In Which She Finally Gets Around to Reviewing a Book, with a Side-Trip or Two

Louis Bromfield would be a mostly forgotten Ohio-born novelist of the expatriate generation of American writers in Paris were it not for his early-middle-aged return home in 1938 to purchase the acreage now known as Malabar Farm, near Lucas, Ohio. We have the second world war to thank for his return, and his keen observation of French peasant farming practice to thank for his decision to make Malabar a model farm, leading the way in practicing soil and water conservation and sustainable farming technique by mingling the best practices of old world agriculture and the best science available from U.S. agricultural schools with a pesticide-free approach that would make Malabar one of the first consciously organic farms.

Bromfield's memoir/manifesto Pleasant Valley (1945) should be read by every Ohioan wishing to build a sense of our long and broad, if neglected, literary heritage, and by all readers who have an interest in ecology and sustainability, or simply in where our food comes from. Later books by Bromfield furthered his argument and helped pay the expense of running his farm which, according to popular account, never could sustain itself financially. Still, even a town and suburb gal like myself cannot read Pleasant Valley and ever look at fields neatly plowed in fall so as to be ready for spring without thinking of how many ways that topsoil can be lost before planting, or see messy hedgerows along the roadside or clumps of trees here and there without remembering how essential those non-farm plantings are to saving soil, purifying and trapping water, and providing homes for birds and animals who can help control pests or offer shade for a tired worker in the field and a place to keep that worker's jug of water cool.

The term "eco-biography" did not exist when Pleasant Valley was written, though it is certainly not the first in the genre. Mary Austin's Land of Little Rain (1903) beats it by some forty years, Walden by ninety, others, no doubt, by more--I am no scholar of the genre. But the term itself is a late twentieth- or early twenty-first century coinage, born of the need to describe a kind of writing increasingly becoming mainstream and increasingly being written. Pleasant Valley, like Walden puts farming at the center of its ruminations of life lived upon the land and, more so than Walden, uses farming as a way to think also about community, about the nourishment we get from being with and working with other people. Thoreau is a bit sour on his neighbors, like the Irish family at Baker farm, and famously considered three chairs sufficient for "society"; Bromfield was eminently sociable, hosting friends from his far-flung travels at Malabar--novelists, musicians, wealthy philanthropists, most famously Bogie and Bacall on their wedding day. Ohioans are, by and large, Midwestern friendly.

All of this brings me to a newly published farm-and-community centered eco-biography from Torrey House Press, A Bushel's Worth, by Kayann Short, a Colorado feminist, social activist, teacher, and organic farmer who, with her husband John Martin, owns and operates Stonebridge Farm, a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) organic farm just outside of Lyons, Colorado. She is also an old and close friend from my Ph.D. days in Boulder. Hers, together with our fellow Ph.D. Sian Mile's, was the last face we glimpsed in our rear-view mirror when we loaded up the rental van and drove off to Dayton, Ohio. She is the only person to whom I regularly write letters on paper in ink and from whom I eagerly await a handwritten reply. In grad school she amassed one of the largest private collections in the region, if not the nation, of books published by feminist presses, since donated to her undergraduate alma mater. (The Friedman Feminist Press Collection at Colorado State University, named in honor of Short's friend June Friedman. Here are the dedicatory remarks.) Every space in her apartment that was not occupied by a stack of books by women held a plant or a piece of vintage stuff she had gathered, from ancestors, family, or yard sales and valued more for its human imprint, its air of having been valued and treasured, than for its intrinsic worth. When she finished her doctorate, got a job teaching writing and women's studies, and bought a Boulder condo, she transformed the pocket back yard into a lush herb garden, and when she married John--another Colorado Ph.D, a mathematician with a farmer's heart and a recently purchased 10 acre organic farm--she became a full hardworking partner in Stonebridge Farm.

