Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  I went to department stores with Julia, who just bought towels and dishes, a sofa, can opener, beds and tables, and a gas stove with butane bottle. I had never seen anyone do that before. She had her Norwegian phrase book with her and she talked to everyone, gestured, lay down on the floor to illustrate that she wanted a bed. She took care of business. She is so disciplined, such an extrovert. The people gathered round, drawn to her. We had such a good time.

  For two weeks after Erica left, Julia set aside her book while she unpacked her batterie de cuisine (Paul said he hung seventy-four items), put up curtains, and ordered a large sideboard, chairs, and a table seating sixteen made of maple and suitable eventually for their Cambridge house.

  Paul wrote to Charlie about the “desperation [with which] one thrusts down one’s roots in each new country,” and surely Julia demonstrated this eagerness to be a part of the life of Oslo, where they expected to spend four years. She took the Trikk, Oslo’s electric train, into the downtown area and opened herself up to meeting everyone and learning everything she could about the country. Professionally, her years in Norway opened her horizons to new ways with fish and gave her the time to complete her book and test her recipes.

  On Sunday mornings the church bells chimed from every neighboring village, as they do, Paul noted, in Venice. “I would be happy to take this house and view with me everywhere,” Julia told Dorothy and Ivan. From their bedroom window Julia could see across a field and then a forest of trees to the blue-green fjord below. According to the Howes, the house, which was some distance outside of Oslo, was owned by the biggest and wealthiest shipowner in the city. Paul discovered that he liked “palazzo living.” They had a huge basement with laundry and Paul’s 200-bottle wine cellar (replenished via Copenhagen), a large attic, many rooms, a terrace, lawn, fruit trees, and by July more strawberries, raspberries, currants, and fraises des bois than they could jam, liqueur, or eat.

  For Julia’s forty-seventh birthday they went to a restaurant with Fisher and Debby Howe. With the gift of a brass elephant from Muttra, Paul wrote to Julia about how much “we owe to Ceylon for providing the golden moment, the perfect environment, the necessary atmosphere, which revealed us to each other. I am happy, astonished and delighted that we met at all, that we had the good sense to marry each other, and that our life together is such a pleasure. Thank you for every concession, every restraint, every thoughtfulness, every cooperative act, every darling endeavor, that you contribute to our mutual life.”

  REBUFFED BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN

  “Thank god I got this book cookery done before we came here, as it would have been impossible otherwise,” Julia said about the lack of produce such as chicken (“they have only stewing chicken and baby chicken”). The vegetables were good in season, but the season was short.

  Julia devoted July and August to completing her reorganization, recipe narrowing, and typing for the cookbook. “Julie’s working like a bastid [sic] on her book—always has,” Paul wrote Charlie, “but now that she actually sees the leet [sic] on the other side of the forest and realizes that, after 8 years of slogging through the windfalls, swamps, and underbrush, she will actually emerge in a few weeks, the realization is sweeping her on like a windstorm.” She sent off the manuscript for Simca’s approval (the last pieces were mailed on September 1), and then to a typist friend in Washington, DC, who sent it on to Houghton Mifflin. She felt “rather lost” without her book.

  Julia knew Houghton Mifflin would take months to accept or reject the book, now called French Recipes for American Cooks, so she joined a class at the university nearby to study Norwegian more seriously (she was working through the grammar book on her own and practicing on shopkeepers). As in Bonn, she would learn the language faster than her linguist husband because she dealt with shopkeepers, housekeepers, the gardener, and service men.

  But it was not until she attended her first embassy luncheon and sampled the tasteless fare that Julia made plans to resume giving cooking lessons. When the canned shredded chicken in what Julia called a “droopy, soupy sauce” was passed to her, she looked across the room to Debby Howe, who gave her an apologetic, knowing look. Years later she would recall the phallic-shaped aspic filled with grapes and cut-up mushrooms: “It was sitting on a little piece of lettuce so you could not hide what you didn’t eat. I didn’t think anything like that still existed!” When the coconut frosted cake-mix cake, molded lime Jell-O salad, and artificial Key lime pie were served, Julia glanced wide-eyed at Debby. “I knew how bad the food was,” Debby Howe said in 1994, “and I knew what Julia would feel about it.” The entire meal was appalling, thought Julia; everything was sweet, and sickening.

