Wendell Berry's Crusty Memory of Old Jack

memory of old jack wendell berry — Manchester, Kentucky. (Unsplash)

Jack Beechum is 92 years old on “the chill whitening dawn” of his last day, still able enough to stand at the edge of the porch of the kind of hotel that in 1952 was not yet called an assisted living facility. But he can no longer decrypt the accelerants upending the world around him. It’s not his world anymore. His Kentucky’s Port William is mostly memory, and there his mind more familiarly shelters.

He thinks back to the day 64 years ago when buying two “black, mealy-nosed mare mules” was a “celebration of himself,” an untasseled commencement to his confidence. He knew then that he would pay off the debt on what had been his father’s farm, the farm that would prove to be his only true love, his only matrimony, with consequences as desolating to his human relationships as they were exalting to this Savonarola of the land. The land was his cathedral. Walls and roofs betrayed him. They did not always protect those inside.

Early in The Memory of Old Jack (1974), one of Wendell Berry’s eight novels (and 57 stories) in the Port William series he began to write in 1955, just as William Faulkner was eulogizing Yoknapatawpha County with his Fable, Jack recalls the day he watched his two brothers Hamilton and Mathew ride off and never return from the Civil War. “Strangers from somewhere else were trying to tell them what to do, and they would not stand for it.” Kentucky was Confederate country, and Port William was in Kentucky.

“Why they went may still be a matter of conjecture,” either Berry or Jack remembers. “Even in the days of their grandfather the farm had not been a large one; there had never been more than a family or two of slaves; the family had no life-or-death stake in any of the institutions that its two sons undertook to defend.” That line, there had never been more than a family or two of slaves, slices like a transom into a society’s miscalibration of America’s deepest scar, to which Berry–grandson of slaveholders–confessed in his Hidden Wound (1968) even as he’s written about it with admirable tenacity and insights at times rivaling C. Vann Woodward’s Strange Career of Jim Crow. But that’s how Hamilton’s and Mathew’s generation must’ve seen it: what’s the big deal with owning a couple of families of slaves? (Isn’t that how the traders of Jamestown saw buying the first slaves off that Dutch pirate ship in 1619?)

Jack is 4 years old when his brothers leave on a September morning in 1862–it is a September morning on that hotel porch, too–and he’s not even sure if he is remembering their departure as he saw it or as he was told of it. Jack is Berry’s nod to the shoals of memory. So much of what we remember is really not memory but interpretation at second, third, fourth hand. It is mythologized myth. “This is not simply the knowledge of retrospect,” Old Jack’s narrator writes; “because the vision of their departure met the knowledge of their deaths in the anachronistic mind of a child, the two have fused, so that it seems to him, in his vision, that he watches them depart with the clear foreknowledge that they will not return. And they did not.”

Berry’s prose is a dry sob of vespers as he describes a grief Jack is disallowed to see in his mother. Bottling it up against his will, he will nurse a grief he will feel all his life as his mother the following spring dies, leaving the house “infected with a sense of loss and diminishment.” By the time he’s 6 Jack’s character was set, “turning away from the house, from the losses and failures and confinements of his history, to the land, the woods and fields of the old farm, in which he already sensed an endlessly abounding and unfolding promise.”

We are only halfway through the second chapter. Berry’s prose, like Jack’s memory, will not recapture the power of those early pages in this calendric book of a dozen chapters, though he writes so naturally well that the descent is barely perceptible (you have to be a bit of an ass to detect it) except when Berry becomes so mawkish as to parody himself: “She had the fierce ideological integrity of her ambition. She had the closely ordered calm of her household and her ways.” Or this description of Jack making love to his wife Ruth, which I found both Nabokovian and a candidate for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award, which alas began only in 1993 and was coitus finivit in 2020, and whose winners have included John Updike (lifetime achievement, of course) and Tom Wolfe (for his bare-notch-above-perv Charlotte Simmons).

Here goes Berry: “Under his hand her flesh contracted. He could feel it, her flesh drawing away beneath his hand. He was overpowering to her. His body bent above her in the dark was like a forest at night, full of vast spaces and shadows and the distant outcries of creatures whose names she did not know. He was a strange country and a loneliness to her. And she was doubly lonely because he feared nothing; so deeply did he belong to the place he had brought her to that even its solitude was not lonely to him.” No Casanovian metaphors of torrid furnaces and thirst-quenching milky river between little globes for this guy.

The Memory of Old Jack is what we call today a “celebration of life,” a phrase that did not exist when Berry wrote the novel (the New York Times’s first use of the phrase was in a 1960 headline over the review of a biography of the dancer Isadora Duncan, whose “Art Was a Dionysian Celebration of Life”), especially not with the meaning we ascribe it today–as a counterpoint to the inevitable, or a reversal to ancient Egyptian customs of mummifying death as a joyful continuation of life by other means.

