 
Choose another writer in this calendar:
by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
Louis Bromfield (1896-1956) |
|
American popular novelist and essayist, forgotten agrarian reformer who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Early Autumn (1926), a portrait of an old New England family. Many of Louis Bromfield's novels have rural setting and have strongly American atmosphere, although he set some of his stories in India. One of the central themes in Bromfield's work is the contrast between city and the country – he saw his own farm as a refuge from the mechanized world, but it also was a meeting place for a number of his friends. The long journey across the burning, dusty plateau became suddenly a kind of nightmare, possessed only of the reality of dreams. It seemed now to belong to the remote past. Only the future existed. In her health and vitality, the aura of past experiences, however bad, never dung to her. The past had the power to depress you only if you were ill or tired. Hope, optimism, antidpation she knew, out of experience and instinct, were the rewards of health and vitality. (from Night in Bombay by Louis Bromfield, London: Cassell, 1940, p. 48) Louis Bromfield was born in Mansfield, Ohio, on a farm. He studied
at Cornell Agricultural College in 1914-15 and journalism in 1916 at
Columbia University, receiving honorary war degree in 1920. After the
United States declared war on Germany in the World War I Bromfield
joined the American Ambulance Corps, with the 34th and 168th divisions
of the French Army. From 1917 to 1919 Bromfied served in the army and was decorated for his services. Bromfield then returned to journalism in New York. He wrote critics for several periodicals, among them the Bookman and Time magazine. He also worked as an assistant to theatrical producer and as advertising manager. In 1921 he married Mary Appleton Wood, a socialite New Englander. They had three daughters. Mary Bromfield died in 1952. After publishing The Green Bay Tree (1924), set in a
small
town in Ohio, Bromfield devoted himself entirely to writing. He moved
with his wife and daughter to France, where he first stayed at the
Hôtel de l'Odéon (a.k.a. Hôtel Regnard). In addition to residing in
this hotel, where Sherwood Anderson took a room during his visit in
Paris in 1926, the Bromfields rented quarters for a period of time on
the boulevard Flandrin. It was a large glass apartment overlooking the
Bois. The Bromfields became members of the colony of writers and
artists. "He prefers to be with those who entertain and interest him,
rather than with those who could advance him," Mary Bromfield said of
her husband. (Louis Bromfield by David D. Anderson, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1964, p. 55) Later the family settled in Senlis, an
ancient village north of Paris. Bromfield's second novel proved to be
such a financial success that he was able to lease an old Presbytère,
which had once been the dwelling place of Capuchin monks. There
Bromfield created a garden, which became famous for its hybrid musk
roses and lilies. This rural estate was his primary residence for
nearly a dozen years. In 1932 Bromfield visited India. The journey inspired his most famous book, The Rains Came (1937), which has been adapted to screen twice. Clarence Brown's version from 1939, starring Myrna Loy, George Brent, and Tyrone Power, is consided slick Hollywood film-making at its professional best. The story is set in Ranchipur and portrays the destinies of a large number of people against monsoon rains and the bursting of a dam. Bromfield's view of the decadent Europeans is seen in the character of Ransome, who is contrasted with awakening India symbolized by the Maharajah. In France in the '20s, Bromfield helped Ernest Hemingway first get published, and he was compared favorably with Fitzgerald, Thurber and Steinbeck, among others. In 1931 he met Edith Wharton (1862-1937), with whom he shared a passion for gardening. Their correspondence was published in 1999. Bromfield and Wharton seldom discussed their writing but they talked frequently and at great lenght of their dahlias and petunias, and their green peas and lettuces. Bromfield learned much of his gardening from her. Bromfield took Wharton to visit a local dahlia-grower, who was a fervent communist and had named his favorite species after Henri Barbusse. She ordered from him dahlias which she never lived to see in flower. Upon the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Bromfield joined the well-known admirers of Gertrude Stein's writing. "Gertrude Stein has an extraordinary power of personality and it is my impression that she has the clearest intelligeence I have ever encountered," he wrote in his review entitled 'Louis Bromfield Hails Her 'Autobiography'' (Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity by Karen Leick, 2009, p. 149) It was published on the front page of the influential New York Herald Tribune's Books section. Stein also mentioned him in the work. After completing in 1933 her first – and only – murder mystery, Blood On The Dining Room Floor, which was not published until 1948, Stein suggested cooperation in writing a detective story. She often visited Bromfield's home in Senlis. Once she gave him a copy of Darwin's The Descent of Man, remarking on how near Darwin had been when she "began knowing everything". During these expatriate years Bromfield wrote his most highly acclaimed novels, including Early Autumn. The Farm (1933) spanned a period of about 100 years and depicted the conflict between the agricultural and the industrial way of life through the experience of several generations. A Good Woman (1927) told a story of a mother, who thinks herself good and righteous, but ruins her son's life. Bromfield once said that he wrote "the Victorian novel with trimmings." In the late 1930s Bromfield moved back to the United States, to his childhood surroundings in Ohio. "I
was sick of the troubles, the follies, and the squabbles of the Europe which I had known and loved so long,"
he said in his memoir. "I wanted peace and I wanted roots for the rest of my life."
