I recently finished reading Wendell Berry’s novel, Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself. I’ve read it before (twice, I think). In fact, one might say that Jayber Crow was my “gateway drug” to Wendell Berry and his stories about a fictional town in Kentucky called Port William. So with Marci’s and my anniversary trip to Kentucky last week, I decided that I wanted to re-read this book — and it turned out to be exactly the right move.
When I got back from Kentucky, I was trying to explain this book (and its accompanying series of books) to my sister and three of her kids — and even as the words were coming out of my mouth, I realized how “Middle-Aged White Man” and uninteresting my explanations sounded. So I’ve been thinking about how I might share the beauty of Wendell Berry’s art — without getting too deep into the weeds about small town life and rural Kentucky and agrarian economies and industrialization in the 20th Century — and here’s what I’ve come up with:
Wendell Berry’s Port William stories are remarkable because of their highly-nuanced characters who deal with timeless themes of the human experience and speak with deep honesty and insight about a world that is rapidly changing around them. The characters of these stories are connected to each other in beautiful and complicated ways, not just from one character to another but from one generation to another. So, the setting of Port William becomes richer and more beautiful with each story that one reads. But at the same time, each individual character and each individual story stands on its own as a deep cut revealing the way that we all deal with love and loss, ambition and ambiguity, plus dozens (or perhaps hundreds) of other elements of life as we know it. In addition, the writing is just so tender, and skillful, and relatable that it regularly makes me stop and think and cry. In very good ways.
Anyway, on the title page of my paperback copy of Jayber Crow there is still a note written on an orange Post-It in the top right corner, with an inscription from my friend Bob: “Dear Eric: a Belated ‘Borders’ Birthday Book, from Bob! (by Berry!) Blessings —” He would regularly give me books to read, and they were usually quite good. But he gave this book to me in the winter of 2012, right as I was preparing to move from Amsterdam to Kent. As the book’s subtitle suggests, the story follows the life of a barber who goes through several significant personal transitions, both externally and internally. And I found Jayber Crow to be such a good lesson on transition (among other things) that I’ve been recommending it to friends ever since. Oddly enough, however, I’ve never taken the time to write a review like this and add it to my archive of “Recommended Reading,” since my previous reading (or readings) happened before I began this practice.
So, now that I’ve re-read it and am sitting down to collect my thoughts: I can officially confirm that this is my favorite book from the Port William Membership. Perhaps partly for sentimental reasons, but largely because it’s just so good! And even if this ends up being a rather lengthy review, as I suspect it will, it feels important for me to have this anchor point for self-reference, and perhaps for the reference of others, too.
This time around, I started by reading the first five chapters in my paperback copy of the book, while still in Northeast Ohio. I continued by absorbing chapters six through fifteen in audio form (narrated by Paul Michael) while driving to and through Kentucky. Chapter sixteen happened to fall during our time in Cave City, Kentucky, so I read that one in the hard copy. I listened to chapters seventeen through twenty-six while driving back home through Kentucky (and Ohio). And then I finished the last six chapters back home, in Kent. It wasn’t an intentional move on my part, but I kind of like the way that shifting from one version of the book to the other was useful, and enjoyable.
A Unique Perspective
Even as I’m typing right now, I feel that I’m subconsciously trying to speak in the voice of the character Jayber Crow (who spoke in at least a voice of Wendell Berry). And as a figure whose barber shop occupied a central space in town — both geographically and socially — Jayber Crow’s voice may be the most comprehensive one coming out of Port William. His unique perspective is a part of what makes him such an interesting observer of the community’s life. Jayber Crow is unquestionably a member of Port William, but he also provides some interesting angles from experiences that he brought in from outside of Port William: spending many of his most formative years in an orphanage and then, for a while, studying at a seminary and then working as a barber in the big city of Lexington and then for a while occasionally visiting the medium-sized regional center of Hargrave for its nightlife.
Jayber Crow is also unique in his spirituality. He holds to some level of Christian faith throughout his life, but there is no dogmatism, or religiosity, to it. And that somehow makes his spiritual perspective more meaningful and more relatable. There’s a moment in early in the book where young “J. Crow” decides to leave his seminary studies in Pigeonville for some reasons that seem much in line with the Book of Ecclesiastes from the Bible (which I just so happened to be reading last week in Kentucky, as well!). In particular, Crow wondered about the way that many Christians delineate between body and soul:
Everything bad was laid on the body, and everything good was credited to the soul. It scared me a little when I realized that I saw it the other way around. If the soul and body really were divided, then it seemed to me that all the worst sins — hatred and anger and self-righteousness and even greed and lust — came from the soul. But these preachers I’m talking about all thought that the soul could do no wrong, but always had its face washed and its pants on and was in agony over having to associate with the flesh and the world. And yet these same people believed in the resurrection of the body.
