Category: Audio Posts: Selected Articles

Wendell Berry’s most recent novel, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, cements him as one of America’s finest propagandists.

I don’t mean this as a personal attack. Berry, now 91, has written more (and more insightful) essays, novels, and poems in his old age alone than most of us could imagine writing over the course of our entire lives. Several of these have impacted my life profoundly. Some I teach every year. 

But Berry has long displayed a tendency to subordinate artistic forms—which should seek primarily after beauty, a true representation of reality, and an authentic account of human flourishing—to politics. Berry’s art is didactic. It wants to teach you something, and that thesis—at least in Berry’s more recent work—is political. It has an ulterior motive. It wants to sell you something. Specifically, it wants to sell you the idea that there is one way of viewing politics that is correct and many, many others that are wrong. This approach instrumentalizes the art into a piece of technology and transforms his relationship with his audience from a dialogue—a mutual gazing on, paying attention to, and representing reality to discern the truth—into a monologue. 

Take, for example, this passage towards the end of Marce Catlett, in which Berry’s omniscient third-person narrator discusses how World War II transformed the role of farmers in America:

It was a foreign invasion, the homecoming of the war, except that the invaders now were the industrial corporations of urban America, employing rural labor as cheaply as possible to establish what has remained a domestic colonialism. … The good, frugal famers [sic] who drove their first tractors into the fields around Port William were entering, without knowing it, the technological romance of the corporate giants, the millionaires and the billionaires, who would conquer the earth, conquer “space,” invade Mars, a place known better to them than the country that grows their food. (This is now a policy of the second Trump administration.)

Here, Berry models his way of seeing the world. Human beings are divided into two groups: the good and the evil. On the side of the good, you have thinly veiled representations of four generations of Berry’s family and those who agreed with their politics. On the side of the bad, you have everyone who fails to live up to their standard. This latter group is doomed, in Berry’s eyes, to ideological slavery to the technocratic, Mars-conquering millionaires and billionaires who represent for Berry the logical and inevitable end to farmers using tractors.

On the side of the good, Berry holds up farmers like the ones in the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association, a real organization founded in 1945 and dissolved in 2020. In our world, as writer Jodi Cash recounts, Wendell Berry’s father, John Berry Sr., witnessed his own father, Pryor Thomas Berry, come home to their place near Port Royal, Kentucky, from Louisville “with devastating news. After a year of ardent labor over his tobacco crop, he returned from the auction with not a penny for his efforts. What little money the fastidiously grown plant had earned was spent simply on the sale’s commission and transport to and from Louisville, some 40 miles from his home.” This inspired John Berry Sr. to devote his life to “protecting his father and fellow tobacco farmers from the same hardship. This was a promise he upheld, spending years as a lawyer and farmer” championing the Burley Tobacco Program, which his granddaughter Mary Berry tells us he was the “principal author” of, a piece of “New Deal agricultural legislation that dealt with tobacco” and “brought stability to thousands of small farmers in Kentucky. … The tobacco industry hated the Program because it required them to pay farmers fairly.”

In Berry’s “fictional” novel, Marce Catlett, grandfather of long-time authorial stand-in character Andy Catlett, returns home from Louisville to their place near Port William, Kentucky, with devastating news. After a year of ardent labor over his tobacco crop, he has returned from its auction with not a penny for his efforts. What little money the fastidiously grown plant had earned was spent simply on the sale’s commission and transport to and from Louisville, some 40 miles from his home. This inspires his son Wheeler Catlett to devote his life to protecting his father and fellow tobacco farmers from the same hardship. This was a promise he upheld, spending years as a lawyer and farmer championing the Burley Tobacco Program, which our omniscient narrator tells us he was the principal author of, a piece of New Deal agricultural legislation that dealt with tobacco and brought stability to thousands of small farmers in Kentucky and was hated by the tobacco industry because it required them to pay farmers fairly.

You get the point. Marce Catlett’s front matter promises that “all of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.” But this is simply not the case. Marce Catlett is the story of the Berry family’s political ventures, a “‘real story’” which, Berry tells us in his acknowledgments, “because it is mostly undocumented, must be told as fiction.” 

This intertwining of reality with fiction makes Berry’s easy division of the world into two camps, friend and enemy, more disturbing, as this valorization at best results in historical revisionism and at worst in a Pelagian vision of the world. Berry breaks with the tradition he’s worked in before, one which combined eastern and western philosophy and stretched back as far as Hesiod and the first indigenous peoples of the Americas, and instead accepts the modern, post-industrial view of human community that posits work—not leisure—as the basis of culture.

Here’s an example. Berry characterizes the farmers of Marce Catlett’s generation as achieving “an authentically settled life in place,” which was “not possible” before “because of chattel slavery and its malign influence on everything within its horizon. Slavery was, and it is, correctable only by the courage to connect freedom with responsibility … the ability and readiness to do one’s own work and to clean up one’s own messes.” The wisdom of this generation was in its anti-mobility, its taking up the duty it had to its particular place to put into effect, “from the work of [their] own hands,” a “democratic, anti-slavery, if not anti-racist, sentiment often spoken in the Port William neighborhood: ‘I won’t ask another man to do for me anything I won’t do for myself.’” These farmers believed that “if the puzzle of a community in place is put together and kept together long enough, it will work out on its own the terms and conditions of its coherence through time and change. It will need no help, no expert advice.” 

