Save Me the Plums

by Ruth Reichl

  Then Jocelyn suggested sending him to the Maine Lobster Festival. I was skeptical. “Can you see DFW at a place whose official theme is ‘Lighthouses, Laughter, and Lobster’? Not exactly up his alley.”

  “I read somewhere that his mother’s from Maine,” Jocelyn persisted.

  “Worth a try,” I said. “But he’s sure to turn us down again.”

  Getting DFW to say yes was only the first hurdle. On day one Jocelyn reported, “The airline lost his luggage. And he’s not happy about it.” Still, we had no idea how many hurdles lay ahead.

  Wallace took to calling late at night, leaving long, rambling messages on Jocelyn’s answering machine. “Do you think he calls then so he doesn’t have to speak with a living person?” I inquired.

  “Probably. But I love getting his messages. They’re hilarious. I can’t wait to read the piece.”

  Everyone in the office knew when the article arrived, because Jocelyn’s laughter echoed down the hall. Still, when she came into my office clutching the hefty manuscript, her voice was not exactly filled with laughter and lighthouses.

  “It’s here!” She handed me the pile of paper.

  “Were we expecting ten thousand words?” The manuscript was even heavier than it looked.

  “It’s DFW.” Jocelyn’s voice was oddly flat, as if she was trying to camouflage her emotions. She was, I thought, probably unaware that we’d all heard her laughter. “He does what he does.” It was clear, from her demeanor, that something was wrong with the piece. She pointed at the pages. “You’d better read it for yourself.”

  Perusing the first page, I began to laugh; at his best David Foster Wallace is wonderfully funny, and this was a gem. He began by offering up the tangled history of Maine and lobsters. He discussed hard-shell lobsters and soft ones, noting that the festival was prepared to offer you a lobster dinner for little more than a meal at McDonald’s. There was one snarky aside in which he opined that the editor of another epicurean magazine, who’d labeled this “one of the best food-themed festivals in the world,” might not have spent much time sampling its delights, but he glided gracefully on to note that because lobsters are still living when they go into the pot, they are the freshest food there is.

  Here he paused to consider a question. “Is it all right,” he asked, “to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” Soon he was delving into the science of pain and the ethics of death, an unstoppable torrent of words that went on for pages. At one point he referenced the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. At another he noted, “It appears to me unlikely that many readers of Gourmet wish to…be queried about the morality of their eating habits in the pages of a culinary monthly.”

  “Thanks,” I muttered, as Wallace proceeded to question said morality for a few thousand more words, moving from lobsters to the entire animal kingdom. Would future men, he wondered, someday look back at our eating habits in much the same way we view ancient Aztec sacrifices? He ended by asking this: “After all, isn’t being extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about one’s food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real gourmet? Or is all the gourmet’s extra attention and sensibility just supposed to be aesthetic, gustatory?”

  It was masterfully done, and for a long moment I sat at my desk, looking down at the pages with admiration and loathing. DFW had seen the mantra I’d been mouthing and raised me. He’d appropriated what was once a cute Annie Hall moment and turned it into an exercise in bioethics; nobody who read the piece could ever casually toss a live lobster into a pot again. But this was not just about lobsters; DFW was demanding that each reader examine his conscience and consider the ethics of eating.

  How many people were going to take this kindly? Not many, I imagined; most were going to find it offensive. Thousands would cancel their subscriptions, and I would lose my job. It would be foolish to print this. But how could I not? I looked down at that brilliant, difficult article, wishing I had never heard of David Foster Wallace.

  “You can’t possibly print this piece!” Doc marched into my office, waving the pages in my face.

  “I know it’s edgy….” I began.

  Doc, normally a mild man, stamped his foot. “I don’t give a damn about that,” he said. “This is writing of the highest order, and it tackles real issues. But David Foster Wallace is so pretentious and arrogant, and…” Spluttering, he began reading some of the article out loud. “Listen to how condescending he is toward all the people at the Lobster Festival. It’s insulting! You’ve got to get him to take some of that out. Otherwise I don’t think we can print it.”

  Caught up in the ethical argument, I’d skipped right past the condescension, but he did have a point. “I’ll see what I can do,” I promised.

  A few hours later I passed the art department and saw Richard and Doc nose to nose, gesticulating wildly. They rarely disagreed and I edged in to hear what they were saying. “You’re serious?” Doc was almost shouting. “You really like this lobster piece?”

  I slowed down, eager to hear what Richard would say. “I think it’s amazing! It’s the coolest thing we’ve ever published.” All around him, the art people nodded their heads.

  Larry uncharacteristically reserved judgment. “So what do you think?” I pressed him.

  He was quiet for a moment. “It’s problematic,” he said. “Readers are going to hate it. But there’s not another food magazine that would even consider running this, and it really sets us apart. But…”

  I waited, worried about what was coming next. “I think we have to show it to Giulio. He can’t sugarcoat it when he tries to sell an advertiser in. They need to know what they’re getting.”

  “Then show it to him,” I said. Was I hoping, in my secret heart, that Giulio would tell me I couldn’t run this impossible piece?

  Half an hour later, Giulio came bounding down the hall and I prepared for the worst.

