Imagination in Place Read online

  In addition to books specifically about agriculture and ecology, I have been steadily mindful, as a farmer, of the writers mentioned earlier as literary influences. And I have depended for many years on the writing and the conversation of my friends Gene Logsdon, Maurice Telleen, Wes Jackson, and David Kline. I have been helped immeasurably also by the examples of Amish agriculture, of the traditional farming of Tuscany as I saw it more than forty years ago, of the ancient agricultures of the Peruvian Andes and the deserts of the American Southwest, of the also ancient pastoral landscapes of Devonshire, and of the best farming here at home as I knew it in the 1940s and early ’50s, before industrialization broke up the old pattern.

  What I have learned as a farmer I have learned also as a writer, and vice versa. I have farmed as a writer and written as a farmer. For the sake of clarity, I wish that this were more divisible or analyzable or subject to generalization than it is. But I am talking about an experience that is resistant to any kind of simplification. It is an experience of what I will go ahead and call complexification. When I am called, as to my astonishment I sometimes am, a devotee of “simplicity” (since I live supposedly as a “simple farmer”), I am obliged to reply that I gave up the simple life when I left New York City in 1964 and came here. In New York, I lived as a passive consumer, supplying nearly all my needs by purchase, whereas here I supply many of my needs from this place by my work (and pleasure) and am responsible besides for the care of the place.

  My point is that when one passes from any abstract order, whether that of the consumer economy or Ransom’s “Statement of Principles” or a brochure from the Extension Service, to the daily life and work of one’s own farm, one passes from a relative simplicity into a complexity that is irreducible except by disaster and ultimately is incomprehensible. It is the complexity of the life of a place uncompromisingly itself, which is at the same time the life of the world, of all Creation. One meets not only the weather and the wildness of the world, but also the limitations of one’s knowledge, intelligence, character, and bodily strength. To do this, of course, is to accept the place as an influence.

  My further point is that to do this, if one is a writer, is to accept the place and the farming of it as a literary influence. One accepts the place, that is, not just as a circumstance, but as a part of the informing ambience of one’s mind and imagination. I don’t dare to claim that I know how this “works,” but I have no doubt at all that it is true. And I don’t mind attempting some speculations on what might be the results.

  To begin with, the work of a farmer, or of the sort of farmer I have been, is particularizing work. As farmers themselves never tire of repeating, you can’t learn to farm by reading a book. You can’t lay out a fence line or shape a plowland or fell a tree or break a colt merely by observing general principles. You can’t deal with things merely according to category; you are continually required to consider the distinct individuality of an animal or a tree, or the uniqueness of a place or a situation, and to do so you draw upon a long accumulation of experience, your own and other people’s. Moreover, you are always under pressure to explain to somebody (often yourself) exactly what needs to be done. All this calls for an exactly particularizing language. This is the right kind of language for a writer, a language developing, so to speak, from the ground up. It is the right kind of language for anybody, but a lot of our public language now seems to develop downward from a purpose. Usually, the purpose is to mislead, the particulars being selected or invented to suit the purpose; or the particulars dangle loosely and unregarded from the dislocated intellectuality of the universities. This is contrary to honesty and also to practicality.

  The ability to speak exactly is intimately related to the ability to know exactly. In any practical work such as farming the penalties for error are sometimes promptly paid, and this is valuable instruction for a writer. A farmer who is a writer will at least call farming tools and creatures by their right names, will be right about the details of work, and may extend the same courtesy to other subjects.

  A writer who is a farmer will in addition be apt actually to know some actual country people, and this is a significant advantage. Reading some fiction, and this applies especially to some Southern fiction, one cannot avoid the impression that the writers don’t know any country people in particular and are in general afraid of them. They fill the blank, not with anybody they have imagined, but with the rhetorically conjured stereotype of the hick or hillbilly or redneck who is the utter opposite of the young woman with six arms in the picture by the late (“Alas”) Emmeline Grangerford, and perhaps is her son. He comes slouching into the universe with his pistol in one hand, his penis in another, his Bible in another, his bottle in another, his grandpappy’s cavalry sword in another, his plug of chewing tobacco in another. This does harm. If you wish to steal farm products or coal or timber from a rural region, you will find it much less troubling to do so if you can believe that the people are too stupid and violent to deserve the things you wish to steal from them. And so purveyors of rural stereotypes have served a predatory economy. Two of the Southern Agrarians, I should add, countered this sort of thing with knowledge. I am thinking of John Donald Wade’s essay “The Life and Death of Cousin Lucius” in I’ll Take My Stand, and A Wake for the Living by Andrew Lytle.

