The Wine Lover's Daughter: A Memoir Read online

  My father was partial to all things fabricated with skill and effort: boots, books, bridges, cathedrals, and, especially, food. He preferred cheese to milk, pâté to liver, braised endive to salad.

  There was nothing—not even dips—that he hated more than grapes. If they garnished a serving of, say, Camembert and crackers, he would leave the plate untouched. Kim once asked him, “Daddy, if you love wine so much, why do you hate grapes?”

  He replied, “Food should be as far as possible from its origins.”

  Kim is sure that he was thinking about more than wine. The “subtext”—a term our father used frequently, since he believed most statements were either too subtle or too disingenuous to be taken at face value—was that he wanted to be as far as possible from his own origins, too. After all, he had put a great deal of skill and effort into fabricating himself. Id vas an Ardt.

  In his seventies, he recalled that as a young man he had looked around him and realized that things were run by people who spoke well and who were not Jewish, not poor, and not ugly. He couldn’t become a gentile, but there was nothing to stop him from acquiring money and perfect English. The ugliness was a self-deprecatory exaggeration. It is true that The Wall Street Journal once referred, not altogether flatteringly, to his “extraordinary physiognomy, a cross between Edward G. Robinson and Charles Laughton”; it is also true that, explaining his fondness for long, thin panatela cigars, preferably Upmann 240s, he once wrote, “As I am, alas, neither long nor thin, my preference for the shape must be compensatory.” But his silhouette was streamlined by the expensive clothes he was able to afford in his prime (though he remained a clueless dresser who always needed help choosing them), and, because he was witty, charming, and never, ever vulgar, he rarely had difficulty attracting women.

  My father was from Brooklyn, a century before it became fashionable: Brownsville, Canarsie, Bath Beach, Brooklyn Heights, Flatbush, all of them crowded with immigrants and smelling of garbage and noisy with street fights. He described his family as belonging—just barely—to the lowest level of the lower middle class. He shared a bed with his two brothers in a succession of shabby, triple-locked apartments over a series of unsuccessful drugstores operated by his father, under whose guidance he jerked sodas, prepared salves, rolled pills, sold leeches, and dispensed condoms (which he thought were called “conundrums” and was told were used for storing toothbrushes). His father came from a village near Minsk, his mother from a village in the Ukraine so small it was said you had to enter it sideways. After his birth in 1904, his mother, a nurse, settled on “Clifton” by turning the pages of the Brooklyn telephone directory until she came to a name so fancy she had never heard it before. (“Fancy,” he once explained to me, “meant Christian.”) “Clifton” didn’t last long; it was replaced by the onomatopoetic nickname “Kip” after he suffered an extended bout of the hiccups at the age of one week. His parents owned a samovar and, when he was a boy, taught him how to drink tea with a sugar cube between his teeth. (“It dribbled. Also, I realized it was low class.”) He had a large number of female relatives who, whenever he visited, would sidle suffocatingly close and say, “Have a piece of fruit!”—or, as he told Kim and me five decades later, in a mock-Yiddish accent, “Hev a piss frrrruit!” He remembered the fruit, and perhaps the relatives, as overripe and unpleasantly squishy. I feel sure this is where the grape phobia came from.

  He learned to read at four. He recalled that before he was ten, in the lifelong conflation of reading and eating that would reach its apogee half a century later when he invented Wally the Wordworm, he “devoured” Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich along with the Rover Boys, the Pony Rider Boys, the Frank Merriwell series, the Dave Darrin series, more than seventy volumes by Horatio Alger, and an adventure story set in the Belgian Congo that made him an anti-imperialist for the rest of his days. At eight or nine he started writing down what he called his “reactions” to various authors, including Poe and Kipling, in a novel-sized notebook with fake leather covers. At thirteen he read Sophocles, Dante, Milton, and Melville. At fourteen or fifteen he read Maupassant, Meredith, Swinnerton, Chesterton, Gissing, Conrad, Shaw, Yeats, Synge, Wilde, and Wells. He became an expert in ambulatory reading, able to step on and off curbs and avoid bumping into pedestrians while walking to and from the library with a book in front of his face. His family wondered how he would find work when he grew up, since all he seemed able to do was read.

  His parents made a point of speaking English at home, rather than Russian or Yiddish, but it was accented and ungrammatical. My father recalled saying to himself, “This is wrong—wrong in the sense that two and two do not equal five, but also practically disadvantageous.” With the help of his elder brother, who had been trained in elocution by the drama coach at Boys High in Bedford-Stuyvesant, he learned English “as if it were Latin or Sanskrit,” and developed the hypercultivated voice—a voice so impeccable no one actually spoke that way except other people from Brooklyn who wished to sound as if they weren’t—that would later attract an avalanche of mash notes from female listeners during his years as a radio host and then help to make him, as Wikipedia so felicitously puts it, a prime example of “the highly educated, elegant, patrician raconteurs and pundits regarded by TV executives of that era as appealing to the upper-class owners of expensive early TV sets.”

  My father as a senior at Boys High, Class of 1920, already with trademark pompadour

  Following class day exercises that featured a Fadiman-devised parody of the ghost scene in Hamlet, he graduated from Boys High in January of 1920, when he was fifteen. (Many smart public-school boys of his generation skipped a grade; he skipped two and a half.) Eight months later, he crossed the East River and enrolled at Columbia. When he emerged from the subway at 116th and Broadway, wearing a jacket and a necktie, his first thought was that he’d never seen such a clean street. The round trip from Flatbush took two hours and forty minutes every day.

  The journalist Theodore H. White, a rabbi’s grandson who commuted in similar fashion from Dorchester to Harvard (and, before my father arrived on the scene, hoped to marry my mother), divided the Harvard student body of his era into three categories: white men (alumni of New England prep schools); gray men (public-school graduates and students from other parts of the country); and meatballs (local Jewish, Italian, and Irish kids who could not afford to live on campus). When my father arrived at Columbia, he was unquestionably a meatball. He spent his years there refashioning himself, through a strenuous but for the most part enjoyable regimen of self-stuffing, into something approximating foie gras.

  Two intelligible fields of study lay before him: the Western canon and the WASP social code. He readily mastered the first, progressing with Wally-like avidity through the reading list of John Erskine’s General Honors course (Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Augustine, Aquinas, Spinoza, Fielding, and Freud, among more than forty others): the wellspring of the Great Books movement. His friend Jacques Barzun considered my father “the bearer of all Western culture since the Greeks” and recalled that every issue of the college literary magazine contained “one or more of his poems—often a sonnet—or an essay, a fragment of philosophy translated from the French, or an imaginary scene between figures in a tragedy by Sophocles.” He made substantial headway in the second field of study as well, learning how to comport himself in the living rooms of professors with long Anglo-Saxon pedigrees whose equally pedigreed wives offered him tea from porcelain teapots rather than samovars and smoked salmon on toast points rather than overripe fruit.

  The greatest impediment to his social education was the fact that his leisure time—the hallmark of the beau monde—was nonexistent. He worked his way through Columbia, not only paying the bulk of his own tuition ($256 a year, of which a state scholarship covered less than half) but saving enough for an occasional stretch in a dormitory ($67.50 a semester). He washed dishes, waited tables, sorted mail, tutored classmates, took attendance, sold magazine subscrip
tions, ran a bookshop in Penn Station, wrote reviews for The Nation, listened to a retired Wall Street speculator with a weak bladder declaim Shakespeare’s erotic verse, gave lessons on French symbolist poetry to a blind actress, served as a companion to a mentally impaired boy who enjoyed tossing him down a small hill in Harlem, and broke in pipes.

  Broke in pipes?

  I remember him patiently explaining this to me when I was a child. The rich boys smoked expensive pipes; new pipes were unpleasant to smoke until a layer of carbon had built up inside the bowl; he was therefore paid to pre-smoke them for a few weeks. This struck me as a Sisyphean tragedy. (He had, of course, recounted to Kim and me the myth of Sisyphus, along with the other essential chestnuts of Greek mythology.) What could be worse than having to give up something just when it got good and start all over again with something bad?

  The rich boys were the ones who bought the upper-crust regalia advertised in the Columbia Daily Spectator: solid gold Sheaffer pencils, Rogers Peet luggage, Tom Logan golf shoes, Earl & Wilson detachable collars (“The informal dance at the country club is not so informal that you can afford to wear a collar you are not sure of”). My father should have hated them, but when he talked about the rich boys his tone was always amused and more than a little envious. He didn’t want to dethrone them; he wanted to become them.

