The Wine Lover's Daughter: A Memoir

by Anne Fadiman

  On my father’s early political leanings: Although it would be exciting if I could report that he was once a Communist, he wasn’t. Before and during the McCarthy era, he was frequently attacked by the right-wing journalist Westbrook Pegler, who, as my father put it, “wanted to ruin me.” Pegler referred repeatedly to an article my father had contributed to a September 1932 symposium in the New Masses, an American Marxist magazine, called “How I Came to Communism.” What Pegler didn’t mention was that (along with Sherwood Anderson, Upton Sinclair, and Granville Hicks, among others) my father had been invited to write about why he had turned left, not why he had become a Communist. As a favor to his old classmate Whittaker Chambers, a member of the magazine’s editorial board, he had done so. “The Menorah Group Moves Left,” by Alan M. Wald (Jewish Social Studies, Summer–Autumn 1976), quotes Felix Morrow as recalling, “Poor Fadiman! This was not his title, nor does the article say more than he is moving leftward.” Chambers apparently changed the title of the symposium “as a funny practical joke.”

  On Prohibition: I relied on Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, Daniel Okrent’s sprightly history. The list of synonyms for “drunk” came from The American Earthquake, by Edmund Wilson.

  On my father’s early career: Two particularly useful contemporary accounts were a 1942 profile by John Chamberlain called “Fadiman for the Millions,” in Post Biographies of Famous Journalists, and a reporter’s file I obtained from the Time morgue that formed the basis for “Fadiman Quits” (Time, September 27, 1943), on why my father left The New Yorker. Much of my material on Information Please came from Information, Please!, by Dan Golenpaul; Information, Please, by Martin Grams, Jr.; and Quiz Craze, by Thomas A. DeLong.

  On my father’s views on women: Carolyn Heilbrun’s When Men Were the Only Models We Had contained discomfiting but important insights. Heilbrun was also a shrewd commentator on academic life at Columbia. When I finished her book, I couldn’t wait to talk with her about my father; I don’t remember ever having been more disappointed to learn that an author I’d presumed living had already died.

  On my mother: If any readers find themselves curious about my mother, Annalee Whitmore Jacoby Fadiman, they might wish to read They Call It Pacific, by Clark Lee; China Reporting, by Stephen R. MacKinnon and Oris Friesen; China Hands, by Peter Rand; The Women Who Wrote the War, by Nancy Caldwell Sorel; or Eve of a Hundred Midnights, by Bill Lascher, a suspenseful account of her wartime marriage to, and escape from Corregidor with, her first husband, Melville Jacoby.

  On Jewish college admissions: Theodore H. White’s In Search of History contained the taxonomy of students as white men, gray men, and meatballs. Columbia’s admissions policies were detailed in Harold S. Wechsler’s clear and comprehensive history The Qualified Student, as well as in his article “The Rationale for Ethnicity: Ethnicity and College Admission in America, 1910–1980” (American Quarterly, Winter 1984); The Chosen, by Jerome Karabel; Stand, Columbia, by Robert McCaughey; Jews in the Academy, 1900–1940, by Susanne Klingenstein; and “How Jewish Quotas Began,” by Stephen Steinberg (Commentary, September 1, 1971). Contemporary sources included Columbia, by Frederick Paul Keppel, the second dean of Columbia College; “May Jews Go to College?” (The Nation, June 14, 1922); Columbia University’s Annual Report of the President and Treasurer to the Trustees with Accompanying Documents for the Year Ending June 30, 1919, and similar reports for 1920 and 1921; “The Spirit of Morningside: Some Notes on Columbia University,” by M. G. Torch, described in the contributors’ list as “the pseudonym of a young graduate of Columbia University” (The Menorah Journal, March 1930); and (a document for which I am indebted to the late Harold Wechsler) a June 9, 1922, letter from Herbert E. Hawkes, the third dean of Columbia College, to Professor Edmund Beecher Wilson, about Columbia’s policy of trying to “eliminate the low grade boy,” who, he explained, often happened to be an over-ambitious New York City Jew.

