Anytime I start to think I can write, or that I might qualify as a respectable writer, I read something written by someone who excels, and then I remember why I am only a Mere Blogger. Last week, I began Wendell Berry’s Andy Catlett: Early Travels. I am only a third of the way through, and I am already in love. {My husband always questions my fidelity when I am reading Berry.}
Berry is interesting to me because he is so simple. He doesn’t spend a thousand pages developing his characters like Dostoevsky. He doesn’t overflow with witty banter like Austen and Wilde. He doesn’t weave intricate, sometimes surprising plots like the Bronte sisters or Dickens. He doesn’t create fantastical worlds like Tolkien, Lewis, or, more recently, Wilson.
And yet his simplicity is every bit a piece of perfection.
What can I say? I already told you I am in love.
Berry shows us his understanding of the human condition:
For I had not grown, as I preferred to think, into the vaguest semblance of adulthood, but rather into a serious and lasting form of nuisancehood. As even I had noticed, I could not be good at home and at school at the same time, which meant that I was a worry to my parents all the time.
And his understanding of the minds of small towns:
Hargrave, though it seemed large to me, was a small town that loved its connections with the greater world, had always aspired to be bigger, richer, and grander than it was, and had always apologized to itself for being only what it was. When school was out, I lived mostly in the orbit of the tiny village of Port William, which, so long as it remained at the center of its own attention, was entirely satisfied to be what it was.
He can turn a perfect phrase:
At the start of the morning you could feel him aiming himself into the day.
And if you know Berry, you know he writes about a world which once was, but is now lost. And you can feel him mourning, and you enter into mourning with him, because you know that what we received in its place is somehow lacking. It was thought to be an improvement, but on fundamental levels it has not proven to be so.
Every Berry novel I read {and every essay and poem, too} contributes to the picture in my mind of what was lost, and how. Perhaps that is the most interesting thing. Many worlds have been lost over time, and the fascinating points of the story are often in the how. Take this, for instance:
Sugar was rationed because of the war, and people were encouraged to drink their coffee without it. Miss Angela, a patriot, did not supply sugar until specifically asked.
[snip]
The war changed things. It was changing the world, and it was changing us. I didn’t know it then, but sugar rationing was changing the way we would live after the war. Businesses and restaurants were given larger rations of sugar than households, and this helped to shift the dependence of households from their own kitchens to commercial bakeries. Betty Crocker was the “homemaker” who got the most sugar, and she did more and more of the baking.
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