Hannah and Nathan

By Wendell Berry
Foreword by Gregory Wolfe
(2006)

Discussion Guide Included

This Reading is an excerpt from Wendell Berry’s 2004 novel, Hannah Coulter with a Foreword by Gregory Wolfe, editor of the journal Image and director of the MFA program at Seattle Pacific University. 

Hannah Coulter, the latest novel set in Berry’s fictional Port William, Kentucky, is something of a sequel to Berry’s first novel, Nathan Coulter (1960, revised 1985). In our selection, which reads more like a memoir than a traditional novel, Hannah narrates the events surrounding her courtship and marriage with Nathan after the death of her first husband in World War II. In the process, she welcomes the reader into a way of life different from our own, and into a vision for what a human life can be.

As Wolfe notes in his Foreword, the story reminds us that “Love is not a passing emotion but a fundamental commitment, a rootedness in being; its shape and meaning can only be known on the scale of a lifetime.” There is a public dimension to marriage, and Hannah’s story raises quiet but insistent questions for us who may have forgotten our own history. Wolfe asks with Berry and Hannah: What have we lost as we have made marriage into an abstract, private pact, forgetting its appropriate setting in the web of obligations that holds together a community?

Touching on life and love, loss and grief—and recovery, commitment and consequence, place and continuity, “Hannah & Nathan” will introduce you to characters you will want to spend time with—and a place you will want to revisit. 

But [Nathan] wanted more than me. He wanted a life for us to live and a place for us to live it in. I can see it as I saw it then, and I can see it as I know it now. He had gone to the war and lived through it, and he had come home changed. He saw Port William as he never would have seen it if he had never left and had never fought. He came home to these ridges and hillsides and bottomlands and woods and streams that he had known ever since he was born. And this place, more than all the places he had seen in his absence, was what he wanted. It was what he had learned to want in the midst of killing and dying, terror, cruelty, hate, hunger, thirst, blood, and fire.

But this was not a simple desire. In order to have the place, he needed me. In order to have me, he needed the place. He knew these things because he was no longer a simple man. He had come to his desire by going through everything that was opposed to it. Nathan plainly wasn’t trying to make it big in the “postwar world.” He wasn’t going anywhere. He had come back home after the war because he wanted to. He was where he wanted to be. As I too was by then, he was a member of Port William. Members of Port William aren’t trying to “get someplace.” They think they are someplace.

Watching him and watching myself in my memory now, I know again what I knew before, but now I know more than that. Now I know what we were trying to stand for, and what I believe we did stand for: the possibility that among the world’s wars and sufferings two people could love each other for a long time, until death and beyond, and could make a place for each other that would be a part of their love, as their love for each other would be a way of loving their place. This love would be one of the acts of the greater love that holds and cherishes all the world.

Category: Readings (No. 43)