Old Jack is what we once called “a character.” You didn’t find characters in large cities; you found them in small towns. Everyone knew them; they might be funny or odd or irascible or curmudgeonly. But they were part of the fabric of the place, part of its history and memory.
Old Jack is 92. Born in 1860, the year before the Civil War, he has lived in the Port William area for his entire life. He’s connected to other families by kinship and relationship. He farmed for as far back as he can remember, but his farming days are behind him. He lives in what passes for Port William’s hotel, really just a boarding house with other elderly residents. But none are as old as he; he can remember some of them as children.
Old Jack can feel the end of his long life approaching. He knows this as well as he knows anything. He finds himself moving almost effortlessly between what was and what is. He recalls his childhood, his courtship of Rose and their doomed marriage, the births and the deaths, his estrangement from his only surviving child, the cost he paid for taking on the farmer who didn’t revere the land like Jack did. He remembers of deaths of friends; but he can rouse himself to engage the present, like seeing young Andy Catlett off to college, knowing it’s the last time he’ll see the boy of whom he’s especially fond.
Wendell Berry
The Memory of Old Jack is the second-to-last of the Port William novels by Wendell Berry. Set in 1952, it is a requiem for the kind of small-town and farming life that slowly vanished after World Wat II. It’s about the land and the people who farmed it, and the lives they lived. It’s not a rose-colored-glasses look backward; not everything was wonderful and simple. But it’s a story that only Wendell Berry could write, I think.
Berry is a poet, novelist, essayist, environmentalist, and social critic. His fiction, both novels and stories, are centered in the area he calls Port William, Kentucky, on the Ohio River. He’s won a rather astounding number of awards, prizes, fellowships, and recognitions. He lives on a farm in Kentucky.
If such a thing as purpose to a novel exists, then the purpose of The Memory of Old Jack is to remind us that this way of life existed, it was important, and when it passed, we lost something worth keeping. This may be my favorite of all the Port William novels,
Related:
My review of Berry’s That Distant Land.
My review of Berry’s Jayber Crow.
Wendell Berry and This Day: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.
Wendell Berry and Terrapin: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.
Wendell Berry’s Our Only World.
The Art of the Commonplace by Wendell Berry.
Nathan Coulter by Wendell Berry.
Andy Catlett: Early Travels by Wendell Berry.
A World Lost by Wendell Berry.
A Place on Earth by Wendell Berry.
Some Monday Readings
The Intellectual Virtues of the Small Magazine – Jeff Reimer at Comment Magazine.
The Darktown Strutters Ball – Debra Esolen at Word & Song.
Message from Pope Francis: Read a Novel – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.
The Fantastic Imagination – George Macdonald at The Imaginative Conservative.
St. James’s Square and the Growth of Stuart London – A London Inheritance.