Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Glynn Young

“Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story” by Wendell Berry

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Andy Catlett, whom we first met as a boy in an earlier novel by Wendell Berry, is now an old man. As old men are wont to do, he’s looking backward – at his life, his parents’ lives, and even earlier. And what he sees, far more clearly than he would have seen in his youth, is what shaped four generations of Catletts, including himself and his own children.

It is a story, a story that happened to his grandfather, Marce Catlett, a story that happened in less than 24 hours but lasted more than a century. And it shows every sign of continuing to last. 

Marce Catlett and his good friend and neighbor Jim Stedman travel together by horse and train to Louisville. Their tobacco harvests are finished for the season. Now comes the time when the crop is auctioned in Louisville. 

Marce and Jim both have an unspoken apprehension about the auction. Both know what they need to make a profit and continue to farm. And both know there is one bidder at the auction – the agent of James Buchanan Duke, who controls a near-monopoly on the U.S. tobacco business. 

When the auction ends, both Marce and Jim leave to return home. Their profit might cover the cost of their train tickets. 

In a few short words, Marce will tell his family what happened. Fear enters the home. Fortunately for the Catletts, they won’t starve; they have livestock and some diversification of crops. But tobacco is the lion’s share of the family income. 

Even then, however, that is not the story. The story is what Marce does next. He begins to make his plans for next year’s tobacco crop. 

Wendell Berry

That resilience in the face of financial disaster, what can only be called theft by monopoly, is what propels the family forward. Marce’s youngest son Wheeler will go on to become a congressman’s aide, an attorney, and the force behind the creation of the tobacco farmers’ cooperative to ensure farmers could make a decent profit. It will propel Wheeler’s son Andy to become a professional writer and then a farmer and writer. And it will influence Andy’s own children.

That’s the heart of Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, Berry’s most recent novel and what feels like the last. Berry’s Port William novels are not precisely autobiographical, but they are clearly shaped by Berry’s own experiences. Marce Catlett reads like a summing up, not only of the series of novels but also of Andy Catlett’s, and Wendell Berry’s, life. The front and back inside covers suggest that as well – the front being a chart showing the relationships of the Feltner, Coulter, Beechum, Wheeler, and Catlett families, and the back being a map of Port William and its environs. 

The map is just as important as the genealogy. Together, they are two sides of the same coin – family and geography. The story that lies between them is the resilience that binds them together.

Berry is a poet, novelist, essayist, environmentalist, and social critic. His fiction, both novels and stories, are centered in the area he calls Port William, Kentucky, on the Ohio River. He’s won a rather astounding number of awards, prizes, fellowships, and recognitions. He lives on a farm in Kentucky. As he should.

Related:

My review of Berry’s That Distant Land.

Wendell Berry and the Land.

My review of Berry’s Jayber Crow.

Wendell Berry and This Day: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Wendell Berry and Terrapin: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Wendell Berry’s Our Only World.

The Art of the Commonplace by Wendell Berry.

Nathan Coulter by Wendell Berry.

Andy Catlett: Early Travels by Wendell Berry.

A World Lost by Wendell Berry.

A Place on Earth by Wendell Berry.

The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry.

Wendell Berry and Another Day: Sabbath Poems 2013-2023.

Remembering by Wendell Berry.

Top photograph: Broadleaf tobacco field by Rusty Watson via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The New Edition of Cultivating Oaks Press: Fidelity

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The autumn edition of Cultivating Oaks Press is online, and its full of stories, articles, poetry, and beautiful photography. The theme is fidelity, defined by my Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “the quality or state of being faithful” and “accuracy in details.” Synonyms are faithfulness, trustworthiness, and loyalty.

This issue includes stories and articles by Tom Darin Liskey, Annie Nardone, Sam Keyes, Rob Jones, Amelia Friedline, Andrew Roycroft, and Lara d’Entremont, among several others. I have a poem, entitled “52,” and an article entitled “A Lock of Hair.”

It’s a wonderful issue.

Related:

A playlist for the autumn edition, Fidelity, of Cultivating Oaks Press.

“Brookhaven” and the Pearl River Lumber Company

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A reader of Brookhaven sent n email, asking if I modeled the McClure Lumber Company in the novel on the Pearl River Lumber Company. A great-grandfather had worked there, the reader said, and she wondered.

