The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Thursday, June 19, 2025

Notably: It was Library of America Day a few days ago, the postman–who rang twice a couple of weeks ago: he was carrying books from France–bringing the second volume of Wendell Berry’s Port William Novels and Stories: The Postwar Years. I have not gotten as far into Berry yet to know what these Port Williams books are about, but they seem to be his Yoknapatawpha County. Instead of Faulkner’s fictional Mississippi based on the non-fictional Oxford), it’s Berry’s fictional Kentucky. The two novels in the second volume span the years of 1945 to 1978, those 50s, 60s and 70-s the French call les trente glorieuses, as in “the 30 glory years” of the post-war miracle. It wasn’t that much less glorious here, with those decades of equality and opportunity and tax sanity as we haven’t known since Reagan’s election. Berry published The Memory of Old Jack in 1974. The book is set in 1952. It’s an elegy by the protagonist on the last day of his life: “Distressingly few novelists treat both their characters and their readers with the kind of respect that Wendell Berry displays in this deeply moving account of the final day in the long life of a remarkable human being,” went the Times review by James Frakes. “On this vibrant September day in 1952, Jack Beechum, 92 years old, relives in richly textured memory the highlights and dark stretches of his career as tobacco‐farmer, husband, father, lover, crusty mentor, man‐model, and archetypal friend in the small river community of Port William, Ky. While the present bustles around him in disjointed and confusing flashes, the “firm sequence of the past is fleshed out with vivid ritual‐like immediacy: “tracing the way by which he came here, into this final solitude of an old mind shaped and taught by years of which all the other rememberers are dead.” All the other rememberers are dead. When do we begin to see for what it is the solitude we’re left with by the death of those we loved–a bitter salve and encouragement toward the inevitable. Remembering, from 1988, about Andy Cartlett, who’s lost his right hand in a farming accident and ponders a fork in his road. The volume includes two dozen short stories. Even summarizing it here is like smelling something appetizing from afar and hungering for it, though the reading pile is a bit too gargantuan these days, lengthened by an earlier Berry.

—P.T.

She had the fierce ideological integrity of her ambition. She had the closely ordered calm of her household and her ways. And Jack threatened both with his wildness, his love of ranging in the dark, which she did not feel or understand and so feared. She could not accompany him into the dark. She could not release herself into what she did not know and could not see or foresee. It was not so much that he violated her as that he asked her to violate herself: his rough hand reaching into her bodice, or insinuating itself upon the inside of her thigh, his eye that watched, first gaily and then fearfully, for her response to his hand—they asked her to be broken, to desire what she could not provide, to open herself to a completion of which she would be ever afterward a fragment. And so, though his hand went its way, though he sought the clefts and shelters of her flesh, though he entered her with the awe of a pilgrim, though he drove into her like the taker of a city, though the storm of his desire cast him ashore upon her at last, as meek and strengthless as a child asleep, yet there remained some prize, some vital gift that she withheld. She hid her eyes from him. As much as before their marriage, she remained to him an unknown continent. She offered him no welcome, afforded him no prepared ways. Each time he made his way to her, he came upon her as if by chance, a newcomer, blundering in the dark. He returned each time more fearfully, and at greater expense.

–From Wendell Berry’s Old Jack (1974).

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