Richard Willis left the farm as soon as he could. He graduated high school a year early and enlisted in an Army training program during World War II to get away. He later spent a long career in the academic and professional theater world. Now in his eighties, Willis has returned to his youth spent farming with his parents near Marengo, Iowa, in this memoir.
Long Gone is an unsentimental book. Do not look here for a description of the good old days, or for a rhapsody about a time when people had values and knew right from wrong, or any other broad pronouncements that I suspect Willis would label as romantic nonsense. Instead, he depicts life on a small Iowa farm during tough economic times with highly personal honesty. Willis’ Marengo had its share of mental illness, poverty, domestic violence, brutality to animals, and other social ills. By presenting these troubles in a straightforward fashion, Willis helps his readers to understand the past freed from the illusions of nostalgia.
Willis balances his memoir by also presenting positive aspects of rural life during the mid-twentieth century. He describes a place where residents felt part of a community and helped each other to get through the hard times. When he returns to visit his hometown during the 1990s for his brother’s funeral, Willis finds Marengo’s main street almost empty of businesses. He laments the end of the vibrant Saturday night scenes of his youth, a time when farm families visited town to shop, visit, and renew community ties. Farmers also felt a sincere bond to the land that they worked. Late in life Willis found he shared this bond and it drew him back to write this memoir.
The memoir is not organized in a linear fashion, but instead moves back and forth in time, focusing on the period from 1933–1947. Willis also moves from topic to topic in a loose and fluid way. This structure gives the reader a feeling of sitting and listening to a friend’s stories. Willis’ spare, but evocative, writing style fits well with his unsentimental approach to the topic. Willis’ family, particularly his mother, father, and grandparents, are the main characters of this memoir and he brings the same unflinching directness to writing about family relationships as he does to life on the farm.
Willis’ depictions of the hard and repetitive work of farming, woven throughout the book, are particularly rich and full of useful details. He includes tasks such as threshing grain, milking cows, and canning vegetables. For example, in his chapter “While the Sun Shines,” Willis discusses how his family put up hay, including personal details such as the neighbors’ comments about his father’s new hayfork, the difficulty he had learning to hitch up a team of horses correctly and efficiently, and descriptions of the many dangers that workers had to avoid. Willis also pays careful attention to gender and age divisions of farm work during the mid-twentieth century.
Willis describes a lifestyle, which is now often interpreted as the epitome of independence, as one of servitude: his family was tied to the demands of livestock that needed care multiple times every day, they labored on land that they did not own, and they were frequently barely able to keep ahead of their debts. Furthermore, his discussions of the economics of farming, then and now, emphasize the continuing difficulty of making a living off a family farm that has resulted in depopulated Midwestern small towns.
This account is not a comprehensive discussion of farming and rural life in the Middle West during the mid-twentieth century. It is not meant to be. It is a personal memoir that presents a rich portrait of this time and place and thus gives the reader a greater understanding of what it felt like to be a part of it.
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[Review length: 641 words • Review posted on October 29, 2008]