Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (12 page)

W
hen my son was eight months old, it could truthfully be said that he devoured literature. Presented with a book, he chewed it. A bit of Henry’s DNA has been permanently incorporated into the warped pages of
Goodnight Moon
, and the missing corners of pages 3 and 8 suggest that a bit of
Goodnight Moon
has been permanently incorporated into Henry. He was, of course, not the first child to indulge in bibliophagy. The great Philadelphia bookdealer A.S.W. Rosenbach deduced that one reason first editions of
Alice in Wonderland
were so scarce was that so many of them had been eaten.

Henry and his word-swallowing colleagues—they include a
Wall Street Journal
editor who absentmindedly tears off morsels from the newsroom dictionary, rolls them in little balls, and pops them in his mouth—are merely taking literally the metaphorical similarity between reading and eating, which makes us say, for instance, that we have browsed through a newspaper or had a hard time digesting an overlong biography. When we call people bookworms, we are likening them to the larvae of insects, chiefly members of the orders
Thysanura
and
Psocoptera
, whose entire diet may consist of paper and glue. “Books are food,” wrote the English critic Holbrook Jackson, “libraries so many dishes of meat, served out for several palates… . We eat them from love or necessity, as other foods, but most from love.” Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt were described by a friend as savoring “the flavour of a rare passage of poetry with an exquisite relish, as though it were a morsel of ripe and juicy fruit.” Galileo compared
Orlando Furioso
to a melon field, Coventry Patmore compared Shakespeare to roast beef, and Edward FitzGerald compared Thucydides to Parmesan cheese.

If books are food, then books
about
food are the pièce de résistance of literary taste. Henry, who is now a year and a half, has graduated from actual page ingestion to this higher, more symbolic form of gourmandise. When he sees a picture of something toothsome, he pretends to snatch it off the page and gobble it up. He usually does this with items that are at least theoretically edible—watermelons, jars of honey, large birthday cakes—although, worrisomely, he did once try to wolf down a dental drill, which was yellow and may have resembled a banana. Later on, when Henry’s diet includes novels, I expect that, like his mother, he will assess the characters not by how they look, what they wear, or how they talk, but by what they eat. In
Anna Karenina
, all the essential differences between Oblonsky and Levin are laid out in the Moscow restaurant scene during which the former orders three dozen oysters, vegetable soup, turbot with thick sauce, capon with tarragon, and fruit macédoine, while the latter longs for cabbage soup and porridge.

I have always preferred Keats to Wordsworth, but I was never able to put my finger on why until I read that Wordsworth, according to a visitor, “will live for a month on cold beef, and the next on cold bacon,” whereas Keats once wrote his friend Charles Wentworth Dilke:

Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine—good God how fine. It went down soft, pulpy, slushy, oozy—all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large Beatified strawberry.

I have never read two sexier sentences. You just know that when Keats got together with Fanny Brawne, there must have been fireworks, just as you know, in the famous eating scene in
Tom Jones
, that Tom’s appetite for Mrs. Waters will equal his appetite for his dinner, during which “three pounds at least of that flesh which formerly had contributed to the composition of an ox, was now honoured with becoming part of the individual Mr. Jones.”

W
hen I read about food, sometimes a single word is enough to detonate a chain reaction of associative memories. I am like the shoe fetishist who, in order to become aroused, no longer needs to see the object of his desire; merely glimpsing the phrase “spectator pump, size
6½
” is sufficient. Whenever I encounter the French word
plein
, which means “full,” I am instantly transported back to age fifteen, when, after eating a very large portion of
poulet à I’estragon
, I told my Parisian hosts that I was “
pleine
” an adjective that I later learned is reserved for pregnant women and cows in need of milking. The word
ptarmigan
catapults me back ten years to an expedition I accompanied to the Canadian Arctic, during which a polar-bear biologist, tired of canned beans, shot a half dozen ptarmigans. We plucked them, fried them, and gnawed the bones with such ravening carnivorism that I knew on the spot I could never, ever become a vegetarian. Sometimes just the contiguous letters
pt
are enough to call up in me a nostalgic rush of guilt and greed. I may thus be the only person in the world who salivates when she reads the words “ptomaine poisoning.”

My most frequent response to gastronomic references in literature is an immediate urge to raid the refrigerator. When I happen to be reading in bed, the spoils are a source of marital strife. If I had married Charles Lamb, who once told Coleridge that he was especially fond of books containing traces of buttered muffins, I would have no problem, but instead I married George, to whom crumbs on the pillows—especially
after
we have brushed our teeth—are a sign of grave moral turpitude. (I am fated to fall in love with men of the Levin rather than the Oblonsky type. Once I asked my college boyfriend what his favorite food was. He thought for a long moment, while I internally debated the relative merits of crème brûlée and runny Brie. “Well,” he said, “I like bread.”) But after reading M.F.K. Fisher’s description of scrambled eggs in
How to Cook a Wolf
, or Hemingway’s ode to sausages and potato salad in
A Moveable Feast
, or Thomas Wolfe’s inventory of the contents of Joel Pierce’s refrigerator in
Of Time and the River
, how could anyone in her right mind
not
bring a small snack to the matrimonial bed?

