Grief Goes Hand in Hand with Gratitude: A Book Review of Marce Catlett by Wendell Berry

By Matt Wheeler

On a mild and sunny November Saturday in the town of New Castle (population 907), one of the great American authors, aged 91, stepped to the podium at Kentucky Arts & Letters Day 2025. In his weathered but stately voice, Wendell Berry carried up a copy of his recently-released novel Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story and, over the course of a bit less than nine minutes, read Chapter VII of the book aloud as the gathered audience paid rapt attention.

Near the end of that session, Berry read a passage from the perspective of a young Andy Catlett, who in Berry’s last few Port William works has even more clearly represented Berry himself, including these words:

“Until about then, his childhood allowed him to think that his home place had always been and would always be as it then was. He learned it eagerly as it then was, and he loved it. He took it to his heart and aspired to it. In vision then he saw himself as a grown man, a farmer, empowered and entranced by the excellent team of mules his grandpa would have chosen for him to work.”

After he continued to read the end of the chapter, he shut the book and shuffled off unassumingly to his seat. The appreciative full room of listeners stood to their feet and applauded, an outpouring of gratitude for a man who has loved his place well and has reached something deep in so many readers as he eloquently told of it.

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Wendell Berry, in his decades-long writing career, hasn’t written a formal autobiography to this point. But, in a sense, he has been writing his life’s story through his Port William fiction series since his 1960 novel Nathan Coulter. In Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, the most recent entry in the long-running saga, Berry has put to paper his most personal and autobiographical work yet. The book serves as a summary of what Berry is about, what has shaped him, and what hope he has for the generations to follow.

At the center of this work is the title story, a fictionalized version of an account from the Berry family’s actual life. Marce Catlett is composed of two sections, “The Past” and “The Future”, with the former functioning as a 27-page prelude to what unfolds in the latter. To start off “The Past”, Berry writes, “Grown old, Andy Catlett has still ahead of him and in obligation the story of a time a hundred and eighteen years ago.”

What follows is the narrative account of a formative story in the life of Andy’s grandfather Marcellus, or “Marce,” Catlett, a resilient and capable farmer, husband, and father of two, already in the midst of financial struggle. Before dawn on a winter morning in 1906, Marce and his friend and mentor Jim Stedman set out early in the morning on horseback, making the trek to Louisville to see their tobacco crops sold. There they find only one buyer, a man representing tobacco mogul James Duke, who by the time had a monopoly on the crop. Marce and Jim, as well all of the other farmers standing there, find they have no choice but to accept the paltry sum they are offered–an amount insufficient to even cover the price of housing their crops.

Marce draws close to giving the buyer a piece of his mind before Jim prompts him not to do so. What remains, then, is how Marce will tell his wife Dorie and sons Andrew (who Andy is later named after) and Wheeler (Andy’s father) the sorely disappointing news.

After Marce arrives home, this scene unfolds.

“Well, Marce, what did it bring?”

“It brought,” he said, “Nothing.”

He unbuttoned his coat, took it off, hung it and his cap on their nail beside the door, and looked at them again.

He said, “It brought just a little short of what it cost to sell it.”

It was his mother’s silence that Wheeler was hearing then, for she had not replied.

“It paid the railroad, it paid something of the warehouse, nothing to me,” his father said.

And Wheeler understood that no more was going to be said about the sale of their crop.

His father said as if in answer, as it seemed to Wheeler, to what his mother had not said, “Dorie, it’ll be all right. I’ll do what it takes to make it all right.”

The bulk of the novel is focused on the future–the reverberating effects of that devastating story and what it meant for the Catlett family, for small family farms in general, and for rural Americans and the country more broadly, from that time to current and beyond.

