Imagination in Place
Other Books of Essays by Wendell Berry
Another Turn of the Crank
The Art of the Commonplace
Bringing It to the Table
Citizenship Papers
A Continuous Harmony
The Gift of Good Land
Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work
The Hidden Wound
Home Economics
Life Is a Miracle
Long-Legged House
Recollected Essays: 1965–1980
Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community
Standing by Words
The Unforeseen Wilderness
The Unsettling of America
The Way of Ignorance
What Are People For?
Contents
Imagination in Place
American Imagination and the Civil War
The Momentum of Clarity
In Memory: Wallace Stegner, 1909–1993
Speech After Long Silence
My Friend Hayden
In Memory: James Still
A Master Language
My Conversation with Gurney Norman
Sweetness Preserved
Some Interim Thoughts about Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End
In Memory: James Baker Hall
Against the Nihil of the Age
The Uses of Adversity
God, Science, and Imagination
Acknowledgments
Works Cited
Imagination in Place
(2004)
By an interworking of chance and choice, I have happened to live nearly all my life in a place I don’t remember not knowing. Most of my forebears for the last two hundred years could have said the same thing. I was born to people who knew this place intimately, and I grew up knowing it intimately. For a long time the intimacy was not very conscious, but I certainly did not grow up here thinking of the place as “subject matter,” and I have never thought of it in that way. I have not lived here, or worked with my neighbors and my family, or listened to the storytellers and the rememberers, in order to be a writer. The place is precedent to my work, especially my fiction, and is, as I shall try to show, inevitably different from it.
By the same interworking of chance and choice, though somewhat expectably, I have lived here as a farmer. Except for one great-grandfather, all of my family that I know about have been farming people, and I grew up under instruction, principally from my father but also from others, to learn farming, to know the difference between good farming and bad, to regard the land as of ultimate value, and to admire and respect those who farmed well. I never heard a farmer spoken of as “just a farmer” or a farm woman as “just a housewife.” To my father and his father especially, the knowledge of land and of farming was paramount. They thought the difference between a good farmer and a bad one was just as critical as the difference between a good politician and a bad one.
In 1964, after several years of wandering about, my wife Tanya and I returned to Kentucky with our two children and bought the property known as Lanes Landing, on the Kentucky River, about a mile from the house where my mother was born and raised and about five miles from my father’s home place. The next summer we fixed up the house and moved in. We have been here ever since. Or Tanya and I have; our children are farming nearby.
Before we moved here, I had known this place for thirty-one years, and we have now lived here for thirty-nine. We raised our children here. We have taken from this place most of our food, much of our fuel, and always, despite the difficulties and frustrations of a farming life, a sustaining pleasure. Also, nearly everything I have written has been written here. When I am asked how all this fits together, I have to say, “Awkwardly.” Even so, this has been the place of my work and of my life.
This essay is most immediately obstructed by the difficulty of separating my work from my life, and the place from either. The place included in some of my work is also the place that has included me as a farmer and as a writer.
In the course of my life and of my work as a farmer, I have come to know familiarly two small country towns and about a dozen farms. That is, I have come to know them well enough at one time or another that I can shut my eyes and see them as they were, just as I can see them now as they are. The most intimate “world” of my life is thus a small one. The most intimate “world” of my fiction is even smaller: a town of about a hundred people, “Port William,” and a few farms in its neighborhood. Between these two worlds, the experienced and the imagined, there is certainly a relationship. But it is a relationship obscure enough as it is, and easy to obscure further by oversimplification. Another difficulty of this essay is the temptation to oversimplify.
As a lot of writers must know, it is easy for one’s family or neighbors to identify fictional characters with actual people. A lot of writers must know too that these identifications are sometimes astonishingly wrong, and are always at least a little wrong. The inevitability of this sort of error is explainable, and it is significant.
Some of my own fiction has seemed to me to be almost entirely imagined. Some of it has drawn maybe as close as possible to actual experience. The writing has sometimes grown out of a long effort to come to terms with an actual experience. But one must not be misled by the claims of “realism.” There is, true enough, a kind of writing that has an obligation to tell the truth about actual experience, and therefore it is obliged to accept the limits of what is actually or provably known. But works of imagination come of an impulse to transcend the limits of experience or provable knowledge in order to make a thing that is whole. No human work can become whole by including everything, but it can become whole in another way: by accepting its formal limits and then answering within those limits all the questions it raises. Any reasonably literate reader can understand Homer without the benefit of archaeology, or Shakespeare without resort to his literary sources.
It seems to me that my effort to come to terms in writing with an actual experience has been, every time, an effort to imagine the experience, to see it clear and whole in the mind’s eye. One might suppose, reasonably enough, that this could be accomplished by describing accurately what one actually knows from records of some sort or from memory. But this, I believe, is wrong. What one actually or provably knows about an actual experience is never complete; it cannot, within the limits of memory or factual records, be made whole. Imagination “completes the picture” by transcending the actual memories and provable facts. For this reason, I have often begun with an actual experience and in the end produced what I have had to call a fiction. In the effort to tell a whole story, to see it whole and clear, I have had to imagine more than I have known. “There’s no use in telling a pretty good story when you can tell a really good one,” my mother’s father told me once. In saying so, he acknowledged both a human limit and a human power, as well as his considerable amusement at both.
