Chapter Ten

Louis Bromfield, Malabar Farm,
and Faith in the Earth

ONE OF THE MOST interesting parks in northeastern Ohio is Malabar Farm, founded by Louis Bromfield, the author and farmer who conducted the first American experiment in sustainable agriculture. The estate, now a state park near the little town of Lucas, occupies 580 acres in a valley about twelve miles west of my place. Although the Mohican State Park and Forest provide many more miles of trail riding, the environment there is all deep woods, while the twelve-mile Malabar Farm trail contains both field and forest surroundings and many more changing vistas. From the horse-trailer park, I can survey the hills to the north rising from Pleasant Valley and the deep woods to the south. I particularly like to ride here in the autumn when the leaves of the sugar maples are red, the oaks golden, and the sweet gum fuchsia and copper. September and October are still warm, but flies no longer plague the horses as they do in summer.

I first read Bromfield in high school and heard much about the celebrated farmer-novelist whose name nevertheless has been forgotten by most non-Ohioans. During a camping trip at the Mohican State Park in the 1970s, I found the house by accident as I was driving in the area; having seen its picture in books, I knew at once that I was at Malabar. Sixteen years later I moved here and began to explore the farm in detail.

The bridle trail begins at the edge of a meadow and winds through young deciduous trees, wildflowers, and woody vines down a steep ravine where it enters the woods and continues to a creek. In places the trail is wide and dry, while in some of the lowland places the trail is muddy and obscured by fallen leaves. We canter up an incline, across a meadow of deep purple iron-weed and goldenrod, and through the old apple orchard that Bromfield first envisioned providing the farm’s cash crop before he abandoned that plan for beef and dairy. At the end of the orchard, the trail leads abruptly down and around a bend into the deeper woods. Here the trail widens and passes through a section of old growth forest with towering sandstone features called “rock cities” rather than “caves.” The farm managers have installed plastic tubing to bring the sap from the maple tree stand to the valley where in the winter it is processed into some of the best syrup in the area. I regret that the sap is not gathered in the old way, with buckets on wagons drawn by horses, but state funding does not allow for hiring many workers. The trail winds down a very steep path to the riparian plateau of Switzer Creek, crosses the stream, and climbs the bank to the other side where we ascend a hillside and emerge at the gravel road that leads from the working farm to the Malabar Inn.

The high point of the ride, this part of the bridle trail contains cultural and personal significance. The wide swaths of corn, wheat, alfalfa, and clover remind visitors that Bromfield was one of the first agriculturalists to promote contour farming and return to natural fertilizers. My horse and I pass the pond featured in the chapter of Malabar Farm titled “The Life Cycle of a Farm Pond” where I can hear frogs and birds singing and view herons still as reeds, watching for fish. The sky is dazzling cobalt, and cirrus curl upward like the foam on cresting waves. Above the pond stands a small barn where I used to buy hay when I first moved here. Farther to the east are the pastures separated into four “cells” that allow cattle to be rotated; while one area is grazed, the others are allowed to lie fallow so that grass can grow back, and hence the pasture is not overgrazed. Across Pleasant Valley Road, the two-story brick house, built in 1820 to be a stagecoach inn, now serves as a restaurant. Beneath the inn is a farm market where vegetables and fruit grown at Malabar are for sale, kept cool by water that flows from the hillside. Farther down and closer to the barn, a pump invented by Bromfield brings the water back out of the ground, propelled by water pressure, not electricity, in the shadow of an old shed where in Bromfield’s day vegetables were sorted and washed for canning.

A side trail crosses Pleasant Valley Road to Mount Jeez where Bromfield gave Sunday lectures on sustainable farming and gardening to hundreds of visitors during the 1940s and 1950s. From the top, the viewer can gaze southward at a 290-degree panorama that includes the rural landscape where five counties meet—Richland, Ashland, Holmes, Knox, and Morrow. The main trail runs along a tractor path between contour-planted rows of corn and alfalfa the length of the working farm, about a half mile, the most exhilarating part of the ride. Here my normally placid trail horse, Dakota, gallops so eagerly that I imagine he dreams he is the reincarnation of Secretariat.

