WH Auden’s famous observation on the writer MFK Fisher – “I do not know of anyone in the States who writes better prose” – has been pressed into service on the cover of this reprint of Fisher’s most beloved book The Gastronomical Me (1943). The power of the puff lies in the fact that Auden wasn’t praising another poet or even a novelist but a food writer, a species conceived at that time as a domestic science teacher with a fail-safe recipe for meatloaf. Implicit in Auden’s praise was the suggestion that Fisher should be removed from this category and set alongside Hemingway or Faulkner as a literary practitioner in her own right. These days we would get around the whole vexed business by saying that Fisher’s hybrid of culinary and memoir writing falls into the category of the personal essay, the kind of thing that has launched a thousand blogs and become a staple of the New Yorker’s annual food issue.
The only hitch with this is that Fisher – or, to be formal, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher – was on record as hating the idea of the personal essay. To the proud daughter of a California newspaper man, the term signalled self-importance and, worse, over-writing. Fisher prided herself on never doing more than one draft which, if true, means she was a genius. Here she is on the food she encountered in Burgundy as a newlywed in the 1930s: “We ate terrines of pâté ten years old under their tight crusts of mildewed fat. We addled our palates with snipes hung so long they fell from their hooks, to be roasted then on cushions of toast softened with the paste of their rotted innards and fine brandy.”
What Fisher is doing here is far more than simply describing a rich meal in even richer prose. As she explains on the first page of The Gastronomical Me, “Our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.” Or, as Bee Wilson glosses it in her short, admiring introduction, “There is a liberating generosity to the way she exposes those private appetites that most of us struggle to hide. No one was ever so confident in her own hungers or so determined in her quest to satisfy them.”
This might sound a bit lush, a bit Eat, Pray, Love, which is surely one of The Gastronomical Me’s bastard descendants. But there is an important difference. For Fisher proceeds from the assumption that everything and everyone she encounters in her odyssey is explicitly and graphically on the point of revealing their own “rotted innards”. A helpful chauffeur flips his lapel accidentally to reveal an enamel fascist party pin; the heavy drapes in a smart restaurant turn everyone’s faces mauve and mustard; while eating a delicious bouillabaisse involves “sucking a hundred strange dead creatures from their shells”. On a train to Switzerland, Fisher’s beloved husband, who has recently lost a leg, weaves unsteadily down the corridor to the dining car where once he strode like a strongman at the circus.
By the time Fisher wrote her book she was no longer devouring lunches made from “those big white beans, the kind Italians peel and eat with salt when they are fresh and tender”, or sitting in a post-house marvelling at how delicious potatoes can be if you gave them half a chance. The girl whom Man Ray yearned to photograph because of her bone structure was holed up in a boarding house in Altadena, California. Recently widowed – her terminally ill husband had shot himself – Fisher was heavily pregnant by a man she never named. The war which she had seen coming in Europe had now finally arrived in America and was consuming the nation’s young men. As Wilson rightly points out, The Gastronomical Me makes you shiver at its deep familiarity with death.
Reading it again in this handsome new edition I am struck by the fact that it is, above all, a queer book. I mean the term not so much as Fisher used it colloquially and carelessly in the middle of the last century but how we employ it today, to mark a work in which sex and gender and everything that is built from them – the whole world in other words – is on a tilt. Nowhere is this better summarised than in Fisher’s trenchant inversion of the usual pap about liking to cook for her friends because it makes them feel at home. On the contrary, she explains gleefully, her goal is to give her guests something that will make them “forget Home and all it stood for”.
In a series of dazzling table turns, Fisher proceeds to demonstrate her own queerness in action. Boarding at Miss Huntingdon’s School for Girls in the 1920s, she swallows her first oyster while simultaneously dancing deliriously in the arms of Olmsted, an older girl of Prince Charming proportions. Later, as that most soupy of things, a honeymooning bride, she finds herself scooping grape skins out of a girl’s navel while her new husband waits for her next door. Finally, when dining alone on the way to Avallon in France, Fisher is kidnapped by a waitress who treats her “like a slave”, forcing her to choke down pickled herring “as meaty as fresh nuts” before leaning in, with her “odd pale voluptuous mouth”, as if for a kiss.
And then there is the queerest of queer chapters, “Feminine Ending”. By now Fisher has wound up in Mexico where her younger brother, David, and his wife are living. David has become obsessed with the lead singer in a local mariachi band, a small monkeyish man with a “wild, cracked” voice who seems equally breathless for David. The moment Fisher sees Juanito she knows that he is biologically a woman. It is the second time that she has felt called on to perform such an unmasking. She tells us how, as a teenager taken to her father’s newspaper office, she pointed out that the star typesetter was not a regular guy but a cross-dressing woman. Mary Frances (the run-together Christian names by which she was always known hint at her own doubleness) is clearly drawn to the inbetween.
This inbetweenness extends to the structure of the book. Fisher’s technique is to proceed obliquely so that the bones of her story – who is married to whom, who is living where, how many babies are in residence – hardly figure at all. Instead we are given a series of interludes, gaps in the timeline where feeling and experience gather in deep pools. This narrative ellipsis can come across as a bit take it or leave it, as if Fisher can’t be bothered to spell things out for her readers, which is why, in recent years, there has been something of a backlash against her perceived snootiness. But this is missing the point.
Fisher always said that her greatest achievement in life was learning how to walk into a restaurant and treat herself as her own honoured guest, ignoring the hostile stares of resentful men and the covertly admiring glances of other women. And this is exactly what she achieves in The Gastronomical Me. To read Fisher is to feel, in Wilson’s words, that “we too should be a bit bolder in feeding ourselves” and a little less bothered by what the world, with its rotten innards, thinks about it all.
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