Ohio, I have finally grasped, shares an extensive border with Kentucky.)

But I didn’t start into the novel right away. In Louisville’s famous Brown Hotel (for example), after a fascinating day of visiting Churchill Downs and Locust Grove, the home of George Rogers Clark, I fortified myself with such Thurber gems as “The Porcupines in the Artichokes.”

A writer, of course, can turn anything at all into a literary discussion, and it might be better not to say anything about anything. — James Thurber, “The Porcupines in the Artichokes”

No, it wasn’t until the third or fourth night of our vacation that I finally cracked Jayber Crow’s spine. And technically I didn’t even start with him; first I dipped my toes into The Country of Marriage. The second piece in the collection, titled simply “Poem,” is profound, in that understated way that Berry has with him. Find it and read it, if you can. I then moved on to “The Country,” but, like unto a traveler in a foreign land, I found I was not quite sure what he was saying. I set the slim volume of poems aside and picked up the floppy one-and-a-half-inch-thick paperback Jayber Crow.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, but, whatever it had been, what met me was something quite different.

“And so there we all were on a little wave of time lifting up to eternity, and none of us ever in time would know what to make of it. How could we? It is a mystery, for we are eternal beings living in time. Did I ever think that anybody would understand it? Yes. Once. I thought once that I would finally understand it.” — Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

Have you read it yet? If you have, perhaps you understand what I mean. If you haven’t, I’m not going to try to explain it to you, or the plot, or the “deeper meaning” of the story. My copy of the book starts with the following notice:

Persons attempting to find a “text” in this book will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a “subtext” in it will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise “understand” it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR

But this I will say. I have for many years wrestled with the question of whether love is still valid and valuable if not returned or reciprocated by its object—that is, whether unrequited love, on a human level, is a waste of time. Another novel I read a couple of years ago (Susan Scarlett’s The Man in the Dark) suggests that love is always worthwhile, regardless of the beloved person’s awareness of or response to that love. On the spiritual level this is of course perfectly sound—I believe God loves everyone He’s ever made, and that His love for them has never been wasted, regardless of their response to it—but could that possibly be true for a human being’s love for another human being (romantic love, I should clarify)? I was skeptical. I was suspicious. If I’m honest, I didn’t believe it could be.

Jayber Crow showed me that perhaps my ideas about love were too small. I’m still unsure what all the implications of that are, but I am grateful.

“But love, sooner or later, forces us out of time...of all that we feel and do, all the virtues and all the sins, love alone crowds us at last over the edge of the world. For love is always more than a little strange here...It is in the world, but is not altogether of it. It is of eternity. It takes us there when it most holds us here.” — Jayber Crow

I am also glad that I didn’t start reading the book as soon as we pulled out of our Kansas driveway and embarked on the interminable drive to the other side of Missouri. (According to Google Maps it takes about four hours to get to St. Louis from where I live, but I swear those four hours must each have ninety minutes in them.) Reading a great story from anywhere in the world can be a profound experience, of course, but reading a story so deeply rooted in a particular place as Jayber Crow is while traveling the very landscape you’re reading about is altogether more moving.

Or at least it was for me. I guess it’s the difference between factual knowledge and poetic knowledge; I knew before I went to Kentucky what asters and winding roads and river towns were like. I had even seen such things with my own eyeballs. But by the time I reached the point in the story where “purple asters with yellow centers” and sharply curving narrow roads make an appearance, I had seen roadsides thick with clusters of butterfly-bedecked wild purple asters, and I had felt my heart leap into my throat more than once as our rental van rounded hairpin turn after hairpin turn climbing up and up and around and through the hills and valleys.

And one of those heart-leaping, nail-biting rides led us to a river town—the little bump-on-the-bank community of Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, where some of my mama’s people were living way back in the 1790s. The whole couple blocks of it is now on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s a quaint tourist spot, mostly; a place for bikers to stop and enjoy a cold drink and a cigar in the middle of their ride, or an opportunity for city folks to get out of town and get the stink blown off them (as my grandpa used to say) in charming rural surroundings. The town is literally right on the river bluff, and you can look across the Ohio and see Rising Sun, Indiana, on the other side.

When we went into the general store for something to drink with our pulled pork sandwiches, we found a bluegrass session in full swing in the back room. I would’ve enjoyed staying a while to listen, but the store was crowded, and we still had miles to go before we slept. Even so, I felt I’d had a tiny peek into another of the (many) spots in the world where the people who made me came from, and when Jayber Crow described the setting and character of river towns like Goforth and Port William, my imagination had living images to draw on.

If you were expecting a book review or bit of literary analysis—or at least something flippant and funny—this time, well, I’m sorry. Well, not really. I finished Jayber Crow with the feeling that something in me had changed—or anyway wasn’t the same as it had been before. I don’t know yet how far that’s true, but it didn’t leave me in a flippant mood.

However, it’s worth mentioning the song “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” which is referenced at a pivotal moment in the plot. Jerome Kern and Otto Orbach wrote it in 1933 for the Broadway musical Roberta, which starred Bob Hope as an American owner of a fashion house in Paris (the type of unlikelihood upon which most of Bob Hope’s starring roles seem to depend). Two years later, RKO made it into a musical film starring Irene Dunn, Randolph Scott (of all people), and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. (Considering that all I remember of it is Fred’s performance of “I Won’t Dance,” I think it’s safe to say that it is not up there in the ranks of any of their collective best pictures.)

“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” became a hit song and was performed by the likes of Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Nat King Cole, Eartha Kitt, and Sarah Vaughan, just to name a few. In 1958, California R&B/doo-wop/rock-and-roll group The Platters recorded their own rendition, which became a huge hit and eventually made it into the Grammy Hall of Fame. I don’t think Jayber ever said which version he heard playing, though.

There’s a lot more that could be said about Wendell Berry himself, as well as his writing, but I’ll just leave you with the closing lines of a favorite poem, his “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”—

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

How’s the view from where you are?

Yrs,
Meli