Mary Frances Kennedy (MFK) Fisher was born in 1908 and grew up in Whittier, California where her father was the editor of the local newspaper. She discovered food and cooking in France, where she lived for extended periods before and after World War II. She was among the first people to write almost exclusively about food as the focus of her memoirs and essays. Her highly personal and sensuous style has made her work a touchstone for many subsequent food writers, especially women.
I have been chewing on MFK Fisher for about a year now. When I first read her books thirty years ago, I had never thought of a person writing about food as a person who was writing. I loved her vivid tales of learning to eat in railroad stations, ocean liners and at the communal table of a down-at-the-heels pension in Dijon. In part wanted to eat what she ate: oysters and caviar, cheese and rich pate. But, even more, I wanted to eat as she ate: with an avid passion and sensuous absorption in whatever was on her plate. Since that time, she has been a constant presence and the more I thought about her, the more I wanted to understand why. Rereading her work, it isn’t easy to put a finger on her intimate appeal. She seduces and attracts, but doesn’t always satisfy. How is it that the godmother of American food writing turns out to be a middling cook, uneven writer, and uneasy female role model?
MFK was a voracious and attentive eater, a lover of restaurants and dining out, but also of impromptu picnics and solitary meals. She luxuriates in everything from escargot and pheasant to fried egg sandwiches and mashed potatoes with catsup. Throughout her life, she cooked constantly for family, friends, and just about anyone who showed up at the door. Most recipes are basic: ratatouille or mushrooms in cream, culled from her years in France, oyster stew and baked ham with mustard, adapted from staple American cookbooks of the early 20th century. Some of her concoctions are downright appalling. She advises wartime cooks to make “sludge,” a sort-of cut-rate haggis made with chopped beef (absurdly “never hamburger”), ground vegetables and oatmeal. In more than one book she recommends a soup made with equal parts beef broth, V8, and clam juice or vermouth. Ouf. She had no training and no technique. Her recipes were one-off inspirations designed to suit her taste, her wallet and to fill the bellies of those around her. She insisted that no one owned a recipe and that few were original, certainly not her own.
With time, her tone of voice shifted: from sparkling, witty, sensual and arch to introspective, bitter, determinedly lonely and alone, and then to the elusive, mystical believer in coincidence and fate, and finally the earthy advocate of simple food and cranky critic of fads and pretensions.
Fisher’s writing, like her cooking, feels improvised. Her pieces are conversational and discursive –favorite stories spun out for guests lingering after dinner with a final glass of wine. She is loose with the facts, self-plagiarizing, full of verbal tics and repetitions. “Hunger,” “being fed,” “good sweet butter,” these are her “swift-footed Achilles” and “wine-dark seas” – incantations that return and repeat, as do key scenes from her life, reworked and re-remembered for each appearance. Her writing is a performance: people and events are reinvented on the fly to suit the day, the audience, her current view of herself. Famously reluctant to rewrite or edit, she may have unconsciously preserved what is most engaging about her style the ability to recreate a moment in the past to show us who she is now.
Her best work has an easy fluidity, twisting supplely from one idea to the next. The opening essay in Consider the Oyster begins with the provocative statement, “The oyster leads a dreadful, but exciting life.” From there she trips through the lifecycle of the succulent bivalve emphasizing its shifting sexuality, promiscuity and feeding. But she also dwells on the oyster’s fate: sucked dry by starfish, worms and leeches – not to mention humans – a thousand hungry mouths from which it cannot flee. In her ode to private eating, Borderland, it is February in Strasbourg. Alone in a hotel room she carefully peels sections of tangerine, dries them on the radiator, and then lines them up in the snow on a window ledge before eating them one by one. With gorgeous precision, she describes the brittle skins shattering under her teeth and the gush of frozen pulp on her tongue. A poignant description of solitary longing – eating that cold fruit alone through a long afternoon, gazing out the window to the street below. Waiting for her husband to return and, maybe, for her life to begin again.
Fisher was obsessed with writing, but found infinite ways to keep from doing it. She told anyone who would listen that she wrote because she had to, but in reality she wrote when she could. Probably her best book, The Gastronomical Me, was in written in three months while hiding out in a boarding house waiting for her first daughter to be born in secret. She wrote Consider the Oyster to entertain her beloved second husband who was dying of Buerger’s disease and required constant injections of painkillers. Her other books and articles were cranked out between family crises, marriages, lovers, two children and travel – lots of travel. She moved on what seems like a yearly basis, up and down the length of California, from Whittier to LA to San Francisco to St. Helena. She spent three years in Whittier caring for her father – even running his newspaper business for a time. But when he died and left her some money, she didn’t use it to buy her freedom to write – she traveled to France, Italy, and Switzerland with a flying circus of children, friends and the children of friends. Often under pressure for money, she was always looking for new assignments to pay the bills. She protested against what she saw as hackwork, but even when she had an open contract with The New Yorker, she still seemed to treat her work only as a means to an end. Now, don’t get me wrong – this is the life of many if not most writers, women in particular. And Fisher’s output is nothing to sneeze at. But she often talked about the nagging sense that she could go further. That she was always stopping short. Getting right up to the edge, but shying away. Pulling her punches.
