When I get lonely for times long gone and people who no longer populate my world, I feel a great need to read Wendell Berry and visit Port William. There is so much in these stories that harkens back to my own early life, particularly the older people, the two women Andy Catlett calls “grandma” and “granny” (which just happens to be the same names had for my two grandmothers), and his two grandfathers, who are so different and yet so much a part of the same mosaic of life.

Wendell Berry can paint that world so vividly that you are walking in it once again. He has all the details right: the night time slop jars, the cold barn, the smoky stripping room, the aromatic kitchen, the hard labor and the sense of satisfaction. Life seems simple, but life is complicated, and the skills are an art, unpraised and taken for granted, but missed.

She did not do much in the way of exact measurement. She seasoned to taste. She mixed by experience and to the right consistency. The dough for a pie crust or biscuits, for instance, had to be neither too flabby nor too stiff; it was right when it felt right. She did not own a cookbook or a written recipe.

Exactly the way my mother and grandmother cooked and the reason no one else could EVER make biscuits like Mama’s or blackberry pie like Grandma’s.

For the most part, Berry just gives us this world without too much expounding upon what it means. You cannot fail, under his spell, to see what it means. But, in this novel particularly, he does tackle the difficult question of race relations, and he does so in a way that I’m not sure anyone else has ever done, and in a way that rings so true of my own childhood and that I find impossible to explain to those younger than myself. It was such an unfair and unbalanced system, a political travesty, but between individuals, it was sometimes very much genuine respect and love.

And so perhaps I offend current political etiquette, as I offend the racism to which it is opposed, by saying that, in and in spite of the old racial arrangement into which we both were born, I loved Dick Watson, and he treated me with affection and with perfect and unfailing kindness.

We were living in the history of “race relations”, to be sure, but, like everybody else, we were living as ourselves in it.

Andy is a boy born into a world that is changing rapidly from agrarian to industrial, and he can see the changes taking place before his young eyes, as horses and wagons give way completely to automobiles and trains. Looking back, he wonders (as I often do) why he failed to ask all the obvious questions about family and life before his time; how he let the people with the answers slip away without writing the stories down or tapping the wealth of knowledge they alone possessed. Mostly, though, he remembers the love and the closeness, the sense of family and belonging, the details of his first bus trip alone and his feelings of passing from childhood to something closer to manhood, if only a small step closer. For, Andy is on the cusp of darker days, World War II is about to have its lasting impact, and he is about to find out about the things that make a boy a man.

And so that year of 1943 was in a sense my last year of innocence, of the illusion of permanence and peace. I was about to enter the time that is told by change, by death and loss, by the absence of the past and its members. By now, of all the people I have been remembering from those days in Port William, I alone am still alive. I am, as Maze Tickburn used to say, the onliest one.

Every time I read a Wendell Berry novel, I am grateful, immensely grateful. Grateful for my own life experience, for the window I had into that past that haunts but warms my own old age, and grateful for God’s grace in giving us such an author, such a man, who could capture it again and put it into words, and make it live on--forever. ( )

This is the author's latest book in his string of novels about residents of the fictional rural town Port William, Kentucky. The main character of this book, Andy Catlett, recounted his experience in 1943 as a 9-year-old spending winter holidays at both sets of his grandparent's houses. During his time over the holidays, he also ran into several Port William residents that are main characters in the author's other books. :P There were details of what farm life looked like in rural Kentucky in the 40s. These descriptions and details remind me a bit of the Little House series. Pleasant to read. The story was narrated by an elderly Andy Catlett 60 years after the event. When Andy describes these childhood experiences, he would often go off a tangent and talk about how these experiences impacted him as a person later in life and how he now better understands those experiences, the people around him at Port William, and just life in general. There were philosophical reflections on technology and modernization, racial relations (his grandparents had black workers helping them on the farm), life and death (because the elderly Andy knew they were about to experience death of family members, due to WWII, or sickness and old age). Those were pleasant to read as well. ( )

In this novella, Andy Catlett describes his “early travels”: when, at the age of 9, he was granted some early independence and responsibility. Narrated by Andy much later in life, he paints a picture of his extended family and the broader Port William community. In December 1943, the people of Port William had not yet felt the impact of World War II, but Andy hints at devastating losses to come (and, if you’ve read any of the other Port William novels, you’ll already know what he’s referring to). But for now, Andy is nurtured by a close-knit, caring community and this clearly shapes the man who figures in some of the other novels. At just 115 pages, Andy Catlett is a sort of “filler” work in the Port William novels, providing a character’s back story, but there’s not enough here for the novel to stand on its own. ( )

[a:Wendell Berry|8567|Wendell Berry|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1209652700p2/8567.jpg] has such a comforting authorial voice: warm and wise, contemplative, humane, nostalgic. This short novel is a snapshot of a vanished America. It never really goes anywhere, but it's a joy to spend time with these characters nonetheless. ( )

I’ve long been an admirer of Wendell Berry’s poetry and essays on activism, farming, social justice, and the environment. This was my first foray into his fictional world of Port William.

