by Anne Fadiman
My father visited frequently when he flew east from Los Angeles on what he called his “literary menstrual cycle” to attend meetings of the Book-of-the-Month Club, for which he had long served as a judge. He might not have been the ideal consort for the Father-Daughter Picnic, but he was a hit at Harvard. He was in his late sixties while Kim and I were in college, but our friends hardly seemed to notice his age, perhaps because he looked exactly like their gray-haired professors and yet, unlike the real ones, was always interested in what they had to say. The qualities that had made Dorothy Thompson call him her ideal dinner guest—wit, urbanity, the ability to quote a Wordsworth sonnet or compose a mildly bawdy limerick—played just as well thirty years later with a cast of students in frayed jeans.
When he came to Cambridge, he usually took us to a good restaurant along with a roommate or two, but once he threw a small party in a Harvard club. The occasion was a wine-and-cheese tasting to celebrate my brother’s twenty-first birthday.
I volunteered to write the menu. Write it? I calligraphed it, using an italic pen I had been given in the eighth grade. Kim, unfortunately, saved the incriminating document.
Oh, how I blush to read it now. The pomposity of the crimson seal at the top of the Veritas stationery I had bought at the Harvard Coop! The earnest attempt at Gothic lettering, embellished with extra little serifs on the Bs, Fs, Ls, Vs, and Ws! The mislabeling of the venue, which was actually the Signet Society, not the Signet Club! The pretentious transposition of number and month in “15 April”! The scattershot accent marks! The off-key French, especially in the effort to designate the anonymous 1840 port, which I characterized as “sans nom”! What kind of girl would create such a document? Shall we just wring her neck?
My menu for Kim’s twenty-first birthday party, 1972
But oh, how my father must have loved it all. The anachronistic formality of the gathering. The setting, a literary association to which George Santayana and T. S. Eliot had belonged. The leatherbound volumes on the shelves. The portraits of dead WASPs on the walls. The definitive demeatballization of his children.
He charmed, he scintillated, he educated. Latour is a great Bordeaux. La Tâche and Romanée-Conti are two great Burgundies. The vagaries of weather make some vintages especially fine, and we are fortunate to have three Great Years here: 1934, 1945, and 1947. We can still drink port and sherry from the nineteenth century because they are fortified wines, infused with brandy to halt fermentation.
Kim and I had heard about wines like these—the names were as familiar to us as Coke and Pepsi—but we had never tasted anything on their level. Our father had been saving them for this occasion. He had laid down the 1840 port (sans nom) when Kim was born. Their extravagance was, of course, preposterous. I knew that most families didn’t live the way we did—there was, among other things, the matter of the cook, though he had been let go when I left for college—but we didn’t ski at Gstaad or wear jewelry from Cartier or drive Rolls-Royces or … well, I wasn’t sure what the superrich did, but we weren’t them. We drove Buicks. We gave each other books for Christmas. We didn’t usually serve refreshments that in a restaurant would have cost as much as several months of our Harvard tuition.
In addition to Kim, me, and our parents, there were, I think, six guests. Five of them couldn’t have told a Romanée-Conti from a Chianti. They did their best to look appropriately pensive as they swirled their goblets and sniffed the bouquets—in the case of the port, a cloudlet of aromatic molecules that had been trapped in glass for more than a century.
The evening was our father’s idea of what a twenty-first birthday party should be, not Kim’s. The guest of honor enjoyed the cheese and the grand gâteau de naissance, but he remembers sensing a poignant gap between what he thought he should feel about the wines and what he actually felt. Like me, he had been steeped in oenophilia all his life. When he was a toddler, he had learned to identify liqueurs and fortified wines by smell and bottle shape; our father enjoyed wheeling his stroller into liquor stores, where, to their proprietors’ amazement and dismay (bets were generally involved), the little genius unerringly chirped, as a procession of open bottles was placed before him, “Sherry … vermouth … crème de menthe … Falernum … Angostura bitters…” At Harvard, Kim had bought a set of wineglasses for his dormitory room and joined the Lowell House Wine-Tasting Society. But on his birthday he remembers saying to himself, “These are the great wines of the world and I am not getting anything from this experience.” And that was that. From then on, he drank wine if it was served to him but never bought it and rarely talked about it.
