Jayber Crow Part III
and Discussion Questions
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Good Morning Readers,
We have finished another book together. It is such a good feeling to finish a book in general, but to finish a book as a group is something special. I hope that you enjoyed being introduced to Wendell Berry if Jayber Crow is your first and revisiting Port William if you’ve been here before.
I have mentioned that I have loved reading this book, but it has felt painfully slow at points. Not in the sense that I don’t want to read it, but in the sense that I will sit down and feel like I’ve read a lot and then see that I’ve only read a few pages. Now that I have finished the book I can confirm that I think Berry did this on purpose. I firmly believe that he wants us to read his books at the pace life should be lived, which is much slower than most of us are used to. I think I can say that I am feeling more peace and intentionally trying to move and think a little bit slower now. Maybe we all need to read a Berry book every few months to recalibrate ourselves to humanizing speed.
If you missed of the other reading guides, here they all are. For this month all of the voice recordings are available for free to everyone. Starting next month they will go behind the paywall.
Chapter by Chapter
23-The Way of Love
In which Jayber keeps his vow and mediates on love, prayer, Scripture, and growing old.
Sometimes I knew in all my mind and heart why I had done what I had done, and I welcomed the sacrifice. But there were times too when I lived in a desert and felt no joy and saw no hope and could not remember my old feelings. Then I lived by faith alone without hope.
What good did I get from it? I got to have love in my heart. (247)
Things to Note:
Jayber is praying again (and still struggling with Scripture)!
I began to pray again. I took it up again exactly where I had left off twenty years before, in doubt and hesitation, bewildered and unknowing what to say. “Thy will be done,” I said, and seemed to feel my own bones tremble in the grave. (250)
We have a call back to the scene with Dr. Ardmire (the college professor that Jayber talks to before he leaves the seminary) when he is thinking about the inevitability of answered prayers. The way that Wendell Berry tells a story and then deepens the meaning of it over the course of the book is so good. I know that rereading this book would be very rewarding because of this.
The meditations about sacrifice and love going together are inspiring…
I prayed to know in my heart His love for the world, and this was my most prideful, foolish, and dangerous prayer. It was my step into the abyss. As soon as I prayed it, I knew that I would die….His love is suffering. It is our freedom and His sorrow….And yet all the good I know is in this, that a man might so love this world that it would break his heart. (254)
He never owned a car again…this seems significant because of all of Berry’s hesitations about industrialism in general, but also because Jayber seems to be living almost a monkish existence.
Some of the meditations on page 250 remind me of Madeleine L’Engle in Walking on Water (RR 2024) in that sometimes asking the questions is more important than getting the answers.
I have been thinking about how Jayber thought he might have missed hearing the call to become a preacher and how he is now preaching the gospel message to us from his worldly vocation…maybe he did hear a call and it just wasn’t exactly what he thought.
We have another Scriptural allusion in the comment made about Jephthah’s vow…you can read the story in Judges chapter 11 if you aren’t familiar.
The way Scripture is being woven throughout the story is reminding me of East of Eden (RR 2024) as well.
24-A Passage of Family Life
In which we hear about Jimmy’s relationship with Athey (his grandfather) and Jayber gains some family membership with the Keith’s for a time.
Things to Note:
I am struck at the comparisons I keep seeing between Troy and Jayber. Troy’s way of farming is necessarily solitary. He has alienated himself from his son, but also from everyone. Jayber has chosen a way of loneliness by his vow. I will be looking for how these similarities are drawn out and what Berry is doing with them in the story.
This chapter has me thinking about the generational pendulum swing. Do we all swing away from our parents and gravitate toward our grandparent’s way of life?
I am again struck at the focus on the old and the young in this book. It seems that because Jayber is an old man now, he is meditating on what he remembers of being young. Or maybe this is simply a meditation on the generational differences and the pain it can cause.
The relationship between Troy and Athey is so complex and well written. The inconvenience and slowness of death are alien to the way Troy lives. I wonder if Berry will draw this out more as the story goes.
Troy didn’t want Athey to matter to him, didn’t want to be bound to an old man dying, couldn’t bear to be enclosed by a house where death had come as a patient guest. He shrugged it off like an ill-fitting jacket, calling over his shoulder without turning his head as he went out, “Well if you need anything, let me know.” (265)
The story of Jimmy after Athey’s death reminds me of Jayber wanting to stay at Squire’s Landing after Aunt Cordie and Uncle Othy’s deaths.
Troy and Mattie’s inner marital disintegration shows outwardly in their home and farm.