I believe I can say properly that my fiction originates in part in actual experience of an actual place: its topography, weather, plants, and animals; its language, voices, and stories. The fiction I have written here, I suppose, must somehow belong here and must be different from any fiction I might have written in any other place. I am pleased to suppose so, but the issue of influence is complex and obscure, and the influence of this place alone cannot account for the fiction and the other work I have written here.
Both my writing and my involvement with this place have been in every way affected by my reading. My work would not exist as it is if the influence of this place were somehow subtracted from it. Just as certainly it would not exist as it is, if at all, without my literary mentors, exemplars, teachers, and guides. Lists are dangerous, but as a placed writer I have depended on the examples
of Andrew Marvell at Appleton House, Jane Austen in Hampshire, Thomas Hardy in Dorset, Mark Twain in Hannibal, Thoreau in Concord, Sarah Orne Jewett on the Maine coast, Yeats in the west of Ireland, Frost in New England, William Carlos Williams in Rutherford, William Faulkner and Eudora Welty in Mississippi, Wallace Stegner in the American West, and in Kentucky, James Still, Harlan Hubbard, and Harry Caudill—to name only some of the dead and no contemporaries. I have kept fairly constantly in my mind the Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton, and Blake. I have taken much consolation and encouragement from Paul Cézanne’s devotion to his home landscapes in Provence and from Samuel Palmer’s work at Shoreham. I have remembered often the man of Psalm 128 who shall eat the labor of his hands, and Virgil’s (and Ronsard’s) old Cilician of Georgics IV. Over the last twenty years or so, I have contracted a large debt to certain writers about religious and cultural tradition, principally Ananda Coomaraswamy, Titus Burckhardt, Kathleen Raine, and Philip Sherrard—again, to name only the dead. Now that I have listed these names, I am more aware than before how incomplete any such list necessarily must be, and how necessarily confusing must be the issue of influence.
I will allow the list to stand, not as an adequate explanation, but as a hint at the difficulty of locating the origins of a work of fiction by me (or, I assume, by anybody else). And I must add further to the difficulty by saying that I don’t believe I am conscious of all the sources of my work. I dislike learned talk about “the unconscious,” which always seems to imply that the very intelligent are able somehow to know what they don’t know, but I mean only to acknowledge that much of what I have written has taken me by surprise. What I know does not yield a full or adequate accounting for what I have imagined. It seems to have been “given.” My experience has taught me to believe in inspiration, about which I think nobody can speak with much authority.
My fiction, anyhow, has come into being within the contexts of local geography and local culture, of the personal culture of reading, listening, and looking, and also within the contexts of what is not known and of the originating power we call inspiration. But there is another context, that of agriculture, which I will need to deal with at more length.
I was brought up, as I have said, by agrarians and was conscientiously instructed in a set of assumptions and values that could be described only as agrarian. But I never saw that word in print or heard it pronounced until I was a sophomore at the University of Kentucky. At that time I was in a composition class whose instructor, Robert D. Jacobs, asked us to write an argument. I wrote, as I recall, a dialogue between two farmers on the condemnation of land for the construction of a highway or an airport. The gist of my argument was that the land was worth more than anything for which it might be destroyed. Dr. Jacobs didn’t think much of my argument, but he did me a valuable service by identifying it as “agrarian” and referring me to a group of writers, the Southern Agrarians, who had written a book called I’ll Take My Stand. I bought the book and read at least part of it about three years later, in 1956. It is a valuable book, in some ways a wonder, and I have returned to it many times since. My debt to it has increased.
I must have become a good deal interested in the Southern Agrarians during my last years at the university, for with my friend and fellow student Mac Coffman (Edward M. Coffman, the historian) I drove up to Kenyon College to talk with John Crowe Ransom on that subject. But it is hard now for me to tell how much I may have been influenced by the Southern Agrarians and their book at that time. (Ransom by then was disaffected from I’ll Take My Stand, though his elegant introduction, “A Statement of Principles,” is still the best summary of agrarian principles versus the principles of industrialism). And I think I encountered not much at the University of Kentucky that would have confirmed my native agrarianism. It seems to me now that my agrarian upbringing and my deepest loyalties were obscured by my formal education. Only after I returned to Kentucky in 1964 did I begin to reclaim what I had been taught at home as a growing boy. Once I was home again, the purpose and point of that teaching became clear to me as it had not before, and I became purposefully and eagerly an agrarian. Moreover, because I had settled here as a farmer, I knew that I was not a literary agrarian merely but also a practical one.
In 1970 I published in The Southern Review a small essay, “The Regional Motive,” that I suppose was descended from, or at least a cousin to, the essays of I’ll Take My Stand. But in my essay I said that “the withdrawal of the most gifted of [the Southern Agrarians] into . . . Northern colleges and universities invalidated their thinking, and reduced their effort to the level of an academic exercise.” Whatever the amount of truth in that statement, and there is some, it is also a piece of smartassery.
