Total Loss Farm: A Year in the Life

by Raymond Mungo

Total Loss Farm attracted widespread attention, critical and commercial success in 1970, when the "back to the land" hippie commune movement first emerged. The hardcover first edition from Dutton was quickly followed by paperback editions from Bantam, Avon, and Madrona Publishers, keeping the book in print for several decades. Very recently, Dwight Garner in the New York Times Book Review cited Total Loss Farm as "the best and also the loopiest of the commune books."

Genres: Nonfiction

179 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Raymond Mungo (born 1946) is the author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books. He writes about business, economics, and financial matters as well as cultural issues. In the 1960s, he attended Boston University, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Boston University News in 1966-67; and where, as a student leader, he spearheaded demonstrations against the Vietnam War.
In 1967, Mungo co-founded the Liberation News Service (LNS), an alternative news agency, along with Marshall Bloom. LNS split off from College Press Service (CPS) in a political dispute. The founding event was a notably tumultuous meeting that transpired not far from the offices of CPS on Church Street in Washington, D.C.. Mungo descriptively details this event in his book, Famous Long Ago: My Life and Hard Times with the Liberation News Service.
In 1968 he moved to Vermont with Verandah Porche and others as part of the back to the land movement.
Mungo continued to write through the 1970s and 1980s; however in 1997 his career path took a different turn. He completed a Master's Degree in counseling and began working with the severely mentally ill and with AIDS patients in Los Angeles. Mungo visited France in 2000 and briefly considered relocating there.

Reviews

[Jim Kownacki · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very disappointed. I thought, based on the title, there would be more farming but the instances of farming can be counted on one hand and they don't start until page 127.
The first two chapters are a crazy 70s road trip to west coast, yes, there is drug use, but not enough to make it interesting. It was weird that they actually stopped in the town I lived near, Carlisle, PA.
Way too much metaphor for me.
I know, I Know, it's 70s counter culture stream of consciousness writing and I need to expand my mind.

[Sheela Word · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Engaging descriptions of and meditations on life beyond the grid. Mungo comes across as sweet-natured and charming. The book rambled, and at times, I had to prod myself to stick with it. Glad I did though.

[Jeff Keith]

TOTAL LOSS FARM, BY RAY MUNGO (copyright 1970)
COMMENTS BY JEFF KEITH
[three stars] I like reading books about that country hippie-type lifestyle 50 or so years ago, since that’s how I lived for a while.
However, this is kind of a strange book. Only the last part of the book (less than half) is about life on their communal farm in the spring and summer. The first part describes a somewhat harebrained idea of canoeing around 100 miles north on the Concord and Merrimack rivers, following Henry David Thoreau’s route 110 or so years later. The problem is, nowadays the two rivers are terribly polluted and interrupted by dams and other obstacles.
The second part covers most of the month of January (the first month of “the seventies”) and a long, hippie-ish trip across the country from Vermont and Massachusetts through New Mexico to Northern California. I knew that Ray Mungo’s best friend Marshall Bloom had committed suicide that fall, and looked for mention of that but didn’t see it. It felt weird that he didn’t say anything about it. A little research told me that Bloom died in November, 1969; so it’s likely that this long trip was a kind of running away to deal with their grief (but they never said that). They drove for hundreds and hundreds of miles almost without stopping, and don’t tell us whether they were taking some kind of “upper” drug to stay awake, or just a lot of caffeine.
The third part finally gets down to a description of what life was like on the communal farm. Mungo gives around half of the people funny made-up names, and the other half presumably their real names. Since this entire story takes place within less than a year, there is no way to know whether or not this living experiment will last for very long. You can look up articles on Ray Mungo’s life and find out that he, at least, did not live there for very many years.

[Alex Furst · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book #19 of 2022. "Total Loss Farm" by Raymond Mungo. 3/5 rating.

This was an eclectic book to say the least. It's mostly string of consciousness writing about a year in Vermont and traveling and some other random things.

Raymond was a hippie to the extreme, except even fed up with the hippie movement because of its ineffectiveness. While the book as a whole was just so-so, there were some incredible quotes:

- "Yet this canoe trip had to be made because there was adventure out there."
- "Remember these are my friends because they are pillars of virtue to me; because I enjoy their company and hope to learn from them and emulate their ways; because I could not leap joyfully to the side of someone I considered my equal, or less, but only those from whom I can draw new life and inspiration."
- "Well the fact is any excuse for giving yourself a fresh start on life is good enough, whether it be New Year's or spring, your birthday or deathday, it hardly matters; what's important is to preserve the right (for it's yours) to call the past over & irrelevant to the present and future."
- "It's not easy, dear one, to love this modern anachronistic Life, but it's great and grave and vibrant, miraculous and holy, serene and ecstatic, lovely and loving in a full, rich, finely textured way with details and quality and character."

[Christian Talarski · Rating 5 out of 5]

good ole book written by a hippie in the 60s. What time it was I'm sure.