The description of Troy plowing almost sounds like he is on a tank (which seems apt after Berry’s description of war).
Berry has expertly made me feel a sense of foreboding for Jimmy at the end of this chapter…
He still had his grin, but now it was turned away from the family. Now it was turned to the world. It was a grin of readiness. He was waiting to see what the world might offer. He wanted and expected it to offer something if not better at least different. He wanted to hear its dare. You could still see the mischief in his grin, but you could see trouble too. All he needed was a car. (272)
25-A Period of Disintegration
In which Port William suffers from the war and the economy and we don’t know if it will regain its strength.
When I say that Port William suffered a new run of hard times in the 1960s, I don’t mean that it had to “weather a storm” and come out safe again in the sunshine. I mean that it began to suffer its own death, which it has not yet completed, from which it may or may not revive. And here, talking against the wind, so to speak, I must enter, along with my lamentation, my objection. (274)
Things to Note:
All of the Dante allusions cannot be an accident. There are too many spread throughout the book. Some are even exact quotes. I am trying to think what these allusions could be pointing toward. The structure of the book being three parts definitely makes me think of the 3 part structure of The Comedy itself and has me looking for Heaven in this part. I also am trying to think of characters that receive punishment/rewards to fit their actions. Troy and Cecilia seem to fit into this theory.
I would love to read this chapter alongside Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy Sayers (RR 2022).
There are some great images that will stay in my mind from this chapter: the school closing, the difference between digging and filling a grave, the buried chainsaw, and the interstate.
City lots would be carved out of farms, raising of course the price of farmland, so that urban people could enjoy the spaciousness of rural life while looking evening and morning at the rear ends of one another’s automobiles. (282)
26-Finalities
In which Jimmy dies in the Vietnam War and Mr. Mumble Something from sanitation drives Jayber out of town.
Things to Note:
I am so interested that with some of the comparisons I’ve seen between Jayber and Jimmy we now have a chapter where Jimmy dies and Jayber has to leave Port William. It is almost like maybe his life at the river will be his Heaven, which would fit with the Dante structure.
Speaking of allusions…Jayber is storing his money in a copy of Paradise Lost. If we weren’t sure where Jayber’s spiritual journey was going from the beginning we should definitely have taken the hint that he would be faithful by the end just from all of the allusions to the Bible, Dante, Pilgrims Progress, and now Milton.
The callback to the man across the desk (from The Good Shepherd chapter) has me thinking that Wendell Berry is doing quite the job of creating a world of images in my mind that brings the story to life and helps me to be on the same page with Jayber because he has led my mind on the same paths that Jayber has walked. I think this is the best of the Port William novels I have read (even though Hannah Coulter, RR 2021 might still be my favorite)
The story with the Inspector is brilliant. The inspector wants to know where the water comes from and then (without a cloud in the sky) it starts raining. Yes, that is where the water comes from!
Troy has now lost a daughter, a father in law, and a son…I am wondering what Berry will do with Troy and his losses.
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. (294)
But the mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either. (296)
27-A New Life
In which Jayber moves to the River and starts a donations only barbershop.
To feel at home in a place, you have to have some prospect of staying there…I was no sooner convinced that I was going to leave than I became eager to be gone. (298)
Things to Note:
I am reminded of Jayber’s one cardboard box that he came with in the scene when he is leaving with his boxes (but now he has friends to help him travel).
I have been thinking that this book reminds me a bit of In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden (RR 2022)…this might be because the characters feel so real.
I was so relieved when he started being a barber again. Berry wrote the story so I felt the lack of good work. He is called to it and we see that again and again.
I was running, you might say, an “underground” barbershop, a guerrilla free enterprise off in woods, born out of the world into the world again…I became a barber from before my time, surviving after my time. (306)
He again makes his home by planting his garden. I love this and am convicted by this at the same time.
It was a little port for the departure and arrival of souls, and was involved in more than time. (301)
28-Branch
In which we meet the Branches and Jayber gets a family.
The Branches seemed uninterested in getting somewhere and making something of themselves. What they liked was making something of nearly nothing. (313)
And so I began what I suppose is my final passage of family life, which has not ended yet. I became what Lyda called her “third bachelor, as if I needed another one.” (316)
Things to Note:
I find myself wondering why the Branches last? Is it simply reluctance to change? Or not thinking of bigger and better things? Why doesn’t this work for other families like the Coulters?
