No. 024: Take It from a Farmer.
On Berry, Wilder, and a timeless wisdom (plus a personal update).
When the oak leaves of springtime are as big as squirrels’ ears, it’s time to plant the corn; and believe it or not that’s a bit of wisdom I recently learned from two different novels in the span of as many weeks.
The first novel was Farmer Boy—Laura Ingalls Wilder’s classic retelling of a year from the childhood of the boy, Almanzo Wilder, who would eventually grow up to become her husband. My homeschooled third-grader is reading Farmer Boy for school, so every day he and I curl up on the couch and I listen to him dictate a new chapter. The pages of Farmer Boy detail stories of the various tasks that constitute life on the Wilder farm throughout the progressing year, as seasons change and as Almanzo grows steadily older—learning new skills, accepting new responsibilities, and enjoying new privileges and freedoms. Though originally published in 1933, it’s a coming-of-age tale as old as time, demonstrating both the sacrifices and the rewards that come with submission to hard work.
The second novel was Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, the newest, and likely the final, release by the author who has influenced my thoughts on work, community, and culture more than any other (and after whom my cat is named), Wendell Berry. For anyone unfamiliar, Berry is a 91-year-old farmer from Kentucky who has spent the past several decades prophesying against the rapacious constructs of modern, American economic culture, preaching in their place an anti-partisan vision for propriety, familiarity, commitment, and (most of all) love to return to local communities and economies.
Marce Catlett belongs to a series of several other novels and stories by Berry that are set in the fictional, rural Kentucky town of Port William. These stories survey the perspectives of multiple generations and families among the small town’s residents, from bachelor barber Jayber Crow, to twice-widowed Hannah Coulter, and more. (As an aside, I often tell people that Hannah Coulter is the most realistic woman-written-by-a-man I’ve ever read. The short novel bearing her story is also a great place to start if you’re a newcomer to Berry’s writing.) The latest installment in the Port William series tells the stories of three generations of Catletts—Marcellus (b. 1864, d. 1969), his son Wheeler (b. 1900, d. 1992), and his grandson Andrew (b. 1934)—as they care and advocate for their family tobacco farm and the local farming community.
Andrew (“Andy”), who appears in multiple of the Port William volumes, has long been understood by readers as representative of Berry himself, as the two share many biographical details and character traits. Marce Catlett, therefore, reads just as much like a memoir as it does a novel. Indeed, in the acknowledgements, Berry writes, “This book is based upon a ‘real story,’ which, because it is mostly undocumented, must be told as fiction. In writing it, I have relied on family stories, my own memories, and my long conversations with [a family friend]” (p. 153).
Many excellent reviews of Marce Catlett have already been written (I’ll recommend this one), so I’ll try to avoid simply adding to the noise. I did, however, find the experience of reading Berry’s and Wilder’s accounts of farm life concurrently to be an amusing one, and it is upon that juxtaposition I’d like briefly to comment.
Unsurprisingly, Farmer Boy and Marce Catlett share many similarities (on top of their quirky recommendation for when to sow corn). Both novels include lengthy passages describing in visceral detail the processes involved in daily labor on a family farm—whether harrowing fields, shearing sheep, or harvesting tobacco; and both present the work of farming, even at its most grueling, with a strong air of dignity, satisfaction, pride, and affection. Both make clear the necessity of cooperation within the immediate community for any individual farming operation to survive; and both highlight father-son relationships as powerful forces in forming the personalities and life trajectories of their protagonists.
However, in another sense, Marce Catlett reads almost as an antithesis of Farmer Boy.
Wilder’s novel—which, I might remind you, is written for an audience of children—tells a thoroughly optimistic story. That isn’t to say it’s always a happy story; Wilder speaks plainly of many frustrations, disappointments, pains, fears, and harsh working conditions that Almanzo and his family face over the course of their year. Among the supporting characters there are bullies and manipulators, and Mother Nature is shown to be a fickle caretaker of the croplands.
