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Author Details Farm Life in the '30s

© Robert Powers

New York author Charles Allen Smart inherited his wife's farm in rural Ross County, Ohio, in the midst of the Depression. His move to the Chillicothe area for life as a farmer is described in RFD (Ohio University Press, $17.95). This book's return to print is a great idea.

Smart wrote so well that admirers can't resist the temptation to quote him. In his introduction, Gene Logsdon fills much of his allotted space with quotations. And I can't resist either.

Describing Chillicothe, Smart wrote: "On a smoky autumn Saturday evening, with the farmers pouring into town, the spectacle has great interest and some charm . . . On a Sunday afternoon, however, no town this side of hell could be more cold, stark, and ugly."

In the late 1930s, times weren't good for Ross County. "Entirely too many people have jobs that are both unsuitable to them and precarious. Trade unions are feeble, or crooked, or both. . . People generally seem to be increasingly dependent on pleasures that have to be bought, like cars and movies, and therefore on money and on their employers. The government is expensive and inefficient, social services are rudimentary, the public library is neglected, and religion is competitive and social."

But Smart writes with great feeling and empathy for the land and those who work it. He's by no means a constant grump. Reading RFD compares to a front porch visit with a trusted friend. The conversation stimulated, the topics change quickly, and one feels better and uplifted at the end of the chat. You can't go away after reading RFD without feeling that you'd like to have known this gentle, clever and highly intelligent human being.

Smart was born in Cleveland in 1904 and his family moved to Long Island, N.Y. when he was 12. He became a successful writer, publishing novels, memoirs, philosophy, essays, a play and a biography about Benito Juarez. Smart's autobiography, The Long Watch, appeared in 1968. His last three decades were spent in Ohio, where he was both a farmer and a writer-in-residence at Ohio University. He died at Chillicothe in 1967.

He had definite ideas about what it was to be a farmer: "A clean-shaven face may be appropriate for a modernistic apartment or office, where everything else is clear-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 in their curves, or a brassiere 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."

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