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A Man of Faith, After All
Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself
by Wendell Berry
Counterpoint, 2000. 363 pages.
Reviewed by Michael Wilt
Wendell Berry published his first novel about the community of Port William, Kentucky in 1960. In an author’s note to the revised edition of that novel in 1985, Berry said, “I did not know that I had begun an interest in these characters that would still be productive twenty-five years later.” Fifteen more years have passed, and Berry’s interest and productivity have yet to flag. Jayber Crow, a good, long, solid novel, adds substantially to the story and character of the Port William community and its members.
While ordinary enough on its surface, Jayber Crow’s life is remarkable at its depths. An orphan, a barber, a bachelor, he enjoys the company of women, as well as that of the farmers and tradesmen who frequent his shop (sometimes for haircuts), and moonlights as a church custodian and grave digger. In the course of his life he witnesses the diminishment of traditional farming and the onset of agribusiness, as well as the declines and rises of the practitioners of these methods. He lives in a town that is growing in obsolescence and in which “loafing and wakefulness are two of the principal arts.” He finds the great love of his life in a woman he cannot have and to whom he cannot express his love. He struggles to maintain faith in the midst of these realities, as well as his predilection to get into what he calls “doctrinal trouble” by way of doubt and relentless questioning. Jayber’s is a life well worth reading.
Born Jonah Crow in 1914, Jayber is orphaned for the second time at the age of ten. His parents had died in an outbreak of fever when he was four; the elderly aunt and uncle who subsequently took him in and gave him the opportunity for a pleasant childhood then die within months of one another. Taken to a church-run orphanage, young Jonah believes he hears the call to be a preacher and, when the time comes, enrolls in college on a scholarship in “pre-ministerial” studies. But it is not long before he finds himself in trouble.
If the soul and body really were divided, then it seemed to me that all the worst sins –- hatred and anger and self-righteousness and even greed and lust -- came from the soul. But these preachers I’m talking about all thought that the soul could do no wrong, but always had its face washed and its pants on and was in agony over having to associate with the flesh and the world. And yet these same people believed in the resurrection of the body.
Jonah comes to recognize that he is not called to preach. “I was a lost traveler wandering in the woods, needing to be on my way somewhere but not knowing where,” he says, echoing Dante. After some trial and error, that somewhere becomes Port William, the community in which he had been born but from which he had been absent since the age of ten. His journey to Port William, through the rising waters of several days of winter rain, evokes the biblical Jonah’s water-journey, but is most memorable for the hospitality he receives at its end. Having picked up the barbering trade in the orphanage and practiced it for a time to support himself, Jonah buys Port William’s vacant shop and opens for business. He is eventually re-christened Jayber by the locals, and can finally say, “I felt at home.”
Readers of Wendell Berry’s vast body of work -- poetry, fiction, essays -- will recognize in Jayber Crow the themes that have consistently occupied Berry. Athey Keith, an aging farmer from the old school, has spent his life and work taking close care of the land through which he makes his living. Rotating crops, leaving land fallow, and being attentive to the limitations dictated by natural topography are just a few of the ways Athey has worked his farm. He also farms with work animals rather than machines. His son-in-law, Troy Chatham, in a position to take over much of the farm operation during and after the Second World War, is the antithesis of Athey. Mechanization, debt, chemicals, and so forth become the keys to achieving Troy’s business-oriented vision of success. Together Athey and Troy provide a microcosm of the changed world of the farmer in the twentieth century. Jayber takes this all in from the listening post that his barber shop has become, and with characteristic understatement describes it as “a disagreement about time and money and the use of the world.” That he sees Athey as the better farmer is clear: Troy’s methods resulted in a farm that “was no longer a place you could see anybody’s pride or pleasure in.”
Jayber also gives voice to Berry’s reservations about organized religion. Jayber walks up to church every Sunday “over a cobble of quibbles.” He sees himself as the “ultimate Protestant” who, after years of reading the Gospels has come to believe that “Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one.” He believes in a Christ who “must forebear to reveal His power and glory by presenting Himself as Himself, and must be present only in the ordinary miracle of the existence of his creatures.” And these creatures journey in community. “For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless. It is why God grieves and Christ’s wounds are still bleeding.”
The value of friendship and community also gets a good deal of play in Jayber’s narrative. His friendship with Athey Keith receives the most attention in the novel, but Port William mainstays Burley Coulter and Mat Feltner, who have larger roles in other of Berry’s Port William titles, also help bring attention to this theme. These friendships provide some of the funniest and most moving moments in the novel. Because Burley was instrumental in Jayber’s safe return and decision to remain in Port William, Jayber recognizes that “my life in Port William and here at the river had been his gift.” After Burley’s death, says Jayber, “I felt his absence as an abiding presence.” The larger community benefits by the endurance of the “dignity of continuity” -- “the dignity at least of knowing that the work you are doing must be done and that it does not begin and end with yourself.”
But the heart of Jayber Crow is Jayber’s unconditional love for Mattie Chatham. Mattie is the daughter of Athey Keith and the wife of Troy Chatham, and is thus caught between their severely conflicting worldviews. But Jayber’s love for Mattie is not a matter of sympathy. Watching her play with a group of children in the churchyard, Jayber observes, “She was just perfectly there with them in her pleasure.” He goes on:
I was all of a sudden overcome with love for her. It was the strongest moment I had known, violent in its suddenness and completeness, and yet also the quietest. I had been utterly changed, and had not stirred. It was as though she had, in the length of a breath, assumed in my mind a new dimension. I no longer merely saw her as one among the objects of the world but felt in every nerve the heft and touch of her. I felt her take form within my own form. I felt her come into being within me, as in the morning of the world.
Jayber can endure this love and the restrictions he allows it to impose upon him only through faith. Faith that “There is a light that includes our darkness, and day that shines down even on the clouds.” Jayber pronounces himself a man of faith even though “Faith puts you out on a wide river in a little boat, in the fog, in the dark,” and does not exempt the faithful from pain. He knows that the person of faith must sometimes pray, Why have you forsaken me, and sometimes, Have mercy. Faithfulness, though, seems for Jayber to be its own reward, and a reward he well deserves.
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