|
Her Giving of Thanks
Hannah Coulter
by Wendell Berry
Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004, 208 pages
The copyright page of Wendell Berry’s new novel includes a disclaimer that states: “This book is a work of fiction. Nothing is in it that has not been imagined.” Toward the end of the novel, as the twice-widowed Hannah Coulter reflects on the wartime experience of her husband Nathan, she says, “Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion.” Hannah Coulter, like all of Berry’s novels, stories, and poems about the fictional farming community of Port William, Kentucky, is the product of imagination that renders things, people, places, real enough to be preserved in the embrace of knowledge, love, and compassion.
“I was a Steadman from up in the ridges behind Hargrave,” says Hannah, but because her home place would not prove to be a permanent home, she migrates to Port William to seek work after graduating from high school in 1940. Readers of Berry’s A Place on Earth know that Hannah will marry Virgil Feltner, and that while he is in Europe fighting in the Second World War she will live with his parents, Mat and Margaret, and bear his daughter, called Little Margaret. Hannah Coulter tells parts of the story, such as the courtship of Hannah and Virgil, that the earlier novel does not, and does so in Hannah’s gentle, honest, and elegiac voice.
And then he said, “Hannah, listen. What if I was to marry you?”
The life we had imagined and wanted seemed close to us. Sitting with Virgil’s arm around me, I felt all enclosed in the warm dark and lost to everything that had happened to me so far. Virgil was strong and it made me strengthless. I didn’t want to be weak, or strong either. I wanted whatever this was going to lead to. And then I laughed because the place where his hand had been felt cold and I wanted to cry. I
said, “If you would I surely would be obliged.” I barely had the breath to say it.
He spoke to me then as if I were even younger than I was, as if not sure that I could understand him. “I’ve been telling you I love you a long time,” he said, “in a way you could take it as a joke if you wanted to. But I meant it. What you’ve got to tell me now is if maybe you might love me a little bit. It doesn’t have to be a lot right now.”
I didn’t cry, but I couldn’t keep my voice from quivering. I said, “Oh, I do. And not a little bit, either.”
Hannah doubts her “acceptability” as a wife for Virgil: “You are all prosperous people with a place in the world, and I don’t have anything. Listen! I don’t have anything to offer but what’s walking around in my clothes”; to which Virgil replies, “That’s what I’ve got in mind.” It is quickly and easily confirmed that “we had the world’s permission, you might say, to love each other and to be together. I felt free. I could put my arms around Virgil and then feel that it was rightly done.”
Knowledge, love, compassion. Imagination.
In A Place on Earth, the death of Virgil in the final spring of the war is perceived primarily from the perspective of his father, Mat Feltner. There, his loss is raw and keenly felt as the loss of an only son, the man who would inherit the Feltner place, and as a blow to Mat’s reasonable faith in the future. Speaking of herself and Virgil’s parents, Hannah says
Kindness kept us alive. It made us think of each other. I could think of myself, of course, with no trouble at all. Justly enough, I could feel sorry for myself. I was a young wife who had been married going on four years, and I had not yet lived a full year with my husband. And now perhaps, possibly, very likely, almost certainly, my husband was dead. Perhaps, possibly, very likely, almost certainly, I was a widow with child by a man now dead, and this child of my love living inside me had become half an orphan before it could be born. . . .
Love held us. Kindness held us. We were suffering what we were living by.
With Virgil’s death a certainty, however, kindness is again primary when Mat Feltner approaches Hannah as she embroiders a dress for her daughter. “He had tears in his eyes. For a minute we just looked at each other, and then as if in answer to something I had said, or in answer to what he knew I wanted to say, he said, ‘I know. I know. But, my good girl, you have got to live.’”
Knowledge, love, compassion. Imagination.
In the post-war years, Hannah chronicles her marriage to Nathan Coulter. “I married the war twice,” Hannah says; Nathan survived the war, and the fighting on Okinawa in particular, which “[h]e did not talk about.” Together raising Margaret and their sons Mathew and Caleb, Hannah and Nathan are established in the Port William membership.
This was our membership. [Nathan’s uncle] Burley called it that. He loved to call it that. . . . This membership had an economic purpose and it had an economic result, but the purpose and the result were a lot more than economic. . . .
The membership includes the dead. Andy Catlett imagines it going back and back beyond the time when all the names are forgotten. The members, I guess you could say, are born into it, they stay in it by choosing to stay, and they die in it. Or they leave it, as my children have done.
There are of course echoes of Berry’s agrarian essays in passages such as this; rightly so, for Port William has always been the literary embodiment of his writings about culture and agriculture. More to the point, however, Hannah’s awareness of and articulateness about just who she is and what she is a part of are key to appreciating the resolute way in which she and Nathan respond to the changes in Port William in the latter half of the twentieth century, including changes that separate their own children from the membership.
The plot of Hannah Coulter might be seen, in part, as the recent history of agriculture writ small. As such it contains its share of loss as the wide world and its own ways of economics encroach upon families, communities, and memberships. But this is a story built upon imagination -- knowledge, love, compassion -- and Hannah can end her story with a glimmer of hope born of renewed recognition of the value of membership. She can rightly say, “This is my story, my giving of thanks.”
|