To be clear, Berry acknowledges the problematic nature of tobacco as a crop. In the first sentences of “The Future”, Chapter I, he writes this: “Having long outlived its economic occasion—for tobacco, a proven cause of cancer, is now not much grown in its old region—the story lives on in its suffering and sorrow, and as a fragment of the history of humankind’s unwillingness to pay farmers for their work or the land for its yield.” Tobacco itself isn’t the point. At issue here was whether or not small family farmers could be paid fairly for their work or not. Berry’s real-life father, John Sr., and brother, John Jr., each were among those who led the Burley Tobacco Co-Operative, a program that assured fair prices for such farmers, and Berry’s daughter Mary leads The Berry Center, where the underlying principles of the program are put into action for small family farmers of cattle in the form of their Our Home Place Meat program.

Over the chapters that follow, Berry, through the character of Andy Catlett, traces his family’s story as it has unfolded downstream of the watershed title event, in a series of vignettes that serve as a good introduction to the Port William community - or membership, as Berry often calls it - for Berry novices and as a welcome reacquaintance for those who know and love his work.

He tells of how the seminal story shaped his father, Wheeler Catlett, who grew to be a farmer as well as a lawyer, advocating for the people of the membership. The reader learns about how Wheeler worked for a time in politics in Washington but, in a move that perplexed his Congressman boss, felt and responded to the pull to invest instead in his home place. And he also shares how Wheeler’s brother Andrew, who young Andy adored, took a wayward path that would veer from the path and end in tragedy - a wound discussed further in Berry’s novel A World Lost.

He tells of knowing his grandfather, the book’s title character and a skilled teamster, in his last years–the years just after World War II that saw the rise of the tractor and the waning of farm work being done with animals. To quote the end of the passage that Berry himself read at Kentucky Arts and Letters Day, “And then in that country, really all of a sudden, the tie was broken between human work and the descent of light from the free and holy sun. That tie to daylight, freely given, a gift as old as creation, was replaced by bondage, purchased by money, to fuels extracted from the darkness under the earth.”

He tells of Andy’s coming of age, to an understanding of his grandfather’s story on a deeper level, and his own time of striking out on his own–to write for an agricultural magazine in Chicago–and his own turn to follow the homeward call that mirrored that of his father’s.

The concluding chapter starts with a detailed description of one of the “artifacts of the old life”, a well-made stone cellar that powerfully symbolizes the goodness and substance of simple things purposely made well. “The beauty of it was not as evident as that of a vault or dome in a church but it was beautiful, both materially and in thought.” The structure was long since bulldozed–“it was a thing of the past, and in the age of the bulldozer it was in the way”– and while he mourns the loss of the many such signs of life the way it had been, he still finds gratitude in the grief. Berry writes, “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.”

It would be difficult to summarize the thrust of this work better than Berry does in these two paragraphs:

“Andy Catlett has grown now into the old age of a grandson, son, father, and grandfather. He feels still living in himself the passion by which his grandfather survived the story of his defeat by the Duke monopoly, and the passion with which his father remembered it, and so the passion with which he himself has remembered it and handed it on, so that in his own final years he sees it living still as memory and motive in his children and grandchildren.

The story and the love borne in it, passing down, has held them together like a living root of the same tree, and like a tuned string, across a hundred and eighteen years and five generations. But from the year of the Lord 2025, looking back, Andy sees how breakable, how threatened, how perilously stretched across departures and returns that vital strand has always been.”

As an avid appreciator of Wendell Berry’s work and admirer of his refreshing and grounding way of telling the interwoven stories of seemingly ordinary people beautifully, I genuinely hope that he has many years, and the writing of many further Port William stories, ahead of him. Whether he does or not, though, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story stands as a concise and masterful culmination of the narrative of the Port William membership. It would be a fitting and compelling sign-off, if it is that. Though I’m hoping for a further epilogue.

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A troubadour, poet with a guitar, & stage banter-conversationalist, Matt Wheeler lives in Lancaster County, PA with his wife & teenage son. He specializes in songs based on classic works of literature - his 2021 album "Wonder of It All", featuring songs & stories based on books including "The Horse & His Boy" & "Watership Down" is an example. His new album, "A Hard History of Love" is inspired by a series of Wendell Berry's short stories & released in September 2023. You can read and listen to more of his work at www.mattwheeleronline.com.

Photo by Reba Spike on Unsplash