Psychic Farming: Country Books

by Richard Todd

A book I sometimes read with covert pleasure is called Five Acres and Independence, a manual of small farming (very small farming) written with a maniacal attention to detail-diagrams of orchards, root cellars, drainage systems and with a lust for agricultural bookkeeping. It was published in 1935. God knows how many Depression dreams this book nourished, but more than could ever have been fulfilled. My copy is from the eighth printing. It is one of a rich genre, back-to-the-land books, most of them quickly forgotten, though if you look in the secondhand bookstores you can find them, poignantly evoking the anxieties of their time. The postwar forties and fifties produced a batch of memoirs by admen and show folk escaping the rat race to rural Connecticut or Rockland County. Most of these are infected with a smug false simplicity. There are, of course, some classics: Helen and Scott Nearing’s laving the Good Life and Louis Bromfield’s Malabar Farm books, the story of his transformation of hundreds of farmed-out acres in Ohio into productive land. (The ascetic Nearings sit oddly next to Bromfield, whose house looked like Gatsby’s, but both writers are favorites of contemporary converts to rural life.) And now we have a fresh resurgence of country books.

You can get a sense of the cultural appetite for such books in the success of a memoir of Vermont boyhood, A DAY NO PIGS WOULD DIE by Robert Newton Peck (Knopf, $4.95), which recounts the desperately impoverished life of a family that adhered to “Shaker ways.” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt said of this book, in the New York Times, that love “suffuses every page,”and he remarked that although it risks sentimentality, it manages to avoid that trap. But I fear it is ruinously sentimental, and that the extent to which it affects Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, or you, or me, is a measure of how much more time we all ought to

spend cleaning out the chicken coop. The book is told in the voice of the boy, but, in the manner of a children’s book, it is full of dialogue and images that are too clever by half, that let the author’s self-approval show through. “Hear me, God,” the boy cries at a climactic moment. “It’s hell to be poor.” The pleasure of the book is its evidence to the contrary. It invites you surreptitiously to enjoy the condition you lament. And yet it touches a subject of importance. It is offering the reader a swap: turn in your comfort and I’ll give you coherence, an emotional and an actual landscape that make sense—a bargain that growing numbers of people couldn’t resist.

The worries from which we seek solace in country books have grown more cosmic. You can see this even in the how-to-do-it manuals. A contemporary equivalent of Five Acres and Independence was published not long ago: GROW IT! by Richard W. Langer (Saturday Review Press, $8.95), and its emphasis, as could be guessed, falls on natural methods of farming; its promise is a feeling of restoration. In a world where almost any gesture can be seen as destructive, spreading manure becomes a sacred act. In Iowa, Vance Bourjaily writes of putting the bends back in the streams, reseeding the banks, replanting the woods, in his new book of essays, COUNTRY MATTERS (Dial, $7.95); in Vermont, Edward Hoagland speaks of the virtue in doing nothing to his woodland, “which I’m informed is probably generating enough oxygen for eighteen hundred people to breathe.” Hoagland is one of the best celebrants of the natural world now writing. The essay I’m quoting from, in his new collection, WALKING THE DEAD DIAMOND RIVER (Random House, $7.95), develops the uneasy case for “escapism—a word that’s going to lose its sting.” A word, also, that recalls some of the deepest temptations and desires of our culture. In two new books, in particular, these old yearnings can be seen at work, and at play.

HOME COMFORT is the most recent offering from Total Loss Farm, a commune in Vermont that no doubt is the most successful literary/farming operation in the country. I’ve used two words there that would nettle the Total Loss farmers: “operation” and “successful”; but still, the place does make you think in terms of yield. The group has previously given us: Total Loss Farm by Ray Mungo (the central spirit of the place, author also of Famous Long Ago; he’s now left the commune); Burnt Toast, a novel by Peter Gould; The Food Garden, by Marty Jezer; The Body’s Symmetry, a book of poems by the exquisitely named Verandah Porche; and Alicia Bay Laurel’s book of lore, Living on the Earth. And now there is Home Comfort, essays by all the “People of Total Loss Farm,” which is a Book-of-the-Month Club choice (Saturday Review Press, $8.95). Marty—all the essays are signed on a first-name basis—points out that the farmers also publish a newspaper, The Green Mountain Post, and says, if we see someone hawking it, “Buy a copy. It’s pocket money for a movie or a boogie,” that is, hamburger, and, sure, I will buy a copy, though without the sense that I’m helping the needy. Anyway, a certain easefulness prevails at Total Loss Farm.