Nevertheless, as my son and I read through the first portion of the book, I came quickly to trust that each chapter would end on a redemptive note. Hard labor is always followed by eggnog, doughnuts, and fried apples and onions, and hard lessons are always followed by grace. Young Almanzo, though occasionally blundering into excessive curiosity or excitement, works hard to earn his parents’ trust in his growing maturity, and in return his parents grant him new responsibilities and the privileges that accompany them. All members of the Wilder family are shown to be diligent workers, the fruits of whose labors clearly testify to the attention and skill of their makers, and they are all compensated as such. Father and Mother bring home exactly the profit they’d hoped for when they sell their handsome stock animals or exquisite homemade sundries, and all the children’s entries to the county fair (a monstrous pumpkin, made-from-scratch jams and jellies, etc.) win them prizes. Life on the Wilder farm is undeniably a laborious one, but the labor is always, without a doubt, worth it.
And that brings us to Marce Catlett.
Berry’s novel opens with an account of the story’s paterfamilias, Marcellus (“Marce”), leaving out from Port William early one morning before the sun rises and arriving in Louisville at midday in order to accompany his tobacco crop from the preceding year to the annual tobacco buyer’s auction. The year is 1906, and James B. Duke’s American Tobacco Company holds a monopoly on the tobacco industry. The results of the sale are not pretty:
In the so-called auction … there was a single bidder. This was the buyer for the American Tobacco Company. Hardly raising his voice, this man bought the hogsheads of tobacco rapidly, one after another, at a few pennies a pound. … Although, like everybody else, Marce had learned what to expect, the single numerals bluntly and forever penciled onto the paper he felt as a wound. There would be no fair payment for him to pick up at the office counter and carry home. As he saw readily enough, the crop would barely pay its way to the market and the commission on its sale. Its purchase, properly named, was theft. He had been robbed of his crop and his work in perfect disregard of broad daylight and of his own presence and eyesight, and he felt the insult” (p. 22).
The remainder of the novel might best be summarized by its subtitle, The Force of a Story. In retelling the life stories of old man Marce, his son Wheeler, and finally Andy, Berry elucidates how the ripples of the failed 1906 tobacco sale would spread forward in each man’s life, informing the trajectories of their efforts and personalities. All three men would use their unique skills and passions to advocate for the family farm and the Port William farming community—at a foundational, almost subconscious level striving to redeem the injustice of 1906. And all of them would experience some degree of success. Wheeler, who makes a name for himself in the world of law and politics, is instrumental in establishing the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association, “or ‘the program,’ as it was called,” which “employed the principles of fair pricing balanced and protected by limiting production to the quantity expectably needed by the manufacturers” (p. 36), thereby ensuring a sustainable quality of life for local tobacco growers.
However, in time the world would discover the carcinogenic properties of tobacco, the “program” would collapse, and corporate operations of industrialized monoculture would sweep the countryside of its family farms. The story keeps reaching for redemption, but the redemption never comes. Berry reflects with grief:
[Andy] sees also, looking back, that the crop and the way of living it supported were doomed. The reasons are obvious. The crop became indefensible because of its identification as a cause of cancer. Following that, the quality of the of the product and its production ceased to count economically, and therefore culturally, as it had before. … Once the program was ended at last by the so-called conservatism that had always opposed it, the crop was already ceasing to support the regional pattern of diversified small farms.
…
As an effect of several causes, including professional and official advice, 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 living from the dead.
As people have grown helpless and lonely, they have come to be governed by the most wealthy, who rule by the purchase of nominal representatives, who, having no longer the use of their own minds, do not know and cannot imagine the actual country by the ruin of which they and their constituents actually live (pp. 138–39).
The contrast in tone from Wilder to Berry could not be starker. Where Farmer Boy tells the story of a family united by its success, Marce Catlett tells the story of a family united by its failure:
Andy has come at last to see his grandfather Catlett, his father, and himself as three aged brothers made so 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, as each one of them in his own time had seen it, could not live beyond them, so hard upon them has been the force of the changing times (p. 142).