For a long time, I thought of that evening as the Emperor’s New Wine Tasting. I now realize it was the opposite. The emperor’s clothes were real. The populace was blind.
The majority of the populace, that is. The sixth guest could not only appreciate Les Vins (as I had termed them on the menu) but appreciate them exquisitely. Kim’s roommate, John Laird, was from Ohio, the son of a gas company executive who drank Scotch on the rocks; there was nothing in his background to explain why he loved wine. He just did, like a man who inexplicably loves philately or sports cars or jazz.
The summer after Kim’s party, John worked as a sous-chef at a French restaurant on Cape Cod. At the end of August, he spent everything he’d earned on twenty-five cases of Burgundy and Bordeaux that he shipped to his parents’ house in Columbus for safekeeping. The following year, when he was a senior, my father asked him, “What are you thinking of doing after college, John?”
“Gee, I don’t know,” he said. “My father wants me to go to law school.”
“Well, you like wine,” said my father. “There are people who make a living in the wine industry.”
“They do?”
So John disappointed his own father and gratified mine. My father introduced him to Sam Aaron, Alexis Lichine, and Frank Schoonmaker, the three great lords of the American wine world. John ended up working for the first two, researching and ghostwriting their books before becoming something of a lord himself, the president of one of the most distinguished wine-importing companies in the world. He was the wine-progeny my father deserved.
John, by the way, did not think of that party as a wasteful casting of pearls before swine. He thought that whether or not everyone could appreciate the wines, it was an appropriate way to celebrate, through the medium my father held most dear, the coming-of-age of a beloved son.
And what of the insufferable calligrapher? What did she think of all this?
My memories of that evening are mostly fond. I remember being bemused—and perhaps confused—by the expense, which, though it was never mentioned, I could guess. But I liked being in a room with my brother and both of our parents. I felt my life before college and my life during college inching into alignment. When I had left home, the bookish vocabulary I had acquired at the Fadiman dinner table had been poured smoothly and usefully into the vessel of my literary studies, but there was nowhere to pour the wine vocabulary. It therefore felt deeply satisfying to write that ridiculous menu and to savor the names as they rolled off my father’s tongue.
Yes, but what did I think of the wines?
“Think of the wines” is an appropriate phrase. I can say with accuracy that I thought about them. I liked the idea of them. But as for the taste of them, I remember absolutely nothing.
12
Milkshake
My father laid down a nineteenth-century port for the wine lover’s son, but he did not lay down anything for the wine lover’s daughter. I asked him about it once. He shrugged and said, “I was a male chauvinist. Kim was a male.” He then told me he owed me a twenty-first birthday party, an offer that might have been more valuable if I hadn’t been in my thirties when he made it.
He hadn’t thrown an expensive party for my half brother, Jono, either. Jono—the son of the arduously retrieved Polly, so much older than I that he seemed a member of a different generation—had turned twenty-one when Kim was a toddler and my mother
was pregnant with me. His coming-of-age had likely ceded precedence to the urgent demands of my father’s new family. Still, there was something specifically gender-ish about the situation. My father was a male chauvinist.
He liked women—relished them, studied them, adored them. As a good progressive who would no sooner have glugged a Pétrus straight from the bottle than voted Republican, he supported the Equal Rights Amendment and called its defeat “the act of barbarians.” But that didn’t stop him from being reflexively condescending. I was recently trolling the online archives of The New York Times for articles that mentioned both “Clifton Fadiman” and “wine” (there were fifty-four) when I came upon an account of a talk he delivered on June 5, 1958, at the “21” Club, on the occasion of the Cigar Institute of America’s Annual Ladies’ Smoker. He asserted that although they were better drivers (true enough in his own household, since no one could have driven more incompetently than he did), “women are not as good at conversation and they know absolutely nothing about wine.”
Oh God, here we go again. Reading about my father, I was always bumping into howlers like that. But this one achieved a hitherto unmatched level of brazenness: He didn’t say it at a men’s club, he said it at a ladies’ luncheon. (If an unusual one. Were his listeners—who, according to the Times reporter, wore flowery hats—all puffing on coronas and panatelas while my father informed them of their inferiority in two of his most cherished spheres?)
It was the times, I reminded myself. The cigar-smoking ladies may have chuckled just as merrily as the female fans of Information Please undoubtedly did when he’d posed such questions (chosen by the producer, I hasten to note) as “Kipling said, ‘The female of the species is more deadly than the male.’ Can you quote two more selections that would please a woman-hater?” But even when those times were long past, he continued to make jokes about the bird-witted literary tastes of housewives; to call women “girls”; and, in both speech and writing, to use “he” when he meant “he or she.” I’m sure he had lower expectations for his daughter than he did for his sons. This persistent bias, as immune to rehabilitation as his own fondness for cigars (the smellier the better), both devalued and protected me. It meant that the pressure fell more heavily on Kim, who, perhaps because his father so intensely wanted him to be a writer, became a wilderness instructor and commodities trader, and on Jono, who went into computer engineering and marketing, although now, in his eighties, he manages a bookstore—a more Fadimanian calling. The writer niche was left open for me.
A few years ago I read a book by Carolyn Heilbrun called When Men Were the Only Models We Had. It was about three of her mentors: my father and his two closest college friends, Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling. Barzun and Trilling taught Heilbrun at Columbia before she became a professor there herself; she included my father in her trio, even though she’d never met him, because, she explained, “Fadiman’s was the life I thought I might live, his the writing that suggested how I might myself one day write.” When she was fifteen, she had come across Reading I’ve Liked—an anthology prefaced by an autobiographical essay in which my father traced the arc of his reading history from The Overall Boys, perused at age four, to the books he reviewed for The New Yorker in his thirties—and vowed to become “a Fadiman.” By this she meant a writer who was “both intellectual, even ‘highbrow,’ and yet available to those who did not think of themselves as either.” All three icons ended up tumbling off their pedestals when Heilbrun realized, in her forties, that their attitudes toward women ranged from discomfort with gender parity to outright misogyny. Her feminist rapier found its mark with particular exactitude when she turned to my father and, citing chapter and verse, observed that “magically, when he reaches for a sorry example of writing, behold, a woman writer he finds at his fingertips.” Though her book was a model of the sort of accessible intellectualism she had admired as a teenager—she did become a Fadiman—I can hardly say I enjoyed it. (Like boys who fight with their brothers at home but defend them from bullies at school, children always feel they’re the only ones who have the right to criticize their parents.) But I had to admit that Heilbrun was right.
My father believed there were certain things only a man should do. Earn more than his spouse. Pay the check at a restaurant. Hold the tickets at an airport. Be the last through a door. Tell the taxi driver where to go. Repeat an off-color joke.
And, of course, swear. Vladimir Nabokov, one of his favorite writers, described his own father, a patrician Russian statesman, as dignified in public but ribald in private. So too my father. In his eyes, swearing was not vulgar; it was a manly prerogative, as long as it was never done in writing or within earshot of children. Incorporating an occasional mild obscenity—“screw” or “balls,” for instance, but never “fuck”—into conversation with his offspring was a way of welcoming us into adulthood. (Some families might observe this rite of passage by serving wine, but of course we had passed that milestone long ago.) These words were reserved for him and for my brothers, though both of them spurned the privilege and spoke as chastely as nuns. My father believed it was appropriate for women to hear salty language but not to use it. When he told me something was horseshit, that was a token of fond familiarity. But had I responded in kind, he would have raised his eyebrows, which were gray and curly and had occasional rogue hairs that snaked out at peculiar angles.
