Seed Time

By John Skow

THE LAND REMEMBERS

by BEN LOGAN

277 pages. Viking. $8.95.

The pastoral dream is as durable as tennis elbow. In a couple of decades, when today's commune children have grown up and fled to the city, they will write fondly of life on the farm--of father squatting in his yurt carving sandals to sell, of mother's work-worn hands picking seeds from the winter's supply of garden-grown marijuana. From such a perspective--from a safe distance, that is--Ben Logan writes a warm memoir about his boyhood on a farm in the Wisconsin hill country. The Logan farm in the 1930s was neither commune nor one-crop agribusiness monster, of course. It was run by Ben's father, a sturdy Norwegian immigrant who had once been a sailor, by his mother, and by Ben himself, his older brothers, and a hired hand. Among the farm's products were corn, oats, dairy cattle, eggs, tobacco, honey, garden vegetables, calluses, and--though Logan does not say this--a continuously renewed assurance that the world made sense.

Ben admits that there were farmers in the area who fought the earth desperately, died bent over, and had to be straightened out to fit into their coffins. But the Logans generally managed to live at peace with the land and each other. The voice of the author is not insistent, and so this is a book that encourages the reader to listen to his own thoughts. One of these might be that what is now called sex-role stereotyping--father as protector, administrator and rough laborer; mother as nest builder and spiritual center--worked quite well in this farm setting. Another could be the suspicion that people as resourceful as the Logans would have prospered happily in a city slum. Yet that pastoral dream, the city man's guilty conviction that virtue and contentment reside in the country, niggles and nibbles.

Lode of Honey. So the poor-devil city man, and the harassed agribusiness exec too for that matter, dream along with Ben Logan. Planting and harvesting. The everyday task, given to the youngest child, of hunting down hens' eggs. The once-in-a-boyhood discovery, made by tracking wild bees, of a huge lode of honey in a hollow tree. The huge, heaped, steaming meals shoveled in at noontime. The circle of yellow light thrown by a kerosene lamp on a winter's evening. Some collective memory says that this is all familiar, that we ourselves have experienced it. In a majority of cases, the truth is that great-aunts and grandfathers told us about farms years ago, when we were small. Most of our parents, long since fled from the farm, were city folk. Logan's book, and our own wispy memories, makes the grandfather farm seem a fine place. Ben Logan is 54. He lives in the suburbs now, and is a TV producer. He does not say why he left the farm, or whether he has ever tried to go back to one of his own.

--John Skow

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