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Louis Bromfield’s “Cubic Foot of Soil”
An essay by David D. Anderson
Reprinted from the Summer 2005 Ohioana Quarterly
When I noted with some dismay several years ago that the then-new (1996) two-volume reference work
American Nature Writers, edited by John Elder and published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, in all its seventy substantial entries on American writers and twelve equally substantial supporting essays, completely ignores Louis Bromfield, I was determined to return to the works of one whom I, like so many others, had neglected for too long.
The neglect on my part had not been total. Since the publication of my Louis Bromfield (1964) and my
anthology Sunshine and Smoke: American Writers and the American Environment (1971),
I had written a number of encyclopedia and dictionary entries on Bromfield as well as several essays and papers, in all of which I emphasize the many dimensions of his life and work as novelist, mythmaker, Jeffersonian, practical and experimental farmer, ecologist, nature writer, and agricultural spokesman. In all these varied dimensions I stress a remarkable unity of philosophy and purpose that continued to the end of his life.
In them I point out, too, that in both dimensions of his life, as writer of the
fiction that dominated his life and American best-seller lists from 1924 to 1944,
and as practical ecologist and farmer from 1940 to his death in 1956, his life and
work were dominated by two themes that stemmed directly from his Jeffersonian conviction that
human beings must learn to live in harmony with others and with nature. In them I noted, too,
that in all his fiction, ranging from the panel novels The Green Bay Tree (1924); Possession (1925);
Early Autumn (1926), his Pulitzer Prize novel; and A Good Woman (1927) to The Farm (1934),
his best, most deeply felt novel, and beyond, Bromfield wrote of the despoilers, whether industrialists or farmers, who damaged and destroyed the natural world as they constructed a Hamiltonian society dominated by materialism and its concomitant greed. That world drove each of Bromfield’s young people out of the once-rich Ohio countryside in search of a place where they might live in accordance with the values that had been lost in America in the years between the Civil War and the Great War of 1914–1918. During those years, materialism ran rampant and ultimately won, resulting in a despoiled countryside, mined for profit by greedy or ignorant farmers, a countryside marked by polluted streams, and smog-infested, dehumanized cities, where individualism had been lost to the machine.
This period, that in which Bromfield’s best fiction is set, is the subject
of my first response to the neglect of Bromfield in American Nature Writers. This was a paper,
“Louis Bromfield and Ecology in Fiction,” given at the Conference on the Culture of the Ohio Frontier
in 1997 and later published in Midwestern Miscellany XXV (1997). In it I examined Bromfield’s use
of and attitude toward the natural world of rural north-central Ohio in his
novels as he portrays materialism triumphant over both the rationalism of the eighteenth
century and the romanticism of the nineteenth. In it I end with a discussion of Bromfield’s autobiographical novel,
The Farm, as that novel portrays the transformation of the Ohio country from natural wilderness to unnatural wasteland as experienced by three generations of an Ohio family. That work culminates in the life of a young man determined to understand what cannot be reversed and ultimately to escape it in his imagination if not in fact.
At the end of that essay, I promised the rest of Bromfield’s story, that of the practical farmer,
ecologist, and naturalist, as well as myth-maker and nature writer, that he became after returning to
America in 1938 from fourteen years of exile in France, his goal to return to the rural Richland County, OH,
countryside that he had left twenty years before to go to war and to search out the land that would become
Malabar Farm. His return, the result of the war clouds of 1938 foreshadowing another war, the exposed nature
of his country retreat at Senlis, on the traditional German invasion route to Paris, and the vulnerability
of his young family, combined with the affluence acquired by a decade of best-sellers and film rights sales,
gave him the opportunity that the young protagonist of The Farm had been convinced was gone forever as
an earlier war approached.
During the first five years after his return, Bromfield continued to write and
publish fiction, including two volumes of short stories and five novels, none of which carried
either the indignation or the determined search of his earlier, best fiction.
This series culminated in a devastating review by Edmund Wilson in the New Yorker XX (April 1, 1944)
of Bromfield’s What Became of Anna Bolton entitled “What Became of Louis Bromfield?” What Wilson didn’t
know or chose to ignore was the fact that Bromfield had largely lost interest in writing fiction
in returning to Richland County, OH, where he purchased three worn-out farms, combined them,
called them “Malabar Farm” after the Indian coast where two of his novels were set, and
determined to reverse the course of history by restoring them to full fertility.