Toward the end of the field, the tractor path turns south toward the barns of the working farm. Across Pleasant Valley Road on private property, a nineteenth century brick schoolhouse is now a dwelling, and for a long time a tree stood in the field, the iconic oak in The Shawshank Redemption, under which the character called Red discovers the box Andy has hidden for him. (The tree is now gone, having been stuck by lightning several years ago.) As I head toward the working farm, I pass sheds for tractors, plows, disks, hoes, hay wagons, and other farm implements. The largest barn houses cattle and, formerly, Belgian draft horses that pulled the wagonloads of visitors around the farm. Now tractors pull the wagons. There is also a petting corral where children can become acquainted with sheep, goats, and donkeys; a farm pond below the barns is usually occupied by ducks, mallards, and Canada geese. The working farm office is located here across the road from the white house, now a youth hostel, where the Bromfields lived while their big house was being constructed. We walk past the buildings and the place where volunteers used to keep the Victory Garden planted by Bromfield in memory of one of the customs that helped the Allies prevail in World War II. Farther on we come to the white picket fence surrounding Oliveti Cemetery, a pioneer graveyard dating back to 1820, where Bromfield and his wife, Mary, are buried along with other family members. Once past the cemetery, we swing into a brisk trot past cornfields and pastureland and continue down the gravel road to the point where we entered the working farm.

About a quarter mile away, the great house, featured on calendars and postcards, sits grandly on a hillside across the road from the main barn, which houses exhibits on sustainable farming practices. It is a replica of the one built by Bromfield, rebuilt by the Timber Framers Guild, as the original burned to the ground in 1993 because of faulty wiring in an incubator. Beside the barn, visitors explore a dairy, coops and pens for hens and ducks, interpretive center, and aviary. Behind the house the terraced flower gardens descend to another farm pond. Part of the bridle trail winds behind the house, up a hill, and into the woods. The rider emerges at the top of the hill into a series of alfalfa fields in a large clearing where we can gallop along a tractor path. At the end of the field the trail enters the woods again, emerges onto another part of the expansive alfalfa field, crosses Hastings Road, and then reenters the woods before leading back to the Horsemen’s Camp and finally the trailer park.

When asked to contribute to the Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twentieth-Century American Nature Prose Writers (2003), I suggested that my subject be Louis Bromfield whose work I was rereading at the time. The editors had not planned an entry for him, however, and I ended up writing about Aldo Leopold. Bromfield was also excluded from American Nature Writers, an unfortunate omission since Malabar Farm contains eloquent and prescient environmentalist writing, and his six other volumes of non-fiction written between 1945 and 1955—all of which emphasize the necessity of harmony between human beings and the natural order—constitute a significant contribution to the literature of nature. Using the term “ecology” in its current sense long before most writers did, Bromfield devoted his life to restoring the land and healing the rift between industrial society and nature. As a result of his boyhood experience on his grandfather’s farm and his own experiment in sustainable agriculture, he produced at least two books that should be included in the canon of environmentalist writing and place him among the ranks of notable literary environmentalists—Pleasant Valley (1945) and Malabar Farm (1948).

As I read more extensively in the work of Leopold, I was increasingly struck by the similarities between our most famous twentieth century literary ecologist and Bromfield. The narrative structures of both Malabar Farm and Pleasant Valley recall yearly patterns and focus on the observations of everyday life on the farm as Leopold so eloquently does in A Sand County Almanac. Leopold, like Bromfield, also wrote many articles on practical themes, such as attracting songbirds, maintaining fish populations, conserving soil, and protecting old-growth forest. Bromfield, like Leopold, lectured widely on the subjects of conservation and wildlife preservation, and his writings also addressed cultural and moral concerns, although Bromfield traveled around the world while Leopold stayed mostly in the United States, making only one trip abroad to Germany.

