Provence, 1970

by Luke Barr

  The movie people were interesting. Fun to watch, anyway. Paul described them coming en masse in the spring, for the Cannes Film Festival—a fascinating mob of

  cinema sycophants, actual stars, bosom-bouncing starlets, quite delicate dressed-alike young men in pairs, hangers on, thickset, hawk-eyed promoters and money-men, poseurs, aging actors warming their trembling fingertips at the flame of public recognition, and endless starry-eyed teenagers, notebooks in hand hoping to get Big Shot autographs, swirling through the crowds and the hotel lobbies like schools of minnows in an ocean full of aquatic giants.

  He had a novelist’s eye for the spectacle of it all. He and Julia would sit at Le Festival restaurant and watch the passing scene. “It’s very enheartening to one’s sense of superiority,” Paul said. Of course, Julia was herself a celebrity of sorts, a “Big Shot.” Not that she acted like one, or put on airs. But among food people in the United States, she was the star around whom all others orbited, seeking her approval and respect. Here in Provence, on the other hand, she was just the tall American with the intrepid accent, ordering vast quantities of food at the local grocery stores, butchers, and fish shops. Provence was liberating that way.

  Child’s matter-of-fact personality and good humor tended to overcome any bad feelings—bruised egos, competitive cookbook authors, slighted chefs—but her position could occasionally cause friction. A new food writer on the scene, such as Richard Olney, might well nurture a sense of aggrieved, disgruntled persecution—always finding himself in Child’s shadow.

  He was arriving tomorrow. Lord was picking him up at the train station in Cannes, and he had made plans to visit both Beard and the Childs. Lord explained that she, Bedford, and M.F. would be preparing dinner for Olney tomorrow—the collaboration dinner they’d been planning since the sensational meal he cooked for them a few weeks earlier. It was their way of repaying his hospitality. Well, they would try, anyway, Lord said, half-smiling.

  Not to worry, Bedford said. The wines would be superb.

  M.F. felt a distinct inkling of dread at the thought of another endless evening with Olney and Sybille. She liked them both, but the rigors of their company were exhausting, their obsession with food and wine having made them too disengaged from the life of the world around them. Yes, she had always been in favor of educating the palate, but she herself had an inclination to the simple and the spare. “For my own meals I like simplicity above all,” she had written in Serve It Forth.

  Paul opened another bottle of wine and outlined his plans for “le parking,” which is how he and Julia facetiously referred to the spot at the top of the driveway that they intended to fix up, by putting in some blacktop or gravel. It struck them as amusing to use French in this bastardized way, poking fun at the inherent pomposity of the language, and their own pretensions, too. Another improvement project at La Pitchoune that Paul was set on was the installation of a dishwasher—“le deesvashaire,” they called it. Of course, this being France, that would require the combined efforts, Paul explained, of (a) a carpenter, (b) a mason, (c) a plumber, and (d) an electrician. All men Paul knew well, since there was always something to be fixed or improved at La Pitchoune.

  In the meantime, there was no dishwasher, so after they ate their sorbet, they all helped clean up. “Everyone has been splendid about dish washery,” Julia noted gratefully in a letter the following week, “and we have gotten along splendidly and happily. I did go a bit wild on food buying, but it is far better to have a bit too much than too little, n’est-ce pas?”

  10

  SEXUAL POLITICS

  M.F. AND ARNOLD GINGRICH WROTE TO EACH other almost every day; letters were at the heart of their relationship. She would sit at the dining table in the house in La Roquette, eating cheese and cold boiled potatoes, or drinking a brandy and Perrier, reading and writing. “I wonder if you’ve heard from me lately,” she wrote. “I hope so, just to keep the threads untangled in the web that binds us.” The coming and going of their letters was on a postal service time delay—one was always catching up and circling back.

