In Good Hands: The Keeping of a Family Farm.

The Keeping of a Family Farm Charles Fish

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $21,229 pp.

Not so long ago, even those Americans who hadn't been raised on farms were apt to be the children of erstwhile farmers and peasants, or to live in towns that moved to the rhythms of rural life. Agriculture had a central place in national imagery; Uncle Sam was only Old MacDonald in his Sunday best. All of that is now pretty much a thing of the past, and Charles Fish deserves thanks for reminding us of the quality of that increasingly distant way of life.

Telling a story of a farm near Rutland, Vermont, still in the family after more than a century-and-a-half, Fish draws on essays by his great-great grandfather, the farm's founder, his grandmother's reminiscences, and his own diary, written as a seven-year-old in 1944. His prose is stately, satin and madeira, and a little sad, as any memoir is bound to be. And he has a grand heroine in his grandmother, a Vermonter and hence a little flinty, not inclined to let feelings threaten her self-government, but no stranger to laughter either. In Fish's warm remembrance, she is serene in her belief in human equality, confident that what matters in moral life--especially in the nurturing of children--is universal and unchanging, a kinswoman to the old lady in Robert Frost's "The Black Cottage," who "had some art of hearing and yet not hearing the latter wisdom of the world."

Yet while Fish admires the quiet decencies of rural life, he doesn't prettify. He is reserved about sex and procreation, but he lets his readers see the farm not only as a place of germinating and growing, but of slaughter and death, with rats under the barn floor, waiting for blood and offal. The art of farming, Fish indicates, assumes that each thing has a right time and way to die, and recognizing that life requires the taking of life, farming requires a hallowing by purpose.

A farm is a human construction, its boundaries defined by law. But the working premise of the farm, Fish observes, is that nature--including human nature--requires cultivation to tease out its excellences. Implicitly, the farm subordinates convention to nature, the part to the whole.

Farm life was emphatically local, of course: begun a few days after D-day, Fish's diary makes no mention of the war, although it does record his rising from private to sergeant in one childhood game, and he remembers learning to hate Nazis through the movies. The farming community believed that the best government is immediate and personal, tailored to human dimensions. The public stage of such small places had speaking parts for almost everyone, teaching the foundations of citizenship as readily as farming, at its best, taught work for a common end. By contrast, as Fish notes, even public places in contemporary life are likely to be shaped and governed by private purposes. Our lives are increasingly postpolitical, pointing back to the self; the farm's parochialities were linked to larger dramas.

Still, although Fish writes with "reserve and circumspection"--the way his grandmother talked, I imagine--he doesn't hide the wolf in the farm's Arcadia. Agrarian America believed in an unchanging moral order, but also in progress and transformation. The contradiction made for uneasiness and denial: Fish reports that the family ordinarily addressed changes in the conditions of life only in allusions or by silence. Subtly, however, the farm's scales were weighted in the direction of modernity. Fish's great-great grandfather wrote that God "created all things for man" and gave him dominion over them; the Bible gives human beings only the limited authority of stewards. Part of a liberal republic, Fish's farm was founded on terms which assume the propriety of human mastery and the pursuit of gain. The family often spoke of the farm as a patrimony, a home place to be passed intact to subsequent generations, but they also saw it as capital, assets held for exchange: as Fish tells us, the possibility of a "higher return" has always been the farm's nemesis.

And as much as Fish admires the virtue of farming, it is not a life he has chosen for himself. Even as a child, Fish was an "irregular," a sometime visitor, and reflection took him beyond the farm's horizons. The farm is a place to come back to, a reminder of first things, a mark by which to measure times and people. Yet by stirring his speculation about the way things come to be and pass away, the farm led Fish to reflect on the transience and value of all human orders, political societies as well as farms. Fish has reason to cherish the farm's "remarkable achievement" as the nurturing Ithaca of his personal odyssey, just as we have a need for its enduring curriculum.

Wilson Carey McWilliams is professor of political science at Rutgers University.