Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture

Most readers familiar with Wendell Berry's novels and short stories will appreciate that his creation of the fictional Port William community has given him a unique perspective from which to examine the concept of family. Serving as the setting in each of his eight novels, the small farming community of Port William enables Berry to return to flesh out the same individual characters in ever greater detail and thus to give more and more history and perspective on the families of which these individuals are a part. The gradual accretion of detail through a multiplicity of perspectives finally creates multifaceted portraits of these families as they face different challenges during the tumultuous changes taking place in rural American communities since the Civil War. Throughout his novels (and his almost thirty short stories), Berry returns again and again to characters representing several generations of some of the older Port William families, including the Feltners, the Beechums, the Coulters, and the Catletts, but many other peripheral families reappear in these narratives as well. All of these families are viewed obliquely, through stories concentrated on individuals such as Mat Feltner, who serves as the centerpiece of Berry's early third-person [End Page 118] narrative titled A Place on Earth. But of course Mat and many of his relatives reappear in later novels. For instance, Andy Catlett and Hannah Coulter, who appear as minor characters related to Mat Feltner in A Place on Earth, are given full-length novels written from their own first-person perspectives later on in Berry's literary career. One consequence of returning to characters and a distinctive setting in this way is that minor characters in one story are humanized more fully in subsequent narratives to create the sense that everyone matters, that everyone has a story, a history, a set of hopes, a unique and unrepeatable personality. In other words, an outcome of reading broadly in Berry's novels is a sense that there are no minor characters, which is to say that there are no minor persons. Another consequence of presenting such a thorough picture of the human community of Port William is that the community itself effectively becomes a character featured in each of the novels, a character that is understood as a particular web of marriages, familial relations, and friendships. As a character, this community lives and grows and changes and even decays over time; it is an organic reflection of the persons of which it consists.

As a setting, Berry's Port William functions much like William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County or J. R. R. Tolkien's even more elaborate Middle Earth; in each of these imaginative realms, the setting acts as a sort of common denominator linking story to story, providing continuity and acting as a semantic framework in which particular actions and symbols have particular meanings. In the case of Port William, it may be said that two communities exist: one may be defined by cold census data, physical topography and buildings, a zip code, or certain GPS coordinates, all of which are summed up by a dot on a map. The other, and more vital, community in Berry's novels may more rightly be understood as a communion of persons bound together by kinship and friendship, by shared memories and history, by working together on the land, and, most crucially, by self-sacrificing love. Thus, the novels make plain that mere kinship, [End Page 119] a shared environment, and common work are not enough to move people beyond being a congregation of individuals in the pursuit of self-interested economic gain; indeed, the novels continually underscore that caritas, or self-giving love, is required to bind persons into a community that may enrich them emotionally and spiritually. This is the living community to which some of Berry's characters refer as "The Membership." In the 2004 novel Hannah Coulter, Hannah relates her brother-in-law Burley Coulter's understanding of this unique kind of community, viewed in this instance on the occasion of relatives and friends joined in helping one another harvest each other's crops.

This was our membership. . . . This membership had an economic purpose and it had an economic result, but the purpose and the result were a lot more than economic. . . . The work was freely given in exchange for work freely given. There was no bookkeeping, no accounting, no settling up. What you owed was considered paid when you had done what needed doing. Every account was paid in full by the understanding that when we were needed we would go, and when we had need the others, or enough of them, would come. In the long anxious work of the tobacco harvest none of us considered that we were finished until everybody was finished. In his old age Burley liked to count up the number of farms he had worked on in his life "and never took a cent of money."¹

These are people brought together in their work by love for others and an abiding concern for a common good; they are not loosely confederated in pursuit of an antiseptic wage. The world of self-interested competition is a world outside their community, their membership; that other world is the world of what Nathan Coulter calls "employment," a world in which individuals are not bound to one another as they are in the membership.

Berry offers the family-like membership as a humane contrast to the hollow communities associated with suburban life in the industrialized [End Page 120] world. In Hannah Coulter, Hannah reflects on her own children, who have moved away from Port William's membership to take jobs in the city:

One of the attractions of moving away into the life of employment, I think, is being disconnected and free, unbothered by membership. It is a life of beginnings without memories, but it is a life too that ends without being remembered. The life of membership with all its cumbers is traded away for the life of employment that makes itself free by forgetting you clean as a whistle when you are not of any more use. When they got to retirement age, Margaret and Mattie and Caleb [her children] will be cast out of place and out of mind like worn-out replaceable parts, to be alone at the last maybe and soon forgotten.²

In contrast to a world that sets up freedom as an idol, members of the Port William membership freely choose to limit their own freedom to some degree in order to attain something of greater value to them: a type of security that is not merely economic, but which instead is based on the acknowledgment of the essential dignity of each member. They are persons, and the other members will always understand and value them as persons, rather than as numbers, or the sum of the labor they can perform, or as a tax write-off or liability. For example, several novels attest that the elderly in the community, like Old Jack or Aunt Fanny, are taken care of not only by their own family members, but also by a larger membership who loves them, who knows them, who honors them and their contributions in the past.