  Gingrich wrote longhand, with news of his travels and travails, how his writing was going, and a lot of New York literary gossip. Who was up to what at Esquire; his book deal with Crown (for The Joys of Trout). He also sent numerous newspaper and magazine clippings, including, for example, an endless and earnest and somewhat fatuous Charles Reich article in The New Yorker, “The Greening of America.” It purported to explain that this was an age of generational revolution, when a new, enlightened form of consciousness, which he called “Consciousness III,” would emerge. The essay was a sprawling neo-Marxist theory of everything from civil rights to bell-bottom jeans to “Mr. Tambourine Man”—a grand summary of sixties attitudes. It was “more of the same, restated, re-hashed,” M.F. wrote back. “Or are people simply hungry for some new kind of medicine?”

  M.F. may have dismissed Reich’s grandiose theories, but she had long been fundamentally sympathetic to the new movements of the 1960s. She opposed the war in Vietnam, and supported the civil rights movement. Norah, a social worker, was also a committed political liberal, and so were all their children. And of course M.F. had long ago embraced a sort of libertine philosophy, a sensualist’s view of the world in which the pleasure of eating extended effortlessly to all the pleasures of life, and where straitlaced morality had no place. This was considered “continental” in the 1930s and ’40s; by the 1960s it had begun to resonate with the politics of revolution and rebellion in the United States.

  Sex was in the air. Indeed, she knew from the letters she received from readers, and the various requests passed along by her agent, Henry Volkening, that her own work was increasingly being seen in the new, red-tinted light of sexual liberation. She had made her literary reputation with her voluptuous, elliptical writing about food, but it had always encompassed much more than that. “It seems to me,” she wrote in the foreword to 1943’s The Gastronomical Me, “that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think about one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it.”

  In the same book, she described a scene between herself and the man she referred to as “Chexbres” (Dillwyn Parrish, who was not yet her second husband) with a seductive yet reticent portrayal of love and longing:

  There was a bottle of smooth potent gin, unlike any I’d ever tasted. We drank it in glasses Chexbres had bought for them, shaped like crystal eggs almost, and with the caviar it was astonishingly good. We sat whispering and laughing and piling the pungent little black seeds on dry toasted bread, and every swallow of the liquor was as hot and soft as the candle flames around us.

  Then, after we had eaten almost all of the caviar and drunk most of the gin, and talked as Chexbres and I always talked, more and better than we ever talked with anyone else, I stood up, thanked him very politely for the beautiful surprise, and walked toward the door to the stairs.

  Sometimes, however, M.F. could be quite bold in expressing her desires, including the illicit ones. Writing of a time when she was still married to her first husband, Al, she says:

  In 1935 or 1936, I went back to France with Chexbres and his mother. The whole thing seems so remote now that I cannot say what was sea change and what had already happened on land. I know that I had been in love with Chexbres for three years or so. I was keeping quiet about it; I liked him, and I liked his first wife who had recently married again, and I was profoundly attached to Al.

  By the end of that trip, a few months later, the “profound” attachment to Al had loosened. “The world I had thought to go back to was gone. I knew it, and wondered how I could make Al know too …” This was a level of candor that was quite startling at the time she published those words in The Gastronomical Me—but much less so thirty years later, when the times were definitely changing, catching up to he
r.

  Now, Volkening asked her, would she be interested in writing a book entitled How to Cook in Bed—a Primer for Hungry Lovers? She fielded such requests with some regularity. The answer was a firm no. Not that her writing wasn’t explicitly erotic sometimes—it very often was—but context was all. She’d been infuriated when Little, Brown sold an excerpt from her 1961 book A Cordiall Water to a stud magazine. “M.F.K. Fisher writes about food as others do about love, only better,” Clifton Fadiman had written in The New Yorker in 1942, but now a critic in an English newspaper had referred to her as “the past-mistress of gastronomical pornography.” She rejected the “Sexy Fisher” label, and explained in a letter to her close friend Eleanor Friede:

