Jayber Crow
- Apr 7, 2022
- 3 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
★★★★★
Recently, I was back in my college town of Bloomington, Indiana. I had last been there in 2019, and it was my first visit since Covid. For me, the pandemic has had the effect of elongating time, and the three-year gap felt much longer. Of course, for years, and probably for much of two decades, I made the trip annually to visit family in Indianapolis and friends and favorite haunts in Bloomington. I guess it feels like a long time because it’s been a long time. As much as that feeling of time and distance hit me about place, it really has more to do with people, and it seemed like a particularly long time since I’d had the chance to see my oldest and dearest friend. I’ve never described Tiffany this way before, and, until this trip, doing so had never occurred to me (nor, to be fair, had not doing so). Our friendship goes back to high school, and though our literal connection has ebbed and flowed over the years due to geography or life or happenstance, when we see each other it is as easy and natural and relaxed as you can imagine. It is a comforting thought that someone has known me for so long, some 35 years now, since before I even knew myself, before I’d figured out who or what I was, let alone what I wanted to be or do, before I’d done anything really. As people, we have certainly changed and grown, and a friendship like this endures because each of us has been no one else but ourselves, to ourselves and to each other, unwaveringly for all this time. Without knowing it, we have become lifelong friends, and I find great comfort and joy in that.
Well.
There are two connections between my lengthy preamble and Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow. First, while hanging out with Tiffany and her wonderful husband, Dave, she took me to the reopened Morgenstern Books. Morgensterns was the independent bookstore when we were in college. It closed in 1996 when both Borders and Barnes & Noble opened at nearly the same time and within spitting distance of the original Morgensterns location. Now, 20-something years later, those chains are gone and Morgensterns is back. While we were there, Tiffany bought me a copy of the book. She’d read it and wanted to know what I’d think of it. Second, those thoughts expressed above, though they must have already been swimming around somewhere in the depths of my brain, it is Wendell Berry’s fine writing—and Jayber Crow’s astute observations—that brought them to the surface. It is a rare work of fiction that unlocks something so extraordinary and revealing.
Jayber Crow is, as the subtitle states, The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself. And so it is—and also infinitely more. I’m not sure if Wendell Berry is more of a literary realist or a naturalist (or if the difference between the two much matters or, at any rate, matters much to anyone anyway, myself included), but he belongs alongside William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters, and I’m sure a great many others whose names I haven’t thought of or do not know. Berry is also a poet and is perhaps as renowned for his verse as his prose, and that lyricism bursts forth from every page. No, that’s not quite right: every page sings. (I’ve never read his poetry but, I assure you, I am looking forward to doing so.) And, not least of which and yet amongst still other things, Berry is a farmer and that plainspoken sensibility is the fabric on which this story is crafted. That is to say, Jayber Crow has it all: eloquence, vulnerability, sadness, longing, hopefulness, heartache, humor … but none of it would amount to a lick if wasn’t such a beautiful story.
Comments