REVIEW: Return to Pleasant Valley
Remembering Malabar Farm
A collection of Louis Bromfield's rural writings

By Trina Smith

April 5, 2004: Return to Pleasant Valley is a compilation of some of Louis Bromfield’s later and more popular works. In non-agricultural circles, these essays may have escaped the notice of readers, so George DeVault does the reading public a service even as he may do a disservice to Bromfield. To condense and crystallize many books into one short, pithy read is a difficult task, and DeVault probably took a meat cleaver to his original stock of selections. In doing so, he gives readers an inkling of the character and ideas of a charismatic writer-turned-farmer. The downside to compilations is that they give the reader a little knowledge, perhaps enough to make rash judgments. DeVault admits that he includes certain sections hoping to spark readers’ curiosity and send them looking for the original books in their entirety. Readers may take that exact course of action. However, in the worst case, some readers may feel that they understand Bromfield and his writing when they find a quote they disagree with, and opt out of further study.

Bromfield was a larger than life character, who strode about, hunted wild game, wrote over 30 books, got into loud arguments, enjoyed good food and big dogs, and farmed like he didn’t know any better—likely because he didn’t. A few conversations between Bromfield and his farm manager Max are recounted (from both Max’s and Bromfield’s daughter Ellen’s perspectives), and they illustrate Bromfield’s idealism, stubbornness and manipulative tendencies. He thrived on doing things that made sense to him, and took no one’s advice without testing the truth of it for his own circumstances. Yet, if anyone came to him for advice (or even if they didn’t) he could not keep himself from imparting any helpful knowledge he had acquired. This is only an apparent contradiction if you expect advice to be given and taken in a quiet, trusting manner. Bromfield expected his advice-givers to be both ready to fight for their point of view, and ready for the full force of his convictions when he got rolling on a topic. Despite becoming well-acquainted with the delicate balances of soil health and the fragility of seedlings and soils, he was not always a gentle man.

Some of Bromfield’s forceful convictions are widely shared, and some ostracize both sides of a debate. He talks about the unharnessed power of lackadaisical farmers. If we motivate farmers with education, rather than dismissing them and their questions with poorly-informed recommendations, we have a new class of citizen who can teach by example or lecture the proper way to maintain fertility, yields, and biodiversity while decreasing pests, erosion and pollution. Bromfield also thought that government programs as a safety net were a sham. To his mind, no public relief program provided the security that healthy soil and various food crops did. He irked ammoniated fertilizer companies by saying that their products were no good without natural organic matter in the soil, and maddened organic advocates by saying that the liquid fertilizer would be helpful under certain circumstances. Bromfield formed some romanticized notions about farming (he battled with his farm manager over the notion that one could be completely self-sufficient [pp. 156-161]; writing about a barn, he said “it had never been painted, but for that same reason it had a beauty, and above all a dignity, which neatly painted barns never achieve, and there was about it none of the toylike appearance of the classic red-painted barn” [pp. 7-8]). Elsewhere, he indulged in harsh social classifications—I take issue with his near-condemnation of settlers on the basis of genetics (p. 83), but that allows me to join the crowd of people that disagree with him on some issues.

That said, his writing does communicate an appealing and intrinsic consciousness of food quality, watersheds, quality of life for all animals and plants, and how vigor improves any organism's chance for survival without toxic additives. Some excerpts from his stories have wonderful descriptions that are completely devoid of the larger-than-life Bromfield. I suspect that in most of his writing, he places life and nature in the superior position, and counts himself a lucky and gifted observer. In a short story titled “The Pond,” the main character expresses to us his fleeting grasp of immortality, feeling that he is an atom, a small part of the infinite wonder of an immortal nature, which just changes form. Then he regains his human sensibilities, and realizes that even as a human being, he still takes part in the infinite ego-less flow of natural history, and that in a sense—as a component and not an individual—he attains immortality.

Living in France as the Germans invaded, Bromfield became intimately aware of his feelings of mortality and felt strongly where his roots lay. “[T]he feeling of frontiers, hostility and peril became increasingly acute, and distant Pleasant Valley, fertile and remote and secure, seemed more and more a haven, hidden away among the hills of Ohio” (p. 27). He returned to Ohio and took steps to ensure his security through hard work and conviction, and we can read and judge his exploits from his own record. I’m sure he would invite us to do so, and challenge us also to determine how secure our own lives are, and what we intend to do about it.

Trina Smith is the CSA manager at Sunrise Acres Farm in Cumberland, Maine.