The Total Loss farmers are mostly former political radicals who decided that they would do more good by participating in the “Let’s Live Decent Lives Movement.” They bought their farm five years ago. About a dozen people live there, in the company of a cow, some chickens and other fowl, and some pigs. Their mortgage payments are $2700 a year, and even at that the Total Loss farmers estimate that they live on less than $10,000 annually. (Royalties notwithstanding: members are free to skim off what they will from whatever money they earn.) They drive old cars, burn wood, grow much of their own food, though they also eat a lot of rice and dried salt cod. Yet for all this admirable frugality, a mercantile spirit hangs over the farm.

At some moment the Total Loss People have discovered that every fragment of their experience is marketable, a mixed blessing for any writer (or group of them), and this has led to such essays as “Where Barf Barf Is,” Barf Barf being a dog shot by a hunter. The dog’s grave is sought by Marty, who really isn’t into dogs. “Now cats are something else. I really dig cats and would rather be telling you a story about one of the cats we know.” Along about the time Marty reaches Far Out Creek, the search turns into a religious experience with Barf Barf appearing in the sky: “My God, I thought. I am seeing God and He’s Barf Barf and He’s right here before me.”

As “Barf Barf’ suggests (among other things too dizzying to describe), the communards are into clever names: Madame and Generalissimo Chiang (the geese), Zsazsa (the tractor), ro-co-co (the hot chocolate), and—a word that many may now be passing into the larger language—“ped-xing,” inspired by the California street signs and referring to any necessary but pedestrian activity. All of this—dogs in the sky, private language—contributes to a sense of remarkable self-involvement (love might not be too strong a word) that flourishes on Total Loss Farm, all the more remarkable still for the skill of the farmers in self-packaging.

But self-involvement is essential to the well-being of Total Loss Farm. As the authors are aware, their wholeness depends on their insularity. They are consciously enacting homemade myths, which lift the farm out of mundane experience. One consequence of this is that for all the evocations of “Far Out Creek,” the Peach Orchard, and “The Depresso” (a room of the house), you’re not at all sure what the farm looks like. You learn with some surprise partway through the book—Verandah has been describing the pleasures of nude weeding-that a neighbor can hear them at work in the garden.

The effect of the prose is to dislocate the place in time and space. You can get a feeling for the difference between the myth and its raw materials in Verandah’s account of pig-slaughter, apparently an inept and squalid occasion, punctuated by Verandah’s scream. Her essay ends by noting that a drum has been made from the pig’s skin, “to mark and measure times of celebration.”It’s the forced elevation of tone that is interesting, and it pervades Total Loss Farm.

Ray reminds those who might get too involved in the grit: “All in all, we are in danger of experiencing the land as real. But the lesson, as always, is that nothing is real, and the farm is in truth an outgrowth of fantasy-consciousness.” As you would expect, they have a name for this rural mythmaking, which might serve for other country residents: “psychic farming.”

Not far from Total Loss Farm, over the line in Massachusetts, lies “Clabberville,” fictive name for a town described by Mark Kramer in MOTHER WALTER AND THE PIG TRAGEDY (Knopf, $5.95). Given the title, and the knowledge that Kramer comes from much the same dropout-radical past as the Total Loss People, you might expect a book similar to theirs, but you wouldn’t be entirely right.

Kramer lives on a farm, though not a commune. He may live with someone else or occasionally with a few others: it isn’t clear. The ambiguity is to Kramer’s credit. Whatever society he may be creating interests him less, as a subject, than the society into which he has moved—the surrounding rural life, whose fragility he anxiously examines.

Kramer has gotten admirably involved with Clabberville; that is, deeply involved, but with a sense of limits. The salient effect of his move was a muting of his world view (“I have learned more about classes, working and ruling, than ever I knew in my bad old lefty days”), but he has also learned how to milk, can take over from a neighboring dairy farmer, Hank, and knows that the name of the hormone that lets the milk down is oxytocin. He has achieved considerable knowledge about haymaking and silage. He has read his predecessors, not just Scott Nearing but Solon Robinson, chronicler of nineteenth-century Massachusetts agriculture.

Kramer has a good way of rendering the emotions that young emigrants from the city are likely to experience, such as a heightened sense of mortality, or perhaps it is a newfound way of looking mortality in the eye. An essay called “Summer Solstice" works to this end; Kramer attends a party at someone’s country playhome, and some of the guests, weekend visitors, besport in the nude. The next morning Kramer wakes up early with a vague malaise and takes a walk through the woods, where he finds the skull of a winter-killed deer (he apologizes for the symbolic heaviness of this discovery) and stops to talk with a neighbor, an old and ailing man chopping wood. They talk about the severity of the past winter. The old man tells a lame joke about it, and “we both laughed loud and deep and his face turned red, and then he took his ax and went back to work, and I took my deer skull and padded back up the hill to see who might be awake.”

