Gumption (16 page)

I found each of the siblings’ offerings to be very moving, each in its own regard. The creativity of Christina’s disseminated quotes and her empty, prestamped envelopes I found particularly moving, as though her dad’s spirit was truly moving through her and into us. I have had a very lucky year since attending Tom’s funeral, but nothing has felt appropriate to write to her about until now, finishing this chapter. I believe I’ll write to her about it; this chapter in this book, with which I hope, among other objectives, to engender mirth and spread the message of love among all my brothers and all my sisters. That seems an awfully sincere thing to say without a joke at the end, but I am going to let it fly.

WENDELL BERRY

G
ood gracious. For me, the fact that you are now reading a chapter on Wendell Berry is quite momentous. If you are (about to be) new to Mr. Berry’s work, let me tell you right to your face that you are in for a treat. Not a treat like ice cream or some other confection. A much more substantial treat, perhaps constructed cleverly of leather or hickory or copper, like you just won a barn, and someone is going to help you build it, and then that person is going to tell you how one might prosper from the use of a barn in your life. You can’t know going in that it’s not the barn itself but rather the building of it and its cumulative use that are the real prizes. That kind of treat.

Those of you who already know him (which, it’s been said, is to love him) will understand just from where I’m shooting in this effort. Chances are that many of you readers are still with me here because you have perhaps enjoyed the show
Parks and Recreation
, or for a much smaller group, my woodworking portfolio, and I have managed to seduce you sufficiently with descriptions of George Washington’s teeth and the ship-caulking prowess of Frederick Douglass to get you
this far into this particular tome. Now, as long as anyone is listening, I will holler about Wendell Berry. If you are inspired by nothing else in this, my sophomoric effort, for Pete’s sake, please read his works, and then pass them on. His well of common sense is deep enough to slake all our thirst, with considered sips of perspicacity that are cool, crisp, and ever so refreshing to the palate.

Because I am such a student and adherent of Wendell Berry’s writing, this chapter, and hopefully this entire book, will contain much less hyperbole than I would sophomorically like to apply to it. Wendell, if you have so run out of useful things to do as to be reading this, I must warn you to prepare yourself to endure some compliments, but, out of the respect for economy that I am very slowly learning from your own work, I will do my best to refrain from over-egging the pudding.

Wendell Berry is the greatest writer ever to have sharpened a pencil. Dang it. That was not a good start. But you are stuck with me, such as I am, so let’s just press on with best intentions.

In 1995 I was working as an understudy and a makeup artist on the Steppenwolf Theatre production of
Buried Child
, Sam Shepard’s masterpiece of a play, with a late, great character actor named Leo Burmester in the role of Bradley. Leo had grown up in Kentucky and was an absolute sweetheart, as well as a substantial talent. Because of our similarly rural upbringings, and I suppose a shared proclivity for playing beefy/sensitive types who might be as comfortable wielding a darning needle as a broadsword, Leo took a shine to me. Upon the show’s closing, he gave me my first Wendell Berry, a book of collected stories entitled
Fidelity.

I am tearing up a little as I write this, for a few reasons: (1) with gratitude that Leo saw in me a budding initiate who would possibly flower in the sunlight of Berry’s words; (2) with remorse that Leo passed away in 2007, before I had the chance to tell him what a profound impact his gift had exacted upon my life; and (3) with relish for the impact itself, which simply moves me to tears. Which is why I’m doing my level best to pass along the gift of that influence to you, the reader, whom both Leo and I would have undoubtedly described as “better looking than us.”

I read the stories in
Fidelity
and was simply gobsmacked at, sure, their beauty and humor and emotional specificity, okay, but what really made me sit down abruptly upon my fanny was that I recognized my own family and my own town in these tales. The small community of families, made up of characters of every stripe, simultaneously called to mind the inhabitants of my own youth and delighted me with new players as well, ones I had not yet discerned in my travels.

