I’ve participated several months now in a kind-of book group with a like-minded half-dozen or so “mature” guys in which the little wrinkle that makes it not quite a book group is that we don’t actually read entire books. Instead, we tackle brief essays, generally just one or two per month, of some 3-12 pages each (at least so far).
I hardly need mention that essays, especially at this stage of life, have the great advantage of not requiring the long slog of sheer reading time that books do. This helps us all avoid the occasional book club scenario of one member failing to complete the monthly reading assignment and then staying so uncharacteristically silent that one of the more forthright group members finally fixes them with a stare and makes one of those discomfiting statements disguised as a question: “Hey, Joe: you didn’t even read the book, did you?”
Rather than face the prospect of ever slinking down in our chairs or feigning a sudden transient ischemic attack to avoid answering such a question, our group has endeavored to go easy on ourselves with essays, thus ensuring almost 100% compliance with each month’s designated selections.
The aesthete can’t imagine eating or drinking at a rate and pace that forsakes the delectable pleasures of anticipation and savoring; the addict can’t abide the deep torment of waiting.
And while I say a good deal of the above with a substantial degree of jest, the truth is that good essays can provide every bit the motherlode of thoughtful, intense, inspirational, and provocative material that books do, with the advantage, given the sheer math of page counts, that one can read many more essays than books.
And then discuss them with the same seriousness of purpose that is always required to digest chewy material—and then be rewarded in kind.
It helps, of course, just as it does with books, to read great work, and so we do. (A good number of them are featured in our current go-to tome: Philip Lopate’s 770-page 1994 collection, “The Art of the Personal Essay.”)
This month, one selection was the noted food-and-so-much-more writer M.F.K. Fisher’s characteristically playful-insightful meditation on managing her food desires, flirtings, and fantasies in an essay titled, “Once a Tramp, Always…” (An allusion to Mark Twain’s “A Tramp Abroad,” a literary cocktail that mixes travel diary and travel fiction, which Fisher drily summarizes as Twain “grousing about the food he found in Europe in 1878.”)
Our group bookended Fisher (1908-1992) with a searing reflection on desires-become-addictions in “Under the Influence,” a memoir of surviving childhood with an alcoholic father, by the prolific essayist and now retired professor, Scott Russell Sanders.
Two ends of a continuum, spanning the joys of anticipatory pleasure and the ills of desperate, uncontrollable need.
***
***
“My father drank.” That short declarative gut punch of an opening sentence from the Sanders essay first appeared in “Harper’s” magazine in 1989, when Sanders was 44 years old. It sets the stage for a somber reflection that plumbs the depths and lifelong effects on children as they watch, helpless but nevertheless crushed by feelings of responsibility, as a parent disintegrates in front of them, lost to bottomless desire.
“In a matter of minutes, the contents of a bottle could transform a brave man into a coward, a buddy into a bully, a gifted athlete and skilled carpenter and shrewd businessman into a bumbler,” Sanders writes. His father, Greeley Ray Sanders, “could multiply seven-digit numbers in his head when sober, but when drunk could not help us with 4th grade math.”
As the oldest of three children, Sanders spends a childhood pock-marked with trepidation, never knowing which of his father’s Jekyll and Hyde personas would show up on a given day or hour.
The competent factory boss and fatherly helpmate?
The seemingly possessed, “graveyard lunatic, quick-tempered, explosive…?”
Or else the “maudlin and weepy” version, which, Sanders notes, “frightened us nearly as much.”
Also preying upon the children: fear of their own imagined role in bringing about their father’s distempers. If only they coud manage to be perfect children who kept their rooms perfectly clean and never left a toy or ball where their father might bump it…
All of it producing such a toxic stew of secret, shallowly repressed guilt, he writes near essay’s end, that even as an adult, it still “burns like acid in my veins.”
But no amount of children’s or a spouse’s redirection, pleading, hiding, browbeating, self-canceling behavior, obsequiousness or desperate search for the demon liquors the addict skillfully hides around the property can ever match the drivenness of his addiction.
That addiction took a 15-year hiatus after his father collapsed, nearly died, and then endured a horrific withdrawal, the doctors darkly warning him he would not be so fortunate the next time. Then came retirement and a celebratory beer offered to him by the moving company workers transporting the family back to his childhood home in Mississippi. Sanders imagines his father’s breezy, fateful rationalizations in consenting for “the amber liquid (to) pour down his throat, the alcohol steal into his blood, the key turn in his brain.”
