How I admired her, as she sat with the three pampered males and assured us that she read every one and wrote a comment on every one and what’s more spoke with each student at least once a term. I could tell—talking with her before she produced her numbers on camera—that she had the energy and compassion of a wonderful teacher. She must have foregone sleep and stayed up late with high school prose seven nights a week the whole school year. She must have been born with that energy, and she took suitably massive pride in what she did—but what terrible sins and shortcomings did her labors expiate?
As I like to say: I average four books a year—counting revised editions of old books; counting everything I can damned well count. Counting books, book reviews, notes, poems, and essays, I reckon I publish about one item a week, year-in year-out. Were I fifteen years old, this would be the moment when I would pretend to blow on the backs of my fingernails, then rub them against my chest.
Work, work, work.
In 1975 when Jane and I left Ann Arbor, and I quit the university for the free-lance life, Wendell Berry wrote, “Don, don’t put in too many acres at once.” “Don’t worry about a thing,” I told Wendell. We know each other better now.
Wendell farms in Kentucky, teaches a little at the university, travels widely lecturing and investigating agricultural practices—and writes superb stories, poems, and essays. As they say, “I don’t know how he does it”; but, also, I don’t want to do it—except for the “superb stories, poems, and essays.” Farming with my grandfather Wesley Wells, when I was a boy, was enough farming for me. I loved his company and enjoyed pitching hay or raking-after as long as he stood above me loading the hayrack and remembering stories. It wasn’t my own work that seized me but his work and his stories.
When I emulate his habits, I can take storytelling literally; but I must go metaphoric about mucking out the tie-up, and substitute my crossing-out of failed language for his disposal of bovine feces. When Wendell wrote his letter, I already knew that I would put in no acres. Although I would love to keep a horse for riding, I would resent caring for the horse; I knew enough not to keep a horse I resented. At first I put in a big garden, but woodchucks and raccoons and insects ate it up. When I was a boy I could sit on the watering trough across Route 4 an hour at a time, at dawn and dusk, to shoot woodchucks feeding on our beans or peas, but now I was too impatient for such sitting; now I wanted instead to read a book or write one. (I wanted to work.) Each year the big garden grew smaller and Jane—who grew flowers by choice, not corn or stringbeans—worked at the vegetables more than I did. Each winter I dreamed crops, dreamed marvels of canning (I canned some green tomato chutney; I froze some tomatoes and Kentucky Wonders) and each summer I largely failed. Shamefaced I planted no garden at all. Guilty I confessed to Wendell—“I’ve never worked a day in my life”—who in his kindness granted me absolution: My task, he told me, was to tell the tales of the tribe.