Blazer Lectures

Life and Work

Wendell Berry

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813154800
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Biographies

By examining the life and work of celebrated painter, Harlan Hubbard, author Wendell Berry creates the perfect vehicle for emphasizing the themes of his other writings: the value of self-sufficiency, our responsibility to the environment, the holiness of everyday life, and the preference of simplicity over modern, mechanized life. Includes 20 color plates of Hubbard's own paintings, along with several photographs of Anna and Harlan Hubbard.

Chapter One

A NEW LIFE

HARLAN AND ANNA HUBBARD spent the hot, humid day of June 15, 1944, painting the house at 129 Highland Avenue in Fort Thomas, Kentucky. Harlan had built the house in 1923 for his mother, Rose Ann Swingle Hubbard. His mother had died in November of 1943, and now Harlan and Anna were preparing the house to be rented.

In the evening of that day, they drove down to the Ohio River, took a short swim, sat out a rainstorm, and then cooked a supper of bacon, eggs, and cocoa on the embers of a smoldering drift pile. “There, on the river shore,” Harlan wrote in his Journal, “old longings and plans were revived.”¹ The Journal says little more, but in Harlan’s book Shantyboat we learn that, undoubtedly on that evening by their supper fire, Anna said: “Now we can build the boat we have so often talked of, and drift down the river.”²

Thus they came to the beginning of the great adventure that they made possible for each other. By the time they had lived together to the end of it, a little less than forty-two years later, it would have become one of the landmark achievements of their time.

With Harlan, the attraction of the river went back as far as he could remember. It began with Anna only when she met him, but her enthusiasm for it gave a legitimacy to his that it had not had before. She gave a necessary permission.

At the time of their crucial supper on the riverbank, Anna was forty-one years old and Harlan was forty-four. They had been married a little more than a year.

Harlan was born in Bellevue, Kentucky, on January 4, 1900. His father, Frank Gilbert Hubbard, died in 1907. In 1915 Harlan and his mother moved to New York City to join his two older brothers, who were working there. He attended Childs High School in the Bronx and later the National Academy of Design in New York and the Cincinnati Art Academy. In 1919 he returned to northern Kentucky with his mother; they settled this time in Fort Thomas.

Until her death, Harlan was a dutiful son to his mother. He was not a success in the world’s eyes or in hers but earned the money he needed as a day laborer, leaving himself ample time for painting, reading, writing, music, long walks through the countryside, and long canoe trips on the Ohio and its tributaries. In his own eyes he was successful because he had escaped what the world called success, because he had mostly been true to himself, and because he had learned many things that he wanted and needed to know. He had learned, among many other things, carpentry and masonry. He had become the good all-around odd-jobs man that his life was going to require him to be.

But he had suffered too from his failure to secure the world’s approval. He was lonely as an artist, for his work went without friends and without recognition; he had virtually no encouragement except for what he could supply himself. And he was lonely as a man. Though he admired women and acknowledged the influence of several who were older than he, he wrote that until “the late twenties and early thirties of my life . . . I never had a girl friend, no one whom I courted. . . . I felt I was guided by that inborn consciousness that some things in life were not for me.”³ The Journal supplies only hints about relationships with women after those years, but apparently they gave him little comfort.

He was, as the world judged, an odd young man. He was a painter, a musician, a serious reader of books, a disciple of Thoreau, a solitary wanderer on the rivers and in the hills, an incessant questioner of his own hopes and aims, a disbeliever in virtually the entire value system of his time and place, a maverick, a lonely man full of love. He was, in his way, a kind of wonder. Except for the friendship of his brothers and his early reading of Thoreau, he had no encouragement or confirmation. That he was so different from other people seems to have been almost entirely the result of his own original response to the society he saw around him and to the river and the hills. His estrangement from women was only the most poignantly felt manifestation of his estrangement from a society which simply did not offer him a place that he could occupy without becoming somebody else. And of course a young man so odd feels two ways about his oddity. He affirms and defends it with all his power. And yet he suffers from it.