These first five stories ran the gamut from stomach-churning drama to staunch familial loyalty to easy raillery between friends and neighbors. The simplicity with which the journey in “Making It Home” resolves itself never fails to fill me with a warm flood of emotion. But it was the story “Fidelity” of which I was most enamored. It concerns a young farmer’s decision to “kidnap” his dying father from a Louisville hospital, so that he may expire in the presence of love, with dignity.

I wrote to Mr. Berry to request his permission for the right to adapt this story to stage or screen, I cared not which. His charming
reply gently explained his disinterest in countenancing any such adaptation of his work. Because the whole of his body of fiction (ten novels, five collections of short stories to date) exists in the same setting and is peopled by the same genealogies across some hundred years or so, he considered it (he still does) a work in progress. Now that I’ve read the entire canon through more than once, and some of it more than thrice, this makes perfect sense. Anybody else’s take on a portion of that work, he feels, would have an unwelcome alien effect on the whole of the town mural, as it were. I was disappointed, but the good news was I still had many years’ worth of his writing to consume.

He also suggested that I write my own story and take this opportunity to deliver the themes I preferred in his work within my own vehicle. I explained that of course this had occurred to me, and perhaps it would even one day come to pass, but my calling has proven to be much more that of story
teller
than story
writer
. Besides, no one can write like him. He writes with the economy of the farmer, which I know he’ll understand I mean as a high compliment. The farmer quietly derives his or her pride from an ability to produce the most bountiful yield with the minimum of extravagance. There is nothing superfluous on the ideal farm; there is no need for applied adornment, because, on a farm, like a Shaker chair, the beauty lies within the structure, in the care of the farm itself. Mr. Berry has described the Shaker style thus: “humble, impersonal, and perfect artistry, which refused the modern divorce of utility and beauty.” Through their respective health, the buildings, the land, the animals, and the garden all tell the tale of the farmer’s attention, and it is beautiful to see. So
read the sentences of Wendell Berry. I can’t imagine I’m the first to float the metaphor that his paragraphs have all the neatness of a well-planted field, ideas bursting through the topsoil, yearning toward the sunlight of our gaze, with nary a weed in sight.

In this day and age, the reading of books has possibly a greater number of easy distractions than ever before, in the ever-present availability of the Internet, not to mention our ability to actually watch films and television shows upon the small-screened devices we carry in our pockets. I especially love to read writers of serial fiction, like J. R. R. Tolkien, Laura Ingalls Wilder, or Patrick O’Brian, who continue to flesh out the world and characters in their stories over a series of books, allowing me to binge upon their work for several episodes, repeatedly forestalling the heartache that invariably descends (if the writing is good) at the end of the final page. I was to discover that the stories and novels of Mr. Berry’s Port William membership fall most satisfyingly into that category.

Wendell Berry was what you might call a right smart young whippersnapper, growing up on his family’s farm between Louisville and Cincinnati before leaving home to matriculate as a man of letters, first at the University of Kentucky, and then at Stanford as a Stegner Fellow, which means he was one of an incandescent group of young, revolutionary thinkers collected by Wallace Stegner; impregnable minds to whom he could teach his principles of writing. Ken Kesey, Edward Abbey, Tillie Olsen, Ernest Gaines, Robert Stone, and Larry McMurtry rounded out this astonishing, unlikely pool of talent, comprised of writers who produced a disproportionate amount of groundbreaking and incendiary work in their careers.

Following up his stint in Alameda, Mr. Berry, newly paired with a fetching young bride named Tanya, traveled to France and Italy on a 1961 Guggenheim Fellowship, where they farmed and kept house together while he continued his studies. After two years they moved back to America, settling in New York City, where, teaching at New York University, Mr. Berry was poised to become one of our nation’s brightest literary talents after the publication of his first novel,
Nathan Coulter.
Everything looked as bright as one might hope, future-wise, but there was just one problem: Wendell was homesick.

