Jayber Crow

NOTICE
Persons attempting to find a"text" in this book will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a"subtext" in it will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise"understand" it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR

This makes it hard, unfortunately, to talk about this excellent work. Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow is an autobiography of a small-town (very small town) barber roughly from WWI through Vietnam (and those landmarks are quite important in the book, not just convenient hooks), and also from orphanage through bachelorhood (both requited and unrequited affections), from youth to almost death. The title character passes from rural life through orphanage to college, spends some time in urban environs (and this early part of the book ranks as one of the finest bildungsroman I've ever read, including some penetrating observations about education and faith), but returns, nearly unknown now, to his hometown. There he makes a life and a living, two very different things, finding a distinctive place and home in that community. The dramatic changes that we think of when we say"20th century America" are muted and slowed in these rural backwaters, and those changes that do come are not terribly effective or sustainable or beneficial. There is deep fellowship in a slow and sustainable lifestyle; there is division and emptiness in aggressive egotistical expansionism.

These aren't terribly new ideas, of course, but they are expressed powerfully and interestingly. It's one of the few books I've read in recent years the writing of which was so good that I was reluctant to finish and quite measured in my reading pace. There is humor and faith and honesty in the characters and their voices (the best non-dialect vernacular writing I've enjoyed in some time; he describes the accents perfectly and you hear them without him needing to replicate them in every line.), and a psychological realism that is so lacking from so much of our literature and entertainment.

I came to the book because it was recommended by someone I trust: John McCutcheon. I don't know him personally (though we did chat about the Orioles briefly at the Winfield festival a few years back), but he's one of the finest songwriters and instrumentalists active today. He wrote a song called"It's the economy, stupid" which he said was inspired by the novel. It's a powerful prose poem set to a driving rhythm (he's a 'folksinger' but he's got a strong rock'n'roll strain); an except:

And the economy Is impatient. It has a short attention span. It is easily bored.
It is hungry. It is late for its next appointment. It puts you on hold. It does not return your call.
It’s the economy, stupid
...
The economy now has no borders Or horizons Or faces Or hands
The economy has only one rule: More.

And the economy lies.
The economy tells us it is about Freedom.
The economy is about Dependence.
Not on land Or animals Or weather Or neighbors
But On machinery And fuel And credit.
Most farmers Have borrowed their way Right out of farming.
And No government loan No government program Will change That cycle.
Because the government Is powerless now, see…
It’s the economy, stupid

And the government is the economy’s Biggest cheerleader.
It plays by the same rules: The quick fix, The stronger army, The bigger bomb, The dependence on machinery To do work That can only effectively be done By humans.
It consolidates When diversity is required.

I'd never heard of Wendell Berry before. Apparently he's written more books about this small town, about the importance of localized economics and sustainable development, about peace instead of victory as our ultimate goal.

The book itself is also very much about the relationship between economy and society. It's not a perfectly localized society: there is some outflow of agricultural products and inflow of manufactured goods. But that flow is not essential to survival or satisfaction. Jayber Crow talks about"my economy," the economy of relationships and sustenance, the economy of a person who is really aware of nearly everyone with whom he has an economic relationship.

One thought I had, as an historian, was that this would be a fantastic book for history students to read because it illustrates a lifestyle that was the world norm for most of human history, and which was (and is) present more recently and more commonly than we give it credit for. It also illustrates the problem historians have doing history of rural societies: personal relationships and barter do not leave records; government is avoided, not appreciated; failures and disasters leave more records than calm, stable lives.