  “Is she in?” I heard him ask Robin. I looked up, apprehensive.

  “This is so exciting!” He held out the pages.

  “So you think you can sell someone into the piece?”

  “Oh, absolutely!” His confidence surprised me. “Most of our advertising partners are on board with the evolution of the book. They understand that Gourmet is redefining what it means to be an authority on food. This just takes it to a new level.”

  “But do the readers understand that?” muttered Doc when I told him.

  * * *

  —

  WALLACE HIMSELF WAS thorny and, when we asked for changes, irate. Passing Jocelyn’s office one morning, I came screeching to a halt as I heard her say, “Have you thought about it? That colon seems very aggressive to me!”

  “Are you really having a battle over punctuation?” I asked when she put the phone down.

  “He’s a grammar nerd,” she replied. “He’s very granular about the piece and he’s arguing over every comma. I think his attitude is that he’ll do what he does and we can take it or leave it.”

  “Let him have all the colons and commas he wants,” I said. He’d been gracious about Doc’s objections and removed the more caustic remarks about festival attendees. “But there are two more things that have to go. The Mengele reference is over the top. And I won’t be a shill for PETA.”

  She sighed. “He won’t like it. And he’s upset about the title. He thinks ‘To Die For’ is too flip.”

  “So does he have a better idea?”

  “No,” she said, “but I do. What if we call it ‘Consider the Lobster’? You know, after the M.F.K. Fisher piece.”

  “It’s perfect!” I said. “But he’ll probably hate that too.”

  As press time came closer, Jocelyn and DFW were still fighting it out. “The good news,” she said, “is that he loves ‘Consider the Lobster’; it turns out his mother is a Fisher fan. And he’s reluctantly agreed to remove
the reference to Mengele. But…”

  I had a bad feeling about what was coming. “He won’t budge on PETA. We’ve hit a wall. If you really want him to take that out, you’re going to have to talk to him yourself.”

  I paced up and down my office, wondering what I could possibly say to persuade him. He held the trump card; he could always take his article elsewhere. This was a brilliant piece of writing, and I had no doubt the editors of The New Yorker or Harper’s or The Atlantic Monthly would be thrilled to get their hands on it. For them it would present no problems….

  That’s it! I suddenly realized. That’s the winning argument.

  I dialed his number. “I won’t publish this with the reference to PETA as it stands. And if you don’t want to change it, you can surely sell it somewhere else. But you don’t want to do that.” I sounded a great deal more confident than I felt. “You didn’t write this for a bunch of effete intellectuals for whom the whole thing is hypothetical. You wrote this for cooks. You’re hoping that no cook will ever blithely throw a lobster into a pot without pondering the morality of his action. Isn’t that true?”

  There was a long silence.

  “Yes,” he said at last.

  I hung up feeling victorious. Later, however, lying in bed, I thought how much easier it would have been if I’d lost the battle. This was by far the edgiest article we’d ever published, and if he’d pulled it I would have had an honorable out. I fell asleep to dream about angry subscribers descending on my office to chase me from the building and woke to the certain knowledge that I was about to lose my job. Giulio might be right: Our advertisers might be ready for articles like this one. But I was not so sure our readers were.

  The night the magazine went to press, I was so jittery I couldn’t cook. Michael was out of town, working on a documentary about the heroin epidemic, so I took Nick out to eat.

  “Let’s go to Honmura An.” It was the calmest restaurant I could think of, a spare, elegant space, soothing as a spa.

  Walking in the door, I thought about our first visit to the restaurant ten years earlier; I’d carried Nick up the stairs. Now he towered over me. At fifteen he was almost six feet tall, with an appetite to match. He watched me order seaweed and soba, and then he asked the waitress for shrimp tempura, chicken meatballs, and a big bowl of udon with sliced duck.

  “I love these shrimp,” he said as the waitress set the plate before him. The giant creatures, larger than any I’d ever seen, were flown in specially from Japan, and as Nick picked one up, a wave of nausea bubbled through me.

  “Mom!” Nick looked frightened. “Are you all right?”

  I waved my hands, took a few deep breaths, trying to quell the feeling. The shrimp looked just like baby lobsters. “I’m fine.”

  “Are you going to faint? You’ve gone completely white. Drink this.” He handed me his glass of water.

  I took a sip, concentrating on the sensation of the cold liquid sliding down my throat. I took another and felt the blood return to my head.

  “What’s going on?” Nick picked up a shrimp. I looked away.

  “Have you ever heard of David Foster Wallace?”

  “The Infinite Jest guy? He’s Zack’s favorite writer.”

  “We’re running an article of his.”

  “Wow. Cool!”

  “That’s what I thought. I was excited he was writing for us. And then I got the article.”

  Nick picked up another enormous shrimp. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “The readers are going to hate it.”

  “Why?” He took a bite; the batter crackled loudly as it shattered.

  I hesitated; was it fair to bring up the ethics of eating at this precise moment?

  “Why?” Nick repeated, taking another shattering bite.

  “We sent him to a lobster festival….”

  “That doesn’t sound very hateful.”

