The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Saturday, June 28, 2025

Byblos: Jack Beechum is 92 years old “the chill whitening dawn” of his last day. He’s able to stand at the edge of the porch of the kind of hotel that in 1952 was not yet called an assisted living facility, but no longer able to fully decrypt the accelerants upending his world around him. Port William is mostly memory, and there his mind more familiarly shelters. He thinks back to the day 64 years ago when buying two “black, mealy-nosed mare mules” was a “celebration of himself,” an untassled commencement of his confidence. He knew than that he would pay off the debt on what had been his father’s farm and make something of himself–the farm that would prove to be his only true love, his only matrimony, with consequences as desolating to his human relationships as they were exalting to this Savonarola of the land. The land was his big-sky cathedral. Walls and roofs and the people they did not always protect had betrayed him, and would always betray him. He would always like it better outside. It’s why he didn’t mind the September dawn chill on his hotel porch, well before the sun warmed him. The next chapter in The Memory of Old Jack (1974), one of Wendell Berry’s eight novels (and 57 stories) in the Port William series he began to write in 1955, just as William Faulkner was eulogizing Yoknapatawpha County with his Fable, is Jack’s mournful evocation of the day he watched his two brothers Hamilton and Mathew ride off and never return from the Civil War. “Strangers from somewhere else were trying to tell them what to do, and they would not stand for it.” Kentucky was Confederate country, and Port William was in Kentucky. “Why they went may still be a matter of conjecture,” either Berry or Jack remembers. “Even in the days of their grandfather the farm had not been a large one; there had never been more than a family or two of slaves; the family had no life-or-death stake in any of the institutions that its two sons undertook to defend.” That line, there had never been more than a family or two of slaves, slices like a transom into Berry’s at-times problematic mis-calibration (ansd in this case dismissal) of America’s deepest scar, about which Berry has nevertheless written with admirable tenacity and with insights at times rivaling C. Vann Woodward’s Strange Career or Jim Crow. But that’s how Hamilton’s and Mathew’s generation must’ve seen it: what’s the problem with owning a couple of families of slaves? Jack is very young Jack at the time, 4 years old when his brothers left on a September morning in 1862–it is a September morning on that hotel porch, remember–and he’s not even sure if he is remembering their departure as he saw it or as he was told of it. This is Berry’s nod to the shoals of memory. So much of what we remember is really not memory but interpretation, usually at second, third, fourth hand. Like history that purports to be fact. “This is not simply the knowledge of retrospect,” Old Jack’s narrator writes; “because the vision of their departure met the knowledge of their deaths in the anachronistic mind of a child, the two have fused, so that it seems to him, in his vision, that he watches them depart with the clear foreknowledge that they will not return. And they did not.” Berry’s prose in these pages is a dry sob of vespers as he describes a grief Jack is disallowed to see in his mother, fermenting a grief he will feel all his life as his mother the following spring herself dies, leaving the house “infected with a sense of loss and diminishment.” So by the time he’s 6 Jack’s character was set, “turning away from the house, from the losses and failures and confinements of his history, to the land, the woods and fields of the old farm, in which he already sensed an endlessly abounding and unfolding promise.” We are only halfway through the second chapter. Berry’s prose, like Jack’s memory, is not able to recapture the power of those early pages in this calendric book of a dozen chapters, though he writes so naturally well that the descent is barely perceptible (you have to be an asshole to detect it) except when Berry becomes so mawkish as to parody himself: “She had the fierce ideological integrity of her ambition. She had the closely ordered calm of her household and her ways.” Or this description of Jack making love to his wife Ruth, which I found both Nabokovian or a candidate for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award, which alas began only in 1993 and was coitus finivit in 2020, and whose winners have included John Updike (lifetime achievement, of course) and Tom Wolfe (for his bare-notch-above-perv Charlotte Simmons). Here goes Berry: “Under his hand her flesh contracted. He could feel it, her flesh drawing away beneath his hand. He was overpowering to her. His body bent above her in the dark was like a forest at night, full of vast spaces and shadows and the distant outcries of creatures whose names she did not know. He was a strange country and a loneliness to her. And she was doubly lonely because he feared nothing; so deeply did he belong to the place he had brought her to that even its solitude was not lonely to him.”

—P.T.