‘The Memory of Old Jack

In the spirit of Katherine Anne Porter’s classic short story “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” Wendell Berry’s novel The Memory of Old Jack occupies one day in the life of a central character. Both are end-of-life stories, Granny Weatherall recalling her jilting at the altar; Jack Beechum, remembering the events of his life as he goes about his daily routine on one September Kentucky day in 1952.

Both stories resist the temptation to romanticize the past; these are two characters who, in Thoreau’s words, “lead lives of quiet desperation,” but at the same time exemplify the human virtue praised by Faulkner in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, having the strength to “not only endure but prevail,” and by doing so earning the respect of those around them.

Berry is a prolific author (fiction, poetry, and essays), a social and environmental activist, and a Kentucky farmer who is now in his 80th year. His 1974 The Memory of Old Jack, is Door County’ Read this winter.

The novel captures the richness of a time and place, a way of life that lives in memory with those of us of a certain age. Berry espouses values that many of us consider uniquely American, the agrarian vision of the earth as a blank slate that offers the possibility of success as a reward for hard work, along with the satisfaction of being part of a primal function much larger than the individual.

The book has an elegiac quality, not only from the fact that Old Jack, now in his 93rd year, is nearing the end of his life, but also from the sense that a way of life is passing. Small farms, small herds, small machinery were already becoming endangered species in the world of agriculture, mega-farms looming on the horizon. But Old Jack is not one to wallow in self-pity.

During his lifetime he became estranged from his wife and daughter, even though they continued to live in the same house, and he subsequently broke his vows of faithfulness in marriage. He toiled tirelessly on his land, struggling to extricate himself from the burden of debt and although he acquired property, he eventually lost land and life stock.

However, he takes strength from the earth and from the camaraderie of his extended family. He is secure in his place both geographically, and in a long ancestral line.

Readers with roots in an agrarian past will find that Berry’s tale resonates with them. And although the story is set in rural Kentucky sixty years in the past, the themes are timeless.

The family patriarch now at the end of his days is a poignant figure, but never pathetic. Time has sapped his boundless strength and has clouded the acuity of his perception. However, he maintains his dignity.

Berry writes in gracefully lucid prose, a style reminiscent of Hemingway in that his narrative is more complex than what appears on the surface of a page. His story is gently engaging, and while this reader could put the book put down, he discovered that a number of passages stayed with him long after the last page was turned.

For example:

“One of the posts of the barn is still standing, charred and smoking, the building burnt and fallen clean away from it, leaving it upright by itself, as plumb as the builders stood it. And now Jack and [his wife] Ruth stand there in one of the great turnings of their life, and as the sun rises and stains the white frost with its rosy light, a woodpecker comes up from the woods, its flight curving and dipping in the air, and clips itself to that blackened post. For an instant, just an instant, it is still and they see the vivid white and black of its wings, its head glowing red in the new light. And then it feels the heat. It cries once, casts off, and drops away down the slope of the ridge.”