The Achievement of Wendell Berry

The Hard History of Love

Fritz Oehlschlaeger

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780813130071
• eBook ISBN: 9780813140254
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

Chapter 1

Practices, Particulars, and Virtues

What Mules Taught Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry remarks in “A Native Hill” that he was born in “the nick of time.” If he had been born only five years later, he “would have begun in a different world, and would no doubt have become a different man.” Born in 1934 in Kentucky, where the Depression and later World War II “delayed the mechanization” process, Berry became “less a child of [his] time” than his contemporaries born in cities or in areas of the country where machine farming was closer to being the norm. He received the paradoxical grace of anachronism, grounded in memory of earlier and alternative ways of living. His “acceptance of twentieth- [and now twenty-first-] century realities”—when he does accept them—has thus had about it “a certain deliberateness.”¹ Here Berry’s language recalls Thoreau, who “went to the woods” because he “wished to live deliberately,” to ask quite consciously what he needed for life and what he was better off without—irrespective of what his contemporaries assumed.² Berry has brought similar deliberateness to his examination of contemporary American life, a deliberateness grounded in his sense that things have been, and can always be, different. His greatest similarity to Thoreau, with whom he is often compared, lies precisely in the radical quality of his questions and his hope. He is not one of the thousands who hack at the branches of evil, but one who tries always to go to the roots.

“One of the first disciplines imposed on me was that of a teamster” (NH, 171), Berry writes, and I believe thinking about this discipline offers us a particularly illuminating entry into Berry’s world. His learning as a boy to work teams of animals has much to do with a whole host of matters: his way of thinking about the integrity of farming, his love of the essay as a literary form, his emphasis on the virtues, his disdain for the word “environment,” his way of placing himself in relation to other American writers, perhaps even his being a Christian. The chapter takes up each of these matters in turn, showing the connections among them and their connections to Berry’s learning to work with mules. I do not mean to suggest that Berry consciously reflected on his history as a teamster when he decided to write essays or even that he “decided” to write essays. It would be more accurate to say that these are analogous practices or disciplines. Gravitating toward the essay as a form reflects a way of thinking about how and what we know that is grounded in practices like those of the teamster. To think about what it would mean for farming to regain its integrity depends first on our understanding it as a set of practices now subject to external forces inherently alien to its disciplines. Skill at a practice requires the ability to differentiate among particulars, a quality dependent on the cultivation of virtues like humility and patience. What the first part of the chapter explores, then, is a way of entering Berry’s world through a language of practices, particulars, and virtues. I use Alasdair MacIntyre’s analysis of practices as a way to clarify the concept and focus particularly on Berry’s understanding of farming as a practice.

The chapter’s second part explores the virtues Berry espouses in both his nonfiction and his fiction. My list, which is certainly not exhaustive, includes prudence, courage, justice, equity, friendship, and the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love or charity, along with the humility and patience mentioned above. The latter part of the chapter extends this introduction to Berry’s world by looking at three additional matters related to his decisions to return to Kentucky from New York in 1964 and to use draft animals—horses, not mules—in the early 1970s. These decisions represent the “free acceptance of proper limits” that Patrick J. Deneen has said lies at the heart of Berry’s conception of liberty.³ I consider first his resistance to using the popular term “environment” and why this has important implications for our thinking about our places on earth. One can see why the term would seem so inadequate to one who thinks of his own farm not just as something surrounding him, but as the source of his own life. Next I look at the way Berry tells the story, in “A Native Hill,” of his decision to leave New York, using that piece as a way to explore his relationship to other American writers who have decided either for or against deep connection to their native places. The final part of the chapter develops the idea that even Berry’s religious understanding may have its roots in his earliest experiences with Grandfather Berry’s mules.

We begin our entry into Berry’s world with his full description of the way he began to acquire the skills of the teamster:

One of the first disciplines imposed on me was that of a teamster. Perhaps I first stood in the role of student before my father’s father, who, halting a team in front of me, would demand to know which mule had the best head, which the best shoulder or rump, which was the lead mule, were they hitched right. And there came a time when I knew, and took a considerable pride in knowing. Having a boy’s usual desire to play at what he sees men working at, I learned to harness and hitch and work a team. I felt distinguished by that, and took the same pride in it that other boys my age took in their knowledge of automobiles. (NH, 171–72)

First it bears emphasizing that learning to work a team is a “discipline,” the acquisition of a teaching, and one that inherently involves learning and accommodating limits. Mules have ways of letting people know what the limits are. People working them will likely become not-so-naive realists, philosophically speaking. People thinking they are working their ideas of mules have probably gone into other trades by now.

