Portrait of Port William.(That Distant Land)(Book review)

That Distant Land, by Wendell Berry; Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004, $27.95.

WHEN WENDELL BERRY began writing his stories and novels forty years ago, he seems to have had his fictional community of Port William and all its characters and their genealogies over nearly two centuries already settled in his mind. Each story he has written about Port William has been a further elaboration of the history of the community, and Berry has introduced few new elements.

He has now written six novels and twenty-three short stories (some as long as 20,000 words) about Port William. That Distant Land collects the stories for the first time. They are arranged in chronological order of the events described; read in that order they form a virtual novel of their own, with Port William the central character.

Many Americans have compared Berry's Port William in Kentucky with William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi. But the greater similarity, I think, is to Thomas Hardy's Wessex. Hardy's Wessex stories had the common theme of attachment to and estrangement from a rural community, and how those who are in some way disaffected with their community disrupt, and can destroy, the lives of those around them. Berry's stories, especially those set since the Second World War, are about the tensions that tend to pull a community apart, and the spirit, usually in the end just a little bit weaker, that tends to keep it together. His 2004 novel, Hannah Coulter, is the story of the rise and disintegration of one Port William family and their farm since the war.

Many of the stories in That Distant Land hinge on a crucial moment, when a character has to make a sudden decision which will have profound implications for the community. If they are responsible and courageous and integrated into their community, the characters usually make the right decision. "Pray Without Ceasing", a brilliant story, contains two such moments. A man, humiliated and drunk, murders his best friend. Twice in the next few hours the dead man's son has to choose between a revenge that will gratify his righteous anger but split the community for generations, and forgiveness.

This story, like many in the collection, is narrated by someone from decades later, piecing together the story as he has heard it from various sources over the years. As the stories are retold, they bind the present members of the community together and to their collective past. Talking about the things that have happened is an essential part of the community's life. Here is a distinct echo of Faulkner, one of whose characters says: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

In a time in which if the past is valued at all it is mostly for what it can do for the present, this is a downright unfashionable thing to believe. Berry's community lives by it. (They also live by Christ's commandment, "Love thy neighbour", taking it literally, which may well be how Christ meant it.) Berry has imagined a place in which, for the most part, people do not choose the easy or the colourful or the abstract, but live a hard and fulfilling life among the people they have always known, in the place where they grew up.