Initiating the tradition followed by Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry, Bromfield focused his attention on sustainable farming practices and believed that the farm should resemble as much as possible a natural ecosystem. He also revered the task of farming and thought farmers were among the most intelligent and valuable workers in society. Living within a place and adapting one’s life to the ecosystem in which one lives—what poet Gary Snyder calls “being inhabitory”—was as essential to Bromfield as it is to Snyder and Berry; as Berry was to do, Bromfield returned in his later years to farm in the area where he had been born and raised. Like the poet Robinson Jeffers, Bromfield questioned the economic direction that he thought America was taking and believed that true independence meant living within one’s ecological means. He also imagined a green economy before environmentalists developed that term. Most of all, Bromfield resembled the quintessential American farmer-author-inventor-philosopher Thomas Jefferson, who envisioned not wealthy men but yeoman farmers as the backbone of the social order and the agrarian life as preferable to any other. Praising Jefferson in Pleasant Valley as “our most civilized American,” Bromfield alludes to him more than to any other writer and followed his example as an experimental agriculturalist, inventor, political and cultural thinker, Francophile, and believer in an economy based on family farming. He would not have agreed with Jefferson’s holding slaves or his refusal to recognize his children by a slave mistress, writing in Malabar Farm that the solution to “racial differences and ills” is equal economic opportunity, education, nutrition, better social ethics, and an end to ideas about the superiority of one race over another.

Louis Bromfield, who led one of the most fulfilled and active lives I have ever read about, was a native of Mansfield, Ohio, born in 1896 to Charles Brumfield and Annette Coulter Brumfield, whose ancestors dated back to the original pioneers in Richland County in the north-central part of the state. He claimed that an editor’s mistake on a publication changed his name to Bromfield, although some critics have suggested that the idea was his own. Louis gained his love of the land and agriculture from both his father and his grandfather Coulter; from his mother he acquired love of literature and desire to distinguish himself, and in a large extended family he found the prototypes of many fictional characters. His interest in writing was nurtured early when he worked for the city newspaper, where he met people from many backgrounds different from his own. After a year studying agriculture at Cornell, he returned to help on his father’s farm. He then chose to study journalism at Columbia, but when the war came he enlisted in the US Army Ambulance Service, seeing much action at close range from 1916 until 1918 and being awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French government. In 1919 he returned to New York and worked for the City News Service, the Associated Press, G. P. Putnam, Time, and The Bookman. In 1923 he married Mary Appleton Wood, a New England debutante from a family of publishers. His first novel, The Green Bay Tree (1924), was an immediate popular success.

Many critics placed Bromfield in the style and tradition of the Victorian novelists and of Balzac, Galsworthy, and Sherwood Anderson. His visit to India in 1932 produced The Rains Came, praised by Braj Kishan Koul Agyani, the book’s translator into Hindi, as the only novel about India written by an American who demonstrated the sympathy an Indian would have for his own country. Not all critics lavished such compliments, however. Edmund Wilson at The New Yorker criticized Bromfield’s work severely and claimed that he had not lived up to his early promise. Joseph Wood Krutch wrote that, while Bromfield had the storyteller’s art, he did not contribute anything new in situation, character, idea, or point of view. Krutch described Bromfield as having merely a “simple sincere style and a competent narrative method.” Marxist critics at The New Republic charged that Bromfield was a reactionary Hollywoodite due to the fact that many of his books were made into films (Bromfield himself wrote screenplays and knew many actors, including James Cagney, Lauren Bacall, and Humphrey Bogart), and they misread his novel A Modern Hero as praise rather than condemnation of materialism.

Recent critics have reassessed Bromfield’s contribution to fiction, stating that his strongest work—most of which was written while he lived in France—conveys the message that human beings must learn to live within the laws of nature and that industrialism destroyed communities and meaningful ways of life. Like Sherwood Anderson, Bromfield knew how stifling life in small industrial towns could be. His first four novels—The Green Bay Tree, Possession, Early Autumn (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize), and A Good Woman, which Bromfield suggested could be collected as a “panel” series—all concern the escape from the narrowness of small-town existence but also the increasing alienation of industrialized society from the natural world. The first paragraphs of The Green Bay Tree describe a garden walled to keep artificial beauty in and industrial ugliness out. Also like Sherwood Anderson, Bromfield did not believe that escape necessarily meant fulfillment; it often led to alienation. No pastoral idealist, Bromfield believed in embracing the present with all its imperfections.