Part of this was the double disgrace of writing magazine articles and writing about food when what a real writer should be doing is writing novels. Everyone begged her to write a novel: her husbands, agents, editors and most famously Clifton Fadiman who said, “Mrs. Fisher was born to write novels and it’s about time she did.” What a constant punch to the gut. Imagine you are a Usain Bolt – the fastest man on earth in a sprint, but all anyone ever says to you is, “Why don’t you run the marathon? After all, that’s what real runners do.”
Someday I’ll write better
Beneath her blasé pose, she felt it. After publishing her first novel at thirty-nine, she wrote to an old friend, Someday I’ll write better and you’ll like it better. As for KA Porter [Katherine-Anne Porter] and VW [Virginia Woolf] … they can and will and ad eternitas [sic] write rings around and around me. You know that, I want to be good, but I also want children and love and stress and panic and in the end I am too tired to write with the nun-like ascetic self-denial and concentration it takes. You can argue that it’s tragic that she felt that the only way to truly write was through nun-like self-denial – but you have to admit she has a point. Writers’ lives may be full of upheaval, but most need to carve out uninterrupted time or nothing gets done, and they have to make the space to become absorbed in the process or nothing gets better. Some lucky few may be Mozart who supposedly transcribed the music that sprang from his mind fully formed, but most are not. Most of us write and rewrite, and throw it away, and write it again.
Writers that Fisher admired were Virginia Woolf and Colette. She considered herself destined translate Colette’s works, but never began the project. Like Fisher, Colette often wrote for money but also wanted fame. Their styles share sensuality and stylization. Both record, in intimate detail, the obsessive desire to love and be loved. They also share dilettantism, self-mythologizing and a feigned indifference that covers a fervent desire to be taken seriously. For both, much of the writing approaches immortality, but stops short.
The comparison with Woolf is harder to see. Woolf had erudition and clarity of purpose, things Fisher knew she lacked. Woolf chaffed against her lack of formal education, but Fisher, who had the opportunity, never had the desire or discipline to finish a degree. Her style shares with Wolff a quality of cool distance, indirection and flexibility of time and memory. She also mirrors Wolff’s two literary voices – the essayist who is more humorous and direct, and the novelist who is veiled, intent and inward. Like Woolf, Fisher fought off periods of intense depression and understood the pull of death.
Like many women from the past who we want to cherish as role models, Fisher is not modern or emancipated in the way we want her to be. Born at the turn of the century, she lived through the shift from the American myth of domestic order to an equally fictional new age of openly fragmented family life. She married three times and had two daughters. She loved her girls fiercely as children, but as they grew older and more troubled, she left them to the care of others. Even on her deathbed, she refused to tell her oldest daughter who her father was – perhaps because the real man did not fit the story of herself she wanted to tell. She had a long-term affair with a woman that she revealed to no one, burning all her letters, and another with a married man in which she played the role of mistress. She could never call his home, or attend his funeral.
As we live, we write and rewrite the story of ourselves. More than most, Fisher needed both to tell and to shape that story. Across dozens of books and essays, she catalogued her life. Was she hiding the real story, or did the creation become the story? She married at twenty-one to leave home. The alluring pictures from her wedding do not suggest an ingénue, but the stories she tells of her early years do. Then, as an old woman, she is shocked to reread her diaries and to see that she was disillusioned with the marriage from the start. She betrayed her first husband with a friend and then arranged to live with both of them in a tiny house in Switzerland. She writes of the anxiety and struggle of this period, but never names the source. She hid her relationship with a woman for years, writing joyously of being in love but never giving her a name or a face. How can such a closely reported life remain so unexamined?
The woman whose desires and responses MFK Fisher explores is outside time and place. Whether in France or California, on a ship, or in a bar, she is only ever alone in her intense inner communion with her own sensuality. Although France or the ship are the vehicle for her experience, they pale in comparison to her inner space. She lavishes her full attention on herself in a way that no one else can ever do. And that may be the crux of her appeal. We all want to turn a spotlight on ourselves. And when that beam cuts through the darkness, we want it to reveal a self that is glamorous, brave and daring.
Must read Fisher:
The Gastronomical Me
Consider the Oyster
The Physiology of Taste (translation of Brillat-Savarin)
Two Towns in Provence (Aix and Marseille)
Biography:
Poet of the Appetites by Joan Reardon
MFK Fisher: A Life in Letters edited by Norah Barr, Marsha and Patrick Moran