The enduring appeal of Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry, the writer, farmer, and conservationist, has been part of what binds my family for most of my life. My father grew up in Henry County, Kentucky, the same place where Wendell, who has published more than 60 books, still lives at age 91. For my dad, who occasionally spent time with Wendell and his brother John before leaving for California at age 18, reading his work was a way to stay connected to a place he never entirely left.
Growing up in New York City and later its suburbs, my sister, brother, and I had the slimmest of connections to Kentucky—we basically knew it as the place my father had been eager to move on from. But then my dad started sharing some of Wendell’s poems and writings with us.
His work gave shape and heft to a place we’d visited only two or three times. Wendell let us know what it meant to be from Henry County. And he let us in on what he had experienced and learned from living there—the healing power of the land, the neighborliness that can arise from small-town living, the ability to see the sacred in small moments, the enduring draw of place.
Without much thought or deliberation, we started sharing his work with our friends. We just naturally wrapped his writing—his poems mostly—into our toasts and eulogies and birthday letters. His words lent so much more weight and beauty to our own sentiments, and they were about home as well.
When my father died in the Bay Area, where he’d lived for 35 years, it seemed right that the number of Wendell Berry poems read during the satisfyingly noisy celebration of his life—the Cal marching band included—ran into the double digits.
By then, we felt such a kinship with the Berry family we’d been reaching out to them for years. We’re friends with his daughter, Mary Berry, who founded The Berry Center to continue her dad’s legacy. His granddaughter, Virginia Berry Aguilar, carried one of my children’s books in The Berry Center bookstore.
And when my oldest son started writing poetry, it seemed only natural that my father would send Wendell a poem for his review. The poet, well into the famous stage of his life, had the grace to write back.
The easy familiarity we felt with Wendell Berry obscured his enormous popularity. For years, I had no idea how many others knew who he was. But that is part of his appeal, says Mary Berry, 67. “I think a reason he is beloved by so many is because people are comforted by him.”
Mary told me she’s been aware of her father’s fame for as long as she can remember. Growing up, she and her mother, Tanya Amyx Berry, and younger brother, Den, became accustomed to being followed and written about. “People would film our family from the road with video cameras,” she says. “The local paper would write about everything that we were doing.”
Wendell never wanted to be famous. Mary describes a meeting in Manhattan sometime in the ‘60s between her dad and his team at Scribner. One of the editors told him ‘We’re going to make you famous.’ “He said, ‘No you’re not,’” says Mary. Shortly afterward, Wendell found a small publisher, Counterpoint Press, with which he has worked ever since. “He wanted to say what he had to say,” says his daughter.
Wendell has always preferred to be on his farm in Henry County, about an hour outside of Lexington, which he and Tanya bought in 1965. Early on, he developed a practice of writing in the morning and farming in the afternoon.
He grew burley tobacco, Kentucky’s once-big cash crop, and almost all the food they needed, including vegetables from their garden and meat from their sheep. To farm, he drew on sustainable, soil-nourishing methods, including rotating his crops, ensuring that the soil is never bare, and relying on horses to work his fields and animal manure to fertilize them.
He shared his views on good farming and his disdain for industrial agriculture in his 1977 book The Unsettling of America. His fierce critique of the ways big ag treats land as a commodity to be exploited rather than a living entity to be cared for changed his life. He turned from a writer with a largely regional following into someone famous.
Called upon to speak all over the country, he talked about the vital role family farms can play in strengthening rural communities and about small and midsize farming as an opportunity to steward the land. His work is often credited with helping lay the foundations of today’s regenerative agriculture movement. For an upcoming podcast series marking the book’s 50th anniversary, Mary plans to ask readers how it changed their lives.
Mary is the eighth generation of Berrys to live in Henry County. Shortly after graduating from the University of Kentucky in 1981, she married Steve Smith, had the first of their three daughters, and started farming full-time. They began as dairy farmers and grew burley tobacco as a cash crop, eventually adding organic vegetables, pastured poultry, and grass-fed beef.
It was hard work, and it didn’t pay well. Farming full-time revealed something to Mary that she hadn’t fully appreciated: It’s tough to survive as a small farmer without a second income. “For all these years we thought we were going to be joining the local food system that we kept hearing about, so we were farming and working hard,” she says. “But it just never happened.”
