Dry Rot in Ohio

THE FARMLouis Bromfield--Harper ($2.50).

Author Bromfield agrees with almost everyone that the U. S. farmer is in a pretty pickle but he is too good a novelist to propose solutions. In The Farm he is merely making pictures and telling stories of a time when things were much better for Ohio landowners, suggesting how the dry rot of the 20th Century crept in and spoiled them.

Readers who dislike proper names will have a hard time with The Farm. It starts off with middle-aged Colonel MacDougal who, planning a Paradise patterned after Rousseau, came West from Maryland in the spring of 1815, cleared the woods, raised a family with his fat young wife. One of his daughters married Jamie Ferguson, a huge, serious red-haired Scot, who settled at the Farm because it seemed to suit him, lived on there for the rest of a long and violent life. Jamie Ferguson's daughter Ellen married a great-grandson of the Pennsylvania Dutch van Essens who settled in Midland County and started a sawmill at about the time the Colonel set up at his farm. Their son, Johnny Willingdon, grew up in the years when the Farm was running to seed. When Johnny came back, grown up, after the War, immigrants were living at the Farm and a town was creeping out towards its deteriorated fields.

Writing informal history as much as fiction, Author Bromfield does not try to make what he has to say seem like a story. The book is a collection of notes about the people whose lives touch Hallie Chambers, the Colonel's simple guide, "had a thin tough horse and wore buckskin pants . . . and a beaver cap. . . . The Colonel thought that at last he had discovered Jean Jacques' 'natural man'. . . ." Weiler, the innkeeper, told the Colonel and his Jesuit friend, Father Duchesne, about "the young man called Lazare who lived with the Indians but was white and remembered mobs and torches and the Revolution" and was supposed to be the Dauphin. Weiler's grandson, in the days when Johnny was growing up, kept a commercial hotel in the town, where drummers sat and exchanged dirty stories. There are enough minor characters in The Farm to fill a dozen Spoon Rivers--people like Dr. Trefusis, whose grandiose Gothic house was one of the town's sights; Big Mary, an amiable, immensely efficient Negro cook, who refused to exchange her status of "accommodator" for steady employment; Johnny's Uncle Robert, a champion bicycle racer who was killed in a railroad accident when, during a wild thunderstorm, his train plunged into a ravine. Sharpest of all is the picture of Johnny's Grandfather Willingdon who came home to Johnny's house when he was an old man. He lived, embittered, eccentric and alone, in a room above the kitchen that was pervaded by the aroma of his kerosene lamp, his dry tobacco and the apples he kept piled upon a table.

Author Bromfield's feeling for the good old clays varies from rhapsodic nostalgia to carefully reasoned approbation. Sometimes it is tedious in the extreme. The Farm is certainly not an exciting book, regardless of how many autographed copies have been ordered in advance by ladies' clubs. Author Bromfield's theories on what happened to the good old days are sometimes arrestingly ingenuous as when, explaining how James Willingdon, Johnny's father, failed in politics because he was too honest, he tells about the " 'agreeable' man from the next county who had a great success within the Republican party until a boss named Harry M. Daugherty arranged for him to be nominated and elected as President." Nonetheless, you end by sharing most of his wholehearted admiration for people to whom the 18th Century was just around the corner, sharing his quiet dismay at the changes that took them all away. He wrote the book in Switzerland and dedicates it sententiously to his three children, "the story of a way of living that has gone out of fashion. ... It was and is a good way of life. ... I counsel you to cherish it. ... It has in it two fundamentals which were once and may be again intensely American characteristics. These are integrity and idealism.''

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