Wendell Berry

The memory of Old Jack

Simon Elliott Stegall

Hold on. Trying to reattach my heartstrings here.

.....

Ok. Now I can start. With many readers, reflective/poetical/memoir-type fiction can, depending on the readers' experiences and dispositions, cause either eye-dabbing or eyebrow raising; the eye-dabbers over-empathizing with the pregnant emotional themes of memoir types and the eyebrowers perhaps unable to empathize with too much sentiment. Wendell Berry's fiction is impossible to see this way. When his writing risks sentimentalism it plants the emotion in genuine and mountainous truths such that one cannot divorce the emotion from the characters and places to which it belongs; one cannot hate it for cheap sentiment, for there is none.

I say this to defend myself, for I (and other men I've spoken to) find Berry's work moving in the way only a farmer's writing can be. How can books about such weepy things as family, love, death, dying, birth, and home-cooked meals bring words of praise to the lips of so many cynical men (for example, the manly mustachioed Nick Offerman, otherwise known as Ron Swanson)?

Well... because it's so damned good.

The Memory of Old Jack is the putative life story of one Jack Beechum, told by his own deathbed (more like deathbench, actually) rememberings. The 92 year-old farmer relives his past, his loves and mostly his abundant failures. The title is a sober pun; for while the book is about Old Jack's memories, it is also about the memory of him that lives on in the next generations. Through this double meaning Berry explores the impact of a life on a community, and profoundly shows us a humanity that is seen only in the passing of a century, and in the death and birth of its people. 

Old Jack is a prideful and foolish person in some ways. But aren't we all? Insofar as Jack keeps faith with the land and those he loves, he does it well. It's hard to tell if Jack's life is one of beauty laced with pain or the other way around, but that it is a life of complexity, truth, and honesty can't be contested. The earth of Port William again yields a crop of wisdom, truth, and story. Berry really has captured something of American history that few other writers did. If I wasn't a Berrylyte before this book, I sure am now.

In a rural Kentucky river town, "Old Jack" Beechum, a retired farmer, sees his life again through the shades of one burnished day in September 1952. Bringing the earthiness of America's past to mind, The Memory of Old Jack conveys the truth and integrity of the land and the people who live from it. Through the eyes of one man can be seen the values Americans strive to recapture as we arrive at the next century. - Back cover.

The memory of Old Jack

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