The Pencil and the Plough

Wendell Berry is a man who refuses to be categorized, because every label attached to him is a distortion of his views. Or so he feels. This lean and lanky, six-foot-something Kentucky farmer is every English city dweller’s idea of what a Kentucky farmer should look like. He has a long face, large hands, close-set eyes, a patient manner and an easy drawl. Yet he is not quite what he seems.

Born the son of a tobacco grower who was also a lawyer, a Baptist and hereditary Democrat, Wendell Berry was university-educated and began life as a university lecturer, when he started to write fiction and poetry. In 1965, having turned 30, he went back to the place where his family had farmed for five generations and bought himself a homestead called Lane’s Landing near Port Royal on the banks of the Kentucky River. When I met him fourteen years ago, I suggested he was what in England we call a gentleman farmer. He denied it flatly. ‘No. Because I don’t hire my work,’ he said. ‘I do it myself – I and my wife. Or we swap work with our neighbours.’ What is not in doubt is that Berry is a prolific writer. He writes mainly about farming – or rather, about the rural communities which 12,000 years of farming has sustained – and his novels are populated with characters like him and his neighbours. He himself lives by a strict code of ‘natural’ or Nature-friendly rules which he thinks we must all adopt if we are not to destroy ourselves in the long run. He writes with a pencil (he won’t have a computer), ploughs his acres with horses, and burns his own timber for fuel. But he cuts his logs with a chainsaw, flies on aeroplanes and drives a car. In some respects, it’s the philosophy of those religious dissenters the Amish – whom Berry admires – who use paraffin lamps at home but drive around in Cadillacs so long as they are painted black and have the chrome taken off. ‘It’s not that I would rule out any particular piece of equipment,’ Berry explained when we met. ‘It is that I would change the kind of consciousness that uses the equipment.’ To put a name to this consciousness is not easy. It is not quite Luddite, though Berry sympathizes with the loom-smashers of the early nineteenth century because they were acting in defence of their communities. It is not nostalgic, because he is looking forwards, to a recovered state of environmental equilibrium. It is not quite ‘holistic’, a word he rejects as a slogan combining, as he put it, ‘disdain of a plain word like “whole” and fear of a forthright word like “holy”.’ Nor is it organic. Berry doesn’t talk about organic farming but about ‘good’ agriculture, ‘because there are good farms that may use a little herbicide’. ‘Hillbilly’ doesn’t describe him, either – he is an educated man as well as a man of the soil. Even less could you insult him with the name of redneck. This polemicist is not an angry man to meet, but he can certainly write angrily about those he regards as enemies of the natural order: agribusiness, the big corporations, the medical industry, those who commodify eating and sex, those who create superfluous needs for ‘frivolous’ economic growth. Berry has no time for the Republicans whom he accuses of being in league with big business, ‘giving the country away to the rich’, but describes himself as a Jeffersonian Democrat. ‘That is, I believe in putting small ownership of usable properties ahead of the interests of capital. I don’t think that the behaviour of money in large piles ought to be permitted to destroy the security of small livelihoods.’ Centralization means an ever-growing dependency and vulnerability. It may seem cheap now but it will be more expensive in the end, he says. Better, he thinks, to go back to the idea that a nation is a collection of local economies, more or less self-sufficient, in which townspeople and their country neighbours contract with one another for goods and services. Eco-warrior, environmentalist, communitarian, anti-globalist, reactionary, Utopian, Pantisocrat? All or none of the above? It is hard to say. ‘I think the problem is I’m some kind of anomaly,’ Berry told me in 1992. He cannot say that now. For the curious fact is that Wendell Berry is exactly the kind of energy-conscious and waste-averse citizen that we are all being encouraged to become in the fight against global warming. He got there long ago, before the politicians had even thought of it. But there is more to him than that. I see the pencil and the plough not merely as signs of a naïve concern for non-renewable resources. I think they stand for something deeper – a gesture of protest, a fist shaken in the face of a world that has forgotten the virtues of simplicity, frugality and self-reliance.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 14 © Christian Tyler 2007