That I had to research the Pearl River Lumber Company to respond to her should answer the question. Or, more briefly, no. 

The company was founded in 1899, building a large mill on the outskirts of Brookhaven, Mississippi. A community grew up around it and was called Pearlhaven. A rail line was built, appropriately named the Brookhaven & Pearl River Railway, and extended from Brookhaven to Monticello in the next county to the east. Coincidentally, int he novel this is roughly the road or direction that the young Sam McClure travels to reach home some months after the Civil War has ended. I even mention Monticello by name in the book. 

The lumber company was eventually acquired by the Goodyear Syndicate, and the rail line was sold to the Illinois Central in 1910. The mill was closed that same year. The rail line operated for another 18 years, finally shut down in 1928. 

In Brookhaven, from the 1850s Sam McClure’s family has been operating a grain mill, a lumber mill, and the general store across from the railroad depot in downtown Brookhaven. The grain mill, facing consolidation in the industry because of the growth of the big milling conglomerates like General Mills, was eventually closed and the property converted to racing racehorses. The lumber mill continued to operate, and the war in Europe increases demand for lumber and wood. I included a short scene about British and French representatives signing a contract with Sam, a contract which would lead to a major expansion of lumber operations. 

The Illinois Central deport in Brookhaven about 1903.

But I didn’t know anything about the Pearl River Lumber Company or the associated railroad operations. The genesis of including a lumber yard in the story came from the fact that Brookhaven is part of the Great Piney Woods of Mississippi, and natural resources like wood and lumber would come to characterize the “New South” after the Civil War and Reconstruction. The South had enormous natural resources, and while agriculture would remain the major industry, it was industries like lumber that helped pulled the South out of post-war economic devastation. 

While the novel had been published, the reader’s question took me back into research. I was rather tickled to discover what little I knew actually aligned very closely with the real story. 

Top photo: Operations at the Pearl River Lumber Company.

“Your Accent! You Can’t Be from New Orleans!”

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When you’re born and raised in a city like New Orleans, you become aware of certain things very early on.

First, there’s food. The basic New Orleans food groups are red beans and rice (on Mondays), crawfish, shrimp, beignets, and drive-thru daiquiris to go. A fifth food group might be the muffuletta. When I’d stay with relatives in Shreveport in north Louisiana, one aunt would make sure she fixed rice, because she worried I might be homesick.

Second, there’s weather. You’ve never met humidity like what saturates New Orleans. When you live in a place bounded by a lake, a river, and a gulf not too far away, and it’s built on swamp and bayous, then you will know what real humidity is like.

Third, there’s the accent. It’s not exactly unique; there are echoes of the New Orleans accent in Brooklyn and even south St. Louis. It’s a multicultural gumbo of influences, including French, Spanish, Cajun, Black American, Jewish, Italian, and German, embedded within American English. New Orleanians would be completely at home ordering in a crowded deli in Brooklyn.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Beignets by Julian Rosser via Unsplash. Used with permission.

An Evening with Elizabeth George

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“As long as the stories are there to be told, I’ll be writing.” – Elizabeth George.

Last Friday, my wife and attended an author’s talk with mystery writer Elizabeth George at the St. Louis County Library. The library’s foundation maintains a robust author program, bringing in some 150 a year. 

It’s been some time (like more than a decade) since we last attended one of these, an evening with poet Billy Collins. That one had been packed with some 800 people; the program was free. I remember having to park across a busy highway at a shopping mall.

George is the author of the Inspector Lynley mysteries. We had been fans of the PBS series (2001-2007) with Nathaniel Parker as Thomas Lynley and Sharon Small as Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers. Just recently, a new version has started on Britbox, with Leo Suter as Lynley, Sofia Barclay as Havers, and Daniel May’s as a perfect malevolent detective chief inspector and Lynley’s boss. We’re enjoyed the four episodes of the first season, including Daniel Mays as the character you love to hate. In fact, we finished episode four the night before we saw Elizabeth George.

Lynley 2025: Daniel May, Leo Suter, and Sofia Barclay

I’ve read about half of the books by George, now numbering 21. She’s on tour promoting the book, A Slowly Dying Cause, set in Cornwall. 