In a 1999 interview, Berry noted that he borrowed the term "membership" from St. Paul.³ In Romans 12, Paul writes, "For as in one body we have many members, and all the members do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another" (RSV, Rom 12:4-5). In his short story "The Wild Birds," Berry has Burley Coulter speak of [End Page 121] the Port William community in a similar way: "The way we are," he says, "we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don't."⁴ As persons, then, we are linked to other persons if only by our common humanity and whether we admit it or not. But neither Paul nor Burley Coulter limits the notion of community simply to the condition of being in proximity to one another. How, exactly, can people in a community be "members of one another?" Perhaps the answer is in self-emptying love, that love by which one fills oneself with other selves, that is, with the needs of others.

As it is presented in Berry's novels, this other-centered conception of community seems to offer more than merely a supportive role to family: at times, community even seems to supplant—or take the place of—family, often by supplying whatever physical or emotional aids or structures an individual person might lack. The "membership" concept might even seem to exalt community over family as a much more significant influence on the individual. Notably, not all the families in Berry's novels are model families, nor do all members of the membership appear to be saints. Small-scale agrarian communities, at least as Port William represents them, are not prelapsarian paradises. Old Jack Beechum's marriage, for example, is disastrous, and in moving to the city, his daughter Rose rejects a close relationship with her father, which is to reject membership in both her family and the special community of which her family is a part. Hannah's children are raised by a most loving mother and father in farming conditions that reinforce a different idea of success than is found in the world of "employment." Nevertheless, her children exercise their freedom by rejecting life on the farm and in the membership, ending up instead in the city, with stories of failed marriages, broken homes, and unfulfilling jobs. In one of the more stark examples, after the death of his wife, Jarrat Coulter abdicates his responsibilities as a father, leaving the upbringing of his sons Nathan and Tom to his brother Burley and his father and mother, Grandma and Grandpa Coulter. [End Page 122]

The world created by Berry, then, is a realistic world, which is to say it is a fallen world; the problems that beset these marriages and these families are the problems that beset all marriages and families. Despite the ubiquity of vice in the membership, a close reading of Berry's novels nevertheless indicates that the particular virtues identified with family life are those upon which humane communities must depend for stability, and thus that family clearly has primacy in relation to community. Jack Beechum's primary supports in his old age are Mat Feltner and Wheeler Catlett, both of whom are members of his extended family. Hannah Coulter helps pick up the pieces after her daughter's marriage crumbles and aids her grandson as he attempts to recover from his troubled life. Jarrat Coulter only entrusts his young boys to his own brother and parents. That many fail to live up to a principle does not mean the principle is false, nor does it mean that people should stop striving to live up to it. In contrast to the individuals, marriages, and families marked by shortcomings, Berry also creates virtuous individuals, like Wheeler Catlett and Mat Feltner; strong marriages, like those of Mat and Margaret Feltner and Hannah and Nathan Coulter; and robust and thriving families, like the Feltners and the Branches.

The Port William membership cannot exist without these individuals, marriages, and families; whereas, flourishing families, morally upright individuals, and inspiring marriages could conceivably exist without the membership, though the membership doubtlessly provides critical support to its members. The problem may be that the membership is weakened by the challenges and allurements that the larger culture presents. The membership is weakened when its agrarian underpinnings are weakened, or when it loses members. The central strength of the membership, however, is that it is an authentically humane community, and it is humane because it behaves, or attempts to behave, like a good family. When the membership works well, it works because it practices the virtues imperative to excellent family life. Observed broadly, some of these familial [End Page 123] virtues include complementarity, respect for individual dignity and freedom, trust, compassion, humility, and justice. All of these virtues, however, extend from selfless love, particularly such as must be found in healthy marriages, which are the center of good family life, and thus of a vigorous community.

As it is presented in Berry's fiction, marriage may be understood as a microcosm of community, a smaller-scale relationship between persons that is related ineffably to every other relationship between persons in a community. In her essay titled "Wendell Berry's Community," Anne Husted Burleigh writes about the connections between marriage and community in Berry's work: "Trust, fidelity, standing by one's word, are the cement of all human relations and therefore of marriage and community. Marriage, in Berry's view, is the cornerstone of the community, the engine that energizes human life. . . . Only within the community can we achieve our end to know and love others; within the community one is at 'once free and a member.'"⁵ If one loves well in marriage, and, it might be added, if one loves well within a family, one may love well in the community. Effectively, Wendell Berry sees marriage and family functioning as schools for the virtues that benefit community, virtues like fidelity and trust, but particularly the virtue of self-sacrificing love.

