A Passage Through the Dark

Wendell Berry. Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story. Counterpoint, 2025. $26.00. 176 pp.

The acknowledgment of failure is the fertile ground of humility from which new growth may spring. That acknowledgment lies at the heart of Wendell Berry’s most recent and possibly final Port William novel, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story. Failure must also be a major preoccupation of this essay, which is more meditation than review—Marce Catlett and with it the whole Port William oeuvre being the kind of text that evaluates you rather than the other way around. Much that might otherwise have been obscure becomes clear under the gentle but unyielding gaze of Berry’s newest tale, this tale that, it ought to be said, more fluently unites Berry the fictionist and Berry the essayist than perhaps any of his works that have come before it.

At the heart of Berry’s well-known agrarian ethic dwells the same question meditating upon which had led John Crowe Ransom to renounce a once-thoroughgoing agrarianism by 1945: “the unhappy human condition that has arisen under the modern economy, and whether art and religion can do anything about it.” Ransom turned from believing that renewal was only possible within a revival of rural life to an embrace of the goods only towns and cities can generate and sustain.

Berry begs to differ, holding fast to the conviction that only a closer relationship with the land can possibly revive a vital creativity and generativity in human culture. Berry also advocates an insistence on the practice of not just conservation of resources—not just the platitudes of reduction, reuse, and recycling—but a specific type of active cultivation of the earth and its fruits that most urban dwellers will never have the background, skills, experience, or opportunity to practice.

This agrarian ideal is so demanding, so rigorous, so all-consuming, that even those who give the entirety of their lives and attention to it are likely to fall short of its desirable completion. Dilettantes cannot hope to succeed here; weekend warriors need not apply. This may be one of the major reasons why, though the ethos is commonplace, the practice has failed to take root. As John Crowe Ransom also wrote, in an observation to which my own exurban existence can’t help but consent:

without consenting to division of labor, and hence modern society, we should have not only no effective science, invention, and scholarship, but nothing to speak of in art … The arts are the expiations [of science’s unintended consequences], but they are beautiful. … They seem worth the vile welter through which homeless spirits must wade between times, with sensibilities subject to ravage as they are. On these terms the generic human economy can operate, and they are the only terms practicable now.

Most Americans, living on these terms—in debt or in thrall to market forces, in suburbs or in high-rises, dashing from here to there on the dubious vapors of fossil fuel—will never be the kinds of localist or the kinds of cultivator that Berry’s ethic considers most admirable.

The near-total absence of the city, any city, in the good life of Berry’s imagination is notable. Only one major Port William denizen, Wheeler Catlett, seems to have any place or meaningful relation within the human city as such, the polis (it is perhaps not part of this ideal, or idyll, to recognize that the city is also a natural form of human social organization). Whatever happens in urbanity is, in this ideal, ordered only toward Wheeler’s ability to escape once again into fields of bluegrass and tobacco and help those fields flourish. The specter of a management job in Chicago is raised as though it were the serpent’s offer of the apple to Eve, and as briskly and summarily rejected as we might wish Eve had done the apple.

But in order for Berry’s vision to be anything like realized, even one-tenth realized, there will have to be many, many more people who admit the influence, even, yes, the force of Marce Catlett’s story yet who do not closely recapitulate the conditions of Marce’s life: not only a veritable army of Wheeler Catletts, but many hundreds of Thomas Franklins, that is principled and ethical lawmakers in public office; many thousands, too, of high-minded and principled staffers to keep the work of that army of Thomas Franklins going; many, many more who are decently resourced and honored for the good work of oikonomoi that silently underlies anyone’s capacity to live any kind of human life, whether in city, town, or country: in short, many more denizens who by their ways of life and their commitments do not devalue but rather honor the Marce Catletts of the world on whose dedication their own capacity for dedication reciprocally depends. There will even have to be many who take on those oh so tempting and apparently so fraught management jobs, who buy and sell the commodities the abundant fields produce, who are able to consider and receive their work not as temptation but as blessing; many who look out their windows not at bluegrass but at steel and concrete, and yet who keep something of the garden alive in mind and in practice, even if only on a rooftop or a balcony.