I received in response a letter from Allen Tate. As I knew, Tate could be a combative man, and so I was moved, as I still am, by the kindness of his letter. He simply pointed out to me that I did not know the pressing reasons why he and his friends had moved to the North. And so when I reprinted my essay I added a footnote apologizing for my callowness and ignorance, but saying, even so—and, as I remember, with Tate’s approval—that I might appropriately “warn that their departure should not be taken either as disproof of the validity of their [agrarian] principles, or as justification of absentee regionalism (agrarianism without agriculture).”
The parentheses around that concluding phrase suggest to me now that I was making a point I had not quite got. The phrase, which appears to have been only an afterthought thirty-two years ago, indicates what to me now seems the major fault of I’ll Take My Stand: The agrarianism of most of the essays, like the regionalism of most of them, is abstract, too purely mental. The book is not impractical—none of its principles, I believe, is in conflict with practicality—but it is too often remote from the issues of practice. The legitimate aim (because it is the professed aim) of agrarianism is not some version of culture but good farming, though a culture complete enough may be implied in that aim. By 1970 I had begun to see the flaws and dangers of absentee regionalism, and especially of Southern absentee regionalism. Identifying with “The South,” as if it were somehow all one and the same place, would not help you to write any more than it would help you to farm. As a regional book, I’ll Take My Stand mostly ignores the difficulty and the discipline of locality. As an agrarian book, it mostly ignores also the difficulty and the discipline of farming, but this problem is more complicated, and dealing with it took me longer.
Of the twelve essayists, only Andrew Lytle and John Donald Wade appear to speak directly from actual knowledge of actual farming in an actual place. And a passage of Andrew Lytle’s essay, “The Hind Tit,” points the direction I now must take with this essay of mine. He has begun to write about “a type” of farmer who has two hundred acres of land, but he does so with a necessary precaution:
This example is taken, of course, with the knowledge that the problem on any two hundred acres is never the same: the richness of the soil, its qualities, the neighborhood, the distance from market, the climate, water, and a thousand such things make the life on every farm distinctly individual.
Thus he sets forth the fundamental challenge, not only to all forms of industrial land use, but to all other approaches to land use, including agrarianism, that are abstract.
The most insistent and formidable concern of agriculture, wherever it is taken seriously, is the distinct individuality of every farm, every field on every farm, every farm family, and every creature on every farm. Farming becomes a high art when farmers know and respect in their work the distinct individuality of their place and the neighborhood of creatures that lives there. This has nothing to do with the set of personal excuses we call “individualism” but is akin to the holy charity of the Gospels and the political courtesy of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Such practical respect is the true discipline of farming, and the farmer must maintain it through the muddles, mistakes, disappointments, and frustrations, as well as the satisfactions an
d exultations, of every actual year on an actual farm.
And so it has mattered, undoubtedly it has mattered to my fiction, that I have lived in this place both as a farmer and as a writer. I am not going to pretend here to a judgment or criticism of the writing I have done. I mean only to say something about the pressures and conditions that have been imposed on my writing by my life here as a farmer. Rather than attempt to say what I have done, I will attempt to speak of farming as an influence.
Having settled even in so marginal a place as this, undertaking to live in it even by such marginal farming as I have done, one is abruptly and forcibly removed from easy access to the abstractions of regionalism, politics, economics, and the academic life. To farm is to be placed absolutely. To do the actual work of an actual farm, one must shed the clichés that constitute “The South” or “My Old Kentucky Home” and come to the ground.
One may begin as an agrarian, as some of us to our good fortune have done, but for a farmer agrarianism is not enough. Southern agrarianism is not enough, and neither is Kentucky agrarianism or Henry County agrarianism. None of those can be local enough or particular enough. To live as a farmer, one has to come into the local watershed and the local ecosystem, and deal well or poorly with them. One must encounter directly and feelingly the topography and the soils of one’s particular farm, and treat them well or poorly.
If one wishes to farm well, and agrarianism inclines to that wish above all, then one must submit to the unending effort to change one’s mind and ways to fit one’s farm. This is a hard education, which lasts all one’s life, never to be completed, and it almost certainly will involve mistakes. But one does not have to do this alone, or only with one’s own small intelligence. Help is available, as one had better hope.
In my farming I have relied most directly on my family and my neighbors, who have helped me much and taught me much. And my thoughts about farming have been founded on a few wonderful books: Farmers of Forty Centuries by F. H. King, An Agricultural Testament and The Soil and Health by Sir Albert Howard, Tree Crops by J. Russell Smith, and A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. These writers bring the human economy face to face with ecology, the local landscape, and the farm itself. They teach us to think of the ecological problems and obligations of agriculture, and they do this by seeing in nature the inescapable standard and in natural processes the necessary pattern for any human use of the land. Their thinking has had its finest scientific result thus far in the Natural Systems Agriculture of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. Natural Systems Agriculture returns to the classical conception of art as an imitation of nature. But whereas Hamlet saw art as holding a mirror up to nature, and thus in a sense taking its measure, these agricultural thinkers have developed the balancing concept of nature as the inevitable mirror and measure of art.