By Jack Ellis
Special to THE DAILY

A retired professor from The University of Alabama in Huntsville, Carter Martin is also a poet and farm owner whose knowledge and experiences are mirrored in the lives of his characters and in the narrative details of “Kelbrn.” It’s a novel whose basic story holds the reader’s attention while concealing layers of meaning and symbolism.

Martin calls his book a bildungsroman, a German word for a tale that describes the psychological evolution of an individual, with particular attention on moral awareness.

In this case, the individual is Miles Kelley, and the story begins with his childhood on a Wisconsin farm near Fond du Lac, an almost Edenic landscape of windmills and sunsets. From this he is suddenly uprooted by his father’s stubborn resolve to move the family to Madison, so as to be in a university town where he can pursue his delusional schemes as an inventor.

As the father sinks into failure and alcoholism, young Miles copes as best he can, eventually leaving home for a stint in the Submarine Corps after America enters the war against Germany in 1917. Afterwards, he settles in New York City, working as a reporter on a scandal-mongering rag called the Guardian.

Soon he falls in love with a strong-willed professional woman named Cissy Barr, a gynecologist, feminist and daughter of a judge, but opposite temperaments soon result in annulment of their marriage. Miles retreats to his sister’s house in North Carolina. Drinking and desperately lonely, he seeks to heal his inner being and to find meaning in life. It is this quest, and the seeming randomness of events surrounding it, that helps define the book’s theme.

Shifting the scene to the familiar places of the author’s own youth raises the book to a new level of immediacy. In a bid to recover what had been lost in childhood, Miles uses a financial windfall to purchase a decrepit farm, and with the help of a black tenant farmer named Jeff Hawkshaw, turns it into a profitable dairy farm. He names it Kelbrn, a combination of letters he thought would “make it have the ring of Ireland.”

For a time, all seems perfect. Miles marries again — this time to a Southern girl named Malinda Evans — and, with the help of Hawkshaw, begins developing new varieties of paints and sealants, which he first tries out on his farm buildings. His formulas use the rich red local soil as part of the mix, and he discovers that they are equally effective for coating threads produced in a textile mill owned by his brother-in-law.

As in childhood, however, Miles is unable to control the forces dictating his fate. Public knowledge of his decision to share part of the proceeds from the new business with his black tenant prompts a nighttime visit from the Ku Klux Klan, sending Hawkshaw and his family in terrified flight (Miles eventually arranges for them to live in California).

Then comes the crash of 1929, which spells the doom of Miles’ business. He finds himself working in a cotton mill, and, to the anger of local whites, starts giving away surplus milk from his dairy to mostly poor blacks. Meanwhile, he begins drinking heavily, indifferent to gossip about his adulterous relationship with one of the young mill workers.

There follows the slow, rancorous disintegration of his marriage to Malinda, which even the birth of two sons is powerless to stop. The deterioration of Kelbrn mirrors Miles’ own descent into the abyss, and with the news of Pearl Harbor, he abandons wife and family to join the Navy again, only to be posted to a boring clerical job in Virginia. At war’s end, he returns to Kelbrn a stranger, already knowing about the lover his wife has taken.

From this point, the story takes several unexpected turns, which I will not reveal, except to say that one of them involves his former black tenant Hawkshaw. While Miles’ prospects eventually improve, readers who like blissful endings and nicely tied-up story lines will not find them here.

Ultimately, it seems, Miles Kelley serves as a metaphor for the human condition, for that unique species that is endlessly capable of holding contradictory notions of realism and illusion, hope and despair. In the novel’s words, Miles “knew only that he wanted to live, and he could do that only in the way he had learned, from one day to the next, accepting some of what each offered him but without regret for what he missed or for what betrayed him.”

“Kelbrn” is a fascinating study in character, full of small scenes within scenes that, like a Bruegel painting, are rich in detail and allegory. Examples include young Miles tuning up his grandfather’s old banjo; a look inside a 1920s textile factory; a North Carolina fox hunt; and a particularly haunting episode where Miles helps his father-in-law clean out an attic full of family keepsakes for a rummage sale after losing the place during the Depression.

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