Wendell Berry died Monday at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. He was 92. His daughter, Mary Berry, confirmed the death to the Associated Press. [1] "There's not enough I could say about him to do him justice," she said. [1]
The easy version of the life is already in circulation: Kentucky farmer, poet of the soil, enemy of industrial agriculture, winner of a National Humanities Medal. That version is not false. It is incomplete. AP's own obituary, by Hillel Italie, holds the hero next to the fights that made admirers flinch — Berry's description of Robert E. Lee as "a tragic figure" rather than an upholder of slavery, and the 2020 lawsuit he and his wife Tanya filed to stop the University of Kentucky from removing a Depression-era campus mural that students and others had long condemned as a sanitizing of slavery. [1] The Kentucky Lantern, filing from the state he never left, said the vacancy he leaves "was not always without controversy throughout his life but was decisive and steady." [2]
Berry published more than 40 books. The novels included "Nathan Coulter" and "A Place on Earth." The poems were gathered in volumes such as "A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997." Michael Pollan has said his life was changed by Berry's line that "Eating is an agricultural act." Alice Waters wrote an introduction to the 1989 essay "The Pleasures of Eating." [1] He never won a Pulitzer Prize or a National Book Award. He did receive a National Humanities Medal, membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and, in 2016, a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle. [1]
The argument that made him indispensable, and that made some readers' eyes cross, was stated without ornament in "The Unsettling of America" in 1977. "The modern urban-industrial society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth," he wrote. "At each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation, government, and experts sets up a profit-making enterprise that results in the further dismemberment and impoverishment of the Creation." [1] He meant it. For decades he and Tanya ran a hillside organic farm in Henry County. They lived without computers, television, or phones, then installed solar units in 2005 in a coal state. [1]
He knew the piety could curdle. Reviewing a Library of America anthology of his nonfiction, the New York Times' Dwight Garner wrote that Berry "bangs the same themes so relentlessly — the perils of industrial agriculture, the decimation of rural life, America's blind faith in technology — that one's eyes begin to cross." [1] Berry also wrote that he was "painfully divided" by the knowledge that "my people established themselves here by killing or driving out the original possessors" and that "people were once bought and sold here by my people." [1] The honesty did not produce a simple politics.
History, AP noted, "led to some controversial opinions." Berry regarded Lee as more "a tragic figure" than an upholder of slavery. [1] Tanya Berry was the niece of Ann Rice O'Hanlon, whose 1934 fresco of Lexington history has been fought over for decades for its depiction of Black labor and of Indigenous people. Wendell and Tanya Berry sued in 2020 to block its removal from Memorial Hall. Three years earlier he had defended the fresco as a painful but realistic portrait. "Black people did work in tobacco fields," he wrote. "Black musicians did play for white dancers." [1] The Lantern records that the Lexington Herald-Leader reported in January that the mural remains in place. [2]
The university was his alma mater and, for years, his employer. He taught English there in two stretches, 1964-1977 and 1987-1993. [2] He cut ties after UK accepted $7 million to name a basketball dormitory for a coal-company donor — AP says a group organized by a coal company president; the Lantern names Joe Craft and the Wildcat Coal Lodge. [1][2] He withdrew papers he had loaned the school. "When the university accepted the gift from (the) coal industry in return for naming the basketball dormitory 'Wildcat Coal Lodge,' the university had sold an advertisement," he told the Kentucky Kernel. [2] In 2011 he joined a sit-in at the governor's office against mountaintop-removal mining. [1][2]
He was born in Henry County in 1934, took a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, lived briefly in New York, and bought Lanes Landing at the end of the 1960s. [1] He told The New Yorker that the drive home in a Volkswagen Beetle brought "a great, deep relief — as if I was following, at last, my true path." [2] The fiction that followed, set in the invented town of Port William, was a long argument that a person is involved whether he wishes to be or not.
The National Endowment for the Humanities once called him "cheerful in dissent." [2] Cheerful is not the same as harmless. The work asked readers to live as if the land were a neighbor. The life asked them to notice when the neighbor was Confederate marble, or a mural, or a coal-named dorm. Both requests survive him. The simplified activist of a trending post does not.
-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin