We're a little late for anything invoking the northern hemisphere's "early autumn". By the time we left the British Isles recently, we were very much into early winter.

Still... This is by Louis Bromfield (1896-1956); it was published in 1926; and it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1927.

I became aware of Bromfield because he's another of the Americans who buzzed around Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. He moved there in 1925, and was a friend of Gertrude Stein's (more on that below).

He was an immensely popular writer in his day, although his work was disparaged by the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. Now, his work is hardly known.

And yet Early Autumn has much merit. I found it a good read.



It's set in the fictional New England town of Durham, Massachusetts, and it paints a picture of two tribes: The new, strong, independent types, who refuse to be hide-bound by convention and tradition; and the old, weak, stuffy types, who are wedded to the past, and unable to envisage change. Their mutual hostility is intense. We're told of two characters drawn from the opposing groups: "They stood, the two of them, in a strange way as the symbols of two great forces -- the one negative, the other intensely positive; the one the old, the other, the new; the one of decay, the other of vigorous, almost too lush growth. Nothing could ever reconcile them. According to the scheme of things, they would be implacable enemies to the end."

Both groups are peopled by interesting characters. But by far the most interesting personalities are the ones who fall in the middle -- the ones who have caught a glimpse of a better, warmer, more loving way of living, but are stayed by duty and responsibility. So the novel revolves around the interaction among the freshies, the stuffies, and the middlies (my terms, not Bromfield's).

The first of the in-between figures is Olivia Pentland. She will turn 40 at the beginning of autumn, and feels the passing of the years weighing on her. She's self-effacing, observant, and always the peace-maker: "Yet she was disturbing, too, in an odd, indefinable way... One never knew quite what Olivia was thinking." She is the outsider, who still feels she is a stranger at Pentlands, even though she's the one whose management ability is most trusted by patriarch John, her father-in-law ("You're the strong one...," he tells her, "You're the Pentland of the family"). She grew up as a "hotel child", dragged from pillar to post by her mother, and she agreed to marry Anson Pentland, John's son, purely "because she did not find him actually repulsive". During the course of the novel, she falls in love with Michael O'Hara (energetic and entrepreneurial, and a budding politician), but Anson will not countenance a divorce, so she ends up staying (also taking into consideration that any scandal will harm O'Hara's political career). She does, however, strike a blow for the freshies by encouraging daughter Sybil and her young man to elope (before the family can use Jean's dubious birth status to stop them marrying).

The other middly is John, Anson's father. His mentally ill wife, Agnes, is confined to the north wing (a bit unnecessarily Gothic, that bit...). For years he has maintained a relationship with the widowed Mrs Soames, drawing down the opprobrium of the stuffies (although he assures Olivia there was never anything physical). He occasionally goes on solitary (and relatively discreet) whisky-fuelled benders, which are cleared up (and hushed up) by Olivia and Higgins, John's trusted head stableman. Apart from these outlets, John is rigorous in following his duty -- and in encouraging others to follow theirs. (He tells Olivia that she will be in charge of his estate after his death, which makes her feel as though "she had been caught when she meant most to escape", afraid that "she had become, after all, a Pentland... hard, cautious, unadventurous and a little bitter, one for whom there was no fire or glamour in life, one who worshiped a harsh, changeable, invisible goddess called Duty".) Conscious of his own and Olivia's unhappy marriages, John sympathizes with the run-away pair: "They've done what you and I were never able to do, Olivia. They'll have what we've never had and never can have because it's too late." He has one breakout up his sleeve, however. At the end, he engineers a fatal accident while riding the notorious red mare. Higgins knows he did it deliberately...


The British Isles autumn/winter we just left

I've mentioned a few of the freshies already: Higgins (an "immoral scamp" with a faun-like quality); O'Hara; Sybil; and Jean. Queen of this camp, though, is Sabine Callendar, back in town after living a "queer, independent, nomadic life", and always up for a spot of mischief-making (thwarted, in this case, by the resigned wisdom -- if such it be -- of the middlies). Therese, Sabine's daughter, is also part of this group, very much an oddity who just wants to do her own thing.

