WRITERS' CHOICE
RICHARD SENNETT: I've
been recently rereading John
Neff's
War and Human Progress
which Norton now publishes. It
is a classic historical study
which has been neglected for
some twenty years. In part, its
neglect is due
to
Neff's Catholic
humanism. He was a friend of
Jacques Maritain and tried
to
combine his religious impulses
with the most exact and detailed
scrutiny of the economics of
early capitalism. Neff's previous
books dealt, for instance, with
the English coal trade in the
seventeenth century and what
this coal trade showed about an
increasing cui tural disposition
lO
quantify human labor and
thus to abandon the metaphysi–
cal ideas of labor which gov–
erned medieval Christian the–
ology.
War and Human Progress
deals with the relationship be–
tween scientific innovation, cap–
italism, and fluctuations in the
severity of warfare over the last
three centuries. It is a superb
piece of historical writing. The
reader is presented with a mass
of details consistently illumina–
ting the larger subject. Neff be–
lieves the ideology of modern
capitalism, rather than the eco–
nomic infra-structure or the mil–
itary exploitation of science per
se, controls the severity of war.
But I'm giving a poor synopsis
of a complicated book-a book
which deserves a large audience.
DAVID IGNATOW: No one
could deny the nobility of Wen–
dell Berry's dream of the sanc–
tity of the soil. I will not com–
ment on his techniques in
Clear–
ing,
Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich
they are all that we have read
before by writers of equal talent
in the free forms of William
Carlos Williams. Occasionally
he works ski\J£ully at the tradi–
tional rhymed and metered
verse, but Berry should be sin–
gled out for his vision. He is a
poet who is a farmer, who is a
professor of English, who can–
not write an evil word about the
work of living .but must make
his farm the podium from which
to
write eloquently of our rela–
tionship to the earth. He suffers
his tasks in the field and in the
barn gladly. He scorns the real
estate developer who prostitutes
the earth for the sake of the
dollar, and he celebrates the
small, ordinary farmer who has
no pretension to wealth but asks
only that the earth return to him
in kind the love and care he
brings to it. Berry's own devo–
tion
to
the earth is quite the
same, if not more so, in that one
gets the feel in his poems of a
lover and his beloved in mystical
union. He is fervently dedicated
to reform of the treatment of the
earth as it has been treated by
greed and shortsightedness, and
his poetry often glows with the
spirit of his pursuit.