What faith there is in this book is in the land, not in the hereafter. Jack’s memory wants to memorialize, justify, excuse, confess, atone, settle a few scores. Like all celebrations of life it can be moving and terribly sad, which fits Berry’s elegiac tone, but also maudlin, a bit ridiculous, and at times cruel, as when he describes his daughter Clara and her husband, the rich banker Glad Pettit, whom he decides to refer to–to his face–as “Irwin,” as if Berry calling him Pettit (French for “small”) hadn’t made the point. There’s no hiding Jack’s didactic contempt for those and what he disapproves of. He wants to sell Pettit his farm to ensure its future. Pettit politely has none of it.

I get irritated with presumptions of innate virtues like the military, the land, the cloth or the stethoscope lording it over lesser stations of life, as if any such hierarchy exists, or has the right to exist, in an egalitarian society. Berry beatifies the land like a latter-day Thomas Jefferson, reupping the paradox of agrarian zealots: they are great preachers of democracy, but when lesser breeds opt for more urban heresies, they become as judgmental as Puritans.

Cue Old Jack’s last judgment of Glad Pettit: “Glad was no longer the lean and muscular young man he had been when he married. He was fleshy now and somewhat stooped in the shoulders; he had been more weakened by the last fifteen years than Jack had been by the last fifty. But his superfluous weight, covered as it was by a tailored suit, set off by his graying hair, a diamond ring, and an excellent cigar, somehow made him look richer, more substantial, more dignified than ever. As his consort, Clara had become plump and opulent. Though she was still pretty, her looks had somehow become merely decorative. She had made of herself a sort of portable occasion for the ostentatious gifts of her husband, a sort of bodiless apparition in fine clothes—useless, so far as Jack could tell, for either work or love.” The prose is rich, the polemic richer, the author’s meanness richest. It is an accumulation of sneers bespittled by value judgments: Pettit made it rich in the city. Jack doesn’t like him for it and makes his daughter pay.

Jack is not kinder to Ruth, though he’s not to blame. His courtship is ardent and sincere. He thinks his love is, too. But we are to understand–we’re told, not shown–that Jack has a violent side, and that Ruth wants to remake him in her family’s image. He was “accustomed to an exciting manhood,” he had been “a dancer, a drinker, a wencher, a fighter,” all of which Ruth mummifies in a marriage based “on the condition that he become better than he was.” “And so when he became her suitor and then her husband, Jack did not exactly occupy a vacancy; he usurped the place of some well-educated young minister or lawyer or doctor whose face and name were perhaps not yet known to the mother and daughter but whose place had nevertheless been appointed. It was this hypothetical and shadowy figure that she held up to Jack as a standard.”

It is an impossible life. Their first child is stillborn and wedges them further apart. Clara doesn’t bring them together so much as she prolongs their agony. Her playfulness with Jack is distant. The land doesn’t interest her. Jack has an affair with Rose, the eccentric widow of an eccentric doctor. With Rose, “there was a joy in him that overrode all outside itself, she had so imparadised his mind.” But the affair reads like a device Berry throws in there to make yet another point. Jack is lonely. Jack’s virility is going to waste. Jack will not be sorry, until he is, but not for Ruth: while he’s away on a trip, Rose burns in a fire. I thought: Berry’s making this interesting. Ruth the arsonist murderer. But his fertility aside, Berry is no serially-sexual Simenon. The Rose interregnum is discarded from the narrative like so much ash and Jack reverts to Ruth until she, too, is discarded by a failing heart, maybe broken by the Jack she never remade in her image.

The French critic in Benoît Denis in his analysis of Simenon’s second novel featuring Maigret describes the second-most famous detective in the world (after the duller Sherlock Holmes, alas), as a “mature and experienced man, with an unusual strength of character and yet having come from everything, neither entirely good nor entirely bad, but with a lucidity about himself and others which condemns him to solitude and disenchantment.” That pretty much sums up Jack, though if he’d had a bit more of Maigret in him he wouldn’t so indifferently have made a cold case of that fire. Berry’s writing tends to meander that way, like the scraggled threads of a Goodwill sweater.

Berry grants Old Jack near-mythical wisdom for having endured so long. Longevity makes you a spectator to change, and wisdom ought to make you a participant with change. Not so Old Jack, who opts for the stifling conservatism of militant nostalgia. His celebration of life is worth attending, but I felt I needed air when it was over and didn’t mind catching it in the pallid surroundings of my exurban sprawl.

Am I being unfair? “Certainly,” André Gide wrote about Oscar Wilde after just beginning to read him, “I was a little unfair to his work and I made too much of it lightly, I mean: before having known it sufficiently.” Not that I am comparing my housefly’s nicks to Gide’s gigantism, but Old Jack is the first Berry I’ve completed, and as much as any work stands on its own, as individual as any human being, there is at least some unfairness inherent to criticism of a work divorced from its oeuvre. I’ll say this about Old Jack: I’m happier for having read it, and it hasn’t stifled my desire to read more of Berry’s Port William.