  I now see my father’s envy as a painful but potent motivator. His generation of self-invented men—most of them Jews, the sons of grocers, peddlers, druggists, tailors, haberdashers, fishmongers, pants pressers, night watchmen, suspender makers, jewelry salesmen—fell into two categories. When they left their immigrant neighborhoods for college, they took a good look at the WASP establishment and were either so angry that they wanted to tear it down or so dazzled that they couldn’t wait to join the club. In my father’s Columbia cohort, which over the years has become legendary for its abundance of public intellectuals, the demolishers became Communists and fellow travelers: Herbert Solow, David Zablodowsky, grad student Felix Morrow, and Whittaker Chambers, one of the few gentiles in the group, though not a wealthy one. (It was my father who, perhaps inadvisedly, encouraged Chambers, until that point an admirer of Calvin Coolidge, to read The Communist Manifesto. Chambers later became a Soviet spy before switching sides and becoming a vehemently anti-Communist journalist.) Chambers called the circle ernste Menschen—serious men—whose ardor for learning he attributed to “a struggle with a warping poverty impossible for those who have not glimpsed it to imagine.” Most of the joiners became academics: Mortimer Adler, Meyer Schapiro, and Lionel Trilling, a middle-class boy with a narrower river to cross but an equally powerful thirst for Western culture. I don’t think anyone wanted to join more fervently than my father. Though he flirted with left-wing politics, it was hard to declare lifelong solidarity with the working class when he was trying so hard to stay out of it.

  You might assume that wine appreciation was among his newly acquired social graces. Not yet. It was Prohibition. My father frequented speakeasies in the West Forties, Fifties, and Sixties. Who would go to the trouble of whispering a password through a peephole and giving a secret handshake while worrying about the possibility of a police raid, and then say, “May I please have a glass of Gevrey-Chambertin Clos Saint-Jacques?”—which, in any event, would almost certainly have been unavailable because hard liquor was so much more profitable to bootleg than wine? During Prohibition, whiskey and gin became far more popular than wine and beer because they packed more alcohol per ounce and were thus comparatively cheaper to transport and easier to hide. Customers came not to sip a leisurely glass with dinner but to get soused. (Or jazzed, jingled, piffed, piped, owled, oiled, canned, zozzled, squiffy, sloppy, scrooched, spifflicated, loaded to the muzzle, fried to the hat, slopped to the ears, stewed to the gills, and lit up like the Commonwealth, to mention some of the 105 terms for drunkenness that Edmund Wilson, who would succeed my father as book critic for The New Yorker, compiled during the twenties.) My father introduced Lionel and Diana Trilling to each other in a speakeasy. As an old woman, Diana told him, “I don’t think that I had a date, whether it was with you or Lionel or anybody we knew in common, in which I didn’t come home drunk.” The Trillings favored Bullfrogs and Brandy Alexanders. My father favored pousse-cafés: seven layers of liqueurs (grenadine, crème de cacao, maraschino, curaçao, crème de menthe, parfait d’amour, and cognac, poured in sequence, heaviest first), whose colors he could never quite make out because of the limitations of speakeasy illumination. Nonetheless, he recalled, “I had full confidence that, together with the reciting of Swinburne, they made up the iridescent symbol of abandonment.”

  He graduated from Columbia in 1925 with a Phi Beta Kappa key paid for by one of his professors, since he couldn’t afford the fifteen dollars; a reputation as a wit so celebrated that fellow students crowded into elevators with him, hoping to catch a Fadimanism or two between floors; the ability to mingle with people who did not drink tea with sugar cubes between their teeth; and unsullied oenological virginity. Until he filled that last gap, his education would not be complete. Reading about Western civilization wasn’t the same thing as swallowing it.

  5

  Gods

  I was sent to private schools chosen to scrub away any vestiges of meatballdom. If I had any, they would have come solely from the paternal side. My mother was descended from distinguished Utah Mormons, an extraction so far removed from the Jewish/WASP and Brooklyn/Manhattan dichotomies that she was free to move with equal, insouciant ease between the world my father had left behind and the one to which he had immigrated.

