Ohio Authors

Review: Early Autumn

/ rtrube54 / Leave a comment
Cover image of "Early Autumn" by Louis Bromfield

Early Autumn

Early Autumn, Louis Bromfield. Open Road Media (ISBN: 9781504073394) 2022, first published in 1926.

Summary: Olivia Pentland, in a loveless marriage in a rich old family, faces choices as the early autumn approaches when she turns 40.

I’ve long had an interest in Ohio-born author Louis Bromfield. Bromfield was a best-selling novelist in the 1920’s, winning the Pulitzer Prize for this work. In the 1938, he returned from Paris to his home town of Mansfield, Ohio, purchasing a worn out piece of farmland that he renamed Malabar Farm, building an elegant home that was the site of the wedding of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. I’ve toured the home, camped with Boy Scouts on the farm, and read two books on his early experiments with sustainable agriculture, Pleasant Valley and Malabar Farm. But until now, I’ve not read any of his fiction, which I suspect is largely neglected these days.

The story is set in the fictional town of Durham, Massachusetts at the estate of the Pentlands, a rich but declining old New England family. The central character is Olivia Pentland. Though Scotch-Irish and of a lower class, she had a dark beauty and her own wealth. As a young girl, a marriage to Anson Pentland appeared promising. Twenty years on, she found herself in a loveless marriage. Anson was in love with writing his family’s history but no longer slept with Olivia, Their daughter, Sybil was turning 18, their son and heir, John, was sickly, and the shadow of death hangs over this narrative.

The one person Olivia shares the deepest bond with is Anson’s father, John. He is still in many ways the family head at the Pentlands, even as Olivia makes the household work. His wife is still living, but confined to a wing of the home, having descended into insanity and cared for by Miss Egan, who is secretly having an affair with Higgins, their groom. While visiting his wife every day, John Pentland also has had a close companionship with Mrs. Soames.

During the summer before Olivia is to turn forty, John’s niece, Sabine Callendar and her daughter Therese have come for a visit, staying at a cottage owned by Michael O’Hara, an upstart Irish politician who has built a new estate nearby. Sabine represents the family scandal, having lived a libertine life in France. She is resented by Aunt Cassie, the family Puritan determined to maintain the rectitude and reputation of the Pentlands. But Sabine’s presence is the catalyst for Olivia to realize the confining character of her own life at Pentlands. The loveless marriage, the strictures of what’s appropriate, and the secrets lurking behind the pious appearances. Not only that, Olivia fears her daughter will inherit all this.

Not only that, Sabine brings Olivia together with Michael O’Hara. O’Hara had been riding horses with Sybil. When Olivia joins to discover his intentions, she learns his interest is in her, not the daughter. Through the summer, romance kindles between them. Meanwhile, she finds a bundle of letters revealing a family secret that will wreck the pretensions of the Pentlands. That includes Anson’s book. Then a young man arrives from France who had met Sybil during a visit and is seeking her hand. He’s a man of character and the two really love each other. But this won’t go down well with the Pentlands.

Things come to a head as autumn and Olivia’s birthday approaches. What will she do about O’Hara? About her daughter? About the messed up household of the Pentlands, which somehow has ended depending upon her? Among all those trying to influence and define her, she is confronted with what she wants in her life at this important juncture, and what kind of person she will be.

I liked the way Bromfield builds up to the crisis we all see is coming. In addition, in developing the character of Olivia, we come to appreciate her strength, quiet beauty, and deep sadness. The novel harks back to a different time, a blend (or clash?) of Regency, Victorian, and Continental sensibilities in a New England setting. Written a century after Jane Austen’s novels, I found it had more in common with these than more recent works. Perhaps that is why people aren’t reading Bromfield these days. But this is Bromfield at his best, and well worth the read.

My reviews of Bromfield’s non-fiction:

Pleasant Valley: https://bobonbooks.com/2015/10/08/review-pleasant-valley/

Malabar Farm: https://bobonbooks.com/2015/10/26/review-malabar-farm/

Review: Jazz Trash

/ rtrube54 / Leave a comment
Cover image of "Jazz Trash" by Michael S. Moore.