 Berry contends that human beings, if rooted to a particular place and left to their own devices, will basically work out any injustices that might come up through their own efforts and wisdom without any external help—including, presumably, the workings of divine grace. Historical injustices like racism and slavery occurred only because people were too focused on freedom of mobility and were unwilling to take responsibility for their own actions. Sin, for Berry, is ignorance, something that you can fix through your own work and efforts if you can think your way out of it.

Meanwhile, ideas that come from outside the community are suspect and bring totalizing solutions that undermine the real goods of rootedness. One of these intellectual viruses is Port William’s “failure to value itself at the rate of its affection for itself. Gradually, it had learned to value itself as outsiders—as the nation—valued it: as a ‘nowhere place,’ a place at the end of the wrong direction.” After World War II, and especially under the production-oriented USDA policies of the 1970s, the people of Port William were infected with, among other dangerous ideas, “a reluctance” towards the “accepting of the work,” as “they began—the older people slowly, the young at once—to work with their minds diverted to quitting time or Saturday night, places where the lights were bright and the good times rolled.”

Berry emphasizes the contrast in the old and new ways of approaching farm labor in his final chapters, which give highly detailed descriptions of older methods of growing tobacco. At every stage—from the burning of the tobacco fields to their being “painstakingly weeded” to the degree that “sometimes you needed the point of a blade of your pocket knife to remove the weed seedlings from among the tobacco seedlings” to the eradicating of pests by hand rather than via insecticide to the tobacco harvest itself, which Berry admits was excruciating, back-breaking labor—the farmers realized how great and enjoyable it all was. “The remarkable thing about this work, hard as it might be,” writes Berry, “was that you got used to it. And just at the hardest, hottest, most miserable, most troublesome moment,” someone would always “render a complaint of exceeding eloquence or make a joke or recall something funny … until the whole miserable bunch, without noticing how it had happened, would be enjoying themselves.” The difficulty, the painterly attention it demanded, made the work more significant, and the suffering that went along with it united the community and built the common character of their local culture.

Does an annual season of picking weed seedlings from the dirt with the tip of a knife not appeal to you? Does inspecting tobacco plants individually for hornworms and removing them by hand sound too hard? Do you not want to harvest tobacco in wet clothes and scorching heat? If you don’t, you don’t care about local community. Even if you do, looking forward to the weekend or thinking about using a backhoe or natural pesticides shows you’ve fallen prey to the externally imposed, un-local, unnatural, governmental mentality of tech billionaires, private space travel corporations, the forty-fifth and forty-seventh president of the United States, the “so-called conservatism that had always opposed” and ultimately ended the Burley Tobacco Program, the domestic colonialist architects of America’s economic production in World War II, tractor users, and everyone else Wendell Berry doesn’t like.

Obviously, I’m being hyperbolic. But Berry’s world really does sort into two camps: the intellectually enlightened, hard-working old farmers and their ignorant, ease-seeking prodigal sons. Certainly, we need both meaningful work and meaningful play to live truly flourishing lives. A life without hard work would be miserable. But the health of human culture is not determined simply or primarily by common work but by common worship, the highest leisure activity, the ultimate pursuit of a good in itself. A community whose center is work, even excellent work, can only point towards itself. It begins and ends with the political. Its beauties are necessarily artificial. Its virtues are industrious but incomprehensible without reference to labor. It perpetuates the lie that we are self-sufficient, that we can overcome the deficiencies of our natures through our own efforts. 

But a community that values leisure, with worship at its center, cannot but see its lack of self-sufficiency. It can only be fulfilled by something it receives as a gift, by grace. Worshippers cannot force God to love them any more than poets can force inspiration or an infant force his mother to care for him. A culture of leisure is a culture of contemplation, which will necessarily get sick of thinking about itself after a while—because to stay in the realm of only thinking about human beings and the world is to fail to see how humanity and the cosmos open up to the divine, how the imperfect opens up to the perfect.

Therefore, Marce Catlett’s problems begin with its subtitle: The Force of a Story. In his essay “Abuse of Language—Abuse of Power,” the philosopher Josef Pieper, author of Leisure: The Basis of Culture, argues that conversations, like works of art, have the same aim: to reveal reality as it is, delightfully. That doesn’t mean that the excellent conversationalist or author shies away from the harshness of natural or human evil, but it does mean proceeding under the assumptions that truth is real, that it underpins reality, that we are meant for the truth, and that we can work together to find it. This is at the heart of dialogue. When my conversation contains within it an ulterior motive, particularly a desire to get something out of the other person, the other “is no longer a fellow subject. Rather, he has become … an object to be manipulated, possibly to be dominated, to be handled and controlled.” I can “use him for my purposes. … Basically, what happens here is speech without a partner (since there is no true other),” as my manipulation takes the form of monologue. When the goal is not to see the truth together, but rather to sell something to the viewer—a political agenda, for instance—then what has been made is no longer, properly speaking, art. It’s propaganda.

Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story lacks force because there is no story. The plot is minimal. The characters are wafer-thin ersatz Berrys, and none of them grow. There are no character arcs, unlike in Berry’s past novels. Their dialogue reads like lecture notes, as even Berry’s usually well-edited and precise prose is lacking: typos abound, a rarity for Berry’s novels. What’s left is a rhetorical exercise lobbying for a particular politics that presumes ignorance of its audience and generational superiority of its author. It treats its readers like how Berry thinks tractors treat the land, plowing over them and crushing them for the sake of a “better way.” I think I’d much rather be crushed by an actual tractor.