Uneasy Money

EDWARD H. FAULKNER wants city people to shun the corner grocery. He wants farmers to shun high prices. Against both of these orthodoxies in our food philosophy, he squares off with obvious relish.

In his first book. Plowman’s Folly, this impulse resulted in a sale of some 500,000 copies. It was, moreover, a useful book with a great cutting edge, whittling down the stature of the plow in a country which has been overplowed. In the case of Uneasy Money the impulse is the same but the result is not so happy.

Faulkner tries to shock city people into growing more of their own food, without giving a clear reason. It won’t be lack of production on farms, he insists. On the contrary, he embraces the orthodoxy of future food surpluses with a lack of skepticism which is disappointing.

Yet in the midst of what he thinks will be mountainous surpluses, city people had better grow their own food. The author says darkly that it is a matter “strictly of economics.”But economics, as one learns from Faulkner’s adventures in that field, is often abstruse. And that’s how the matter remains.

When he moves into agricultural practice, he becomes again the Faulkner of Plowman’s Folly. Increase yields and reduce costs, he argues, by disking “green manure" crops into the soil. Whether you agree with him or not, this is the sort of thing which made Plowman’s Folly. But the author leaves tillage and soil — where he is at home for another foray into economics. The interested farmer will be as confused by his attempt to justify lower prices for agriculture in the interests of a “tight money” era as city dwellers will be by his argument as to why they should grow their own food in the midst of surpluses.

The too few pages he devotes to farming practice indicate that we have not heard the last of Faulkner as an original agricultural thinker of great power. But Uneasy Money does not measure up.

ARTHUR MOORE