Wendell Berry’s character Jonah ‘Jayber’ Crow, the unassuming barber of a small, mid-century Kentucky town, is a man born out of time, a kind of medieval knight carrying a pair of scissors instead of a sword. Jayber is an orphan and bachelor, leading a solitary existence and observing the lives of the residents of Port William, Kentucky, including the life of the woman he’s secretly in love with, Mattie Catham. But here’s the catch: Mattie is already married, and, to make matters more complicated, her husband is unfaithful to her.
Rather than seeking to draw Mattie away from her husband or break her vow to him, Jayber makes a vow of his own: to be the faithful husband Mattie never had, loving her secretly and from afar, just as a medieval knight would choose a lady to love and serve from a distance, according to the rules of courtly love.
Is Fidelity Possible?
Set against the backdrop of all that is best about small, rural communities, Jayber’s struggle reflects his own spiritual journey as well as the larger social and economic changes of the 20th century. The central question of the novel is this: In an increasingly fragmented and changeable world, is real fidelity—to a place or to a person—possible?That question is dramatized in a quartet of characters and their interweaving stories: Jayber; Mattie; Mattie’s father, Athey; and Mattie’s husband, Troy.
Athey Keith is an old-timer, a methodical, patient man, who has spent his life cherishing and developing the family farm. He knows its animals, its fields and coppices, and its smell and feel intimately. He knows its unique character as if it was himself—and, in some sense, it is. Athey does not seek to control nature on his farm, but rather to work in concert with it using traditional methods, bringing a synergy and coherence to his work and his life.
Athey stands for the wholesomeness of things as they once were all over rural America, a theme deepened by Berry’s depiction of Port William, in which people live, love, and work together in genuine community. The people are rooted in their homesteads, their history, and their relationships, and life takes on a rhythmic stability that has something of the eternal about it.
Diametrically opposed to Athey and what he stands for is Troy Chatham, Mattie’s husband. He is concerned only with speed and efficiency, not integrity or harmony. He does violence to things (including the family farm) in order to make them yield more and more profit. He always aims to “get bigger” and modernize his farming business, permanently scarring the land and entering into deeper and deeper debt to do so. Deep in Troy is a restlessness, a discomfort with himself and his position in life, despite his boasting. Real life, real success is always just over the next rise, and he’ll sacrifice anything—and anyone—to reach it.
Troy’s mentality parallels the decline of Port William in the second half of the novel, due to a loss of fidelity to the place and its institutions. Jayber, with regret, details the closing of the town general store, the departure of the young people to go “make something of themselves,” the demise of family farms, buildings left empty and sway-backed, and the shuttering of the town school. This last event, Jayber narrates, “gave the community a never-healing wound.” With children shipped away to bigger towns for education, the future of Port William is, quite literally, gone. Many of these changes are driven by the industrialization of farming, the increasingly global economy, and the obsession with the efficiency and the bottom-line—precisely the obsessions that characterize Troy’s mindset.
People grow unfaithful to Port William and its traditions, and, even to each other. Troy’s infidelity to Mattie—who is much like her father and prefers his ways—becomes a microcosm of the larger-scale breakdown in trust and loyalty in the world.
Mattie represents Port William, rural communities, and simply traditional living in general. As Port William is being abandoned, this good wife and mother is also being abandoned by her husband. The parallel is too obvious to miss. She, like Port William and what it stands for, is a pearl of great price, yet not valued by those to whom she was given.
Jayber attempts to make up for that infidelity by holding to a radical vow of secret fidelity, a “marriage” with all the sacrifice and none of the reward, and this is the central drama of the novel: can fidelity win in the end?
In some sense, the novel itself parallels Jayber’s efforts, as it upholds an older set of ideals, an anti-progressive agenda, and tries to be faithful to America’s past. I think it succeeds.
