If you want to know why Julia Child and Avis DeVoto got to be such good friends long before they actually met, the answer is very simple: both were tireless correspondents. No slouch in this department myself, I feel like a total piker every time I finish one letter and begin the next. These unflagging typists wrote at length! They also wrote very well, and you forget from time to time that they are writing off the tops of their heads, not for publication in the book that you hold in your hand.

But it’s this generosity at the keyboard that cemented their bond, not kindred spirits. I’m not at all sure that they would have become good friends had they started off face-to-face; although generally sympathetic, they were very not on the same track at all. Avis DeVoto was happy to be a devoted wife and mother; Julia wanted to Do Something. There was something of the hipster about Avis, a breeziness that might have sat very poorly with Julia’s good-humored earnestness. Here, for example, is Avis’s retort to Julia’s fondness for pigeonholing people:

I think you are carrying this Upper Middle Brow etc. thing too far, my good girl. I told you I distrust categories and I am pleased that Paul does too. It is too pat and all-inclusive, and if I know anything at all it is that there are no final answers to anything, and the older I get the less I know and the less final the answers are. It’s just possible, you know, that those upper middle class Republicans you distrust may have some answers that are better than we eggheads have. Could be. You can only approximate — and if you can do that occasionally you’re in luck. I condemn all kinds of Republican thinking, but really I know better, because I’m continually being surprised by the good things about these people. And I’ve been living in the pockets of the intellectuals for thirty years and some of them are the awfullest fools. If I could write I would write a book called the “Care and Feeding of Intellectuals.” There aren’t any more final answers about how people’s minds work than there are about how their marriages work. I used to think, in my innocence, that there were some awfully well-adjusted people who got on together like a house afire most of the time. Well, there aren’t. Or if there are I never met them. All you have to do is know them well enough to find out how things really are. In the family I bet on for years and years — four wonderful children, a fine position in the community,  great sympathy between husband and wife — it turns out (and this I might mistake but B. never makes mistakes like that) the husband has got definite strong homosexual tendencies though I doubt if he has faced them, and the wife is a mass of well-concealed panic. They function damn well, but at what a cost. Thoreau was quite right, you know. It turns me into a mush about the human race, I love them all so much. I am quite sure I could never love McCarthy, but I suppose I could love Eisenhower, the poor boob.

As I see it, DeVoto and Child were brought together by the extended correspondence course in one another’s personalities that they conducted for two years before they met, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Speaking of which, there’s an interesting ambiguity in Joan Reardon’s introduction to the second chapter of her edition of the letters, which recounts the women’s meeting, which was nothing at all like the scene in Julie & Julia; the Childs arrived at the DeVotos’ in the middle of a cocktail party.

As Avis recalled in a short unpublished remembrance of Julia, Bernard was trying to finish a book and wanted no part of Avis’s plan to have guests for a week or more. “Benny wasn’t very happy about strangers. But he went up to Julia and he said, ‘What will you have to drink?’ and she looked down at him, because she’s a very tall woman, and said, ‘Well, I think I’ll have one of those martinis I’ve been reading about [in Harper’s].’ Julia drank two or three without turning a hair, although she must have felt them. Bernard admired that enormously, so his attitude toward the Childs’ visit softened a great deal.”

That bracketed referernce to Harper’s — Reardon’s or DeVoto’s? Because it’s clear that Julia had been reading about the martinis in her new friend’s letters. (Among other things, the martinis explain why the DeVotos didn’t — couldn’t — drink much wine. 

***

You can stop here if you’d rather not hear more about The Kindly Ones. Ever since I claimed, a week or so ago, that Max Aue, Jonathan Littell’s hero, is a man like any other, and not a monster, I’ve been nagged by the recollection of Max’s homicidal frenzies. The murders at the heart of the novel are so dire that Max has no recollection of them, even years later, in his quiet postwar life in France. (Since the book is narrated by Max, we don’t witness the murders, but, like the detectives who dog his footsteps right up to the novel’s end, we realize that the killer can only have been he.) In the middle of a long march back to Berlin, behind enemy lines, Max shoots an elderly organist playing Bach in a private chapel on a Pomeranian estate..

The old man finished the piece and turned to me: he wore a onocle and a neatly trimmed little white moustache, and an berstleutnant’s uniform from the other war, with a cross at his neck. “They can destroy everything,” he said to me calmly, “but not this. It is impossible, this will remain forever: it will go on even when I stop playing.” I didn’t say anything and he attacked the next contrapunctus. Thomas was still standing. I got up too. I listened. The music was magnificent, the organ wasn’t very powerful but it echoed in this little family church, the lines of counterpoint met each other, played, danced with each other. But instead of pacifying me, this music only fueled my anger. I found it unbearable. I wasn’t thinking about anything, my head was empty of everything except this music, and the black presence of my rage. I wanted to shout at him to stop, but I let the endd of the piece go by, and the old man started the next one, the fifth. His long aristocratic fingers fluttered over the keys, pulled or pushed the stops. When he slapped them shut at the end of the fugue, I took out my pistol and shot him in the head. He collapsed forward onto the keys, opening half the pipes in a desolate, discordant bleat. I put my pistol away, went over, and pulled him back by the collar; the sound stopped, leaving only the sound of blood dripping from his head onto the flagstones. “You’ve gone completely mad!” Thomas snarled. “What’s the matter with you?” I looked at him coldly. I was livid but my cracked voice didn’t tremble. “It’s because of these corrupt Junkers that Germany is losing the war. National Socialism is collapsing and they’re playing Bach. It should be forbidden.”

(Do I detect a sly echo of  Adorno in that “forbidden”?)

I’m not going to try to square this with a claim for Max’s humanity, much less the far grislier strangulation of an importunate lover in a lavatory, during a disorderly party during the very final days of the Reich. Nor the murders on the last page! I will note that Max’s murders are impassioned; conversely, he cannot bear to take part in the “actions” against the Jews, in which all members of the SS, officers as well as their men, are expected to participate. Max’s squeamishness in this regard is noted by the gimlet eyes of his superiors; at last there is nothing for it but to climb down into a ravine and shoot. 

Men came and went, they shot round after round, almost without stopping. I was petrified, I didn’t know what to do. Grafhorst came over and shook me by the arm. “Obersturmführer!” He pointed his gun at the bodies. “Try to finish off the wounded. “I took out my pistol and headed for a group; a very young man was sobbing in  pain, I aimed my gun at his head and squeezed the trigger, but it didn’t go off, I had forgotten to lift the safety catch. I lifted it and shot him in the forehead, he twitched and was suddenly still. 

Max is genuinely and deeply grieved when his new friend, Leutnant Dr Voss, a linguist attached to the army (not the SS), is killed by peasants who dialect he is
studying. He rushes to the dying man’s bedside and begs the attending doctor to administer morphine even though it is in short supply. “I gently touched Voss’s cheek with the back of my fingers, and went out too.”

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 11th, 2011 at 3:00 pm.