(From My Experience: The Pleasures and Miseries of Life on a Farm, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955, p. 1) He settled near Lucas,
where he had the most famous experimental farm of the postwar years. Bromfield found it in January 1939,
when he turned the corner of the road into Pleasant Valley and saw that valley after twenty-five years under
deep snow. His six-hundred-acre Malabar Farm was named after the setting of his bestseller, The Rains Came. The farm was visited by such famous actors as Humphrey Bogart, who loved to drink and argue with writers, and Lauren Bacall – they were married there in 1945; Bromfield was best man. As a wedding gift he gave them a boxer puppy. Bromfield was more conservative than Bogart, who was a supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and later Adlai Stevenson. When Bromfield visited Bogart in Los Angeles, their debates often ended in dissention on political questions. However, Bacall described Bromfield as "one of Bogie's oldest and best friends." They had known each other since the 1920s, when they had worked in the New York theater world. Bromfield also wrote the story 'Better Than Life' for the Humphrey Bogart film It All Came True (1940). Books and gardens were Bromfield's great passions. Every
Sunday, he hosted a party in his garden. One visitor noted that his
clothes combined "the shirt of a gangster, the trousers of a student,
and the slippers of a peanut salesman." (The Planter of Modern Life: Louis Bromfield and the Seeds of a Food Revolution by Stephen Heyman, W. W. Norton Company, 2020, p. 2; first published in 2020) Bromfield received several awards and honors, among them LL.D. from
Marshall College, Huntington, West Virginia, LL.D. from Parsons College,
Fairfield, Iowa, D.Litt. from Ohio Northern University, and Chevalier,
Légion d'honneur (1939). He was President of Emergency Committee for
the American Wounded in Spain in 1938 and the director of the United
States Chamber of Commerce. Bromfield died on March 18, 1956 in Columbus, Ohio. His later works
include Pleasant Valley (1945),
a personal statement with an ecological theme. Bromfield believed in
market-orientated conservation and modernization, but a decade before
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring
(1962) warned the world of the dangers of DDT, he criticized giant chemical manufacturers "who make millions
each year out of the tons of poisons used in the growing and processing
of American food." ('Bromfield on Food Poisons. Probers into Chemical Sprays Smeared by Lobby Tracing to Manufacturers,' Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 9, 1951) Bromfield
was an eager supporter of mechanizing the farm work. He didn't like his
wife driving a tractor or working in field. In Malabar Farm
(1948) he wrote: "Without mechanization it is difficult for the general
farm to compete on even terms with the wheat specialist or the corn and
hog specialist or the grass farmer or the big and efficient poultry
operator or the orchardist with from five thousand trees upward or the
ioo-cow dairy." (Ibid., p. 57) Brigham Young - Frontiersman (1940), filmed by Henry Hathaway, was a fictionalized part-biography of the Mormon leader who founded the Salt Lake City. Dean Jagger played the title role. The screen version was less concerned with the religious aspects, but focused on the theme of the persecution of a minority and the pioneering story in the Fordian vein. The romantic historical novel about the American Civil War Wild Is The River (1941), was set against the background of the occupation of New Orleans by the Yankees. In Until the Day Break (1942), a resistance novel, one of the characters Roxana, asks, "Why are the Germans worse than other people?" (Ibid., New York, Popular Library, p. 31) The events take place in occupied Paris, where a group of expatriates act against the Nazi regime. The dedication of the book is "To all those brothers regardless of race and greed, color or nationality, who have died fighting the Anti-Christ". Also in The World We Live In (1944), a collection of short stories, Bromfield expressed his hostility towards the German nation. The author's daughter Ellen has depicted in The Heritage: A Daughter's Memories of Louis Bromfield her life growing up in the shadow of her famous father. "His was a vital character, energetic, ambitious, insatiably curious about every human being, every manner of living," she wrote. "To be surrounded constantly by an assortment of human samples from as many walks of life as possible was, indeed, an obsession with him." (The Heritage: A Daughter's Memories of Louis Bromfield, foreword by Lucy Dos Passos Coggin, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999, p. 2; originally published by Harper & Brothers, 1962) In Strangers in the Valley (1957) Ellen Bromfield Carson drew a picture how she and her husband Carson moved to Brazil to live a farm life on the new frontier there. Louis Bromfield's Malabar Farm has become a popular tourist attraction in Ohio, receiving visitors from all parts of the world. For further reading: The Planter of Modern Life: Louis Bromfield and the Seeds of a Food Revolution by Stephen Heyman (2020); 'Louis Bromfield, Malabar Farm, and Faith in the Earth' by Deborah Fleming, in Organization & Environment, Vol. 19, No. 3 (September 2006); 'The Jeffersonian Restoration of Louis Bromfield,' in The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement Toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century America by Allan Carlson (2004); Yrs, Ever Affly: The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Louis Bromfield, edited by Daniel Bratton (1999); Louis Bromfield, Novelist and Agrarian Reformer by Ivan Scott (1998); The Heritage: A Daughter's Memories of Louis Bromfield by Ellen Bromfield Geld (1995); Louis Bromfied and the Malabar Farm Experience by John T. Carter (1995); 'Louis Bromfield' by Pamela Cleaver in Twentieth-Century Romance and Historical Writers, edited by Lesley Henderson (1990); Louis Bromfield by David D. Anderson (1964); Louis Bromfield and His Books: An Evaluation by Morrison Brown (1956) Selected works:
|