I know; “padded” is the wrong word, but Kramer is the sort of young writer whose slips bring out an avuncular corrective impulse in you, and when he lapses, as he occasionally does, into the cookbook chattiness that is endemic to these books (“the cows will say yeccch”), you take this as blemish, not as his essential style. He can turn around and deliver precision, as in his description of the pleasure of farm mechanics, “excluding, at least for brief periods, the dangerous multiplicity that usually keeps us in dread and blandness.” Or wellspecified outrage, as in his worry for the fate of the town: “I dread things to come soon, when the area I live in goes the way of southern Vermont, the relics of its ‘atmosphere’ peddled for export to the city, its honest citizens either moved out or converted into dishonest servants of city folk at play.”

Two themes run through this book. One has to do with the morality of living in the country. “Well, that’s over,”Kramer says of his former apprehensions about the self-indulgence of country life, about being complicitous in oppression by failing to pursue radical politics, about retreating from reality. Kramer feels that radical politics aren’t working, and that the city has no monopoly on problems or on life, and that he is a great deal less certain than he used to be about his ability to prescribe change, more confident in his privately moral skills. You suspect those alterations in character will stick. A related question of morality persists-how to use one’s gifts. Genius can flourish in the country, but talent has a hard time. The smart money for writers as well as others is still in town or on the campus, and if a writer is to make his subject the country, he must face the possibility of turning into a sort of calendar artist. I’d guess that the drawer into which Kramer has put this issue won’t stay shut.

The second theme in the book grows out of Kramer’s melancholy apprehension about the future of rural life. Like most people who move to the country, he feels that he has arrived just in time to watch its disappearance. “This is the time that things are changing for the worse.” “The old order is dying, the rural social order with roots which stretch back clear to medieval England. Farmers whose greatgrandfathers were farmers now must become handymen on city people’s summer estates.” The best sustained piece of writing in the book dwells on this. Called “Leaving the Farm,” it’s a lament for the plight of a neighbor who has very reluctantly decided to get out of dairy-farming, urged, in part, by the carrot and stick of rising land prices. To stay and make money he figures he’d have to double the size of his herd. To double the size of the herd would mean spending $35,000, which would keep him in debt until he was past sixty. The new equipment would save labor, but the new cows would create it; he’d still be putting in days that lasted at least fourteen hours; longer in the summertime. If he could stay small, he’d stay. Kramer roundly rejects the other, hip solution: “If Jo-Anne was only into weaving homespun and sewing far-out rags for little Benjie, everything would be fine. The sometimes absurd fashion of my own life here becomes all the clearer in the light of Hank’s staunchness.” Staunchness subsumes a multitude of virtues. What makes the farmer such a compelling figure,

I suspect, is that he offers a resolution between old and new; he is an enactment of the notion that a traditional life is possible without the pretense of the arriviste farmers from the city. And when the farm sells, he’ll be evidence on the other side.

Does it matter? Kramer tries to say that it does: “I admire the diversity and specificity of his knowledge, and the virtuosity he applies to the daily problems of running a farm. That is a city boy’s admiration, I know, because men around here are supposed to know these things. Yet no factory job and no contract to mow another man’s field can give constant play to Hank’s knowledge. He has been forced by hard times in the nation’s economy, and perhaps by the nature of that economy, to trade in independence for security, resourcefulness for efficiency. Hank’s youngest son won’t know his dad’s craft, and he will be prey to the same modern work city boys are prey to, and to the same malevolent spirit.” That passage isn’t wholly under control, torn by its effort to avoid romance. And yet I find it rather affecting—in part, I think, because of the situation itself, but also because of Kramer’s visible struggle to speak in a full but unsentimental voice.

So: a flawed but engaging book. Its failures, moreover, aren’t entirely a matter of individual talent and energy. To write about the country is to take on a peculiarly risky chore.

The best contemporary book I know on the subject of pastoral concerns is THE MACHINE IN THE GARDEN by Leo Marx, a different order of book altogether from the ones I’ve discussed so far. It helps to explain the aesthetic and spiritual difficulties in writing about the threatened countryside. The Machine in the Garden, published in 1964 by Oxford, is a history of the pastoral tradition in American literature—a mode of thought and feeling, Marx argues, that stands at the center of both our literature and our society.