I love the reason that Danny Branch starts getting his haircut at Jayber’s…
A barbershop in town, run in the usual way, did not interest him much. A barbershop in the woods on the riverbank, giving free haircuts in return for which people gave away dollars, a barbershop bootlegging haircuts in defiance of authority, dispensing and receiving lawless charity- that appealed to his fundamental dissidence and contrariness. (314)
The present tense statement about Jayber being in a family with the Branches made me tear up. I feel the lack of loneliness finally!
I am struck by the difference between the inspector’s world of business and this familial, neighborly exchange. Berry expertly crafts these sections to contrast one another.
29-On the Edge
In which Jayber is on the edge of town, society, family, and Heaven.
I can’t look back from where I am now and feel that I have been very much in charge of my life. Certainly I have lived on the edge of Port William community, and I am farther than ever out on the edge of it now. But I feel that I have lived on the edge even of my own life….And so when I have thought I was in my story or in charge of it, I really have been only on the edge of it, carried along. Is this because we are in an eternal story that is happening partly in time? (322)
Things to Note:
When he mentioned that a machine digs graves now my heart broke. After the way he described the experience it feels so wrong for a machine to do it. Jayber is seeming to me to be more and more like a mythological creature of the world that is passing away.
What is the significance of the river? He has been musing on it for the whole book and I have so many images sticking in my mind. Is it the ever changing nature of it?
To think of “a place” on the flowing surface soon baffles your mind, for the “places” are ever changing and moving. (325)
Jayber’s seasonal existence leaves me with a longing for what seems right.
I am drawn to the idea that we must connect ourselves to the good and the beautiful to endure the sufferings and anxieties of this world. The image that Jayber paints of this process is worth noting…
For a long time then I seemed to live by a slender thread of faith, spun out from within me. From this single thread I spun strands that joined me to the good things of the world. And then I spun more threads that joined all the strands together, making a life. When it was complete, or nearly so, it was shapely and beautiful in the light of day. It endured through the nights, but sometimes it only barely did. It would be tattered and set awry by things that fell or blew or fled or flew. Many of the strands would be broken. Those I would have to spin and weave again in the morning. (330)
At the end of the chapter Jayber tells us about a good dream he had where he was back together with Athey, Art Rowanberry, Burley, and Elton Penn. It is this etherial scene and there are multiple mentions of time not moving (which reminds me of the broken clock sign at the barbershop)…by the end he finally realizes where he is. I think he’s on the edge of Heaven.
Here on the river I have known peace and beauty such as I never knew in any other place. There is always work here that I need to be doing and I have many worries, for life on the edge seems always threatening to go over the edge. But I am always surprised, when I look back on times here that I know to have been laborious or worrisome or sad, to discover that they were never out of the presence of peace and beauty, for here I have been always in the world itself. (327)
It is not a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that the world is always passing and irrecoverable, to be known only in loss. To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain. It is a terrible thing to love the world knowing that you are a human and therefore joined by kind to all that hates the world and hurries its passing- the violence and greed falsehood that overcome the world that is meant to be overcome by love. (329)
30-The Keith Place in the Way of the World
In which Jayber can’t love Troy and reflects on why that may be.
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. (342)
Things to Note:
Berry’s use of Troy in the novel to symbolize the changing times is so effective. If he simply described the changes I wouldn’t care as much, but because he has embodied them in a person I do care.
Troy Chatham seemed to signify what the times were changing to. (335)
We find out that Mattie is ill in passing…I am worried about what will happen to Troy when she can’t temper his desire for change.
Berry has me feeling the weight of Troy’s debt. He is still a sympathetic character and I do feel for him.
This was why he was reduced by everything he did to enlarge himself; it was why his life was all spending and no gain. (338)
The image of Troy’s “parts department” is so vivid and sad…
This was a patch of two or three acres completely covered with old or broken or worn-out machines. And here a kind of reforestation was taking place: Weeds and vines and sapling trees of various kinds were growing up all around and even through the machines. (340)
These last few chapters almost have little cliff hangers at the end…is the novel picking up pace to finish or am I finally getting into the slow rhythm of the book? How is Jayber going to “be together” with Mattie?
31-The Nest Egg
In which Jayber and Mattie meet at the Nest Egg, Mattie dies, and we find out that this is, indeed, a book about Heaven.
Things to Note:
The description of the Nest Egg and how Jayber is careful in it is how I feel about reading this book…
Everything there seemed to belong where it was. That was why I went there. And I went to feel the change that that place always made in me. Always, as soon as I came in under the big trees, I began to go slowly and quietly…because in a place where everything belongs where it is, you do not want to disturb anything. I went slowly and quietly. I watched where I put my feet. I went for solace and comfort, for a certain quietness of mind that came to me in no other place. (346)
I think there is significance that Jayber meets Mattie there after waking up from a nap. Sleep is always symbolic of death. It almost seems like he is meeting her in the afterlife…dare I say Heaven?