I see in the contrast between the two novels a reflection of the complexity expressed by biblical Wisdom Literature. Farmer Boy, that is, materializes the wisdom of the Proverbs: “The LORD will not allow the righteous to hunger, but He will reject the craving of the wicked. Poor is one who works with a lazy hand, but the hand of the diligent makes rich” (10:3–4). Marce Catlett, on the other hand, repeats the lament of Ecclesiastes:
So I hated all the fruit of my labor for which I had labored under the sun, because I must leave it to the man who will come after me. And who knows whether he will be wise or a fool? Yet he will have control over all the fruit of my labor for which I have labored by acting wisely under the sun” (2:18–19).
I have seen that every labor and every skill which is done is the result between a person and his neighbor. This too is futility and striving after the wind (4:4).
There is futility which is done on the earth, that is, there are righteous people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the wicked. On the other hand, there are evil people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the righteous (8:14).
So which story—and which wisdom—is true? Which story—and which wisdom—should we read?
The answer, of course, is both. Just as followers of Christ need to receive the full canon of biblical wisdom, so too do we need to open our ears to stories of both success and failure. I’m glad my nine-year-old is reading Farmer Boy: I can see it encouraging him with a positive vision for working hard, and it is building in his mind a tangible framework for what just economics should look like.
But I hope in time he will also learn to receive stories like Marce Catlett—stories of injustice and failure—for these are the stories that will resonate with many if not most of the neighbors he will meet in his lifetime.
This, I think, is what we often miss in discussions of “privilege.” Those who are “privileged” recoil at being labeled as such, for they believe they are being accused of not working for their keep. But a privilege is a privilege precisely because it is earned: to be “privileged,” therefore, is simply to experience the blessing of being compensated adequately for one’s work—a blessing that is very often withheld from those holding the least power in any given society. I hope, no matter the degree of success my son experiences in his lifetime, that he will always look with compassion and empathy upon those whose just deserts have evaded them, and that he will serve them and advocate for them accordingly.
Reading stories like Marce Catlett, just like reading Ecclesiastes in isolation from the rest of the biblical canon, could become ripe ground for cynicism or even despair. But that is not where Berry leaves us. Instead, he writes:
The history of the Port William countryside, like that of the world since 1492, has included so much disgrace and destruction that the continuation so far of the life of it, and of the beauty still of so much of it, seems to Andy to be a wonder almost equal to the wonder of creation in the beginning. It is a wonder to him that he and his people have been spared so far the just consequence of their folly. He thinks that a great patience and a great forgiveness must so far have been in force, and he gives thanks.
Myself a former student of archaeology and ancient world history, I am well acquainted with the reality that every great empire, every great system, and every great mover and shaker will eventually wither, die, and become forgotten. Every human in history, even the most successful, has felt the fear that the work of their hands and the way of life they value and love will slip away into the tides of time. And frankly, they’ve all been to some degree right: there is only one Eternal Kingdom and only one Eternal Law—all the rest is dust. But praise the Great Patience, and praise the Great Forgiveness, that he gives his grace so freely and upholds his creation with such tender and undeserved care. The force of his story is a force of redemption, the scope of which we could never ask for or imagine.
That marks the end of my essay, but I wanted to close with a brief, personal update:
I’ve been building an online platform for my writing and printmaking for almost a year an a half now, and I’ve designated this season as one for trial and error. That is, my approach to publicizing my work has been “try everything, and let’s see what works.” Now, however, I’m feeling the weight of trying to do too many things at once. I’m feeling the need to prune away excess, to streamline the trajectory of my work, and to create more sustainable rhythms in my creative processes.
Therefore, for the next little while, I am taking a break from my online presence in order to focus on building a unified plan for how to proceed with my creative work. This process will eventually include transitioning my platform completely away from Instagram so that I can focus exclusively on Substack. I hope to incorporate more of my linocut work into my Substack posts, and I also hope to create some downloadable resources for the benefit of my readers. I have some ideas drafted out, but I’d like to wait to make changes until I have my entire plan devised.
Therefore, you may not hear from me for a little while, but I will eventually be back—hopefully better and more consistently than ever. Thank you for your patience and support, and I’ll be in touch!
Cheers,
Holly
Looking forward to your next chapter!