Jazz Trash

Jazz Trash, Michael S. Moore. Crumpled-paper.com (ISBN: 9798985928945) 2025.

Summary: Andrew, who cannot play the guitar, is chosen to play guitar for a group that explores the boundaries between jazz and noise.

Perhaps you were (or are) like me–a music fan who dreamed of playing in a rock band. Maybe lead guitar. But the only guitar you can play is an air guitar, and even that not very well. That’s Andrew as he walks to meet band members. He’d seen a poster like this one:

Postcard: “Wanted Guitarist who does not play guitar” from “Jazz Trash” © Michael S. Moore (part of book promo materials)

It turns out he is exactly who Dave and Phil are looking for. They are jazz musicians wanting to create a new kind of music. The fact that Andrew doesn’t even have a guitar and doesn’t know how to play makes him a prime candidate. At his audition in the pictured warehouse, they give him an old guitar and plug him into an amp. And then, on cue, he is to play, which really means making loud noise. Then Dave on bass and Phil on drums improvise behind him.

Andrew has no clue how he is doing. But Dave is ecstatic. This is just what Dave and Phil wanted. So, they make an audition tape to send to the Kit-Kat Club, the premiere jazz club in town. But the owner just doesn’t hear the magic, just the noise. But they get by with a little help from their friends.

Some are friends I’d met before in Moore’s first novel, Crumpled Paper, which I reviewed in 2023, calling it my “sleeper” of the year. Richard is the artist whose breakthrough with a series of “crumpled paper” works. His studio is upstairs in the warehouse from the group, which, after this disastrous mixtape, names themselves “Jazz Trash.” Richard not only sympathizes with the group. He takes them under his wing and arranges a gig at the Kit-Kat under their new name. But the owner pulls the plug as soon as Andrew hits his guitar. A chance to play at a private reception goes slightly longer before the police shut them down on a noise complaint.

Meanwhile, their circle of friends that gather at an artsy cafe, stick with them, Lulu, one of the servers, and Andrew have a budding friendship. Glenn, Richard’s volunteer manager, works his magic. Martha is taken up photographing another artist, Reginald, and his literally haunted house, which reminds her of a series of Nancy Drew mysteries. Yet, she helps with band pictures as Dave creates a music ‘zine to hype the group.

While all this is going on, everyone is working hard getting ready for the annual Art Walk. Reginald will debut new works and try to get free of his ghosts. Meanwhile, Richard will try to follow up on his previous successes, and the band will get what could be their last shot at his reception.

Like Crumpled Paper, Moore explores the world of artists in various media who try to break out of the boundaries of their art. So much is about getting that chance to find an appreciative public. But part of what makes this book so enjoyable is the ensemble of characters living in this artsy community, enjoying tea and good food and conversation in the cafe as they support each others’ efforts. It’s a pleasure to recommend this book by an Ohio author living in my home town! (And I can’t help but wonder if our Short North arts district and its monthly Gallery Hops served as his inspiration.)

____________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the author.

Review: Paul Laurence Dunbar

/ rtrube54 / 3 Comments

Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird, Gene Andrew Jarrett. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022.

Summary: Perhaps the definitive biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the first African writers to achieve fame for his poetry and other writings.

On the sesquicentennial of the birth of Paul Laurence Dunbar (b. 1872), Princeton University published this extensively researched biography of a man who, arguably was one of the first great African-American poets and writers. Born of former slaves, including an alcoholic father who soon divorced his mother Mathilda, he was able to enroll in Dayton’s top high school when few African-Americans achieved more than an eighth grade education. A classmate of Orville Wright, being educated in a classically-oriented curriculum, he began writing, teaming up on several publishing efforts with Wright.

