Imagination and the Limits of Fiction

The narrator in Wendell Berry's eighth novel calls himself "an old man, traveling as a child among the dead." It is a fitting label for Andy Catlett, who is recounting the first trip he ever took alone—a bus trip from Hargrave to Port William, where all four of his grandparents live, during the few days between Christmas of 1943 and the new year, a year that "would be as bloody . . . as the one before and the one after." "That year of 1943," Andy says, "was in a sense my last year of innocence, of the illusion of permanence and peace"; the new year "would teach me something about loss that I had not learned in all the years before: It could happen to me"—as indeed it does. A world will be lost when his uncle Andrew is murdered in July of 1944, and then another in 1945 when his uncle Virgil is lost in action. That same year his Grandpa Catlett's hired hand, Dick Watson, dies. The next year will claim Grandpa Catlett, and future losses will include Andy's own right hand, as we know from another novel.

There, as here and elsewhere, travel and its cognates signify variously for this traveler who fairly early in his life will enact an old story, the story of departure and return. He is a young boy in A World Lost when his grandmother calls him "old traveler"; he is a grown man in Remembering when travel briefly tempts him with its false promise of a detached unburdened existence. Here in Early Travels the nine-year-old Andy regards this trip as his "first step into manhood."

This phrase marks the governing conflict that Berry calls upon to bear the richness of this short tale, for, if the trip is a step into manhood, then it is necessarily a step into the future. But Andy's route is by way of the past: he gets off a bus that travels thirty miles per hour (observing the wartime speed limits) and is met by his Grandpa Catlett and Dick Watson, who sit on a mule-drawn wagon that travels four miles per hour. Andy sits between the two men, one white and one black, as they take him back into a world the narrator in Remembering calls "the end of something old and long that Andy was born barely in time to know"; in this novel it is a place that will end with "mechanization in the aftermath of the war," for, as Andy says, "the time was about over when a boy traveling into the Port William community might be met by a team of mules and a wagon." Born in the nick of time, as it were, Andy stands between two worlds, one dying and the other powerless not to be born—given a nation poised to go shopping in the postwar years. He recalls that Hargrave was a town that aspired to keep up with the times, Port William a town "entirely satisfied to be what it was." Looking back, the narrator says it never occurred to him "that those two worlds were in mortal contention." "In my innocence," Andy recalls, "I thought only that the world the mules were drawing us into was a truer world than the world of Hargrave, and I liked it better."

His childhood preferences are not the last word on this. In the sobriety of age—and in perhaps the most poignant lines the novel offers—Andy says that "the old world in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and animals, was the true world; and . . . the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed, and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater. This new world seems a jumble of scenery and props never quite believable, an economy of fantasies and moods, in which it is hard to remember either the timely world of nature or the eternal world of...