In Hannah Coulter, Hannah speaks of the metaphorical "room of love" that she shares with her husband and describes coming together with him into that imagined space that is created by—bounded by—their love for one another: "There you are where giving and taking are the same, and you live a little while entirely in a gift. The words have all been said, all permissions given, and you are free in the place that is the two of you together."⁶ Obviously marriage contains an erotic component not present in the dynamic of love that unites the broader Port William membership, but the principle of gift emerges as a fundamental element of both marriage and the membership. In marriage this giving and receiving exists as a complete giving of self and receiving of the other that creates a heightened sense of well-being, of being free within the boundaries of [End Page 124] love; in the membership, too, the free giving and humble receiving of aid and comfort creates the boundaries of the membership and generates security and a sense of peace and happiness within that space.

In A Place on Earth, for example, old Jack Beechum comes to visit Hannah Coulter when she is recuperating after the birth of her first child. Hannah realizes the depth of his care for her, though witnessed in his bumbling way of offering her candy and simply sitting quietly in her room, staring out the window. At this tense point in her life, when she is weary with mourning the death of her first husband, Virgil Feltner, and fatigued with childbirth and the myriad difficulties accompanying a newborn, old Jack is ushered into her bedroom, visits for a bit, then sits in a nearby chair, gets quiet, and does not seem to be willing to leave. As long as she had known him, their relationship had consisted merely of amiable banter. She considered herself a stranger who had married Jack's grandnephew, and she thought Jack merely humored her as an old man might a pretty young woman, but now it becomes apparent to her that there is a different relationship that had existed between them ever since she had become part of the Port William community:

Now, as from the extremity of her embarrassment, she grows aware of his caring for her. She understands, with shame at her misapprehension, that he is not there because he is flattered by her small attentions; he has come to offer himself. In all her life she has known nothing like it. She sees how free he leaves her. His love for her requires nothing of her, not even that she find it useful. He has simply made himself present, turning away, as he has now, to allow her to sleep if she wants to. She feels enclosed in this generosity as in a room, ample and light.⁷

The membership, then, like a marriage, also provides a sort of "room of love," a secure place that fosters the life of each member. This is a gift of self on the part of old Jack, and as is the case with [End Page 125] all authentic gifts, there are no strings attached, there is nothing expected in return. There is only the love given—the self given—and this frees Hannah from feeling bound to respond to him or required to return a gift; it is in this condition of total freedom that she finds peace and safety.

So, this gift of self, born out of the freedom of the giver, in turn promotes the freedom of the receiver. Hannah is not forced to take Jack's proffered self, or it would not be a gift. Similarly, the membership does not dictate to members or subvert their own free will. This idea of preserving the individual's freedom is witnessed, for example, in the episode in the novel A Place on Earth involving Ida Crop, whose husband Gideon abandons her for a period after their daughter is drowned. When her husband disappears, Mat Feltner and Burley Coulter step in to offer her assistance with the repair and running of the farm, but they are careful not to force her to live with the Feltners or to relieve her from doing the farm chores that she clings to, almost as a hope for the return of her husband. The novel The Memory of Old Jack offers another such example, when Mat Feltner's wife Margaret encourages Mat to intervene in Old Uncle Jack Beechum's life by bringing him to live with them. She says they may be sorry if they do not take him in and something happens to Uncle Jack. Mat counters: "I'd be sorrier to have something imposed on him he didn't like" and adds, "When he needs it, we'll help him. When he don't, we won't."⁸ And while Mat is willing, under extreme circumstances, to impress help on those who need it, he is careful to preserve the dignity of those whom he helps. In A Place on Earth, Mat discovers his irresponsible alcoholic cousin, Roger Merchant, sleeping in his own filth in his deteriorating home. Mat and Burley clean him up, and Mat afterwards oversees a new legal arrangement with his cousin that will provide Mat the provisional power he needs in order to save Roger's farmland, and thus Roger, from ruin. At the same time, Mat provides for Roger to continue to maintain his self-respect by living in his own home, but with the help of a live-in assistant. As the examples of Old Jack and Roger [End Page 126] Merchant suggest, preserving the freedom and dignity of the individual is as significant, and as delicate, a matter in the membership as it is in a family.