I have had the luxury of staying as a guest in the chicken house (which I would gladly rent for a season if I had a book to finish and needed a comfortable setting with beautiful views of the Front Range, conducive to peace and reflection), of watching my young son press apples for cider and help John drive the tractor and weave on John's loom. And I have gobbled the vegetables and asked for more. So I may be a bit partial as a reader, but only a bit. It was partiality to the writer that made me pick up the book in the first place, as eco-biography is not my first choice of reading material. But it was the grace of the prose, the interweaving of generational history, recipes, reports on current and past farm practices, and musings on family, friendship, and community that kept me reading, those and Short's humble and generous consciousness of her debts and her contributions to multiple writerly traditions in which she grounds herself: feminist, farm, ecological, western, literary, that kept me reading.

A Bushel's Worth began its life as a blog three years ago, when the author, turning 50 began taking stock of her life--as I am doing with my blog. There's something about reaching, or perhaps passing, what can only be the halfway mark to impel one to pause, reflect, and wish to record those reflections, even if nobody ever will read them. But it's clear from the reading that the book actually began its life earlier, with young Kayann's summer trips to her grandparents' North Dakota farms, with her saving and studying of old photographs and objects, with her grandmother's mint plant under the spigot, with a grade school activity marking April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day--a small green hopeful moment in a year otherwise marked by the Kent State massacre (less than two weeks later on May 4), the My Lai Massacre in March, the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the Killing Fields. Its chapters retain some of the best features of blog writing--relative brevity, focus, recursiveness, a willingness to mix modes and to incorporate other artifacts--but achieve the polish and depth one expects of carefully written memoir. Various chapters take up Short's farming roots, or what seem to be the three S's of sustainability--seeds, storage, and salvage. The chapters on seed saving (The Seed Box), the fall of the farm's ancient cottonwood (What Goes Down) and finding oneself (Mountains to the West)  besides being fine pieces of writing--exemplary essays--are, in the vein of the best naturalist writing, about more than they pretend to be.

But what has struck me most about A Bushel's Worth is the centrality of community--of communities, actually--to all of the farm's practices and to Short's philosophy of sustainability. Stonebridge's communities include the subscribers, the barterers (people who pay for their shares through farm labor), area musicians, writers, and artists who find temporary refuge and work space in the farm's community room and who may also be subscribers or barterers, Short's and Martin's children and grandchildren, holders of neighboring fields, far-flung fellow CSA farmers, students who come to the farm to learn farming or life-writing, water-rights holders up and down the three ditches that bound or bisect Stonebridge, Coloradans touched by the great St. Vrain flood of 1969, long dead canners of vegetables and builders of barns, and women literary forebears from Vita Sackville-West to Alice Walker. It is the magnitude of Short's vision of community, of the complex web of interrelations generated by every human action, and her willingness to construe those connected in this web as family that mark A Bushel's Worth as a feminist eco-biography with roots in the second wave as well as in the sustainability movement.

The reason I do not eagerly reach for naturalist writing is its generally dour or mournful undercurrent. Thoreau was already warning us that we were fouling our nests over a century and a half ago. A decade or so before him, Cooper had Natty Bumppo decrying Americans' "wasty ways" in The Pioneers. Austin points to the litter of trash the heralds the proximity of every western town along the road. Leopold, Berry and Abbey continue to remind us. After all this time and so much writing we are still fouling the nest. How hard it must be for the later generations of nature- and eco-writers to have to remind us again and again; how dreary to be reminded and to see proof of the need to be reminded along every roadside and with the advent of another strip mall or housing development or big box store with attendant parking acreage! There is a bit of that mournful sense of loss in A Bushel's Worth to be sure. It would not be an honest entry in the genre without it, and the farmers at Stonebridge Farm must know that theirs may be a losing battle. Short remarks several times that the fate of the farm when they are too old to farm it is uncertain, that they are working out options. But overriding that in this book is still Short and Martin's joy in community and connection.