  On anti-Semitism in the academy: My understanding was deepened by New York Jew, by Alfred Kazin; by “America Is Home,” by Nathan Abrams, in Commentary in American Life, edited by Murray Friedman; and by an April 1, 1986, letter to Commentary by Estelle Gilson that mentions Morris Raphael Cohen, the philosopher who did not know how to wear a dinner jacket. I was fascinated by the awkwardly adulatory tone and the publishing venue (unusual territory for a gentile) of Mark Van Doren’s “Jewish Students I Have Known” (The Menorah Journal, June 1927), an article that was said to have given him a reputation for “philo-Semitism”; only someone who was accustomed to hearing contemptuous remarks about Jewish students would have felt the need to overcompensate so strenuously.

  On middlebrow culture: “The Tenth Muse” (Harper’s Magazine, September 2001; reprinted in Concepts of Culture, edited by Adam Muller), by Jacques Barzun, presented my father as an intellectual leader who had helped civilize the American public. The theme of transmission was emphasized in “A Carrier of Ideas: An Interview with Clifton Fadiman” (The Center Magazine, July/August 1977) and in “Clifton Fadiman ’25: An Erudite Guide to the Wisdom of Others” (my father’s obituary in Columbia College Today, September 1999), a title to which Barzun took exception, because it “ignores the wisdom needed for unerring guidance.” In “Masscult and Midcult” (Partisan Review, Spring 1960; reprinted in Macdonald’s Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain), Dwight Macdonald included my father among the Midcult popularizers who corrupted and marketed High Culture. As far as I know, Macdonald never called my father “the standard-bearer of middle-brow culture” (as Barzun said he did) or “the high priest of midcult” (as Heilbrun said he did; that phrase was in fact from a summary of Macdonald’s views in my father’s New York Times obituary), but I have little doubt that he would have concurred with those assessments, since in a 1968 interview with Book World he crowned my father one of the “kings of the middlebrows” (Interviews with Dwight Macdonald, edited by Michael Wreszin).

  On Brillat-Savarin: The quotations from Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste are all from the edition gorgeously translated and annotated by my father’s friend M.F.K. Fisher, the great food writer and certifiable gourmand (she even looked like us). After my father’s death, I found eighteen letters from her in his files, one of which said, “By now it seems plain that you are the only person in the world who has read anything I’ve written in the way I most hoped for.”

  On Hemingway: The history of what my father called “the letter Hemingway wrote me when he was drunk” merits some explication. The letter was written in response to “A Letter to Mr. Hemingway,” my father’s review of Winner Take Nothing (The New Yorker, October 28, 1933). My father often said that because it had arrived years before he realized such letters might be valuable, he’d thrown it out. His secretary, Bert Hunt, remembered the story differently. In a letter to the Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker, she said she’d put it in a folder called IMPORTANT LETTERS TO KEEP (and that my father told her he’d probably tossed out later, when he moved his office) but typed a copy for herself because she wanted to reread it. I’d often heard about the letter but read it for the first time after I met Paul Hendrickson, the author of Hemingway’s Boat, a fascinating account of the last half of Hemingway’s life. Hendrickson mentioned the letter, sent me part of it, and directed me to the Carlos Baker Collection of Ernest Hemingway in the Princeton University Library, where Bert Hunt’s copy is archived. Hendrickson wrote in his book that the original “may have been typed,” but in her 1976 conversation with my father, Diana Trilling described the letter—which she and Lionel had seen before it disappeared—as handwritten, “all the way through the margins, up and down, around.” Incidentally, Hemingway wasn’t entirely joking when he invited my father to watch him “break Max Eastman’s jaw.” Four years after Eastman wrote a review called “Bull in the Afternoon” (The New Republic, June 7, 1933), in which he compared Hemingway’s literary style to “wearing false hair on the chest,” Hemingway met him by chance in the off
ice of their editor, Max Perkins; unbuttoned both his shirt and Eastman’s in order to reveal the abundance of his own (real) chest hair and Eastman’s relative paucity; hit Eastman in the face with Art and the Life of Action, a book that contained the review; broke the book’s spine, though not Eastman’s jaw; and wrestled with Eastman until Perkins intervened. Unfortunately, my father was not there to watch.