In 2009, Mary met with her father for what she calls a road-to-Damascus moment. This isn’t working, she told him. We’ve either got entrepreneurial farmers or industrial agriculture, but nothing between. In spite of all your good work, we’re not getting anywhere. And I have a lot that I want to work on. “He told me, it sounds like you’re starting a Center,” says Mary.
Mary founded The Berry Center in 2011 to put her dad’s work to work. Among its major initiatives is Our Home Place Meat, modeled after the Burley Tobacco program established in the 1930s by her grandfather, John Berry Sr., a farmer, lawyer, and Kentucky House Representative.
The Burley Tobacco program was inspired by John’s own father who, on one terrible day in 1906, sold his entire tobacco crop for nothing. “He would tell us about the men leaving the warehouses with tears running down their faces,” says Mary. “We were raised on that story.” Years later, still troubled by the vulnerability of small farmers, John legislated production quotas and guaranteed minimum prices to give them a reliable source of income.
Wendell stepped into his role as a public figure, in spite of himself, because of that story, Mary says. “This belief that we can stand for something and do something about it is just so important. That’s what I’ve learned from my family.”
The Burley Tobacco program is now gone—Congress made sure of that when it pulled the plug on it in 2004, removing a reliable source of income for Mary and Steve and many other small farmers. But Our Home Place Meat, a cooperative that helps farmers sell grass-fed meat to regional markets, is making it easier for families to farm full-time. The plan is to replicate it in other communities.
“What’s happened to rural places is not inevitable,” says Mary, “it’s destruction by design. That’s a powerful thing to believe. If you let inevitability wash over you, you just don’t matter anymore.”
I’ve sometimes wondered what it’d be like to grow up with Wendell Berry as a father. Mary says she “complained a lot.” She’d have liked the chance to drink a Coke now and then, was totally embarrassed about the composting privy in the bathroom, and wanted a television—her parents still have no screens in the house.
Water became less of a problem after her parents installed a cistern in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. But Mary and her brother still sometimes took baths in the river. “My aunt would give us soap on a rope for Christmas so the soap wouldn’t be carried away by the current,” she says.
“I told my parents I didn’t understand why we had to do everything the hardest way possible,” says Mary. “But I adored them.”
Though her father was busy writing, farming, and teaching a couple of days a week at the University of Kentucky, the family met up for three meals a day, farmed together, and often took walks in the woods on Sundays.
She and her dad also connected around his frequent asks that she help out the neighbors. Not a problem, says Mary. She liked the work of bringing in the hay or tobacco. More, it was a chance to sit with her neighbors, hear what was on their minds, and take them up on their offers of iced tea, buttered biscuits, and fried chicken.
“It was a wonderful way to grow up,” she says. “That’s the beauty of this culture. There were other people from whom I learned so much.”
This past October, Wendell Berry released another book, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, and once again the reviews are good. The Wall Street Journal writes: “Gratitude seems like an appropriate response to this short and heartfelt work, which further develops a vision of Americanness that eschews the familiar values of progress, mobility and power.”
As with the reviewer, I find it reassuring that there are no unexpected twists when it comes to Wendell Berry. “Daddy is exactly as he appears to be,” says Mary. “He has not enriched himself. He’s been true to his beliefs, and that’s meaningful to people.”
She has read the letters people send him asking for help with a relationship or a job they find meaningless. On book tours, she’s seen the lines, sometimes wrapped around a city block, of people waiting to hear what he has to say. “People are looking for advice,” she says, “for something to believe in.”
About a week ago, my family held a low-key memorial for my mom. Before all 19 of us headed up the California coast for her service, Mary sent me her dad’s most recent work, newly published in The New Yorker, because I’d told her I was planning to read one of her father’s poems.
I ended up reading two—the one she sent me, “Our Loved Ones,” where he writes about existing in the in-between state that opens up to us when someone we love dies, and another, “Gratitude,” copied out by my mother a few years before she died, about—most simply—the gift of family.
A few months from now, my sister, brother, and I, and our families, will come together again, this time in Henry County. We’ll bring my mom’s ashes, and bury them beside my dad’s. After spending his entire adult life outside Kentucky, my father chose to return once more to Henry County, where his sister, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents all lived and died.
It’ll be a quiet ceremony, with just a few of us, held in front of the gravestones marked with my parents’ names and the years they lived. As ever, we will read one of Wendell Berry’s poems, maybe more.
How fascinating! Xoxo
Just beautiful.