Novelist into Farmer
Pleasant Valley. By Louis Bromfield. (Cassell. 10s. 6d.)
WHEN, after Munich, war seemed likely, and Mr. Louis Bromfield returned from France to his native Ohio and bought himself a farm, it was perhaps inevitable that sooner or later he would tell us all about it in a book. He is not the only popular novelist, in America or here, to take up farming "on the side," in the gay assumption that all that was necesary to make a success of it was plenty of cash and a bailiff. The only difference (if lasting results can be assuiried at so early a date) is that Mr. Bromfield seems to have succeeded.
And so here we have the expected book all about his farming adventure. No doubt his numerous readers, the world over, will buy it and read it ; but one cannot help wondering what they will make of it. He himself calls it "frankly a romantic book" ; and in so far as the reclamation of more or less derelict land can be said to consti- tute a romance, that is what it is. Also, of course, there are chatty chapters about such quaint old Ohio characters as Johnny Appleseed, who used his metal cooking-pot for a hat and scattered seeds of fennel, spruce and lily from his poke wherever he went, and about Mr. Bromfield's pets on the farm. But these comprise only a fraction of the book ; the remainder is made up of more serious matter—the story, in short, of how one farmer has done his best in a few years to redeem a thousand or so acres from the vandalism of his pre- decessors, who, in common with so many American old-time farmers, had exhausted the land by bad farming. It is here that Mr. Brom- field's fans are surely in for a shock.
Admittedly, even such a desperate theme as the degradation of American fanning can be made the basis of a romantic story, as Mr. Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath well showed ; but Mr. Bromfield's narrative is much more pedestrian. Those hill-farms which he bought, and merged, in Ohio, were largely typical in that their previous owners had " mined " them—" as if their rich fields were no more than coal or iron ore to be dug up and sold." They had, in fact, made their contribution to the tradition that caused the American farmer to become "one of the worst farmers in the world" and to the consequent erosion of which it was estimated that "if the soil lost annually . . . was placed in ordinary freight wagons, it would fill i train reaching four times around the earth at the equator."
Slowly, today, this grievous state of affairs is being remedied by the application of a system of agriculture that includes "terracing and covet crops, trash farming, proper drainage and forestry practices and pasture treatment, the use of legumes as green fertiliser, diversi- fied farming and the rotation of crops." And the best of Mr. Brom- field's story tells of his own share in this reclamation.
"Each day the forest grows greener and thicker. Each year the soil grows darker and deeper and the crops a little heavier. . . No longer does the soil vanish by the ton after each rain to darken the streams and leave our fields bare and sterile. On the thousand acres of Malabar no living gully, however small, exists like an open wound today. Each year more water gushes from the springs to water the cattle and the sheep and feed the little brooks where the
. water cress, which tolerates only clear, pure, cold water, grows on the gravelly bed."
It is a story that was worth telling and could have been better told without the frills. Was it necessary to say, quite so often, that he has made "a great deal of money," has supped with the great and has Jived on the fat of many lands? But perhaps Mr. Bromfield, whose conviction of the importance of good farming to the world economy is never in doubt, had in mind the need to interest a wider public than would have been attracted by a factual, straightforward narrative? If so, the intention was admirable enough ; for in this one-World era it matters to everybody everywhere, in town or country, this side of the world or that, that there should be a responsible awareness of the necessity for good farming as the ultimate basis of human well-being.
All the same, it is doubtful whether the popoilnr-novel reader will not demand more jam with the pill Mr. Bromfield seeks to administer. As for the serious reader, he could spend his time to better advantage by studying C. McWilliams' Ili Fares the Land, which goes to the roots of the matter and is based on the findings of the La Follette
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