Books: Specialty Farmer

R. F. D.—Charles Allen Smart—Norton ($2.50).

On a hill a couple of miles beyond the suburbs of Chillicothe, Ohio (pop. 18,340) is a 63-acre farm with a hundred-year-old stone house, Oak Hill. Its inhabitants are 34-year-old Charles Allen Smart and his wife. They call themselves plain farmers.

But compared with ten million other U. S. farmers, they are not plain. While milking the cows, Farmer Smart sings Gregorian chants. Their outdoor privy, built last year by the WPA, is decorated with colored reproductions of Toulouse-Lautrec, Laurencin, Chirico. Winters, the Smarts produce plays in Chillicothe’s Little Theatre. Farmer Smart believes that the land should be socialized. His farm deficit he makes up by clipping coupons (“much less pleasant than shoveling dung”). But in common with plain farmers he wants to make his farm pay by the sweat of his own brow.

Such, in R. F. D., are some of the unusual details of farming as practiced by Farmer Smart, a Harvard graduate, onetime editor, schoolteacher, Paris expatriate, and author of two novels, who three years ago inherited Oak Hill and several thousand dollars in cash. A Book-of-the-Month Club selection and a likely candidate for the best-seller list, R. F. D. is also one of the most enthusiastic documentations yet to appear on that rare phenomenon, an intellectual who intends to farm his “farm.”

R. F. D. is told in the personal, random style of a farmer’s almanac. Animal husbandry alternates with tributes to his wife; poetic fervor (“you want to sing, dance, yell, get drunk, and pray”) is mixed with the technique of shearing; observations on the sexual prowess of rams with gossip about his neighbors; market conditions with a description of bathing with his wife in washtubs (“one felt it as something out of Daumier or Cruikshank, of Degas or Rembrandt”); dissertations on the weather with proposed reforms for farmers’ dress (kilts and beard).

But for all his bubbling enthusiasm for farming, Farmer Smart admits that his only successful crop so far has been “ideas, sensations, intuitions, feelings, sympathies, and delight in action.” For city folk, his much-repeated moral is: Don’t take up farming unless you have a “specialty”—writing, for instance. (In Ross County the average income per family is $572; Farmer Smart’s minimum budget is $3,000.) Plain farmers might deduce a somewhat different moral. What is needed, they may decide after reading R. F. D., is not to teach writers to farm, but to teach farmers to write bestsellers.