By 1940, writing fiction had become the means by which that restoration would be financed rather than the end in itself that it had been for so long. For the rest of his life - from his establishment of the farm and his construction of the “Big House,” a monument to himself and the Ohio early nineteenth century past, until his death in 1956 - his conviction was reserved for the determination to restore the farm, to operate it effectively and ecologically soundly, and to record his experiences and what he learned in some of the most effective nature prose of this century.
This record appears in the seven volumes of non-fiction that Bromfield published between 1945 and 1955, works that eclipsed and supplanted his fiction. These works, ranging from the folklore of the Ohio country to personal essays, political and economic theory, and treatises on practical agriculture, have their common inspiration in Bromfield’s Malabar experience and their common theme is his conviction that the enlightened American in the twentieth century must, if he or she would survive in an increasingly material world, return to the dictum of the eighteenth century enlightenment that reason must be applied to experience, that one must generalize intelligently from his or her conclusions and both apply and publish the results. And nowhere, Bromfield was convinced, can the individual find truth more clearly presented than in the observation of the natural order of the earth and the living things that inhabit it.
Malabar Farm, the natural order of the microcosm, despoiled by five generations of human ignorance and greed, would provide the place - a word descriptively important to Bromfield - where observation, learning, experimentation, and determination would return depleted earth to the natural order.
The record of Bromfield’s successes and failures - and there were more of the
former than the latter - properly belong to agricultural history, the results of which are clear today at
Malabar Farm, now part of the Ohio State Parks system and operated as a working farm.
But the record is evident, too, in the seven volumes that came out of the Malabar experience. In 1945,
he published Pleasant Valley, the story of his return, his strong sense of rediscovery, and the experiences of the first five years on the farm. The book consists of a series of loosely connected essays in which he describes his sense of discovery, tells the stories behind the farms and houses that made up Malabar Farm, and defines the theory and practice of agricultural and natural principles that had already, by 1945, resulted in the restoration of much of the soil that had been depleted for a century.
Central to the book is the exposition of Bromfield’s two plans for the farm: to restore the eroded fields and hills to full production and to provide full economic security for the families who lived and worked on the farm. Sound practices, including grass and trash farming, would restore the soil; the farm itself would produce everything needed for subsistence except coffee. In effect, the farm would become the natural or in microcosm, a general society in an age of specialization. But that plan - that dream, in effect - was modified many times in the first five years, as it would be in the future.
But the book is more than the record of Bromfield’s return to the land and the working out of his
romantic dream. In some of his most effective and deeply felt work, he explores the countryside,
the people, the animals, and the legends that have given it life for more than a century. In “Up Ferguson Way,”
he combines the beauty and wildness of a lost farm that exudes a mystic aura marked by the spirits of
long-dead Indians and settlers, the stones that mark the sites of long-gone cabins, and the relentlessness with
which nature eradicates human signs. In “Johnny Appleseed and Aunt Mattie,” he recreates the most enduring
of Ohio legends, those of Johnny Appleseed and the Lost Dauphin; in other essays, he retells other valley
legends ranging from the pastoral to the violent. In each of the essays is echoed
Bromfield’s search for the natural order, for insights into the life cycle of plants, animals,
the countryside, and the inexorable passage of time. The relationship between Bromfield’s Pleasant Valley
and Thoreau’s Walden is clear, even as Pleasant Valley defines the path whereby, Bromfield was convinced, one might find fulfillment and peace in the social as well as the natural order. In the final analysis, he was convinced, the secrets of life and nature are revealed clearly and completely in the ultimate microcosm that is a cubic foot of soil.
Bromfield followed Pleasant Valley with the first of two economic treatises, A Few Brass Tacks
(1946). Like its successor, A New Pattern for a Tired World (1954), A Few Brass Tacks extends Bromfield’s Jeffersonian search for order and harmony in nature to the economic and social world, seeking a new harmony between production and consumption through rational distribution. In so doing, he asserts in the first volume, as he does in more detail in the second, that principles of sound agriculture can remove the sources of much of the disharmony and violence in the world. Jefferson, rather than Karl Marx, he asserts, is the source of the order that must prevail if man is to endure.
In a sense, Malabar Farm (1948) is a sequel to Pleasant Valley in that it records
the results in only a few years of what Bromfield had set out to do in the early years on the farm. If
Pleasant Valley is imbued with a sense of discovery, of enthusiasm and confidence, Malabar Farm
is a record of failures as well as successes, particularly of the impact of economic reality on romantic convictions.
