Two things about my walks on the beach:

Going to the beach, I head down the length of Schooner Walk, climb the boardwalk that humps the dune, and plod straight through the dry sand to shoreline. (It’s the shortest distance of dry sand.) Then I turn ninety degrees, facing west, and walk down to Lonelyville. On my return, I look for my own footprints in the dry sand. They’re always there to be found. The imprint of my size 14 Speedo beach slipper is a standout. I follow the footsteps back to the dune, half as a game, half because it’s easier than pausing to look where I’m going, which my immobile neck would oblige me to do.

Every day, at some point on the westward leg of the walk, a song bubbles into consciousness, and it is always the same song, the one at the end of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. I don’t know why this happens. I know the song very well, but it is not what I would call a favorite. Maybe it is becoming one. As music, it is deliberately, if superficially, naive. Much the same could be said of my walks on the beach. 

***

After dinner, I played some curiosities. The bricklayer segment of Gerard Hoffnung’s Oxford Union Speech. And two music-hall songs that Julie Andrews recorded back when I was in college, “Burlington Bertie From Bow” and “Waiting at the Church.” The first song has a tune, sort of, but it is not meant to be sung, except here and there — a job that Ms Andrews ironically makes the most of. (I really must see Star! one of these days.) The second is a confection of cockney cheek that I always have to listen to a second time.

There was I,
Waiting at the church
Waiting at the church
Waiting at the church
When I found
he’d left me in the lurch —
Lor’, how it did upset me!

All at once,
he sent me round a note —
Here’s the bloomin’ note —
This is what he wrote:
“I can’t
Get away
To marry you today;
My wife
Won’t let me”!

***

In the middle of the night, I woke up to find the room flooded with moonlight. (That can’t happen at the apartment in town, where we only get to see the moon rise.) Later, when I woke, the night was dark again. I went to the door leading to the deck. The moon had not quite disappeared; it was dallying at the horizon, looking more like the sun than I’ve ever seen it do.

Kathleen is coming out tonight — to stay until the end of our lease in two weeks — and tomorrow the rest of our Labor Day house party will arrive, beginning at lunchtime. I hope to have finished with Dearie by then. There is a much better book to be written about the surprising career of Julia Child. Among other things, launching it was Paul Child’s singular achievement; for, apart from Julia, his promise went unfulfilled. Madeleine Kamman, who was both, complained that Julia Child was neither French nor a chef, but the irony is that nobody would have watched a show starring an actual chef from actual France. (Nor would anyone have dreamed of making explicit reference to the program’s roots in la cuisine bourgeoise — “bourgeois” was a dirty word among progressive-minded people, and conservatives pretended that they’d never heard it.)

Between 1947 and 1961, Julia Child worked like a dynamo, first to transform herself from someone who couldn’t boil water into an accomplished home cook — a veritable cuisinière bourgeoise — and second to transform an unwieldy and imprecise bundle of recipes into Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It might be said that she could not have worked any harder. But she was also very lucky. First, of course, she had met her husband, a man on a budget who liked to eat well. Second, she met Simone Beck, one of the compilers of the bundle of recipes. Third, she met, via the post, Avis DeVoto, who championed her project and brought it not just to Knopf but to the right people at Knopf. Fourth, Mastering was published at a moment when the First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, was broadcasting the message that Americans ought to be more attractive, and Julia Child was just the sort of educated but not particularly pretty or graceful woman to show how this could be done — whilst having a good time. The better you know the story, the less inevitable and more miraculous it gets.

Meanwhile, I’ll have to make do with Bob Spitz and his pop eloquence. I don’t think that I shall ever forget one of his epithets for Simca Beck — the “Norman nonpareil.” It’s so magnificently awful!   

***

I’ve just spent twenty minutes trying to find a particularly glitz-laden paragraph from Dearie, sadly or not, as the case may be, in vain. I wanted something to cushion an unpleasant observation: Bob Spitz almost made me dislike his subject. He admires Julia Child’s unabating drive, but his portrait presents a cranky attention-hound who tended to resolve conflicts between friendship and self-advancement in favor of the latter. She was, no doubt, more her father’s daughter than she might have liked to think, but I hope that she was not really so callous as she appears in these pages. The instances that I would cite are all fairly minor, but an impression develops of willed heartlessness. It’s tricky, of course, because Child was a pioneering woman, with all the inconsistencies of an effective pioneer, with strong if unconscious roots in the world that, for the most part, she left behind. These inconsistencies are like cards in a deck; they can be arranged or they can be scattered. Spitz’s strictly linear narrative tends to scatter them, making them obtrusive. For example — and I’m only going to mention it — Child’s unthinking homophobia, which se questioned only after the death, of AIDS, of her lawyer, whom she had always regarded as a “he-man.” As a woman, of course, Child was expected to be “nice,” which she wasn’t — she was, in many ways, much better than “nice.” One must make the effort at times to judge her insistent assertiveness as one would judge it in a man, and not as an unwomanly failing.

 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2012 at 7:14 am.