Wendell Berry's 'Port William Novels & Stories' celebrates a great American voice

Port William Novels & Stories
The Civil War to World War II
By Wendell Berry
Library of America. 1034 pp. $40

Reviewed by John Timpane

This book makes me really happy. Now 83, Wendell Berry, poet, essayist, novelist, farmer, teacher, social activist, has been a great American voice since the 1960s, when his principled essays against the Vietnam War began to appear.

Library of America is now recognizing Berry's stature. The present volume collects some of his "Port William" fiction – novels and stories centered on the imaginary town of Port William, Ky. A boxed set of his essays is set, I am told, for next spring, surely one of the big publishing stories of 2019. I asked the folks at Library of America about his poetry, and, yes, they are talking about doing that also.

Port William Novels & Stories, the first of two volumes, is an event to celebrate in and of itself. Across eight novels (beginning with the 1960 novel Nathan Coulter) and more than 50 stories, Berry has enacted his ideas and aspirations about our relation to the land, to one another, to history, and to ourselves. As per the book's subtitle, this selection takes us from the Civil War to 1945. That comprises four novels – Nathan Coulter, A Place on Earth (1967), A World Lost (1996), and Andy Catlett; Early Travels (2006), plus 23 stories. By the end of the war, the old ways are beginning to fall before the newer, mechanized ways. Written out of chronological order, the works appear here in chronology. That's a good thing for any reader wanting to read for the whole sweep of it.

If Berry's project sounds Faulknerian, it is in some ways: the concern for place (on the pastedown and front free-endpaper, we get a detailed map of the Port William area), the ravages of history on the social fabric (when war comes, "The realization grew upon them all that everything would be changed. … Now history was outrunning time"), the loving genealogy of interlocking families (Beechum, Wheeler, Feltner, Coulter, diagrammed on the back endpaper and pastedown), the profiles, the character studies.

Berry is a quieter, cleaner writer, capable of poetry but not given to Faulkner's prose flights. Both are Southern writers, but only Berry is really agrarian. He takes his time describing hunting, farming, the work, the interiors of their homes. Faulkner describes farm work, of course, but not with Berry's precision or detail or Berry's reverence for the traditions of work for their own sake. He does not idealize, yet these stories are an homage to the world in which Berry grew up.

Throughout the series run the values that underlie and inform people's lives. In the story "Misery," Dorie and Marce Catlett's household is unhappy, and yet "the household embodied and was sustained by an agricultural order, resting upon the order of time and nature, that was at once demanding and consoling." People refer to themselves as The Membership: All consciously acknowledge that they are members of the land, the region, one another.

Berry does not share Faulkner's penchant for the perverse, the epic stains of original sins, the echoes of classical and Greek fatal machinery. Faulkner is interested in how tragedy and violence mutilate, Berry in how people take the blows and move on. There can be poetry – Berry is a fine, fine poet – yet it arises from the moment, the person. I especially love "A Desirable Woman," in its careful discussion of a woman's awareness of, and commitment to, a kind of love about which she is both ambivalent and determined. Troubled, she takes a walk to a farm in the midst of lambing season, and as she walks among ewes and new lambs, a little comfort comes: "Here was a small success, even a small triumph, of the kind the world most dependably allows." Sweet.

It's up to you how you read. You could certainly skip around, read a few of the stories first. Or start at the beginning and let the current move you along, like the great river that bisects the true, fictional world created here. However you read, in Berry we all have a patrimony, a clear-sighted vision of how we were, how we are, and how we could be.