I read Wendell Berry’s The Memory of Old Jack when it came out in paperback in 1985. It was an experience I never forgot. I passed the book on to my father and brother to read. I found it on my dad’s bookshelf after he died. Over the years, I remember reading Berry’s poetry and some non-fiction books. How did I miss all of the Port William fiction? I was living in small towns, and it was before Internet access, and I had a child. Reading How It Went, I hope to return to the novels about these characters.

The world Berry writes about was not my world. It was disappearing while my dad was a teenager. Berry’s Andy Catlett was a teenager in the 1940s, as was my dad. Port William was still farmland, before the mechanization of farming. As a teen, my dad helped out the neighboring farmer John Kuhn, driving his tractor. Photographs of Kuhn and his farm from decades before that show the world Andy grew up in. By the time of my birth, post-war housing had sprung up on the farmland.

The stories in How It Went are beautifully written. There is humor and sadness, and great nostalgia for a kind of community that has disappeared. A place that had shared stories, where people helped each other. But there is also prejudice and judgement. From the perspective of old age, Andy understands the beauty of the old world and how quickly it disappeared. Now, most of his friends are “in the graveyard on the hill.” Who is left to remember, to tell their stories?

We were telling of course the story, clearly ongoing and with no foreseeable end, of the departure of the people and the coming of the machines.
from How It Went by Wendell Berry

the boy Andy wants nothing more than to do a man’s work. He attaches to hired hand Dick, who he greatly loved and admired, and who patiently taught him the quiet pride of workmanship. His grandmother told him the stories of the past while he longs to escape outdoors. His father longed to be a full time farmer, but unable to make ends met becomes a lawyer to pay the bills.

Farmers warn against purchasing farming machines, against borrowing money which could be a trap to lose everything. Several years of bad harvest and you can’t pay back the loan, and you lose the farm.

The stories are an elegy to time gone, the end of a way of life. Andy understands that the stories were disappearing as fewer remembered them. “I see that we are passing through this world like a river of water flowing through a river of earth,” our lives being a chance to learn “something of love,” this being “the order of things, nothing to complain about.”

As gorgeous and evocative as these stories are, I was sometimes too aware of the idealism of the past. Elders have always talked about the ‘good old days’ when things were better. Andy’s good old days still included coal furnaces and food fueled cooking fires. There was danger and prejudice and ostracism.

I greatly enjoyed these beautifully written stories.

I received an ARC from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased. ( )