Customer Reviews

Pleasant Valley

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Novelist Louis Bromfield won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1927 (Early Autumn). He wrote a total of 31 books in his lifetime. But, for my money at least, Pleasant Valley is the best book he ever wrote. Malabar Farm comes a close second. Bromfield's other farm books include: The Farm, 1933 Out of The Earth, 1950 Animals and Other People, 1955 From My Experience, 1955

In 1962, his youngest daughter, Ellen, wrote The Heritage -- A Daughter's Memories of Louis Bromfield. She tells the story of growing up in the shadow of her famous father and his Hollywood pals -- Bogie and Bacall were married at Bromfield's Malabar Farm in 1945 -- wonderfully well. But even better, I think is her 1957 Strangers In The Valley, the story of how she and husband Carson moved to Brazil to start a Bromfield-style farm on the new frontier there.

Jim Breiner is right: Louie Bromfield was a genius and a brilliant writer. Living in France in the '20s, he helped Hemingway first get published, and was compared favorably with Fitzgerald, thurber and Steinbeck, among others. His fiction is now dated, but his farm writing is immortal.

I grew up in Mansfield, Ohio and visited Malabar Farm on occassion. However, I never read any of Louis Bromfield's book until recently. After reading Pleasant Valley I was very touched by the stories of the people and animals Louis writes about in the book. I am reminded of the beauty of life we all experience no matter where we live if only we allow ourselves the opportunity to look around. Wonderful book.

I bought this because it was one of several valuable books recommended by Gene Logsdon in his own book, THE CONTRARY FARMER. Logsdon said that the chapter entitled, "My Ninety Acres" was one of his favorite short stories. After reading it, all I can say is: me too, me too.

Romantic? Sure. But it gets to the core of what is really important in life.

This was our book club's August selection, partly because Malabar Farm is nearby. Bromfield made his name as a fiction writer, but this is non-fiction, and it would be interesting to read one of Bromfield's novels to see if his fiction still has any power to capture an audience. "Pleasant Valley" has an ecological theme that resonates well with today's readers. Twenty-five years ago when I was reading 20th century American fiction with a bunch of know-it-alls in graduate school, Bromfield was not on any radar screen. Maybe it was snobbishness or academic fashion or whatever, but I had never heard of the guy until much later and then only in relation to Malabar Farm and Humphrey Bogart. The literary critics who mention major American writers of this century never mention his name. He may be a genius and a brilliant fiction writer who has gone unnoticed, but I wouldn't know.

This book is such a personal statement for Bromfield that it probably isn't fair to judge him as a writer on the basis of this book. What I was conscious of was the polemical nature of his writing. He hectors his readers with his opinions about agriculture and human culture. Granted, he is writing in the context of recent history that included a depression, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and the Second World War. He sees his farm as a refuge from the insanity of the world that is evident all around him. Some of that writing is quite nice and funny.

The book highlights the old contrast between city and country that is a literary theme as old as the ancient Greeks and Romans.

But after a while, I got tired of hearing the same arguments over and over. Let's see if I can summarize. Natural is better than unnatural. Farmers are cultural heroes. Rotating your crops is a good idea. Manure makes good fertilizer. Do your plowing perpendicular to the fall line of a hill. Rednecks are lazy and stupid because they are brought up on inferior agricultural products of farms that have been stripped of their vital nutrients. (This sounded a little like General Buck Turgidson's rant about fluoridation destroying our precious bodily fluids in "Dr. Strangelove.")

His focus on the loss of topsoil as a huge threat to civilization is understandable in light of what he could see happening in the 1940s. But farmers did change some of their practices. The book's appeal today, I thin, is as an example of pastoral writing with an ecological theme.

This is an account of the author moving back in the late 1930's to the farming valley of his childhood which he remembered with fondness and longing.

Part memoir, part practical account, the focus is on sustainable farming, enriching the soil with manure, compost, and green crops and being true stewards of the land, not 'mining' the land as he calls it, i.e, just using the land, stripping the soil of all nutrients and allowing topsoil to wash away creating wind and dust and dead land, then moving to the next farm and doing the same thing, which the author says is one of the causes of the westward migration, though he says part of the problem was the use of European farming methods, whereas the climate in the U.S. is harsher and requires more care. I had no idea that by the late 30's farming land was in the poor state it was in, especially he says, in the south.

He has some interesting observations such as plants that grow together and seem to have some type of mutually beneficial relationship, as in the case of clover and Kentucky Bluegrass, and how there are times when weeds are beneficial. He also determined that plowing is not good for the soil because it turns the manure, compost, leftover plant material or green crops under the soil where it ferments and creates detrimental acids whereas when the materials are allowed to stay on top of the soil they break down and amend the soil.

He talks about the farms in the valley on the land he purchased and their differences and how you could tell which farmers had used good farming methods and which hadn't. He also became reaquainted and made friends with a farmer friend of his father's who truly loved and cared for the land and it was evident by how green and healthy his farm looked. (This reminded me of the Native American in the book, Grandfather, by Tom Brown, Jr. who cared for the section of woods he lived in and it looked healthier than the other parts of the woods.)

There are chapters on the refashioning of the house on the farm he chose, to suit his family, the dogs and other animals on his farm and a few others, all delightful, but the focus is on the land which I thought was especially relevant today with our soil as it is, in a dead state and kept going only by chemical fertilizers, and with the move toward organic and biodynamic farming methods.

For anyone that loves the land.