Wendell Berry: Farmer, Ecologist and Author

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The impulses of fecundity and fertility, that other cultures have honored in rites and ceremonies, we've put down and covered up. We don't have harvest festivals anymore. We don't really have anything festive anymore. The mad farmer is full of celebration and he's full of the praise of fertility and rutting and loving and dancing and singing. Some literary critic is always saying that he really is sane. The mad farmer's sane, of course, but he says himself, "To be sane in a mad time / is bad for the brain, worse / for the heart."

PLOWBOY: Have critics given your work a rough time?

BERRY: I remember an attack or two. But the ones I remember best didn't come from critics. A friend gave a copy of The LongLegged House to a professional military person and this person looked in it and took it right down and put it in the furnace. He apparently thought it a piece of Communist subversion. Then another couple gave the same book to some friends who were kind of radical types, and they wrote back that I was an "anti-communist individualist", which seems to be a term of censure.

But it's awfully hard, when you write arguments, to avoid the tone that implies that you know what other people ought to do. My work is best, I think, when I talk as a person who's not an authority on anything but his own experience. I'm very much aware of this and have quit writing arguments for the time being: After finishing the essays in A Continuous Harmony, I went with a great deal of relief back to a novel.

PLOWBOY: Does your new novel take up the story where you ended in A Place On Earth?

BERRY: In a way it does. After I finished A Place On Earth I could see that I would probably write a novel sometime about Old Jack, and the new book's going to be called The Memory of Old Jack. It's about the last day that Old Jack lives and about his life as he recalls it and meditates on it, and about his influence on his friends and his survival in their memories.

I've tried in the figure of Old Jack to write a kind of a criticism and celebration of my grandfather Berry's generation., born about the time of the Civil War. I think that was the last generation in this country until now, and maybe for some time to come, that had a chance to become a truly indigenous agricultural community. They identified with their land and took good care of it, or the best of them did. But then the opportunity that they represented was destroyed by adverse markets and social fashions. They had a terrible struggle, and so when there was a chance opening up in the cities for their children to get away, they couldn't advise them to do anything else. I remember my grandmother saying to me, "Don't ever farm."

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