I resonated with this passage, and I resolved on some level to keep this in mind as I returned to preaching responsibilities with H2O. But in addition to that, the character had some concerns about the idea of the infallible, literal truth of the Bible which I didn’t share so much (though I still admit that he made some good points about the pious concern of seminaries and the way that they can lead to contradictions and hypocrisy stemming from their interpretation of the Bible). There were also some observations about prayer (particularly praying in public) in this section of the story which intrigued me but didn’t rankle me in the same way they rankled the character in the book. That is to say, these days I feel quite at ease with the idea that prayer is far more about us coming around to the idea of God’s will than it is about manipulating God to accomplish His will. Or, to use the character’s words:
By then I wasn’t just asking questions; I was being changed by them. I was being changed by my prayers, which dwindled down nearer and nearer to silence, which weren’t confrontations with God but with the difficulty — in my own mind, or in the human lot — of knowing what or how to pray. Lying awake at night, I could feel myself being changed — into what, I had no idea. It was worse than wondering if I had received the call [to preach]. I wasn’t just a student or a going-to-be preacher anymore. I was a lost traveler wandering in the woods, needing to be on my way somewhere but not knowing where.
It’s all just so honest — both Jayber Crow and Ecclesiastes. Jayber’s spiritual questions didn’t depress me or cause me to doubt the existence of God or the goodness of God. They didn’t even lead me to a crisis of confidence in regards to my chosen profession. If anything, they increased the sense of my own call: to walk with others and sit with them through increasingly troubled times, where all the drama of the human experience continues but younger generations have fewer and fewer certainties. Doctrinally, to be sure — but also the steadfastness of community and sound mental health and clarity on “real news” versus “fake news.” Reading through the spiritual musings of young “J. Crow” helped me to feel a sense of privilege, getting to be both a preacher and a lost traveler wandering in the woods in this Post-Christian context in which we increasingly find ourselves. And I really appreciate that.
By chapter 29, Jayber retires from his work at the barbershop and moves into a little place down by the river. In this transition, he also describes the way that he decides to retire from his part-time position as gravedigger for the Port William Cemetery, but not from his janitorial responsibilities at the church — and I think this offers a fascinating glimpse into a more mature understanding of spiritual things:
I still walk up on Fridays to clean, as I have always done, and on Sunday mornings I go up to ring the bell and sit through the service. I don’t attend altogether for religious reasons. I feel more religious, in fact, here beside this corrupt and holy stream. I am not sectarian or evangelical. I don’t want to argue with anybody about religion. I wouldn’t want to argue about it even if I thought it was arguable, or even if I could win. I’m a literal reader of the Scriptures, and so I see the difficulties. And yet every Sunday morning I walk up there, over a cobble of quibbles. I am, I suppose, a difficult man. I am, maybe, the ultimate Protestant, the man at the end of the Protestant road, for as I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.
The War and The Economy
On this particular pass through Jayber Crow, I also appreciated the way that the middle-aged character thought and talked about current events — which is especially remarkable considering that his narrative was set in the 1960s at that point in the narrative, with the character speaking from the vantage point of 1986, with the book actually being published in the year 2000, and me reading it now in 2025. Jayber Crow grew up with the vaguest of memories about the First World War, and he nearly went to war himself in the time of the Second World War (though he was deferred on account of a heart murmur). He observed the comings and goings of the Korean War and then the Vietnam War. And in chapter 25, he writes with incredible clarity about dynamics that far supersede any particular conflict and resonate with shocking accuracy to the headlines of today:
Port William was contending with The News. The local news was just talk, the result of Port William’s never-ceasing observation of its own doings and its listening to itself. The other news, The News of the World, seemed to have to do principally with The War and The Economy.
I know it is somewhat objectionable to capitalize such things and speak of them as if they were freestanding creatures. But The War and The Economy were seeming more and more to be independent operators. The War, I thought, was just the single Hell that is always astir in the world, always going on in modest ways even when it has not broken out in full force. And the nations were always preparing funds of weapons and machines and people to be used up whenever The War did break out in full force, which meant that sooner or later it would
Also it seemed that The War and The Economy were more and more closely related. They were the Siamese twins of our age, dressed alike, joined head to head, ready at any moment to merge into a single unified Siamese, when the crossed eyes of government should uncross. The War was good for The Economy. There was a certain airy, word kind of patriotism that added profit to its virtue. There was money in it, as Troy Chatham would say, who himself was being used by The Economy like lead in a pencil or in a gun. After he was used up, he would not be given a second chance. There is no rebirth in The Economy.
