by Anne Fadiman
Mr. Trilling went on to become one of the great literary scholars of the twentieth century; my father went on to become, in Dwight Macdonald’s view, a middlebrow who, along with Thornton Wilder, John Steinbeck, Archibald MacLeish, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and psychoanalysis, polluted modern America with the “tepid ooze of Midcult.” Mr. Trilling taught university students; in his twenties, my father taught salesgirls, stenographers, truck drivers, merchant seamen, night watchmen, and clerks in the Great Books classes he led in libraries and YMCAs, and, later on, millions of Americans who read his essays and reviews and forewords and afterwords and anthologies, or listened to him on the radio, or watched him on television, or heard his intermission lectures at the Boston Symphony, or subscribed to the Book-of-the-Month Club. What Ed had done for him by making him read an entire college literature textbook at the age of thirteen, he did for the general public. Although middlebrows considered him a highbrow, highbrows disowned him. Jacques Barzun loyally argued that my father’s career was a noble crusade to civilize the philistines, though his defense shone with a little too much sweat; he had to admit that, as he put it, “popularity was the fatal stain.” My father couldn’t have guessed that the young Mr. Trilling so grievously envied his early fame as a critic that he became discouraged about his own prospects; Diana Trilling believed this contributed to a severe depression during which he lied to her about working on his dissertation when he was really spending his days at the movies. But Mr. Trilling never envied my father as much as my father envied him.
None of this would have happened if my father had been born an Episcopalian.
So I believed him when he told me that of all the factors that made him feel like an outsider—being poor, being short, having parents who spoke improper English, having an elder brother he thought he could never equal—the most important was being a Jew. He said, without irony, that he was certain all Jews felt like that: Jewish governors, Jewish millionaires. He once told Kim that whenever he looked at a page in a book or a newspaper, the capital Js—which he reflexively assumed were attached to the word “Jew”—immediately leapt to his eye, “the way I might spot my own initials.” He also told Kim that after he revisited one of his old neighborhoods in Brooklyn, “I was right back there. I was a little Jew boy walking the streets of Brooklyn, and I still am.”
My college boyfriend was half-Jewish, like me, but his longest-running successor (until I met my husband)was an alumnus of Groton who bore the almost parodically WASP name of Sedgwick and would someday rest in a circular cemetery plot in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, called the Sedgwick Pie, with his feet pointed toward the center, where his great-great-great-grandfather was buried. It was said that the deceased Sedgwicks were oriented this way so that when they rose on Judgment Day, they would see no one but other Sedgwicks.
“Do they mind that you’re a half Jew?” my father asked me once.
I explained that “they” had already managed to absorb entire Jews. He seemed unconvinced.
Now I think he wasn’t worrying about what the Sedgwicks would think of me; he was worrying about what I would think of myself. I’m sure he wanted me to marry a WASP—where else was my demeatballization supposed to lead?—but not that much of a WASP. (I did end up marrying a WASP, though not a Sedgwick. The Colts don’t have a pie-shaped cemetery. Also, George doesn’t look like a WASP. When he was young he was told he resembled Bob Dylan; when he was older, Philip Roth.) My father feared that if I entered the Sedgwick family, the curtain would fall away, and all the things he’d worked so hard to make me feel were naturally and deservedly mine—the big house, the private schools, the fine restaurants, the French accent, the cook summoned by the buzzer over my mother’s knee—would be revealed as fraudulent, the rightful province only of people who had enjoyed them for generations. In fact, though the Sedgwicks had an even bigger house, it was scruffier than ours, and though they had a cook until their youngest child left for boarding school, she served dinner at the kitchen table. The Fadimans had overdone it. On Judgment Day, when the Sedgwicks rose from the Pie, I’d be unmasked.
When I wrote the Life story about my father’s eightieth birthday, he told me that he would prefer I not mention he was Jewish. “If I had no legs and you wrote a piece about me,” he said, “I would prefer you write about me as a man.”
I gaped at him. “I don’t feel that being a Jew is equivalent to having no legs,” I said.
My father didn’t believe me. He simply could not imagine a time when being a Jew, or even a half Jew, was not a disability.
It was safer to raise his children so they could pass.
It was better to lay down a dozen cases of first-growth Bordeaux, because each one brought him closer to something he could never reach, but in whose direction, like a plant bending toward the sun, he could still turn. Shiker iz der goy.
