Jayber Crow
Jayber Crow
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Wendell Berry on Jayber Crow
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A calling recognized late, and written backwardIn a 2006 interview devoted specifically to Jayber Crow, Berry was asked how closely he identified with his protagonist’s sense of vocation. His answer was more autobiographical than critical: he did not explain Jayber so much as confess that Jayber’s trajectory had been his own, including the long confusion before the clarity.
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.
The phrase ‘awkward business’ does real work. Berry is not presenting Jayber as a man who chose wisely and early; he is presenting a man who arrived at his calling through error, which is how he says he arrived at his own.
When Berry described his own return to Kentucky from New York, he reached for the same language of passive discovery that runs through Jayber’s retrospective narration. He was not telling the interviewer what he had decided; he was telling her what he had felt himself being led toward.
I don’t want you to make me sound like some kind of mystic, but, you know, I felt a great, deep relief — as if I was following, at last, my true path.
How he wrote it
Farming as a model for formBerry has talked rarely about the mechanics of composing any single novel, but he has spoken at length about where his subject matter comes from. When asked what returning to Henry County gave him as a writer, his answer was not romantic: it was epistemological.
After we moved back here, I understood that my subject was here, and that, wherever I might have gone, I would still have been drawing on this country, because it was what I knew.
Berry’s analogy between running a mixed farm and structuring a novel is the clearest window he has given into how he thinks about narrative form. He made the comparison in The New Yorker, not as a whim but as a considered parallel between two crafts he practiced on the same acreage for decades.
The integration of the various animals and crops into a relatively small acreage becomes a formal problem that is just as interesting and just as demanding as the arrangement of the parts of a novel. You’ve got to decide what comes first, and then you work your way to the revelation of what comes last.
The analogy matters for Jayber Crow in particular, because the novel’s structure is cumulative rather than driven by conventional plot: the farm metaphor explains why Berry would find that arrangement not a deficiency but a formal solution.
When asked directly which of his books he thought represented his strongest writing, Berry gave an unequivocal answer. He had published more than forty books by then, across poetry, fiction, and essays, and the ranking he offered was not false modesty.
If someone asked me what novel to start with, I would say *Jayber Crow*. I don’t think I can write any better than I was writing in *Jayber Crow*. The essays, some are better than others, pretty clearly, some that stick out in my mind; but they’re all occasional work, written to have something to say.... I like the fictions best.
Berry’s account of storytelling as a communal practice, offered before a reading at an Organic Valley conference, explains why Jayber’s barbershop, where Port William residents gather and are observed, is not simply a convenient narrative device but the condition that makes the novel’s voice possible at all.
And if people are neighbors, one thing they do is study each other. And they tell stories about each other. Sometimes the most appreciative hearer will be the subject of the story. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
The gospels he couldn’t argue his way out ofJayber’s religious life in the novel, his years at a seminary he eventually leaves, his decades of solitary Scripture-reading, his prayers that come out as arguments, mirrors something Berry acknowledged directly in his conversation with Bill Moyers. He did not describe a resolved faith; he described one he was still inside.
I still consider myself a person who takes the gospels very seriously. And I read in them and am sometimes shamed by them and sometimes utterly baffled by them. But there is a good bit of the gospel that I do get, I think.... And I’m hanging on for the parts that I don’t understand.
Berry’s father once summarized his own long life with a sentence that Berry repeated in interviews across many years. By the time he quoted it in a New Yorker conversation, he had added a postscript: he could now say the same thing himself. That sense of a life received rather than engineered is the emotional spine of Jayber Crow.
I’ve had a wonderful life. And I’ve had nothing to do with it.
On what the book is wrestling with
What fidelity actually costsThe novel’s central pressure is Jayber’s one-sided, lifelong commitment to a married woman, Mattie Chatham, who does not know he loves her. Berry built that relationship to test a distinction he cared about: the difference between love as feeling and love as sustained, responsible action. The analogy he used to articulate it was not drawn from psychology but from land use.
The fundamental one for me is the analogy between your relationship to your spouse and your relationship to your place. Both need to be a settled commitment and both involve continuous learning and adjusting.
Asked to say what marriage is, beyond the legal or the sentimental, Berry answered in terms of obligation rather than romance. The answer clarifies why Jayber Crow treats Jayber’s unreciprocated love as morally serious rather than merely poignant: the novel is testing whether responsibility can constitute love on its own.
It’s a sacrament and it’s probably some kind of necessity, to take responsibility, to be, to love somebody, and marriage is a way of acknowledging and accepting the responsibility.
What he wants us to sit with
Hope earned by stayingAsked to characterize the project that had occupied his writing life across novels, poems, and essays over more than fifty years, Berry did not answer in terms of subject matter or argument. He answered in terms of what he had been trying to make available to a reader.
I think you could say that a large part of my writing has been the effort to establish an authentic ground of hope. Authentic reasons for hope.