After days of sunny weather, clear and otherwise, low, wet clouds have spread over the sky. It makes for a change — a pleasant change from yesterday, certainly, which was hot and still. What seemed to be a dark grey mass over the city to the west has dissolved into torrents of rain, sheets of which drape the sliding-glass doors. Kevin and I had quite a time of it, yesterday, closing all the skylights. With my immobile neck, I could not stand close enough to hold the hook and still see the ring into which it fit; I was effectively blind. Kevin managed the job, but he couldn’t see very well, either. It took both of us to get one of the skylights closed. I knew, on Sunday, that I ought to ask Megan, who had opened them during the sunny weather, to cool the house, to close them, but I didn’t have the heart.

Out on the deck, the beach ball that I bought for Will at Dinosaur Hill, printed to be a globe, blows about, rolling in dejection.  

***

I got to bed early last night and was treated to richly transgressive dreams. Wouldn’t it be nice, every night, to be naughty in dreams and to awake in all innocence? The main thing about my dreams was that I was young in all of them. That was quite naughty enough.

***

I’m working my way through Bob Spitz’s biography of Julia Child, Dearie. I’m about a third of the way through, and Julia is in her late thirties. She has enrolled at the Cordon Bleu and is fighting her entertainingly recaptured battles with Mme Brassart. The connection with Simone Beck that would catalyze her career still lies in the future. As she is still very much an apprentice cook, the idea of writing any cookbook, much less the magisterial one that would make her justly famous, has not crossed her mind.

Julia Child was a late bloomer in part because she was not expected to bloom at all. She was expected to marry and to mother, and that’s what she expected for herself as well. Her great height interfered with this program, because it severely reduced the stock of interested men. One of the Los Angeles Chandlers proposed to her twice, before and after the War, but she did not love him and she had no intention of acting desperately. She would probably never have gotten to know Paul Child if it hadn’t been for the collegiate atmosphere of the Allied intelligence operation that brought them together in Kandy, Chongqing, and Kunming, where, over the course of two years, they discovered that they both liked to eat well. Paul already knew this about himself, of course; ten years older than Julia, he was a master of life’s higher pleasures (by which phrase I do not exclude sex). But it was teaching Julia how to appreciate the cuisine of Yunnan and Sichuan that drew him to her.

There is a wider lesson to be taken from this life. Julia Child was always a bright woman, but she was never academically eager. She did well enough to get “acceptable” grades, dipping below even that standard during one of her years at Smith. She loved interesting people, but it turned out that she didn’t really know any, because her privileged life in Pasadena (and in New York as well, during her sojourn in the mid-Thirties) more or less completely excluded them. It was the war effort, which scrambled brilliant people from different backgrounds together, that ushered her into real life. Now she was eager. Now she could not learn fast enough. Her eyes were opened even before she met Paul; while crossing the Pacific on the SS Mariposa, she got to know people who would never belong to a “country-club set.”

These people were a world apart — they were informed on the issues of the day, on the arts, on culture, on a far deeper level than the parochial planes of Julia’s usual acquaintances. Julia had never taken an interest in such business before, but everything they said, and the way they looked at things, fascinated her. These people stimulated something in her brain that none of the private schools or elite colleges had been able to do do. Julia had developed as someone who took an interest in the life of the mind, but in a social setting as opposed to an academic setting. Someone droning on about the indigenous sects of India in front of a blackboard set her to daydreaming; but around a table and over navy grub — that was an altogether different story! It was all in the presentation. There was no getting around the fact that Julia was a social animal.

If well-informed, intellectually-active Americans are almost as rare as hens’ teeth, it’s because our teachers and professors have, in their benighted way, seen to it.

Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child is not easy to read. Correction: it is not easy to put up with. There are solecisms that ought to trigger suicides among the staff at Knopf — the following phrase appears on page 6: As a young coed at Smith College… There are cake-and-eat-it passages that, for example, present Julia’s wartime life in China as both an exhausting grind and a round of cocktail parties. Sometimes these are compressed into phrases of nonsensical jocularity: “carloads upon carloads of the bare essentials.” And there is a lot of froth. Here are the Child twins, Paul and Charlie, in wartime Washington:

[Paul] and Charlie thrived in DC, where a community of intellectuals and artists drew strength from their common refugee status. It seemed the whole of academia was involved in some aspect of the war, along with the leading cultural luminaries: writers, journalists, filmmakers, painters, broadcasters, publishers, a melting pot of the clever and the articulate. These were people eager to talk, eager to rub shoulders and exchange ideas outside the confines of their war work. There wasn’t a night when the Child brothers weren’t engaged in some intense social interaction — a dinner party or embassy soirée, a mixer, a full-on intellectual conversation. And the conversation was meaty and well-cooked. One entry in Paul’s Washington journal provides an example of the nightly dialogue: “This highlights the ideas we were discussing the other night…[how] context and relationship are what create moral structure.” [sic] A bit highfalutin perhaps, but Paul feasted on this kind of chin fare.

Chin fare! Even if this were true, even if the Childs were out every single night, up to their eyeballs in meaty conversations and intense social interactions, the passage is still too obviously exaggerated to be informative. The pile-up of “luminaries” is pornographic, as is the catalogue of soirées and mixers. And, as for “highfalutin” — it wouldn’t be my word for that journal entry. There is a great deal of this sort of thing in Dearie.

There is also a somewhat wrong-headed inclination to sieze upon instances of gross behavior. Here is a sentence that I could have lived without, and one I’m sure that Mrs Child would not have been happy to see in print: “Mary Case encountered Julia, shitfaced, prowling the Hubbard Hall corridor on her hands and knees.” It is utter nonsense to claim that such tittle-tattle “casts light” on the biographer’s subject. It’s not that I wish to have Child’s earthiness expunged altogether. Peeking ahead, I came across a very wicked but also very funny anecdote about making “cock monsieur” on Good Morning America. (Go to a bookstore and turn to the top of page 429.)

***

The sky is clearing, but the ball is still rolling. What kind of a day are we in for?

 

But Julia keeps me going.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2012 at 8:28 am.