Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder ed. by Chad Wriglesworth (review)

Book Reviews Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder. Ed. by Chad Wriglesworth. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2014. ISBN 9781619025462. Pp. xxv + 288. $16.95 (pbk), $30.00 (hbk). Christians have long been interested in the letters of their heroes, the apostle Paul’s epistles and Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, for example. To read these, and letters such as the one Martin Luther King quietly crafted from his Birmingham jail, is to recall that understanding letters requires some knowledge about the recipient(s) as well as the occasion. Reading letters from just one contributor in an exchange makes one wonder if the correspondent is also influencing the sender. C. S. Lewis’ Letters to an American Lady contains only his letters, leaving the reader ignorant if Mary, to whom he offered spiritual guidance for 13 years, also consoled him when his marriage to Joy Davidman ended with her death. Literature lovers also love letters. There survive hundreds of them from Emily Dickenson and 60 years’ worth from J. R. R. Tolkien. The Berry–Snyder collection reviewed here offers a satisfying difference from these collections. Wriglesworth’s selections let readers in on the occasion for each letter by including responses from both conversation partners. This treasury, thus, resembles The Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams, poets esteemed and sometimes emulated by Berry and Snyder. Perhaps closer still is The Lytle–Tate Letters: The Correspondence of Andrew Lytle and Allen Tate. These men (novelists and poets like Berry and Snyder) are among the Twelve Agrarians who produced I’ll Take My Stand, the 1930s southern manifesto that made a sustained impression on Berry. Berry and Snyder, like these two literary agrarians, write as supportive friends, ideological loyalists, and kindly critics of each other’s literary output. In Wriglesworth’s collection, the reader is taken into a relationship, not just an individual mind, and in so doing the letters he’s selected demonstrate the existence of differences within, and alongside, commonality. The book starts, quite usefully, with an introduction from Wriglesworth. He sets the stage by recounting the protagonists’ narrative as well as disclosing the major insight that emerges as each man’s mind is increasingly spoken to by the other: their letters . . . grapple with questions about particularities of religion, local economics , styles of writing . . . Though not always in agreement, their friendship is a testament to the power of fidelity in an increasingly sectarian culture . . . [they] have Christianity & Literature 2016, Vol. 65(3) 370–394 ! The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/ journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0148333116637054 cal.sagepub.com also left us a social map that leads to more generous and imaginative ways of existing together. (xxii) Wriglesworth’s introduction will be indispensable for those new to Berry and/or Snyder and to others it offers a most promising start. The letters are, of course, chronological. But their ordering is more than just a sequence of exchanges plodding through 40 years. They also reveal the progress and experiments underway on their respective homesteads at Lanes Landing Farm in Port Royal, Kentucky and at Kitkitdizze in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California. There is news of their continuing engagement with various ecologically concerned associations; they speak of developments within their families: marriages and granddaughters for Berry and wife Tanya, and Snyder reports of the growing abilities of sons Kai and Gem in wilderness skills and of their adventures together in Alaska. News comes of lambing, horses, and apricot trees; there are questions about tractors and electric fences. There is even a poetic niggle from Snyder in praise of his Macintosh. Berry, in response, raises his pencil in salute (162). Along the way the men introduce each other to each other’s world: friends, environmental informants, important poets, and their primary moral referents: Eastern culture for Snyder, Western culture for Berry. There is much, too, about their travels to each other and with each other. When near the Bay Area or close to Kentucky for poetry readings or speeches, they earnestly make plans to stay with each other and always are eager for time to talk. After...