The Farm, Bromfield’s semiautobiographical novel, most fully conveys his conviction that the degradation of the earth by industrialism and greed leads to diminishment of society and individual freedom. Some critics have suggested that this novel embodies Bromfield’s conception of the Ohio country as an ideological battleground between two forces—the Jeffersonian ideal of the yeoman farmer versus the destructive Hamiltonian philosophy of trade and industry. Three passages describe the transition of the region from pristine wilderness into industrial wasteland. A stream called Toby’s Run, viewed by the owner, flows clear among wooded hills, although its corruption has begun: the name derives from a native dweller who drowned there, drunk on the whiskey the settlers brought. Next the stream is described through the consciousness of the pioneer’s son-in-law just before the outbreak of the Civil War. The hills, denuded of trees, are covered by houses, and although the waters are still clear, cinders and gravel have begun to fall from the railroad bridge that now spans it. Finally, the founder’s great-grandson, at the outbreak of the Great War, gazes at the stream that has become a sewer carrying debris and pollution from the factories to the river. Houses along the stream are not pioneers’ cabins but hovels, where factory workers live in conditions as degraded as the river. The name Toby’s Run remains, however, underscoring the beginnings of the corruption of the wilderness, although the townspeople have forgotten its origin as well as its history.

Whereas his novels tell of alienation and disruption, Bromfield’s seven volumes of nonfiction, written in his last fifteen years, demonstrate the way toward belonging and fulfillment, not in the pursuit of material success but in learning to live in harmony with nature. Those works are Pleasant Valley (1945), his account of the return to Ohio and the first six years of his experiment in sustainable agriculture; A Few Brass Tacks (1946), a study of economic imbalances and their possible remedy in strong communities; Malabar Farm (1948), the record of his observations and experiments, together with an account of his successes and failures; Out of the Earth (1950), almost an agricultural textbook on restoring soil; A New Pattern for a Tired World (1954), his most ambitious socioeconomic work; From My Experience (1955), a reappraisal of his work on the farm; and Animals and Other People (1955), a collection of his best nonfiction essays.

The story of Bromfield’s return to Ohio and farming begins with a trip Louis and Mary took to France in 1924, which turned out to be a stay of fourteen years. The Bromfields leased a house with a large garden in Senlis near Paris where Louis wrote and fulfilled his passion for gardening. They entertained a diverse group of people from nobility to peasants, on Sundays receiving as many as eighty guests, which included F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Somerset Maugham, Edith Wharton, Edna Ferber, Pablo Picasso, and the Maharajah of Baroda. Bromfield wrote later in Malabar Farm that one of the most stimulating of his wide acquaintance was Gertrude Stein; he described her as naturally brilliant and praised her immense capacity for enjoyment of the moment. Although Bromfield traveled widely—in Spain, England, Cornwall, Switzerland, Denmark, Austria, Holland, Indonesia, and India—he was most attracted to France: if fortune smiled, the French knew how to spend their money; if not, they knew how to make the best of a bad situation. In Pleasant Valley Bromfield includes this tribute: “I am deeply grateful to the French for what I learned from them of the earth, of human values and dignity and decency and reality. And I am grateful to Louis Gillet, dead now of a heart broken by the humiliation of France, for the long talk of the evening in the moonlit forest of Ermenonville while we listened to the calling of the amorous stags, for he sent me back to the country where I was born, to Pleasant Valley and the richest life I have ever known.” The Bromfields left France reluctantly when the next war became imminent and Louis was convinced that he could help his adopted country more from within the United States.