  On Sidney Franklin: The “Brooklyn Bullfighter” is widely referred to as my father’s cousin, but they didn’t share grandparents; my father told me Franklin was his second or third cousin. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway, who knew Franklin well, called him “one of the most skillful, graceful, and slow manipulators of a cape fighting to-day,” though his admiration eventually cooled. Franklin’s autobiography, Bullfighter from Brooklyn, is rollicking, if shamelessly inaccurate. Lillian Ross published a three-part New Yorker profile of Franklin, “El Único Matador,” in March 1949 (reprinted in Ross’s Reporting and, in part, in Reporting Always). More recently, Double-Edged Sword, a biography by Bart Paul, revealed that Franklin was gay, though diligently closeted. Paul wrote that Sidney’s original last name was “Frumpkin,” but his niece, DorisAnn Kolodny Markowitz, told me that it never had a p; it was “Frumkin,” which is how my father (and Ross) spelled it.

  On port: In “Seventeen Years Later,” my father wrote that during a period of depression, he had drunk “two or three glasses of an inexpensive port” every evening. In “Four Wine Epiphanies,” he described drinking a far more expensive port on a single, stormy night, also in the midst of a depression: “Among the few bottles I kept in my office was some vintage port, a wine I love. I may be mistaken, but I decanted what I now think was a Cockburn of that great year 1927.” The second account appeared to correct the first, if without absolute certitude, but it’s possible that both were true, or that only the first was.

  On the Book-of-the-Month Club: I drew on A Family of Readers, by William Zinsser; The Book of the Month, edited by Al Silverman; A Feeling for Books, by Janice A. Radway; “There Goes the Judge,” by Wilfrid Sheed (The Yale Review, January 1999); my father’s reports on manuscripts; and his reviews in the Book-of-the-Month Club News.

  On VIP: I learned about my father’s experience at VIP (now called Lighthouse of Southwest Florida), the vision rehabilitation agency in Fort Myers at which my father took a class in independent living skills, both from the notes I took during our phone calls and from recent interviews with his instructor, Sue Wild.

  On taste science: Most of my material came from interviews and correspondence with Virginia Utermohlen, the former director of the Cornell Taste Science Laboratory, and Larry Marks, a fellow at and emeritus director of the John B. Pierce Laboratory at Yale, as well as from correspondence with Barry Green, also a fellow at the Pierce lab. Dr. Utermohlen’s website, www.tastescience.com, contained much helpful information. Other useful sources included Dr. Utermohlen’s “Was Proust a Taster? Taste Sensitivity to 6-n-Propylthiouracil and the Relationships Among Memory, Imagination, Synesthesia, and Emotional Response to Visual Experience” (Food and Foodways, Issue 3, 2002); Proust Was a Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer; The Taste of Sweet, by Joanne Chen; “The PROP Test and Reactions to It,” by Jancis Robinson (www.jancisrobinson.com); “The Gustin (CA6) Gene Polymorphism, rs2274333 (A/G), as a Mechanistic Link Between PROP Tasting and Fungiform Taste Papilla Density and Maintenance,” by Melania Melis et al. (PLOS ONE, September 2013); “Bitter Receptor Gene (TAS2R38), 6-n-Propylthiouracil (PROP) Bitterness and Alcohol Intake,” by Valerie B. Duffy et al. (Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, November 2004); and my genetic reports and raw data from 23andMe.

  Acknowledgments

  This book started eight years ago when I suggested a few article ideas to Ben Metcalf, then an editor at Harper’s. At one point in the conversation, I said, “I think I could tell the story of my father’s life and character through wine.”

  “‘The Oenophile’s Daughter!’” he exclaimed.

  Ben and Harper’s parted ways; I realized I needed to write a book, not an article; and the title met its Waterloo after I discovered that hardly anyone knew how to spell, pronounce, or define “oenophile.” (I felt better after I was reminded that Nabokov’s original title for Speak, Memory, perhaps my favorite book, was Speak, Mnemosyne. Same problems.) But Ben’s three words had set me in motion, both giving me permission to include myself in the narrative and launching me on a long and sometimes circuitous quest for a fuller understanding of my father.

  En route to The Wine Lover’s Daughter, I was lent a hand by many generous people.