  If you understand that what you do as a farmer will be measured inescapably by its effect on the place, and of course on the place’s neighborhood of humans and other creatures, then if you are also a writer, you will have to wonder too what will be the effect of your writing on that place. Obviously this is going to be hard for anybody to know, and you yourself may not live long enough to know it, but in your own mind you are going to be using the health of the place as one of the indispensable standards of what you write, thus dissolving the university and “the literary world” as adequate contexts for literature. It also is going to skew your work away from the standard of realism. “How things really are” is one of your concerns, but by no means the only one. You have begun to ask also how things will be, how you want things to be, how things ought to be. You want to know what are the meanings, both temporal and eternal, of the condition of things in this world. “Realism,” as Kathleen Raine said, “cannot show us what we are, but only our failure to become that to which the common man and the common woman inadequately, but continually, aspire and strive.” If, in other words, you want to write a whole story about whole people—living souls, not “higher animals”—you must reach for a reality which is inaccessible merely to observation or perception but which in addition requires imagination, for imagination knows more than the eye sees, and also inspiration, which you can only hope and pray for. You will find, I think, that this effort involves even a sort of advocacy. Advocacy, as a lot of people will affirm, is dangerous to art, and you must beware the danger, but if you accept the health of the place as a standard, I think the advocacy is going to be present in your work. Hovering over nearly everything I have written is the question of how a human economy might be conducted with reverence, and therefore with due respect and kindness toward everything involved. This, if it ever happens, will be the maturation of American culture.

  I have tried (clumsily, I see) to define the places, real and imagined, where I have taken my stand and done my work. I have made the imagined town of Port William, its neighborhood and membership, in an attempt to honor the actual place where I have lived. By means of the imagined place, over the last fifty years, I have learned to see my native landscape and neighborhood as a place unique in the world, a work of God, possessed of an inherent sanctity that mocks any human valuation that can be put upon it. If anything I have written in this place can be taken to countenance the misuse of it, or to excuse anybody for rating the land as “capital” or its human members as “labor” or “resources,” my writing would have been better unwritten. And then to hell with any value anybody may find in it “as literature.”

  American Imagination and the Civil War
br />   (2007)

  Some sentences of the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh have been prominent in my thoughts for many years:

  Parochialism and provincialism are opposites. The provincial has no mind of his own; he does not trust what his eyes see until he has heard what the metropolis . . . has to say . . . The parochial mentality on the other hand is never in any doubt about the social and artistic validity of his parish.1

  In spite of necessary qualifications, which I will get to in a minute, Kavanagh’s distinction has become indispensable to me in thinking about my native place and history. In Kentucky, a state famously characterized as barefooted, we might oversimplify Kavanagh by saying that those of us who are always admiring our shoes are provincial, whereas the unself-consciously bare or shod are parochial. Or we could more legitimately paraphrase him by saying that people who fear they are provincial are provincial.

  I believe I can say truthfully that my particular part of Kentucky, at the time of my growing up in it, was in Kavanagh’s terms more parochial than provincial. The parochial in any locality probably always is subject to qualification and inexact in geographical extent. I grew up in a county at that time almost exclusively preoccupied with farming: the county of Henry, a few miles south of the Ohio River. But the country truly native to my family and my experience is in the watersheds of Town Branch of Drennon Creek, Emily’s Run, and Cane Run.

  During my first twenty or so years, the “social validity” of that place at that time certainly was impaired by racial segregation. That phrase now has the currency of an abstraction, but segregation itself could be experienced only in particular. We were living in the history of segregation, but we were living in it in our place, with our neighbors, and as ourselves. In our small communities segregation involved the wicked prejudice on which it was based, but it also involved much familiarity and many exceptions. Racial inequality was a theory that performed its customary disservices and sometimes justified horrors, but that theory was inevitably qualified by the daily life in which the two races were separate only to an extent. In those places the history of segregation was lived out familiarly by black and white people who knew one another, told stories about one another to one another, helped or harmed one another, liked or disliked one another, and often worked together. Separate and different as the races were, it is impossible to imagine a white person of that place and time whose knowledge did not include the stories, songs, sayings, teachings, and characters of black persons. An honest accounting of the ancestry of my own mind would have to include prominently several black people. Despite segregation, the communities of my young life were, in function and in their consciousness of themselves, more intact than they are now.

  As for the “artistic validity” of our place at that time, I have to be both careful and modest. We did have a local music that came to the fore at square dances, though not everybody granted much value to it, and it had begun to be supplanted by music from the radio and jukebox. Most of us were familiar with the Protestant hymns and the King James Bible. But we were not greatly concerned with issues of art, local or otherwise.

