Provence, 1970

by Luke Barr

  In the kitchen, Jones raised the idea once again of Beck writing a cookbook. She would be eager to publish it, of course—she was a great admirer of Beck’s instinctive talents and original recipes—and Jones also knew that if Beck were to begin work on a book, that would go a long way to clearing the air between her and Child.

  Jones reminded Beck of some of the wonderful recipes they had not had time to fit into Mastering II—here was a way to use them. Like that pork, brown sugar, and whiskey braise they had corresponded about at such great length. And Child, too, Jones said, felt strongly that Beck should have a book of her own.

  Beck nodded. She understood that this was a face-saving way forward, and she also started to see that it could be a good move for her. Soon her enthusiasm got the better of her, and they were discussing how the cookbook might be organized, other possible recipes to include, and so on. Beck proposed a series of menus organized by style: menus for informal occasions, for more formal occasions, and for special occasions.

  Some of the meals, she said, might be inspired by regional cooking—“Autumn in Normandy,” for example. Other menus might be suited to a particular moment—“After a winter walk in the woods,” a “High Tea,” or even a “Hunt Breakfast.” Beck would write brief introductory sketches describing how she had prepared these meals, adding colorful recollections and bits of advice.

  Of course, they would need to engage a coauthor, Jones said, someone who could translate Beck’s recipes and stories. “Certainly I am able to read chapters in French and ask logical questions,” she said. “But there should be someone who would do the dog work.”

  Jones had a few ideas about possible coauthors; in the meantime, Beck would write up six or eight recipes and send them along. This would not be a book for beginners, she said, but rather for those “who adore to cook and partake of la véritable cuisine à la française—the true French cuisine.”

  When the potée normande was done, Beck made a sauce with some of the cooking broth and heavy cream. This was then served over the thick slices of beef, pork, sausage, and chicken, along with the carrots and leeks. Large bowls were passed around, steam rising from the fragrant meat and soup.

  It was almost midnight when they finished eating. Jean opened the champagne, and everyone stood and toasted the New Year—1971! To old friends and new adventures!—kissing one another on both cheeks. Someone put an old foxtrot record on the old Victrola, and they all danced and laughed.

  Child and Beck never did talk directly about their split. “There was no need to,” Child would later write. “After so many years of working together, we knew each other inside out. Now we were graduating from each other and going our separate ways.”

  41 minutes into 1971, and only in this wild, violent vital town could the noise be so sustained—like a too-long concert of very modern music for auto horns, old coronets and trumpets, guns, churchbells, sirens. In my room high above the vieux port I am in a kind of cocoon of sound. It is hypnotic.

  M.F. was in Marseille. The noise was tremendous, exhilarating—liberating, somehow. She felt at ease. She had escaped a major storm by no more than an hour or so when she left Avignon the day after Christmas on what turned out to be the last train out. A light snow had begun to fall, and the driver she’d hired to take her to the station cursed and said it would never last, but soon enough the trains were stopping, thousands of cars were stranded on the road, and the Red Cross was hard at work.

  But she had made it to Marseille, and to the Grand Hôtel Beauvau. This was a sentimental favorite, of all the hotels M.F. had ever known, the one she loved the most. Here, she did feel at home. She felt warm, released from the lonely quest in Arles and Avignon. She’d been coming here since 1932, and the same severe, all-knowing concierge had been presiding over the lobby since the beginning. He never smiled, but she sensed a certain warmth. “I came to think of him as unflinching, eternal, like Gibraltar but a little nicer,” she noted.

  The Beauvau was at the old harbor, with views of the fishing boats and all the urgent excitement of that environment. The hotel was not for everyone; indeed, though it was her favorite, she did not routinely recommend it to others. They might find it too loud, or too foreign. But as far as she was concerned, the good old Beauvau, which had been newly redecorated and refurbished in what she considered excellent taste, was better than ever. Yes, she was at home, but ready to return home, too. She had written what she needed to write in her journal; she had made her peace with France.