Dunbar gained the attention of influential men like James Whitcomb Riley and Frederick Douglas early on, giving him connections, the opportunities to read his poetry, and reviewing his books. This was a mixed blessing. Fellow Ohioan William Dean Howells praised an early collection of his poetry, bringing him wider notice of the literary public but also imposing the first of the “cages” Jarrett depicts that would trouble his brief, yet brilliant career.

Dialect poetry. Howells especially praised his dialect poetry, often around scenes of southern life pre- and post-Emancipation in the language and idioms people supposed Blacks to use. Throughout his career Dunbar composed poems both in formal English and dialect, the latter to satisfy the demand of the public. This also represented a larger struggle against the racial stereotypes that both shaped public taste and yet Dunbar strove to transcend. He wanted to be known simply as a great poet, not as a Black poet.

Poverty. While publishing his first collections and trying to cultivate connections who would help publicize his work, Dunbar struggled with lowly jobs such as an elevator operator in Dayton, earning a meager $4 a week while trying to help his mother. Poverty would be a cage against which he would struggle, shaping his efforts both in writing prodigiously for papers, periodicals, several musicals, one of the early Black librettists, as well as his book publishing efforts. This also necessitated relentless travel to readings, all while working at the Library of Congress, efforts detrimental to his health.

Alcoholism. Like his father, Dunbar drank increasingly throughout his life. On the one hand, it seemed to facilitate his composing, as when he turned out a school song for Tuskegee Institute on short notice and, increasingly hampered his readings when he turned up drunk. It also released violent tendencies exacerbating problems in an already troubled marriage.

A difficult marriage. Fellow writer Alice Ruth Moore came to his notice in a magazine article and they began writing, developing a deepening bond long before they met. At this time, as throughout his life, Dunbar had flirtations (and perhaps more) with a number of other woman. For this reason, she was slow to engage, and then to set a date for a wedding. Neither her parents nor Mathilda would give the couple their blessing (and Mathilda would occupy an unhealthy place in their eventual marriage). Jarrett covers at length Dunbar’s rape of Alice (when inebriated) during their engagement. Apparently she had physical injuries requiring medical attention and leave from work. It nearly broke the engagement. After several years of marriage, there was another violent incident, leading to permanent separation (though not divorce) during which she refused to respond to his attempts to apologize and reconcile. Dunbar, in declining health, purchased a home in Dayton. living with his mother.

Tuberculosis. Through most of his adult life, Dunbar was in frail health, frequently laid low by “colds” that signaled something more. Eventually, it became clear he was sick with what was then called “consumption” and is now known as tuberculosis. During his life, before the age of antibiotics, there wasn’t a cure. Dunbar even rationalized drinking as curative. A trip to Colorado brought a remission, but after his break with Alice, his condition worsened. All he could do was read and write. The end came in February of 1906, when he was but 33 years of age. He was buried in a different part of the same cemetery where his father was buried.

Jarrett not only covers the “cages” of Dunbar’s life but also how the caged bird sang. He traces his literary career, citing a number of poems. He traces Dunbar’s transition to writing several moderately successful novels as well as the previously mentioned musical collaborations. One wonders what Dunbar would have done had he lived longer or not faced the constraints he had. Yet were these constraints the very thing that drove and inspired Dunbar?

As a fellow Ohioan, I knew of Dunbar but welcome what is probably the definitive biography on Dunbar. Jarrett confirmed to me the extent of Dunbar’s greatness. He also confirmed me in his recognition of his and my favorite Dunbar poem, “We Wear the Mask,” and arguably one of his greatest, with which I will close:

  We wear the mask that grins and lies,
  It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
  This debt we pay to human guile;
  With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
  And mouth with myriad subtleties.
  Why should the world be over-wise,
  In counting all our tears and sighs?
  Nay, let them only see us, while
        We wear the mask.
  We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
  To thee from tortured souls arise.
  We sing, but oh the clay is vile
  Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
  But let the world dream otherwise,
        We wear the mask!

Paul Laurence. Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask.” from The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, ) via Poetry Foundation

Review: A Little Devil in America

/ rtrube54 / 4 Comments

A Little Devil in America, Hanif Abdurraqib. New York: Random House, 2021.

