R. F. D.: Charles Allen Smart - Softcover

Smart, Charles Allen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 082141254X ISBN 13: 9780821412541

Publisher: Ohio University Press, 1998

Synopsis

This book, the author tells us in his preface, is intended to be a picture of life on a farm in Southern Ohio in the 1930s. RFD is a faithful portrait of farm life as thousands of men and women experienced it from one end of the country to the other and from pioneering times to the present century. Originally published in 1938 to enthusiastic reviews and commercial success, RFD is the story of one couple s trials with leaving the comforts of city life for a chance to get back to the land. Charles Allen Smart was a New York novelist and prep-school teacher when he inherited his aunt s farm in Chillicothe, Ohio. He and his wife moved into a rustic stone farmhouse, determined to combine their lives as working farmers with their active intellectual life, love of art, and political progressivism. They upset some in their small town by staging parts of Clifford Odets s play Waiting for Lefty, but they won respect for their hard work and honest dealings. Smart conveys the feel of their lives at a time when living in the country was a meaningful distinction in America. He also writes movingly of his concerns regarding America s materialism, the rise of industrial agriculture, burgeoning chain stores, and frayed communities. Told with sensitivity, gusto, and a fierce honesty, RFD became a classic because embedded in its charms as a first-rate farm memoir is the universal story of one couple s earnest, joyful attempt to live meaningful lives.Ohio University Press is especially pleased to reissue this midwestern classic with a new foreword by noted farm writer Gene Logsdon.

About this title

About the Author

Charles Allen Smart, born in Cleveland in 1904, was raised on the East Coast and died in his adopted home near Chillicothe in 1967.

Reviews

This reissue of the 1938 bestseller is an engaging and honest memoir of the first three years the author and his wife spent farming in southern Ohio, close to the city of Chillicothe. Smart (1905-1967), a writer (Sassafras Hill) and teacher, inherited the farm from his aunt and details here both the joys and hardships of rural life. Smart and his wife, Peggy, whom he clearly adored, raised both sheep and cattle and, in addition, cultivated a productive vegetable garden. He provides many descriptions laced with dry humor of the backbreaking labor involved in small farming. Despite the hard work and isolation, Smart found great pleasure in country living and expresses a deep respect for his neighbor farmers. He and his wife sought relief from their daily drudgery by taking an active part in a community theater group. They also found farm life conducive to their sensual natures and indulged themselves in a mutual enjoyment of good homemade food, flowers, art and bathing in the open air during the warm months. A committed socialist during the Great Depression, Smart frequently remarks on the negative effects the profit-driven U.S. economy had on agriculture and farmers. Unfortunately, Smart's attitudes toward African Americans were not as liberal but instead reflect the prejudices of his time: several condescending references to the black men and women who worked for him undercut the book's otherwise generous, bucolic tone.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In this 1938 best seller, Smart reveals how he gave up his life as a novelist and teacher to run an inherited farm in the boonies of Ohio. He and his wife raised livestock and crops while trying to remain intellectually active through the community's limited theater offerings. Along with his description of farm life, he contemplates America's material lust and more.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