14
Oakling
A few years ago I wrote an essay about Hartley Coleridge, a nineteenth-century British poet who had the bad luck to be the son of a far more famous poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Hartley started off as a celebrated wunderkind and ended up a penniless alcoholic who often spent his days in alehouses and his nights in ditches. A review of the only book of Hartley’s poetry published in his lifetime allowed that it manifested “no trivial inheritance of his father’s genius”—a sincere compliment, if one that implied he had no genius of his own—but also cited an old adage: “The oakling withers beneath the shadow of the oak.”
I am interested in oaklings because I am one myself. When writers beget writers, there are, of course, some advantages. There are plenty of books in the house. There’s an example right under your nose that words are a plausible way to earn a living. There’s the intimacy that comes when you and your parent like the same things and are both good at them.
There’s also the likelihood that if you have at least semi-famous parents, you’ll occasionally meet at least semi-famous people. My parents were hardly the L.A. equivalent of the Barzun salonniers, but one evening, at age eight, wearing a full-skirted organdy dress with appliquéd flowers, I opened the front door for Groucho Marx, a guest at the only genuinely flashy party they ever threw. A few years later, when my father interviewed P. L. Travers for a book he was writing on children’s literature, I poured her tea. (The tea set was Victorian silver, bought in England, formerly the property of an earl who had fallen down on his luck: an anti-samovar.) The only thing I remember her saying is that William Butler Yeats had once chased her around a table; she did not say whether he caught her. When I was in college, my father and I had dinner at Julia Child’s house in Cambridge. In one of his essays, he quotes Hilaire Belloc: “I cannot remember the name of the village; I do not even recollect the name of the girl; but the wine, my God, was Chambertin!” I, by contrast, remember the pegboard on the wall, the wooden slab wedged over the sink to conceal the dirty dishes, the wipeable Marimekko tablecloth, the horsey laugh, and the perfect roast chicken, but I do not remember the wine.
Despite the perks, oaklings face a universally acknowledged problem: the mighty oak grabs all the sunlight. One solution is relocating yourself as far as possible from the shadow. As I’ve mentioned, my brother and my half brother chose not to become writers. When Kim became an expert on avalanche prediction and Jono compiled a 204-page handbook on the circuitry of an early transistor-based computer called the Lincoln TX-2, they could rest assured that they were doing something their father could never have done. They were thereby saved the angst of Nick Harkaway, John le Carré’s youngest son, who said that becoming a writer would feel as pointless as standing next to a lighthouse and waving a flashlight. He became one anyway.
Harkaway had only one lighthouse to worry about. I had two. (Plus a formidable older brother. Until our paths diverged after college, Kim was my Ed. He did all the same things I did—got good grades, backpacked, canoed, went to Harvard, majored in History and Literature—but a little sooner and a little better.) Fortunately, both had dimmed some
what by the time I tentatively raised my own flashlight, which nonetheless felt like a tiny toy powered by a single AAA battery. I doubt I would have had the nerve to wave it at all had my mother not abandoned her career, conveniently situating her successes at a safe distance, or had my father not been so old. His age—something I once viewed as a liability—turned out to be a boon. My friends’ parents had heard of him, but my friends hadn’t, except perhaps as the genial but mildly fuddy-duddy host of the Encyclopædia Britannica films they had been required to watch in high school English class: a peripheral character who lacked the gleam of an authentic celebrity.
Still, he was famous enough that when I was starting out as a writer, I briefly considered using the name Anne Whitmore (I figured my mother’s maiden name was safely forgotten) so that no one would compare Fadiman père and Fadiman fille or assume I was trading on my father’s reputation. I gave up the idea only because it seemed unfair. I was Anne Fadiman. Why should I have to pretend to be someone else?
In my early twenties, I lived in an apartment with an editorial-assistant roommate, hundreds of cockroaches, a kitchen window with a missing pane, and a rent of which my share was $162.50 a month. This situation, I felt, was appropriate to my station as a freelancer, and it even had a certain romance: the Manhattan equivalent of a Parisian garret. I boxed up my mortifyingly unbohemian memories of being raised in a house with a uniformed cook. I was glad that my parents lived three thousand miles away, and that their image of where I lived, what I ate, what I drank, how I worked, and with whom I slept was as indistinct as a distant galaxy glimpsed through a child’s telescope.