The second thing to notice is that the discipline was “imposed on” Berry by his elders, who had had it, no doubt, imposed on them in turn. Ultimately it was imposed on all of them by mule nature and by the demands of making a living on relatively small, often hilly farms. There was nothing unfeeling about such imposition. It would have been irresponsible, even unloving, not to have imposed this discipline on Berry rigorously. Bringing a child up without the skills needed for life in a difficult world is irresponsible, and, as there are inherent dangers in working with mules, the loving thing to do is to make sure that a boy knows how to do so as safely as possible. Probably Berry felt at times that such discipline was punishment, but he could always see that there was nothing arbitrary about it. He could see that what the men insisted he learn was part of what they did every day. They were right before him all the time doing what they were teaching him to do. They seemed also to enjoy it, to do their work as part of a life they considered worth living and passing on, and so, in time, the child could be pleased and proud to have acquired the disciplines that made their life possible.

The third thing to notice is that no mule is like any other mule. Having different qualities, strengths, and temperaments, they must be known as particulars. One must learn what and how much each can do and how to match them properly. Learning what’s necessary will involve, especially at the beginning, direction by one who has had a long history of working with mules—a master—for only through such history does one learn what to look for in a mule, to know what makes a “good one.” As one works more and more with the animals, the good learner—the one who learns to pay the right sort of attention—will become an increasingly skilled teamster. But he or she will know, too, that there is always more to learn about managing teams and caring for the animals and that even the best knowledge of this kind is largely proximate. It cannot be known with the degree of certainty that one can achieve in other kinds of pursuits. The best standard for being a good teamster will always be those acknowledged to be the most skilled in the work.

What Berry was learning was a “practice,” in the sense defined by Alasdair MacIntyre. In After Virtue, MacIntyre defines a practice as “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity.” One result of such activity is that “human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.” Thus, tic-tac-toe and “throwing a football with skill” are not practices—because there can be no “systematic extension” of excellence in these—but the games of football and chess are. Or, to take an agricultural example, “Planting turnips is not a practice; farming is.”⁴

Several qualities of MacIntyrean practices are helpful in thinking about Berry’s work. First, as we have seen in regard to Berry’s learning the teamster’s art, the acquisition of a practice requires an authoritative teacher—the skilled practitioner—and a certain amount of prereflective training. Some things have simply to be learned first before they can be thought about. Second, practices involve external and internal goods. We might, to use one of MacIntyre’s examples, teach a child to play chess by rewarding her good performance with candy, but we hope that eventually “the achievement of a certain highly particular kind of analytical skill, strategic imagination and competitive intensity” will become reasons for the child to do her best at the game. Her happiness will thus lie in a certain kind of excellence “internal” to the practice itself (AV, 188). Or, as Berry puts it, “there came a time when I knew, and took a considerable pride in knowing” how “to harness and hitch and work a team” (NH, 171–72). Third, practices involve “standards of excellence and obedience to rules as well as the achievement of goods.” The standards need not be fixed and unchanging. Practices have histories; standards are “not themselves immune from criticism.” But “to enter into a practice is to accept the authority” of the “best standards” current; to be willing “to subject” one’s “own attitudes, choices, preferences and tastes” to those standards; and to judge one’s own performance “inadequate” when it fails to meet the standards (AV, 190). When practitioners are no longer willing to be judged by the standards, a practice risks losing authority over itself. This may happen because the lure of external goods is greater than fidelity to a practice’s internal goods, as it has been, for instance, for steroid-using baseball players.

This example specifically illuminates Berry’s discussions of what has happened to farming under the model of industrialized agriculture. Berry clearly understands farming as a practice, a discipline with its own evolved standards of good and bad work. “All good human work remembers its history,” he says in “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” and yet much of modern farming has sought to make its history irrelevant.⁵ Farming, like baseball, has been unable to prevent external goods from destroying its very status as a practice with an integrity of its own. This destruction of farming’s integrity is what Berry objected to as early as The Unsettling of America in response to then-secretary of agriculture Earl Butz’s proclaiming food “a weapon.” “Food is not a weapon,” Berry insists. Moreover, “to foster a mentality willing to use it as such” is to “prepare, in the human character and community, the destruction of the sources of food.” This conclusion may seem counterintuitive; after all, using food as a weapon depends upon either producing it or being capable of doing so. But for Berry the conclusion follows because the character of farmers and the health of farms are matters that cannot be left out of account. To begin thinking of food as a weapon, Berry suggests, is evidence that already the “fundamental integrities” of the practice of farming have been “devalued and broken.”⁶ It is not an overstatement, I believe, to suggest that the most important thrust of all of Berry’s work has been to help farming reacquire linguistic authority over itself, to give it again a way of understanding itself that will enable it to reestablish its integrity as a practice.

