Of people, land, ties that bind

A Place in Time

Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership

By Wendell Berry

Counterpoint. 256 pp. $26. nolead ends

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Reviewed by Adam Cieszkiewicz

It is hard to remember one world when you live in another. It is harder still when the world to remember, like that of America's preindustrial farming communities, is peopled in most of our imaginations with stereotypes. So for those who want to know the way of life that survived in rural America until just after the Second World War - know its temperament, griefs, and satisfactions - A Place in Time, the latest installment in Wendell Berry's Port William fiction, comes as a great gift.

It is the gift of a Kentucky native who for more than 50 years has acquainted readers with the land and culture of his birth. Like Mark Twain to the Mississippi or Wallace Stegner to the West, the 80-year-old farmer firmly belongs to his home country, although he is a partisan of its past more than its present. At the heart of his literary output, more than 50 volumes, are the ties between people and agriculture, the communities that conserve such ties, and the consequence of those communities' evanescence from the American landscape.

These ideas endow A Place in Time with moral importance of a rather grave sort. But that doesn't begin to suggest the real beauty and pathos of Berry's achievement. For, the most remarkable thing about Port William is something brighter and more expansive: its talk. The 20 stories of A Place in Time are a sort of compendium of talk - the stories and memories that flow through a place like a river, carrying its members together through time.

And there are what Berry calls "graduated depths in that flow. . . . At the top was the convivial talk, open and unembarrassed." In "Down in the Valley Where the Green Grass Grows," narrator Burley Coulter tells one of the stories that moves with ease around Port William. It is that of Big Ellis, whose courtship of his wife-to-be involved the rather unfortunate circumstance of driving a team of mules past her house, pants crumpled around his ankles, shirttail flagging in the wind. Burley comments, "You would think a fellow whose paunch was bigger than his ass would take the precaution of underdrawers." Berry relishes this kind of rural wit and does it justice.

Beneath its convivial talk are exchanges "quieter and darker and less free . . . the talk that issued from fear and envy, cherished grudges and resentments, meannesses, suspicions, unforgiven or unregretted wrongs."

More than any other story, "A Girl in the Window" admits the reader to this shadow side of Port William's intimacies. In "Girl," Rebecca Dawe relates how she found herself hostage to the vandalism and thuggery that accompanied the Civil War's "official" violence. Her defiance of men who did not care whether the war ended stands over Port William like a kind of founding act, a precedent for the affection, kinship, and decency that for a century would preserve the town.

And there is another, still lower depth. It is "much quieter and darker . . . the depth at which the community suffered its mortality, error, pain, and grief." Here, slowly drifting in the deep of Port William's consciousness, are stories of childlessness, drought, the leave-taking of its younger members; of endless days worked from dark to dark, land left derelict, homes auctioned and bulldozed; of drunks, bereaved spouses, and memories that perished with the dead.

For all his sobriety, though, Berry is more than a mere elegist. Life in Port William is never without some unnameable thing, not quite religious, although religion is a part of it. It is what you might call a special consolation of nature, or perhaps of life and work that rest on an agricultural order.

And it has something to do with the muteness of the nonhuman world: the silent passion of a wet autumn day, the speechless noise of animals, the quietude of field or wood during hard, solitary work. Of Port William resident Laura Milby, Berry writes: She felt the great, mute creation was trying to speak to her. It moved her almost to tears, for it seemed to intimate the nearness of some consolation - forever imminent and unreachable, almost unknowable - for everything that was wrong.

In Berry's Port William, there is a fit between its members' talk and the natural silences that compass it. Somehow, they make up one piece, as if the human and nonhuman worlds have been made - by work, choice, and affection - as companionable to one another as they are, in this world, likely to get.