Tending to the Land: Wendell Berry’s “Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story” https://ift.tt/AB7qTO3
At 91, Wendell Berry doesn’t require much of an introduction. He’s been writing books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry for much of his time on this planet, and his latest work Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story proves that he is still penning stories worth telling. Considering Berry’s large body of work and that he’s still publishing in his 90s, it seems fitting that Marce Catlett is an origin story of sorts, providing a founding incident for the themes and ideas that the author and his characters share. In this novel, Berry returns to the fictional town of Port Williams to tell the story of how three generations of Catlett men became not only farmers, but farmers who defend farmers and traditional agrarian values, the very themes that Berry has pursued for much of his life.
As often is the case with Wendell Berry, returning to the past is the way forward. The first part of Marce Catlett is titled “Past” and recounts how in 1906 Marce brought his tobacco to the market in Louisville and didn’t receive a just payment. In sentences void of sentiment, Berry writes how the James B. Duke’s American Tobacco Company “bought the hogsheads of tobacco rapidly, one after another, at a few pennies a pound.” Marce knows immediately that “the crop would barely pay its way to market and the commission on its sale. Its purchase, properly named, was theft.” The long hours of his physical labor and deep knowledge of his land and craft go unpaid for. He returns home with an empty stomach to break the bad news to his wife and sons.
But “Past” is not only Marce’s story. In fact, the whole novel is told from a mix of perspectives that compresses three generations of Catlett men. Though the founding story happened to Marce, his voice is the least heard. Instead, it is how the story of the stolen tobacco passes through Wheeler, Marce’s son, and Andy, Wheeler’s son, that is the true focus of the novel. The arcs of both Wheeler’s and Andy’s lives are summarized as effects to this single cause: Wheeler becomes a lawyer and champion of the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association that provides fair prices to farmers, while Andy returns to farming and becomes a writer. “[The story] lives in their hearts and thoughts as a motive to correct a profound and worsening national flaw.” The three generations are folded into a single stance against the industrialization of farming in America.
Similarly to how there is no one point of view, the novel doesn’t have a singular plot. Instead, in the fifteen short chapters of Part Two, titled “Future,” the narrative oscillates between Wheeler and Andy and uses Marce’s story as a shared center. They each leave Port William and their “home place” only to return with a new understanding and appreciation for what this place is, what it once was and what it could be again. About midway through Marce Catlett comes this reflection that summarizes Berry’s purpose in writing this novel: “The story was less remembered in Andy’s generation than in his father’s, still less in succeeding ones. By now there is no politics and no party that stands for, or would recognize, the indispensable loving care for the farmland and the farm communities that was still prominently voiced in the politics of Wheeler Catlett’s generation. And so the story, for the time being at least, has no political life. But it has been remembered continuously in Andy’s family so far, perhaps in others, and it has retained so far a formative power.”
Marce Catlett is not interested in individual responses to how rural life and agriculture have changed during the last century but in the importance of communally remembering a history on the verge of being wiped out. The novel uses remembranceas a point of comparison to fan our anger at how industrialization has flattened, monotonized and monetized the food we eat and the land and communities we are a part of. By highlighting the culture in agriculture and the beauty in knowing how to do a particular kind of work, Berry directs our attention to what we have lost. At the end of Marce Catlett comes two chapters that eulogize two particular losses: the first is the description of growing, harvesting and curing tobacco and the second is the beauty and construction of a cellar. These chapters are poetic invocations of another time and pass on of a way of life Berry doesn’t want us to forget.
I was surprised that the “Future” of Marce Catlett ends with Andy’s generation and the cellar. Even though the cellar “is the most lost and the most needing to be remembered,” and a beautiful image that resonated after I shut the book, the future doesn’t end with Wendell Berry (who is most likely also Andy Catlett). Berry’s legacy is enormous, and if an agriculturally leaning person hasn’t stumbled on him through his own writings, then they’ve probably heard of him through the writings of those he’s inspired. But perhaps that’s what his future made up of the past is nodding to: now that you’ve read about the cellar and rural communities and intimate ways to tend the land, what choices will you make in the present to keep remembering?
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