How can a collection of letters between two middle-aged women, writing in the 1950s, be monumental? It’s taking a while to sort that out. What’s not in doubt is that As Always, Julia: Food, Friendship & the Making of a Masterpiece is a monument. The letters running back and forth between Julia Child and Avis DeVoto are a great read, but the book itself is a commemorative object,  preserving the record of something important. The ‘something important’ isn’t the back-story to Mastering the Art of French Cooking  or the How-Julia-Got-Famous legend. What I mean is the testament to exceptional humanity that exudes from the correspondence. (Never has an exchange of letters more ardently lived up to that term!) My talk of monuments and exceptional humanity might conjure expectations of heroism and bravado that the book will disappoint, but I’ll take that risk and venture to propose other expectations: what we find in these letters is the ready ability to make truly interesting writing out of everyday whole cloth, and perhaps because I am in late middle age myself I find ordinary life more challenging than emergencies, precisely because the challenge of the ordinary, unlike that of an emergency, can be disregarded with impunity. You can just look the other way while your life courses through the neck of the hourglass. People do it all the time. (How else to explain television?) Avis and Julia were fortunate women, and they knew it; and we know it because their letters are imbued with a gratitude that takes the form of attentive appreciation of the world before them. The letters, no less than the great cookbook, repay good fortune by opening it up to us. 

As the years passed by — the letters span for nearly a decade, from early 1952 to the spring of 1961 — I was tickled by an idle conundrum: to what extent were these women feminists? From one perspective, neither was interested in what we call women’s issues. They came from relatively lofty backgrounds (Julia especially), were highly educated and well-traveled, and married interesting, good-natured men — whom they loved. They were not unhappy with the prosperous housewife’s calendar of duties, and Avis appears to have been a doting mother. It’s clear that Julia occupied a remarkably unusual position in American culture, in that she practiced a domestic art with professional rigor, keeping her eye on the ball while extending a vaguely maternal welcome. Because no one with a voice like hers had ever appeared regularly on television, she was a sensation in the way that maiden aunts can be sensational: unintentionally funny but wholly endearing. (As the years passed by — the real ones, I mean — we would learn that there was nothing ridiculous about the woman.) Because she had so little to do with the general idea of “femininity,” there was little to antagonize the feminists. There she was, counseling housewives to spend hours over hot stoves, because it was fun.

Whether anyone would listen to her was very much the matter that the publishers disputed. Like the women’s magazines, which consistently refused to print any of the recipes that would go into Mastering the Art, the businessmen at Houghton, Mifflin foresaw the dismay with which “housewife/chauffeurs” would recoil from the book’s exhaustive instructions. William Koshland, at Knopf, in contrast, saw that the instructions would make good cooking easier — because they were clear, lucid, good instructions. Once you familiarize yourself with the method for making a soufflé, and commit a few measurements to memory, making a soufflé is as straightforward as making a ham sandwich, and you never have to look at a cookbook again. This distinction, with some people seeing enlightening complexity where others see alarming complication, does not run on an axis that is easily oriented to arguments for and against feminism. That’s why the conundrum is idle: it doesn’t matter whether Julia and Avis were feminists. They were passionate Democrats!

It did not take long for me to decide that Avis was the more natural writer. Not the better writer, necessarily, but the one more compelled to express herself in prose. (I don’t begin to know enough about her long association with Bread Loaf to understand how it failed to inspire her to have her own career as a writer.) Hers is the greater emotional range, and hers the wider array of registers. She also wrote more — much more, if you discount Julia’s discussions of her book. As the mother of two young men — the book ends, quite sweetly, with her offer to get Harvard Commencement tickets for the Childs; her son, Mark (who turned 71 the other day), was about to graduate — and the wife of a college professor, Avis was in touch with youthful speech patterns, and her tone is often what used to be called ‘smart.’ “Everybody horribly restless because after four-day frightful heat wave a real humdinger of a storm is toying with us…” At the risk of confusing apples with oranges, I’d have to say that Avis’s style is what the French call BCBG — bon chic, bon genre. For all her housewifely devotion, you can imagine Avis rewriting the Cindi Lauper song: “Girls Just Get to Have Fun.” Not that they get to have just fun. In the middle of the book’s time span, Bernard suffers a fatal heart attack in a New York hotel room, and Avis’s devastation is marked mostly by silence. A slightly more distant passing, however, prompts a profoundly memorable letter to Julia:

I wrote you a note from St Petersburg and I hope it reached you. My old pa telephoned Sunday midnight last week to say my mother had just died in the hospital. He was all in pieces and wanted me to come down so I flew down next day and took over. It was a rugged five days, and I thank God is all I can say that it was so quick. Cancer of the breast, and two more weeks in hospital and then all over. She was lucky. So was Dad and he knows it now. The thing I have always dreaded most is having either of them require long nursing, which is so terrible for everybody and would pretty well put me in the soup financially as well. I had to arrange everything, and funerals in the hinterland are something — viewing of the remains and all that. But it all went off rather smoothly, none of the horrors I had expected, and I cleared everything of hers out of the apartment, but quick. Only thing to do. Incredible woman. She saved things like the Collier brothers. Eighteen boxes of notepaper and she used to write me on the backs of old Christmas cards. Unopened boxes of stockings I had sent her. Forty years of medical clippings, some of them yellow with age and quite outdated. And yet when she was sickshe never wanted anybody to know anything about it until it was over, for which I am deeply grateful. Nobody but Dad knew she was in the hospital this time. I never got along with her, but I will hand her this, and it’s a great deal — she never clung, or whined or complained, and she let me live my own life. 

My father is 86, thin and reasonably spry and except for bad eyes, in good health. He seems to be the only Democrat in St Petersburg and we cheered each other up considerably by discussing politics, about which he knows a great deal. He’s a cutie — Scotch and deadpan and full of wry humor. And now an old, old man. St Petersburg is about as non-U a place as there is in this country — dreary beyond measure to me, but he is rather used to it now. And by God they do take care of the old people — everyone exceedingly kind and gentle and friendly. Living is incredibly cheap. Cafeterias are just wonderful. For a dollar and a quarter you can get a big piece of good roast beef and everything that goes with it, good vegetables, fine salads, and superlative apple pie. He does this once a day, and picks up his other two meals in his own little kitchen. Not much appetite at that age, so I left him three bottles of rye with orders to take a little nip in the evening, for his appetite’s sake. He ate lunch and dinner with me at the hotel while I was there and had a drink each time — the first in years. His landlady is one of those wonderful lower middle class types who never read a book in her life, but is pure gold, full of energy and kindness. And he has many friends close by. So I will try not to fret about him. But he knows and I know that the next call from St Petersburg will probably be for me to go down and bury him. Such a nice man. And it’s just hell to be old and have no function in life.

There is nothing like this in Julia’s letters. Nothing quite so personal (about another person), and nothing quite so detailed (about another person’s life). The material is instinctively well-organized, The two paragraphs share an emotional trajectory, beginning with a generalized, social sorrow (the death of a parent; the dreariness of retirement communities), passing into engaging anecdote (the things her mother hoarded; her father’s diet), and concluding on a note of intense but restrained regret (“I never got along with her”; “But he knows and I knows and I know…”).What Avis has fashioned of her grief is nothing less than a pair of fine silhouettes of her parents; one can almost see them hanging on the wall, in matching oval frames. The world of Mastering the Art couldn’t be further away from the atmosphere of cached stockings and cafeteria roast beef — or so you might think. In fact, as this book of letters shows again and again, one of the finest and most useful treatises ever published was brought forth by two American women who were remarkably open to life, and cheerfully rueful about shrugging off its banalities.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, January 24th, 2011 at 2:45 pm.