  Julia determined that no such embassy meal would ever be served to her again and made plans to offer cooking classes for those who wanted them. Few did, but her Norwegian friends were enthusiastic. She began two practices here in Norway that continued for several years: she would cook a meal in the kitchen of a family, showing them how to prepare the lunch, and she would offer small classes for six to eight women. Debby, who thought she “was a good sport, especially with diplomatic wives,” cared nothing about learning to cook herself, for she had two young children and planned a number of the functions for the ambassador, a woman named Frances Willis, whom Julia admired. “Julia was appalled that I did not want to learn to cook,” reported Debby Howe.

  Their living pattern changed considerably now that Paul was Cultural Attaché. His work hours often included evenings and weekends (with only four on the USIA staff, everyone played a second role as entertainer and greeter of planes). He had always planned exhibits and run a photography library, but here he was in charge of all the cultural events: directing the Fulbright program and the library, mounting all exhibits, working with the director of the Institute of American Studies at the University of Oslo, meeting the planes of arriving celebrities, and entertaining the likes of Pearl Buck, Buckminster Fuller, and every Washington junketeer who had anything remotely to do with the arts and education. He entertained Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic (the King came to this performance) and hosted Thanksgiving dinner for all the American Fulbright scholars in the embassy cafeteria.

  Paul’s boss, the head of the USIA, was Marshall Swan, who with his wife, Connie, befriended the Childs. Swan had a Ph.D. and spoke Italian and Dutch, for he previously served as Public Affairs Officer (Paul’s job) in Milan and The Hague. His outlets, much to Paul’s delight, were writing, music, and literature. Together, he and Paul traveled to many cities for lectures, film showings, and conferences on behalf of the United States. As everywhere Paul served, he worked for the promotion of his country and consequently as a counterforce to Russian propaganda. A “running contest with the Russians” for friends, Paul called his work.

  Julia sympathized with Paul’s work demands, but, as Paul pointed out to Charlie, “Julia just can’t understand bastardry, neurosis, hard luck, illness, suffering, sleeplessness, the quiver of fear, the sense of inadequacy, the frustration of having to do something fast and perfectly which you never did before, etc., etc.” Julia clearly took the vicissitudes of life differently than Paul did.

  After a letter from their Houghton Mifflin editor in September, which praised the manuscript, Julia received a letter from Paul Brooks, an executive at Houghton Mifflin, 2 Park Street, Boston, dated November 6, 1959. He commended the book as “a work of culinary science as much as of culinary art,” but declared it too expensive for them to publish: “In a letter of March, 1958, you yourself spoke of the revised project as a ‘short simple book directed to the housewife chauffeur.’ The present book could never be called this,” he explains. The cost of publishing such a large book was not a risk they would take; he suggested Doubleday, which had a large assortment of book clubs, and added that if they did not succeed in placing it with another publisher, HM would take a look at a possible “smaller, simpler version.”

  Julia and Paul, as well as Simca and Jean, were devastated. A letter f
rom Avis five days later affirmed the economic basis of the publisher’s decision: “the decision was based on a very cut and dried equation: probable costs against possible sales.” She was sending the manuscript immediately to Bill Koshland at Knopf, where she once worked, because Koshland had already seen parts of the manuscript and tried some of the recipes with enthusiasm. Therefore, she added, “assuming authority I realize I have not got,” she took decisive action: “I am sending this down to Bill. Do not despair. We have only begun to fight.”

  When Julia called Avis to ask if she should return the Houghton Mifflin advance they were given, Avis told her to keep the money. At this point, Avis already knew of William Koshland’s interest: in a June 19, 1959, letter to Avis he asked her when he was going to have a look at the “big book.” She knew that he would not just read, but cook from the book.

