The role in socialization of the last thing you should do in polite society: "The Stackpole Legend" by Wendell Berry (2025 O.Henry Anthology)

I've blogged Best American Short Stories nearly every year for the past seven years, but I've only done the Best Short Stories anthology, a.k.a. The O.Henry Awards, twice. Both times I did O.Henry, I did it after BASS. This year, I'm aiming to switch the order and do O.Henry first. I don't know if I can get all the way through O.Henry by the time BASS comes out in a little over a month. I'm hopefully starting a new job soon, and it's going to take up a lot of my better brain cells for a while. But I don't want to not start something just because I might fail to finish it. So here we go.

For a long time, I didn't read much contemporary fiction. I think I felt like there were the classics and there was contemporary fiction, and contemporary fiction had to be all frivolous, or else its products would be classics. Since I wanted to write what would become classical fiction myself, I decided to stay away from anything that wasn't already on college syllabi. I'm not sure how, in my highly circular system of evaluation, anything new could become considered classic, since its failure to already be considered a classic meant it must not be one, but it was my system. It's really only been in the last dozen or so years that I've read books written by people who were alive when I read them. 

I wonder what my brain would have done if, by chance, the first contemporary writer I had chosen to read had been Wendell Berry, because reading Berry is a lot like reading all those authors that a high school student encounters in the first semester of American Lit. The language is a bit more up to date, although still full of some anachronisms, but if one of his stories was slipped into a high school class next to Twain or Washington Irving, a student might very well not notice the difference. 

"The Stackpole Legend," which leads off the 2025 O.Henry anthology, is a good example of a story with a 19th-century feel in a 21st century book. Its entire presentation as one of many local legends collected by an author who is more aw-shucks-I-just-came-across-this than the thundering man of tortured genius the 20th century created reminds me more of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" than it does any work of the last hundred years.

This throwback feel is Berry's signature style. I try not to write too much commentary on writers themselves on this blog and focus only on the work, but with Berry, it's kind of important to know that you're reading someone whose entire oeuvre as well as personal life is an effort to turn the clock back. Much of his work takes place in the past of his fictional Port William, as does this story. 

Berry thinks modern society is unhealthy for humans, both individually and as a society, but rather than write entirely about what's wrong about us, he writes a lot about humans in a bygone age to show what a different relationship with the world would look like. That isn't to say that every story he writes is a rosy picture of the past, a sort of MAGA literary movement that goes back to 1850 instead of 1950 the way the current political MAGA does. But his stories from the past do present us here today with a different way of viewing human nature, both individually and in a social context.

Socialization

"The Stackpole Legend" is a fable about how socialization happens. We follow the life of Delinthus Stackpole, one of Port William's residents long ago. Delinthus is made fun of for his name, but he neutralizes his would-be tormentors by simply not realizing they were teasing him. Soon after, the boys his age, thinking him slow, try to bully him by pushing him, but they realize that, just as Delinthus will not be teased, he will also not be pushed. This is how he earns the nickname "Stump," presumably because he is as hard to move as the stump of a tree is hard to pull out. 

Since he was raised in a very small society of three on his family's farm, one in which he did very little talking because it simply wasn't needed, he is bewildered by the avalanche of questions to be answered that he faces when he enters school. He is happy to let others do the talking. One could look at this and say that it was the relative isolation Stump grew up with, having only his parents nearby and not speaking much with them, that made socialization difficult when he began school, but it's actually the opposite. It is the solidity and certainty of his value and place in his family that prepares him for life outside the farm. His unique upbringing is what allows him to remain unbothered when introduced to social life at school. He might take longer to become part of the community, but he at least survives childhood unharmed by society--more than most people can say--and when he decides he is ready, he turns out to have all the tools he needs. Stump is able to navigate his way into society precisely because his personality is first made secure and unmovable through isolation. Stump's progression is to first be secure in himself, and then to try to find how to make that self fit into a larger world. 

Stump is impervious to the mean side of social life, which does him a lot of good, but he is also unable to enjoy the positive aspects of living in a community, and therein lies his arc. When both his parents die, he realizes the same thing Adam realized when alone in the Garden of Eden: it is not good for man to be alone. But Stump, who has been content to not speak for most of his life, suddenly finds himself in need of speaking if he is to find a wife to end his loneliness. 

Stump feels lost, but he does, in fact, know everything he needs to know in order to develop his capacity for speech. "To say something, he had to begin by saying nothing" is now the narrator put his reluctance to speak, but it also sums up Stump's progression. He becomes part of society by first not being part of it, and he learns to speak by first being silent. If the path to socialization of young people today is thrown off by too much togetherness through social media and other forms of technological togetherness at too young an age, Stump, by contrast, is able to follow a much more natural path of silence then speaking, of learning to be comfortable being alone before learning to be comfortable being with others.  