Summary: A celebration of Black performance and its significance for Blacks in America.

Just over a year ago, I read a couple of Hanif Abdurraqib’s essays in an anthology of Columbus writers. Little did I realize how much I would encounter this Columbus writer’s name in the next year, culminating in his recent award of a MacArthur Fellowship (a five year, $625,000 grant) and this week’s award of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction by the American Library Association for A Little Devil in America. He was born and grew up in the same city we moved to thirty-one years ago. If nothing else, it’s exciting to see an Ohio author from Columbus do so well!

This is an extraordinary book. It’s major subject is a survey of black performance in many genres from dance to magic to music. The title is drawn from a statement by Josephine Baker, who by 1963 had danced across the stages of the world. Speaking at the March on Washington, she proclaimed, “I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too.” The statement speaks of the passionate, celebratory, and resistant character of Black performance.

Abdurraqib takes us through this history with chapters reflected well-researched descriptions of performers from the dance marathons of the ’20’s and the 30’s through to Don Cornelius’s Soul Train and how in Black neighborhoods across the land, young men and women danced, desired and sometimes found and sometimes lost love. In later chapters, he projects that forward to the clubs and masses of bodies moving together to the music.

Then there is Aretha. He looks back from her funeral to the film Amazing Grace and the short distance “between soul music and music of the soul.” One of the most riveting stories is that of Merry Clayton, who recorded the background vocals on the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter, even while very pregnant. The intensity in which she sings the words “Rape. Murder. It’s just a shot away” is something I never heard before reading Abdurraqib. I had to go back and listen to music I knew from my teens. I had never paid attention to what an extraordinary singer she was. Abdurraqib chronicles her efforts to move from the background to a solo career that never took off. But he also draws us into that moment, the third time she repeats the word “murder” in a “voice cracking howl”–no longer just fear, but anger, and even glee.

He takes us through the rivalry between Joe Tex and James Brown, the inability of Whitney Houston to dance and how Beyonce, a supporting act to Coldplay steals the show and owns the Super Bowl and makes a powerful Black power statement remembering the Black Panthers. Then there is the incomparable Michael Jackson, and Abdurraqib’s own miserable attempt to “moonwalk.”

He moves between the famous and the marginalized. We learn of Ellen Armstrong, a black female magician, and William Henry Lane, who out-danced the white performer John Diamond. Lane, under the stage name, Master Juba, wore blackface, perhaps a subtle or not so subtle criticism. He reflects on the actor Don Shirley, and the movie he wishes could be made where no Black suffers, where they simply live. He remembers fellow Columbus native Buster Douglas’s stunning defeat of Mike Tyson twenty-eight days after his mother’s death–and how he could see the change in the eyes of a man who no longer feared.

Abdurraqib dedicates the book to Josephine Baker and the book’s central chapter focuses on her extraordinary dancing career–the vaudeville performer who flees to France, first entertaining Black servicemen in World War I and then making it her performing home, and using her talent and celebrity to act as a spy in World War II. Abdurraqib reflects on his own departure and return to Columbus as he traces Baker’s return to the U. S. Each section begins with “On Times I Have Forced Myself to Dance,” most of which reflect Abdurraqib’s poetry slam experience, having the feel of spoken word performance.

He moves seamlessly between profiles of performers and his varied life experiences. He reveals the kind of Black performance that goes on every day, whether in a game of spades or “beef” and the thin line that often runs between love and hate, closeness and violence, and the possibility that it could all end, as it had with so many friends. The book captures the range of emotion from exuberant joy to rage, from soulful hope to the gritty resistance that runs through both Black performance and Black life in America. There is the apprehension of the sweetness of life and love, made all the more so because it can be snuffed out in a moment and that “no job can stop a bullet.”

Review: The Planter of Modern Life

/ rtrube54 / 2 Comments

The Planter of Modern Life: Louis Bromfield and the Seeds of a Food Revolution, Stephen Heyman. New York: W.W. Norton, 2020.

