From the department of don’t stand near me because I’m vomiting. In the current New Yorker, from a profile of Wendell Berry by Dorothy Wickenden, subtitled, “Wendell Berry renounced modernity sixty years ago, but his ideas have never been more pressing.”
About Tanya, Berry’s wife: “She became her husband’s first reader and best critic. She was also, in mechanical terms, his typist, a fact that outraged feminists when Berry mentioned it in his Harper’s essay. (Tanya looks back on the controversy with amusement: ‘Did I tell you that several women have greeted me with, “Oh, you’re the one who types!”‘) Berry responded that he preferred his admittedly old-fashioned view of marriage–‘a state of mutual help’–to the popular idea of ‘two successful careerists in the same bed’, and a ‘sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended’.”
This piece is written by Dorothy Wickenden, as mentioned. Not mentioned is that Dorothy’s husband, in mechanical terms, typed it. She doesn’t include this because she doesn’t want to call attention to things true of her life or her opinions, except that Wendell’s ideas have never been more pressing. When modernity has been renounced, what does the sex look like? Why can’t Wendell type? Can he actually type and just likes seeing Tanya at the keyboard? Does it help them in the bedroom? Can there be such a thing as a private political system? Can there be such a thing as a language spoken by only one person?
Elsewhere in the piece Dorothy writes, “Berry cultivates the unfashionable virtues of neighborliness and compassion.” Why are they unfashionable? Everywhere I look except on my posts, virtue seems to me very fashionable. As for compassion. Maybe not so fast Dorothy when Wendell is protecting the bedroom from feminists who modestly point out that rights and interests have always constituted pretty much everything that happens in bedrooms, on desks, in elevators, on grassy knolls down behind the barn.
Back to the issue of typing. It’s super useful to type your own stuff, Wendell. Just a neighborly and compassionate tip.