Windmill in the Grove

...a GOOD friend of Louis Brontfield's /\ tries to explain him by observing ' that he has a windmill in his head...

...He listened patiently not only to the professors of agriculture but to cranks and prophets like Edward Faulkner and Sir Albert Howard...

...Brooks would not conceivably write about any living author, there may be something in it...

...He brought to the enterprise everything that sticks in the unconscious'of a farm boy, everything that he had learned in a brief year at agricultural college, everything he could get the United State Department of Agri-ruiture to tell him...

...I believe him because they work even for me, on my pocket handkerchief of wild hillside above the Delaware in porthern New Jersey...

...If Van Wyck Brooks had written that I would consider it very silly, but since it is precisely what Mr...

...They work so well that I am now eating some of the earliest and best cabbages that have ever been grown in my township although in general I am an amateur and a tyro as a farmer, whereaa Bromfield is a working professional...

...I submit that Bromfield had to travel a long way from Hollywood before h* could write that...

...He used both, as did his neighbors Cosmos Bluebaugh and Walter Oakes, as did Hank Gowder in Georgia...

...Second, Pleitant Valley is a major contribution to a wholly new kind of "back to the soil" mov*n*rnt which takes the idea oltf'rnmmric drid social .planning back to the land and asks nature how much anil, what kind of plenty snd peace is possible for man'and on what terms...

...Seven years ago, Biomlield started to do this with a string of Worn-out and abandoned Ohio hill farms totalling a thousand acres...

...a movement that teaches people to stop raping the land Tike paranoid vandals, but instead to woo it and cherish it like loyal and intelligent husbandmen...

...e The next time I met B romfield was last week at the Fourth Annual Conference on Conservation, Nutrition and Human Health conducted by the Friends of the Land at the pleasant university town of Athens, Ohio...

...to the state legislature...

...The first time I met Bromfield was in 1917 when we were both inmates in a custodial institution for the mildly insane operated by the army at Allentown, Pa...

...Digest was the authentic voice of rural Ohio...

...into gulley plugging and contour plowing and composting and mulching...

...otherwise known as the training camp of the United States Army Ambulance Service...

...What we need is a new courage and a new race of pi...

...When Bromfield came back from France, bought a farm, and began sounding off about the ineptitudes of the WFA and the OPA, some of our omniscient literary commentators seemed to think it was a kind of hay shaker act put on by a sophisticated expateriate with an eye to the picture rights...

...Which if probably what has saved him from becoming permanently a writer of Hollywood tripe...

...They were wrong as usual...

...that, aa he himself frequently reiterates, he has done nothing that you or I could not do if we, put our minds and our hearts isito the job...

...as I have watched an ex-linotype operator doing on the Delaware flats just below me...

...The observation is sccurate, but needs /»>«*-» pielation...

...The windmill operated almost continuously as a matter of fapt dining the whole two-day show...

...That yell you heard in the Reader...

...in short in his heart and mind he has never been anything else but a farmer for the past twenty-five years, during which he has incidentally written a lot of popular books and made and spent a lot of money...

...He got himself a professional farm manager as partner, and hiied the beat help be could find...

...Moreover, Louis knew what he was talking about — barring a few hasty errors ot degree and timing...

...H« siphoned the irrationally large tees of Hollywood and the Reader's Digest into carefully rationed expenditures for fees), seed, fertilizer...

...Take this, for example from the concluding chapter: "The possibilities of the future are boundless...

...Hiointiehl didnSToecome a farmer yesterday...

...Loins' windmill is a good example of the American genius tor production in that it works and makes money even when the inventor has something more important in mind, a* in the present instance...

...Aiii/foi freej, the obvious fact being that Loins csies more about saving the American land than he d«s about saving himself...

...His personal windmill was going full blast—you could almost hear the clank...

...These new pioneers will have to be mm who sit not in libraries working «ot theories, but people who understand th* people of this country and the illimitable wealth of its natural resources andbrau-ties, and above all the fact that Hints wealth for all and a good life and that it is founded, as is the wealth and well-being of rvery sound nation, upon its soil, its wster snd its forests...

...I won't bother to say much about Bromfield'* book for ihV reason that you have probably read it, or should ft you haven't...

...Which is why he has -a future both as a writer and as a farmer, instead of, like certain career laureates of total politics, » literary past which one remembers with difficulty...

...On tins friendship with the land, says Bromfield, sll successful...

...It is two things: first an 'engaging and significant ' autobiographical record in which the occasional swank and bravura of an expansive personality is balanced by the underlying, integrity and hard energy of "'the Bromfield" intelligence...

...But he also would have gone broke if he hadn't used his heart...

...cated than the job of subduing the wilder, nesa by the nrst settlers...

...He was brought up on a farm, studied to be a termer, has raised his own vegetables and hobnobbed with farmers all over the world...

...oneers, aa sturdy ai the original pioneers, but wiser than they—a race of pioneers concerned with the physical, econoeiu-, and social paradise which this country could be...

...This time Louis has geared his windmill to the highest traditions of American life and letters, including, among others, the slightly crackpot tradition of Concord and Brook Farm...

...Until now we have destroyed as much as we have constructed and we are beginning at last to pay for that destruction in terms of reduced Uviag assadards and health and '-»-'"m*|fc subsidies and all manner of politieo-es, cislsscrmomic short cuts, tricks snd pan*, cess...

...If there, were fewer exploiters, fewer selfish minorities, fewer self-seek ing, vainglorious politicians, fewer social and economic panaceas and fanatics...

...Louis looked like what he was— a healthy Ohio farm boy who thought the world was his oyster, war or no war, and who was out to swallow it...

...He minded the crucifying imbecibilities of the brass hats scarcely at all, being wholly intent on his own business which at the moment was learning how to be a writer...

...indeed his reverence for the "immutabilities" of economics sometimes seems as amateurish is his farming and his writing are professional...

...Louis' windmill is sirictly American, and operates under its own power, as contrasted say, with the dual purpose manure spreaders and washing machines that aie currently being operated, seemingly by remote control from the Kremlin, in the h«eds of various "totalitarian, liberals...

...He says he tried their recommendations on the land and they worked, not always snd everywhere, but in many esses magnificently, like nobody's business...

...There is a tremendous job aaasj of reconstruction and raatorstion, * J^k quite as big and infinitely more comsii...

...Despite such occasional clanks of the Bromfield windmill it is really amazing how consitently he remains in the groove of straight thinking, sound feeling, and good writing...

...When there ii , no more soil, there will be no more, nation, and the American civilization,.eves in its crude materialistic and mechanical manifestations, will wither and past away...

...IE Bromfield had not used his head in his struggle to bring those eroded dying hill farms back to life, he could easily have gone broke, Hollywood or no Hollywood...

...as did a retired telephone engineer over the mountain who a few yeara ago bought a broken-down Sussex county dairy farm with the idea of growing old gracefully,, bat who instead has been getting steadily younger, buying mure dairy farms, and clothing barren hillside* with green, all so successfully that last year the dairy farmers elected him...

...economic and social planning must be based, and in this he is right, although one frequently disagrees with the steps by which he reaches this conclusion...

...I cits these instances merely by way of showing that Bromfield is neither a Munch-haiisen nor * miracle man...