It’s 1943 and nine-year old Andy Catlett is going to visit his paternal and maternal grandparents alone for the first time. Although there are differences in the details, there are so many parallels to my own life and relationship with my grandparents in this book that it is uncanny. And Berry, poet that he is, captures the feelings of Andy (and me) towards his grandparents, his family, his “place”, with precision and beauty. His description of the protagonist would also have fit me for much of my young life:

“As even I had noticed, I could not be good at home and at school at the same time, which meant that I was a worry to my parents all the time.”

Like Andy, I also travelled often to my grandparents alone. I had a “country” set on the paternal side in Mokane Missouri, and a “city” set outside of Baltimore Maryland. It was a good 30 years after this story that I was nine years old but I still noticed the huge difference between rural and urban living. Although they had running water at my Grandma and Grandpa’s, the hand pump was still in the front yard and they still had a large garden supplied much of their food. Nana and Grandfather lived in a grand ivy-covered house in an old neighborhood. It was there that my heart was, and remains. I still drive by that house everytime I am in the Baltimore area, which is much more often than I am off the mainroads in Missouri.

So this book resonated with me constantly. Andy is recalling his family as an old man, as I am now as well. There is so much elegant writing describing his memories. The paragraphs on his mom and grandma especially touched me. Andy remembers his mom in this touching paragraph:

“When I was behaving myself and out of trouble more or less everywhere, my mother was a refuge to me. She understood the not always manifest quietness I had inside me that made me dislike gatherings and want to be alone. Even when it put her at her wit's end, she understood it. She understood my times of introspection and silence, my susceptibility of being carried away by a book or a thought or something vividly seen in my mind. She encouraged my intermittent bookishness. She approved of what she called my "long thoughts." She was often only amused at my weakness for drifting away from whatever I was supposed to be doing--except when I was supposed to be doing my homework. When I drifted away--mentally or (as I preferred) physically--from that, I "drove her crazy" and made her wonder what was going to become of me. There were times when I sat helplessly not-thinking about my math while she stood over me as helplessly, and perhaps hopelessly too, with a shingle or a switch. At my best, I hope, I deserved her sympathy, for I greatly needed it and took shelter in it. She was, and her memory is, a comfort to me.”

And then his Grandma:

“But knowledge grows with age, and gratitude grows with knowledge. Now I am as grateful to her as I should have been then, and I am troubled with love for her, knowing how she was wrung all her life between her cherished resentments and her fierce affections. A peculiar sorrow hovered about her, and not only for the inevitable losses and griefs of her years; it came also from her settled conviction of the tendency of things to be unsatisfactory, to fail to live up to expectation, to fall short. She was haunted, I think, by the suspicion of a comedown always lurking behind the best appearances. I wonder now if she had ever read Paradise Lost. That poem, with its cosmos of Heaven and Hell and Paradise and the Fallen World, was a presence felt by most of her generation, if only by way of preachers who had read it. Whether or not she had read it for herself, the lostness of Paradise was the prime fact of her world, and she felt it keenly.”

But my déjà vu really hit when he talked about his feeling upon leaving his Grandma after a visit. Berry could be writing about my Nana and me:

“That made me realize that I hated to go. I would miss them when I was gone. To make a journey, especially alone, always carries a metaphorical power, and I felt the sorrow of it pass over me. We come to a place we love, we meet loved ones there, and we go. The thought of leaving made me realize how much I liked being there with her. I looked around for something more to do, something she and I could do, before I would have to go.”

Even as an adolescent that had plenty of friends, lacrosse, soccer, and mischief to keep him occupied, I cherished my time with her. Sitting in her warm kitchen playing solitaire next to each other and eating Taylor’s Pork Roll sandwiches.

The point is that Berry’s writing evokes that long-lost time in my life even as he is talking about a scenario that is fictional and different from mine in many significant ways. That, to me, is writing at its best.

Whether you’re interested in the rural America of the past, enjoy a heartfelt tale, or would like to experience one of America’s great multi-talented writers, you should read some Wendell Berry. I’ll leave you with another favorite passage:

“Time is told by death, who doubts it? But time is always halved--for all we know, it is halved--by the eye blink, the synapse, the immeasurable moment of the present. Time is only the past and maybe the future; the present moment, dividing and connecting them, is eternal. The time of the past is there, somewhat, but only somewhat, to be remembered and examined. We believe that the future is there too, for it keeps arriving, thought we know nothing about it. But try to stop the present for your patient scrutiny, or to measure its length with your most advanced chronometer. It exists, so far as I can tell, only as a leak in time, through which, if we are quite enough, eternity falls upon us and makes its claim. And her I am, and old man, traveling as a child among the dead.”