Most writers begin as readers -- devouring books, when young, for the sheer pleasure of reading; then reading later in life to learn precisely how to write. In college, I kept a notebook into which I copied passages from favorite authors -- "seeing" how they worked, not with my eyes, but by moving their words through my fingers onto the page.
I recorded this passage from M.F.K. Fisher: "People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do?
"The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. . . There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. And that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?"
Being young and hungry for experiences beyond the Midwest, I searched out every book by M.F.K. Fisher I could find, reveling in her evocative descriptions of food, fine wine, France, California, Mexico, ocean freighters, backwater restaurants, painters, gypsies, vineyards, and the last virgin truffle hunter.
When I moved to the Napa Valley and learned that M.F.K. Fisher lived one valley over, I wrote asking if we could meet. She agreed.
"Call me Mary Francis," she said, leading me through the stucco cottage nestled in the corner of a large ranch in Sonoma. The house is essentially two rooms with a bath: a bed-room-workroom and a living-room-kitchen. Each room is filled with books, original artworks, momentos of world travels. High-arched windows frame stately oaks and distant mountains. The first California wildflowers colored the fields.
From the kitchen, Mary Frances offered coffee. We then sat down in the center of the living room to talk. "How do you feel about W.H. Auden saying of you: 'I do not know of anyone in the U.S. today who writes better prose' or The New York Times Book Review writing: 'In a properly run culture, M.F.K. Fisher would be recognized as one of the greatest writers this country has produced in this century' or Cyra McFadden calling you 'A Living Treasure'?"
She laughed away the praise, and then shook her head. "I don't read reviews. The only one I've ever read was the first review of my first book Serve It Forth -- written by S.I. Hayakawa in 1937. It was just what I hoped someone would feel about that book. It was so nice that I haven't read any since."
"What are you working on now?"
"Two books -- but I won't say what they are about. Viking Press is soon bringing out Here Let Us Feast, an anthology of my writing."
"What is your day like? Do you have set hours for writing?"
"No -- the writing just happens," she said with a far-off look in her eyes. She then glanced down at her cat Charlie. "I just cook and talk and have fun."
On July 3rd, M.F.K. Fisher turns seventy-seven. (If she had been born a day later, her father had threatened to name her Independencia). She grew up in Whittier, California, the oldest of four children, happy, secure, and well fed.
She had an early start with both writing and cooking, standing on a small footstool to reach the dictionary and to assist in the kitchen. By age ten, she was writing original verses and creating basic sauces and egg dishes. Cooking made her feel important. As she later wrote in Among Friends: "I had to fight for my place on stage, and I soon discovered, no matter how melodramatically now and then, that almost always everybody smiles passing beams of pleasure if a little girl, or even a jaded old one, can turn out good scrambled eggs and a commendable oyster stew, a crisp well-seasoned salad, even a cupcake. That was my way to show that I was there too...and perhaps still is."
At twenty, she married Albert Young Fisher, the son of a Presbyterian minister and left for France where, in the late 1920's, she and Al studied at the University of Dijon. With a lean pocketbook but robust spirit, they roamed about France looking, tasting, writing.
Of all the influences in M.F.K. Fisher's life, perhaps the greatest has been France. "It is where I feel most at home, most complete. I like to be in a culture that has history and traditions. Even the soil there is older," she said.
The post-Depression years brought the Fishers back to America and to WPA jobs. By 1936, she had divorced Al and married their friend Dillwyn Parrish, a gifted painter (and relation of great artist, Maxfield Parrish). They lived in Switzerland, near the French Alps, but then Parrish died in 1941.
She then settled in Helmet, California, cultivating a vineyard and working as a Hollywood screenwriter. She married for the third time, to the publisher Donald Friede, with whom she had two children, and then divorced. In 1954, M.F.K. Fisher returned to France with her daughters Anne and Kennedy, taking up residence in Aix-en-Provence, a place she beautifully describes in Map of Another Town.
