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Thanks to a friend, I read @VerlynKlinkenborg’s @nybooks review of Berry’s essay collection: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/10/08/wendell-berry-high-horse/ Sadly, it’s pretty terrible. If it made a coherent argument, it’d be worth engaging at greater length, but it keeps changing directions. So just a few notes: 1/x
1) It misidentifies the source of the collection’s title, which actually comes from Berry’s poem “Below.”
2) It wrongly states that Berry is a systemic thinker: there’s a reason he’s only published a couple of nonfiction “books”: almost all his nonfiction consists of occasional or “ad hoc” (his phrase) essays.
3) It makes bizarre stylistic critiques (why is the chronological “then” better than the causative “then”??) and weird genre claims (why must an essay not be a “disquisition”??).
4) There is an interesting discussion to be had about Berry’s use of abstractions despite his critiques of abstract thought. I’ve offered one possibility (in the “Humility” chapter here: https://bookshop.org/a/2037/9780813179421), but there is certainly more to be said.
Unfortunately, Klinkenborg only raises the issue before wandering away from it.
5) It asserts a gap between the sentiments of Berry’s implied reader and Klinkenborg’s feelings, but then Klinkenborg imposes his confused reactions onto his own readers (“Again and again, you come across moments in Berry’s essays…” “ You can feel in this sentence…”)
Maybe that’s how Klinkenborg “feels,” but it isn’t how all readers feel. We learn a lot about what bores or bothers Klinkenborg, but very little about the merits or demerits of Berry’s essays.
My review of the collection in @plough is certainly not the last word on the significance of Berry’s nonfiction prose. But at least I got the meaning of the title… https://www.plough.com/en/topics/culture/literature/what-i-stand-for-is-what-i-stand-on
