Customer Reviews

Poet of the Appetites: The Lives and Loves of M.F.K. Fisher

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I enjoyed Joan Reardon's intimate biography of the food writer MFK Fisher quite a lot but the pleasures of reading it deepened into dispiriting reflections on how intrusive biography can be. Taking its title from an inane description of Fisher;s writing by John Updike, POET OF THE APPETITE peers almost literally into the abyss, the destruction and mixed feelings left behind by a talented, "play-acting" lady's sweep through life. Reardon details the events of Fisher's three marriages almost as though she'd been there, and she brings to life some long affairs as well. Before reading this book, I don't remember knowing that Fisher had often had to fight off members of her own sex, and occasionally she succumbed, bragging about it later. In contrast to the three dimensionality imparted to Fisher's male lovers, it is perhaps unfortunate that Reardon seems unwilling to portray the estimable Marietta Voorhees as anything other than a quarrelsome, needy, aged and ugly pest, whose function in Fisher's life was to whine and to fret about her mother.

Meanwhile a comparable affair with a man, her late in life hook up with Esuqire editor and Hemingway buddy Arbold Gingrich, a married man no less, is presented as kind of cute in that old-lovers Cocoon way.

Most distasteful is Reardon's prompt, efficient way of laying out the whole sad story of Anna Parrish, Fisher's younger daughter. After reading the facts of her life in this book, how could poor Anna ever raise her head high again? Reardon eviscerates her as a hedonistic hippie who let her toddler walk across a six lane highway unattended, while she was having a manic episode on a commune. I guess part of the point is that Fisher's karma finally caught up with her.

And what about the food industry, which drove Fisher to restless spasms of having to produce a new book every year even when she was dying, or trying to? Those late books are looking more and more grotesque, like the late De Koonings produced by "the Master" in the stages of Alzheimers Disease. And yet, as Reardon shows, Fisher was complicit in their production. Anything for a buck or so it seems. I liked reading the book, its cool analysis, its thorough research, its sturdy construction, best of all for showing us, in more detail than entirely necessary, how a legend fights its way into being, and folks, it isn't always pretty.

I, too, was greatly impressed by MFK Fisher's books - they had everything -- an appreciation of food, wine, travel, writing, husbands, lovers, children and always money. Yet, my appreciation of these tales, I think, reveal a retarded adolescence on my part.

Reardon's biography is well written, very informative, and considerate. It is the work of someone who is grown, mature. MFK Fisher never grew up. And I think that's what is at the heart of some readers dislike for her. To blame the biographer for this is shooting the messenger.

It's clear from this biography that MFK Fisher's personality did not grow beyond the age of 16 or so. Her children were props to her romance of her life. It was beyond cruel not to reveal the father of her daughter. I think that Reardon had to deal with some bad feelings of her own about MFK -- the mystification that occurs when people we admire do not seem admirable at all. From there, how do we accept their work -- do we decide that the artist's life has nothing to do with the work?

The romance Fisher created of herself, the mirror she created in her work, should have been obvious to me as a reader. No one's life could be so fluently lived. Yet, I can also see that her theatrics must have been quite compelling, very enlivening...but not real.

There is a darkness to her character that Reardon describes but never actually states. So I end up seeing this biography as completely necessary because MFK Fisher is part of our culture. She inspired many imaginations -- culinary, literary, everyday. But it was all a romance... a dark romance of someone in love with her image -- an adolescent.

This is a first rate biography for its fairness, its scholarship, and its clear writing.

`Poet of the Appetites, The Lives and Loves of M.F.K. Fisher' by Joan Reardon is, obviously, a biography of America's greatest culinary essayist. It is important to distinguish Ms. Fisher's subject from her great contemporaries, Julia Child and James Beard, who wrote about food and cooking. The point of the title of this book is that Ms. Fisher wrote about eating and the enjoyment of eating.

Ms. Reardon is eminently qualified to do the biography of Ms. Fisher, as she was a friend and associate of Ms. Fisher for several years and a commentator on her works in earlier writings. Her main problem was that the eminent writing stylist, Ms. Fisher wrote so many memoirs on various parts of her own life that it may have been hard to compete with her subject.