[Henry Sturcke · Rating 3 out of 5]

What's it like to turn your back on society -- to just drop it all and run off to a communal farm? There's a bit of the drifter in all of us, and so we wonder.
Mungo was the rabble-rousing, issue-inciting editor of the school paper at Boston University the year I entered. That was the year that Nat Hentoff, writing in the Village Voice, named the News the best college weekly in the country. That was the year I became interested in journalism.
After his graduation, Mungo dropped out of a fellowship at Harvard Graduate School and went to Washington, D. C., where he and Marshall Bloom formed the Liberation News Service, a radical alternative to AP, UPI, and Reuters.
That didn't last long. Mungo writes: "I woke up in the spring of 1968 and said, 'This is not what I had in mind,' because the movement had become my enemy; the movement was not flowers and doves and spontaneity, but another vicious system, . . . a minority party vying for power rather than peace. It was then that we put away the schedule for the revolution, gathered together our dear ones and all our resources, and set off to Vermont in search of the New Age'" (p. 17).
What follows is a loose, monologue-style journal, composed of three sections. The tone of each section is similar to the development of a sonata.
The first section is perhaps the most interesting. It takes place in the fall, and is subtitled "Another Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers." In it, Mungo and his friends retrace the steps of Thoreau's expedition a century earlier. What they found, contrasted with Thoreau's observations, makes an interesting commentary on what pollution and commercialism have done to this rich land.
But the section is marred by self-indulgent ramblings: some of them revealing, others distracting. I don't know how interesting his comments about his friends would be to someone who didn't know them. They don't suffice as character development, they are merely impressions.
The second section, or movement, varies the theme with depression and desolation. Set in winter 1969-70, it is marked by two jolting tragedies: Bloom's suicide and the death by fire of four on a neighboring commune.
The section mainly covers the time between these two events, during which Mungo and friends took a wild but somber trip to the west coast in a drive-through car. The writing shows the pain and strain of the time, and is the weakest section of the book.
The book ends with an apocalyptic fairy tale, set in the spring and summer. In it, Mungo drops the hip language and literary allusions of the previous sections and looks through the eyes of a child at the destruction of the old order and the dawning of the new age.
In it, he asks "why the kids here can look on each other as brother and sister, . . . and cast their material lots together . . . how can they all live in a heap, . . . why have they no ambition? Is it because they cannot pursue the material goals which their parents before them succeeded in reaching? No, not really; but because their own goals and lives are truly material, not the fake comforts of Buick and Sylvania but the richness of soil and the texture of oatmeal bread; the children are not idealists and politicians, children never are, but real hedonists: they want the best of everything, and at Total Loss Farm that is the standard" (pp. 150-51).
The name of the commune, Total Loss, refers not to financial ruin but to a way of life that seeks to renounce the ego. Mungo sees the present and future of America much as Charles Reich did in The Greening of America, but the idea of achieving the Kingdom of Heaven by reverting to the innocence of childhood is much older.

[Lori L (She Treads Softly) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Total Loss Farm: A Year in the Life by Raymond Mungo has an appeal (as far as the reissue of a piece of stream of consciousness writing from 1970) based on capturing a specific time and place and movement rather actually representing a selection of great literature. It is, as mentioned in the forward by Dana Spiotta "essentially a diary of a very bad year: bad for Mungo and bad for America. The book begins in the fall of 1969..." and is the "first-hand account of a decisive moment when the intense idealism of the anti-war movement scattered. At its best the book achieves a genuine poignancy. The young bruised idealists have a brutal comedown ('a colossal bummer') while Nixon and the establishment rule the land. The desire to change the world gets downgraded to just trying to change yourself, and even that was difficult."

While there isn't going to be wide audience appeal for Total Loss Farm, any student of human nature and history who also has an interest in studying the 60's and early 70's (and hippies) would likely appreciate reading Mungo's observations and reflections from a sociological/historical perspective. It has, in truth, very little in totality, to do with a farm or farming. There is much talk of hitchhiking and traveling and some experiences with living on a commune. What is does do is expose those who are interested in the ideological roots behind many current movements and causes you see continuing on today.

"But I woke up in the spring of 1968 and said, “This is not what I had in mind,” because the movement had become my enemy; the movement was not flowers and doves and spontaneity, but another vicious system, the seed of a heartless bureaucracy, a minority Party vying for power rather than peace. It was then that we put away the schedule for the revolution, gathered together our dear ones and all our resources, and set off to Vermont in search of the New Age."


Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Pharos Editions for review purposes

[Molly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Indeed, the "farm" of the book's title comes only at the end, in the season marked Warm, and like many collections of short stories (this is not, however, purportedly fiction), the title story is the strongest. In fact, if I were to edit this book, I might perhaps suggest to Mungo that he take that section of the book, allow it to be the introduction, and see what stories from that place arise, rather than preempt it with two on-the-road narratives.

I had to sink into the rhythm of the prose in order to follow along and if the experiences and observations hadn't taken me a decade backwards in my life, I perhaps would have spent more of my reading time annoyed rather than bewilderingly charmed.

On a side note: my copy came used, no dustjacket, and thus, no packaging. It has that gorgeous musty smell of used bookshops, and I wonder how the book was marketed in its heyday. Did it keep Kerouac and others company on display shelves? Was it relegated to the back corner, certain to remain coverless?

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Something comforting about this one. I don't remember it much, except maybe it was like a tamer, hippie-soaked On the Road?