Lucky to be Grateful

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

We are the lucky ones. One can only imagine the near-infinity of invocations of this thought over human history. How many people are even saying or thinking it in the very moment in which I write this thought—or you read it? Whether for those uttering the sentiment or those hearing it expressed, an inevitable addendum follows: Why? Lucky. . . how so? Lucky. . .for what?

The outpouring of thoughts we have from Wendell Berry—in the form of poetry, essays, and fiction—is nothing if not a sustained answer to this question. This sometimes surfaces subtly when he launches his most trenchant criticism of the industrialization, mechanization, and environmental destruction wrought by modern economic, technological, and demographic developments, for instance in his now classic work, Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture. But in many of his poems and fiction, it hits the reader over the head—in a good way. In Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, the latest in his series of Port William novels, the answer comes, true to its title, in the form of a story.

The story at the heart of the novel takes place long before the life of its protagonist, Andy Catlett. Readers learn the story in question through the gripping first 31 pages titled simply “The Past.” In 1906, after the year of hard work to bring their tobacco crop from seed to harvest, Andy’s grandfather and a neighbor friend rode their horses in the dark to catch the train to Louisville to sell it, only to find it was worth not just nothing, but even less. A single wealthy buyer caused prices to fall so low that the price offered was less than it took to produce the crop and transport it to market.

So the story follows Marce (short for Marcellus) back home with nothing to show for his labor, and nothing to add to a household economy already stretched to the breaking point, riven with debt since the 1890s. His wife had said to him the night before the midnight ride, that whatever amount of money they received, “we’ll be glad of it, because we need it.” When her husband told her upon returning from Louisville that they had not received a cent, “she was silent.” Told from the point of view of their youngest son, old enough to feel his mother’s pain if too young to grasp its cause, “Wheeler would remember the fear in his mother’s silence. He would remember it as the silence of justice outraged and hopeless. But on that night he was able to know only that she meant her silence to conceal her suffering.”

This novel, centering on one of the families that appear frequently in the Port William novels, the Catletts, goes on to detail story after story that spins off from that momentous ride through the darkness of the wee hours of night. If one were to read chronologically for plot alone, Wheeler’s participation, once grown, in founding “an organization of farmers that for the six decades of its political life gave them an asking price for their tobacco crops,” the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association, would stand out. So would what we encounter as Andy’s “homecoming,” when he left the “good living” he had achieved for himself, his wife Flora, and two children, by writing for a farming magazine in Chicago, to move his family back to the Catlett family’s neighborhood in Port William.

This is because, in addition to these and the other stories relayed in the book is an overarching story all its own, of the larger historical change of which their lives were a part. This latter story casts a kind of shadow over the stories of the individuals and families, a story of that very way of life that Wheeler defended and to which Andy intended to return but which he found changing beyond recognition as machines and agricultural consolidation displaced small farmers, their communities, and customs. The book joins Berry’s other works in comprising an elegy for such a life gone by.

Yet to see Berry mainly an elegist would be to miss the unruly way he tells his stories, whether of Marce, Wheeler, Andy and the other Catletts, the other individuals and families in their neighborhood, or the world they were born into and saw vanishing. After the careful narration of each step in order of Marce’s disastrous trek to market and back in the past comes a longer portion of the book, “The Future.” It is as if, in the playing out of the original story, all sense of linear time is let go.

It is true we find out what happened to main characters such as Wheeler and Andy, but embarking on each of the fifteen brief chapters and the even smaller episodes into which they are divided, it is never clear where we will find ourselves in time. In Chapter I, we find that “Andy Catlett has grown now into the old age of a grandson, son, father, and grandfather.” We then hear the story of Andy’s father as a young and middle-aged man, of Wheeler’s wild brother, Andrew, who died young in a fight he provoked, and by chapter VI, we are back in Andy’s childhood, encountering a different side of Marce’s wife Dorie, Andy’s grandmother, “who often made a companion of him.”

Faded by her silent worry into the background of Marce’s original tale, she now comes to life in vivid detail. Andy accompanies her as she hoes in the garden, tends chickens and turkeys, and more: “She could milk a cow if she needed to, as Andy discovered to his shame when he neglected his chores. When the milk came to the house from the barn, she strained it into crocks, set the crocks in the cellar to cool, skimmed off the cream when it rose, churned the cream into butter, and shaped the butter into pats of about a pound apiece, which she ornamented by crisscrossing their tops with the edge of the butter paddle.” Although Andy grasped that his grandparents did not get along and that “his grandma was not a happy woman,” after Marce dies Andy discovers that she has kept a corsage from their 50^th wedding anniversary the year before. Andy felt his grandmother’s grief at the loss of her son “as something dreadful and permanent” and her sorrow at the loss of her husband. In Chapter VII we find Marce alive again, as we see him, in turn, through Andy’s eyes.

