We Came Along with a Hammer

Loius Bromfield was the man. This seems like an important thing to know about him. He did it all first: Joined the ambulence corps in WWI before America entered the war (and was awarded both the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor), wrote a first novel which became a bestseller (The Green Bay Tree, two books before Early Autumn), hung out in Paris between the wars (he helped Hemmingway get his first story published), conquered Broadway (play based on his first book: smash hit), was the toast of 30s Hollywood (Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart got married in his backyard) and then retired to the country, incidentally, as it were, becoming one of the pioneers of the organic farming and ecology movements (his home, Malabar Farm, is now a state park).

I must correct myself: Louis Bromfield was the fucking man. If he’d managed to cram in a few evenings gigging with Louis Armstrong during this period, not only would you believe it, he’d be fucking Zelig.

Which makes it all the odder that I’d never heard of him. Not so much because I’d never heard of him, but because you’d think anybody would have heard of him, with a resume like that. The cat was hep. He made the scene. Cooler than Lou Reed on F.D.R. drive in February. And he won a goddamn Pulitzer. So how could he have died from literary memory so quickly?

Well, the short answer may suffice: He’s not very good. Dread Penny and I chatted a bit about this, of which more anon, but there’s something about him that reminds me a bit of Stephen Fry’s character in Cold Comfort Farm. There’s a brief scene in a tea shop that shows what I mean (two and a half minutes in, although Ian McKellen as a fire and brimstone preacher has its pleasures as well, as does the entire film and the book it’s based on):

In a slightly less spittle-flecked way, that’s Bromfield to a T. Early Autumn is a book consumed not with the actuality of sex, but with its possibility; practically everyone in it who actually does manage to knock boots is nearly destroyed by the experience, because they’re too weak, damn it, damnably weak, and lack the passionate animal spirits which lend the lower classes their pulsating vitality. Or something like that. Bromfield condemns this narrowmindedness and leads the rah-rah section for honest lust; but it all feels like a wrestling match with a scarecrow today, and one gets the vague sense that it did even back then. To wit, here’s a contemporary review of the book from the Hartford Courant:

Bromfield Not Quite Master of His Craft

The Hartford Courant

Nov 28, 1926

Here is presented to us the third “panel” in Louis Bromfield’s “screen of American life,” “The Green Bay Tree” and “Possession,” being the “panels” already unfolded to the reading public. Mr. Bromfield’s books are exceedingly difficult to criticize the author possess, indubitably, a fine talent, yet it is a talent with abrupt and daunting limitations; his imaination is acute and subtle, but he lacks the power to bring the fruits of that imagination clearly and acceptably before the reader; he has the mind, and the material, but somehow they do not fuse properly, the author is unable to work them together into a wholly satisfying narrative.
“Early Autumn” is a sad scare story of the yellow leaf; of the decadence, or better perhaps the disintegration, of an old aristocratic New England family. In an exceedingly interesting letter to his publishers, Mr. Bromfield writes of how New England, through the migration of her most vigorous citizens to the west,—“has spread over all America a thin veneer of what passes for Puritans, and is merely a pale, degenerate imitation of the positive, fighting, masculine force represented by the Roundheads of Cromwell’s day.” This is a bit of acute analytic comment, which reveals something of Mr. Bromfield’s individual idiosyncrasy.
The men and women in “Early Autumn” are drawn with patient, painstaking care, but they never come quite alive; but Mr. Bromfield does succees in conveying the sense of breaking down, of a strain bred too far, of general collapse. If only this sensitively minded writer were more completely master of his craft, if he were able to attain the height for which he manifestly strives, his work would be comparable with that of Mrs. Wharton; as it is there is, in Mr. Bromfield’s New England trilogy, a constant suggestion of Mrs. Wharton’s manner and method.

It cheers me to think at least some reviewers saw him as a bit of a soapy old fraud as well. (Of course, maybe I’m just pissed because Humph and Lauren didn’t get married in my back yard. We’ll always have Paris….) But it is startling and disturbing to think that such a prominent cultural figure could disappear so utterly. Quality, it seems, does count for something. But contemporary prize pickers don’t seem to be very good at spotting it….which makes one’s right eyebrow float aloft when looking at some more recent winners….

This entry was posted on April 9, 2009 at 4:47 am and is filed under Contemporary Reviews, Early Autumn, Louis Bromfield . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.