Reading The Need to Be Whole

I've recently discovered a group effort to read (and write) through The Need to Be Whole. It consists of weekly essays by at least one (sometimes two) group members and the opportunity to comment.

Stacy Boone, who hosts the series, introduces the project with this thought:

When the book arrived, I did not feel emotionally or sufficiently educated to tackle the work of 515 pages. The simplicity of the cover intimidated me because I knew it contrasted with the sheaf of pages. Now that a few years have passed, I feel I have grown up a bit. It seems the time to avoid avoidance and delve into a book that will require a face-to-face dive into uncomfortable topics. I might argue that Berry is anything but confrontational, he speaks his mind, there is little ambiguity. He has long considered his perspective and why the opinion he has is valuable enough to share. But that does not mean his words don’t generate controversary.

A few reviews push back on Berry’s interpretation of history, maybe it is some revisionism, maybe it is failure to delve deeper into explanation, or it simply might be that (as Mary Beth and I have exchanged in our emails) that Berry is simply a grandfatherly curmudgeon. None of these excuses his words—when you are a writer, you must stand by your words.

A list of essays written up to now can be found HERE.

You can subscribe to the Crooked Roots substack HERE.

UK mural lawsuit is dismissed

The controversial mural at the center of a lawsuit between the University of Kentucky and Wendell Berry must be maintained and cannot be removed, according to a court order filed Monday that also dismissed the lawsuit. The ruling comes after a years-long debate between students, administration and Berry over what should happen to the mural, which depicts Black workers — possibly slaves — planting tobacco and a Native American person wielding a tomahawk. Berry and his wife, Tanya, filed the lawsuit in Franklin Circuit Court in 2020 to halt the removal of the mural. Tanya is the niece of the mural’s artist, Ann Rice O’Hanlon.

Read all of "Judge dismisses Wendell Berry’s lawsuit against UK, but says controversial mural must stay" by Monica Kast at Kentucky.com.

Another review of The Need to Be Whole

In every facet of modern life, we are being exploited, fragmented and alienated from the reality of the world and our own human natures. For over 60 years, Wendell Berry, writing from his farm near Port Royal, Ky., has attempted to draw back into relationship things that human sin, always wrapped up in “our destruction of precious things that we did not and cannot make,” has made separate through pride and greed. He has attempted to heal the great divisions that afflict us: our estrangements from the place where we are, the soil that we stand on, the people that surround us and the call of the natural law within us.

Now nearing the end of his life, Berry has looked back over what he has done, the long labor of one who has “entered the way of love and taken up its work,” and attempted in a new book, The Need to Be Whole, to give a glimpse of the undivided foundation that underpins all he has ever tried to think and say. Perhaps by necessity, he is only partly successful.

Read all of "Review: Wendell Berry on healing our divisions" by John-Paul Heil at America: The Jesuit Review.

Speaking of Wendell Berry's "The Need to Be Whole"

Wendell Berry responds to UK Mural Removal Plan

The new plan rests upon the university’s case against the fresco, which remains a flimsy rationalization, in several ways open to question. It ignores the fresco's considerable value and significance as a work of art, which has been attested by qualified critics, some of whom have been employed as such by the university. It has therefore the standing of an artwork of established worth. Insofar as the university has already publicized its disapproval of the fresco and concealed it from public view, and insofar as President Capilouto has expressed publicly his willingness to destroy it, and insofar as he and the university now assume willingly the risk of its destruction, the university is implicated in acts and threats of censorship. This appears to be a precedent that can be expanded without limit. If President Capilouto, largely on his own initiative, can define or sequester or endanger or destroy this fresco, what then can prevent him from forbidding an invited speaker to speak, or from forbidding any book to be assigned by a professor, or from removing a disfavored writer's books from the university library?

Read all of "UK's plan for Memorial Hall mural dishonors honest thought" by Wendell Berry at Lexington Herald Leader.

For more information on the history of this controversy see: "Wendell Berry files suit to prevent removal of UK mural."

Another review of Wendell Berry's The Need to Be Whole

The association between wholeness and the love of a place is at the heart of Berry’s decisive contribution to our national conversation about race in his new book; The Need to Be Whole, Patriotism and the History of Prejudice. In his characteristically prophetic style, Berry delivers a message of biblical simplicity: black and white Americans will remain estranged so long as our lives remain enslaved by an economy which forbids the love of a place and rewards abusing the land and our fellow human beings. But despite an entire economic organization of our society constructed upon rootlessness and the relentness destruction of communities, we must continue to hope, because “[l]ove of country is not yet a possibility foreclosed.”

Read all of "Rage Against the Machine" by Renaud Beauchard at his Limits and Hope/Substack.