Louis had been contemplating the idea of buying a farm in the United States before 1933 while writing The Farm. The family, which by then included three daughters, returned before him in 1938 while he remained to help with war relief in the Spanish Civil War. The following year he bought three adjoining farms in Richland County, Ohio, and the family set out on the way of life that was to occupy them until Louis’s death. Thomas Wolfe notwithstanding, Louis did go home again. The farms—the Anson, Fleming, and Ferguson places—described in Pleasant Valley included one thousand acres which had at one time all belonged to John Ferguson, a hunter and trapper who had been given a deed of 640 acres of forest by President James Monroe, and whose family line ended in 1890. In the pile of deeds, writes Bromfield the novelist, lay the human history of the place—of marriages, births and deaths, quarrels, bargaining and bankruptcies, and strange tales like that of Ceely Rose, the miller’s daughter, who murdered her parents because (she thought) they would not let her marry the man she loved.

The story, however, was not recorded only on paper but in the earth, forests, and buildings; it also constituted “a sad history of rich land slipping downhill over a period of more than a century. The story was sadder even than the history of the births and deaths, the crimes and the murders written into the deeds. It was the story of good earth being murdered by carelessness and bad farming and greed and ignorance.” Bromfield describes his three reasons for choosing Pleasant Valley as his location: he had loved the valley and had never really been able to escape it; he could not tolerate the thought of living where the land was completely flat; and he wanted to prove that worn-out farms could be restored and that hill country could be farmed successfully. He explains the deeper reason for undertaking his experiment:

I knew in my heart that we as a nation were already much farther along the path to destruction than most people knew. What we needed was a new kind of pioneer, not the sort which cut down the forests and burned off the prairies and raped the land, but pioneers who created new forests and healed and restored the richness of the country God had given us, that richness which, from the moment the first settler landed on the Atlantic coast we had done our best to destroy. I had a foolish idea that I wanted to be one of that new race of pioneers.

Here Bromfield joins ranks with Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, and Wes Jackson in proposing a new way of life drawn from tradition but inspired by a new ecological ethos.

The Great House at Malabar Farm (named for the Malabar Coast of India), however, did not resemble a pioneer’s cabin. Bromfield wanted it to represent the New England architectural style that he thought characterized northern Ohio, arguing that architecture should be suited to place and way of life. The dormer windows imitated the style of the inn at Zoar, a nineteenth century communal agricultural experiment founded in Tuscarawas County by German settlers. Craftsmen as skilled and careful as those Bromfield had known in Europe created the cabinetry and woodwork. The twin stairways and big doorways at either end of the big hall combined the simplicity and dignity of the Jeffersonian Greek Revival style. Purposely designed to look as if it had been added onto, the house was intended to be put to hard use. Not only was Malabar a working farm but also the scene of much coming and going. The Bromfields remained social people who were well liked and sought after as they had been in France, and Louis wrote in Malabar Farm that scarcely a week passed “without visitors from some remote part of the world as well as from all parts of the United States.” Describing the vista from the house, Bromfield explains the importance of landscape and memory:

It stands overlooking the Valley which I loved as a boy and still love better than any valley in the world. I fished the creek below and ranged the hills and woods hunting and gathering nuts as a small boy. I swam in the swimming hole where now the kids of the farm go swimming. I find there the continuity which existed in France, that growing of one thing into another, the succession of generation by generation, which is the rich, satisfying rule of Nature herself and indeed of all civilization. I think the dream of that house was there long ago in the days when as a small boy I knew every tree and spring and pasture in the Valley.

Bromfield sounds prophetic when he foresees the time when his house would receive visitors as a state park: “Perhaps one day it will belong to the state together with the hills, valleys and woods of Malabar Farm.”

Like Aldo Leopold, Bromfield believed a farm was the best teacher. He begins chapter 11 of Pleasant Valley with the Confucian saying that “The best fertilizer on any farm is the footsteps of the owner.” In an acre, Bromfield asserts, there is the whole of the universe and the answer to most of man’s problems. He held good farmers to be among the most intelligent citizens and among the best educated people because they had to know more than any other professionals: “A good farmer must be many things—a horticulturist, a mechanic, a botanist, an ecologist, a veterinary, a biologist and any number of other things—but knowledge is not enough. There must be too that feel of all with which nature concerns herself.” Agriculture was the most satisfactory and inexhaustible of the sciences because it included so many other areas of study. The good farmer knew and appreciated tradition but also kept an open mind, ready to absorb new ideas, and therefore he was a stimulating conversationalist and companion.

