Wendell Berry, part three

Part one is here, and part two is here.

Loss is the primary driving force behind Berry’s newest look at Port William, the very brief Andy Catlett: Early Travels, which tells of two days in the life of 9-year-old Andy Catlett, who has over the years served as Berry’s stand-in in his fiction. As 1943 turns to 1944, Andy spends a day with each of his sets of grandparents, helping with farm chores, visiting with neighbor kids, and enjoying the freedom of a solitary walk to town. He reads the tales of King Arthur, eats his grandmother’s biscuits, and tears up when he can’t figure out what to say to a friend of the family whose nephew has been lost in the war. Mostly, though, he just enjoys the implicit freedom of a two-day pass to his grandparents’ houses, and we, through the eyes of an older, 70-something Andy, enjoy it with him.

Like kids do, Andy generally takes the people around him for granted. But as those of us who’ve read A Place on Earth realize, much of what Andy is telling us about will be gone soon, much of it with astonishing speed, and that perspective, represented by the older Andy, imbues the story with both sadness and a sense of forever-lost opportunity. “By now,” he says, “of all the people I have been remembering from those days in Port William, I alone am still alive. I am, as Maze Tickburn used to say, the onliest one.” The book is shot through with the lament, so pervasive as to almost be a refrain, “Why did I not ask them about it when I had the chance?” As much as anyone writing, Berry makes clear the tremendous cost of every single death: the world thus lost to us is unrecoverable, and the older the person who's died, the more precious and full was the world that has been lost.

But for all that, it is not a depressing book, or even a particularly sad one. Like Proust or Anthony Powell or any number of other authors, Berry has at least partially succeeded in his aim: he has stored up some of the flavor of those times, the reality of those people, so we all can know and understand them. Much is lost, but the beauty of what has been preserved, what has been shored up against loss, keeps the sadness in check--a component of memory, yes, but by no means its entirety. As Andy Catlett notes, late in the book:

We measure time by its deaths, yes, and by its births. For time is told also by life. As some depart, others come. The hand opened in farewell remains open in welcome. I, who once had grandparents and parents, now have children and grandchildren. Like the flowing river that is yet always present, time that is always going is always coming. And time that is told by death and birth is held and redeemed by love, which is always present. Time, then, is told by love’s losses, and by the coming of love, and by love continuing in gratitude for what is lost .It is folded and enfolded and unfolded forever and ever, the love by which the dead are alive and the unborn welcomed into the womb. The great question for the old and the dying, I think, is not if they have loved and been loved enough, but if they have been grateful enough for love received and given, however much. No one who has gratitude is the onliest one. Let us pray to be grateful to the last.

At an age when many people are retired—but when, for example, many of Berry’s characters, too infirm to work, continue to traipse out to the field each day simply to be around and feel a part of the work and companionship that for so many years defined them—Berry is continuing to put the finishing touches on his overall masterpiece. I look forward to him continuing to tell me more about the Port William Membership; I’m sure there are some stories there I haven’t heard yet, and I don’t want it to be for lack of asking.

It's a helluva town.

I'm in New York this week for work, so my reading is on the subway instead of the L. Some New York notes:

1) I started my trip, on the plane, with the least New York book I had handy, Wendell Berry's new novella, Andy Catlett (2006). Berry is a man of the country and the farm, unimpressed by cities, though he has lived in them at times, and Andy Catlett is in part a lament of everything that I can hear right now through my hotel window, the sounds of post-War America--fueled by petroleum, always on the go, mind always split between here and there, now and the future. It's an elegiac book, despite being written about a nine-year-old boy, and in picking it to bring, I guessed right: its slow cadences put me in the right mood for entering the city.

2) But once I got to my hotel, the Hudson, I had no choice but to leap with both feet into the future that to Berry is of such uncertain value, for the Hudson resembles nothing so much as a vision of tomorrow dreamed up by Wong Kar Wei and Haruki Murakami, with the addition of at least a dollop of Eurotrash. So back to Murakami I went, this time to Norwegian Wood (1987, translated into English in 2000).

And I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Norwegian Wood is haunted by a similar sense of loss to that which pervades Andy Catlett. A thirty-seven-year-old man looks back, from 1987, on a love of his 1960s youth:

Each time [that memory] appears, it delivers a kick to some part of my mind. "Wake up," it says. "I'm still here. Wake up and think about it. Think about why I'm still here." The kicking never hurts me. There's no pain at all. Just a hollow sound that echoes with each kick. . . . Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

For all that Murakami's books get discussed as weird pageants of contemporary life, icons of postmodernism, the ones I've read have all featured narrators driven by loss, alienated from their past or from the world by people they can't have back, decisions they can't unmake, times they can't recapture. There is a similarity in tone between Murakami and Berry, or Murakami and Anthony Powell, or Proust, that I never expected when I first opened his novels.

3) For weeks, I've been trying to remember the name of a contemporary British author, whose multi-volume family saga has been reviewed favorably, and whose prose style seemed like one I would appreciate. Take this exchange, for example:

"Imagine wanting to talk to someone on the phone," said Eleanor. "I dread it."

"Youth," said Nicholas tolerantly.

"I dreaded it even more in my youth, if that's possible."

Wanting to read this unknown author's collected novels, and knowing what its spine looked like, I'd even gone so far as to quickly look over all the fiction shelves at 57th Street Books in an attempt to circumvent my faulty memory, but to no avail. Then last night, while waiting to meet some friends, I wandered into Three Lives and Company on 10th Street and there it was, stacked high on the front table of staff favorites: Edward St. Aubyn's Some Hope (2003).

When fate gives you such clear instructions to buy a book, you are required to do so, fidelity to your local bookstore and lack of space in your luggage be damned.

4) As a longtime Joseph Mitchell fan, I talked the aforementioned friends into visiting McSorley's Old Ale House last night, and I was pleased that it was all I could have hoped for, abjuring modernity while somehow avoiding the deadly taints of kitsch or irony. The urinals alone--deep, tall, and majestic--made me feel young and insignificant, part of a lesser, fallen generation. We can't even pee like they used to pee.

Then we proceeded to irk our waiter with our frequent indecision in the face of his queries. It was hard to fault him: after all, one's only choices are light or dark, have another round or don't. And again I felt a failure. Joseph Mitchell would have had no trouble deciding. William Maxwell would have had no trouble deciding. Hell, had they allowed women back then, Dorothy Parker would have had no trouble deciding.

A couple of times, our waiter simply decided for us, always in the affirmative, always for the dark, and he was right, of course. We drank what was put in front of us and talked, of, among other topics, baseball, on which subject we were not the only patrons dwelling on this mid-December night. Imagining people talking of Ruth and DiMaggio in their day, just as we talked of Pettite and Giambi, made me feel a bit better about our efforts as patrons.

But my confidence received its largest boost when, as we made our thanks and headed for the door, the waiter chucked me on the elbow and said, "That's a nice suit."

Had I had my proper hat, I would have tipped it to Joseph Mitchell as I left.