Short's capability in finding joy in these reminds us that community, connection, and family--the web of relations--are the very reason for cleaning our nests and preserving our natural spaces. Short's friends are mostly ordinary people like us; being with and working with them nourishes her, and she them--even beyond the gallons of Stonebridge pancake batter she dishes up annually. Her capability and vision--her awareness of the nourishment to be had in communities spread across space and time--are, I think, Short's real contribution to the eco-biography genre and, beyond the pleasure to be had in reading good prose, make this book worth the reading.

I'm reminded of the fate of Malabar Farm, and hope the Stonebridge farmers can take hope from it. Upon Bromfield's death in 1958, his friend the philanthropist Doris Duke provided much of the funding to allow Friends of the Land, a conservationist group, to buy and operate the farm and keep it safe from development. In the 1970s the land was deeded to the State of Ohio, which operates it as a state park and educational center. It still operates as a model farm and offers the community an opportunity to connect over the preservation of the land and a way of life. Perhaps something similar can happen for Stonebridge Farm. In the meantime, I am hoping for more writing from the farm by Kayann Short.

In which she simply posts a link

One Book In . . . This, in the NYT Sunday Book Review captures the way a great childhood book can hold you.

In Which She Simply Posts a Link

If you care about books as artifacts, as I do, and about their place in history, Books for Victory is a must read blog.

"We realized the importance of pens and books when we saw the guns."

Malala Yousafzai, 16 years old.

On the "Spray and Count" Approach to Understanding Literature

This piece in the Times' Sunday Review for July 14 gets a mixed review from The Omnivorous Reader. On the one hand, it makes The Reader quite happy that the Times believes readers need to be reminded that "Not long ago, for example, critics focused their attention almost exclusively on white male authors." O to have those dark days of my undergraduate years become faint memory! On the other hand, I have to wonder if any regular feature called "Gray Matter" could have applied less of that substance to the printed matter at hand? 

Apparently the author of this essay and of the essay in the journal Social Science History, to which he refers us, has concluded that simply toting up the occurrence of certain words in an era's literary output offers a keen insight into the pressing concerns of the day. What a time saver! For example, the immediate post-Seneca Falls writings of many women did show a marked increase in the words "women's rights" so the author of the study concludes that women's rights was of increasing concern during those decades. Golly. And  the uptick in the occurrence of some words after 1960 "caring, nurturing, infant, toddler and childhood" proves that a positive focus on children was the hallmark of the era, thus Thomas Pynchon (a nihilist? really?) was an outlier.

The author of the Times essay--an historian, but not, apparently ab hiustorian of literature--concludes  that the "insights [these word frequency databases] make possible should encourage scholars to revisit longstanding assumptions with a critical eye."

Let's set aside for the moment that David Lodge predicted and admirably spoofed word-frequency analysis in  Changing Places (or possibly its sequel Small World--no matter, both are brilliantly funny). And let's further set aside that entomologists deride a similarly mechanical approach to understanding  insect ecologies as  "Spray and Count." Let's simply think about the possibility that writers may have lots of concerns, frequently highly mixed concerns. If they just wanted to espouse viewpoints they would have written pamphlets or bumper stickers.  "Domesticity No! Women's Rights Yes!" would have been an admirable, a positively Strunkian, savings of words over, say, the 500 pages of Fettered for Life, or, Lord and Master: A Story of Today or even over the relatively brief "A Jury of Her Peers" to name two literary works concerned with the competing pulls on women's psyches (and their social worlds) of women's rights and domesticity, neither of which literary work, I am sure, ever uses the terms "domesticity" or "women's rights."   And while I will bet that Thomas Pynchon never included the words caring, nurturing, infant, toddler  or childhood  in his early fiction, the early novels are full of poignant scenes of children, frequently abandoned (or wandering away), or abused or neglected by institutions, but always sweetly charming in their innocence and resilience: think of the dreaming lost children Oedipa Maas encounters in the night, the horrifying children's camp in Gravity's Rainbow, the plucky and adaptable Prairie Gates. Think of, for that matter, all of the adult children wandering through his landscapes, trying (and sometimes succeeding) to put together temporary structures of meaning to hold out against the assault of the repressive state apparatus--then tell me he's not positively focused on children?

