Books: "Wendell Berry: Port William Novels & Stories (The Postwar Years)"

 

Wendell Berry: Port Williams Novels & Stories (The Postwar Years) - The Memory of Old Jack, Remembering, Stories

Edited by Jack Shoemaker

Library of America; hardcover, 800 pages; $40.00; available today, Tuesday, July 16th

Wendell Berry created a portrait of rural America, as seen through the lens of Port William, Kentucky, that is one of the most fully imagined narratives in American literature. It is a river town that is home to generations of Coulters, Catletts, Feltners, and other families that was collectively known as the Membership, women and men whose stories show the richness of life in community.

This series edition from The Library of America, which is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full-cloth cover, and a ribbon marker, was prepared in consultation with the author, and has the complete Port William novels and stories presented in chronological order for the first time. This reveals the intricate nature and irresistible through lines of his larger masterpiece.

In this second volume of Berry's works, there are two novels and twenty-three stories, including "The Divide (V-J Day)," "One Nearly Perfect Day" (1946), "One of Us" (1950), "The Boundary" (1965), and "The Wild Birds" (1967). 

It spans the years 1945 through 1978, with Port William pushing itself into the age of mechanization and confronts the looming possibility of its own disappearance. There is an updated chronology of Berry's life and career, a map of Port William, and Membership family tree, plus helpful notes. 

Port William map.

Membership family tree.

As families begin to move to cities, Andy Catlett "thinks of the long dance of men and women behind him" and chooses to stay. His neighbor, Burley Coulter, says, "The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don't."

The Memory of Old Jack (1974, 1999) is an elegy for the choleric and lovable Jack Beechum, who on the final day of his life relives stories of the land he worked and the people who shaped him. Remembering, from 1988, finds Andy Catlett, who has lost his right hand in a harvest accident, once again at a crossroads. 

These novels are framed and reframed by the stories that accompany it, among them the final ones that center on Burley Coulter and Mat Feitner, "The Dark Country," "That Distant Land," and the humorous, while heartbreaking, "Fidelity."

The editor, Jack Shoemaker, has worked with Wendell Berry for over fifty years. He was the cofounder and editor-in-chief of North Point Press, and co-founded Coutnerpoint Press, where, in his role as editorial director, he published the work of Gary Snyder, M.F.K. Fisher, Evan S. Connell, Robert Aitken, Anne Lamott, Jane Vandenbaugh, and many other writers.

Project support for Wendell Berry: Port William Novels & Stories (The Postwar Years) was provided by Edwin S. Matthews Jr., who made an additional gift to the Guardians of American Letters Fund to keep the volume in print.

In this excerpt from A Clearing (1945-2014), Berry writes: "Andy Catlett remembers a day when he was wandering. He does not remember very surely when this was. He was a boy, young enough to be glad his elders did not know where he was, old enough to allow the foldings and unfoldings of the countryside around Port William to draw him into wandering. It was early summer. Perhaps school had just ended after using up so many months of the year, and he was feeling free.

He remembers where he was. He was, at the beginning of this memory, crossing one of the more distant ridges on his grandfather Feltner's farm. He was at the top of the ridge. When he looked back to where he had started, he could see, among the treetops of Port William, the steeple of the church, one of the gables of his grandparents' house, and the cupola on the roof of their home barn. On the top of the spire on the top of the cupola, though he was too far away now to see it, he knew that a mockingbird was likely to be singing.

Ahead and below, in the direction he was going, the open pasture ended and the woods rose up, its various greens all darker than the grass of the pasture. Perhaps he was thinking of the shadow contained in the woods, where he would be out of the sun. In that direction he could not see far. It was maybe a hundred and fifty yards to where the woods started, or resumed, and at that distance the mottled greens and shadows of the foliage against the strong morning light appeared as impenetrable as a wall. Above the woods was only the sky with its wide procession of white clouds. Behind and below him now lay the wooded hollow he had just climbed out of, his steps seeming to assume a direction as he entered the full sunlight and could see his shadow on the ground.

He walked anyhow fairly straight and purposefully down to where the slope steepened and the woods began again. As he approached the woods, it lost the aspect of a wall and acquired increasingly articulate shallows and depths, revealing ways in. He began to see openings, high up, that birds might fly through.

He found an entrance lower down, along the brushy edge, where he could go in himself, and he went in. A great change of feeling came over him, as complete as the shadow of the woods within the woods. In the open grassland of the ridgetop, it easily could seem to him that he watched himself, as if from somewhere above, as if from a cloud, and he could easily tell himself, as he often was likely to do, the story of himself: 'Now the boy is walking across the ridge.'

In the woods he disappeared from himself, or he disappeared from his picture or his vision or where he was. In the woods his vision was all of the woods. In the shade of the woods he could see better, and he was cooler. Though he had not noticed or thought about it, the direction that had guided him across the ridgetop now had left him, and he began again to wander. He could not see far ahead, and he had no direction in mind. Or he had lost whatever direction he might have had in mind, or any need or wish he might have had for a direction. It was too soon after breakfast, too long until dinner, for him to be hungry. His shadow when he had been in the sun was still plenty long. Nobody anywhere would be maybe about as long as he was tall, when the day began to heat up even in the shade, when his stomach notified him that it was getting empty, then direction would return to him, and he would head back toward his granny's kitchen. But time also was lost to him now. He was in no hurry.

And so he became almost thoughtless. He had already submitted, almost without thinking, to the charm of the little paths that laced across the face of the slope under the trees. It would be maybe fifteen years before there would be deer again in this country. Here and there he would see and for a while walk along a cow path. But most of the paths, and about all of them where the slope was the steepest, had been pressed into last year's fallen leaves by the feet of small animals. These were just traces, almost invisible, and yet offering dependably the best footing. Sometimes they led to something he saw that he wanted to get closer to and see better. Sometimes they led to or departed from the mound of earth at a groundog hole. Once he stopped to look at a half-grown gray fox that had stopped to look him, and a shiver crawled up between his shoulder blades." 

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