Defeated but not destroyed
Wendell Berry's latest novel, Tolkien's "long defeat," and the peculiar power of story
“Things reveal themselves passing away.”
-W.B. Yeats
In the opening chapters of Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, the latest (and perhaps final) novel in Wendell Berry’s beloved Port William series, an elderly Andy Catlett tells a story.
The story he remembers is an old one. In 1908, his grandfather, Marcellus “Marce” Catlett, took his tobacco crop into Louisville and, in exchange for a year’s worth of hard work, received a pittance from the Duke Tobacco Company. With no legal protections, there was little he or the other farmers could do. So Marce began the long journey back to his wife and two sons, defeated but not destroyed. Trotting home astride his horse, he “felt pressing upward under his heart, under his breath, the force of his willingness to bear his wound and to keep at his work. In his own life and strength and in his soul, he was all right.”
This particular story, one which remains “a force and a light” to all those who remember it, anchors the entire novel. As it is passed down from one generation to the next—its hearers are indelibly changed by it.
“So Marce remembered [the story] to Wheeler, who told it to Andy, who in a world radically changed needed a long time and great care to imagine what he heard, but as he has imagined it he has passed it on to his children, for the story has been, as it is still, a force and a light in their place.
Because of the story, there were some kinds of a man that Wheeler could not be, a certain kind that he had to become, and certain things that he had to do.”
Indeed, the rest of the novel could be described as an outworking of Marce’s story in the lives of his son, Wheeler, and grandson, Andy. Wheeler, deeply affected by the economic exploitation of his family and community at the hands of powerful corporations, goes on to help create a co-op program that protects tobacco farmers for decades. But the stability it brings is short-lived. Eventually, the government program ends, along with the way of life and farming as the Catletts have known it for generations.
Wheeler’s son Andy, now an old man, reflects on his formative childhood experiences working on the farms and fields of his beloved Port William. He remembers too, with grief, the tremendous changes he has witnessed in his lifetime. He recalls the time before World War II, when all the farming in their region was done by horse teams. By 1950, nearly every farmer used a tractor, the first of many trends which would lead to disastrous outcomes for rural communities.1 Andy considers how his life “like the history of his home country in his time, has divided into two parts, the first agrarian and creaturely, the second industrial and mechanical.”
“They are the two parts of one life and one history but they are…opposed to each other. The parts are joined, it seems to him, only by the strand of his own diminishing life, compounded of the lives of his grandfather Catlett and his father and of others, many others, and only by the diminishing life of the country, continuing by the spirit and the breath of God toward whatever in God’s time it is coming to.”
ii.
The poet William Butler Yeats once said, “Things reveal themselves passing away,” a quote Berry himself has cited often. His latest novel is a kind of elegy for a way of life that is all but gone, in large part due to the mechanization of agriculture and the rest of the world along with it.
But what exactly has been “revealed” in its passing? The question is at least one way of framing Berry’s novel (and perhaps his entire body of work)—a patient, loving revelation of what we’ve lost to the maw of the Machine. Indeed, while reading Marce Catlett, one cannot help but feel a bright sadness for what has been taken—not simply a vocation but a language, a culture, a community, and an entire way of life. A life lived in deep connection with and dependence on land and neighbor. A conviviality altogether foreign to us. A multi-generational blessing of story and craft.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Andy’s childhood memories of burley tobacco farming, which, in those days, was “a work of art.”
“No other crop demanded such continuous attention over so long a time. No other required so much and such elaborate knowledge, or such refinement of perception and judgment, or such artistry of management and handling. It seems doubtful that in the modern world any other product depended for its production upon such a level of artistry that was generally or democratically distributed…And so the crop, its interest, and its work shaped the minds, seasons, and lives of every farmer of its region.”
What’s striking about this chapter isn’t just the arduous nature of the work2, the deep affection the farmers had for it, or the impressive artistry required to accomplish it—it’s how wonderfully convivial the work was. Family members and neighbors spent long hours together “wedding” (weeding) the seedling plants and later stripping the leaves from the stalk. The work was multi-generational too: young boys and girls worked alongside the adults. (Andy was fourteen when he was first paid to work in Elton Penn’s tobacco fields.) And even in the most challenging seasons of the work, there was camaraderie, conversation, humor, and stories. Always stories.
To the people of Port William, burley tobacco represented far more than just an agricultural product. It was a tapestry of meaning, beauty, dignity, community, and livelihood. Which made the loss of it all the more devastating. As Berry writes, “When you have a crop, and a culture, that gives employment at home to whole families, that puts the children to work with their parents, that helps you to raise your children, and you lose it all at once and have nothing to replace it, then what?” The “then what” is the cultural, economic, and spiritual “unsettling” of an entire community.
“…the traditional subsistence economies of households and neighborhoods were supplanted by the global economy of extraction, consumption, and waste. Homemade goods, derived from the homeland and handwork, were replaced by purchased goods dependent upon ‘purchasing power.’
By those errors the country people were gathered into cities, or into the city economy even when they remained in the country. Thus they were exiled from their homelands, their histories and memories, their self-subsistent local economies, thus becoming more ignorant and dependent than people ever have been before. And so they made perhaps the worst error of all: a bothways exile of the living from the dead.”
In writing about the loss of his native culture, Berry (via Andy) cannot help but convey the deep affection he has for them. “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.” And in writing about them so movingly, we feel a hint of the love and sorrow for that which many of us have never known.
iii.
There is a particular resonance in Marce Catlett which is hard to ignore. Like Andy, we find ourselves in the midst of a seismic cultural change brought about by a powerful, new technology that promises great gains in “efficiency.” We will also undoubtedly witness the loss of certain things (perhaps even entire vocations), and only in the process of losing them will we come to see how precious they really are.