There are also a couple of freshies who return as phantoms from the past. There's Horace Pentland, a remittance man, sent away for undisclosed indiscretions, and recently dead. John gives evidence of his innate compassion by granting Horaces' wish to be buried with the rest of the family (the stuffies, of course, are scandalized). And then there's ancestor Savina Pentland. She is remembered for her extravagant, reckless, and emotional behaviour, and "the dark taint of Portuguese blood" (wince...). She eloped with Jared Pentland, and eventually drowned in the company of Toby Cane, her cousin. Olivia, prompted by a mania of Agnes's, locates letters that reveal Savina and Toby as lovers, and Savina confident that the child she is carrying is Toby's... So there, slap bang in the middle of the Pentland line that the stuffies are so proud of, is the child of Toby Cane: "[Anson] was not a Pentland and none of his descendants had been Pentlands... not one." But ultimately, what difference does blood make, wonders Olivia. The environment has "made Pentlands of people who were not Pentlands at all". Different blood hasn't mattered a jot: "The very air, the very earth of New England, has changed them, dried them up."

Sabine's lead-freshy counterpart in the stuffies camp is Mrs Cassandra Struthers, John's sister. When Sabine was orphaned, Aunt Cassie had a lot to do with her upbringing, and her interventions were such that Sabine has never forgiven her for them. She's a judgemental, narrow-minded, thoroughly unlikeable busybody.

I've already mentioned Anson, who is very into lineage and genealogy, and is proud of "a family which could trace its ancestry back three hundred years" (Olivia never tells him or Aunt Cassie what really happened with Savina...).

Not stuffy, but sadly weak, is Jack Pentland, Olivia and Anson's son, who has been ill since birth, and dies in the course of the narrative. No-one is expecting the couple to produce any more children, so Jack's death brings the Pentland line to an end on an official basis. Olivia's reaction testifies to a deep depression: "She came to see for a certainty that there was no tragedy in her son’s death; the only tragedy had been that he had ever lived at all such a baffled, painful, hopeless existence."

Bromfield sets up these three groups very convincingly, and uses them as a vehicle to present us with genuine dilemmas.

The close of the book is muted, imbued with quiet resignation. With O'Hara rejected, and Jack dead, and John dead, and Sybil gone, Olivia looks calmly into the future: "As she climbed the worn stair carpet to the north wing, she knew suddenly a profound sense of peace such as she had not known for years. It was over and done now, and life would go on the same as it had always done, filled with trickiness and boredom and deceits, but pleasant, too, in spite of everything, perhaps because, as John Pentland had said, 'One had sometimes to pretend.'"



***

Bromfield is a little too willing to pile on the stereotypes (the mad woman in the attic, "the evil, beautiful red mare", the wild Latin ancestor...); sometimes the backstories are introduced a little clunkily ("there were times when the memories of Olivia's youth seemed to sharpen suddenly and sweep in upon her..."); and we expect more from Sabine, who doesn't really fulfil her promise as an intriguing character.

Nevertheless, he packs a lot of commentary into his entertaining story.

Some of the themes reminded me of The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton (Bromfield met her in 1931, and the two were friends until Wharton's death).

There's a definite sense, for example, that the Pentlands (like the elite families that Wharton's outrageous Undine persecutes) have been superseded...: "The nation had run away from New England and the Pentland family, leaving it stranded and almost forgotten by the side of the path which marked an unruly, almost barbaric progress away from all that the Pentland family and the old house represented... [Olivia] saw perfectly why Sybil had a fondness for these two outsiders [Higgins and O'Hara]; she had come to see it more and more clearly of late. It was because they possessed a curious, indefinable solidity that the others at Pentlands all lacked, and a certain fire and vitality. Neither blood, nor circumstance, nor tradition, nor wealth, had made life for them an atrophied, empty affair, in which there was no need for effort, for struggle, for combat. They had not been lost in a haze of transcendental maunderings." Similarly, the advent of the mills has changed the nature of the country round Pentlands: "The ancient dying village that was fast disappearing beneath the inroads of a more vigorous world..."