All the same, I had to admit that a little parental encouragement was not entirely unwelcome. “Anne lives in New York,” my father wrote to an old friend, “trying to establish herself as the writer she essentially is. So far the path has been difficult, impeded by the emotional and romantic problems proper to her age. With a little luck, she may be heard from in the future.” Not quite the panegyric he lavished in the same paragraph on Kim, whose career as an outdoor instructor was, he said, “a strange turn for a son of mine who is twice as intelligent as I am, three times the writer, and n times handsomer”—but nonetheless a plug, if a modest one, by someone solidly in my corner.
After I started writing full-time for Life, I worried that I might be suspected of benefiting from my parents’ help and bent over backwards to make sure they didn’t contribute so much as a semicolon. I rarely showed them my work before it was finished, lest they make a suggestion I actually wanted to use. But they read every piece after it was published, and my father unfailingly wrote me a letter of unconditional, and frequently unmerited, praise: a far cry from his famously acerbic New Yorker reviews, since he believed his children were a protected species and therefore warranted a suspension of his critical faculties. He also took pains to compliment me implicitly by asking my advice on the contents of his anthologies (“If you have a spare 3/4 of an hour, would you read 3 short stories by Sean O’Faolain and tell me which you like best?”) and discussing literature (one letter mentioned, in this order and over the course of twelve paragraphs, Helprin, Tolstoy, Mann, Hemingway, Frost, Leithauser, Vonnegut, Barthelme, Mailer, Ginsberg, Didion, Montaigne, Chekhov, Roth, Malamud, Goethe, Céline, Beckett, Updike, Cheever, Byron, Kerouac, Kesey, Wolfe, Johnson, Savage, Goldsmith, Shakespeare, Keats, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Joyce, Proust, Eliot, Yeats, Burroughs, Wallace, Michener, Uris, and Krantz).
In my office at Life, 1984
Because he spent most of his time at his desk, a steel hulk with a surface area of eighteen square feet that exerted the gravitational pull of a small planet, he derived a good deal of vicarious pleasure when I traveled. Once, when I was contemplating a reporting trip to Mauritius, he sent me the following:
On the island of Mauritius
You will eat exotic dishes,
All varieties of fishes,
Thirteen different kinds of knishes,
And (especially delicious)
Shish kebab and other shishes.
You’ll fare well, with my best wishes,
If you journey to Mauritius.
This is, incidentally, the only time I remember him ever recommending a Jewish food. Those knishes would never have been allowed in had it not been for the rhyme scheme.
The classic oakling problem is that it is hard to become one’s own person when that person so closely resembles someone else’s person. There were, of course, a few areas in which my father and I diverged. He was a critic; I was a journalist. He had meticulous work habits; I was a procrastinator. He was neat; I was messy. His idea of recreation was reading in an armchair with his back to the window; I preferred climbing glaciers. He was unable to boil an egg; I enjoyed folding whipped cream into chocolate mousse and pummeling veal cutlets with a mallet. He had a hazy relationship with visual details and once, not insultingly, referred to a green skirt I was wearing as “some kind of bluish rag”; I could distinguish a red-tailed hawk from a sharp-shinned hawk by its flight pattern. He thought pets were boring, because they couldn’t talk; at parties, I often spent more time with the dog than with the host.
But I had to admit that our similarities far outnumbered our differences. We were not only both writers but both devotees of Vermeer, late bedtimes, anagrams, and doggerel, which we often composed for family celebrations. When we took the Johnson O’Connor aptitude tests, we both scored in the “95th+ +” percentile (95 was the official maximum) in English Vocabulary and the 6th percentile in Lefthanded Finger Dexterity. We both loved pasta, cheese, and lamb chops; we both hated pickles, mayonnaise, and garnishes. I shared his horror when Sam Aaron took us to the Quilted Giraffe, an Upper East Side restaurant whose very name represented everything my father detested about nouvelle cuisine, and he spied an ostensibly ornamental fragment of lettuce in the butter dish. “It is a travesty,” he said, “to take a nice natural product and drape it with a disgusting piece of vegetable material, moist and horrible.”