  Paul cynically concluded their book was ten years too late because the cooks of America were already “conditioned to speed and as little work as possible, combined w/a belief in magic (the ‘secret’ of French cooking lies in a mysterious white powder that chefs shake on at the last minute. It has GLYCODIN-32 in it! Only 89 cents!).” Charlie picked up on Avis’s suggestion that Julia would do better with a publisher with more imagination. “I still think Joolie a natural for TV, with or without scribble-pub, but this [is] only one man’s opinion.” In a letter informing all her family, Julia calmly and sanguinely told them Knopf is looking at the manuscript:

  If nothing comes of this, I shall drop the whole thing until we get back to the States, and just continue on with my self training … I have loads to learn in patisserie, and many hundreds of types of regular cooking recipes which I have never gone into. I just feel sorry for poor old Simca who has been in this for years, with nothing yet to show for it. She just picked the wrong collaborator, and it is too bad. [And to Freddie:] I don’t seem to be very much upset. I got it done, and now I have for myself a whole batch of fool-proof recipes.

  Julia expressed the same practical attitude twenty-seven years later when asked if she regretted creating such a huge book when only a portion of it was published: “Oh, no, I have been drawing on those recipes ever since.”

  Nonetheless, she was, quite naturally, lost without the book, and disappointed that eight years of work would not be published. In the meantime, she kept on with cooking classes “to keep my hand in” and continued cooking for dinner parties in her home, for, as Paul declared, “one of the magical aspects of this household is its potentialities for gustatory pleasure.” One such meal Paul declared “one of the Great Eatments of the century—an eatment that we would not be ashamed to share w/Curnonsky, Prince des gastronomes, were he still alive”: rognons de veau (veal kidneys) sautéed whole in butter, sliced into a sauce of reduced wine, butter, and mustard; sautéed potatoes and snow peas; served with red burgundy Grands-Echézeaux ’53 (given to them by Alice Lee Myers at the dock in New York City in May). They ended the meal on a regional note with creamy Danish blue cheese and knekkebröd. “Both food and wine were glorious, and it left us in the kind of esthetic transport that you can get from a wonderful symphony or a tremendous sunset.”

  “You have to know how to eat in Norway,” Julia wrote, and in a letter to a complaining embassy employee a decade later, she suggested eating sea trout and legs of lamb (and contacting her friends the Egges and the Heyerdahls). She remembered “the big dinner parties we would have with a big leg of lamb or a big poached sea trout, just delicious, with butter and potatoes. I loved Norway.”

  WINTER TRAVEL AND VŒRSYK

  After months of beautiful hot weather and little moisture, the rain arrived at the beginning of November and snow the beginning of December. The sea turned pewter and the sky “woolen,” but the Weegians were conditioned to respond, their inner nature in rhythm with the power of the elements. With the deep white snow, they donned rubber boots and brightly colored rubber raincoats—not just yellow sou’westers, but bright red and green and blue hooded jackets. The days grew shorter, ending at 3:30 in the afternoon.

  Skiing was both a necessity and a religion in Oslo. Julia and Paul bought skis so they could maneuver in areas not plowed. Because Paul worried about broken bones and Julia about her weak knees, they did not do much downhill skiing. “We are being careful and middle-aged,” she assured her father. But in fact, just as she always overbid her hand in card games, so she took on any challenging hill. “I’ve broken toes half a dozen times,” she told Avis years later. “The first time I was rushed to the emergency section of the Oslo hospital, but they said toes heal by themselves.”

  “Julia and I skied just outside the door some mornings,” said her neighbor Debby Howe. “We did a little cross-country skiing or went to a nearby hill. It was nice to have a friend then. We could say anything to each other and not have diplomatic worries. Neither of us was a tremendous skier, but Julia had skied in California. We had lunch at Julia’s or a restaurant together—those times were precious. We would fix a simple lunch of quiche or omelet, salad, bread, and wine.” On any sunny winter Sunday a fifth of the population navigated the mountain trails within the city. Every electric train carried skis along the outside bars. Julia loved the outdoors: “I am at heart a Viking.”

  Jan and Froydis Dietrichson became the second Norwegian couple to befriend them. According to them, the Childs “were very popular among the natives … and made friends here that Julia will keep till the end of her days.” Paul studied the Norwegian language with Froydis. She and her husband, a lexicographer and linguist at the university, were “intensely intelligent,” Paul concluded. He learned soon after arriving in Oslo that the dialect he studied in Washington, DC, was a Danish-based tongue and not one of the two main dialects. This discovery, together with his perfectionism and lack of daily opportunity to speak with shopkeepers, brought on considerable frustration.

