In 1963 the English poet W.H. Auden proffered the name of “America’s greatest writer.”
Hemingway had died in 1961. Faulkner in 1962. So in 1963 Auden chose another writer as America’s greatest: M.F.K. Fisher.
If you have never heard of this writer, join a club with members that include Dr. Ink. After considerable research, the Doc concludes that Auden has a good case, and that M.F.K. Fisher is not more widely known and celebrated for three reasons:
- She was a woman (Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher).
- She wrote nonfiction.
- She wrote about food.
To say that Fisher wrote about food is to say that Hemingway wrote about fishing or that Chaucer was a travel writer. Fisher, according to those who know her work best, invented a genre.
Fisher died in 1992 at the age of 83. According to the New York Times obit, Fisher wrote hundreds of stories for The New Yorker and 15 books of essays and reminiscences. In a Times book review in 1982, Raymond Sokolov wrote “In a properly run culture, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher would be recognized as one of the great writers this country has produced in this century.”
A simple Google search reveals the passion of Fisher’s admirers. Along with discussions of her books, Dr. Ink found websites devoted to her life, her writing, her cooking, a literary contest in her name, and references to film documentaries about her.
Doc decided to dip into one of Fisher’s most famous books, “How to Cook a Wolf,” written in 1942 and reissued with new commentary a dozen years later. The conception of this book reveals the author’s brilliance. The “Wolf” of the title is at the door, in the form of the German war machine. Wartime rationing makes cooking and eating well difficult, but as Fisher demonstrates, not impossible. In a time of war, good, hearty, economical food brings strength and comfort, to soldiers and to those on the homefront.
Even the act of boiling water can have cultural significance as this passage by Fisher demonstrates:
“There was a semiapocryphal figure, in my childhood, who could not even boil water. I forget who she was: A southern girl, I think, who went to finishing school in Virginia with my mother.
“‘Oh,’ my mother used to say, snorting a little and tossing her head half scornfully and half with a kind of wistful envy, ‘oh, she couldn’t even boil water!’ Then my mother would add, ‘…before she was married!’
“For a long time I believed that the first pangs of connubial bliss brought with them a new wisdom, a kind of mystic knowledge that slipped with the wedding ring over all the fingers of the bride, so that at last and suddenly and completely she knew how to boil water.
“Now, I believe otherwise. Now, I believe that few women, Southern or not, even virgins or not, ever realize the spacious limits of putting water in a pot and boiling it. When is water boiling? When, indeed, is water water?”
Born in Michigan, Fisher came of age in Whittier, California (Richard Nixon’s home town), an Episcopalian among Quakers. Her father was a newspaper editor. During high school and college she cultivated both her literary and culinary sensibilities. After her first (of three) marriages, she moved to Dijon, France, cut the mustard there, and spent most of her professional life traveling between European and American venues.
Her writing voice moves easily between the insignificant and the metaphysical, the gritty and the whimsical, the deadly serious and the off-beat.
“I began,” she wrote, “in Albion, Mich., and was born there on July 3, 1908, in a heat wave. I leapt forth only a few minutes before midnight, in a supreme effort from my mother, whose husband has assured her that I would be named Independencia if I arrived on the Fourth.”
As Dr. Ink reads M.F.K. Fisher, he is struck by the realization that he may never have ever read any food writing before — with the exception of an occasional restaurant review. Has he been missing something?