The program was interview-style, with George asked questions by St. Louis writer, filmmaker, and director Katherine Bratkowski. About 250 people attended; the program had an entrance fee included an expanded fee if you also bought the book. The people who attended, and it was largely a female audience, were Lynley fans.

“I really wanted to take my characters around England,” she said, “because I like England.” In the series, Lynley’s aristocratic family lives in Cornwall, so he has a good excuse to be in the area. He has to deal with problems with the family estate (a Grade II listed building, meaning repairs can only be made with materials from the time it was built). He takes DS Havers with him, “because she’s in trouble; Havers is always in trouble,” George said.

She explained that she originally created the two characters to be complete opposites. Lynley was created first – upper class, Oxford-educated – while Havers is from the working class, comprehensive-school educated, and always seems to be eating. In the original TV series, George said, “Sharon Small really got the Havers character.” For all of the characters in the stories, she writes an assessment that’s physical, emotional, and mental before she ever works them into the story.

With A Slowly Dying Cause, she says she wrote five beginnings, rewriting until it worked like she wanted it. She writes everything first draft and then goes back and edits and pares down heavily. For several of the stories, she didn’t know how the crime would be solved, “a really scary situation.” 

George says she’s been an Anglophile since the 1960s; she majored in and taught English literature for several years before turning to writing. She writes every day, emphasizing that, for any writer, discipline is the key. She said it takes about 18 to 24 months to write a novel now. 

One of the first questions from the audience was “why did you kill Helen?” Helen was Lynley’s great love, and she’s murdered in one of the books (it made a big impression on me, to the point where I can still remember who the murderer was). George’s answer: to keep the story open. Had Helen continued in the series, the overall story line would have closed down in family and children.

Yes, I got my copy of the book autographed.

She starts stories with the place or setting, then the victim, and then how the victim was killed.

George said she likes the new Lynley series on Britbox, but the episodes are very different from the books they’re based upon. “You can see the series and then read the books because they’re so different.”

It was a fun, informative evening; George loves to talk about her books and writing, and she was graciously patient in signing copies for the long line of people (including me). And she posed for photos for anyone who asked. I’ve now started reading A Slowly Dying Cause, and it’s already a great story. 

“Midnight on the Potomac” by Scott Ellsworth

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A considerable portion of my historical novel Brookhaven is set in the last year of the Civil War, and yet the novel only covers a few of the momentous events – the battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Courthouse, the final siege of Petersburg, Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox, and Johnston’s surrender to Sherman near Greensboro. 

Indirectly, the novel covers Grierson’s Raid through Alabama, the fall of Atlanta and Sherman’s march to the sea, and the political and social chaos that followed. People lived through those times; my own ancestors (on both sides of my family) lived through it.

The last year of the Civil War is also the focus of Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America. In almost a conversational vignette style, historian Scott Ellsworth guides the reader through the major events of 1864-1865, showing how they not only were significant in and of themselves but also how they shaped post-war America.

You meet spies and ghost armies, experience the horrific battle in the Wilderness near Richmond, and discover how slaves were liberated and sometimes abandoned by Union armies. You follow the acting career of John Wilkes Booth and how it led to that fateful night at Ford’s Theater. You learn how the fall of Atlanta assured Lincon’s reelection, and you join Booth in listening to Lincoln’s second inaugural speech. You meet the famous and not-so-famous, and you experience history in many of the words and first-hand accounts of the people who were themselves involved. 

Scott Ellsworth

It says something of Ellsworth’s skill that the writing and stories seem almost effortless. You know they’re not; a prodigious amount of research and knowledge was required for that “effortlessness.”

Ellsworth previously published The Ground Breaking: The Tulsa Race Massacre and an American City’s Search for Justice; Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921; The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball’s Lost Triumph; and The World Beneath Their Feet: Mountaineering, Madness, and the Deadly Race to Summit the Himalayas. He attended Reed College in Oregon and graduate school at Duke University in North Carolina. And he also worked as a historian at the Smithsonian Institution. He lives with his family in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and he teaches at the University of Michigan.

Through the power of stories, Midnight on the Potomac explains what happened that last, fateful year of the Civil War, and it does so in a highly readable, engaging way.