In Ms. Reardon's favor is the fact that Ms. Fisher had a tendency to `play fast and loose with her renditions of events' (quote from Ms. Reardon's introduction). This means that while Ms. Fisher's description of, for example, her early 1930s life with her first husband in Dijon in `Long Ago in France: The Years in Dijon' may be more interesting to read than Ms. Reardon's account of the same period, Joan Reardon is more likely to be giving us the unvarnished story.

Part of my problem in reading this biography may have been the fact that I knew relatively little of Ms. Fisher's life. Unlike my reading the biographies of Julia Child and James Beard, I had no sense of anticipation to discover how, for example, Julia Child acquired her passion for French cooking.

My exposure up to this point had been a brief essay by James Villas on an encounter with Ms. Fisher late in her career. And, many of her most famous pieces were published by the early 1950's, when the biggest events in her life were her private problems with husband number two and her daughters. When I reached this point in her life, the reading becomes much more labored.

Ms. Reardon's narrative is, I am convinced, extremely accurate, albeit not very engaging. It is obvious from financial difficulties why Ms. Fisher wished to disengage from her second husband Donald Friede, but I simply get no strong sense of why she fell out of love with her first husband, Al Fisher, aside from her interest in Dillwyn Parrish.

As I write this, I get the sense that maybe I wanted too much, but I will go with my visceral reaction and say that Ms. Reardon's straight talk may not get behind the events quite as well as I may hope.

The problem may also be in the fact that where Child and Beard had such public, active lives, Fisher's life was quite private.

The very best thing about this book is that it gives you a new perspective on Fisher's own writings and add to their value. The book may or may not encourage you to read Fisher's works, in spite of John Thorne's enthusiastic recommendation on the back cover.

My final take on this book is the fact that I have read other culinary biographies with more interest than I got from this book, but I still consider this an excellent biography of a very important American writer.

Just like the author of this biography, I had read MFK Fisher's books and wondered who she was. Who were the men in her life? How did she learn to write the way she did? This book has all the answers and then some.

If you are interested in food history, cooking, family life or travel, this book will please you. MFK Fisher was a fascinating, exasperating person who had a fabulously interesting life with sojourns in France, mysterious love affairs and a zillion excellent meals.

The author does a wonderful job of never, ever boring the reader. I kept asking myself: How could she plug ahead through so much research, so many years, never rushing, never overdoing the details, getting it all just right? But she did it somehow and for that I admire her.

If you have read the published journals and collected letters, this book is largely redundant. Ms Reardon has meticulously documented how she has supplemented these with interviews and excerpts from the Fisher papers at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. Despite the significant effort and research, I'm not sure that this book has added significant content or understanding. I believe that we are all human beings with our own frailties and foibles and I think that Ms Reardon has tried to fairly capture that aspect of Ms Fisher's life. However I think Ms Fisher's voice in the published journals and letters does this as well.

It's hard to compete in a book that tries to tell the story of someone who is best known for writing about herself. Reardon does a great job of making the reader feel along for the ride which was seldom without fellow travelers anyway. You soon learn that Fisher was not always honest (or perhaps not always correct) in the details of many of the twice-told descriptions of events in her life, and tended to modify the circumstances to fit the tale she was telling at the time. Getting the facts right does not diminish Fisher's stature with the reader, because the stories are remarkable enough in the unvarnished versions.

Unlike many of the better known Americans in France during the first half of the century, one of the first things Fisher did was to learn French and immerse herself in the daily life of the people. Ultimately this served the purpose of giving her entree to French kitchens, but she began this long before she discovered her metier. She did not isolate herself, as many did, with other expatriate American artists and writers but dove into French culture and French institutions, doing the best she was able to live like a French person. When she returned to America, she brought with her a life plan to write about French life at the table that served her well as she become one of the most successful writers of her generation.

Fisher was a remarkable woman with many talents, and Reardon brings her to life.

This is the best, and by far, the most revealing look ever at M.F.K. Fisher. The author has done her homework.