  When I was in the sixth grade at one of those private schools, I was assigned two long themes.

  In the first assignment, we were to write about a Greek god. Which one do you think I chose? Correct. In “Drink to Dionysus,” after describing how the fun-loving god with the crown of grape leaves learned to make wine and “journeyed through Greece and far-off lands, giving wine to human beings,” I observed that Apollo, who had for no apparent reason barged onto the last page of my theme,

  was kind, sensible, and rational. This is the “correct” personality for a civilized person to have, but that few possess. So many people are like Dionysus, though, the god who symbolized the crazy, uncontrolled, irrational, but enjoyable way of life.

  What must my teacher, Mrs. Louise Smith, have thought of this peculiar assertion? Did she have any inkling that I had somehow recognized I was more Apollonian than Dionysian—doomed to a life of carefully controlled cerebration, good at being correct, bad at letting go?

  In the second assignment, we were to write a report on a foreign country, presented “creatively” in the form of an ersatz diary. Mine (seventeen pages, because I was such an Apollonian goody-goody) was titled “La Belle France.” Along with the population of Marseille and the number of people who had committed suicide by jumping off the Eiffel Tower, it contained the valuable intelligence that “Bordeaux is bottled in abruptly-shouldered bottles, while Burgundy bottles have more sloping shoulders.” (Duh. I’d known that since I was six.) After “visiting” Bordeaux, I wrote:

  I cannot describe the endless underground cellars, where the wine is aged in casks for a year or so before bottling. The coolness, and the odor of aging wine is unique. We tasted the wine. I thought it would be strong and sour (a word shunned by wine connoisseurs—they call it dry). But it was lovely, not at all like the wine my father has at home.

  The last sentence was a joke, though it may have sailed right over Mrs. Smith’s head. I knew that the hundreds of bottles my father kept on X-shaped racks in the pantry of our house in Los Angeles—laid horizontally, he explained, so their corks would not dry out—contained lovely wine, even if my palate was not yet ready to appreciate it. (When we’d lived in Connecticut, the bottles he planned to drink during the next few weeks had been stored in his office and the rest in the basement, near the bench where my brother performed chemistry experiments, many of which involved small explosions. Ki
m always worried that he’d blow up the wine and our father would never speak to him again.)

  The final diary entry in “La Belle France” was ostensibly written in Paris. On my last night, “as I looked up at the stars, pinpoints against a black velvet pincushion, I realized how much I would miss France. I had grown to be a part of it.” I’m not sure about the pincushion, but I know where “I had grown to be a part of it” came from. As my father had told me many times, that was how he felt about France.

  6

  Kismet

  My father went to Paris for the first time in 1927. He was twenty-three. “My wife had by a few weeks preceded me there,” he wrote in “Brief History of a Love Affair,” “so that when I arrived she was already wearing the city like a glove.” That summary left out one or two minor details, including the fact that the wife in question had preceded him because she had run off with an Italian count. (Or a baron. My father told the story both ways. Once, when I tried to pin him down, he answered, with a wicked grin, “I can’t remember. Which is better?”)

  In most households, a story about a beautiful but unfaithful first wife might not be ideal dinner-table fodder, but in our home the Retrieval of Polly was a family favorite—enjoyed even by my mother, the second wife—partly because my father’s narration lent it an irresistibly epic quality, like the quest for the Golden Fleece or the Holy Grail, and partly because we all knew the real prize was not Polly. It was the glass of white Graves he drank in the lunchroom of the Bon Marché department store.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  The initial hurdle was financing the quest. One of his Columbia professors introduced him to Bennett Cerf, the chairman of Random House; he asked Cerf if there was any available work; Cerf asked him if he knew German; and presto! He had an assignment to translate two volumes of Nietszche for the Modern Library. Depending on the rendition, he was paid either a hundred dollars apiece or a hundred dollars for the pair. Either way, it was enough for a third-class passage to Le Havre. Because his shared cabin had no table, he spent all day in the ship’s bar, a glass of warm beer (he still had never tasted wine!) next to his German-English dictionary as he translated Ecce Homo and The Birth of Tragedy, the latter of which is still in print, nine decades later, in a Dover Thrift Edition.