The Hurt Man by Wendell Berry, 2003
The magic trick:
Narration that doesn’t just tell the action of the story, it ruminates on the impact of the story’s action
We start another week of Wendell Berry stories. I’m writing this from quarantine-land of April 2020, finding that to travel back to Berry’s Kentucky of 100 years ago is a very comforting proposition right now.
I’m reading his This Distant Place collection, which is just such a wonderful book for many reasons. In it, he does the coolest thing – instead of organizing the stories by when he wrote them or when he published them, they are presented here according to the chronology of the stories’ events. I’m not aware of any other collection that does this. The result is a complete history of Berry’s fictional town of Port William, Kentucky. There’s even a map!
It’s so good.
Of course, it helps that the stories are almost uniformly brilliant. Berry knows and loves deeply this place and these people. And now we have the opportunity to as well… starting with “The Hurt Man,” published in 2003 but set in the late 19th century.
This one is a terrific example of one of Berry’s strongest traits as a writer – the show and tell. I’ve noted this before with him on this site, but it bears repeating. He lets the story’s action show the reader truths about the characters and life in this town. But he also will allow his narration to pontificate about the themes. So you’re not just left to your own devices as a reader to interpret the bare bones of the story. You get a full-scale analysis and dissection.
It’s writing that is like a very rich dessert. Heavy even. Some people, I know, don’t like that style at all. They prefer the Raymond Carver, Gordon Lish school of minimalism. But when you’re able to pull it off as well as this story does, who cares about stylistic preference?
And that’s quite a trick on Berry’s part.
The selection:
But to him, when he was five, those deaths were stories told. Nothing in Port William seemed to him to be in passage from any beginning to any end. The living had always been alive, the dead always dead. The world, as he knew it then, simply existed, familiar even in its changes: the town, the farms, the slopes and ridges, the woods, the river, and the sky over it all. He had not yet gone farther from Port William than to Dawes Landing on the river and to his uncle Jack Beecham’s place out on the Bird’s Branch Road, the place his mother spoke of as “out home.” He had seen the steamboats on the river and had looked out from the higher ridgetops, and so he understood that the world went on into the distance, but he did not know how much more of it there might be.
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