It works on so many levels! Well, okay, three. It works on three levels. And now my title to this blog post is even longer than the title of Wendell Berry's short story "The Great Interruption: The Story of a Famous Story of Old Port William and How it Ceased to Be Told"

It's easy to forget while reading Wendell Berry's "The Great Interruption: The Story of a Famous Story of Old Port William and How it Ceased to Be Told" that it is, just as the title advertises, a story about a story. That's because so much of the story's biomass is not the meta-fiction about the fiction, but the story itself. It's just a plain, old good story, told not in a literary fiction voice, but in the natural, beguiling, and folksy tones of an oral story teller. It's not unlike the feeling of reading Mark Twain's "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" or the shorter fiction of Norman Maclean. It's an easy-to-enjoy yarn in the American folk tradition. So that's one level on which the story works. It's the most obvious level at which it's working, and, I'd wager, the one most readers will walk away with, in spite of the wishes of the narrator.

Portrait of the artist as a young shirker 

But there are two other levels on which "Interruption" is working. One is as a history of the education of a storyteller. Billy Gibbs is the spinner of tales who learns his craft, and a big part of his education as a storyteller has to do with how he was raised. He was forced to work a lot, being the son of tenant farmers, but he was also given occasional leave to follow his own inclinations. He learned, as a result, to value his ability to go unseen, because when he was unseen, he would not be put to work. This penchant for going unseen is what enables him to oversee his first great story.

But just perfecting the art of going unseen and the voyeuristic insight it gives him isn't enough to make him a good storyteller. Because his parents raised him to both be responsible and to know the joys of occasionally shirking work, he is continually of two minds. "But along with the wish to avoid work, his mental development brought him also to the wish to be useful to his parents and to work well, especially if an adult dignity attached to the work. And so he was a two-minded boy."

Without the willingness to shirk what the adult world sees as adult responsibilities, no fiction writer will ever produce anything, because it requires a certain brazen selfishness to take the time to oneself it requires to write. But pure selfishness doesn't make for a good writer, either, because the best stories come from those who care, on some level, about the people who are reading or hearing the story. There is a symbiosis, as Billy finds out, between teller and listener, and "if Billy told his story well, and he did tell it very well, that may have owed a good deal to the excellence of his audience."

The push-pull between selfish desire to follow one's own interests and social responsibility is not the only split in Billy's nature. He also is split between the desire to do what is right and what satisfies his curiosity.

Billy first "successful story" comes to him when he happens to be in the right place at the right time to catch a prominent local politician en flagrante delicto in the woods with a woman who is not his wife. Billy wants to go see what they are up to, but hesitates, because he is a "mannerly boy, accustomed to granting respect, not invariably sincere, to grownups." Because of this psychological split, "his feet were itching to creep up close" to see, but "the same itch made him cautious."

All writers are voyeurs. We notice when others think we aren't, and we use our powers of surveillance and observation to steal bits of the lives of others and bottle them for our own selfish purposes. But anyone who doesn't balance this out somewhat with a sense of what is actually a decent invasion of privacy and what is not is likely not human enough to tell stories other humans love.

By the end, Billy is a fully realized story teller. His curiosity and selfishness give him the material to develop his material, but it is his "pure generosity" that allows him to give that story away and his control over it once he's told it.

Threnody for a place

But that's not all this story of a story is about. It's also a lament for and love letter to a place, in this case, to a rural Kentucky that doesn't exist anymore. And it is here where a first-person voice suddenly enters the narrative, a first-person voice that is likely very identifiable with the author himself, a voice that realizes how Billy's saucy tale will seem to outsiders.

To the people who originally heard the story, the people within it were real people. "The ones who told it and the ones who heard it knew the abandoned field and the brushy fencerow at the lower end of Birds Branch. They knew the Blue Hole and the big briar patch. They knew Billy Gibbs, and the boy he had been and was...The tellers and hearers of the story understood in an ever-renewing instant the entire signification of their vision of the august Forrest La Vere conjugating the commonplace old verb upon an extracted back seat in a weedfield. Thus, for the men, the story was a way of knowing what they knew, and a way of teaching the boys."

Because of the resonance the story would have had to Billy's original audience it would have had to no one else, the story "belonged richly and completely to Port William." But the Port William of the story is gone from the world now. World War II came, and the town was never the same after the boys came home, went to college, and went off into the world. All of the natural rhythms of the city vanished.

If the story were to be told now, it would be by some Port William ex-pat gone off to the big city himself, where the story would mean something else to its audience. "It would be heard then as little more than a joke on the subject of what we have learned to call 'sex.'" The new narrator imagines the teller at a cocktail party, where the story would be "understood as an exhibit of the behavior of rural Kentuckians, laughable in all their ways, from which the teller had earned much credit by escaping."

This is the final, most emphatic layer of the story that unfolds. Billy's development as a storyteller was intimately tied up in his relationship to the world around him, including the people of a particular place and time. The author Wendell Berry, through the voice of "Andy," his late-come first-person-narrator, seems to be telling us that he developed in the same way.

For fellow BASS blogger Karen Carlson's take on the story, go here.