She then moved back to the United States, settling into a big Victorian in St. Helena, California. "The wine men -- Ficklin, Mondavi and the like would come for lunch and a wine tasting and end up staying for days. It became a boarding house. All I was doing was marketing, cooking, serving food, washing dishes -- not getting any writing done, so I had to leave."
In 1973, she accepted a long-standing offer to have a house built to her specifications by David Pleydell-Bouverie, an English architect-friend who owns 500 acres of vineyards and open land -- where she resides today.
She likes living alone and is unwilling to depend on others. Outside of a weekly marketing trip with a helpful friend, she remains at home, seeing a steady stream of friends and admirers.
M.F.K. holds a special place in the California food establishment and wine community. In 1978, to commemorate M.F.K Fisher's seventieth birthday, Alice Waters, owner/chef of the celebrated Chez Panisse in Berkeley, along with James Beard, planned a surprise party for her in San Francisco. Alice Waters created a menu in celebration of M.F.K.'s books. The first course, called Consider The Oyster, consisted of eight varieties of the shellfish on the half shell. Next, A Considerable Town (Marseilles), presented California escargots with Pernod, tomatoes and garlic, whole Pacific rockfish charcoal-grilled with herbs and anchovies, spit-roasted pheasants with new potatoes, a bitter lettuce salad with goat cheese croutons, and three plum sherbets in orange rind boats. A Cordiall Water suggested the last course, a Muscat de Beumes-de-Venise, coffee, and cordials.
"Of the seventeen books you've written, do you have a favorite?" I asked.
"My translation of Brillat-Savarin's Physiology of Taste which, of course, I did not write and A Cordiall Water are the pick of the litter."
She went to the door to greet an arriving guest. Then, after seeing that she didn't have enough ingredients to cook with, she suggested that we move on to Au Relais, near downtown Sonoma, for lunch. We were four: Mary Francis, myself, the Wine Country photographer, the editor of "The Journal of Gastronomy." Before entering the restaurant, Mary Francis announced to we three gentlemen: "It's nonsense to end a good meal by arguing over the bill. I am paying and if that's a threat to your masculinity -- then just pretend you are my gigolos!"
We stepped into the dining room smiling over our private joke. The maitre 'd led us to a corner table. She and I ordered the Mussels Mariniere. I lifted each mussel directly from its shell to my mouth. Mary Francis didn't begin eating until all her mussels were shelled and bathing in the savoury broth.
I mentioned how her writing reminded me of Hemingway's -- not in subject matter but in the accent on rituals, the proper way of doing things worth doing. We talked about the Lost Generation writers, and I asked why she is alive and they aren't.
"Moderation," she said lifting her wine glass. "But when you are young, you don't know what moderation is. . ."
"What kept me away from fine food, at first," I said, "was the image of the gourmand being a pompous stuff-shirt. But then when I read The Gastronomical Me, my outlook changed. Since then I've viewed food as an adventure to be enjoyed with friends without a bunch of fuss or pretense. Like your description in Serve It Forth -- when you belonged to the Alpine Club of the Cote d'Or -- of being tired together up on the hill and then restored in the cold air by a piece of chocolate and hunk of bread."
The afternoon pleasantly wound down. The crowd was gone. The room was quiet as we lingered over the last of the wine. Mary Frances paid the bill with no protest from "her men." As we were leaving, the chef poked his head into the dining room and received words of approval from Madame Fisher.
Standing outside the restaurant in the sunshine, wearing an old pair of Wayfarer sunglasses that are now "New Wave," M.F.K. Fisher looked to be beyond linear age -- with her books again in print: another generation following her art of living. I recalled a passage from The Physiology of Taste where, in writing about Gastronomical Mythology, Brillat-Savarin describes Gasterea as the muse presiding over all the pleasure of taste. "She was happiest in places where the grapevine grows, where orange trees send out their perfume, where the truffle waxes and wild game and fruits may flourish."
The same can be said of Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher, I thought as I closed her car door and she departed for home.