His father died not long after at age 64, plopped dead on the linoleum floor of his younger son’s trailer, Sanders observing the larger story: “He didn’t quit drinking, He quit living.”
***
***
Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, on the other hand, made her living, and quite a sterling reputation, writing about the glories of fine food and drink. Not at all in a profligate sense, but more as an aesthete of the culinary arts, where she reigned nearly supreme over decades as a refined literary stylist who just happened to apply her intelligence, erudition and wit to gastronomy.
“I do not consider myself a food writer,” she once told an interviewer. It’s a fair enough self-analysis, even for a writer whose bibliography and legacy are dominated by much-revered titles such as, “The Art of Eating,” “Consider the Oyster,” “The Gastronomical Me,” and my own personal-favorite-title-of-a-book-I’ve-never-read: “How to Eat a Wolf.”
In “A Tramp Abroad…”, Fisher reflects on a handful of favorite foods and drink—her experience of them in the past, her longing for them in their absence, the delectable anticipation and consummation of once again coming into their presence—almost as if they were lovers, which in a powerful sense they are (and on exceptionally advantageous terms…).
After a paragraph waxing rhapsodic about “gooseberry pie on a summer noon at Peachblow Farm,” “the whiff of anise from a Marseille bar,” and the widespread public admiration of that era’s performing artists Gaby Deslys and Fanny Brice, she observes: “Of course, the average person has not actually possessed a famous beauty, and it is there that gastronomy serves as a kind of surrogate, to ease our longings.”
This reference to classic sublimation—If we can’t possess Gaby or Fanny, we can at least gather on the veranda to eat oysters washed down with a delicate French champagne—speaks to a universal: everyone’s need to have something to look forward to, a reason to arise from our slumber and wrap ourselves in a plan. To finish our work with some reward at the end, something to slake our thirst for pause, pleasure, and at least a glimmer of well-being, however small or delayed it may be.
Matter of fact, delayed gratification can heighten the pleasure and spice up the days leading up to experiencing it. The difference between an aesthete and an addict comes down to that very point: the aesthete can’t imagine eating or drinking at a rate and pace that forsakes the delectable pleasures of anticipation and savoring; the addict can’t abide the deep torment of waiting.
Reading along, I couldn’t help but think of Fisher’s privilege in being free of the demons that gnawed at Greeley Ray Sanders’s soul, which shrunk the same world that Fisher expanded to the extravagant heights she did.
Free of obsession and enlarged by her capacity for restraint (there’s a lesson in that!), she could remain playful and at a slight remove from the objects of her desire. This afforded her both the time and orientation to revel in the tastes, textures and presentations of oysters, foie gras, cheeses, pastries, champagne, the humble tomato, and even, I was so very glad to read, potato chips! (A longtime love that gets me weak in the knees of my otherwise passable dietary habits…)
Greeley Ray should have been so lucky.
How much of the responsibility for addicts’ descent lies in their genes, problematic upbringing, misfortune, moral failure or countless other factors is, in the end, impossible to determine. Which suggests that we tread softly in condemnation, acknowledge our own good fortune if we indeed have been able to avoid the same snares, and appreciate in our own time and way the good things that life makes available to us, in the truly riotous abundance and endless variety it does.
That last point about appreciation seemed to work particularly well for M.F.K. Fisher, along with this sentiment I suspect anyone would gladly take to the bank and cash in for a life well-lived, her once telling an interviewer, “I decided at the age of nine that one of the best ways to grow up is to eat and talk quietly with good people.”
***
I wrote in this space back in 2015 about the tragic life trajectory of Amy Winehouse. Listening again here as she makes light (or does she?) of the very issue that killed her is a sobering experience, no matter how else one tries to categorize it…
***
The Sanders essay can be read in its entirety here. The Fisher essay is here.