  According to one of Paul’s colleagues, he “took everything so seriously, dear soul that he was.” Once when someone sent a (now forgotten) complaint to the embassy, Paul wrote a long personal letter of three pages, handwritten, when a simple letter of two paragraphs would have served him better. “He overdid it,” admits Fisher Howe. “We had a long go-around about how much I could mess with his prose.” His perfectionism, along with his evening and weekend work, explains why Paul did not have time to put paint to canvas or touch his violin while in Norway.

  While Paul focused on the artistic, cultural, and educational issues for the embassy, others, particularly Fisher Howe, concerned themselves with the economic issues, which usually dealt with navigation (Norway had the second-largest maritime fleet in the world). Behind all their work were two overriding issues: NATO and the Berlin shuttle, the rescue mission between West Berlin and West Germany. The Norwegians were staunch supporters of NATO, and the following year were caught in the glare of international attention when American Gary Powers’s spy plane was shot down by the Russians as it was headed toward northern Norway.

  For many of the events Paul planned or attended, Julia accompanied him: travels to interview Fulbright applicants in Trondheim, the former capital and still the gateway between northern and southern Norway; a conference for librarians in Bergen, a port reminding them of Marseilles; a conference for Scandinavian Teachers of English in Leangkollen, forty-five minutes away. When their niece Erica visited they took her to Lillehammer, later the site of the 1994 Winter Olympics. They also visited the Egges’ cabin near the Swedish border and the Telemark region with the Dietrichsons. All Norwegians rushed, lemming-like, each weekend to their mountain huts. During an Easter week at a mountain hotel, Julia considerably improved her downhill skiing. According to Froydis Dietrichson, Paul never really learned to enjoy skiing in this country in which only about 5 percent of the land is flat enough to cultivate.

  Paul and Julia returned to familiar ground for the Christmas and New Year’s holiday. Erica and Hector joined them at Mari and Peter Bicknell’s home for Christmas in Cambridge, England. Then after fo
ur days at the Pont Royal in Paris, Julia and Paul drove to Marseilles and on to Grasse to visit with Simca and Jean in their stone home they called Bramafam, on a Provençal hillside in the land where perfume had been made for centuries. On January 4, 1960, they drove to Rome, to see Lyne and Ellen Few (she had been stricken with polio in Düsseldorf). Lyne Few would always remember that Paul, with his “generous nature” and “athletic physique,” gave Ellen her first pedestrian view of Rome, pushing her wheelchair all day over cobblestones, in and out of churches, up flights of stairs, and through museums. The Childs then flew to Copenhagen and took the ferry train home.

  The almost dayless winter season brought on vœrsyk, or winter sickness, a kind of short-tempered depression bred by gray skies and short days. Julia and Paul had yet to acclimate to the winter sickness the Norwegians understood all too well. Paul was too busy to create a Valentine artwork for 1960, so they sent one of his verses. And Julia waited to hear if Knopf was interested in publishing the cookbook. “I’ve started a cooking school here in Oslo with 5 Norwegians, 1 Hungarian/English, 1 English, and 1 American … and will be putting you on the mailing list for recipes,” she wrote her sister Dorothy. She gave three classes at three different homes this spring, with lessons on fish, veal, poultry, eggs in aspic, and omelets. Many of her students were drawn from a reading group, according to Margie Schodt, whose husband was an economic officer at the embassy. Schodt believed Julia was “an impressive figure” who performed a patriotic service with her classes, yet was modest about her cooking.

  Among her cooking students was Mosse Heyerdahl, an attractive blond woman, who with her husband, Jens, a tall, slender lawyer in horn-rimmed glasses, befriended the Childs. The Heyerdahls were Francophiles who liked theatergoing. Julia golfed with Jens, taught Mosse techniques of French cooking, and visited their summer cottage on the Oslofjord. They took Julia and Paul to Norwegian theaters, translating “a bit,” and afterward for a light meal and discussion of the play. Jens remembers that when they attended Stig Hegerman’s Skyggen av Mart (The Shadow of Mart), Julia and Paul “insisted on going behind the stage to greet the actors, all very famous. This was not customary here, but they were received with enthusiasm. The great actor Toralf Maurstad even mentioned this event in his book about his life as an actor. He was flattered that the Cultural Attache of the American Embassy came to pay him compliments.”