by Anne Fadiman
The Information Please regulars: Oscar Levant, John Kieran, the Grand Inquisitor, and Franklin P. Adams, circa 1940
He spent a decade at each of these jobs. It was only when I looked up the dates that I realized there were at least a dozen years when he held two at once. But that was just the tip of the vocational iceberg. He claimed that during this stretch he never had fewer than seven jobs and at one point had thirteen. He was once referred to as a “celebrated multihyphenate.” The multiplicity of hyphens hadn’t changed much since he worked his way through Columbia, the only difference being that instead of a dishwasher-waiter-pipesmoker-etc.-etc.-etc., he was now an editor-critic-emcee-teacher-translator-lecturer-columnist-essayist-anthologist-agent-consultant. The “consultant” was to Samuel Goldwyn, who hired him to recommend books that would make good movies, ignored his recommendations, and, for reasons my father never figured out, labored under the unshakable conviction that his name was Mr. Goodleman. Interviewers never failed to remark on my father’s industry, sometimes with awe and sometimes with distaste, as for the grind who studies all night and ruins the curve. One called his modus operandi “mass production.” He worked as many as eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, holidays included. He was constantly, pathologically, insanely busy.
That’s how he afforded the wine.
9
Initiation
I teach undergraduates. Many of them get drunk three nights a week. (Few classes meet on Friday now, so weekends start on Thursday afternoon.) For the heavier drinkers, many of them women, many of them underage, the pattern has become standardized: four to eight shots consumed with friends, before heading out to a party, just in case the alcohol runs out by the time they reach the main event (one of my students likens this to squirrels loading up on nuts before the winter); at the party, huge handles of cheap vodka, all with Russian-sounding names although they are produced in the United States; Coke, Pepsi, and orange juice to render the vodka swallowable; if it’s a frat, grain-alcohol punch; red Solo cups; loud music; dancing; darkness; sex, sometimes consensual, sometimes not, sometimes too blurred to remember.
By contrast, my own college days were as poignantly, irrecoverably innocent as the time my father asked the Information Please panelists to recite their Social Security numbers to millions of listeners. (None of them could.) When I was a student at Harvard, “to party” was not yet an infinitive. I was vaguely aware that football players drank beer and boys in Final Clubs drank cocktails. Knowing how to mix martinis seemed a weirdly grown-up skill, like knowing how to tie the bow ties I saw dangling from the club boys’ wing collars as they wove down Mount Auburn Street late at night with well-dressed girls on their arms.
But the people I hung out with were either serious intellectuals who were too busy thinking empyrean thoughts to drink much of anything or serious outdoorsmen—members of the Outing Club, my chief extracurricular activity—who drank hot cocoa in their mountain tents. Perhaps because it was not part of my normal routine, or perhaps because I was reading so much poetry by inebriated English Romantics, intoxication seemed like something I should learn about. A necessary milestone. An initiation.
I had, of course, gotten drunk when I was fifteen, while lunching with Monsieur Cosnard des Closets. But the Brut Crémant hadn’t been on my own terms. I hadn’t elected to get drunk; my intemperance was prompted by my desire neither to die on Autoroute A7 nor to be rude. (I might not have received the prize for Politest, but both my parents had taught me manners.) So one weekend in the winter of 1972, during my sophomore year, I drove to a farmhouse in southern New Hampshire with my friend Peter for the express purpose of getting spifflicated under conditions that were pleasant, voluntary, and safe. There was no question what we would drink. Peter had grown up in Europe, so he was hardly a stranger to wine. And even though I seldom drank it, wine still figured large in my personal mythology. “You talked about it all the time,” Peter told me recently. “I remember you mentioning Château d’Yquem more than once. You had a sort of reverence. It was like reciting the names of the saints.” When I heard that, a little whoosh of memory rolled in: how it had felt to leave my family for a world in which no one knew or cared about those holy mysteries, and, like a Catholic among heathens, to struggle to protect their sacredness. My insistence may have come partly from my uncertainty about the strength of my own faith.
Peter and I were eighteen. In those days, there was nothing out of the ordinary about spending a weekend alone with a boy with whom you were not sleeping, though I knew Peter wished our platonic relationship were otherwise. The previous year, he had sent me a love letter—the best one I have ever received—in which he wrote, “Every part of me loves every part of you.” He would, in fact, have made an excellent boyfriend, but I can see that only now, more than forty years later. We are still friends. I was Best Human at his wedding. He was a bridesperson at mine.
I’ve asked Peter if he remembers what kind of wine we drank in New Hampshire. He doesn’t. We agree that it was a French or Italian red, either two bottles or a magnum. He had borrowed both the car and the farmhouse from a generous family for whom he had worked as an au pair, so perhaps the wine was borrowed too, in which case it was better than anything we could have afforded ourselves. He does remember that he was on edge that weekend because in a few days he would find out his Vietnam draft lottery number, and his Conscientious Objector statement, along with several college papers, was overdue.