Spray and count kills. Kills Bugs. Kills the Literary Experience. Kills, dare I say, Historical Understanding. Fiction is nothing if not profoundly ambivalent--just as we are, as our culture is. The sheer multiplicity of characters in a fictional work--as Bakhtin pointed out a century ago--means the author does not control every message in the work. The ultimate incapacity of language, no matter how refined, to directly bridge the gap between our inner and outer selves, its reliance on figurative speech to get close to, but not absolutely at, what may be unspeakable --as Freud pointed out over a century ago--means the author may not even be using the most direct language to address his or her more direct (or unconscious) concerns. And our taste for having our news from afar (even when "afar" means simply "of other experiences and understandings") in narrative form--as Benjamin pointed out somewhat less than a century ago--means that understanding of that news happens in the taking in of the whole story, possibly in community, but certainly while the mind is partly on something else (say, for example, on unpacking the strands of narrative enrobing the wisdom or news, or unpicking one's knitting while taking in the storyteller's words). 

Nobody ever gathered round a Storyteller who just shouted out words of concern--although I have a nagging sense that Kurt Vonnegut imagined something like that somewhere. "Children" or "Women's rights" or "Parent-child bonds are important" or "Nixon is the enemy" or "Jesus saves" may be pleasing concepts. We may wish to emblazon them on our T-shirts or hire a plane to fly them over the football field. We may even read or write books which demand we think about them. But in and of themselves, they do not literature, nor literary understanding, make.

June 25, 1876

I admit to being a sucker for all things Little Bighorn. On this day in 1876 Sioux and Cheyenne under the leadership of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse outwitted the U.S. 7th Cavalry and thus successfully resisted for a time their relocation to reservations away from their sacred spaces and on lands deemed unfit for agriculture. These were nomadic people inexorably being hemmed in by US settlement into the Great Plains. With the Civil War over, the nation was able to devote the full strength of its military to suppressing the indigenous people of the country's great midsection. Two very readable books on the Battle of Little Bighorn are Evan S. Connell's 1984 Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn and James Welch and Paul Stekler's 1994 Killing Custer: The Battle of Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians. 

Connell is author of the Mr- and Mrs. Bridge novels dramatising a midwestern family's uneasy movement into mid-twentieth century social change from two points of view: the conservative, outer directed Mr. and the domestic, pollyannaish Mrs. The 1990s Merchant Ivory film combined the two and starred Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward in the titular roles. 

James Welch, the great Montana novelist who died far too young, author of Fools Crow, The  Heartsong of Charging Elk, The Indian Lawyer, The Death of Jim Loney and Winter in the Blood, was of mixed Blackfeet, Gros Ventre and Irish heritage and centered his novels on the often tragic intersection of white and Native cultures, usually in small strips of Montana-Wyoming-Idaho where cultures rubbed against each other frequently--though Heartsong (which is probably his best) took that cultural collision to Paris and Marseilles in the wake of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.  Think of Heartsong of Charging Elk (2000) as a late twentieth century reversal of Robinson Crusoe. Three of his novels, including the first two--Death and Winter --which cemented his reputation as a leading figure in the Native American literary renaissance were were spare modernist tragedies but the last two, Fools Crow (a many-paged book) and Heartsong, while still laced with melancholy, were expansive historical fictions in which some measure of individual peace could be found. As far as I know, none of Welch's novels has been filmed, which is a great loss.

A Reading Now Report

Only about a tenth of the way through The Executioner's Song. Mailer's narrative restraint is notable here; the opening pages are spare and elementary sounding, unlike, for example, the opening pages of An American Dream or Armies of the Night. At first one thinks he has opted for a minimalist reportorial prose style diametrically different from his own and wonders at the badness of a decision not to vary the sentencing or indicate hierarchies of thought with the occasional subordinate clause. Then one hits the first chapter centered on the ditzy Nicole, when the prose shifts ever so slightly into an airy, still unsubordinated, brainlessness that aptly captures the low-Q victim-narcissist that she is. But it's not her speaking--that is the chapter is not narrated by her--it's simply Mailer's omniscient narrator with a contact high. It reminds the Reader that even in Mailer's other books when his prose seems most out of control, the excesses are in fact utterly under his discipline. And makes the Reader wonder: is Mailer suggesting the inability to subordinate or coordinate is a symptom or cause of Gilmore's pathology? Or of the vast edge-dwelling economically and ethically limited milieu from which such a pathology occasionally springs?