In Malabar Farm, Bromfield assumes throughout, in eighteenth-century fashion, the self-evident
truth that inherent in nature is a perfect balance in the continuous cycle of birth, growth, reproduction, death,
decay, and rebirth that governs the natural order. The application of that truth is best exemplified in the essay
“The Cycle of a Farm Pond,” in which Bromfield recounts the restoration of a pond and the springs that
feed it after generations of abuse had dried them up. In the apparently elusive but ultimately
perceivable order that lies beyond the result of human abuses, Bromfield sees the order that
gives the pond and its spring the life that had been denied them for so long. The pond, like the
soil of the farm itself, is returned to its normal, natural place in the order that governs all things.
Bromfield ruefully recognizes, too, the failure of an important part of his dream for Malabar: that the intricacies of modern economics made impossible the establishment on the farm of a totally self-sufficient unit, and it was increasingly becoming a specialized operation for the production of beef cattle. It was to be the first and not the most serious of his disappointments.
In a sense, Out of the Earth (1948) is the agricultural textbook describing the Malabar experiment that
Malabar Farm was not. In it, he restates his conviction that worn-out soils can and must be restored,
but here he presents the evidence and describes the techniques that had made restoration the basis of
Malabar’s success. This is the means, perhaps the only means, he insists, by which a growing world
population can hope to feed itself. The book marks, too, the acceptance of Bromfield, his theories,
and his practice by many in the farming community, as the bulging file of letters after the publication of
Out of the Earth attests, and it is this success that led him to write A New Pattern for a Tired World (1954), in which he proposes a system whereby land will be restored and its produce distributed to the world’s people.
By 1955, Bromfield was ailing, and he had little more than a year to live; but in that time
he published two more books: From My Experience (1955) and Animals and Other People, published later the same year. In the former, Bromfield looks back at a life that he is reasonably sure has been well lived, particularly in his decision to return to Ohio and to the land. Much of the text is technical in its record of the past and his plans for Malabar-do-Brasil, a project for the future that was ultimately carried out by his younger daughter, Ellen Bromfield Geld, and her husband. But interspersed among the technical chapters are some of the most personal writing Bromfield was ever to do: his sense of romantic escape from the world in his return to Ohio; the frightening reality that shook him badly when he saw what was ahead of him; the determination to make the ideal real. In it, too, he records the discovery of his spiritual kinship with Albert Schweitzer’s “reverence for life,” and he knows that that principle had governed life at Malabar and beyond.
Included in the book is some of the best nature writing and mythmaking that Bromfield was to do and some of the best that has ever come out of rural Ohio and America. Among these are the essays “A Hymn to Hawgs” and “The Hard-working Spring.” In the former, he describes the pig-raising operation at Malabar as it is part of the natural order of the farm, and he explores, too, the idiosyncrasies of hogs as living, individual beings, a theme he would explore in detail later; in the latter, he explores place and people and the life cycle of both. Perhaps most telling, however, is the justifiable pride that he takes in reconstructing the soil of Malabar. In nature, he recounts, it takes ten thousand years to build an inch of top soil; at Malabar three to seven inches had been created in little more than a decade.
In his last year, Bromfield also published Animals and Other People (1955), a remarkable re-creation
of Malabar, its people, and its animals, and the mystic rather than rational ties that unite them.
Perhaps most telling, however, is his summation of what he had learned on the farm:
In the last analysis we are all animals and the fact of being born a man does not endow us with any special
rights or virtues; rather it imposes upon us obligations of a high order indeed, which animals and birds do not share -
obligations of intelligence, ethics, decency, loyalty, and moral behavior.
The sad thing is how frequently these obligations are violated and ignored by man himself.
Perfection and order had ultimately eluded Bromfield at the end, perhaps giving rise to this regretful epitaph and final statement. Bromfield died at University Hospital, Columbus, on March 18, 1956. The next day his ashes were added to the soil of Malabar and to the “cubic foot of soil” in which, Bromfield was convinced, all of nature’s creation was made manifest.
This article originally appeared in the Midwestern Miscellany, XXVII, spring 1999. Our thanks to the editors and to the
author for allowing us to reprint it as part of our Ohio Legacy Series.
David Anderson is author or editor of thirty-five books and more than three hundred
published articles, essays, short stories, and poems.
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