Comments, questions, attaboys or arguments suggestions for future posts, songs, poems? Scroll on down below, and/or on Facebook, where you can Follow my public posts and find regular 1-minute snippets of wisdom and other musings from the world’s great thinkers and artists, accompanied always by lovely photography. https://www.facebook.com/andrew.hidas/
Deep appreciation to the photographers! Unless otherwise stated, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing
Homepage rotating banner photos (except for library books) by Elizabeth Haslam https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/
Library books by Larry Rose, Redlands, California, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com
Jellyfish by Thomas Hawk, San Francisco, California https://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/
Liquor display by Nguyễn Hiệp, Ha Noi, Viet Nam https://unsplash.com/@hieptltb97
Seafood dish by Marika Sartori https://unsplash.com/@jasmineinthewood
Sanders portrait by Indiana Public Media https://www.flickr.com/photos/wfiupublicradio/
Fisher portrait courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery
A reading group that focuses on essays and poetry speaks volumes to me now. Spending several days or numerous hours reading a novel that leaves you expressing opinions like…it was okay…I liked the plot but the characters were flat…the ending was weak…I liked the characters but the story didn’t grab me…It lacked description…none of the characters are likeable…far too violent…too much sex…too little sex. Sound familiar? I need to go on a walkabout and find a group that has one very simple requirement: Brevity. Short stories should max out at 30 pages; most poetry makes the cut as do essays; occasionally a novella could be considered but individuals do possess veto power. Then, perhaps as an end of the year final, participants can create their own essay, poem or short story to be read aloud or, if preferred, silently; wine, coffee and sweets are a must. Can’t go wrong with the latter and guarantees a great turnout. Oh, by the way, it’s an ideal platform for introducing one to the must-read list of immortal novelists: Tolstoy wrote many essays that thankfully don’t require weightlifting “War and Peace.” “Moby Dick” has more chapters than “Billy Budd” does pages. Everyone knows Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”, but have you read his letters to his brother Theo?
Matter of fact, I HAVE read those letters to Theo, but it was a very long time ago now, and as is most always the case with books, songs, lectures from your parents, etc., pretty much the only thing I remember is their tone, the way they made me feel, which was more sad than not, for what he faced in his flaming meteor of a life…
Meanwhile, I hesitate to disparage novels, them being the immersive, total-psyche experience the best of them can be, though I have grown increasingly skeptical of the need for them to go on & on, which applies to music and film, too, for that matter. So brevity being the soul of wit & such, I believe I will bring this comment to a close now, Bro, in keeping with the basic sensibilities of this discussion!
A couple of things:
On the right hand side of of your page, is an Archives section, going back to 2012. I want all of us who read your essays to revel in that time scape with Drew…’That Thing You Do” has some long legs, and is consistently excellent. It is a body of work about which you should be proud!
Secondly, the alcoholic parent so many of us Baby Boomers had, makes a really complicated foundation from which to grow into an adult. In my early years, I blamed my own father for a miserable childhood. Later, I to softened my views with the thought that he was doing the best he could given his background. Quite a responsibility being a parent, when in the end, they are just people with flaws, whose actions and behaviors are so amplified in a child’s world. I’m pretty sure that without the booze, my Dad would have been a mean spirited prick, but the alcohol just made that “spirit” come out into the open more readily. Thanks to you and your group for bringing this essay to my attention
Thanks, Moon, I never look askance at words of encouragement, which I appreciate very much. And I’m not even sure most readers even know the Archives on the right side of the page even exist, given how obscure things can get on the narrow confines of one’s phone, by which increasing numbers of readers take in blogs and everything else on the Internet. So thanks for shining a little light over yonder!
Also appreciate your words of wisdom borne of experience of a child navigating a world presented to them by an addicted parent whose “…actions and behaviors are so amplified in a child’s world.” That is spot-on, and tragic, yet I remain impressed by how so many kids emerge resilient and resolute even with the scars they inevitably carry from the experience. (I also know that a lot of kids can’t/don’t muster the resilience it requires, all’s the more the tragedy…)
In our essay group and among others of my friends, as I’m sure it does in your own circles, we run the gamut, from fall-down, early death addiction to reformed drunks to occasional bingeing to no addiction at all. And then this: one friend with the opposite of your own experience: an “alcoholic” parent who didn’t drink, but repressed it so mightily—and unsuccessfully—that they may as well have, given how much the repression stunted their parenting. What a treacherous world this can be, into which we throw children at the feet and under the care of parents who, ready or not, will assume the role of God to the kid—until the kid finds out otherwise as the years pass, and has to come to grips with the implications of that knowledge…