The Discovery of Kentucky

Wendell Berry (b. 1934)
From Wendell Berry: Port William Novels & Stories (The Postwar Years)

Interesting Links

Interview: “Nature as an Ally: An Interview with Wendell Berry” (Sarah Leonard, Dissent)

Video: “Nick Offerman on How He Got Involved with Wendell Berry” (BUILD Series, YouTube)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Fly Away, Breath,” Wendell Berry
• “Haircut,” Ring Lardner
• “Petrified Man,” Eudora Welty
• “Shingles for the Lord,” William Faulkner

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Wendell Berry: Port William Novels & Stories (The Postwar Years)
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“St. Clair Street, Showing the Old State Capitol, Frankfort, Kentucky,” 1950, photographic postcard using five-color Colortone process by Curt Teich Company, Chicago, IL. (eBay)

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In eight novels and more than fifty stories, Wendell Berry has conjured for readers the interconnected lives and adventures of the denizens of the fictional rural town of Port William, Kentucky—a community, as he wrote in one story, “without pretense or ambition, for it was the sort of place that pretentious or ambitious people were inclined to leave. It had never declared an aspiration to become anything it was not.” The late author Barry Lopez, a longtime fan and friend, praised the distinctiveness of the series: “In American literature, few sustained visions, perhaps only Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha stories and novels, can compare with Berry’s evocation of a specific place through time or his insight into human fidelity and ambition.”

One of the many recurring characters in the Port William story-and-novel-cycle is Jayber Crow, the town’s only barber for three decades. In 2000, Berry featured him as the narrator of an eponymous novel, which begins:

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.

In a 2006 interview with Marene Muller and Dennis Vogt, Berry explained how Jayber Crow’s calling in life reflects Berry’s own development in both his community and the world:

Jayber, as he looks back on his life, feels that he was called to be a member and a servant of Port William. Looking back on my own life, I have a similar feeling—that I was called to do the work I’ve done. Like Jayber, I was a long time figuring out what my calling was and making a response that seemed to me to be creditable. It was an awkward business. There was of course some error and misconception. I really can’t imagine how it could have been otherwise, and of course one learns from one’s errors and misconceptions, and perhaps this learning gathers toward an outcome that is in some way substantially different from error and misconception. I don’t want to make too strong a claim or pretend to too much understanding, but my experience has caused me to believe that help does come. It comes by way of inspiration, and it comes from friends and books met with at the right time.

A decade before Berry wrote Jayber Crow, he published the Port William tale “The Discovery of Kentucky” as a limited-edition, 26-page hardcover book issued by a small press in Frankfort, Kentucky, where the story is set. It is one of Berry’s more humorous stories, a satirical (bordering on farcical) comedy that portrays a merry band of would-be pranksters at a parade organized around the theme “Kentucky for Progress,” in celebration of the inauguration of the state’s governor. Like his story “A Half-Pint of Darling” (a previous Story of the Week selection), “The Discovery of Kentucky” is told—as biographer Andrew J. Angyal puts it—“in the tall-tale tradition.” In a 1998 interview with Lionel Basney and John Leax, when asked about the comic quality in some of his tales and how it fits with the “more realistic world” of other Port William stories, Berry responded:

I’m not entirely satisfied with a “realistic” art or a “realistic” world. Things are real to me that are not real to the “realists.” There is certainly a layer to the reality of Port William that has to do with what you are calling “a tall tale quality”—that is, with stories that are remembered because they are extravagant and wonderful and that are improved and made more wonderful in the telling. As one of my mentors used to say, “There is no use in telling a pretty good story when you can tell a really good one.” Nevertheless, it reassures me to know that behind many of the imagined events of those stories lie real events. And I am fully serious about some of the events, particularly the acts of compassion.

“The Discovery of Kentucky,” set during an inaugural parade, and “A Half-Pint of Darling,“ which takes place on election day, have something else in common: both stories feature concealed bottles of whiskey. We’ll leave it to readers to speculate on what it is about political events that leads the residents of Port William to drink. “Of course,” Berry added during the 1998 interview, “when I wrote those stories I was having fun. One of the purposes of writing stories is to enjoy yourself as much as possible. I take it as a solemn duty that I should at least attempt to be always writing for pleasure.”

Notes: The parade float featuring King Coal has three fiddlers, a reference to the eighteenth-century nursery rhyme “Old King Cole,” in which the king “called for his fiddlers three.” See Matthew 13:12 for the bible verse quoted by one banner, “To them that have, it shall be given.” The gospel and bluegrass song “When They Ring the Golden Bells” was written in 1887 by musician, Civil War veteran, and circus clown Daniel de Marbelle.

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John T. McCallum said he just felt it was his patriotic duty to take part in the inaugural parade in Frankfort. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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