M.F.K. Fisher was more than a food writer

Hello,

here. I usually write over at Poor Man’s Feast, but Katherine is caregiving for her mother in hospital right now, and I offered to step in with some words about M.F.K. Fisher, to close the month of discussion about The Gastronomical Me.

I first came to M.F.K. Fisher’s work in the eighties, when I was a bookseller in New York, specializing in cookbooks and collections of food essays at Dean & Deluca in Soho. North Point Press, a small publisher in northern California, re-issued Fisher’s work in lovely jacketed paperbacks that I carried in my department, and which I could not keep in stock. If I bought ten copies of one title, they were gone within a week. If I bought twenty, they were gone within two weeks. At roughly the same time, a publisher’s rep came into the store and waved a green-jacketed hardcover at me and told me to take it home and read it: It was Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking, and I read it on the long subway ride up to my apartment in the East Nineties. There is a lot to say about Colwin’s book — brilliant, hilarious, human (who but Laurie would have the guts to write about horrible and vile meals at a time of betweezered vertical food and mawkish culinary excess, when everybody thought they were a gourmet?) — but the first thing I remember is that I always got a seat on the train going home when I was reading it because I was laughing so loudly to myself that people thought I was crazy, which is saying a lot about New York City in the eighties.

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On the other side of the coin, when I read Fisher’s books, I didn’t laugh because, to put not too fine a point on it, they weren’t funny; they were exceedingly sensual. Born on July 3rd, 1908 in Albion, Michigan to sturdy newspaperman, Rex Kennedy, and his wife, Edith, Mary Frances was meant to be born on July 4th, and her parents were all set to call her Independencia, when she arrived a day early. So much for their plans.

It’s hard to nail Fisher down; lord knows the world has tried. Prolific, single-minded, bull-headed, arguably bisexual, she was an enigmatic sensualist through and through, which is perhaps why her first marriage to the incredibly handsome Al Fisher failed. According to her biographer, Joan Reardon, their marriage was never consummated for reasons that remain murky. And yet: the truth often lies deep between the lines of well-crafted narrative, and here I am referring to a section from her famous essay, Borderland, published as part of her first book, Serve It Forth, in 1937:

❝

In the morning, in the soft sultry chamber, sit in the window peeling tangerines, three or four. Peel them gently; do not bruise them, as you watch soldiers pour past and past the corner and over the canal towards the watched Rhine. Separate each plump little pregnant crescent. If you find the Kiss, the secret section, save it for Al.

[Would Al have cared? I don’t know. Still, one needs a cigarette.]

She goes on, in a section of the essay rarely quoted:

❝

On the radiator the sections of tangerines have grown even plumper, hot and full. You carry them to the window, pull it open, and leave them for a few minutes on the packed snow of the sill. They are ready.

I have various editions of all of Fisher’s books, but the one I cherish most and read from regularly is a hardcover 1954 edition of The Art of Eating, her collected culinary(ish) works, originally belonging to Laurie Colwin and given to me by Colwin’s adult child, my friend RF Jurjevics. As in many pre-owned and much-loved books, it’s easy to see the essays that Colwin favored: Borderland had been flagged on the tangerine story one day very long ago, leaving a cloudy brown ghost where a bookmark once sat for who knows how many years.

I’ll save my conjecture about Fisher’s marriage to her second husband, Dillwyn Parrish, for my upcoming conversation with Katherine, along with Fisher’s mystifying response to an impending World War while she and Parrish were still living in Europe. We can talk about her How to Cook A Wolf, commissioned as a collection of parsimonious recipes meant for the war-time kitchen dealing with rationing. But in my estimation, there is no better example of what makes Fisher truly extraordinary than Last House, her collection of short pieces dating from 1943-1991 and published posthumously in 1995, which includes two back-to-back, breathtaking short essays on being a caregiver to her father, Rex Kennedy.

Here is what makes her work sing: its ambiguity. Fisher doesn’t tell us how to feel; she doesn’t manipulate us or pull the horses this way or that. She doesn’t tie her stories up with nice neat little bows. She may not provide you, the reader, with all the information. Characters may live happily ever after, or not; they may live in beautiful Switzerland and never know who among their neighbors is a fascist in the years just before the world changes; they may taste their first oyster while simultaneously experiencing the advances of another woman. And if they are incurably ill, in severe chronic pain and facing the loss of all their limbs to amputation, they may take their own life with a pistol in the countryside near the home they share with their writer wife, who, four months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, will be awakened by the gunshot and spend the rest of her life without him, quietly grieving while remaining resolutely, publicly stoic and productive.

This is the place where life and food intersect, and where I bristle at Fisher — and Colwin — being called food writers. Food writing is a genre constructed by the publishing industry when a bookstore clerk received a box of books one day, opened it up, and had no idea where to shelve them. Memoir? Non-fiction? Cookbooks? Essays? Writing about food requires that one’s senses be alive in exactly the same way that writing about sex or music requires it. The best food writers are simply excellent writers who are crafting narrative about a specific sensory experience set in the context of history, science, memoir, and practical description. W.H. Auden had it right when he wrote I do not know of anyone in the United States today who writes better prose in the introduction to a British edition of The Art of Eating.