Even so, the knowledge was being forgotten, as many farmers in America used up the soil until it was worthless and left the area. Exceptions to this pattern were the Pennsylvania Dutch, the Amish, and the Mennonites who lived closely among themselves. Farmers whose ancestors had immigrated long ago turned out to be poorer farmers than the more recent arrivals, Bromfield observed, because older European methods of farming were unsuitable to the American soil and climate. The more recent immigrant farmers, however, had learned from scarcity that they must conserve, and this experience put them ahead of the farmers whose families had long been in America.

Slowly a system of sustainable agriculture suitable to the United States had evolved, not primarily from Europe but from Asia and the Near East, of using terraced crops, cover crops, proper drainage and forestry, natural fertilizer, diversified planting, and crop rotation. Writing only fifteen years after the Dust Bowl, Bromfield advised readers that America is not a land of limitless resources and that the American method of “mining” the soil for its fertility had become bankrupt. One of Bromfield’s suggestions was that farmers learn from garden clubs, to which he gave many lectures, because gardeners often knew more about soil.

Sounding very contemporary, Bromfield lamented that the sickness of American agriculture was due in part to the gradual disappearance of the family farm and its replacement with mechanized farms more like industries. He did not believe that the impulse of the time toward regimentation, centralization, mechanization, and industrialism represented true progress; instead, they produced material rewards at the cost of human stamina, decency, and dignity. He lamented that the high cost of machinery prevented young people from going into farming, much as the high cost of land prevents many from pursuing farming today. Modern economics thus subverted the dream of the self-contained family farm, which Bromfield believed represented the heart of social harmony.

Bromfield echoes Henry David Thoreau and precedes Wendell Berry when he states that a nation is based on its natural resources, forests, and agriculture. In the preface to Pleasant Valley, he writes that “agriculture is the keystone of our economic structure” and “the wealth, welfare, prosperity and even the future freedom of this nation are based upon the soil.” The nation was beginning to pay for the destruction its greed had brought, Bromfield warned. A tremendous job of restoration and reconstruction awaited the country, greater than the job of subduing the wilderness. Later in the book Bromfield sounds again his call for a new type of pioneer farmer:

What we need is a new courage and a new race of pioneers, as sturdy as the original pioneers, but wiser than they—a race of pioneers concerned with the physical, economic and social paradise which this country could be… . These new pioneers will have to be men who sit not in libraries working out theories, but men who understand the people of this country and the illimitable wealth of its natural resources and beauties, and above all the fact that there is wealth for all and a good life and that it is founded, as is the wealth and well-being of every sound nation, upon its soil, its water and its forest.

When the soil was gone, the nation would be gone, even “its crude materialistic and mechanical manifestations.” Short of war, there was no greater human folly than allowing soil erosion. In Malabar Farm Bromfield continues this theme:

Out of the earth we came and to the earth we return, and it is the earth itself which determines largely our health, our longevity, our vigor, even our character. In the broadest sense any nation is as vigorous and as powerful as its natural resources, and among them the most important are agriculture and forests, for these are eternally renewable and productive if managed properly. Upon them, and largely upon agriculture depends another vast source of any nation’s power—the health, vigor, intelligence and ingenuity of its citizens.

When agriculture fades, the civilization fades; therefore, permitting the soil to erode constituted moral failure. “Man himself cannot escape from Nature,” Bromfield writes in Pleasant Valley, “Neither can he ever subdue her or attempt to exploit her endlessly without becoming himself the victim.” In Malabar Farm he continues, “Nature is still unconquered by man and when he attempts to upset or circumvent her laws, he merely courts disaster, misery, low living standards, and eventual destruction.” His statements seem especially far reaching in this time when climate change, caused by burning fossil fuels, presents our greatest challenge.