It was at this juncture that Wendell and Tanya made the decision that would come to shape the rest of their lives together. In 1965 they moved their family back to Kentucky, to the farm upon which Mr. Berry had grown up. He was still fully invested in his vocation of writing; it was just that he wanted to write about the people and the land that he knew most intimately, and those subjects just simply happened to reside on the banks of the Kentucky River in Henry County. On the farm, he cultivated his tobacco crop, even as he planted words in the furrowed minds of his hungry readers, seeds of love that would take root all around the world and bear an ever-increasing yield.

I exchanged a few more letters with Mr. Berry over the years, hoping to gently convince him to let me adapt one of his stories, and then eventually I just wanted to go and work with him on his farm. Ever the gentleman, he prudently kept me at arm’s length while never hurting my feelings. I continued to read everything he had written, completing his body of fiction and moving on to his essays and finally his poetry. Meanwhile, I had moved to Los Angeles from Chicago, only to discover firsthand how superficial and materialistic so much
of the television and film industry were. I suppose I had known this to be the case, but I naïvely thought that I would remain somehow above the filth of commerce that so permeates the very atmosphere in that town.

By saturating myself in his words and identifying with his characters, I was able to maintain a sense of my origins, the hardworking and loving family I had left in Illinois in order to pursue my goal. Even before I got to the plain-speak of his essays, I was powerfully moved by the common sense running through his fiction. The grace and reverence with which he described hard work, the people who performed it, and the resultant satisfaction they derived from it, struck a chord within me that rang robust and true.

My own father and mother had given me these same lessons, and given them well, but the power of Wendell Berry’s art reinforced them, bringing them to the forefront of my psyche. Girded by his narrative, I ceased chasing many of the minor paste-brass rings that Hollywood dangles and instead renewed my focus upon my tools, and the people in my own fellowship, to build myself a foundation upon their love.

I want to point out that this is much easier to describe now, with the clarity of twenty years’ distance. At the time, I was just following my gut instinct as best I could, navigating through a haze of bourbon, striving to strike gold with the confusing balance of carpenter, actor, country lad, and clown. What I do know is that through all the distracting chatter of popular culture and sour-mash medication, I kept steadily reading these stories for the guidance with which they were laced.

For the past fifteen years, if you’ve had a conversation with me
that ran on longer than seven sentences, then you’ve been told about my favorite writer, Wendell Berry, who is “this amazing Kentucky agrarian who never quit farming with horses.” Thanks to my bottomless yammering, a saintly friend in Austin named Holly Sabiston—if you know her, (a) you’re lucky, and (b) please buy her a cupcake—put me in touch with a pithy young filmmaker and mother of five boys (!) named Laura Dunn, who just happened to be making a documentary film about Wendell Berry.

Through Laura’s generosity, and the reported approbation of Mr. Berry’s granddaughters for my television show, I was put in touch with Wendell and Tanya’s daughter, Mary Berry. I wish that I had saved the initial voice mail Mary left me, but, with apologies to her, I will attempt to paraphrase: “Hello, Nick. This is Mary Berry. I have to say I don’t really know who you are, but my girls seem to think you hung the moon, and Laura Dunn is also vouching for you, so give me a call and we’ll see if we can get you in to meet Daddy.”

I’ll spare you the girlish delight that flooded my beefy corps from that moment, through a most illuminating October afternoon visit, and right up until this very typing. It continues yet. Suffice it to say that Wendell and Tanya were as quietly generous with their time and their thoughts as granddaughters Emily Berry and Tanya Smith were with their giggles.

I’ll only mention that the Berrys’ son, Den, came through at one point (having just rehung the barn doors, naturally), and he was interested to meet me without any real awareness of my work as a song-and-dance man—he knew me from an article I had contributed to
Fine Woodworking
magazine about a shop-made router sled for
flattening large slabs of wood. He had constructed and employed the jig to great effect on a book-matched ash slab for an handsome coffee table. I mention this episode because I gratefully feel that my woodworking may have legitimized me far beyond any other qualifications in the eyes of the Berrys. Just a hunch.