What Are People For?. Wendell Berry
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has been to know what he is talking about, to condescend to no occasion, to indulge in none of the easy pangs of “disillusionment.” What has kept him going?
Not, I think, his sense of justice or his capacity for moral outrage—or not only those things. A sense of justice, though essential, grows pale and cynical when it stands too long alone in the face of overpowering injustice. And moral outrage, by itself, finally turns intelligence into rant. To explain the endurance of Harry Caudill, it is necessary to look deeper than his principles.
It is a fact, and an understandable one, I think, that many would-be defenders of the land and people of eastern Kentucky have felt both to be extremely uncongenial. The region is, after all, part of a “national sacrifice area,” and has been so considered and so treated by governments and corporations for well over half a century. The marks of the ruin of both land and people are everywhere evident, are inescapable, and to anyone at all disposed to regret them they tend to be depressing. The first article on strip mining I ever read began by saying how delighted the writer had been to leave Hazard, Kentucky, where he had served a protracted journalistic term of, I believe, one week. Harry Caudill, by contrast, can write: “I had the good fortune to be born in 1922 in Letcher County, Kentucky.” He did not come there, then, to serve justice. He has been there because he has belonged there; the land and people for whom he has spoken are his own. Because he got his law degree and went home with it, his mind has never made the expedient separation of knowledge from value that has enabled so much industrial pillage, but has known with feeling and so has served with devotion—a possibility long disregarded by modern educators, who believe despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary that education alone, “objective knowledge,” can produce beneficent results.
Another thing. As anybody knows who ever got within earshot of this man, Harry Caudill is a superb storyteller. A lecture, public or private, on the industrialization of the coal fields is apt to be followed by a string of wonderful tales, each reminding him of another, all riding on a current of exuberant delight and laughter. And this telling and the accompanying laughter do not come, I think, as escape or relief from the oppressive realities of the lecture, but come from the same life, the same long concentration on the same region and people.
And so this book, The Mountain, the Miner, and the Lord, which would be welcome enough by itself, is particularly welcome because it is a significant part, until now missing from the printed record, of Harry Caudill’s statement about his region. It is not “something different,” but belongs innately to the twenty years’ work that began with Night Comes to the Cumberlands and is a part of its explanation.
In the preface, valuable in itself as a remarkably compact, incisive historical essay on his region, Mr. Caudill tells how these stories came to him: “I practiced law within a mile of my birthplace for twenty-eight years and saw and talked to a daily procession of people . . . . I tried to afford them a good listener.” Or that is the way most of the stories came; elsewhere in the book he makes us aware that some of them, or some parts of them, were learned in the years of his childhood and youth. It is evident in places (and is nearly everywhere supposable) that the stories were not heard all together, as they stand here, but were collected in scraps from various other rememberers and tellers and pieced together over the years like quilts.
“These tales,” he writes, “are intended to show how the cultural layers were formed and a people fashioned.” And they do that, or help to do it. They show again and again, for example, how the parade of national history and power has impinged on the region: the frontier, the Civil War and its various successors, Prohibition and the continuing federal excitement over moonshine, corporations, unions, welfare, et cetera. They show also the influence of cultural inheritance, topography, geography, poor farming, and the oppressions of coal.
But they also do—and are—more than that. They spring, as perhaps the best stories always have, from the ancient fascination with human extremity, from the tendency, apparently native to us all, to remember and tell and tell again the extravagances of human vice and virtue, comedy and tragedy. This book contains a number of examples of the sort of outrageous wisdom that passes endlessly through the talk of rural communities:
One woman ain’t hardly enough fer a man if he is any account a-tall.
The worst thing that can happen to a man is to need a pistol and not have it!
There are tales of justice, public and private, heartwarming or hair-raising. There are the inevitable chapters of the region’s history of violence. Best of all, to me, is “The Straight Shooter,” a political biography of one Fess Whitaker: I don’t know how it could be better told.
This book, I fear, is doomed to be classed by those who live by such classification as “folk” material. But they had better be careful. It is, for one thing, very much a lawyer’s book. Harry Caudill is master of an art of storytelling that I think could rightly be called “legal,” for it has been practiced by country lawyers for many generations. Its distinction and distinctive humor lie in the understanding of the tendency of legal rhetoric to overpower its occasions:
Thereupon he towered above Collins like a high priest at some holy rite and poured forth a generous libation of buttermilk upon the judge’s pate, shoulders, and other parts.
For another thing, these stories—though they have to do with people who by a certain destructive condescension have been called “folk”—are the native properties of an able, cultivated, accomplished, powerful, and decent mind.
1981
A FEW WORDS IN FAVOR OF EDWARD ABBEY
Reading through a sizable gathering of reviews of Edward Abbey’s books, as I have lately done, one becomes increasingly aware of the extent to which this writer is seen as a problem by people who are, or who think they are, on his side. The problem, evidently, is that he will not stay in line. No sooner has a label been stuck to his back by a somewhat hesitant well-wisher than he runs beneath a low limb and scrapes it off. To the consternation of the “committed” reviewer, he is not a conservationist or an environmentalist or a boxable ist of any other kind; he keeps on showing up as Edward Abbey, a horse of another color, and one that requires some care to appreciate.
He is a problem, apparently, even to some of his defenders, who have an uncontrollable itch to apologize for him: “Well, he did say that. But we mustn’t take him altogether seriously. He is only trying to shock us into paying attention.” Don’t we all remember from our freshman English class how important it is to get the reader’s attention?
Some environmentalist reviewers see Mr. Abbey as a direct threat to their cause—a man embarrassingly prejudiced or radical or unruly. Not a typical review, but one representative of a certain kind of feeling about Edward Abbey, was Dennis Drabelle’s attack on Down the River in The Nation of May 1, 1982. Mr. Drabelle accused Mr. Abbey of elitism, iconoclasm, arrogance, and xenophobia; he found that Mr. Abbey’s “immense popularity among environmentalists is puzzling” and observed that “many of his attitudes give aid and comfort to the enemies of conservation.”
Edward Abbey is, of course, a mortal requiring criticism, and I would not attempt to argue otherwise. He undoubtedly has some of the faults he has been accused of having, and maybe some others that have not been discovered yet. What I would argue is that attacks on him such as that of Mr. Drabelle are based on misreading, and that the misreading is based on the assumption that Mr. Abbey is both a lesser man and a lesser writer than he in fact is.
Mr. Drabelle and others like him assume that Mr. Abbey is an environmentalist—and hence that they, as other environmentalists, have a right to expect him to perform as their tool. They further assume that if he does not so perform, they have a proprietary right to complain. They would like, in effect, to brand him an outcast and an enemy of their movement and to enforce their judgment against him by warning people away from his books. Why should environmentalists want to read a writer whose immense popularity among them is puzzling?
Such assumptions, I think, rest on yet another assumption that is more important and more needful of attention: namely, that our