The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Louis Bromfield and His White Room Last fall, Louis Bromfield wrote me a letter in his own clear script, in which he quoted something Henry Ford once said: "I...
...Then, when cars cost a fortune, I wanted to build a car everybody could own...
...He was thinking of the land as the basis of our country, as the heritage from our ancestors and the only solid basis for the lives of our descendants...
...He should have had twenty more years of rich and productive living...
...The phrase was "reverence for life...
...This man, so vital, so useful, died at 59...
...Francis and St...
...He did harm to none and good to many...
...For several weeks, I had not heard from him...
...he might have accomplished more than even his most devoted admirers foresaw...
...He was enormously vital and was driven by his inner energy to try one profession after another...
...In the life of Schweitzer he found a solution for his problem...
...I was not entirely unprepared for this tragic event...
...What we needed, he perceived, was "a marriage of the two elements, that the material and mechanical advances should serve, not to enslave man's mind and spirit in a wallow of mediocrity and time-saving, but rather to free his mind and spirit and foster their growth and enrichment...
...Everything he tried he did well...
...The master of Malabar Farm had promised me an article for The New Leader, and it had not come...
...His influence both in practical affairs and in the area of public and private ideals was growing every day...
...I happened to be a pretty good businessman, but my goal was never merely making money...
...And he had much the same feeling toward politics, toward the Constitution, toward the texture of our living...
...I was never once thinking of making money, but after I achieved those two goals I couldn't keep money away...
...With just a few added years...
...It seemed to him that this problem had not been solved either in "the utterly graceless and materialist world of the Communists or the bustling, practical, material world of American capitalism...
...As I sit here and think of Louis Bromfield's life, I can't rid myself of the notion that it has a special significance for success-crazy America...
...My first reaction was inevitable...
...In it a man could read, think, write...
...It was simple...
...That proved the man's greatness...
...In his last book, From My Experience, Louis describes the White Room in the Great House at Malabar do Brasil...
...There are today countless men and women in Australia, in Brazil, in India everywhere who are producing more and living better because Louis Bromfield touched their lives...
...Then, inevitably, he came to Albert Schweitzer...
...He had a great love for people, for animals, for the whole gaudy show of existence...
...And there this man who had traveled so far over the world stood up to the ultimate mysteries of life...
...There, too, horrible erosion results from laziness, stupidity, sloppiness...
...One would think that this man had a right to consider his life an eminently useful and satisfactory one...
...And now he was gone...
...There was nothing to distract the mind or the eye...
...Monday morning's paper brought the news that Louis Bromfield had died on Sunday afternoon...
...Augustine...
...he was not thinking merely of making more money out of the land...
...As in the case of Henry Ford, the money came rolling in...
...But always he was seeking something which he had not found...
...Because he was successful, he was able to help thousands of others find the way toward success...
...I first got my start by building an automobile because that was what I wanted to do most...
...Money on the line -there was no arguing with that...
...After this quotation from the creator of the Model T, Louis continued: "For my money, there is nothing so contemptible as the average greedy, quick-rich American...
...He loved it more than any room he had ever known...
...When he talked of soil erosion...
...Practically every one of his newspaper biographies included the fact that, on the basis of a one-paragraph preview of Mrs...
...What they were really after perhaps uncousciously was some hint as to how life could be lived so that it would have meaning...
...He spoke of religion, of St...
...From way back, however, Louis had worked toward more satisfactory rewards...
...He served well both his country and the world...
...And in the elucidation of these penetrating words he ended his book and gave us our last glimpse of him in his While Room...
...And then this announcement with the heartless biography which had been dug out of some newspaper morgue...
...And he was seeking it not just for himself, but for all of us...
...THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Louis Bromfield and His White Room Last fall, Louis Bromfield wrote me a letter in his own clear script, in which he quoted something Henry Ford once said: "I never yet knew a man who set out with no goal but making money to ever make any, or to be a success by any standard whatever...
...In a beautiful passage written by the doctor-musician-philosopher he discovered a phrase which served as his long-sought key...
...Parking-ton, Louis was handed a check for $60,000 by a Hollywood movie studio...
...All of this man's drives went deep...
...The thousands of people who came to Malabar Farm every year did not come just to learn better farming...
Vol. 39 • April 1956 • No. 14