  Marseille was enchantingly beautiful at this season—there were delicate garlands of pale gold decorating the harbor, and a fantastic arch with representations of eleven kinds of fish, and festoons of sea-blue lights like waves on either side. The whole town was giddy, and she had the best seat in the house.

  And now it was a radiant blue New Year’s Day, very cold, with a rough, windy sea. The storm was still coming. The noise of celebration in the streets had lasted all night. She listened in astonishment, and did not sleep at all—writing a letter to Gingrich and then reading until about four o’clock in the morning. Afterward she lay in bed, warm and relaxed. The noise continued until about eight o’clock in the morning. Such a vigorous outpouring could surely happen only in Marseille, she thought, and only on the Vieux Port.

  Today, the first day of 1971, she felt unusually well.

  15

  GOING HOME

  FRANCE WAS PARALYZED BY COLD AND SNOW. The storm had arrived two days after Christmas and lasted a week.

  The Associated Press reported on the aftermath:

  Paris, Jan. 3—Helicopters dropped food today to some of the 72 communities in the Rhone Valley still isolated by a record snowfall, and the rest of France struggled out from under a week-long freeze.

  Elsewhere in Europe, there was treacherous ice, snow, heavy fog, gales and rain.

  Thousands returned to Paris after exhausting trips from holidays on the sunny Riviera. Planes and trains from the south were booked solid, and on the Nice–Paris line many passengers spent the night standing because all seats had been reserved days in advance.

  The storm cut short the time Jones and M.F. had together in Marseille: Judith and Evan’s flight to Paris was canceled, so they had to take their chances on one of the very crowded trains north. The women had planned a leisurely several days, including time to go over edits on M.F.’s manuscript, and lunches and dinners in several restaurants. They would have to do it all in a compressed schedule.

  It was true, just as Sybille Bedford had intuited, that M.F. took no pleasure in being edited, and in fact hated to revisit, or even read, her own writing. On the other hand, M.F. really liked Jones, who was in her mid-forties: young, dynamic, and smart. They met at the Beauvau in the New Year and talked about Among Friends.

  The book was a memoir of M.F.’s early childhood in Whittier, California, a series of vignettes that Jones proposed dividing into three sections: “The Family,” “The Town,” “… And Beyond.” M.F. had grown up as the oldest child in a large and busy household, overseen by her reserved mother, Edith, and much-adored father, Rex, who ran the town newspaper. They were Episcopalians in a predominantly Quaker town, and the social politics of Whittier’s religious and ethnic divisions was a thread that ran through the book. M.F. and her family lived mostly segregated from the town’s Quaker majority, not shunned, but never accepted. The politics of Whittier in the early twentieth century still resonated today, M.F. explained:

  I think this way of life was a good introduction to the powers and also the weaknesses of human prejudice, if not of love itself. It taught me a lot about why people must turn other people off. They seem to press an invisible button that says “No” or “Jewish” or “Garlic,” and something mystical goes dead. Well, with children all the buttons can be pressed, but if the little human beings are healthy in their spirits, the life flows on, innocently, irreversibly. It did with me, and I’m thankful for this plain fact.

  M.F. also wrote about food and cooking
: the Victorian and rather puritanical sensibility of her maternal grandmother Holbrook, who lived with them, she credited with nurturing, by counterexample, the family’s “latent sensuality and gourmandise.” Her parents and she and her siblings all loved eating together boisterously, especially when the strict Holbrook was absent: “We had a fine time when she was not there, mostly in the dining room,” M.F. wrote.

  M.F. learned to cook at her mother’s side, standing on a footstool, beating eggs for the occasional Saturday cake and licking the bowl afterward as a reward. Later, she filled in for the family cook on her day off: “It made me feel creative and powerful,” she wrote, “and that is possibly the truest reason for my continuing preoccupation with the art of eating.”

  I had to fight for my place on stage, and I soon discovered, no matter how melodramatically now and then, that almost everybody smiles passing beams of pleasure if a little girl, or even a jaded old one, can turn out good scrambled eggs and a commendable oyster stew, a crisp well-seasoned salad, even a cupcake. That was my way to show that I was there too … and perhaps it still is.