  My father liked to say that wine was an intelligible field of study. Among those who helped make it more intelligible to me were Ric Hopper, Fred Holley, and Victoria Sadosky. Mannie Berk, the founder of The Rare Wine Co., commented on my father’s Cellar Book and shared his extensive knowledge of Madeira. My old friend Sam Perkins, the former executive editor of Wine Enthusiast, shed light on many aspects of oenology and oenophilia (he knew what it meant). Monique Josse at the Musée du Vin in Paris, Pauline Delmarle at the Musée du Vin et du Négoce in Bordeaux, Jean-Marie Verbrugghe at the Écomusée de la Vigne et du Vin in Gradignan, and Tracey Dello Stritto at the Finger Lakes Wine Alliance responded swiftly and helpfully to wine-related queries. Julia van der Vink, a viticulturist and former sommelier, provided a winemaker’s perspective, answered an incessant stream of questions about both French and California wines, and often saved me from embarrassing myself. Over the years, I had many conversations about wine with my friend John Laird and my former literary agent Robert Lescher. I wish they were still alive so we could have more.

  I wrote part of The Wine Lover’s Daughter as a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, than which there could be no more perfect place to write. The book was enriched by conversations about writing, wine, fathers, and Judaism with fellow fellows Alicia Svigals, Stewart Wallace, Maureen McLane, Ruth Franklin, David Petersen, and, especially, Alex Halberstadt.

  I am grateful to the Norman Mailer Center for enabling me to write a chapter in the Mailer house in Provincetown, and to Mary Dearborn and Eric Laursen for renting me the phone-less and usually-Internet-less one-room cabin—paradise!—in which I wrote the last half of the book. Conveniently, Mary happened to be the author of the recent and excellent Ernest Hemingway: A Biography, so she also served as a valuable Hemingway resource.

  Oh, how I love my publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux! Who would not feel fortunate to have her book gracefully designed on the inside by Jonathan Lippincott and on the outside by Alex Merto, meticulously (but not officiously) copy-edited by Susan Goldfarb and Lisa Silverman, gently shooed along its editorial path by Carolina Baizan, expertly brought to the attention of its readers by Jeff Seroy and Sarita Varma—and, above all, sensitively edited by Jonathan Galassi, whom I’ve known for more than forty years but whom I still think of, with awe, as the God of Books?

  It was my lucky day when Lynn Nesbit, who (as far as I can see) is both telepathic and omnipotent, became my literary agent: I have only to wish for something and presto!, she has made it happen.

  I am grateful to Paul Hendrickson for telling me that Hemingway’s memorable letter to my father—or at least a copy of it—had not been lost and for pointing me in its direction; to AnnaLee Pauls, in Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton’s Firestone Library, for helping me find it; to the Columbia Center for Oral History for providing the transcript of my father’s 1976 conversations with Diana Trilling and permitting me to quote from it; to Kirk Curnutt, at the Ernest Hemingway Foundation, for permitting me to quote from Hemingway’s 1933 letter to my father; to Gary Shapiro for his assistance in all things Columbia; to Olga M. Nesi, the librarian at Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn, for combing old Boys High yearbooks for information on my father and my uncle Ed; to Harold Wechsler and Jerome Karabel for their helpful correspondence on Jewish college admissions; to Martin Grams, Jr., for sharing his expertise on Information Please; to DorisAn
n Kolodny Markowitz for background on her uncle Sidney Franklin; to Rob Sedgwick for refreshing my memories of his delightful family; to Christopher Buckley for showing me that it was not impossible to write a good book about one’s father; and to Barry Nalebuff and Reba and Dave Williams for serving me such extraordinary wine that I (almost) loved it.

  My understanding of my father’s medical issues was aided by Sandy Colt, who answered questions about cancer and end-of-life care; by Sue Li, who tracked down the details of his stay at Mount Sinai Hospital; by Natali Latorre, who provided information about the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute; by Sue Wild, my father’s instructor at VIP, who remembered her student and his independent living skills class with fond exactitude; and, especially, by Eve Higginbotham, vice dean and professor of ophthalmology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, who read and improved my descriptions of my father’s acute retinal necrosis and its effects on his vision.

  I am indebted to two distinguished taste scientists, Virginia Utermohlen and Larry Marks, who invited me to Ithaca and to the John B. Pierce Laboratory at Yale, respectively, for testing and conversation about their fascinating field, after which, along with Dr. Marks’s colleague Barry Green, they responded at length and with unfailing good humor to a merciless barrage of e-mails.