That Marce Catlett is likely Berry’s final novel in the Port William series makes what it has to say and the stories it tells all the more important. But as I meditated on it in the weeks after reading it, I wondered, What exactly is the story telling us? Is it, ultimately, a doomer tale? A dirge for another livelihood swallowed up by “Progress?” A bitter taste of what’s to come in the age of AI? Or is it something more?
If the novel was a song, its melody would almost certainly be laden with minor chords. And, when read alongside Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine (which has a rather bleak tone for most of its 300+ pages), there are moments when a sense of helplessness and despair may creep in. After all, what chance do any of us really have against the inexorable march of the Machine?
And yet, there is a strange, shimmering hope that runs through Berry’s novel like a small, winding creek. Its gentle music is difficult to hear against the din of the Machine’s chainsaw, but it is present nonetheless. It is the kind of hope embodied in the phrase “defeated but not destroyed,” and calls to mind an idea J.R.R. Tolkien once expressed in a letter to a friend:
“I am a Christian…so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ — though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.”
Tolkien’s ‘long defeat’ is a recognition (and a reminder) that the world isn’t necessarily on an up-and-to-the right trajectory. Sin has torn the fabric of the universe. Things fall apart. But regardless of how bad the score may seem, according to the Christian story the “final victory” has already been secured—ironically, through an act of supreme defeat: the cross of Christ.
Likewise, Andy (the character who most closely mirrors Berry himself3), isn’t shy about acknowledging his failure. Towards the novel’s end, he takes the measure of things, as an elderly man is want to do. In one poignant passage, he envisions his father and grandfather as brothers alongside him, the three men bound “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…could not live beyond them, so hard upon them has been the force of the changing times.” But even their defeat gives “glimpses of final victory.”
“[Andy’s] remembering and his thoughts have carried him by now far outside the matter of fact of this world’s present age. He stands now with his father and his father’s father, and with others dear to them, in the presence of a longed-for beautiful land that they have desired as if seen afar, that yet is the same, the very land that they have known and that they know, a love-made land, dark to them until by their own love they came to see it.”
Though the three men failed, in one sense, to make a life in a beloved place that their children could carry on, Andy takes the long view. An eternal view. An eschatological view. He envisions himself, alongside his beloved forebears, “in the presence of a longed-for beautiful land…the very land that they have known…a love-made land.” His hope ultimately rests, I think, in the coming redemption of all things, including (and especially) the very land itself—that day when “the mountains and hills shall break forth into singing, and the trees of the field shall clap their hands.”
Perhaps he longs for it in a way that only a farmer can.
iv.
If this is beginning to sound a bit defeatist or resigned, a “hold on ‘til heaven” message, I assure you it is not. The hope of Marce Catlett isn’t just an eternal one; it’s also profoundly “here and now.” But it’s easy to miss.
As the subtitle of the novel suggests, some stories possess a strange power. The truth is, even a tale of defeat can become fertile soil for the seeds of “final victory.” Marce’s story is one such example, after all. Though he was defeated by the Duke monopoly, his story nevertheless had a profound, generative influence on Wheeler and Andy.
Here is the key: The same could be said of Berry’s novel itself4. It is not simply a lament for that wholeness and beauty of life which has passed into the shadows. The book is to us what Marce’s story was to Wheeler and Andy—a story with tremendous power to shape and constrain our hearts and imaginations. Though the three Catlett men were in a way “defeated” by the forces of modernity, they were not destroyed. And their collective story still carries with it a “force and light” to all who cherish it.5 Because of its peculiar power, we can say, along with Andy and Wheeler, that there are some kinds of men and women we cannot be, a certain kind that we have to become, and certain things we have to do.
Yes, as the Machine continues its march under the banner of “Progress,” there will be new losses and new things to grieve. But despite what the prognosticators of Silicon Valley say, the technological change that’s coming to us is not “inevitable,” at least not in every way. We still have agency. We still have choice. We can choose to become a cadre of “Mad Farmers,” those who embody “a vision of sanity breaking forth into a world driven crazy by dreams of wealth, power, ease, and fear.”
Far from throwing our hands up in despair, Marce Catlett compels us to put them back down into the soil, both literally and metaphorically. Though many of us will never become full-time farmers, we can still seek to live more in tune with the land and our neighbors. To plant a garden. To do good, honest work. To teach our children to love their place and its people. To recover our calling as artists and gardeners,6 cultivators of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. To live, in the words of Berry, as creatures instead of machines.
Like Marce, we can feel, pressing upward under our hearts, “the force of our willingness to bear our wounds and to keep at our work.” For even if our way of life is overcome by the Machine, we may yet be a sign post for that coming Kingdom which cannot, ultimately, be defeated.
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In 1860, 53% of the American population were farmers. In 1930, it was 21%. Today, it’s less than 2%.
“The crop was exceedingly ‘labor-intensive.’ In 1949, when wheat required 5 hours of work per acre, corn 19 hours, and cotton 83 hours, an acre of tobacco required 460 hours, and this partly was because of the unrelenting emphasis at that time (and long after) upon quality.”
If you read Berry’s essays, “A Native Hill,” “The Making of a Marginal Farm,” and his lecture “It All Turns on Affection,” you will discover how much of his own story Berry put into this novel.
And indeed, the entire Port William series.
“Past each of them, as his strength failed and the way of nature opened before him, the vision would have to be taken up again, seen again in a changed light, renewed by a younger effort.”
Andy Crouch, Culture Making
Thanks Mark, beautiful as always. On your recommendation I am reading Hannah Coulter. It also is beautiful.