Louis Bromfield

This article contributes to phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard’s call for topoanalysis by examining houses and inhabitation depicted in two works by American writer Louis Bromfield (1896-1956). The first work considered is “The Hands of God,” a 1939 short story that recounts the defilement of a 300-year-old Basque farmhouse. The second work considered is Bromfield’s last novel, the 1951 Mr. Smith, which depicts the unraveling, pre-World-War-II home life of Wolcott Ferris, a conventional Midwestern, middle-class husband and father. These two works demonstrate how, regularly in his creative efforts, Bromfield depicted a lived reciprocity whereby house and inhabitants mutually sustain and reflect each other, sometimes in positive ways that facilitate engagement and care; at other times, in negative ways that intimate or spur personal or social dissolution.
        The article concludes by considering implications for phenomenological research on houses and homes in the 21st century. The argument is made that, on one hand, inhabitation involves a lived whole unified by its total character. On the other hand, inhabitation involves a lived dialectic founded in a twofold significance involving internal diversity versus external connectedness. In both these inner and outer relationships, there are “sustaining” and “undermining” situations—e.g., the home as a place of comfort and regeneration versus the home as a place of unease, vulnerability, or conflict. Most broadly, the perspective argued for here looks inward toward the uniqueness of particular homes and inhabitations but also recognizes that they are integrally related outwardly to the world beyond, including other places, the broader societal context, and global interconnectedness.

Though relatively unknown today, American novelist and agrarian reformer Louis Bromfield (1896—1956) was regarded in the 1920s as one of America’s most promising young writers. A major theme in many of Bromfield’s works is the 20th-century loss of a lived sensitivity to the natural world percipitated in part by American industrialism and materialism. At the same time, Bromfield sought to resurrect a style of environmental encounter whereby plants, animals, and places could be seen as they were in themselves and thereby be genuinely cared for and protected.

One label he used for this sympathetic way of knowing nature is “teched”—a colloquial word referring to a capacity for experiencing an intuitive intimacy with things, creatures, and landscapes such that the boundaries of self and other dissolve. Bromfield believed that such direct openness to the world was essential to understanding nature and for using it in a responsible, sustainable way, especially in regard to particular places, including his home region of northern central Ohio.

In this paper, I draw on two of Bromfield’s short stories—“Up Ferguson Way” and “The Pond” (both written in 1944)—to examine the experiential dimensions of “teched” and to indicate how this mode of encounter relates to attachment to place.

Key words: Louis Bromfield, Malabar Farm, environmental experience, place, attachment to place, love of nature, phenomenology of place