I am no authority on Mailer, having read only a handful of his books. He is rather too demanding, and his long books too time-consuming to read very often. But Executioner's Song had been on my list for a long while, and this June I've been in a Mailer frame of mind. My edition, released last year by Grand Central Publishing and available in electronic format which alleviates the physical toll that hefting a Mailer novel exerts, has an introduction by Dave Eggars who, I am pleased to see, mentions the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, which he won in 2010 for Zeitoun and at which, returning in 2011 to bestow that year's award for nonfiction, he met "real-life murderer" Wilbert Rideau, author of  In the Place of Justice. No authority at all, just an admirer of bits and pieces, like, particularly, the closing pages of Armies, the essay on Marilyn. But I think I may come to agree with Eggars that this, Executioner's Song, is his best.

In Which She Basically Just Links to an Article

This exhibit at the New York Public Library is one I will lament missing. Who would not want to be for a moment in the great green room?

Mostly Concerning Libraries, Sexy Books, and Small Deceptions

In 1969 when the Schaechterles washed up there, Yerington, Nevada, had no bookstore. As far as I know it has never had one since. Menesini’s dime store and soda fountain by the old courthouse had a rack of True Confession and True Detective magazines and comic books; Nevada Drug on the other end of Main Street boasted a more reputable magazine rack—I would buy the first issue of Ms. Magazine there in 1972—plus a spinning comics rack and a shelf of paperback westerns for the men and one of paperbacks featuring terrified women in long nighties running away from brooding ruins for the women. The furniture store had a small supply of Thornton W. Burgess animal stories in hard cover which my mother periodically bought for my younger sister, as she had previously bought books for me.

Yerington was not what you would call a bookish town; the closest brush it has had with literary fame is that Nevada Barr, author of the Anna Pigeon series of mystery books, claims to have been conceived there. The nearest bookstore was 80 miles away in Reno, not a trip my parents took often. But there was a library. And in 1970 when my parents bought a house in town—we had been renting some two and a half miles out on the Mason road—the Lyon County Library became the first public library in my experience that was within walking distance and freely available to me. I turned twelve the summer we moved into town and I acquired a library card as soon as we painted the last room and unpacked the last box.

The walk was short enough to be convenient, but long enough that it took in Yerington’s entire business district: Leaving by the back door and angling down the driveway to Littell Street, the Reader would cross the short ends of three blocks from California Street to Main Street, then make a left on Main, traverse one long block from Nevada Drug past The Emporium to the old Owl Club restaurant and casino—then half the next—Menesini’s and the Crescent Garage

where my father worked—to the Old Lyon County Courthouse. Between the Garage and the Courthouse was a little green space dominated by a marble Ten Commandments, the Protestant, not the Catholic (and certainly not the Jewish), version, but no matter: over the next six years I would break every one of those commandments through my reading.

Up the steps and into the courthouse, the Reader would veer to the left of the grand interior staircase. The library took up the two exterior rooms at the rear of the courthouse, about a sixth of the first floor. Across the hall was the Lyon County Sheriff’s Office, with cells for miscreants either upstairs or below. The first room of the library held the children’s books, a reading table, and a mean old bat of librarian as unlike the sort of motherly, encouraging, possibly magical librarians populating children’s books as could be. The second room—paradise—held the entire collection of books for adults, fiction and non-fiction. On my first visit, the day I got my library card, she limited me to two books and tried to make me stay in the children’s room. I had to convince her that I had already read most of the books she tried to make me choose (true) and tell her that my mother did not care what I read (false) and name two books I wanted to get from the adult room (Oliver Twist and The Three Musketeers) before she would let me enter that nest of vice. My mother, in fact, would skim every book I brought home for forbidden sex scenes. As long as the books appeared sex-free she did not care whether I read The Bobbsey Twins or The Communist Manifesto, but her policy did make bringing home contemporary fiction a bit of a crap shoot.

