NY Times Book Review: Farm Friends
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This Sunday’s New York Times Book Review takes a look at Farm Friends: From the Late Sixties to the West Seventies and Beyond by Tom Fels.
Reviewer Claire Dederer observes that, in recounting how his former compatriots at Montague farms seemingly traded their 60’s idealism for 80’s narcissism, “Fels is rueful,” his bittersweet portrait of a lost Eden “tinged with regret.”
From the review:
Tom Fels was there. Not at Total Loss Farm, but at nearby Montague. He stayed for four years, building, drugging, socializing, all that stuff. He finally left because he missed the real world. As he writes in “Farm Friends,” his new memoir, “To stay would have been to prolong and excuse a naïve ignorance.” “Farm Friends” deals briefly — too briefly — with the actual history of the farm. Those who weren’t there and who haven’t read Mungo’s or others’ accounts of the commune movement might find themselves with a muddy idea of, as they say, what went down. Fels recently founded the Famous Long Ago archive at the University of Massachusetts, which, according to the flap copy for “Farm Friends,” “focuses on the extended family of Montague Farm and its times.” It could be that to the author, this material is simply too well known — to recount it would be like retelling Genesis.
Whatever the reason, “Farm Friends” quickly shifts its attention from the farm itself to what the farmers did once they headed into the great world. “It was very difficult,” Fels writes, “to move from a sphere in which a few farms formed a world, and the presence of a supportive counterculture was ubiquitous in the media and on the street, to one in which each of us had to make his own way.”
Fels’s investigation loops through a few time frames. In the opening section, it’s the late 1970s and Fels finds a lot of the farm folk in New York. Pete is a wildly successful drug dealer with some cool stories about a politician friend in Panama — a “stone killer.” Irv is a wealthy lawyer. Jeannette — a French admiral’s daughter and bisexual aesthete — tells Fels she’s on “girl patrol.”
Fels is at first baffled by how all these rural folk have ended up on the make in New York, but soon realizes that the city is a perfect crucible for their particular genius for survival. “It is an endless absorber of their energies; there is a great deal to do in the city, and money and progress to be made at a relatively low cost, if one is willing to work and to take a different approach.”
The next bout of remembrances takes us to California in the early 1980s, and then on into the next decades. Fels encounters some of the better-known alums from the farms: Sam Lovejoy has become an important anti-nuke activist; Jesse Kornbluth has a thriving career in journalism; Mungo continues to make his eccentric way through the world.
Fels is clearly after a group portrait; the book follows in the tradition of Henry Miller’s “My Bike and Other Friends” (one of whose subjects is found, in fact, in these pages, hanging around with Mungo in Carmel.) But where Miller is expansive (if potty-mouthed), Fels is rueful and sometimes even bitter.
Looming large is his sense of the futility of the whole commune project. He is much given to using words like “insular, self-made and self-justified” to describe the farm. Even his evocations of Eden are tinged with regret. Of those who left the commune, he writes: “We had lost the garden. But we had at least seen the garden; it is this that gives the experience its importance.” And he’s downright grumpy about the cultivated self-interest he finds three decades later among his old friends and even in himself (Fels has made his career as an art historian). “We do our best to write, to paint, to create music, to raise educated children, to encourage a culture of inquiry, invention and originality. But who has been minding the larger shop? Where are the politicians to advocate the public good: not just to advocate — we do have some — but to succeed?” His conclusion is damning, if a little opaque. He and his contemporaries, he writes, have “often placed ourselves apart. The results are obvious.”
