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UNLIKELY UTOPIA
Ami Cooper
Instructor’s comment: When I suggested to Ami Cooper that she polish “Unlikely Utopia” for submission to Prized Writing, I told her not to write for the possibility of publication or a prize but for the personal satisfaction of crafting an essay that would be as perfect as she could make it. And this was precisely the spirit with which she undertook the project. Certainly, I had no idea that Ami would not live to see her work in print. Ami was proud of her essay, and as her teacher, I too was proud of her efforts. She would be very pleased, I know, to be recognized here. But beyond such recognition, Ami learned, as every writer must, that writing well is its own reward.
—David Stevenson, Campus Writing Center
The preface to Wendell Berry’s What Are People For? is in the form of a two-part poem, titled “Damage” and “Healing.” By carefully digging through its cryptic obscurities (“It is despair that sees the work failing in one’s own failure”), we find the main message: The more diminutive, local, and settled a culture, the healthier it is and the less “damage” it inflicts upon its people and the land. Berry can be called a utopian but not in the traditional sense. He pines not for the future but for the past. Basing his lifestyle upon his boyhood memories of fifty years ago as well as America’s pioneer days, Berry is confident he has found the answer to the perfect existence.
In this case, book and individual are difficult to separate. What Are People For? is Wendell Berry, so to criticize one is to criticize the other. His book is a compilation of contemplative essays on subjects ranging from literature to technology from the perspective of a Kentucky farmer. Having been in the same profession and location most of his young life, Berry in 1958 (at age twenty-four) accepted a Stanford University Stegner Fellowship. Intrigued, he decided to read Stegner’s books and take this professor’s writing seminar. Berry is reverent and testifies that Stegner filled the Jones Room of the Stanford Library with an aura of literary authority. It is here that Berry learns “responsible writing.” This is writing that contains the values one has “proven” by living exclusively in one country place and by perfecting one’s knowledge of the place so as to bring sustainable benefit to it. Responsible writing actively promotes “good agriculture and forestry” unlike writing “by self-styled smart people in the offices and laboratories of a centralized economy and then sold at the highest possible profit to the supposedly dumb country people.” What Berry says about his seminar experience is that it started him on his development toward working at home, and away from his assumption “that I was going to follow a literary career that would lead me far from [Henry County] to teach at a university in a large city.”
In important ways Berry has some very good ideas. Concerned that radio and television have done too much to homogenize society, he uses “Nate Shaw” (a pseudonym) to provide an illustration of a man who lived without euphemistic clichés. Shaw does prove to be interesting, as Berry points out:
Berry does have some reason to resent big corporations, power companies, mining industries, and agribusiness. He has seen poor farm families driven off their land. He has seen land decimated and miners poisoned. But for him to harp on modern schooling (“A powerful superstition of modern life is that people and conditions are improved inevitably by education”) is unreasonable. Berry should remember that without education he would be unable to write his essays.
Berry too often stands on a soap-box. True, when we feel passionate it may be permissible to stand on one, but Berry never proves many of his statements, and this can frustrate his readers. Merely to say Abbey is a “cultivated man, a splendid writer” is unfair to Berry’s audience. Where is the evidence? Berry’s righteous indignation unfortunately tends to cloud his arguments. People who criticize him for implying that every writer’s wife must serve as her husband’s editor are “audacious and irresponsible gossips” (“Why I Am Not Going To Buy a Computer”). In this rush to always have the last word, Berry ends up appearing foolish, with terrible arguments:
In trying to attain any utopia, problems arise. The pre-industrial rural model of community life has its advantages, but no one can inspire everyone in America to follow his lead in adopting a model of community. Indeed, we may not be able to follow the lead. Even with everyone’s consent, it would be difficult to regroup the population into separated rural enclaves. The logistics of relocation, the confusion for our system of distribution and supply of goods and services, and the havoc visited upon our property values, are huge and prohibitive problems. Small is not always possible. Big hospitals are necessary to provide care and services unavailable from small hospitals. Big schools and universities are necessary to educate the populace and help us understand each other better. And “outside experts” in their laboratories are necessary to discover new ways of feeding everyone. The population problem is not going to go away. While certainly Berry is right in saying we should strive to cause less environmental damage, to do so we must remain down to earth. Ironically, Berry the Farmer hasn’t realized this yet.