My friend Susan McCarthy, the co-author of
When Elephants Weep
, recently reminded me that reading about eating can occasionally send one running
away
from the kitchen. She mentioned a passage she had read about how killer whales feed on humpback whales. “They sort of peel them with their teeth,” she explained. Susan has considered posting this passage on her refrigerator as an appetite suppressant. I could do the same with the sentence in John Lanchester’s
A Debt to Pleasure
that describes a first course in a boys’ boarding school as “a soup in which pieces of undisguised and unabashed gristle floated in a mud-colored sauce whose texture and temperature were powerfully reminiscent of mucus.”

But I’m sure Susan and I will leave those passages right where they belong: on our bookshelves, not our refrigerators. Deep down, we know better than to subvert the glorious hunger that is whetted by the printed word. The art critic Eric Gibson once told me that one of the most frustrating experiences of his life was reading the description of chicken-and-sausage stew in
A Moment of War
, Laurie Lee’s memoir of the Spanish Civil War, while riding the Washington subway, at least a half hour’s ride from his kitchen.

That passage is especially powerful because the soldiers who scarfed down the stew were absolutely famished. The best food writing is associated not with decadent repletion but with hunger. Hemingway was practically starving when he ate his potato salad; Tom Jones had fasted for twenty-four hours when he indulged in his three pounds of roast beef, preparatory to indulging in Mrs. Waters. When Coleridge was a student at Christ’s Hospital, where the food resembled John Lanchester’s mucus soup, he once received a maternal shipment of plum cake. Did he choose to accompany his tuck with a reading of Brillat-Savarin? Of course not. Wisely, he chose
Robinson Crusoe
, one of the finest hungry books in history.

In fact, my very favorite food literature does not even describe real meals. It describes meals that were
imagined
—voracious reveries by people who were hundreds of miles from the nearest larder. Accounts of Arctic and Antarctic expeditions are crammed with such figmental menus. In 1883, on Adolphus Greely’s ill-fated scientific expedition to Ellesmere Island, Lieutenant James B. Lockwood kept a list of the dishes he missed most: turkey stuffed with oysters, Boston pilot bread, oatmeal muffins, corn fritters. “Chewed up a foot of a fox this evening raw,” he wrote in his journal. “It was altogether bone and gristle.” He followed that entry with: “Pie of orange and coconut.” On Ernest Shackleton’s 1914–17 Antarctic expedition, Dr. James McIlroy conducted a poll of the twentv-two men who were stranded on Elephant Island, asking each what he would choose if he were permitted a single dish. The sweet-cravers outnumbered the savory-cravers by a large margin. A sampling:

Clark	Devonshire dumpling with cream
James	Syrup pudding
Mcllroy	Marmalade pudding with Devonshire cream
Rickenson	Blackberry and apple tart with cream
Wild	Apple pudding and cream
Hussey	Porridge, sugar, and cream
Green	Apple dumpling
Greenstreet	Christmas pudding
Kerr	Dough and syrup
Macklin	Scrambled eggs on toast
Bakewell	Baked pork and beans
Cheetham	Pork, apple sauce, potatoes, and turnips

As a member of civilized society, the closest I’ve come to these cravings has been during my pregnancies, when the siren call of gluttony has been both irresistible and permissible. One night, when I was pregnant with Henry, I lay in bed thinking, for some reason, about
Treasure Island
. I realized that from the entire book there was only one sentence I remembered verbatim, something that Ben Gunn, who has been marooned for three years, says to Jim Hawkins: “Many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese—toasted, mostly.” I repeated the last two words over and over, like a mantra. “Toasted, mostly. Toasted, mostly. Toasted, mostly.” Then I found myself drifting toward the kitchen as if in a somnambulist’s trance. I opened the refrigerator. In one of the drawers there was a lump of cheddar. I dropped it in a Teflon pan, turned up the flame, and bashed the cheese with a large spoon. This wasn’t cooking, unless you call what a Neanderthal did to his haunch of woolly mammoth over a bonfire cooking. When the cheese was reduced to a molten glob, I ate it from the pan. Was it good? I don’t know. It went down too fast.

Since then, I have wondered whether this in utero experience, which resulted in a terrible stomachache, was responsible for two of my son’s most salient characteristics. He loves books. He hates cheese.

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T
he editor and baseball savant Dan Okrent, who is also an excellent cook,
²
once brought a ham larded with pistachios, garlic, and raisins to a potluck lunch. The cookbook editor Judith Jones, who happened to be a guest, enjoyed it so much that she asked Dan for the recipe, which he provided verbatim from a book by James Beard. (“I thought she wanted to
cook
it,” he explained later. “Not
publish
it.”) When
American Food
, by Judith’s husband, Evan Jones, appeared a few years later, there, on page 224, was the recipe, titled “Dan Okrent’s Stuffed Fresh Ham.” Dan subsequently spotted James Beard at a cocktail party, screwed his courage to the sticking-place,
³
and apologized profusely. “Oh, that’s all right,” said Beard. “I stole the recipe from another cookbook.”
⁴