Bromfield also articulated a new economics based on long-term investment in the land and people. There would be no shortcut through socialism, communism, capitalism, or fascism. Marxism, with its emphasis on materialism, negated all that man is; however, wrote Bromfield presciently, those who believed that industry and technology were the sole means of liberation were as wrong as the Marxists. Neither the boom businessman nor the New Dealer understood that theories would not make a strong culture: good farming communities, however, could create economic security. The American nation had every possible advantage with rich resources and freedom from invasions, but it had the mentality of the rich son who wastes what he inherits, Bromfield continues in Pleasant Valley. Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot knew that in a democracy action must come from the people and not be imposed on them, but the government should invest heavily in education so that people could understand the choices before them. Industry and great cities brought the evil of economic insecurity, Bromfield wrote in Malabar Farm; like Robinson Jeffers in “Shine, Perishing Republic,” Bromfield foresaw a period of decline for the United States: “Sometimes it seems to me that we are in a period resembling the beginning of the disintegration of the Roman Empire, one of those periods when ‘civilization’ having reached a peak, starts slipping back again out of sheer weariness and moral decadence through a kind of anarchy into a simplified primitive existence.”

For an example of the best kind of life, Bromfield goes again to the French. The permanence and continuity of the French culture had emanated from its contact with the soil. The French peasant or working man had a little plot of ground and modest house and wages but had more permanence and stability than the American worker or even white-collar businessman who received higher wages but who rented his house and was perpetually in debt for his car, radio, and other luxuries. The so-called high standard of living of Americans was an illusion, based on credit and installment payments, which caused homelessness and penury if the husband lost his job. Bromfield continued in Pleasant Valley that “real continuity, real love of one’s country, real permanence had to do not with mechanical inventions and high wages but with the earth and man’s love of the soil upon which he lived.” What Bromfield missed most about France, he wrote, was not the intellectual life or the “curious special freedom” a foreigner feels in a country he or she knows well, but the old house and few acres that he had worked for fourteen years. Of all his honors he especially valued the diploma given him by the Workingmen-Gardeners’ Association of France for his skill as a gardener and the medal given him by the Ministry of Agriculture for introducing American vegetables into popular cultivation in the market garden area surrounding the city of Paris. He tells the story of his friend Bosquet who had a few acres on which he grew virtually every sort of vegetable; kept chickens, ducks, pigs, and goats; built his own house with help from friends; and owned everything he had—house, furniture, old car, gramophone, records. He worked in a machine-tool factory. When he was laid off, he and his family never went hungry because they grew everything they ate. Manure from the livestock went back into the soil as fertilizer. He gathered fuel from the nearby state-owned forest. This life Bromfield contrasts with that of the laid-off American worker who was in debt for everything and who went on relief when unemployed. The Depression, Bromfield explains, stemmed from American extravagance and the conviction that there is always more to exploit. The whole society has convinced the worker that it was his patriotic duty to buy as much as possible on the installment plan. The laws of economics are as immutable as the laws of nature and mathematics, however, and so if costs are not recovered, the whole enterprise collapses. Sounding like Aldo Leopold, he continues in Malabar Farm that material things are not what provide security or happiness:

One might add that all this is true and that it might save the world if the trill from a migrating sparrow could be heard above the clamor for higher wages, higher profits, election promises, water closets and automobiles, above all the outcry for materialist things and standards by which man does not live, by which eventually he dies the death of the soul, of the spirit, of all understanding and growth, in the end, of decency itself. An age in which God is represented by the Holy Trinity of plumbing, overtime and assembly lines is not a great age, unless man learns to use these things for his freedom and the growth of his spirit rather than his brutalization.

Bromfield’s religious views—like Leopold’s, Jeffers’s, Berry’s, and Snyder’s—are centered in the relationship to nature, not in transcending it. In Pleasant Valley he writes that living close to wild creatures enabled him to feel an integral part of the grandeur and beauty of nature and to understand the beliefs of the Jains of India who believed that lives, even those of insects, were sacred. Religion never came to him through churches or people but by seeing “the beautiful dignity of the small animals of the field, of a fern growing from a damp crevice in the rock, or a tulip tree rising straight and clean a hundred feet toward the sky.” Many of the best farmers were not regular churchgoers or religious in the conventional sense because their faith arose not from a church or creed but from closeness to the land.