Jayber Crow doesn’t just deal with these immense realities of the human experience in abstraction, or in theory. The costs of The War and The Economy are brought home in a casket, carrying the remains of a young man from Port William who died in Vietnam. Chapter 26 serves as a powerful study of grief, spoken by a character who had endured more than his “fair share” of grief (whatever that means), as an orphan and a drifter, an “ineligible bachelor” and a part-time gravedigger for the Port William Cemetery:
Both sides, in making war, agree to these deaths, this dying of young soldiers in their pride. And afterward it becomes possible to pity the suffering of both sides, and to think of the lost, unfinished lives of boys who had grown up under hands laid with affection on their heads.
It seemed, after he was killed and buried, that my own left hand kept the memory of the shape and feel of Jimmy Chatham’s head when he was little and I would have to clamp my hand above his ears to keep him from looking around while I cut his hair.
Somewhere underneath of all the politics, the ambition, the harsh talk, the power, the violence, the will to destroy and waste and maim and burn, was this tenderness. Tenderness born into madness, preservable only by suffering, and finally not preservable at all. What can love do? Love waits, if it must, maybe forever.
In any moment when I was quiet, tenderness and madness would come upon me and content to no purpose, to the making of no sense. I could hardly bear to read the newspaper, which filled me with disloyalty and unbelief. We were, as we said again, making war in order to make peace. We were destroying little towns in order to save them. We were killing children in order that children might sleep peacefully in their beds without fear. We were raping and plundering a foreign land (and our own) for the sake of “love of country.” We were carrying into the heavens this cruelty and emptiness of heart. I felt involved in an old sickness of the world. I was sick with that sickness and could see no end. We had waded halfway across a bloody mire and could not get out except by wading halfway again, either forward or back.
I also found it fascinating that it’s in this part of the story that Jayber Crow finds his way back to faith by realizing that Jesus chose to subject himself to suffering. It’s a truly beautiful passage. And I feel it’s important to note — though I don’t know how to fully convey it — that Wendell Berry doesn’t write “Christian Fiction” at all. His characters are complex and deeply-flawed. There are no paragons of virtue and piety in Port William. In fact, the most religious characters are often the most unlikeable and antagonistic towards the point-of-view characters (Cecelia Overhold is a particularly good example in Jayber Crow). In the midst of all that, though, the character of Jayber Crow seems to understand the concepts of Christian faith, and hope, and love — not just in spite of his borderline-heretical thinking and “debauchery” in Hargrave, but seemingly because of these “deficiencies.”
A Love Story
More than anything else, Jayber Crow is a love story. But it is so different from most love stories in circulation today. He notices a young woman from Port William when they were both quite early in their lives. But circumstances led young Mattie Keith towards a relationship with a young man named Troy Chatham, who was a star on the school’s basketball team. Jayber could see that it wasn’t a good match, just as Mattie’s parents could see that it wasn’t a good match. But they eventually needed to recognize: “Mattie was a grown woman in love, and they had to let her go, with their blessing, enduring what could not be helped.”
When Jayber is in his mid-thirties — and Mattie and Troy have been married long enough to bring two children into the world — he experiences a cataclysmic revelation one Friday afternoon, watching Mattie with her children: “I was all of a sudden overcome with love for her. It was the strongest moment I had known, violent in its suddenness and completeness, and yet also the quietest. I had been utterly changed, and had not stirred. It was as though she had, in the length of a breath, assumed in my mind a new dimension. I no longer merely saw her as one among the objects of the world but felt in every nerve the heft and touch of her. I felt her take form within my own form. I felt her come into being within me, as in the morning of the world.”
He tells no one about his newfound feelings. But over time, he realizes that the sense of calling he perceived early in life may have been a calling to love Mattie — even if that love would remain, for all intents and purposes, unrequited. And, of course, this love story is complicated considerably by Mattie’s marriage to Troy. Later in life, Jayber confesses, “I did not love Troy Chatham. I was no longer capable of the effort of will it took to understand why Mattie did. Which would sooner or later remind me that I could not understand why God did. That was my sanity.”
I won’t reveal too much about the way this love story plays out, in case someone reading this post wants to enjoy the full effect of following the story over the course of 363 pages. I will say, however, that it ends up being one of the most beautiful love stories I’ve ever read, even if it’s also one of the most unconventional. In the last chapter of the book, without spoiling anything, I can tell you that Jayber Crow reflects on his life and says:
I am a man who has hoped, in time, that his life, when poured out at the end, would say, “Good-good-good-good-good!” like a gallon jug of the prime local spirit. I am a man of losses, regrets, and griefs. I am an old man full of love. I am a man of faith.
Jayber Crow is good-good-good-good-good. I don’t know how to say it any better than that. Probably a Top Five Book of All Time for me. I could hardly recommend it more highly than I have been doing, or than I intend to continue doing.