  Perhaps Kip Fadiman started the Sexy Saucepan Syndrome with his often-quoted remark. But that English critic helped, with his often mis-quoted one. As you well know, our mores have changed since 1937! A renewed interest in Fisher as a pornographer, if it happens, can only be a symptom of our avid interest in overt sex right now. It is old hat! We just like to read and talk about it more hungrily than we did twenty or forty years ago. I shall continue to be as straightforward in my voluptuous approach to the pleasures of life as I have been in the past …

  I just wish my fellow-countrymen were more relaxed. They have been conditioned to believe that there is something basically EVIL about physical and moral sensuality. I cannot possibly agree with them. Therefore their titillation from some of what I have written over the past forty years is their problem, not mine! California girl raised in a Quaker town has managed to imply, and for many years into an almost void, that eating and love can both be fun?

  Still, it was undeniably heartening to be recognized, to be in demand, particularly at this moment in time. Contending with challenges to the status quo from women’s groups and gays and lesbians (the Stonewall riots in New York had happened in June 1969) and from the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements, America was changing for the better, M.F. thought. It was opening up in intriguing ways.

  The anti-establishment mood was now filtering into seemingly nonpolitical areas, too, signaling new possibilities, bringing about an infusion of energy. Just as the 1960s had introduced more relaxed attitudes about sex, the same was true of food and cooking. Chefs were no longer necessarily professionally trained—skilled amateurs were beginning to open restaurants and to experiment. For restaurant chefs and home cooks alike, fresh seasonal ingredients were front and center. One bought what looked fresh and created a menu to suit the ingredients, rather than the other way around. Great food was no longer necessarily French, either; it might be American. The embracing, sometimes amusing tone of Child’s French Chef television program suited the moment better than the classic, pedagogical approach of the Mastering volumes, and so did Olney’s effusive purism and his seasonal recipes.

  As for M.F., she was glad her writing had new currency and sex appeal. She liked fan mail. But she was also aware of a new challenge that the cultural and political landscape had gradually, implacably imposed on her, for how could she continue to write and reminisce about France as she always had? As food and taste were changing, would she blithely keep turning out her “Gastronomy Recalled” columns for The New Yorker, with their nostalgia-heavy descriptions of food and drink she had enjoyed, mainly in France?

  France had always been at the center of her worldview, her primary source of inspiration, but now, here in France once again, she found herself confronting the seductions and limitations of Francophilia. Were not the poetic evocations of “Gastronomy Recalled” just another, gentler version of the very snobbery she increasingly deplored in Sybille Bedford? There was, after all, in both cases an unspoken assertion of privilege and taste, the source of which was undoubtedly French, and of a prewar vintage.

  M.F. and Gingrich’s correspondence was easygoing and diaristic for the most part, but every so often he would raise the question of “them,” their relationship, and what it all meant. He wanted more, he said. He was jealous of her friendships with other men, demanding to know who was gay and who wasn’t. “As for Beard,” M.F. responded, “he has lived for many years with a male friend, an Italian architect. He is a wonderful person to be with, and is always surrounded by genuinely loving females (like me!). Draw any or all conclusions!”

  And “as for talking about ‘us as us,’ ” she wrote, “What, really, is there to say, that we don’t already know?” They loved each other, but for her, the connection was more romantic than sexual. Their flirtatious letters kept a sensual element in her life, and sensuality was the current that animated her writing, the very essence of her philosophy—the entwining of hunger and love. They would never really be together, but for M.F., that wasn’t the point. The fact was that M.F. was set in her solitary ways, and happy to continue in them.

  11

  TWILIGHT OF THE SNOBS

  RICHARD OLNEY HAD NOT PARTICULARLY wanted to come, but here he was, making his way through the Cannes station early on Monday morning, December 14, 1970, newly arrived from Paris on the overnight train after the CVF dinner at Lucas Carton. The trip had taken nine hours.