The otherwise bucolic narrative of Malabar Farm includes a tale of heroism arising from the French Resistance. Denyse Clairouin, whom the Bromfields had known in France, visited Malabar Farm in 1941 on a visa secured for her by someone working for the Underground inside the Vichy government. Through her and his French publisher, Louis donated all his royalties to the Underground, a transaction which could not have occurred except between two French citizens. His royalties otherwise would have been seized by the Germans who prohibited the publication of his books after they occupied France and who had long since proscribed his writings in Germany.

Clairouin was arrested, however, after her return to France and died in Mauthausen concentration camp in 1945. Thus does Bromfield show that no place, however rural, can ever be entirely separated from the rest of the world politically as well as ecologically.

Bromfield’s patriotism nevertheless escaped officials in the United States. The Mansfield News Journal revealed on August 22, 1999, that the FBI had kept a file on him between 1941 and 1954, including information on his speeches and social affiliations. Among his most suspicious activities, the report states, were the facts that he was living on a large farm where he entertained an unusually large number of visitors—some of whom were under FBI surveillance; gave Sunday sermons on farming techniques and soil conservation; and knew and socialized with many Hollywood stars. The file included the information that Bromfield was interested in Russia and France and that he had lived outside the country for a long time. Also causing suspicion was a letter he had written saying that he would be a sponsor for the Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, which fought an attempt to deprive a California resident and Communist Party member of his naturalized citizenship. A memo dated June 9, 1943, and published in 1999 by the News Journal reveals the extent of the FBI’s knowledge:

Bromfield still residing at Malabar Farm, Lucas, Ohio; follows the occupation of gentleman farmer and writes weekly syndicated newspaper column entitled “Voice from the Country.” In this column he acts as spokesman for the farmers and discusses various political and economic problems of current interest. Has been visited by [name blacked out] Managing Editor of the Daily Worker, and [name blacked out] Ohio State Communist Party Secretary. He is reported interested in work of Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, an alleged Communist Front; was a sponsor for American Soviet Friendship Rally in Cleveland, Ohio; and spoke at Chicago meeting of “France Forever,” criticizing United States policy in North Africa and recommending post-war alliance between United States and Russia as basis for a stable postwar arrangement.

The file ends with a two-page memo dated May 28, 1954, which includes four paragraphs of Bromfield’s alleged affiliations and activities and concludes that he was a “communist sympathizer.” The agent probably had not read Bromfield’s books on farming, however, for the file does not include his assertion in Pleasant Valley that the design of Malabar Farm was based on a Russian commune and in Malabar Farm that the success of reactionary politics was always checked by its own smugness and capacity for underestimating other people. Whatever their motivation for the investigation, the FBI did not stop Bromfield’s work.

Pleasant Valley and Malabar Farm stand as elegant testimonies to faith in the earth. The lyrical opening of Malabar Farm signals the reader to the descriptions of the cycles of nature to follow: “August 31 [1944]: The drought broke today with a heavy, slow, soaking rain which began during the night and continued all through the day. Forty-six days without rain, save one or two thunderstorms, has left the corn that was planted early in the season parched and dry with only undeveloped nubbins as ears. … Drought in our green Ohio country where it is seldom expected is a shocking experience. It raises in good Ohioans a sense of indignation and outrage.” The book is a collection of diverse pieces, five of seventeen being journals of a farm year representing the four seasons (with two summer journals), discussions of Bromfield’s philosophy of farming, chapters on new farming methods, the life cycle of a farm pond, and grass as healer for soil deprived of humus. In its tapestry of descriptions of farm practice, wildlife, economic theory based on soil conservation, and cultural theory based on small communities, Malabar Farm reads like a forerunner of Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild.

Malabar Farm and Pleasant Valley are narrations of hope as the farm itself is a working monument to that hope. Families visit the Great House and hear about the writer’s movie star friends who helped with weeding and canning. They also tour the barns and fields and learn about experimental agricultural practices—crop and grazing rotation, contour farming, composting—which have become widespread due to the influence of environmentalists and visionaries like Bromfield.