MFK Fisher, the crone years, at Christmas
"When I saw that I was no longer a helpless mess, a subhuman thing, but that I was instead an angry woman, that I was in a contained and tightly controlled rage, then I felt released, actually happy."
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Throughout her long career, M.F.K. Fisher, rhapsodizes. Whether her subject is peaches, oysters, friendship, flinty wine, sisters, garish cocktails, being young and foolish, betrayal, train rides, or walks in the mountains, hers is the language of romance—including its torment and cruelty. Her writing is always in the rearview, and nothing is boring in hindsight (why remember the unnoteworthy?), which gives Fisher’s writing its tension, no matter the topic. The stakes are high, even at lunch.
“Nostalgia,” wrote Helen Chandler, author of one of my favorite substacks, Old Diaries, is “the emptiest of all the emotions. Calorically dense but nutritionally useless.”
Yet nostalgia, that emotional junk food, may be my favorite narrative engine. Wanting, reaching, the melancholic outstretched hand. Homesickness, the hanging question, the unreachable destination.
Longing, we say, because desire is full / of endless distances.1
Some writers seem born to the register of hindsight. Joan Didion was a tender twenty-nine when she wrote the world-weary “Goodbye to All That;” M.F.K. Fisher, known off the page as Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, was the same age when she published her first of more than two dozen books, Serve It Forth in 1937.
“People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking?” she wrote in the foreword to The Gastronomical Me. “Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do?”
“They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft. 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. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it…and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied…and it is all one.”
Reading Last House, a book Fisher was determined to finish at the end of her life, is the voice of a changed woman. Here is the writing of someone bothered by arthritic pain, sleeplessness, and Parkinson’s dissolution of her lifelong companion: language. She struggles to type, then to read. Then others struggle to understand her speech.
Rightfully, she complains. She complains about her sleeplessness, about her telephone ringing, her visitors, her alarm clock.
She is no longer quite rhapsodic, but a different passion takes over these pages, one of anger and vituperation and spite. Of frustration and the dogged determination of a writer to cling to her most enduring love.
At seventy-six, she writes:
“Lately I have been wasting a lot of time, waking harshly into pained awareness of where the moon is in the sky, with phrases and even paragraphs ringing in my dream-brain-mind-machine, complete with commas and periods, because I am a careful writer, even asleep. And the sentences were good. They were well and perhaps truly spoken, but they were also cruel, cutting, potent, death-possible.”
She complains, fascinatingly and at length, about a young magazine photographer who arrives late, “moving like a beautiful giraffe with a very small head.” At once, the two are off on the wrong foot, and as the photographer fusses with the lights and chatters in a mostly-casual monologue, she returns to one cutting refrain:
“I’ve never had such a venomous cruel assignment.”
(How I would like to hear the beautiful giraffe’s version of events.)
In an unmailed letter written in 1989 at age 81, Fisher eviscerates a friend for his guileless complaints of age:
“Surely you must in some way have been prepared for this dreadful condition. You must have known somewhere along the line that you were bound to feel sadder and more miserable than you had in your whole life—you must have known, K., that if you lived past seventy you would ache and hurt and things would grow misty and so on and that you would endure them all.
[…]
I honestly feel, though, that you are grumpy because you are frightened, and I am very impatient about that because by now you should know better. You’ve had a whole lifetime to face the fact that you will be old and sad and aching, and now that you are old you are suddenly angry at being so.”
Had I read Last House when I was in my twenties, I wouldn’t have understood Fisher’s sourness, her meanness. I might likely have been offended by it. I wanted her to rhapsodize about Provencal produce. But it is twenty years since my first discovery of Fisher in the Saint Paul Public Library, and now, I have complaints of my own. I admire the voice that calls the “Aging Process” “a kind of sorting out of what is IMPORTANT.” The one who trots out the same phrase again and again. Je-m’en-fichiste. Who cares?
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