I have read poetry by Wendell Berry but I have never read any of his fiction. Judging from Hannah Coulter, published in 2004, his prose is like his poetry: lyrical, peaceful, elegiac to farm and country, and spiritually radiant. But quietly so. Berry above all is quiet. Firm and persuasive, but quiet. Like his main characters, who live off the land and for the land and who accept that they are of the land and when dead, will return to the land.
Berry paints for us a beautiful place, this land where generations of the narrator, Hannah Coulter, have lived, and which she fears none of those generations to come, will know. It is a part of America that seems foreign to me in many ways; I’ve heard of such places but the beauty of it is that they exist. Berry is telling us that they will not exist forever. These quiet towns of good, decent, hard-working people, came out of the Depression with values which were sharpened by World War Two, and a way of life made more precious by the losses endured in that war, and the things that were seen by the soldiers in that war.
Hannah tells us the story of her life in this rural village of Port William, Kentucky. If Barbara Kingsolver or Louise Erdrich or Marilyn Robinson were telling this same story, they would add in certain details of dysfunction and abuse, of misery and ecstasy. There is something not quite true in Berry’s world of Port Williams (too good to be so). Nevertheless we believe that Hannah is a woman who does not dwell on the pains of human nature. Instead she gives us a picture of the human kindnesses that allows her people to endure the most harrowing and difficult grief that we all suffer through, the sorrow of losing someone we love: “It was a kindness of doing whatever we could think of that might help or comfort one another. But it was a kindness too of forebearance, of not speaking, of not reminding. And the care of not reminding reminded us, every day, always, of what we could not mention without being overpowered and destroyed.”
Berry is able to distill the emotions labored through, sometimes for years, to endure the loss of a spouse or a child or a sibling. Deaths that are more timely are also mourned in Port Williams, but it is a mourning of missing the person, not of pain for the time lost, time that both sides needed.
In addition to being a beautiful elegy to a way of life and a type of person who cherishes that life, Hannah Coulter is most firmly an anti-war book. In the narrator’s view, World War Two, and the Battle of Okinawa which her second husband lived through but never, ever talked about, are the worst that humans are capable of, the hell on earth that humans can create by forgetting love and compassion and the suffering already endure for centuries (and endured by Christ for his people: Berry is a religious man). The strange thing about the book is that the Vietnam War is never mentioned and certainly people from Port William would have died in that war as well. But the focus of the book is World War Two and the fifty plus years after the war in which the people of Port William lived on: “we will live through this” as one of the characters says in times of trouble, but the shadow of war was always there. On the best of days, the shadow of war throws in beautiful relief the life that survives; in the worse of times, it reminds us of the hell we are capable of creating on earth. Much better to create the peace that is found in Wendell Berry’s Port William.