A good place to look for further understanding of how farming’s “fundamental integrities” came to be broken is Berry’s recent essay “Renewing Husbandry,” which focuses on another “landmark” moment in his past involving mules.⁷ The moment is in summer, 1950, and he is mowing a field with a “nearly new Farmall,” when his father sends a hired man with a “mowing machine and a team of mules to the field” where Berry is working. Berry notes again that he “had been born” into “the way of farming represented by the mule team” and “loved it,” and he knew, too, “irresistibly,” that these “mules were good ones” as they stepped “along beautifully at a rate of speed” only slightly slower than his own. Nevertheless he remembers how, “from the vantage point of the tractor,” he now “resented their slowness,” seeing them primarily as “in my way” (91). It has taken Berry a “long time” to learn how to read this incident, largely because the fifty-four years between its happening and his writing about it “have widened the context of the scene as circles widen on water around a thrown stone.” He now understands that the “team belonged to the farm,” to a kind of farming that had its own integrity because it could be sustained from its own resources, from “free solar energy.” The tractor, on the other hand, “belonged to” an “alien” economy dependent on “distant supplies,” “long supply lines,” and petroleum. The life made possible by the team, the life of Berry’s mule-working grandfather, was one “of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits.” With the tractor, and the apparent promise of “limitless cheap fossil fuel,” we “had entered an era of limitlessness,” or, at least, “the illusion thereof” (RH, 94–95).⁸

Berry’s point is not that all farming be done again with mules or horses, although these do have a place in today’s farming, and their role is likely to increase as we come to the unavoidable conclusion that we must depend less on fossil fuels and more on free solar energy. Berry does some of his own farming with horses, having made the decision to do so in the early 1970s, a decision he describes in The Gift of Good Land almost as a kind of metanoia: “Now I was turning around, as if in the middle of my own history, and taking up the old way again.”⁹ This language suggests Berry’s description in “A Native Hill” of another turn in the middle of his history, one we’ll look at in a moment, the decision to return to Kentucky from the cosmopolitan center of New York. Both decisions represent the free consent to limits, perhaps deriving from the intuition that freedom involves for any of us the trustful and ever-deeper exploration of the history and places that have made us who we are. We might think of the decision to farm with horses as Berry’s way of going deeper into the logic of his earlier decision, deeper into the fund of trust he had opened in his ancestors’ way of life.

To use terms Berry has adopted from Wallace Stegner, we might say he had decided to be a “sticker” rather than the literary equivalent of the American “boomer.”¹⁰ Or to use analogous terms, he decided for “nurture” rather than “exploitation,” concepts Berry has used to explore fundamental tensions in our attitudes toward the land. The exploiter asks of a “piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce,” whereas the “nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity?” (UA, 7). To think of food as a weapon, as Secretary Butz proposed, is to go wholly over to exploitation in the treatment of land: to consider the farm as merely one variable in a vast quantitative and calculative effort of output whose goal is national empowerment. To do so is to introduce so many alien valuations into farming that it inevitably destroys the integrity of farming as a practice and the health of farms along with it. If farming has one advantage over other practices—baseball, for example—in its attempt to reclaim its integrity it is that the ultimate authority in farming is not human beings, but the land itself. For fifty years we have treated the land otherwise, but ultimately we must learn to bring our actions into harmony with the “disciplines imposed” upon us by nature. We must learn again to live within limits, a fact whose growing acceptance no doubt contributes to the growing audience for Berry’s work. If we are to read Berry not as an elegist, but rather as a “futurist,” as David W. Orr suggests, we can do so by attending to how that work offers an extended exploration, an opening up, of the practices, particulars, and virtues of a way of life that understands itself to be limited.¹¹ Berry’s work offers opportunities, on all sorts of levels, for the kind of creative retrieval that is at the heart of the new agrarianism, one based on finding analogous ways to use the best practices of the past to create a sustainable future.

Learning to manage and care for teams of mules taught Berry an Aristotelian lesson: that pursuits of different kinds of knowledge carry with them different degrees of certainty. “It is a mark of the trained mind never to expect more precision in the treatment of any subject than the nature of the subject permits,” Aristotle writes in Book 1 of the Nicomachean Ethics. We cannot reasonably demand “logical demonstrations” from a teacher of rhetoric any more than we would accept “mere plausibility from a mathematician.”¹² We might argue, in fact, that failure to understand such elementary matters has led to the crisis in farming, at least as Berry depicts it: expe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Practices, Particulars, and Virtues: What Mules Taught Wendell Berry
• 2. Toward a Peaceable Economy for a Beloved Country: Berry as Agrarian, Citizen, and Patriot
• 3. Against the Church, For the Church: Berry and Christianity
• 4. Port William’s “Hard History of Love”: The Short Stories
• 5. Remembering the Names: Andy Catlett, Nathan Coulter, A World Lost, Remembering, and The Memory of Old Jack
• 6. Imagining the Practice of Peace in a Century of War: A Place on Earth, Hannah Coulter, and Jayber Crow
• 7. The “Art of Being Here”: The Poetry
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index