  He looked around for Lord, who’d promised to pick him up. It was she who had invited him to stay at Les Bastides and insisted that he come. She had arranged a busy schedule for him. First there was to be an early lunch with her and M. F. K. Fisher. Later that day he was to pay visits to Julia Child and then to James Beard, and that night he would be attending the collaboration dinner Lord, Bedford, and M.F. were hosting. M.F. was, maybe, possibly, Lord implied yet again, going to write about him in The New Yorker.

  These were the grand titans of the American food world, and Olney had come to pay his respects. That was Lord’s unspoken idea anyway—that he ingratiate himself so as to be inducted into the rarified circle of the American food elite.

  Lord meant well. She was an old friend and he loved her. She was right; the success of his book did depend in part on the good will of people such as Child, Beard, and M.F. It was through connections with them and those in their orbit that one arranged to teach cooking classes, write for American food magazines, and publish cookbooks. But he would not kowtow, or play the role of eager young acolyte, thankful to be included. For one thing, at forty-three, he wasn’t exactly young anymore. And for another, he measured himself not by his professional success in America—the sales of his cookbook—but by his skill as a cook. He would never be much good at self-promotion. He was too proud to shill.

  And so he would pay his respects, but he would demand respect, too. It was he in this group, and he alone, who lived in this country; who was a contributor to its preeminent food and wine publication; whose closest friend, Georges Garin, was a preeminent Paris chef; who had been embraced, in other words, by the French food establishment. More than that, Olney had managed to absorb at a seemingly molecular level the intuitions, knowledge, palate, and prejudices of French cooking, from rustic to haute cuisine, and to articulate the mythological essence of bœuf bourguignon, or gigot d’agneau, or bouillabaisse.

  He was a better cook, he was quite sure, than any of the other Americans in the group. He was an artist. And didn’t that count for something?

  In the small kitchen of her rented apartment in La Roquette, M.F. was deveining shrimp. She liked shrimp; they were pretty little creatures. She had written about them at some length in her latest book, With Bold Knife and Fork, noting how Asian brush-painters liked to use shrimp as models, and that the best she’d ever eaten were in Venice, “caught in unmentionable locations in the canals … served peeled in a bowl with enough herbs to mask the dangers and enough wine in the glass to counteract them.”

  She was planning a similarly simple dish for the long-awaited “collaboration dinner” that Lord had planned for Olney. Shrimp, baked with parsley and garlic, butter and bread crumbs. She usually served this dish warm, but it would be room temperature today for convenience’s sake. She wanted something she could make now and then carry across the street to
Les Bastides when the time came.

  With a small, sharp knife, she split a prawn down the back, took out the vein, and then placed it cut side down in a baking dish that was well covered with olive oil. She continued in this manner until all the shrimp were peeled, letting them marinate in the oil for a while. Then she turned them all over, sprinkled parsley on them, and put the dish in the oven.

  She poured herself a vermouth. She was anticipating an awkward evening. She liked Olney—she and Lord had taken him to lunch in Mouans-Sartoux earlier in the afternoon—but he was a tightly wound personality. He seemed on edge. And in her own steely, quiet way, she was on edge, too. For one thing, M.F. had reached the limit of her tolerance for Bedford’s unrelenting superiority and snobbism, her persistent reminders of M.F.’s ignorance and “American” extravagance. There were stern dissertations about decorum, the proper pronunciation of French words, and in fact almost everything.

  Just the other day, M.F. had been subjected to an entire conversation about tipping. Bedford was opposed to tipping on principle, she said, though she did comply with convention as a matter of courtesy. The waiter at a restaurant was paid a salary to do his job—why did he also require a tip? He didn’t. A few coins left on the table were surely fine.

  Americans, on the other hand, were liable to leave extravagant and unnecessary tips. It was vulgar. Bedford herself was a notably meager tipper, M.F. had not failed to notice.

  “Ah well,” said M.F.