M.F.K. Fisher Wrote About Food, But Fed The Soul

For what it's worth to anybody, my bedtime reading is eclectic - novels, poetry, investigative books, newspapers, press handouts, the works.

But one favorite is always there, "The Art of Eating," by M.F.K. Fisher.

As you know, this great lady - called by the poet, W.H. Auden, "America's greatest writer" - died last June. She was 83.

By dumb luck, I found in a Portland bookstore a new one on Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, one that now has a permanent place on the bedside table. It's called "Conversations with M.F.K. Fisher."

It's a funny thing about this lady. Lucius Beebe, an avowed gay, fell in love with her because of her writing - he thought Fisher was a man. Many people thought MFK was a man.

She made little money from her writing; she wrote hundreds of magazine essays, notably for The New Yorker, yet her biggest book royalty check was $500.

In the late '30s, the '40s, and even into the '60s, she almost dropped from sight. It may be our recent, 30-year fascination with cookery that brought her to prominence. She probably had a hand in starting it.

She does not write cookbooks, although she throws in recipes on impulse.

Food is what Fisher uses as a plinth for writing, a plinth being no more than a foundation to build on.

She could have become an equally great writer using politics, feminism or any other subject upon which to build her brilliant, perceptive essays.

She just happened to like food and enjoyed writing about it; it gave her the platform from which to project her views.

One of my favorite of Fisher's books is "How to Cook a Wolf." The wolf, in this book, is the figurative wolf at the door - during the Great Depression.

Anyway, this new book, "Conversations," is a compilation of written interviews, TV interviews and some of Fisher's own writing.

One of hers is "As The Lingo Languishes," a delightful attack on lofty writing about food, the ads aimed at enticing us to use certain brands.

Here is the way she begins: "Hunger is, to describe it most simply, an urgent need for food. It is a craving, a desire. It is, I would guess, much older than man as we now think of him, and probably synonymous with the beginnings of sex."

As she grew older, M.F.K. Fisher had painful arthritis and a weakened heart. Of these, she told an interviewer:

"I will not bow, absolutely will not bow. I say, `Brother Pain, come in and sit down, you and I are going to take this thing in hand. And I will not give in.' "

Mary Frances was, herself, an excellent cook. She was also a beautiful woman, a beauty that carried on into her 60s and 70s.

One of her savagely comical pieces, I remember, was her bemused account of how bachelors tried to seduce her by inviting her over and cooking dinner for her.

In the foreword to one of her books, "The Gastronomical Me," she explained her purpose:

"It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food, security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the other . . .

"There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine is drunk. And that is my answer when people ask me:

Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?"

Her recipes (I've tried some, with good success) can be found in "Serve It Forth," "Consider the Oyster," "How to Cook a Wolf" and "An Alphabet for Gourmets."

She has no truck with "precious" food writers. She denounces the species. First on her list of fine cookbooks is Irma Rombauer's "The Joy of Cooking," perhaps the most important item in any kitchen, barring the stove.

In one interview with Bill Moyers, used in "Conversations," Moyers himself quoted a great MFK passage:

"The helpless weeping and sobbing and retching that sweeps over somebody who inadvertently hears Churchill's voice rallying Englishmen to protect their shores, or Roosevelt telling people not to be afraid of fear, or a civil rights chieftain saying politely that there is such a thing as democracy - those violent, physical reactions are proof of one's being alive and aware.

"But the slow, large tears that spill from the eye, flowing like unblown rain according to the laws of gravity and desolation - these are the real tears, I think. They are the ones that have been simmered, boiled, sieved, filtered past all anger and into the realm of acceptive serenity."

She was unpretentious. When Moyers read those words to her, she had totally forgotten that they were her own.

How sad that Death took her away, but nature, or God, always takes the best of us, along with the worst.

Emmett Watson's column appears Sunday and Thursday in the Northwest section of The Times.