  When she was six, her mother took her to a restaurant for the first time, along with her sister Anne: to the Victor Hugo, in downtown Los Angeles. It was thrilling. This was a restaurant M.F. had heard her parents talk about, the epitome of grown-up sophistication. She asked for chicken à la king. She could still remember the black-suited waiters—teams of them—and their enormous silver chafing dishes and glittering spoons.

  Now, as M.F. and Jones went through the manuscript in Marseille, they sat in the restaurant Centra and ate loup au fenouil (sea bass with fennel). The fish was poached, they noticed, which was unusual, but quite good.

  M.F. was happy not to be eating alone. She had survived her “solo performance,” as she thought of it—the two-plus weeks in Arles and Avignon—and was feeling carefree. She was tired of writing and of her own internal monologue. It was nice to hear someone else talk for a change. M.F. and Jones discussed the menus and cooking techniques at the restaurants they visited, they told each other about their respective Christmas adventures, and Jones led the way through M.F.’s soon-to-be published book. Most of the changes were minor, fixing word repetitions in consecutive sentences, that sort of thing, but she also wanted a new introduction, and so, by the time they were through, M.F. was left with what she cheerfully referred to as a “nasty pile of work.” But she didn’t mind. They’d had fun, and just as with the Childs, she had great respect and affection for both Judith and Evan, and for the two of them as a couple.

  M.F. and Jones had another meal at the Jambon de Parme, one of M.F’s local favorites—the most delicate ravioli she’d ever had, she declared—and then they had to part company. Judith and Evan took the train to Paris, where they discovered that their flight to New York had also been canceled. It took a few days more to get home. M.F., meanwhile, stayed on at the Beauvau a few days longer, waiting for her flight to California. She was looking forward to home. For one thing, she’d had enough of eating in restaurants. She was bored of restaurants. She wanted to cook for herself.

  M.F.’s thirteen-hour flight from Marseille to San Francisco turned into a journey of five days. The weather was still bad—there was terrible fog in England, and an unplanned stopover in Iceland.

  Beck and her husband drove from Provence to Neuilly, the quiet town where they lived on the outskirts of Paris, once the roads had been cleared. It took ten hours of slow, tense, dangerous driving.

  Judith and Evan arrived in New York several days later than expected. No one at home had paid any attention to Europe’s winter storms, and when Jones finally made it into her office at Knopf and gave her excuses, people only said, “Oh yeah, Gay Paree,” and laughed.

  The Childs remained in Provence, enjoying a few weeks of solitude before their own return home. “The captains and kings have departed,” Julia said, “every one.” Julia was paying her bills, which she’d ignored over the holidays. The weather was cold—there were even a few snow showers, highly unusual in Plascassier. She and Paul returned to Cambridge in mid-January. Julia worked on recipes for the TV show; filming would begin again later that month, and she needed to be ready.

  Olney had spent the holidays in Italy, visiting his younger brother, Byron, and family in Vicenza. Byron was a doctor, and stationed there with the U.S. Army. Olney’s pre-Christmas flight, like every other flight that season, it seemed, had been a disaster—landing him in Genoa instead of Venice. He hated Alitalia without reservation—“the rudest and most incompetent of national airlines,” he declared. He took a train from Genoa and arrived the next day. White truffles were still in season, and he and his brother and sister-in-law admired the piles of them in local shops, “grayish-white, stone-like objects, which, when cut into, presented a pearly flesh veined with feathers of faded lilac,” Olney wrote; “the perfume was explosive.” He returned to Solliès-Toucas in early January.

  In New York, Beard landed in the hospital in the New Year. His legs were worse, not better—quite swollen and painful—and he could barely walk. He had resisted the hospital, but his doctor had insisted, so there he was for six days. “It is annoying and seems unnecessary but nevertheless it happened,” he wrote to Child from his hospital bed. But the treatment was apparently working, and the swelling was much reduced.

  And so 1971 began: cold, stormy, and with low visibility. It was a year of new beginnings.

