Wendell Berry and Pure Writing

I read Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry’s iconic fictional memoir of a barber in the made-up town of Port William, Kentucky, when my middle daughter gave it to me as a birthday present in about 2001. That period was before I completed writing my first novel, but it was during the phase when I had started paying attention to words and what made them tick. Here is the first paragraph of the book.

I never put up a barber pole or a sign or even gave my shop a name. I didn’t have to. The building was already called “the barbershop.” That was its name because that had been its name for nobody knew how long. Port William had little written history. Its history was its living memory of itself, which passed over the years like a moving beam of light. It had a beginning that it had forgotten, and would have an end that it did not yet know. It seemed to have been there forever. After I had been there a while, the shop began to be called Jayber Crow’s, or just Jayber’s. “Well, I’m going down to Jayber’s,” people would say, as if it had been clearly marked on some map, though it was only so in their minds. I never had a telephone, so I was not even in the book.

A few days ago, I decided to re-read the book because I wanted to nominate it as a book for the book club I’m in to read in 2025. I’m about forty-five pages into my second reading, and I noticed last night that something had come over me as I have been reading it.

I found myself swept up by a sense of literary purity.

I don’t know how else to put it. It’s as if the book transported me to another time and place, not an idyllic fairy tale construct, but rather a place where people suffer life’s tragedies, embrace its joys, make the most of what they have, admit their shortcomings.

These are not flimsy characters. They bleed, die, suffer heartbreak, laugh, and play jokes on each other. As the end approaches, they realize that they have left many things undone and incomplete.

These people are real, even if they’re made up.

And something about reading about Jayber Crow’s fictional life makes me want to lead a truer life in the here and now, one characterized by sincerity and authenticity, compassion for those I come in contact with in the humdrum of life.

Maybe the right word for Berry’s writing is “authentic.”

All I know for certain is that what he does with words is the sort of thing to which writers should aspire, not because it is impressive but because it is pure.