  The arts that we took for granted, and that did gather us all together, were the arts of farming, gardening, cooking, and talking. Our economy was either agricultural or in service to agriculture. Vegetable gardens, grape arbors, and fruit trees were still commonplace. It was still ordinary to see poultry flocks, fattening hogs, or milkcows in the back yards or back lots of the towns. The grocery stores still bought surplus produce from the farms. Most of the food was homegrown, and excellent cooking was customary. Most of the cooking was done by women, but everybody talked about it.

  Everybody, in fact, talked about everything. It seems to me that I grew up totally immersed in talk. Talk was a fifth element: talk in hayfields and tobacco patches, in tobacco barns and stripping rooms, in kitchens and living rooms, on porches and out in the yards. Sometimes, as we sat out in the yard or on the porch after a hot day, the dark would gradually disembody us, and we would become just voices going on until weariness re-embodied us and we would go into the house to bed. My best gift as a writer was that circumstance of talk. We had no cultivated art of conversation. Our talk was practical, local in reference, but was carried on also for pleasure or comfort. It was sometimes crude enough, but it was also articulate enough, humorous, precise, expressive, and sometimes beautifully so.

  Though by then most of us had listened to the radio and seen at least a few movies, our talk as yet bore no hint of apology for the way we talked, or for our status as country or small-town people. We knew we were not Yankees, for we had heard Yankees talk and we knew we did not talk like them. We also had listened to people from “down South,” and we knew we did not have what we called a “Southern accent.” Maybe I can be excused for concluding, when I got old enough to read a map, that I spoke a perfectly average language, Standard American, since I could see that I lived at about the middle of the north–south axis. And maybe I can elicit a little sympathy for my surprise when, having clung to this notion all the way to some literary party in California, I delivered an undoubtedly sophisticated opinion to a literary young lady, whose eyes thereupon grew round with recognition. “Wayull!” she said in Yankee-Southern. “Wheah you’all frum, honey chile?”

  And so I turned out to be a Southerner—legitimately so, as that term is used. I was born on the south side of the Ohio, was descended from slave-owners, and certainly did not talk like a Yankee.

  The problem, as I am hardly the first to know, is that being a Southerner is less a condition than a job. The job, unendingly, is to distinguish between local life and the abstractions that we have allowed to obscure it. There is a huge difference between knowledge and classification. “South” and “Southerner” are not terms that are invariably useful. They belong sometimes to a taxonomy of clichés, stereotypes, and prejudices that have intruded between ourselves and our actual country. These shallow, powerful abstractions have worked to depreciate local knowledge and provincialize local life, and so have denied us the imaginative realizations that alone could have saved our country from the damage that has befallen it.

  These old habits of mind and speech have continued in the babbled-to-nonsense polarity of “conservative” and “liberal,” and of “red states” and “blue states.” This oversimplified language of the media and politics is as far as possible from the best of the local speech I heard as a child, which was like no other in the world because it was of and about our place, which was like no other in the world. In it we were at least beginning to imagine ourselves somewhat as we actually were, and even somewhat as we should have been. Now, under the influence of media speech, we can only pretend and try to be like everybody else.

  The problem is that there can be no general or official or sectional or national imagination. The chief instrument of economic and political power now is a commodified speech, wholly compatible with the old clichés, that can distinguish neither general from particular nor false from true. Local life is now a wren’s egg brooded by an eagle or a buzzard. As Guy Davenport saw, nothing now exists that is so valuable as whatever theoretically might replace it. Every place must anticipate the approach of the bulldozer. No place is free of the threat implied in such phrases as “economic growth,” “job creation,” “natural resources,” “human capital,” “bringing in industry,” even “bringing in culture”—as if every place is adequately identified as “the environment” and its people as readily replaceable parts of a machine. Devotion to any particular place now carries always the implication of heartbreak.

  I suppose that human minds have always been threatened by the slur and blur of general bias, but it seems to me that this curse fell upon us Americans with a great fatefulness in the circumstances leading to the Civil War, and that the curse has persisted.

  The Civil War and the rhetoric associated with it become penetrable by actual thought only when one asks why. Why could people of good sense on both sides not have treated slavery
as a problem with a practical solution short of war? The answers, I suppose, are foolishness, fanaticism, sectional loyalty and pride, the wish to protect one’s faults from correction by others, moral outrage, self-righteousness, the desire to punish sinners, and sectional hatred.

  The Civil War was caused undoubtedly by disagreements over slavery and secession. It was contested so fiercely and so long by the Confederacy undoubtedly because of a truth that our federal government has never learned: People generally don’t like to be invaded. But why was there no lenity?

  Shakespeare’s Henry V, incongruously in the midst of his invasion of France, gives “lenity” a pertinent definition:

  . . . we give express charge that in our marches through the country there be nothing compelled from the villages, nothing taken but paid for, none of the French upbraided or abused in disdainful language; for when lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.2