From the Stacks: A Place on Earth
By Jeffrey Bilbro
One of my most treasured books is a battered and stained paperback that, when it was published in 1969, cost ninety-five cents. It’s the first Avon printing of a novel that came out in a more quality, and expensive, edition three years earlier from Harcourt, Brace & World. Copies of this first edition now sell for upwards of $400; copies of the Avon printing are available online for $15. The novel is Wendell Berry’s A Place on Earth.
When Berry published it in 1967, the only other novel he’d published was Nathan Coulter, and he had just moved back to Kentucky with his family three years earlier. As his vision for the Port William fiction developed, along with his talents as a writer, he became dissatisfied with both these early novels and made arrangements with his new editor, Jack Shoemaker, to publish revised versions. The radically shortened and re-written A Place on Earth came out in 1983, and Berry published a version with more changes in 2001. In the preface of the first revision, he calls the original a “clumsy, overwritten, wasteful” book. He published a drastically altered Nathan Coulter in 1985, lopping the last four chapters off the version first published in 1960. I have a discarded library copy of the first edition of this novel; it was weeded from a library in Walterboro, SC sometime after 2005. Good copies of this edition can be had for around $400, though my copy was much cheaper.
While these early editions can be hard to find now, they give a fascinating glimpse into Berry’s growth as a writer. In graduate school, I went through the three versions of A Place on Earth and the two versions of Nathan Coulter line-by-line, documenting all the changes he made in the revision process. I ended up publishing an essay on the changes and then later reworking this material for a chapter in a book, but the real benefit came from apprenticing myself to Berry’s sentences and watching the choices he made while editing his own prose.
The revised versions of both novels are aesthetically and imaginatively better than the originals. But some gems inevitably got cut in the process. The first edition of A Place on Earth has an endearing scene where Old Jack Beechum comes to visit Hannah Coulter after the birth of her daughter. Hannah’s husband is missing-in-action somewhere in war-torn Europe, and Jack comes to offer the gift of his presence and whatever consolation he can provide:
He makes his presence as little an intrusion as possible, asking nothing, offering nothing, just there in case he’s needed, perhaps hoping to be needed, though she can’t be certain of that. He almost seems to pay no attention to her, to be unaware of her. But she understands that to be a sort of sacrificial deference on his part. She has come to accept his presence as he offers it, grateful for it, aware of needing it. It’s quieting to her, a steadying in her mind. And, Lord knows, she has need of steadying. Lord knows she has need. Her body suddenly filling with her need, it seems to her that to be more alone than she is would destroy her. Her eyes hold to the old man’s still head and shoulders as to a vision. She’s accompanied. She wonders at the great kindness by which he knew, before she knew herself, that she would need him.
Jack dozes off, and later several women come to pay their respects to the new baby. Jack sits quietly in the corner, aware that as a man he’s somewhat out of place in this feminine conversation but also determined to remain in solidarity with Hannah. He’s frustrated by the chitchat that seems to deny the reality that Hannah’s husband is missing: “Do they believe, talking, it can be made not to be? To pretend the world is better than it is is as bad as to believe that it’s worse. It’s beautiful and terrible, the world. Not to admit it, both ways, is to destroy it.” When the baby becomes fussy, the ladies’ conversation grows awkward. Clearly she needs to be fed, but how can Hannah nurse her baby with a man present? Jack eventually realizes what’s going on:
“Honey,” Old Jack says, turning abruptly to Hannah, “if you want to let him suck, go ahead. It won’t bother me.” He resumes his gaze out the window, shaking his head in dismissal of the whole problem. “I’m long past that.”
Jack has been told before the baby is a girl, not a boy, but he can’t be bothered to keep details like that straight, in much the same way he can’t be bothered with social niceties. He has more pressing issues to figure out—like how to accompany a young widow and her orphan through their great loneliness. Hannah, much to the shock of the other women, takes Jack at his word and nurses her daughter; she is grateful for his love, uncouth and awkward though it is.
Maybe this scene isn’t needed in the book and Berry was right to take it out. But it remains a favorite of mine, and it’s one of the reasons I cherish this ninety-five cent paperback.
Jeffrey Bilbro is a Professor of English at Grove City College. He grew up in the mountainous state of Washington and earned his B.A. in Writing and Literature from George Fox University in Oregon and his Ph.D. in English from Baylor University. His books include Words for Conviviality: Media Technologies and Practices of Hope, Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News, Loving God’s Wildness: The Christian Roots of Ecological Ethics in American Literature, Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place (written with Jack Baker), and Virtues of Renewal: Wendell Berry’s Sustainable Forms.
