Hannah Coulter

by Wendell Berry

I finished reading this book months ago now, but haven’t blogged about it yet—not because I can’t think of what to say, but because there is so much I could say that I don’t know where to begin.

Wendell Berry is my dad’s favorite author. His books fill a whole shelf in my parent’s house. Occasionally I have pulled a book down and read an essay or the first couple chapters of a novel, but I’ve never finished any of his books. Last Christmas, my dad told me I should read Hannah Coulter. He had just read it on his last trip back from (the Republic of) Georgia. During the long day of international flights and airports he had let the story consume him. He said parts of the book had made him cry and he wondered what the people next to him must have been thinking as he wiped tears from his cheeks.

So it’s been on my list for a long time, but I didn’t pick it up until this fall, and I’m glad I waited. I didn’t finish it in a day like my dad did, but I’m sure it didn’t take me more than a week. And I also cried, not on an airplane, but while sitting on the couch in my Grandma Dale’s house where I live now, and she lived for the last thirty years of her life. Hannah, the title character and narrator of the story was born in 1922; Grandma was born in 1915.

I think of my grandma often. Her presence in my life as I was growing up and she was living just a short walk up the driveway from my parents house, and now that she has passed and I have moved back home and into her little house and nestled my books and dishes in with what remains of hers, I think of what her life was like at my age. I know bits and pieces—that she loved to read, wanted to be a schoolteacher, but didn’t have the money for it, so instead moved to the city and talked her way in to nursing school. Eventually she met my grandpa and they married and had four children together, the third of which was my dad. I understand my grandma because we share books and escaping to the city and independence, but I don’t understand her because we share history. I don't know what it is to live through the depression, being a housewife in the 50s, and entering a new century with the wisdom of an old woman instead of the naivety of a teenager. Hannah Coulter is the (fictional) story of one woman’s life who does share this history with my grandma. Because they share a generation, Hannah's story is also a window into my grandma’s story, giving context and emotion to the facts of her life.

While Hannah shared a generation with my grandma, as a character, she shares values with everyone in my immediate family—a connection to the land you live on, hard work, family, community, common sense. I was actually inspired to make a venn diagram to compare the values expressed in Hannah Coulter with Atlas Shrugged. They overlap a lot, but at their root have the opposition of city versus country.

I am not the only one in my family who Dad has recommended this book too. It is relevant to all of us. Mom and Dad for choosing the life they have—to farm, to live simply, in a small community—and my brothers and I for choosing to come home and continue to farm and live simply. We all took different paths to come to this decision, but ultimately, we have all come back.

One night I am playing cribbage with my brother Jon (who moved home this fall and shares Grandma’s house with me) and we are discussing Hannah Coulter and rootless American culture. As he deals our cards, I say, “It’s like we leave for something better, and we make our lives more complicated, but we don’t actually get anywhere.”
“Right. We make our lives more complicated, and we don’t get anywhere. We get lost,” he replies. And I think how glad I am to not be so lost anymore, and can only guess he is thinking something similiar.

Hannah Coulter is just one novel in a collection of novels that Wendell Berry has written about the same fictional community of “Port William.” Like Louise Erdrich (and Toni Morrison), he returns to the same land and web of characters to tell his stories, and instead of running out of stories to tell, it seems with each book he opens more doors for more stories. In Hannah Coulter he writes (in Hannah’s voice): “Writing about Port William to Virgil in his absence and distance, I realized that the story of even so small a place can never be completely told and can never be finished. It is eternal, always here and now, and going on forever” (43). Being home and seeing home with a writer’s eye, I feel this way constantly—that everything is connected and complicated and “can never be completely told”—even writing this post, I have a hard time containing the tangents or fully explaining how one little novel affects me, other than to say it describes a life that I deeply connect with.