Marx offers a crucial distinction between “sentimental” and “complex pastoralism.” The first consists of a simple belief in the timeless beneficence of the land. The second begins with that emotion, but quickly qualifies it with an awareness of the conflict between the pastoral ideal and the imperatives of civilization. Much of the energy of our culture—high and low—has gone toward an effort to reconcile those opposing forces. The best of our writers, almost without exception, have given themselves to this theme. And yet there has been no resolution.

The pastoral mode, of course, predates American literature, but in American literature it has found a special urgency—for reasons implicit in our history. What had been a purely literary convention abruptly became, with the discovery of the New World, a social and political question. As Marx demonstrates, violently opposed philosophical visions of nature emerged from early accounts of the newly discovered continent: it was a bountiful Eden, it was a “howling wilderness.” By the time of American independence, however, these images had been reconciled into a compromise whose literary origins can be traced as far back as Virgil: the “middle landscape,” a concept of man at peace with his surroundings in a gardenlike setting. But this was, to repeat, not just a literary conceit: it was, in the minds of Americans, a practical vision of their destiny. Its quintessential spokesman was, of course, Jefferson. In the late eighteenth century, when nine of ten Americans lived on farms, it seemed a vision tantalizingly attainable. Yet no sooner had this society been successfully imagined than it was threatened by the incursions of industrialism.

Common sense said that in the vastness of the country, room existed for both technological progress and pastoral tranquillity, and reams of popular literature argued this case. But literary instinct said otherwise. Countless instances in nineteenth-century literature—in Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Twain, James—turn on the author’s realization that the presence of “the machine in the garden” (the railroad, for example, disturbing the peace of Walden Pond) will profoundly upset the culture.

The collision between technology and nature has by now become a commonplace way of seeing the world. We drive into a shopping center, mourning the apple orchard that once was there, in a car named after an animal that is headed for extinction. These ironies—so obvious and available to everyone—are painful to state.

And that is a further irony: now, when large portions of the society are, in some inchoate and ineffective way, aroused about our inability to live at peace with the natural world, there is scarcely a thing you can say that is not despairingly trite. “Complex pastoralism” is virtually an exhausted literary theme. (Who but the boldest of contemporary writers, Norman Mailer, has persisted in pursuing it?)¹ As Leo Marx concludes, “The machine’s sudden entrance into the garden presents a problem that ultimately belongs not to art but to politics.”

And, one might add, to daily life. If the problem of how to write about the country doesn’t nag at many lives, the concomitant difficulty, how to think about the country, surely does. If you live there, you live with your heart in your throat awaiting the next assault. The very word “country” seems delicate; how long will we write it without quotation marks? Is it an anachronism, a sentimental figure of speech? In caring for it, are you caring for anything at all, or romanticizing both the present and the past?

At the center of this anxiety lies the question: What is real? If you’re a Total Loss farmer, the answer is at hand: “. . . nothing is real, and the farm is in truth an outgrowth of fantasy-consciousness.” At an interesting moment in their book, the farmers allude to the dangers of agribusiness, speculators, land developers “grasping at the borders of our land.” The writer finds a quick way to incorporate these concerns into the Total Loss dream: “But they belong to a present that has already become obsolete. We’ve gone back to our roots, discovered the past, and inherited a future.” But you probably aren’t a Total Loss farmer, and can’t wish your life into this private and essentially literary resolution.

And yet I’d argue that to recognize the irrevocable ascendancy of technology isn’t to acquiesce to a world reduced to an “industrial park,”that oxymoronic phrase that represents still another attempt to harmonize the two warring cultural forces. The landscape may no longer be a symbol of our highest aspirations, but that is not to say that it need be empty of meaning. The question of its future, as Leo Marx points out, will not be resolved in fiction but in legislatures, in journalism, and in court. But in the effort to preserve what is left of “the middle landscape” (and to recreate it), it is useful to remember that a certain artifice has always been a part of country life.

I think of an oddly comforting item in The Machine in the Garden, a quotation from the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1797: “It may in truth be said, that in no part of the world are the people happier ... or more independent than the farmers of New England.”

The niceness of the sentence proceeds from its blandly reckless use of the word “truth.” Did the writer know that he didn’t know? No matter. The sentence, like a wealth of literature it represents, reminds us that a certain mythology governed American rural life from the start. Today, striving to avoid sentimentality, we expel romantic pictures from our heads, imagine a cheerless, driven past. But that vision itself commands no more reality than a Currier and Ives print. Rural life was willed, self-conscious, stylized. There was always a bit of “psychic farming” going on. And (I’ll go this far with the Total Loss Farm People): if the existence we value was always partly imaginary, cannot imagination help keep it alive?