Wendell Berry | Stray Thoughts

Hannah Coulter is Wendell Berry’s seventh book, published 44 years after Nathan Coulter. But the action picks up right where Nathan Coulter left off. I’ve only read these two books and Jayber Crow, but I understand that Hannah appears in some of the other Port William books as well.

Hannah tells her story as an elderly woman, twice widowed, looking back over her life. She was born in 1922 as the only daughter to her parents. Their farm was owned by her father’s mother, Grandmam, who lived and worked with the family.

Hannah had responsibilities around the farm from the time she was five or six. By the age of twelve, when her mother died, Hannah could do “a woman’s part.” She tells of her father’s remarrying a woman who “lived up to the bad reputation of stepmothers.” Grandmam watched out for Hannah, though, providing for her to go to high school and secure her first job.

Hannah met her first husband, Virgil Feltner, at work. He died in WWII while Hannah was expecting her first child. Hannah lived with her in-laws, who loved her like a daughter.

Then Nathan Coulter came back from the war and helped the Feltners out on their farm. Hannah tells of his budding interest, then hers, until they finally married and moved into the fixer-upper farm he bought.

Along with the details of their lives together, Hannah shares the history of the times and the community of neighbors that they called “The Membership.” The Membership wasn’t an official club; rather, that’s what they called the group who lived near each other and helped each other on their farms.

Over the course of Hannah’s long life, Port William saw many changes. Hannah decried many of the changes, like not knowing many of the families in the community any more, some technologicaladvances, and so on. Many of the “Membership’s” young people did not stay on the family farms, including Hannah’s.

Hannah Coulter reminds me of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books in the sense of showing how people used to live and how things changed over the decades of one person’s life. But Berry’s voice is quite different from Wilder’s.

Hannah is my favorite of the three Port William books I have read so far. There’s an unfortunate smattering of bad language, as with the other books. Michele Morin had hosted a discussion of Jayber Crow (which I think is what prompted me to read it) and mentioned once that it sometimes felt that Berry took the microphone in place of Jayber. I had that same feeling in a couple of places here, particularly in passages about the war.

But Hannah seems the most authentically Christian of Berry’s characters that I’ve encountered so far. And the main strength of Berry’s writing is the lyricism, the sense of place, community, love, and relationships.

A few quotes that stood out to me:

Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

The living can’t quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can’t because they don’t. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.

I began to trust the world again, not to give me what I wanted, for I saw that it could not be trusted to do that, but to give unforeseen goods and pleasures that I had not thought to want.

Sometimes…I wander about in this house that Nathan and I renewed, that is now aged and worn by our life in it. How many steps, wearing the thresholds? I look at it all again. Sometimes it fills to the brim with sorrow, which signifies the joy that has been here, and the love. It is entirely a gift.

It is hard to say what it means to be at work and thinking of a person you loved and love still who did that same work before you and who taught you to do it. It is a comfort ever and always, like hearing the rhyme come when you are singing a song.

He was a humorous, good-natured man, maybe because he hoped for little and expected less and took his satisfactions where he found them.

A lifetime’s knowledge shimmers on the face of the land in the mind of a person who knows. The history of a place is the mind of an old man or an old woman who knows it.

Even old, your husband is the young man you remember now. Even dead, he is the man you remember, not as he was but as he is, alive still in your love. Death is a sort of lens, though I used to think of it as a wall or a shut door. It changes things and makes them clear. Maybe it is the truest way of knowing this dream, this brief and timeless life.

Any time an eighteen-year-old boy tells you not to worry, you had better worry.

Members of Port William aren’t trying to get someplace. They think they are someplace.

One theme that comes up continually is something Nathan says. When unexpected changes come, even his own terminal diagnosis, Nathan says he’s just going to “live right on.” “Living right on called for nothing out of the ordinary. We made no changes. We only accepted the changes as they came.”

I listened to the audiobook nicely read by Susan Denaker.

Have you read Hannah Coulter or others of Berry’s books? What did you think?

Nathan Coulter was Wendell Berry’s first book, published when he was 27. This is the beginning of his eight novels set in Port William, a fictitious town based on his own Port Royal.

Nathan grows up on a family farm in Port William with his brother Tom, who he usually just calls Brother, and his parents. His father’s parents live next door on the farm that had been passed down through the generations.

Nathan’s mother is sick, so he and his brother are told to stay out of the house in the afternoons so she can rest. They wander all over, getting into various kinds of mischief.

When Nathan’s mother dies, he and Brother go to live with their grandparents. One source said this was so because the father blamed the boys for their mother’s death, but I don’t recall that being the case. One problem with an audiobook is that it’s hard to go back and look up details like this. Another source cited the father’s depression.

Whatever the father’s issues, he was a taciturn man, generally quiet, tending to motivate the boys by taunting them rather than encouraging them. His reason for living was work. He handled everything by working. He was determined to outwork everyone else.

We see events unfold from Nathan’s point of view, though he doesn’t say much. The book mainly describes life on a farm in a small Kentucky community. But the theme seems to be Nathan’s journey to becoming a man. One scene where all the men are working hard to get a tobacco harvest in on time reads with the tension of Ben-Hur’s chariot race as the father challenges Tom, who has never beat him before but is coming closer all the time. The men seem to be in the various stages of manhood: the grandfather lamenting his decline and inability to do what he used to, the father in his prime, the oldest son growing in strength almost to the point of the father.

Unfortunately, Nathan doesn’t have many good examples. His grandfather and father are harsh and distant. His uncle Burley is kind, but has a wild streak.

The version of the book I read ends with the death of Nathan’s grandfather, when Nathan was sixteen, almost like the baton is passing to the next generation. I’ve read that the book originally was longer, telling of Nathan’s growing into adulthood.

I got this audiobook (wonderfully read by Paul Michael) because it’s currently in Audible’s Plus Catalog of free titles for members and because I wanted to read more of Berry. I’ve only read his Jayber Crow until now, which I had mixed emotions about.

I had mixed emotions about this book, too. Berry’s writing is lyrical in places, his characters well-drawn, and with a strong sense of place. None of my relatives were farmers, but many did live in rural settings which Berry’s story reminded me of.

There’s a smattering of bad language. But the most offensive thing in the book is when Tom and Nathan go to a carnival, part of which has a strip-tease act–which, for some reason, boys were allowed into. Berry describes the act in too much detail, and I almost stopped the book there. The only reason I continued was because the act was presented as somewhat sad rather than titillating. If this is a story about becoming a man, unfortunately, men at some point come across this type of thing. Thankfully Nathan felt sorry for the woman and wasn’t attracted by the display. But I think the author could have gotten across his point with much less visual detail.

Also, most of the characters who are religious to any degree are odd.

I got Hannah Coulter at the same time as this book, for the same reason. I was going to review the books together, but I ended up saying more about this book than I planned to. So I’ll wait til next week to talk about Hannah, though I’ll say that I liked her story much, much more. Some of the themes Berry is know for are represented in seed form in Nathan Coulter but come to fruition in Hannah Coulter. Hannah is Berry’s seventh novel. It was written 44 years after Nathan, but its story begins just a few years later.

I started reading Berry because I know so many people who love him. His poem “The Blue Robe” is one of my favorites, along with “They Sit Together on the Porch” and “To Tanya on My Sixtieth Birthday.” I love the way he writes, lyrical and tender in places, with a strong sense of place and relationships. But I disagree with him in some areas. I’m still trying to figure him out.

Are you a Wendell Berry fan? What do you like about him?