Wendell Berry’s Living Room

Abstract

Wendell Berry’s Living Room David Heddendorf (bio) In the summer of 1963, returning to a place filled with old family memories, Wendell Berry rebuilt the cabin on the Kentucky River where as a boy he went to fish, swim, and loaf. The cabin, known simply as the Camp, had been flooded several times, and Berry decided to tear down the crumbling structure and reposition it higher up the wooded bank. He recounts his progress, together with the early history of the Camp, in “The Long-Legged House” (1969), an essay with deliberate echoes of Thoreau and Walden. Like his New England predecessor Berry describes in detail his wild surroundings, observing the warblers, herons, phoebes, squirrels, and chipmunks with whom he shares the trees and shoreline. His reclaimed house gives him intimate access to the native creatures until he feels that, like them, he belongs to the place. Thoreau exults in untrammeled wildness, but Berry pointedly leaves his mark on the forest. Even before deciding to rebuild the Camp, he begins every visit by cutting back the weeds and brush that have resumed their conquest of the site. “To ever arrive at what one would call home even for a few days,” he writes, “a decent, thoughtful approach must be made, a clarity, an opening.” Years later, clearing the ground for the cabin, he shakes off his gloom at “a human place gone wild” and enjoys the excitement of newly reopened possibilities. He has begun to fashion a human dwelling, one that imposes order on random growth and that checks untamed exuberance. Berry’s by now familiar compromise between the wild and the domestic finds its clearest expression in the single room he devises for his cabin. “I have never been able to work with any pleasure facing a wall,” he complains, “or in any other way fenced off from things. I need to be in the presence of the world. I need a window or a porch, or even the open outdoors.” So, when [End Page 282] he builds his house in the woods, he installs a large window, with a work-table commanding a view of the river. Additional windows salvaged from the original Camp turn the house into “a container of shifting light.” At his perch overlooking woods and water, where he can look up and see hawks and ducks and can listen for the sycamore warbler’s “peculiar quaking seven-note song,” Berry writes in the mornings before resuming his afternoon carpentry—snug in his “satisfactory nutshell of a house,” with the world’s busy life going on before him, and the world’s light admitted around him. The book Berry worked on during these months was A Place on Earth, his long novel first published in 1967. Many of its characters have since reappeared in “the Port William Membership”: the protagonist, Mat Feltner, whose son Virgil becomes missing in action in the spring of 1945; Virgil’s wife, Hannah; Old Jack, the crusty farmer and beloved busybody; Jayber Crow, the philosophical barber; Burley Coulter, a plainspoken farmer and sometime rogue; and numerous others. Although a town street and planted fields replace the wilderness setting, A Place on Earth no less than “The Long-Legged House” is concerned with belonging to a place, with knowing and caring for its inhabitants and natural features. Both cultivated countryside and untamed forest impose responsibility on their human occupants for the things that grow there and for an inhabitable future. Just as Berry must learn to respect his neighbors and the fragile riverbank he shares with them, so the small farmers of Port William guard the health of the land as they tend their crops and livestock. Each act of clearing, fencing, ploughing, or building both adds to and subtracts from a place, and the tiller or woodsman tries to leave his surroundings at least no worse than he found them. Like his narrative of the Camp, Berry’s novel also dramatizes the tension between wildness and order, spontaneity and restraint, openness and enclosure—and does so by its very form. In A Place on Earth digressions and subplots test the boundaries of novelistic structure, and an anarchic rowdiness interrupts...