A Consideration of Wendell Berry's The Need to Be Whole

Daunting to summarize, not only is this Berry’s longest work, it seems destined to be regarded as a kind of career capstone and magnum opus. While prompted by the topic of race, like The Hidden Wound this book encompasses all of the themes Berry has explored over decades of writing about place and membership, culture and agriculture, economics and education. He draws on literary analysis and historical scholarship, on personal anecdote and long friendships, and of course on his careful attention to language, his sense for pacing and poetry, his knack for making profound points in plain, direct speech.

The central theoretical theses include a need to clarify different senses of “race prejudice” and to distinguish patriotism from nationalism. Individual passages will draw attention from different kinds of audiences. The book is attuned to current events—BLM, #MeToo, Supreme Court drama, and pandemic response—but eschews polemic. There is a subtle and relevant perspective on the civic significance of Confederate monuments. Examining the cases of William Faulkner and Mark Twain, Berry shows the unavoidable complexity in the taboo of “the n-word” (which Berry himself had employed, in The Hidden Wound, to challenge the way Americans racially trope “menial” work, though he avoids the word here). Even more than in The Hidden Wound, Berry shares autobiographical accounts of his indebtedness to Black neighbors, friends, and colleagues. Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman are targets of criticism; but Berry risks discriminating appreciations of Robert E. Lee and John Calhoun, not far from a fond homage to his late friend Ernest Gaines.

Read all of "An American Augustine" by Joshua P. Hochschild at Front Porch Republic. 

A Review of Wendell Berry's The Need to Be Whole

For more than six decades, a steady breeze of earth-scented essays, novels, poetry, and short stories has tumbled from a small farm in Kentucky’s Bluegrass region, where the writer Wendell Berry, now 88 years old, has made his home. As comfortable with a hoe as with a pen, he has been one of the few intellectuals reminding us that country life is far more complex than its caricature, that industrial progress is nothing of the sort, that living in the country and working with the land can be a path to redemption, that living in the country and working with the land is the path to redemption. His latest book, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, is the culmination of a lifetime of thinking and writing, and it is by turns infuriating, brilliant, lazy, startlingly radical, deeply disappointing, and filled with love, even as it seethes with resentment.

Read all of "One of Our Most Beloved Environmental Writers Has Taken a Surprising Turn" by Daegan Miller at Slate.

Thoughts on Wendell Berry's new book

The Need to Be Whole elaborates on themes Berry explored in his 1970 book on race, The Hidden Wound. Both argue that racism has a damaging effect on both white people and black people, and that injustices to both races have a deeper cause. He likens the "decline of a small black community in Chicago" to "the decline of the now nearly all-white small towns in my rural county." If both these things are occurring, he says, "then the problem cannot be race prejudice, or only that, but a prejudice of another kind."

He counts Martin Luther King Jr. as an ally in this analysis, saying the civil rights leader's own impulse toward wholeness moved him "from concern for black people to concern for poor people to concern at last for all people, their land and culture." Berry also pulls in the perspectives of others, including writer Ernest J. Gaines, whom Berry knew well, and bell hooks, who visited him at his farm. And while making his definitive life statement on the issue of race, he also explores all of the other issues—including the importance of community, localism, and physical labor—that run constantly through his work. ("Tanya," he relates in the introduction to his 2017 essay collection, The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings, "says my principal asset as a writer has been my knack for repeating myself.")

Read all of "Beyond Good and Evil: On Wendell Berry's Brave New Book" by Bill Lueders at Common Dreams.

Fifth essay from Front Porch Republic on Wendell Berry's The Need to Be Whole

... “The general principle”—equality—“can have no substantial or lasting result if it is not absorbed into the ordinary practice of neighborhood among neighbors.”

Who can argue with this? Anyone who wishes to owes it to their ideals to read Berry’s reflections on his own personal history of prejudice, he who, as a descendant of slaveowners, was “born into customary race prejudice,” as he confesses; he numbers himself among those “who feel they have got rid of the old reflexes, but who know better than to be sure.” If you’ve hoped for a something like a memoir from Berry, you will find his writing in this book as personal, detailed, and autobiographical as anything he’s written. And much of this self-disclosure is in service of his effort to show with historical precision the ways in which movement both away from and toward wholeness in race relations has taken place in his lifetime and in his part of the world. Life in neighborhoods, he concludes, makes possible degrees of healing, conviviality, and solidarity not otherwise obtained; love of neighbor is the best “stay against disorder and ruin.” For Berry, the guiding question must always be, “What scale of living and working permits us to know and value one another as the individual and unique persons we know ourselves to be?” In settings of interdependence, healing has a chance.

Read all of "A Pathway to Peace: Hope in The Need to Be Whole" by Eric Miller at Front Porch Republic.