While “apple” language may be perfectly apt as a metaphor to explore the undeniable evils of modernity, this more concrete presentation of diminished goods in the city, Berry’s implicit weighting of urbanity as the more deprived and more circumscribed of two possible modes of life, will and should trouble the thoughts of even the most committed city dweller. Before this novel’s candid face the reader becomes keenly aware of both the limitations and the urgent necessity of all human prudence. If we are hesitant in the face of such passionate and convicted statements about the ethical as Berry finds necessary, perhaps it is often because we are too conscious (defensive? afraid of deep self-examination?) when it comes to the contradictions inherent in our own habits and practices. Both the healthy rural and the healthy urban are, if not declining, at least shifting shape dramatically under our eyes and hands daily.

Berry’s narrator and authorial scout Andy Catlett, an experienced observer of these shifts as they have played out under his own eyes and hands over the course of many decades, is as trustworthy a fictional voice as we are likely to find, so closely does his experience recapitulate what we may surmise to have been Berry’s own. In this story more urgently than anywhere before, he is as candid as can be with his children and grandchildren, who are the implicit listeners to his tale: The hope of having a home place rooted in the land, sustainable, independent, beholden only to its own people and its own standards without needing or wanting to turn elsewhere, is an ideal that has largely failed so far in America. We could look at history and argue that the ideal has also failed, to some extent, in some ways, as long as humans have farmed. That human success and human failure are somehow joined at the root. That all our successes seem to involve and include failures, sometimes catastrophic ones. That, most important, to succeed at some things might be to fail at others.

Please understand that this is anything but glib language play: it is an attempt to dig in deeper to the unavoidable ethical question, How should we commit our lives? And perhaps, to some extent, even: What must we do to be saved?

Part of the force of Marce Catlett’s story is a championing of precisely the specialist’s value to any socioeconomic fabric. His tobacco farmers of the recent past are specialists par excellence, even artists of a kind. What, then, seems to be missing from the picture? It is certainly not tenderness for those workers who nourish and nurture the world, nor gratitude for the gifts of abundance that flow through their hands. It may be, again, a sensibility about the value of the city itself. What end, after all, were all those beautifully grown and layered hands of tobacco, packed so delicately into hogshead barrels, destined for? Is it really such a horror and a harm that town and country should be interdependent, ultimately all part of the same irreducible membership of the human? “Though you deal in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business,” wrote Thoreau: and the “curse of trade” with which Marce Catlett is preoccupied seems to describe, also, a curse upon those who trade and upon those who consume without proportionately producing.

In turn, this observation lives too close for comfort to a feeling awfully common in capitalist societies (whatever else you may think about such societies): the feeling that what one merits is exactly and only what one earns, in the strictest and basest terms, where the arbiters of who earns what are judging value by an obscure calculus that is never articulated and seems to be constantly shifting. I am surprised by how rarely anyone seems to connect the dots between these rotten roots and their psychological bad fruits. And while self-esteem is radically overrated, healthy self-regard is not, and one striking thing about Berry’s characters is how they never seem to lack that regard, which has its roots in the quality of their work.

What Berry, through Catlett, grieves is that the beloved community, Port William, has failed “to value itself at the rate of its affection for itself.” This rate was once rooted in the inherent dignity of each person and the inherent quality and satisfaction of good work done for its own sake. Now, instead, American rural places at scale seem to have adopted the devalued self-perception, imposed by a cursed monetary economy, of the small town as “a ‘nowhere place,’ a place at the end of the wrong direction.” This move the poet Patrick Kavanagh would identify as “provincialism,” or self-definition through the eyes of the nearby metropolis, as opposed to Kavanagh’s positive sense of “parochialism,” or an affirmation of the validity of local perception. (The curse of the monetary valuation may also underpin Allen Tate’s devil’s-dictionary definition of globalism as “world provincialism,” meaning, almost surely, “provincial” in Kavanagh’s salty sense.) Berry’s Port William, in the history told in its earlier iterations, appears as parochial in the best possible, Kavanaghian sense. This is one of the Port William cycle’s most compelling aspects for any reader who would like to love his or her place, be that place rural or urban, and to think and act more clearly from the foundation of what the flourishing of that place requires.