Summary: A biography of novelist, screenwriter, and sustainable farming pioneer Louis Bromfield.

This happened to be a serendipitous find as I was shopping at an online book site. I was unaware of this recently released biography of Louis Bromfield. I will forgive you if you are wondering Louis who? Stephen Heyman, his biographer, acknowledges that this is not an uncommon reaction:

If Bromfield ever appears in a book today, he is shoved into parentheses or buried without ceremony in a footnote. If we remember him at all, it is only as a character in somebody else’s story. As Humphrey Bogart’s best man, say, or Doris Duke’s lover. As Gertrude Stein’s protege or Edith Wharton’s gardening guru. As Ernest Hemingway’s enemy or Eleanor Roosevelt’s pain in the ass. What is surprising is not that he has his own story to tell, but that, six decades after his death, that story suddenly feels important (pp. 2-3).

Louis Bromfield’s life began and ended in the Mansfield, Ohio area, and so he is well-familiar to this lover of all things Ohio. I’ve toured Malabar Farm and the Big House where Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were married. I’ve learned about his farming ideas and even camped at the farm with my son’s Boy Scout troop (a story in itself!). I’ve read some of his farm writings, Pleasant Valley and Malabar Farm. Much of what Heyman mentions in the quote above had nothing or little to do with this part of Bromfield’s life.

It turns out that this part of the story of Bromfield is what Heyman believes to be important in our day. He does not rush to make this point but sets what he thinks Bromfield’s most significant contribution in the context of his whole life. He renders the story in two parts. The first centered around Paris, his very successful novels, the Lost Generation set of which he was part, and his gardens at Senlis. The second focused around his childhood home of Mansfield, and Malabar Farm in Pleasant Valley, where his work and revolutionary thinking about the soil and farming practices began a movement that continues to this day.

The first part picks up with his ambulance corps work during World War I where his love of France was born. After a few years back in New York working in the publishing trade, he published his own first works, to immediate success. Both The Green Bay Tree and Possession featured strong, modern, American women. And he married Mary, the antithesis of these women. Heyman traces his longing to return to France, realized in 1925. He fell in with the literary set, befriended by Gertrude Stein while Hemingway resented his success, including his Pulitzer Prize. Even amid the success, the glitter, and the parties, Bromfield loved the soil, creating a beautiful garden home along a stream in Senlis, which became a gathering place for his friends, including Edith Wharton, a fellow gardener. We also learn about the beginnings of his association with George Hawkins, his personal secretary, discretely gay, and responsible for at least some of his success in Hollywood.

With the rise of Nazism, the response of appeasement, and increasing longings for home, Bromfield organized a rescue and repatriation effort for the American Lincoln Brigade, fighting in Spain. Through his connections, he mobilized the means to get over one thousand sent home, winning the French Legion of Honor. But Munich closed the door on Europe, and in 1938, he moved back to the States.

The second half of the book describes his purchase of a worn out farm in the Pleasant Valley area outside Mansfield, and his work with agricultural efforts to restore the farm through green crops, contour plowing, and limited use of fertilizers and chemical interventions, crop rotation, and shunning the monocultural farming of so much of Ohio. I learned that he was one of the first to sound the alarm as to the dangers of DDT. Heyman captures the sheer joy Bromfield derived from this work in his chapter “Four Seasons at Malabar.” He offers a nuanced treatment of these years, highlighting the reality that Bromfield’s Hollywood earnings sustained the farm–and really didn’t do that, especially after Hawkins death. He was controlling and didn’t let his two daughters, who loved farming, take a share in the work. They and their husbands went elsewhere, Ellen to Brazil, where she and her husband far more successfully realized Bromfield’s vision.

While Bromfield’s own careless business practices, mistaken ideas, and endless experiments led to mounting debts, his books and lecturing inspired future generations of agricultural writers, and the organic food movement, all of which have challenged America’s business-agricultural complex. Heyman traces the lineage of writers and activists influenced by him including Wendell Berry and Robert Rodale, founder of Organic Gardening magazine and the organic food movement.