“Organic nature is not, I think, completely sober, and we cannot be so if we wish to understand her, and smile. Our sober little minds are cold, and she is warm and large.”“Good farming is more complex, even, I think, than good juggling or good painting, and the odds against perfection are even greater. I have never seen a farm that justified a sour face, and too many good farmers go around looking as though they were attending their own funerals, as indeed they are.“If I have sheep for forty years, my mind may wander slowly all over the place, like a sheep, but I may be worth listening to.”“But isn’t good farming a means? And, if so, can it be so emphasized, refined, perfected that it becomes a thing of beauty, and an end, in itself?”“The hardest weather, for me, is the weather of attrition, the last week of ten weeks of rain, the fourth flood, a dry hot September after three earlier months of it in a row, the last short days of January, the last savage snowstorm in March . . . ”“We are peculiarly at the mercy of markets, because our methods and plans cannot be changed quickly, and because we have fewer sources of business information. Also, our opponent, nature, can make our best strength and brains look very small and futile, overnight. However, she is also our partner, and she has incomparably greater dignity than any other opponents and partners.”“What I’d like to see on dressed-up farmers and wear myself is kilts, with soft, loose, low collared shirts, and very short jackets. And I’d like to see beards . . . A clean-shaven face may be appropriate for a modernistic apartment or office, where everything else is clean-shaven and sexless, but it is not appropriate on a farm. A razor is as timid and citified a thing as a girdle to flatten buttocks whose glory is their curves, or a brassiére to lift up breasts that can be lifted in health and pride, or a pair of pants with buttons or—nadir reached by man in the machine age—a zipper instead of a codpiece.”“I hate quareling over property, I hate negotiation, and as you may have gathered, the whole idea of private ownership is repugnant to me. On the other hand, I did own property, and I represented both my living sister and her children and all our dead. I didn’t propose to be cheated and imposed on, and I had not forgotten the pain that some of these people, notably the Murgatroyds, had caused my aunt.”“. . . I prefer those farmers whose farms may or may not be on the messy and mortgage side, but who always smile and wave hello, and who often have time to stop, watch, and wonder, alone or with a neighbor.” “When I walk over good land and crops ruined by droughts and floods, when I feel the heat of the sun, and the cold from beyond the stars, I feel something a good deal larger than ourselves, something without any interest in us, something in whose presence we simply cannot go on being hogs, cowards, and fools, and survive.”“. . . (A) farm is a very poor place to earn a living in the ordinary meaning of that phrase, and a very rich and splendid place to earn a living in every other meaning of that phrase. I mean in the growing, so to speak, of ideas, sensations, intutions, feelings, sympathies, and delight in action, all of those things that alone justify work and money.”“It takes about thirty years of active work, experiment, observation, and study to make a passable farmer.”“. . . [A]nyone who isn’t stupid enough to spend all his time trying to farm, or to make money, or books, or something, knows that a neighbor’s orchard is a perfect place for making love.”“The ends of farming are certainly not natural; that is to say, nature has never made a farm apart from man, as she makes some deep-sea fishes, just for the hell of it. . . . And as for society, if it is so stupid as to half-starve itself, while hiring us to grow less food, surely our feeding it isn’t so important as to justify . . . the clouding of our days.”“There is also a society of trees, which is certainly more important to human society, and is more important to me personally, than the gracious society of flowers. When your old trees, your old friends, are dying, and being hewn into firewood, not only a reasonable attention to the first principles of agriculture, but also an inner hunger, a psychological necessity, demands their replacement. They cannot really be replaced, within a century or two, but as any old person, and especially any old person without children and grandchildren, will tell you, a beginning is already something.”“The ends of farming are certainly not natural; that is to say, nature has never made a farm apart from man, as she makes some deep-sea fishes, just for the hell of it.”“A farmer may use his empirical knowledge most, but his intuitions, based on experience unconscious or forgotten, and aroused by sympathy, are to me more exciting. They may even be more important. I like to see a good hand at a job, but I like even better to see a farmer at work who is so close to his animals that he knows what they need without any kind of thought at all.”“Look at any farmer, no matter how old, tough, and experienced, when he is taking care of his calves, or colts, or lambs, or pigs, or whatnot. Look at him, look at the small fry and their mothers, and feel the pulse of something beating.”“The only people I know who make what educated and lucky city people would call a decent living have farms of a thousand acres or more. My kind of farming is not for incompetents and weaklings; it is for people who have no interest in ‘getting ahead,’ who like animals and plants more than machinery, processes more than figures, solitude more than most company, and a hunting cap more than a derby hat.”“. . . Peggy has supper ready before the fire, but has taken time to make us both a little drink. So we sit there, a minute, before the fire, and raise our glasses to each other, and talk about this and that, and fall silent. Then we eat, well, and clean up the table. Sometimes we call up Gerald Rowan, or somebody, and go to a movie. Or else we stay at home, and listen to music, or play chess, or talk, or read, sometimes aloud, some book that has blood in it . . . Then we put the dogs in their kennel, take the air a few minutes in the cold moonlight, listening to a hound somewhere far away, and go to bed. And after a while, when we are lying close to each other, and the windows are open, we watch the black limbs moving, and listen to the wind, or to a mouse in the wainscoting, and watch the moving firelight on the ceiling.“If there is a god, anywhere, who has done this to me, let him hear my thanks."

Edition details

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 082141254X
• ISBN 13: 9780821412541
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 270