Clearly, we're on the cusp of the change represented by Elmer Moffatt in Wharton's novel. In Everybody's Autobiography, Gertrude Stein recollects giving Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man to Bromfield, who had never read it. I don't know the date of that gift, but there's definitely something Darwinian about this tale, just as there was about Wharton's. The Pentlands are succumbing to natural selection... It's complex, though. Bromfield was not a fan of the apparently inevitable move towards industrialization: He saw "the factory system and modern war as a common assault on human dignity". But he believed in "a natural aristocracy, the few endowed by nature’s God with the ability to lead" (Olivia, for example).

The Custom of the Country is also reflected in Olivia's aspirations for her daughter: "It was so necessary that Sybil should fall in love with a man who would make her happy. With most girls it would make little difference one way or another, so long as they had money; if they were unhappy or bored they would divorce their husbands and try again because that was the rule in their world." Undine to a tee...

Meanwhile, Olivia's wanderings with her own mother -- "in the background of the memory there was the figure of a dark little girl, overflowing with spirits and a hunger for friends, who was left behind to amuse herself by walking out with the Swiss governess, to make friends among the children she encountered in the parks or on the beaches and the boulevards of whatever European city her mother was visiting at the moment ... friends whom she saw today and who were vanished to-morrow never to be seen again" -- foreshadows Wharton's The Children (1928). Indeed, Olivia specifically sees her mother as "a character out of a novel by Mrs. Wharton".



***

In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Toklas/Stein notes (in her trademark style): "Bilignin [the house they rented in the French countryside] brings me to a new old acquaintance. One day Gertrude Stein came home from a walk to the bank and bringing out a card from her pocket said, we are lunching to-morrow with the Bromfields. Way back in the Hemingway days Gertrude Stein had met Bromfield and his wife and then from time to time there had been a slight acquaintance, there had even been a slight acquaintance with Bromfield’s sister, and now suddenly we were lunching with the Bromfields. Why, I asked, because answered Gertrude Stein quite radiant, he knows all about gardens. We lunched with the Bromfields and he does know all about gardens and all about flowers and all about soils. Gertrude Stein and he first liked each other as gardeners, then they liked each other as americans and then they liked each other as writers. Gertrude Stein says of him that he is as american as Janet Scudder, as american as a doughboy, but not as solemn."

In 1930, Bromfield moved from Paris to Senlis, a village 30 miles north of the capital. There he created a beautiful garden (his friendship with Wharton was cemented by their mutual love of gardening).

Stein was a frequent visitor to Senlis.

(As an aside, Bromfield favourably reviewed The Autobiograpy in the New York Herald Tribune. Later, in Everybody's Autobiography (the continuation), Stein contemplates collaborating with Bromfield on a detective story... "I am always wanting to collaborate with some one...," she writes, "I suppose I like the word collaboration and I have a kind of imagination of how it could take place. Well anyway." I'm not sure how easy it would have been to collaborate with Stein...)


Gertrude Stein's home in Paris

After leaving France in 1938, Bromfield purchased a vast number of acres in Ohio (reports of exactly how many vary), set up Malabar Farm, and became an advocate for the kind of farming he had seen in France, with its emphasis on sustainability and diversity: "Bromfield became the nation’s most famous farmer, its most visible spokesperson for a different approach to agriculture. Before long, he was testifying before Congress and delivering hundreds of talks to local farming groups, where he advocated a conservationist approach to the land. He preached the use of compost and manure instead of chemical fertilizers. He proselytized for the benefits of contour farming. He raised chickens, cattle, and hogs and sold his varied produce at his own private farmer’s markets. He published books that detailed his experiences on the farm, inspiring countless young people (including a young George Herbert Walker Bush and the esteemed environmentalist writer Wendell Berry). And he helped insert into the American lexicon a new set of terms: organic, sustainable, environmental."

In magazines, newspapers, and books, Bromfield documented his efforts to create "a farm that operated in harmony with nature". The whole business was never as profitable as he presented it, and his lavish lifestyle eroded some of his ideals, but to a broad section of the American public, Bromfield was the modern Henry David Thoreau.

Of course, you can never do everything... And his writing career definitely suffered.

But while his books have been largely (though unjustly) forgotten, thousands of people still tour Malabar Farm each year. He'd probably have settled for that legacy.