We cooked beef stew together. We poured some of the wine into it and drank the rest. After a while, the room spun and my sentences went on way too long. My Apollonian desire for control cut in. I put down my glass.
Peter kept on drinking. He wept. There were confessions of frustration. Longing. Loneliness. Heartbreak. It hadn’t turned out to be so safe here after all.
I followed him into the bathroom. He knelt in front of the toilet. I still remember his heaving shoulders. The smell of his vomit. My hands on his head. The snowy darkness outside the window.
10
Counterfeit
By any measure, my father had made it. But he didn’t believe it. Even though he possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of Western literature (which, in that time and place, was viewed as the only kind there was); even though his linguistic facility was so fabled that John Kieran had said, “Be careful to specify when ordering whether you want English, French, German, or medieval Latin”; even though Time had called him the smartest book reviewer in the country; even though Dorothy Thompson had included him on her list of ideal party guests, on a par with Noël Coward and ahead of all past, present, and future presidents; even though Charlie Chaplin had called him “gifted and cultured” and E. B. White had called him “simply swell”; even though, from his forties to his eighties, he topped off his writer-editor-lecturer income with lucrative stints as a television host and commentator, all the while cheerfully biting the hand that fed him by casting witty aspersions on the idiot box; even though, as he put it to me, the maîtres d’hôtel of Manhattan recognized him “and all that horseshit”; even though, in the depths of the Depression, he could afford a velvet smoking jacket and a wine cellar—nonetheless, both at the peak of his fame and for the rest of his life, he considered himself an outsider.
My father the cigarette peddler, during one of his television emcee gigs, 1952
This was no secret, at least not within the family. We all knew he felt like a man who has been admitted by mistake to a gentlemen’s club and, as soon as he is discovered, will be booted out the service entrance. He once wrote that he would never have “the ease, the charm, the grace of movement of those who have been sure of themselves from the cradle.” Whenever he started sounding that note, I could scarcely prevent myself from shouting, “What a load of bullshit!” (Or, rather, horseshit, his preferred obscenity, since he had probably never been to a farm and had read about bulls only in Hemingway, whereas horses figured prominently in English novels.) He was the most cultivated man I knew. And the two
most cultivated things about him—books and wine—weren’t some fancy facade; they were him. How could he not see that?
In his old age, he showed me a letter he had written years earlier to Dorothy Van Doren (the widow of Mark Van Doren, his favorite Columbia professor), with whom he’d conducted what he called “an Adams-Jefferson correspondence” that lasted for decades. The letter described his plans for a book-length essay addressed to his children, to be read after his death. “I am quite convinced,” he wrote, “that our whole culture makes it difficult, if not impossible, for children ever really to know their parents.”
The book was to be called Outside, Looking In. He explained:
Its basic drang would turn on my so-called “career.” In every case my tiny successes have always seemed to occur in a vacuum because at no time could I feel that I was experiencing them within a culture of which I was a part. The nearest analogy is a performed play: the actor knows that though he engages in heroic activities, he is not a real hero but only a technician, in this case solving a problem in impersonation.
… I remember, when I got my job on the New Yorker, or won notoriety as a radio hack, or achieved anything else usually called success, my immediate reaction was: “This is a fraud, a charade, and I am either a counterfeiter or an actor.”
He eventually gave up on the idea of writing the book and decided I might as well read the letter while he was still alive. I remember his face the night he showed it to me. His mouth was curled in an odd way. His expression contained both resignation and something akin to disgust.
That night, he told me that although he felt grateful to the country in which he had spent his entire life, he had never felt truly a part of it. He contrasted himself with Jacques Barzun, who felt completely at home in the United States even though he had not arrived from Europe until he was thirteen. (Jacques, a well-known cultural historian, had been my father’s only Columbia friend from an upper-crust family. He was French and gentile, raised among avant-garde intellectuals in a bucolic village outside Paris and then in the posh 16th Arrondissement; as a child, he had been dandled on Apollinaire’s knee in the salon his parents hosted every Saturday afternoon. Even after fifty years of friendship, my father did not consider himself Jacques’s social equal.)