There is also a gift here for any reader who has given decades to the development and flowering of a humane art some say is dying. This is the novel’s portrayal of farming as craft, tragically overtaken by machine, which serves as a subtle analogy for literature as craft, which is now likewise under threat of being overtaken by machine. Berry celebrates farming as not mere formula—nitrogen in, calories or health benefits out, as swiftly and mechanically as possible, impatient even of the sun’s rise and fall—but as a beautiful and cooperative human practice with goods both intrinsic and extrinsic that generate and sustain community around the practice itself.

The analogy packs all the more power because Berry’s narrator does not call overt attention to the likeness between the tobacco farming of the early twentieth century and the literary practice of the late twentieth, both of which Berry experienced but only one of which he finds himself in his last years rhapsodizing about. The analogy nevertheless becomes obvious in the painstaking account of the long labor involved in each crop, a labor like that which underlies the making of any good novel (or any other work of art). The closest Berry comes to spelling it out is in telling us that “No painter could have had a more schooled and unresting eye for detail than the farmer who had earned the rank of ‘tobacco man,’ a title not easily earned and always spoken with respect.” There is an artistry in doing this work well, a command of many interlocking skills and a coordination of many individuals’ gifts and abilities, whose mastery is little short of prudence itself.

In the age of machine “learning,” we desperately need to find a way to preserve and pass on the skills of literate culture. We need to realize that if we do not do so, these skills are as much at risk of being lost as the arts of tobacco growing, harvesting, drying, stripping, and packing—but at much greater cost, and at much greater loss. The devastation of local economies after the end of tobacco farming only faintly presages what stands to be destroyed if we forget ourselves so far as to stop reading, writing, thinking, speaking, and questioning well. This bears more than a little further thinking about; it is a need worthy of spending one’s entire life trying to meet.

How might societies better make room for the humane practices that educate, form, and unite? How might we concern ourselves less with quantity and more with quality in our economies and communities, so as to make room for those goods that both encompass and go beyond the merely productive? How might we care equally about the things we make and about the kinds of people we become in and through the making of them? The risk of failure at this life-defining task lies heavy on so many hearts. We may be tempted to say, with Houston ground control during the Apollo missions, that “failure is not an option.” But the conditions of the future may not be in our control. If, then, we must not reckon without the reversals of history, how much more must we not reckon without the goodness of Providence?

The total effect of this novel’s ethos, implied by the choice of the word force (not something violent but something gravitational, almost impersonal), is to give us strength for our own no doubt imminent passages through the dark. It speaks the language of Rilke’s archaic torso: You must change your life. It resonates with an observation already made by W.P. Southard in a meditation on Robert Penn Warren’s poetry:

… maybe the best thing we could do is try to get a seed or two planted, to be available when the world is old enough to want it. It might be enough of piety, enough of love of God, to use your blood up slowly, at an unheroic enterprise, without much confidence. Somewhere between the furious abstract life and the furious classical structures—just a little concrete life, to attach your ‘ontological fury’ to.

But in what that perennial planting, that concrete life can consist, when so many of us are already mired in so many and such heavy forces that may feel as if they suppress our ability to withstand them, will be the burning question with which most readers will come away, this reader not excepted.

Most of all we must ask: Can the force of a story, transformed by human will from sentiment to action, outdo money, power, and the presence or absence, equally spectral, of enough resources to fuel our needs and desires? Can story outdo wrongheaded calculation, outdo political machination, outdo ideological influence, all to awaken and regenerate the human capacity to choose the good? We have little choice but to hope that it may, though we have considered (or have we?) all the facts.