As the observant bachelor barber of Port William, Jayber Crow is in a good position to recognize both the failings and triumphs of these families, and of the communal membership based on them. In the novel titled Jayber Crow, which is offered as Jayber's memoir, he writes of Port William, "It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointing its members, always trying to contain its division and gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always preserving a sort of will towards goodwill. I know that, in the midst of all the ignorance and error, this was a membership; it was the membership of Port William and of no other place on earth."⁹ Jayber concludes that, despite their individual failings, the love that members had for one another redeemed them. They were "all somehow perfected, beyond time, by one another's love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace."¹⁰ To enter timelessness through love in community is a way of saying that, in loving on earth, one rehearses for heaven, in which the lover will love and be with God forever in the special community that is Christ's mystical body. This self-giving love is surely the "fairest love" of which Pope John Paul II writes in his "Letter to Families." The late Holy Father writes, "The contemporary family, like families of every age, is searching for 'fairest love.' A love which is not 'fairest,' but reduced only . . . to a man's and a woman's mutual 'use' of each other, makes persons slaves to their weaknesses."¹¹ As in families, so in communities; a community is poisoned when the members of the community objectify one another, when they fail to see and value one another as persons.

One cannot overemphasize this feature of the membership: it is above all personal. In Berry's 2008 novel Remembering, Andy Catlett, the nephew of Mat Feltner, is invited to speak at a college in San Francisco and, as he wanders through the city, he is bewildered by the impersonal nature of his experience of this place. Berry writes, [End Page 127] "A man could go so far from home, [Andy] thinks, that his own name would become unspeakable by him, unanswerable by anyone, so that if he dared to speak it, it would escape him utterly, a bird out an open window, leaving him untongued in some boundless amplitude of mere absence."¹² Remarking on this passage in his essay "On Devotion to the 'Communal Order': Wendell Berry's Record of Fidelity, Interdependence, and Love," the critic Stephen Whited writes: "In Berry's work, such 'absence' represents more than personal depression, loneliness, or angst; instead, Andy has briefly lost track of the communal relations that define him even to himself."¹³ In the midst of the faceless crowds and imposing buildings, Andy is threatened with a loss of self; no wonder then, that he reacts by casting his memory back to the Port William membership, where his personhood was continually confirmed by those who knew and loved him. In the membership, as in a family, interpersonal knowledge does not efface, obscure, or threaten individuality, but instead fortifies one's sense of identity as an individual.

In too many contemporary families, the cultural exaltation of individualism has promoted quite a different telos for the family; too often families today exist as loose confederations of autonomous individuals, each of whom is concerned more with his or her own self-realization than with one another, much less the common good of the family. As divorce and abortion rates suggest, persons in too many families are viewed as interchangeable parts or as obstacles to self-fulfillment rather than as the means of authentic self-fulfillment. Certain aspects of parenting are too often delegated, or subcontracted, to impersonal outside parties, whether it be a day care program, a television, or an iPod. More a set of business aquaintanceships than an organic system of personal relationships, this miniature familial "community" is a sad reflection of the larger commercial and cultural community surrounding the family and invading the home.

In his encyclical letter Evangelium vitae, John Paul diagnoses one of the central factors corrupting today's culture: the materialistic view of the human person. The late Holy Father writes that this "practical [End Page 128] materialism . . . breeds individualism, utilitarianism, and hedonism," and concludes that, in the contemporary "culture of death," "the values of being are replaced by those of having. The only goal which counts is the pursuit of one's own material well-being. The so-called 'quality of life' is interpreted primarily or exclusively as economic efficiency, inordinate consumerism, physical beauty and pleasure, to the neglect of more profound dimensions—interpersonal, spiritual and religious—of existence."¹⁴ Such a cultural community obviously poses a threat to families insofar as family members are led by this culture to think of themselves primarily as individuals pursuing their own good, instead of members pursuing a common good, whether of the family or the community.

It falls, then, to our families to help build up the community of love and the culture of life, to help cultivate the "more profound dimensions" of existence in each person. Of course, this local action has global consequences. In his apostolic exhortation Familiaris consortio, John Paul writes that "the future of the world . . . passes through the family."¹⁵ As Berry's novels affirm, a good community will extend from a taproot in the self-sacrificial love—the "fairest love"—that is the first principle in good families. Again, this "fairest love" is itself an image of the fullness of God's love for man, as well as of man's love for God, the love that is finally the most fulfilling of all human loves.

Perhaps Berry's character Hannah Coulter should have the last word on the multidimensional nature of this "fairest love," at least as it may be examined through the families that make up Berry's Port William membership. At the end of the novel that bears her name, Hannah imagines herself talking with Andy Catlett about the membership: "The room of love is the love that holds us all, and it is not ours. It goes back before we were born. It goes all the way back. It is Heaven's. Or it is Heaven, and we are in it only by willingness. By whose love, Andy Catlett, do we love this world and ourselves and one another? Do you think we invented it ourselves? I ask with confidence, for I know you know we didn't."¹⁶ [End Page 129]