Agricultural History Review, Volume 68 Part 2 (2020), p. 321

‘How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm/After they’ve seen Paree?’ asked a popular song of 1919. It expressed the fear that mid-Western doughboys, dazzled by their experiences in the French capital, would never again ‘want to see a rake or plow’. But, to the writer Louis Bromfield (1896–1956), who was raised on an Ohio farm and volunteered to serve as an ambulance driver on the Western Front, the experience of French life brought a fresh perspective on agriculture: one which would ultimately make him the most celebrated farmer in the USA.

Stephen Heyman’s biography of Bromfield places greater emphasis, as its title suggests, on his commitment to the soil than on his literary career, but by no means neglects the latter. Indeed, Bromfield’s fame as a farmer could not have grown without his already existing reputation as a novelist. This reputation has not survived, though in his time he was an international best-seller.

Surrounded by the devastation of the Western Front, Bromfield fell in love with a beautiful rural landscape even as it was being destroyed. He had to wait six years, after his discharge, before he could return to France: a period during which he gained status as a journalist and novelist. At first he lived in Paris, among the American expatriates, but the call of rural France was strong and in 1929 he moved to Senlis. He became the town’s most noted resident – initially, because of the many literary figures who visited him; later, on account of the splendid garden he created, which was admired by painters and horticulturalists.

A neighbour called Bosquet became for Bromfield a symbol of Gallic self-sufficiency. His two-acre holding was intensely productive, largely thanks to his skill at composting. He was ‘allied with nature’, and Bromfield, sated by a hectic life of celebrity, wanted to experience that sort of stability. With the guidance of a peasant, Victor Picquet, he created a fertile soil; this required the use of methods entirely different from those which were devitalizing the land in Ohio.

By the time he wrote his semi-autobiographical novel, The farm (1933), Bromfield believed that ‘no nation can exist or have any solidity which ignores the land’ (p. 86). The ‘Dust Bowl’ was clear evidence that the USA had made a catastrophic error in treating the land as an inexhaustible resource. Bromfield was influenced by a tour of India he undertook in 1933, during which he visited Sir Albert Howard’s agronomic institute in the state of Indore. Howard had retired by then, but Bromfield was impressed by the scientific composting carried on there, and became an early advocate of his methods. India also provided the inspiration for Bromfield’s novel, The rains came, which in 1939 was made into a highly successful Hollywood film. With the wealth this brought him, Bromfield was able to build what Heyman describes as ‘one of the most influential farms in American history’ (p. 147).

Returning to America in 1938, Bromfield simply wanted to raise his children on the sort of farm – Jeffersonian, democratic – which had sustained his grandparents. His was no ‘hobby farming’. He was determined to make his farm profitable, and between 1939 and the mid-1940s transformed its worn-out land into an agricultural showpiece, using methods which were in tune with the ideas of Howard and of the US soil scientist, F. H. King.

Like the British organic school, Bromfield saw a thriving agriculture as vital to the stability both of rural communities and of the nation as a whole. Whereas industrial civilization imposed a state of economic insecurity on its inhabitants, Bromfield wanted to create a ‘thrifty island of security’ (p. 173) as an example to other American farmers. He was also, like the organicists, opposed to specialization: Malabar was a mixed farm, a challenge to the mechanized agri-business that made it practically impossible for a family to live off the land.

During the war, Bromfield grew critical of government policy; from having been a very left-wing Democrat, he shifted to supporting the Republicans. He became a spokesman for ordinary farmers at a time when, in his view, everything was being done for the sake of industry and to the disadvantage of food producers. It is possible that his attacks on the Roosevelt administration helped alter certain aspects of its policy in favour of the farming sector.

There is no doubt, though, about Bromfield’s impact on the work of the ecological group, Friends of the Land, founded in 1940. Invited to Malabar Farm the following year, the Friends were powerfully boosted by his support. He became their Vice-President in 1942, speaking on their behalf at a wide range of venues across the USA.

The story of his own achievements was now more interesting to Bromfield than any fiction could be, and he enjoyed a new lease of life as a writer of autobiographical books such as Pleasant Valley (1946) and Malabar Farm (1949). His fame as a farmer led to him appearing as a congressional witness on aspects of food policy, including the use of DDT. For a time, he supported the work of entrepreneur and health promoter Jerome Rodale (another of Albert Howard’s disciples), but came to consider him too much of an organic ‘cultist’.

Malabar Farm proved not to be commercially successful, and Bromfield was forced to accept a move to greater specialization. He poured his wealth into the project, but sales of his farming books did not match those of his novels, and he ended up in financial difficulties. His final few years are a story of sad decline.

The sub-title of Stephen Heyman’s book surely over-states the case. As Heyman points out, less than one per cent of America’s arable land is organically cultivated: this hardly amounts to a ‘food revolution’. Nevertheless, Bromfield drew attention to social and ecological issues that remain of critical importance, and Heyman has performed a most valuable service by producing such a lucid account of this extraordinary and appealing man.