My father had given a lot of thought to his sense of inferiority and concluded that its source was his brother Ed, his elder by five years. He had looked up to Ed even more than he had looked down on his parents. Ed was the president of the Boys High student council, the president of the literary society, the vice president of the Correct English Club, the editor of the school magazine, the winner of the gold medal in the declamation contest, the star of all the plays, the class valedictorian, and 6′1″. (My father was 5′8½″. He never omitted the ½; he wanted credit for every micron.) Everything Ed did, my father did. When he was five, Ed taught him all forty-six of the state capitals and brought him to school to show him off. Ed was the first to cross the East River to Columbia; he made my father, then thirteen, read the entirety of his own English literature textbook and assigned him essays on Hakluyt and Spenser. Ed was the first to cross the Atlantic to Paris; he returned with a perfect French accent, whereas my father’s was merely very good. Although Ed became a wealthy businessman whose ventures in radio, television, and real estate paid for the fine French bottles that provisioned their wine-guessing contests (not to mention the butler who served them), my father became more famous. But even when more than a tenth of the population of the United States was listening to him every Tuesday night, he could never be taller than Ed. Or, for that matter, than his younger brother, Bill (5′10″), a successful Hollywood producer who also laid down a respectable wine cellar. When my father was an old man, there were occasional moments of distraction in which the names of his sons and his younger brother were more or less interchangeable, but he never, ever called any of them Ed, who constituted a category of one.
He considered his insecurity one of the factors that had contributed to his success (or, as he would have put it, his “so-called success”). It had, for instance, elicited the bulging folder he had handed to Max Schuster in 1927. “What produced the hundred ideas?” he once asked me rhetorically. “Not intelligence, not ingenuity, not knowledge. Fear. The fear that I couldn’t sell myself the way a real, proper young man six feet tall could have, who looked as if he had more than one suit, could speak well, came from the right background, and could talk about friends who might be useful in the publishing business.” I thought he was done, but he paused and then said, “I had none of these things. I was a little stinker.”
Those were his exact words. I know because when I was thirty, my boss at Life magazine thought it might be nice if I wrote a puff-ish piece about my father on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. It occurred to me that as part of my “research,” I could tape hours and hours of conversation, most of it on topics I knew I would never mention in my story, and get Life to pay for the transcription. I hoped that if I ever had children, they might want to listen to the tapes someday. Needless to say, the “little stinker” comment did not make it into the pages of Life. I still have the tapes, thirty-three-year-old cassettes I am afraid to digitize lest they get broken in the process. (I know that’s faulty logic.) I told my father the conversations were “an excuse to find out what is going on in your mind.” He replied, “I feel very flattered that you should give a damn.”
One of the things we talked about was the Train Dream. He’d had the same recurring dream for decades, even after we moved to California and he traveled only by car or airplane. Its plot was simple: He failed to make a train. One morning, while he was on a trip to New York with my mother, he told her he’d had the dream the previous night. “You missed that train again?” she said, as if it had come thundering through the Hotel Intercontinental. He told me that the atmosphere of the Train Dream could be characterized by a single monosyllable: loss.
I am sure that is true. But I don’t think he kept missing the train because of what he had lost. I think he kept missing it because he never fully trusted what he had gained.
Sometimes his self-deprecation was an act. It was part of English good manners. A conversation with him could be like a badminton game in which you were supposed to swat a compliment in his direction and he was supposed to swat back a bit of hyperbolic modesty. A rally with a genteel admirer might have gone something like this. (All my father’s comments are things he actually said about himself in print.)
G.A.: It is an honor to meet a man of such formidable accomplishment, Mr. Fadiman.
C.F.: I have acquitted myself moderately well.
G.A.: Moderately? Nonsense!
C.F.: I have achieved a certain mild reputation as a wit.
G.A.: But Information Please is incontestably brilliant!
C.F.: I am master of a profession which in my more melancholy moments I range about midway between that of the bubblegum chewer and that of the bathroom baritone.
G.A.: What becoming humility! And in such a distinguished man of letters!
C.F.: A rank amateur.
G.A.: Well, surely you must consider yourself a critic of the first rank.
C.F.: I suppose I have developed certain minor specialized abilities, like a retriever or an aphid.
And on and on and on, until the players ran out of shuttlecocks.
It could get tiresome. Jacques Barzun said that self-deprecation was my father’s “one irritating trait.”
And sometimes it was not an act. Beneath the posturing there lay a core of truth. If you scraped hard enough, some ugly things were laid bare: anxiety, humiliation, shame. It makes me uncomfortable to remember them. It makes me uncomfortable to name them.
11
Demeatballization
My father, of course, was happy that my brother and I went to Harvard. He once told me that boys from his own social class had not been able to lift their eyes that high. City College was the norm; Columbia was the hope; Harvard was,
as he put it, “Camelot.”
And I was happy there, surrounded by collegiate versions of the Gauloise-smoking Sartre-quoters I’d hung out with in France. Compared with my father, I had an easy path: no commuting by subway, no waiting tables, no breaking in pipes. Unlike his college friends, mine felt no obligation to choose between demolishing the establishment and joining the club; they protested the Vietnam War by day and read Dante Gabriel Rossetti in wood-paneled libraries by night. If they thought there was anything strange about a miniskirted girl from L.A. pronouncing aristocrat and exquisite with the stress on the first syllable (my father believed that anyone who said aristocrat or exquisite was neither), they held their tongues, though my freshman roommate did once give me a funny look when I complimented her on her “stripèd socks.”