As he grew older, he was becoming always better prepared, by the inclination of his character and by learning and experience, for the life he was to lead, but he seemed no nearer to it. The Journal from its beginning in 1929 to the time of his marriage clearly was written by a man of strong conviction, self-confidence, and faith. He experienced much authentic pleasure and even joy in those years, and accomplished much that satisfied him. And yet he was just as clearly a man often despondent, balked, or disappointed. Sometimes he was near to despair. In November of 1932 he wrote, “What great event in my life am I waiting for?”⁴ Ten years later he seems to have been still wondering.

The great event proved to be his marriage on April 20, 1943, to Anna Wonder Eikenhout. The marriage is recorded in the Journal on May 17, which is the first entry for that year, and the entry is preceded in the published Journal by Harlan’s assertion, made many years later, that “I do not know just how it came about.” The entry itself says that “it has all happened naturally, as something growing into ripeness, or a flowing together of water.”⁵

Anna, in a memoir written in 1982, also neglected to remember “just how it came about.” But she recorded a little fragment of conversation that is touching because of what it foretold. On one of their first dates they went to a large international exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum. After they had looked at the paintings, Anna wrote,

it was a relief to come out into the open air and sunshine again.

“It’s still early,” Harlan said. “We’d have time to go for a little drive before I have to take you home. Where would you like to go?”

When I hesitated he said, “If you leave it to me, you know where we’ll end up—on the riverbank.”⁶

Anna was born into a music-loving Dutch family in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on September 7, 1902, the second of three daughters. She graduated with honors from Ohio State University in 1925 and then taught French and German at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, “for a few years.” By 1933, she was in Cincinnati, working in the Fine Arts Department of the Public Library. There she became acquainted with “Harlan Hubbard, the young artist across the river in Kentucky.” She knew him, she wrote, “several years as a patron.”⁷ One Sunday afternoon they began to play music together, and finally, however it came about, they were married.

Harlan’s reason for writing so little about the circumstances of his marriage may have been that what his marriage meant to him was not expressible. At the time of his wedding he was forty-three years old, and he had believed for a long time that such a thing was not for him. And the woman he married was not only brilliant and beautiful but she loved him devotedly as he was. His marriage, then, confirmed and redeemed all his life before, and it permitted, indeed it became, a life that he desired.

They went to the riverbank in earnest in early October of 1944 when they moved into an improvised shack on the stony shore near the small town of Brent, down the hill from Fort Thomas, where Harlan had spent much time alone in the years before their marriage. The shack was, as Harlan put it, a “construction camp,” in which they were to live while they built their boat; the materials of the shack would later be used in the construction of the boat’s cabin. Like Thoreau’s house at Walden Pond—a fact that Harlan would have known and relished—the Hubbards’ shantyboat was to be built and furnished almost entirely with materials salvaged from an old building or scavenged from dumps and from drift piles along the river. Harlan and Anna characteristically made a proper household of the shack and enjoyed their homelife in it while they built the boat. Harlan wrote of their suppers there “by the open fire—always so pleasant, with warmth and rest and good things to eat.” And he said that “these were days of near ecstasy.” Though they were not yet aware of all the implications, they had begun “a deep and permanent alteration” in themselves.⁸

The boat was built under the influence of the dimensions of available materials, so that in the end “the proportions were a surprise.” By December 11, though far from finished, the boat was fit for occupancy, and they moved aboard. On December 27, the river rising, the boat floated off its cribbings. Construction of the cabin continued while they lived in it. “Nothing is arbitrary or merely decorative,” Harlan wrote. “This shell which we built, or which grew around us, has become as efficient as that of the river mussel, and has almost as little waste space.” Later he said that unloading it “was like opening a dry milkweed pod,” so cunningly were its spaces contrived and used. And he wrote that “from the first, in contrast to the roughness and asperity of our environment, we found our shantyboat such a cheerful and snug place, and our enjoyment of living there so keen, that we felt we were celebrating a continued holiday, one about which the rest of the world did not know.”⁹

Harlan and Anna thus had departed from the life of the twentieth century as their families and friends were living it and as they had been expected to live it themselves. One of the costs of this had already been felt: “Our relations with our friends are strained by our unconventional behavior.”¹⁰ But the rewards were great. By removing themselves from their old lives and moving first into the shack on the riverbank and then onto their boat, they had recovered the elemental joys of human domesticity. By making with their own hands a house that was also a boat, they had recovered the elemental joys of housebuilding and boat-building, and of floating and living afloat. And ahead of them, they knew, were the elemental joys of providing for themselves and of travel by drifting. They had entered into the spell of things infinitely charming.