When he finally gets up the nerve to talk to Kizzie, he feels "himself pushed backward" by his question, but "he held his ground." His practice at being "not pushed" that came in his pre-social days has prepared him for his dive into society. 

The fart

I'd bet a lot of us have heard many stories from friends and family that involve passing gas in embarrassing ways. It's a pretty normal topic of conversation for real tales, but not for literary ones. High literature might include frank depictions of sex or the gory details of injury or illness, but I can't think of a single story from one of the "best of" anthologies of the past many years that had a fart in it. Literary fiction is seemingly like the female-dominated planet Gazorpazorp in Rick and Morty, where it is referred to as "the sound we do not name because it does not exist." 

"The Stackpole Legend" not only includes passing gas, but it's the climax of the story. Stump gets up the nerve to take Kizzie out for a buggy ride, but this is no "Surrey with the Fringe on Top" kind of trip. Kizzie is curiously quiet, and for once, Stump can't stop talking, because he is no longer comfortable with silence. He keeps talking and talking, which makes him more and more nervous, until pressure starts to build up inside. He tries to cover over the sound of his fart by firing his revolver into the air, but it misfires, meaning she hears the whole thing. She laughs, and soon he does to, and that's what opens the door to them having a long life together.

Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry away from this fart I just ripped.

In modern couples' therapy wisdom, there is something of a split verdict on the value of couples breaking wind in the presence of one another. Some say it promotes intimacy, because you're being real with one another and doing in each others' presence what you wouldn't do in polite society, which makes you both co-conspirators of a sort. The other school says that it takes the mystery and the romance out of a relationship. Couples should strive to impress one another as much after marriage as they did before, so the thinking goes, and that means still going on dates and thinking of thoughtful gifts and romantic gestures and not farting, burping, or going to the bathroom in the presence of the other. 

Stump's flatulence is involuntary. He didn't mean to do it. It's possible he will go the rest of his life and never fart in front of Kizzie again, because now he won't be as nervous. For them, at least, it's a faux pas that Kizzie generously interprets (as she also interpreted his accidental touch of one of her softer areas). She laughs at it, and this laughter is what allows "Nature" and the preacher to guide them to the altar. Stump has missed out on society at its worst, the mob mentality, but it isn't until he shares a laugh with Kizzie that he gets to enjoy society at its best.

Nature

Nature looms large in "Stackpole." Stump eyes up potential mates with the eye of a "stockman," comparing them to livestock. The "Nature" that lays the way before Stump and Kizzie is capitalized. Nature is best when it's in harmony with society, as in the case of Bill the horse, who is always ready to go when he needs to go, and always ready to stop. And the best way for a person to integrate into society is naturally, as Stump has done. 

Portrait of an artist

You could probably turn about half of all art into self-referential works about art, and this story is no different. When Stump realizes he needs to start talking to people, he begins by talking to himself. When someone catches his talking to himself, he quickly makes up a lie about what he is doing. He finds, to his own surprise, that he is pretty good at making up lies. What is making up lies but writing fiction? He also opens up his imagination to start asking himself what someone else might be thinking, frequently questioning "how do you reckon" someone would react if they saw his home. Trying to imagine what someone else might be feelings is foundational both to writing fiction and to the empathy upon which all life in a society is grounded. 

Style

As I said up above, the narrative style is a throwback. The narrator slips himself into the story, but as a cataloguer of the legends of Port William, not as a character within the story itself. He uses folksy devices, such as turning God's declaration in Genesis of "It is not good for the man to be alone" into "the world's first piece of good advice." The are numerous euphemisms and some hilarious use of litotes, both of which are characteristic of how an old person might tell a real, spoken story, but neither of which is used in the same rhetorical fashion in much literary fiction nowadays. Literary fiction and a good yarn have little to do with one another. Except in Wendell Berry. 

I've mused before on why the best literary writers don't seem to tell stories the way our best story-telling friends do. It's nice once in a while to enjoy a pace and tone that's a little more like the everyday tales our co-workers might tell, the ones we stop our work for a minute to hear. 

Future

Kizzie and Stump have four boys and a girl. They children all go off to school, and eventually they move off to the city, into the "world of the future." Their background of hard work and love on a farm ensures they succeed when they go off into the world, but it also means they never come back home, and eventually, the Stackpole name disappears from Port William. Here, the story lays out an irony of the idyllic life in which Stump was raised. Its success leads to its own demise. Stump was raised with the right mix of solitude and society, and so were his kids, but they eventually move off to cities, where they--and most of America--will now have too little solitude, too much community. The America that balances the individual and society, leading to healthier versions of both, will disappear. To a nation that now cannot even conceive of things being different, the narrator presents a version of life from the past, one in which a different balance of individual and society existed, to suggest what ails us.