That first year I stuck to many-paged classics from the great age of novels--Dickens and Dumas, Tolstoy and Twain, reading every holding in the library for a favorite author, carrying home books two or three at a time (this was in the era before book bags and backpacks, when you hugged books to your chest as you walked) stopping at the market for a bottle of Coke to drink on the way home. Late that year the old librarian disappeared or died of meanness and was replaced by a librarian too busy talking on the phone to give my books more than a cursory glance. That, and  my secret acquisition of the “lost” second key to my father’s camper trailer meant I could ditch books there to be read in the afternoons under the backyard elm or smuggled into my bedroom on a non-library day when my mother would not be suspicious: The Godfather, The Joy of Sex, Breakfast of Champions, books which she would have made me take straight back to the library, as well as more innocuous stuff, not sexy but soaked in adultery and guilt, like the novels of Grahame Greene. Thus did a lonely girl form her early taste for thick novels and for harmless deception, under the shadow of the block Y.

In Which the Reader Receives a Birthday Gift

I had nearly deleted without reading the email from Barnes and Noble, assuming it was just another advertisement, when the word "gift" caught my eye. Turns out my excellent friend Joan had ordered a copy of The Last Chinese Chef, by Nicole Mones for my e-reader in anticipation of my birthday. A true friend knows all your tastes--and for me, the only thing better than an absorbing book is an absorbing book in which food figures largely. Armed with this book and a few others for summer reading, the Reader can face fifty-five with equanimity.

Purchased and in the Reading Queue

A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth, recommended here, and The Night Bookmobile, by Audrey Niffenegger, recommended by my most excellent friend Joan.

In Which She Simply Links to an Article

Time to read The Executioner's Song.

A Reader, Not a Writer

I have been reading compulsively since my older sister taught me how one summer when I was between the ages of three and four and she--a compulsive reader and high school senior thinking about going to college to become a teacher--practiced upon my malleable self. Like most avid readers I wrote a bit as a youngster and imagined becoming a writer, but long ago realized I lacked both the staying power and the kind of imagination necessary to do the kind of creative writing I would want to do. Why clutter up the landscape with my indifferent efforts, I reasoned, when there were so many really good books out there for me to read?  Unlike Gertrude Stein, who tells us in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (another non-writing reader--Alice that is, not Gertrude) that Gertrude Stein, an avid reader, feared as a young woman that she would soon read up all the books there were and so would have to take up writing herself to ensure a future supply, I have been willing to trust that there will always be plenty of books worth reading and that simply reading them, a task for which I have infinite staying power and real talent, would be a full-time job.

To make that full-time job pay I became a trained reader of texts, with a Ph.D. in American literature and an academic gig which is rounding up its second decade. I have even committed the occasional--too occasional--act of scholarship. Which involves writing, of course, but is not Writing of the sort that Writers do. Literary scholarship is a highly esoteric form, a set of gestures, postures, and movements that bear the same relationship to Writing as Tai Chi does to actual hand-to-hand combat: once, long ago they may have been the same, but while the former has great value as a kind of discipline and as performed by the Sifu is capable of great beauty, it does not risk all in order to conquer--a city, the self, a readership. A Writer, by contrast, risks everything with every word. The culture of literary scholarship, too, limits the ways a reader can write about the thing read. There are fashions and shibboleths. And, perhaps because of these, very few readers. So while I continue to produce, slowly, effortfully, literary scholarship which from time to time (I hope) evinces small beauties, there is so much more that I need to get down about all that reading.

This blog is conceived as a place where this Reader can sift through a lifetime of notes on reading, making sense of five decades of doing the thing I am really good at: burying my nose in a book.