The Art of Loading Brush. Wendell Berry

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СКАЧАТЬ of self-knowledge and local accountability. And there are the expectable liabilities. Though liberals do not have prejudices, they do sometimes deal in categorical judgments that they know to be absolutely just and true. A southern white man will learn about this without much research. That I am a southern agrarian white man accounts in part, I am very sure, for the “ecocritical” verdict that I am at least suspectably a deliberately racist southern agrarian white man.

      Beyond that, and for a good many years, I have been classified in reviews of my books and in assortments of interesting facts as a “tobacco farmer.” This comes apparently from some “site” on the Internet. According to the same source, I also grow wheat. So reliably informed, even some people who have visited this farm apparently assume that in a nook or hollow well out of sight among the slopes and the woods I have a tobacco patch and a field of wheat. So far, I have not received any blame for my implication in wheat-production—which in circumstances common enough, and especially in mine, would be sufficiently blamable. But the revelation that I am a tobacco farmer typically is accompanied by the suggestion I am, as such, an immoral man, and that my writings on agriculture are therefore to be held under suspicion, if not doubted altogether.

      And so I know very well that the entitlement of everybody to “alternative facts” was not invented by apologists for Donald Trump. Perhaps I am now entitled to “equal time” to present my own alternative facts to the alternative facts mentioned above. This I need to do because tobacco and the federal tobacco program are prominent themes of this book.

      I live in what has been one of the most prominent tobacco-producing counties in Kentucky, which has been one of the most prominent tobacco-producing states. Members of my family have been involved in growing tobacco and in various aspects of the tobacco economy as far back as I know anything about them. My father and my brother were actively involved in the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association. As I grew up, I played and then worked in tobacco crops (along with the other enterprises of our then highly diverse farming) on family and neighboring farms. Later, after my wife and children and I settled on our own small farm near Port Royal, I worked for thirty-some years, mainly at “setting” and “cutting,” in the tobacco crops of my neighbors with whom I swapped work. But it has happened that I have never grown a tobacco crop of my own. During some of our early years here, when we were glad to have the money, I leased our “base” (the right, belonging to our place, to grow a small amount of tobacco) to neighbors. Later I swapped it for the use, not often, of a neighbor’s tractor.

      I am, then, not without complicity in tobacco production. But I can be called a tobacco farmer only by the same sort of categorical inference that from time to time has brought me under the suspicion or the allegation of racism. I understand very well the intellectual achievement of guilt by association. My intellect is entirely baffled and defeated, however, by the discovery that I grow wheat. On this farm?

      Though I share fully, I believe, my people’s love for tobacco (rightly grown, it is a beautiful and fascinating crop), though it was long a staple of my region’s economy, and though a vital culture of family and neighborly work depended on it, I have never defended either the crop or its uses. The Surgeon General’s Report on tobacco and cancer, which made defense of the crop morally impossible, was published in 1965, before my writing on agricultural problems began.

      But I have defended the federal tobacco program, as represented here by the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association. The principles of the Burley Co-op—production control, price supports, service to small as to large producers—are not associated with tobacco necessarily, but are in themselves ethical, reputable, economically sound, and applicable to any agricultural commodity. I discussed this issue pretty fully in an essay, “The Problem of Tobacco,” in 1991. In this book, I have attempted to see the Burley Co-op more clearly than before both in its geographic and historical context and in relation to what I take to be the necessity of its principles to the survival of the land and people of rural America.

      It is wrong, I think, to deal with the past as if it can be simply departed from or “solved,” or brought to “closure.” It is discouraging to see the conservatives treat history as one of the “humanities” that can be dispensed with or ignored by hardheaded realists. It is both discouraging and amusing to be assured by the liberals that the past can be risen above by superior persons who, if they had been Thomas Jefferson, would have owned no slaves.

      But the problems that belong to one’s history, to one’s place, and thus to one’s life, cannot in any ready or simple way be solved, and some of them cannot be solved at all. Problems such as categorical judgments against kinds of people or the production of unhealthy commodities—or land abuse or pollution or social “mobility,” to name some more—these are, for the willing, a life’s work. They can be confronted, studied, struggled with, to some extent understood, and (always to the peril of truth and justice) judged. Such, anyhow, have been among the never-finished concerns of my writing.

      As the author of such writing over a good many years, I know both that I cannot and that I should not expect agreement or approval from my critics. But I think that I rightly should expect them to acknowledge fairly the complexity of my subjects, and to be honest in their use of evidence.

      IV

      Readers will notice that the parts of this book, although they are related to one another and to my interest in the connection of land and people, are of different genres: essays, fictions, fictions partaking somewhat of the character of the essays, and, as epilogue, a poem congenial to the essays and participating in the fiction.

      The most peculiar, and perhaps the most questionable of these mixtures, is in “The Order of Loving Care,” in which one fictional character, Andy Catlett, from my novels and stories of Port William, encounters and learns from a number of my own “real life” friends and teachers. If my work had not been so incomplete in its parts, and therefore continuous over so many years, such an expedient would not have been needed. But it happens that “The Order of Loving Care” is the third of a sequence of writings specifically about the “making” of Andy Catlett’s mind, which, as it further happens, has been a theme of my Port William fiction since 1960.

      With some significant differences, Andy Catlett’s life is like my own. This likeness enables me, in fiction, to bear witness to my time and place. The differences between his life and mine make my testimony subject to imagination rather than merely to the factuality of my life, which, apart from imagination, would be a bore. As fiction, a story does not have to be submitted to the burdens of a tedious pursuit and gathering of facts, or to the risk of factual error and triviality, or to apology for forgetting facts.

      However, in my fiction as in my essays, I have tried always to be true to the facts of history, natural history, work, tools, economy, and economic life. Once that condition is met, I see nothing inherently wrong in asking one genre to do the work of another.

      V

      Though conservative politicians and organizations were always opposed to the tobacco program of the New Deal, the small farms and small towns of what is now called “rural America” (meaning nearly all of our actual country) had substantial political support throughout the 1940s. My father and his friends who led the now-defunct Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association had a significant influence in their region, and they could be heard and understood in Washington. My daughter, Mary, who continues my father’s work in behalf of small farmers, has not one ally in state or national government.

      President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, proclaimed the official termination of favor to anything not “big.” And now it has been a long time since an agrarian, or any advocate for the good economic and ecological health of rural America, could be listened to or understood or represented by either of the political parties.

      To wakeful persons living in rural America, aware of СКАЧАТЬ