I’ve never been to Port William, Kentucky. It is, after all, fictional. And yet, I feel like I know its streets and their one-time inhabitants so well that I may recognize them, if I were to visit. Over there used to stand Jayber Crow’s barbershop. And that’s the house where a wounded man once rushed in and bled all over the floor in Anno Domini 1888, as five-year-old Mat Feltner watched—yes, that same Mat Feltner who would grow up to become the friend and neighbor of Marce Catlett, and then both of them would in the course of time become the grandparents of Andy Catlett, although long before that Mat would also be the father of Virgil Feltner, who would marry the Hannah who would eventually become Hannah Coulter, the wife of Nathan Coulter, but first for just a short while she was Hannah Feltner, before her husband of too short a time was killed somewhere in the Pacific in WWII and his body never recovered.
Time and stories and people in Port William can unfurl and at other times collapse together over the series of novels and short stories about them, reminding us that no one’s story is his own alone. The people and their stories all belong together and to each other, in a covenant that they describe as “the membership.” For a time, the meek in these stories inherit the earth—quite literally, in the farmland in Port William that they lovingly work. Except, this inheritance, as all else since the expulsion from Eden, comes with the obligation of much hard work.
This fictional town is not wholly fictional, however. It is loosely based on Wendell Berry’s own home of Port Royal, Kentucky, where he still lives and farms in the same county that has been home for his family since before the Civil War—a reality on which he reflects in his 2022 work of memoir-cum-cultural criticism, The Need to Be Whole. How might we heal our souls and our places? The two, after all, are sick or well together, not separately.
Ever since Berry published the first of his Port William novels—Nathan Coulter, which appeared in 1960—he has been thinking about the story of this place, so similar to the real one where he dwells in rural Kentucky, and whose decline (along with the rest of rural America) he has been lamenting in such works of nonfiction as The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977). Against its backdrop, the people of Port William have acquired stories, which have grown deeper and more three-dimensional over the course of the intervening decades. We have gotten to know the joys and the sorrows of the life and work of Nathan Coulter, Hannah Coulter, Jayber Crow, Andy Catlett, the many Feltners and the Branches, and now of course, Marce Catlett too—after whom Berry’s newest (and likely final) Port William novel, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, is named.
The relationship of Berry’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—for he has been a prolific writer in all three genres—is unapologetically close. But in his review of Marce Catlett, John-Paul Heil is concerned that Berry has abandoned any interest in developing the plot of the novel in favor of a political manifesto glorifying the hard work of the leisureless, industrial variety. “Marce Catlett’s problems begin with its subtitle: The Force of a Story,” he remarks, clarifying that “Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story lacks force because there is no story.” The story, he suggests, has been hijacked by Berry’s defense of his family’s own real-life political decisions. Worst of all, Berry seems to present in this novel “work—not leisure—as the basis of culture.”
The charge against Berry that this novel lacks a plot is, to an extent, true. And yet, the accusation misses something important—that all of Berry’s Port William fiction is one continuous story to which he has been adding with subsequent books and short stories for the past sixty-five years. Marce Catlett, as a result, is an epilogue to a very long story of a lifetime, or even several lifetimes—its author is now ninety-one years old, and the novel’s protagonist, Andy Catlett, is in his tenth decade as well. As an epilogue, it is fitting that this novel does not have a developed stand-alone plot and story arc of the sort we’ve seen in the previous Port William novels. Instead, Berry at last offers his readers—and himself—needed closure. There is a force to the overall story of Port William, we realize as a result—just as there is force to the overall story of American farmers and others who live in towns like Port William or Port Royal. Most of all, though, there is force in telling stories of virtue prevailing over vice in an age that makes the latter so much easier. And the ultimate virtue is to stay, choosing to love a place and its people well.
To abandon one’s story, we know from some of the younger characters of this series who haunt this particular novel as ghosts by their loud absence, is to become unmoored, uprooted, lost and confused in the modern world.
As a result, this novel, unlike Berry’s earlier ones, does not have as much of an overall plot, once we depart from the opening backdrop tale about Marce Catlett and the injustice of a tobacco sale that defrauded small-scale farmers. Instead, we hear Andy’s now elderly voice—Berry speaking through him—reflecting in the novel’s opening sentence on the story that has defined his life: “Grown old, Andy Catlett has still ahead of him and in obligation the story of a time a hundred and eighteen years ago.”
Except, the force of the opening story continues to drive the novel. The characters all belong to that story. There is, indeed, much reflection throughout the novel about stories to which people belong—stories of family, community, place. So it is, for instance, that “the story of a family at home is like a puzzle put together. Put together, the separate parts cohere in a kind of sense, not otherwise ever to be made: the story of the family at one for a time with the story of its place.”
As seasoned Berry readers will recognize, all of Berry’s stories have been stories of gradual decline—of the “unsettling of America,” as the children of the Port William families move away, abandoning that family story and choosing other careers over the agriculture of their ancestors. But what effect does it have on the soul when one moves away from the place where one belongs to a story? Belonging to a place means belonging to a story; the two are inextricably connected by roots no less strong for being invisible. To abandon one’s story, we know from some of the younger characters of this series who haunt this particular novel as ghosts by their loud absence, is to become unmoored, uprooted, lost, and confused in the modern world.
This brings us to Andy Catlett, who, a half-century ago now, once lost an arm to the latest agricultural technology. Now he is an old man, thinking alone about the story to which he belongs—and which belongs to him: “For a century and more after the time it happened, the story has been kept in living memory, and so it has had a future. It has been joined to the story of its own survival and influence. If it has at present no public life, it continues to live locally, to inspire local work, and to produce local benefits. So far, it has not ended.”
But do these reflections on the value of local work amount, as Heil believes, to a glorification of hard, industrial, modern work that is the enemy of leisure? Not so fast. While Berry indeed glorifies work in this novel, as in his previous ones, it is the beauty of work that takes the front seat in these discussions. Berry continues to juxtapose work that is beautiful and soul-enriching (and usually done by people in love with their land and the craft of caring for it) with work that is very modern and mechanized, apt to crush souls and bones (as Andy Catlett had experienced). But when Marce Catlett comes home from his heartbreaking day in the opening story of this novel, he joins his family for a dinner together where they rest as one. Yes, there is leisure in the hard-working life of Berry’s farmers. It repeatedly involves the cultivation of relationships and the sharing of a table—the communion of saints, breaking bread together.
It is undeniable that Berry’s novels appear more politicized to some readers now, as Heil contends. But if this is the case, this isn’t because Berry’s message about the value of small-town life, farming, family, and community has changed since 1960. Rather, it is because more voices in our society have grown louder in rejecting these concepts as worth preserving or even in any way praising. In response, Berry’s message of love for place, family, and the rooted life suddenly seems decidedly radical.
Berry’s Port William novels are an invitation into the achingly beautiful membership that the novels describe. It is fragile and imperfect, and yet you cannot help but see its beauty that inspires longing. You too, reader, can come into this community, get to know its history, and consider who you might have been had your own ancestors lived in a town like this one, where you still could live now. Perhaps even, like Berry, without a computer.
There is undeniable melancholy in this novel and its conclusion—and yet, as in The Need to Be Whole, there is hope and warning too. We have all been created for relationships, real roots, and stories to which we need to belong for our wellbeing—spiritual, intellectual, familial. The promises of the American countryside still beckon, and I reflect on this as I share the road with Amish horse-drawn buggies in my small Ohio town. Even in this age of cities and the reign of machines, the meek—the farmers and others who choose to dwell in America’s small towns and the countryside and love them—could still inherit this earth.