My father also believed that, as a general rule, women were more superficial thinkers than men. How could they not be, with so much of their mental effort siphoned off to dresses, hats, and where to put the sofa? However, he was willing to make exceptions of the some-of-my-best-friends-are-Jews variety. It would have been hard not to, given that he had married my mother.
Although she had more than a passing interest in dresses, hats, and sofa placement, my mother was the antithesis of a fluffhead. Unlike many men who condescend to women, my father would never have chosen a dumb wife. Had he merely wanted a class-vaulting accessory, he would have plucked a WASP from the New York Social Register—plenty would have been glad to oblige—rather than falling for a WASP-Mormon-agnostic from Utah. He was pleased, however, that Annalee Whitmore Jacoby was what he called “well bred” (by which he meant she wasn’t Jewish and she hadn’t grown up poor, at least not until her banker father lost most of his money before the Depression and the rest during it; he viewed her as akin to a Chekhovian aristocrat who had been forced to live in reduced circumstances). He envied her social ease, an insider’s natural right rather than an outsider’s acquired skill. She added a few squiggles to his arrow-straight trajectory. If she’d been a wine, she would have been not a first-growth French Bordeaux but one of the best of the new California wines that had cropped up since Prohibition—say, an Inglenook Cabernet, a fine varietal in the vernacular style.
I once asked him why he had married her. He told me that she had a superior mind, she foamed with liveliness, and she looked irresistible in a white silk Chinese dress that was extremely sexy even though it buttoned all the way up to her neck. He added, “And both of us were looking for something because each of us had suffered. In your mother’s case it was a real tragedy, and in mine it was a pretty bad trauma.” He meant the unraveling of his marriage to Polly.
My mother’s summary of the situation was that when she compared my father with his potential rivals, “he made the other ones look like palookas.”
Up to that point, my mother had made a career of confounding feminine stereotypes. She was the first woman managing editor of The Stanford Daily; one of the few women who rose from the stenography pool to become a screenwriter at MGM, where she co-wrote scripts for movies starring Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Lana Turner, and Clark Gable; as a reporter for Time-Life, the only woman war correspondent in China. I once wrote a piece of celebratory doggerel about her that included these lines:
She sailed off to China in the heat of the war,
With MacArthur and Stilwell she forged a rapport,
And while dining
on mule meat and K-ration mousse
She sent daily dispatches to Henry R. Luce.
She returned with a knowledge of Rolleiflex optics,
She could type under fire and eat ice cream with chopsticks—
But I think that what really brought Kip to his knees
Was the fact that my mother could curse in Chinese.
(It was apparently permissible for women to swear in languages he didn’t understand.)
The tragedy to which my father referred was the loss of her first husband, a journalist named Melville Jacoby who died in a military accident six months after their wedding in Manila and two months after the newlyweds escaped from Corregidor. Not long before she met my father, she collaborated on a book with Theodore H. White, the self-described meatball who went on to become a well-known political reporter. Thunder Out of China, an angry critique of America’s Far East policy, became a bestseller and was banned both in China and in U.S. State Department libraries. My mother and Teddy, who had long been in love with her and had tendered an unsuccessful proposal, were invited to be guest panelists on Information Please. Oscar Levant told my father he should marry her.
My mother working on a script at MGM, circa 1940
He seems to have needed little encouragement. He courted my mother by buying her a flamethrower to melt the snow in her driveway (on the assumption, I feel sure, that she would be the one to use it) and by once bringing her a large quantity of a rum cocktail of which he was especially proud and which went over so well that both she and her mother got, as he recalled it, “tight as ticks.” (My mother remembered the drink as an alcoholic milkshake, which may have been more likely, since, like me, she was very fond of milkshakes. Either way, you will note that he didn’t bring wine. Too la-di-da. He had figured out that pretension, which had served him well ever since he left Brooklyn, would get him nowhere with a woman who had been dodging bombs in Chungking while he was exchanging bons mots in Upper East Side salons.) When I observed that getting my mother drunk might have had certain advantages but that it seemed unnecessary to get my grandmother drunk as well, my father insisted that the intention in both cases had been entirely innocent.