  “As he stands there watching lobsters going into the boiling water, he starts to wonder what they feel. Does it hurt? Can they feel pain? The next thing you know he’s asking whether we have the right to kill animals just because we happen to like the way they taste. In the end it comes down to whose life matters most.” I pointed at my pristine seaweed. “After all, we don’t need meat. It’s perfectly possible to stay alive without killing other creatures.”

  “But don’t you think cooks should be asking themselves those questions?” Nick had stopped eating, and as he stared down at the shrimp I knew he was imagining a sleek animal gliding gracefully through a turquoise sea.

  “Uncomfortable, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Yeah. But I want to be aware of those things!” He spoke with so much heat that I remembered how it felt to be a teenager filled with ferocious passion. “Don’t you think one of the problems of the way we live is that we’re disconnected from the whole life cycle?” He stared earnestly at me before asking, “Do you want to know what I really think?”

  I had the awful feeling I was about to get one of those stinging assessments your children are uniquely equipped to deliver.

  “I think you’re underestimating your readers. Give them some credit.”

  It was 2004—and that article changed everything. Two people canceled their subscriptions, but hundreds wrote in to say how much they valued a magazine that published such thought-provoking articles. “Keep it up” was the basic message.

  And we did. It was DFW who gave me the courage to publish “Some Pig,” David Rakoff’s extremely controversial piece on the tortured relationship between Jews and bacon. Would I have dared, before DFW, to publish “The Taste of Home,” Junot Díaz’s essay about how his love for Asian food is inextricably linked with his yearning for his absent father? Probably not. And I’m pretty sure that before DFW I would have run, fast, in the other direction when I read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Too Hot to Handle,” a feminist food piece about growing up in Africa. Every one of these articles took food writing into a deeply personal, psychological direction, and every one of them was edgy and uncomfortable. But DFW had proved that our readers appreciated a challenge, and we were all eager to stretch the traditional boundaries of food writing.

  I’ll admit that on first reading I was frightened of Nina Teicholz’s deeply troubling investigation into the food industry’s thirty-year attempt to sabotage a scientist who’d discovered a link between trans fats and cancer. “These two guys from the Institute of Shortening and Edible Oils—the trans fat lobby, basically—visited me,” the scientist recalled, “and, boy, were they angry. They said they’d been keeping a careful watch to prevent articles like mine from coming out in the literature and didn’t know how this horse had gotten out of the barn.”

  Great story. Also problematic. Procter & Gamble, the company that held the first patent for trans fats, was one of Condé Nast’s biggest advertisers. I remembered Florio talking about Si’s fury when a fashion editor angered a major advertiser. Would he fire me for this? We called Nina’s story “Heart Breaker” and waited to see what would happen. (We never heard a word from P&G.)

  And when Barry Estabrook said he wanted to go to Florida to investigate the plight of tomato pickers, once again I thought of DFW. The cut line on “The Price of Tomatoes” went like this: “If you have eaten a tomato this winter, chances are very good that it was picked by a person who lives in virtual slavery.”

  I had nightmares about every one of those pieces. But in those sleepless nights while we were editing the David Foster Wallace piece, I’d learned an important lesson: When something frightens me, it is definitely worth doing.

  NO TRUMPETS SOUNDED. NO ALARMS blared. The bland piece of paper sailed onto our desks disguised as a routine memo: Florio was being named vice chairman. We all knew he was being kicked upstairs, but did any of us understand that this marked the end of life as we knew it?

  I certainly did not. I w
as like a frog in a kettle of water and this was the moment they lit the fire, turning it up so gradually I had no suspicion that Gourmet would soon be cooked. If you’d told me that the end was near, I wouldn’t have believed you. Halcyon times still lay ahead, but even later, when the pot was being stirred, I never really felt how hot the water had become.

  That memo wrenched Florio out of Si’s orbit, and he faded slowly from the scene until, like the Cheshire Cat, nothing but the grin remained. As his influence evaporated, the exuberant company he’d created vanished with it, the manic energy replaced by something sterner, sturdier, and far more predictable.

  “This is going to be good” is what I thought when I first met the man who stepped into the office next to Si’s. Chuck Townsend projected solid reliability. With pale-blue eyes and windburned cheeks, he was an upscale version of every Elk and Shriner in the nation, and as I watched him consume a bland white-bread lunch, I thought back to the strange and ebullient Florio meals. Things would be calmer now, I thought, more sane, more sober.

  I was optimistic as I watched Chuck, the commander of the New York Yacht Club, pilot us away from the casual accounting of Steve’s stewardship. But I did not reckon on the cost, did not know this would mean spending endless hours attending to the business of the magazine. Meetings that had once been held twice a year became monthly affairs, and I grew depressingly familiar with the dreary tenth-floor conference rooms. Struggling with spreadsheets and financial reports, I found myself thinking wistfully back to Truman asking, “You don’t suppose Anna Wintour worries about budgets, do you?”

  New bean counters seemed to appear at every meeting, and they had endless questions. “Why,” they wanted to know, “are you still using analog film when digital photography is less expensive?”

  “Because Richard prefers the quality” was my perennial answer. It had always been good enough for Si, who wanted the best of everything for his magazines. But now he sat silently by as we went digital.