  16

  LAST HOUSE

  M.F. MADE IT HOME, EXCEPT THAT SHE HAD no home, really. She had sold her house in St. Helena to longtime acquaintances with the understanding that she would rent it from them until her new house was built. But while she was gone, they had begun to move in—painting the walls, piling her books, papers, and correspondence in the basement. Her telephone had been disconnected, causing all kinds of confusion. Her daughter Anna had tried to call and been told quite firmly by the operator that no one by M.F.’s name had ever been listed in St. Helena. “Murder,” M.F. thought, imagining Anna’s confusion at being told her mother’s listing (and that of her childhood home) had disappeared without a trace. Anna was high strung enough as it was.

  Despite her momentarily awkward domestic arrangements, M.F. was happy to be back in California, near her sister, daughters, and grandchildren. For the first few months of the year, she divided her time between her old house during the week, when the new owners were away, and the guesthouse at the Bouverie ranch on the weekends, where she watched her new house being built. As she drove back and forth in her VW, she brought boxes and boxes of books, preparing for the move into Last House. She watched the doorknobs being fitted and the tiles being laid. Though the guesthouse gradually overflowed with cartons of books and papers, she never quite had everything she needed for her work.

  “Split living is not for me,” she declared. She was looking forward to moving in.

  M.F. was working on the new introduction to Among Friends for Judith. She was also preparing for the republication of two earlier volumes. Her friend and editor Eleanor Friede at Macmillan would be reissuing The Art of Eating in late February. This was the omnibus collection of M.F’s first five books, for which James Beard had agreed to write an “Appreciation”—a short essay for the new edition, to follow the Clifton Fadiman introduction that was in the first edition. (“Her subject is hunger,” Fadiman had written. “But only ostensibly so. Food is her paramount but not obsessive concern. It is the release-catch that sets her mind working.”) Originally published in 1954, the collection included Serve It Forth, Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf, The Gastronomical Me, and An Alphabet for Gourmets—the books that had made her reputation in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. Later in the year, Knopf was planning to republish M.F.’s translation of Brillat-Savarin’s seminal early-nineteenth-century Physiology of Taste, which she had done in 1949.

  And so there would be a lot of M. F. K. Fisher in 1971. She had mixed feelings about it. “Except for the new Quaker stuff,” she wrote to Gin
grich, referring to Among Friends, “this is the year that WAS, for Fisher … a Voice from the Past. Makes me feel odd …”

  It felt odd because she was moving in a new direction.

  But it was all good for her popular standing: she had reached a new plateau in her career. Her brand of direct, self-revealing writing and her embrace of taste and style as a high-low improvisation fit the mood of the moment. She wrote about oysters and ocean liners and small-town bistros in France, about potato chips and tripe, and about eating alone, being in love, and growing up. She was no Voice from the Past. Indeed, the world seemed only now to be catching up to her.

  In his “Appreciation,” James Beard described his discovering How to Cook a Wolf during World War II, when he was a soldier, and meeting M.F. many years later. He focused on her range, and managed to communicate how very modern—indeed, prescient—these books were:

  Mrs. Fisher is a woman who has had many gifts bestowed upon her—beauty, intelligence, heart, a capacity for the pleasures of the flesh, of which the art of eating is no small part, and the art of language as well. Though she can write with a silver attelet dipped in a sauce of Carême or Montagne, her palate goes beyond ortolans and rare vintages. She can also write about eating and drinking with a pure, primitive enjoyment. I think of that intoxicating description, in Alphabet for Gourmets, of a family meal in Switzerland, al fresco, highlighted by the ritual of eating peas fresh from the garden, cooked right on the spot. This celebration—it could be called nothing else—supports my thesis that good simple food, even rudimentary food, can give the same delight as the most elaborately prepared dishes.

  As soon as it came out, Paul and Julia Child each wrote to congratulate M.F. on The Art of Eating. “We are re-reading it with pleasure—re-pleasure!” Paul wrote. “We are delighted to re-have it,” said Julia, “and just love that appreciation by Jim Beard. I think that is one of the most charming bits of J. A. B. I’ve read, full of love and warmth and so deftly said.” She asked how the construction of Last House was coming along, and described the renovations underway at their house in Cambridge—“dust, disorder, and stacked up furniture.”