They made themselves at home at Brent for two years, slowly preparing themselves and their outfit for their voyage to New Orleans. During this time they established what would be the pattern of their life, not only during the nearly seven years they spent on the shantyboat but during their thirty-four years at Payne Hollow as well. Their life was to be defined first of all upon the principles of household economy. And Harlan set forth his aims early in Shantyboat, the book he wrote about their voyage:

I had no theories to prove. I merely wanted to try living by my own hands, independent as far as possible from a system of division of labor in which the participant loses most of the pleasure of making and growing things for himself. I wanted to bring in my own fuel and smell its sweet smell as it burned on the hearth I had made. I wanted to grow my own food, catch it in the river, or forage after it. In short, I wanted to do as much as I could for myself, because I had already realized from partial experience the inexpressible joy of so doing.¹¹

This was the rule both of their river voyage and of their life afterwards: they did as much as they could for themselves, and their rewards were the joys of doing so. Their household was always a household in the fullest sense, as nearly as possible an independent economic unit. Having provided themselves with shelter, they set about providing themselves with food and fuel. Their life was the adventure it was partly because their economy was always to a large extent one of discovery. Among Harlan’s most useful and most endearing gifts were his love of adventure in all things and his constant alertness to the adventure of the countryside and the things to be found and experienced in it. He foraged in the woods and the fields for things to eat. He was an indefatigable ransacker of drift piles and dumps for firewood, building materials, and other things of use. He fished in the river, and he prepared whatever wild game came to hand from the enterprise of their dogs. Every summer he and Anna grew a large garden, and all through the warm months they canned and smoked and preserved their provisions for the winter. Typically, the previous year’s provisions would be running out just as the wild greens and the earliest garden crops became available in the spring.

Harlan was thoroughly happy, thoroughly at home within himself, as a forager, wandering on land or water, finding things both delightful and useful that the world freely offered, making one enterprise of economy and leisure. It was an adventure at once lighthearted and serious: “This roaming the fields and woods, gathering the wild or neglected fruits of the earth[,] appeals to me, and is I think in no way trivial. Rather than to farmer or nomad, it relates to the Garden of Eden.”¹²

His writings contain many catalogs of things brought back, such as this one from a bicycle excursion in Louisiana: “Thus I arrived at the boat with some roadside dewberries, fresh oysters from a little seafood shop, an empty case for sun glasses, lost from a car, a few deep-orange lilies, a sack of ripe bananas (a bargain from one of the roadside hucksters . . .), a bunch of parsley picked from a field, and for the dogs a rabbit freshly killed by traffic.”¹³ But a more characteristic accounting is this recollection of blackberry picking, written at Payne Hollow ten years later: “As I picked the shining berries, wandering from bush to bush attracted by their red and black, I smelled the crushed pennyroyal and listened to the song of birds. The summer tanager has a nest near the berry patch, and the prairie warbler repeats his rising trill. Also the towhee, cardinal, chat, [and] field . . . sparrows . . . and in the distance contrasting notes of dove and jay. All this music and no man to hear it but myself in these brief moments.”¹⁴ Like Whitman, Harlan was afoot with his vision, and his vision was of the country in which he was afoot.

Anna was as adventurous a cook as Harlan was a provider, and from the beginning she achieved marvelous meals, cooked on the hearth or wood stove. On April 20, 1947, to give one example, they served their guests on the boat: “Small catfish, dressed just before frying, mashed potatoes, kale just brought in, salad of choice tomatoes, cottage cheese and be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• 1. A New Life
• 2. Much in Little
• 3. A More Direct Revelation
• 4. Painting Heaven
• 5. Anna
• 6. Harlan Alone
• 7. Some Recollections
• 8. An Afterword
• Notes