And so the story proceeds, each step forward necessitating yet another leap backward, jumping back up to the present then edging forward into a future unforeseen, perhaps, but not entirely unexpected. As the stories unfold, then fold back upon themselves, then fold forward at an angle, the trajectory is toward inevitable loss. When Andy feels—or rather, lives—the mourning of his grandmother, “he learned of grief by signs that he would understand only later, as his own years and griefs accumulated.” He moves his family back to rural Kentucky only to find the culture of small farms vanishing. On the larger scale of change, “the traditional subsistence economies of households and neighborhoods were supplanted by the global economy of extraction, consumption, and waste,” while on the smaller scale, people left the countryside to earn for “purchasing power” in the consumer economy in place the skill and self-sufficiency of “homemade goods” and “handwork.”

Berry makes it clear through this fictional account of real-world developments that he believes this was a change of epic proportions: a clear and unmitigated tragedy. Not only that, he makes it clear that for Andy, as well as his father and grandfather, it was experienced as a personal failure not to see their lives of stewardship result in a continuation of these locally rooted manners and mores: “Andy has come at last to see his grandfather Catlett, his father, and himself as three aged brothers made so by their shared vision of a life permanently settled in a place chosen and beloved, but made brothers also by their failure: their discovery that the vision, as each one of them in his own time has seen it, could not live beyond them, so hard upon them has been the force of the changing times.”

In passages of synthesis, it becomes clear what the organizing principle of the novel really is. It clearly follows the pathways of memory, as Andy reflects, very late in life by the time the narrative begins, on his entire life history, the people in it, and its ultimate significance. Yet even more than that, it follows the path of a certain kind of memory. It is not stream-of-consciousness, even though it has Proustian elements, with exquisite details such as the smell of an old, dried carnation, whose color had faded, still able to flood young Andy’s senses upon opening the drawer. It is the path of a well-exercised muscle of memory always reaching for understanding.

This memory-for-understanding—a very different faculty from idle meanderings or ransackings for fleeting entertainment—explains the capaciousness of the narrative, which runs back and forth over a huge swath of time, breaking beyond the bounds of a single human life include both those who came before and those yet to come. As Andy’s strength fades in old age, and he could not work the land anymore, “he began to waken into his memory and the memory of his elders.” Berry’s stirring prose then evokes that most momentous of reasons Andy has for this awakening in his heightened awareness of death. He continues, “It was as if his soul had learned so to speak, to stand outside his own life in the great opening in which time comes and goes, in the company and council of fellow souls.” Now the linear narration and episodic skipping of stones over the rippling surface of time past, present, and future both seem to give way to a soaring timelessness as Andy pulls away from the historical particulars: “In reveries and dreams he makes his way among loved ones lost to one another in this world’s great sundering, as if again in their presence and present to them, as if in some hereafter already here.”

So Berry’s answer to the question of why we are the lucky ones—why in his rendering, Andy still comes across as believing himself one of the lucky ones, despite the very real disasters he recounts with such poignancy—is found here near the end. It is not in spite of the devastation of the land and the folkways it sustained that Andy finds solace, or in spite of the losses and injuries sustained in the course of his life. It is through them. Wave upon wave of understanding over the course of remembering a life and a particular story as it played out in multiple lives ended not in bitterness—though it had a share of that, too—but in a breathless invocation of a devastated country, “continuing by the spirit and the breath of God toward whatever in God’s time it is coming to.”

In a final image, Andy describes in loving detail the unexpected beauty of the sunken cellar that “provided Grandma Catlett a place to store her canned goods, and in the warm months to set her crocks of fresh milk, morning and evening, to wait for the cream to rise.” Even in the sorrow of the razing of the dome of this storage room that so enchanted Andy as a boy, we learn that its beauty—though “not as evident as that of a vault or dome in a church”—inspires reverence. No matter our suffering, we are lucky to know such people and the reverence-worthy places—these everyday cathedrals—they construct and inhabit.

We usually hear the phrasing that we are grateful to be lucky in some way. But Berry turns this thought around in this book as in his work overall: we are lucky to be grateful. “As he has come to know, Andy’s grief for the things that are lost affirms his love for them, as even the loss of them affirms the bounty by which they once existed, for in this world grief goes hand in hand with gratitude.” If we lose—somethings, someplace, someone—we love with all the passion that is humanly possible. We are the lucky ones. Even our agony, if we cultivate, as few have taught us to do as well as Berry, our memory-for-understanding, we enter the realm of love, which knows everything of pain but nothing of change.