Heyman captures Bromfield’s essential message, that ‘{m}ost of our citizens do not realize what is going on under their very feet.’ Bromfield recognized the danger of not caring for the top soil, one of America’s great assets and that chemical fertilizers could never substitute for good soil management. Perhaps the time in France and seeing farms that had been owned for generations had something to do with it.

I welcome this work. Perhaps it is just Ohio pride, but I do believe Bromfield deserves to be better known as an important influence on our contemporary movement for sustainable agriculture and healthy food. His other writing work is another matter and I suspect the author’s inferences to its lack of enduring value are on the mark, though I still want to read more Bromfield. Bromfield was one of the first to practice and preach good soil management, testify before Congress on the dangers of pesticides, and attempt to return to sustainable practices. He also left a tangible monument to his work in Malabar Farm, a working farm where people can learn about his ideas and tour the Big House. The farm doesn’t fully realize his dream of a research center nor display all his farming practices, given its tourism focus as a state park, but one can learn about his life, and see the land he saw, and perhaps something of his vision, which Heyman captures in his biography.

Review: Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

/ rtrube54 / 3 Comments

Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, Mary Oliver. New York: Penguin Press, 2017.

Summary: A selection of the poetry of Mary Oliver written between 1963 to 2015.

I have only discovered the poetry of Mary Oliver since her death in 2019. Isn’t that how it often has been with great writers? One of the ironies of this was that I lived in Oliver’s birthplace of Maple Heights, Ohio for nine years. How did I miss knowing of her for so long? She was even teaching at nearby Case Western Reserve during some of the time I lived there and it was during this time that she won the Pulitzer prize in 1984 for her collection American Primitive. I am glad at last to have found her, a writer roughly of my generation.

This collection is a good introduction to her work, a selection of her poetry written between 1963 and 2015 and published in 2017, a couple years before her passing. The book features over 200 of her poems arranged in reverse chronological order, most recent first. One of the most striking things one notices is that most of the poems are of sights on her daily walks near her home in Provincetown in New England. She writes of snakes and swans, of the pond near her home, of blueberries and violets, sunrises and sparrows. Her poetry is suffused with wonder at the simplest things, her sense of the oneness of all things and her desire to be one with them.

The transcendent is never far, sometimes in the Romantic awareness of the Ultimate in all things, sometimes in echoes of Christianity, writing of “Gethsemane” and Psalm 145. Her poem “Praying” (from Thirst, 2006) might do as well as anything to encapsulate the prayers of the “spiritual but not religious”:

It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't 
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

The reference “into thanks” reflects another theme running through her work, a profound thankfulness for life, even in its transience. In the concluding lines of “Why I Wake Early” (2004) she writes, “Watch, now, how I start the day/in happiness, in kindness.”

One of the striking things evident in the arrangement of the poems is that her later poems are much shorter, and to me carry more meaning in fewer words. Another morning poem, “I Wake Close to Morning” (Felicity, 2015) opens this selection:

Why do people keep asking to see
                         God's identity papers
when the darkness opening into morning
                         is more than enough?
Certainly any god might turn away in disgust.
Think of Sheba approaching
                         the kingdom of Solomon
Do you think she had to ask,
                         "Is this the place?"

Perhaps it is the “simplicity on the other side of complexity” or perhaps the waning of life’s energies that both slows her steps and leads her to choose her words as she writes in “The Gift” when she states: “So, be slow if you must, but let/the heart still play its true part.”

It would be wrong to give the impression that all here is sweetness and light. She writes of loneliness, and disappointment, and of death. One of the few poems of social comment is on the death of Tecumseh, one of the native leaders who fought displacement from the Ohio lands. Yet the dominant note is the wonder of the world around her that makes me wonder as to how much I miss on daily walks. We see, but do we pay attention? Oliver’s poems suggest she lived a life of paying attention