The
Wine Lover's Daughter: a memoir
Anne
Fadiman (2017, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Throughout
the middle third of the twentieth century, Clifton Fadiman was a name
to conjure with: publisher, critic, anthologist, appearing frequently
on radio and television, he was the very model of a public
intellectual. The Wine Lover's Daughter is his daughter Anne's
memoir of his life, and her life in his orbit. It's a brief cultural
history of the times he lived and worked in, and a loving rumination
on influence and memory. He lived long enough to trim down his
literary estate, so that her task as executrix wouldn't swallow up
her own life, but she still has plenty to work with with.
Anne
traces the arc of his journey from the crowded, impoverished streets
of Jewish Brooklyn, to Columbia University, to a career that would
have fully occupied three or four lesser men. His original goal was
to remain at Columbia as an English professor, but the department had
a Jewish quota of one, and his friend Lionel Trilling got the job.
You
could say he was overcompensating on many fronts: his mother picked
his fancy first name out of the phone book; his older –and taller–
brother preceded him through Boys' High and Columbia, and helped him
acquire the plummy elocution that became his hallmark in
broadcasting. He was famously witty, and he practiced
self-deprecation as a style of 'English manners', but also as a way
of staying ahead of anyone who might consider him lower-class.
He
cared about that: he had a deep commitment to hierarchies of quality.
"My father was partial to all things fabricated with skill and
effort: boots, books, bridges, cathedrals, and, especially, food. He
preferred cheese to milk, pâté
to liver, braised endive to salad." Between his bookworm
childhood and the Great Books at Columbia, he had as much knowledge
as any man about what was classically considered great in literature.
On a fateful trip to Paris, he discovered the pleasures of wine. A
couple of years after the end of Prohibition made it possible, he
began investing in a similarly curated library of the best vintages
he could afford.
Anne
was the younger child of his second marriage (he'd been divorced, and
her mother, widowed.) She grew up in ease and comfort, marinated in
culture, language, and English manners; after Harvard, she became a
journalist, like her mother. Later, like her father, she began
writing essays; the age gap of nearly fifty years made it possible to
get out of his considerable shadow. (Though he still gets more hits
on Google – she checked.)
She
grew up expecting to inherit his taste in wine, as well. It seemed
natural, since she'd grown up speaking the language, at the table of
the man who later compiled a giant book called The
Joys of Wine. "My
father wrote in Joys
that 'to take wine into our mouths is to savor a droplet of the river
of human history,' a pronouncement I found a tad grandiloquent but
whose sincerity I did not doubt." He loved wine, and felt at
home with it. He knew its quality first-hand.
Alas,
these things are genetic, and Anne inherited her taste buds from her
mother. To her, everything bitter tastes too strong. At the end of
the book, she makes a fascinating detour through the laboratories of
scientists who study and measure the senses of taste and smell. (At
least, I found it fascinating, but then, I would.) Fadiman says, "My
researches made me feel different from my father not only in matters
of gustation and olfaction but also in character. He liked to leave
some things a mystery. I'd rather find everything out."
Any
Good Books
January,
2018
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