In very Berry fashion, the love of the same place is what brings them together.
Berry/Jayber finally confirms that this is a book about Heaven (and is Mattie his Beatrice?).
This is a book about Heaven. I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and is the realist thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which you cannot see among the crumbs of earth where it lies. It is like the reflection of the trees on the water. (351)
The book can’t end with Jayber’s death since he is writing it, but how will it end? He says he is ready…
32-Seen Afar
In which Mattie is dying, Troy bulldozes the Nest Egg, and Jayber hopes for the world.
This is, as I said and believe, a book about Heaven, but I must say too that it has been a close call. For I have wondered sometimes if it would not finally turn out to be a book about Hell-where we fail to love one another, where we hate and destroy one another for reasons abundantly provided or for righteousness’ sake or for pleasure, where we destroy the things we need the most, where we see no hope and have no faith, where we are needy and alone, where things that ought to stay together fall apart, where there is such a groaning travail of selfishbess in all its forms, where we love one another and die, where we must lose everything to know what we have had.
But the earth speaks to us of Heaven, or why would we want to go there? If we knew nothing of Hell, how would we delight in Heaven should we go there? (354)
Things to Note:
I am so glad that he wraps up the stories of Clydie, Cecilia, and Troy a bit…this seems especially significant after talking about making “Hell” by things he left undone.
The man in the well story is excellent…these stories within the story will stay with me a long time.
Listen. There is a light that includes our darkness, a day that shines down even on the clouds. A man of faith believes that the Man in the Well is not lost. He does not believe this easily or without pain, but he believes it… (357)
Jayber can finally forgive Troy because of Mattie’s love for him…this is the trial of his life and Mattie leads him through it. She does seem like his Beatrice.
The time would come (and this was my deliverance, my Nunc Dimittis) when I would be, in the small ways that were possible, his friend….For finally he was redeemed, in my eyes, by Mattie’s long-abiding love for him, as I myself had been by my love for her. (361)
Mattie’s death with Jayber’s unsaid words reminds me a bit of Simon from Kristin Lavransdatter (RR 2020)
The “other thing” that is unnamed reminds me of the unsaid word in The House of Mirth.
What is the other thing?
I will leave you with the last few lines of the book…
Her eyes filled with tears, but she said quietly, “I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it’s being ruined is hard.”
Then, in the loss of all the world, when I might have said the words I had so long wanted to say, I could not say them, I saw that I was not going to be able to talk without crying, and so I cried. I said, “But what about this other thing?”
She looked at me then. “Yes,” she said. She held out her hand to me. She gave me the smile that I had never seen and will not see again in this world, and it covered me all over with light.
Discussion Questions
Chat about your experience with Berry’s writing. Have you read other Port William novels? How does this compare? What about his non-fiction?
Share a favorite quote, scene, image, or character.
How would you introduce someone to Berry who doesn’t see the value of the humanizing life yet? Is it a mystery or is there a way to prepare them?
Discuss the allusions to the Bible, Dante, or other literature and how it affects your reading and remembering of the story.
Discuss the rambling/vignette/storytelling nature of the book.
Discuss any of the Berry themes and how you saw them play out in the story. (Nature, Time, Memory, Place, Names…)
Has this reading left you with any personal changes, thoughts, or questions? (this is not the normal type of question I ask about books, but Berry’s writing begs us to ask this question)
Discuss if this book is a chiasm and how that affects your reading of it.
Thank you for joining us to read Jayber Crow and for making it all the way through these long Read Along Guides. I hope that Berry has changed you and your life has been enriched by reading with us.
Until next time, keep revisiting the good books that enrich your life and nourish your soul.
In Case You Missed It:
What We’re Reading Now:
December
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
January
Othello by William Shakespeare
February
Out of the Silent Planet AND Perelandra by C.S. Lewis
A Few Reminders:
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Moving at a slow pace and never owning a car again…These topics are dear to my heart. I do not drive (though my husband does). I am currently editing a post about my slow(er) walking life and it is hard to know what to say. For the most part, modern life feels designed to treat anyone who does not drive as a relic of a bygone age at best and sub-human at worst.
I definitely caught onto Jayber's entrance into a sort of monasticism, one that seems very Franciscan (especially when he mentions talking to animals). It seems he's being taught a vocation of love.