As oaks and oaklings are wont to do, we even looked alike. Our type was minutely described in 1825 by Brillat-Savarin, the French epicure who not only was one of our favorite writers but had lent his name to one of our favorite cheeses, a triple-crème with a fluffy white rind and a ravishingly unctuous interior. “People predestined to gourmandism,” he wrote, “are in general of medium height; they have round or square faces, bright eyes, small foreheads, short noses, full lips and rounded chins.” Aside from the small foreheads—and the medium height, which might be stretching things a little—that was us to a T. I should explain that to Brillat-Savarin, calling someone a gourmand was the highest of compliments. He pitied those who took little pleasure from eating: poor souls with long faces, long noses, and attenuated physiques. “It is undoubtedly they who invented trousers,” he observed, “to hide their thin shanks.” No thin-shank problem for us Fadimans!
You will notice that much of the large overlapping center of the father-daughter Venn diagram involved food. It was no accident that my father’s poem about Mauritius was entirely about comestibles, right down to the shishes. In matters of gourmandism, the oakling was the spitting image of the oak. If I opened my refrigerator and spotted an unfinished pint of Haägen-Dazs, the butt end of a salami, or a fractional wheel of couldn’t-afford-it-but-bought-it-anyway Brillat-Savarin, the doomed remnant would have little chance of lasting until the next day, or even the next ten minutes.
In the gastronomic realm, the only area of marked disagreement was the one in which I wished we were more similar. If I found half a bottle of wine left over from dinner with friends—or even some uncorked champagne carried home from a party, wreathed in convivial associations—it would languish for weeks. The champagne would go flat. The wine would turn to vinegar.
It’s not that I disliked the taste of wine, exactly. It’s that there was too much taste. Wine tasted to me sort of the way hard liquor (which I liked even less) must taste to most people—not bad, but better when diluted with club so
da or Coke. I liked food cooked with wine; in fact, if I remembered that half bottle in the fridge before it oxidized into oblivion, I’d happily dump it into a pot of coq au vin. Once the alcohol boiled off, everything was fine—but that was like saying ice cream would be fine if you removed the cream. According to Charles Lamb, another writer of whom my father and I were jointly fond, “There is a smoothness and oiliness in wine that makes it go down by a natural channel, which I am positive was made for that descending.” (Lamb wrote those words the day after so much wine descended his natural channel that he had to be carried home on a servant’s shoulders, “like a dead log.”) But wine didn’t taste smooth and oily to me; it tasted astringent. I was more like Art Buchwald, who was once invited on a tour of great Bordeaux vineyards by Alexis Lichine. First they visited Château Margaux, where he said the wine tasted like cotton. Then they visited Château Latour, where, after a single sip, he said, “My mouth is all puckered up. My cheeks are stuck to my teeth.” He preferred champagne, though he said it made him feel as if his foot were asleep.
Looking back at my twenties and thirties, I’m surprised I didn’t just throw in the towel, or at least the white linen napkin with which my father swathed his silver wine cradle. By then I was well aware that the world was full of people who didn’t like wine, or didn’t care about wine, or didn’t know anything about wine, or never even thought about wine. Why couldn’t I just be one of them?
I wasn’t weeping into my milkshakes about it, but neither was I giving up. There were several reasons. One was that I was the kind of person who liked wine; therefore, I would like wine. The only question was when. According to my father, civilized minds were naturally drawn to wine. I was civilized! I had swallowed Western culture hook, line, and sinker! I knew the difference between Ben Jonson and Samuel Johnson! More to the point, I knew the difference between Beerenauslese and Trockenbeerenauslese—and even how to spell them! In a column that tipped its hat to my father, the wine critic Robert Balzer wrote, “There are travelers who can cross the great Mojave Desert with no awareness of its awesome beauty, finding it simply arid, monotonous and dusty. There are ears upon which the sounds of Stravinsky or Scriabin fall as strident noise. And there are legions of our fellow countrymen who find the joys of wine much ado about nothing.” That wasn’t me. It couldn’t be, because my father believed there was something actually wrong with people who did not love what he loved. He wrote, “When you find a first-rate brain, like Shaw’s, rejecting wine, you have probably also found the key to certain weaknesses flawing that first-rate brain.” However much I might have liked to deny it, I cared, deeply, what my father thought of me. No way were those certain weaknesses going to flaw a second-rate brain like mine.
