balzac's feast

Honoré de Balzac died today in 1850 at the age of 51, leaving behind an enduring legacy in French literature.  His life was generally busy with writing and living amid the intrigues of Parisian society, and he loved food.  While working on a book, he kept his appetites in check, eating little and opting instead for pots of coffee to keep his pen moving across the page.  At other times, dining to delicious excess was more his style, with no oyster safe from his appetites.  This is all well-detailed in Anka Muhlstein's Balzac's Omelette:  A Delicious Tour of French Food and Culture with Honoré de Balzac, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter.  If you're a Balzac fan, you already know how food is a frequent backdrop in Balzac's works -- and you've probably already read this book since it was initially published in the U.S. in 2011.  If new to Balzac, the focus on the delights of the table and on 19th century French cuisine -- combined with the captivating character and words of the author himself -- will make Balzac's Omelette a tasty read.

Flicoteaux's restaurant is no banqueting-hall, with its refinements and luxuries; it is a workshop where suitable tools are provided, and everybody gets up and goes as soon as he has finished. The coming and going within are swift. There is no dawdling among the waiters; they are all busy; every one of them is wanted.

The fare is not very varied. The potato is a permanent institution; there might not be a single tuber left in Ireland, and prevailing dearth elsewhere, but you would still find potatoes at Flicoteaux's. Not once in thirty years shall you miss its pale gold (the color beloved of Titian), sprinkled with chopped verdure; the potato enjoys a privilege that women might envy; such as you see it in 1814, so shall you find it in 1840 ... When the whiting and mackerel abound on our shores, they are likewise seen in large numbers at Flicoteaux's; his whole establishment, indeed, is directly affected by the caprices of the season and the vicissitudes of French agriculture.  By eating your dinners at Flicoteaux's you learn a host of things of which the wealthy, the idle, and folk indifferent to the phases of Nature have no suspicion, and the student penned up in the Latin Quarter is kept accurately informed of the state of the weather and good or bad seasons. He knows when it is a good year for peas or French beans, and the kind of salad stuff that is plentiful; when the Great Market is glutted with cabbages, he is at once aware of the fact....

From A Distinguished Provincial at Paris (Lost Illusions) -- Honoré de Balzac

the literary legacy of philomena guinea

I had read one of Mrs. Guinea's books in the town library--the college library didn't stock them for some reason--and it was crammed from beginning to end with long, suspenseful questions:  "Would Evelyn discern that Gladys knew Roger in her past? wondered Hector feverishly" and "How could Donald marry her when he learned of the child Elsie, hidden away with Mrs. Rollmop on the secluded country farm? Griselda demanded of her bleak, moonlit pillow."  These books earned Philomena Guinea, who later told me she had been very stupid at college, millions and millions of dollars.

From The Bell Jar -- Sylvia Plath

Pictured:  Woman Reading -- Kuroda Seiki, circa 1890 (Tokyo National Museum)

mango pain

. . . Aziz turned to topics that could distress no one.  He described the ripening of the mangoes, and how in his boyhood he used to run out in the Rains to a big mango grove belonging to an uncle and gorge there.  "Then back with water streaming over you and perhaps rather a pain inside.  But I did not mind.  All my friends were paining with me.  We have a proverb in Urdu:  'What does unhappiness matter when we are all unhappy together?'  which comes in conveniently after mangoes."

A Passage to India -- E.M. Forster (1924)

Pictured:  Mangoes (detail) -- Francisco Oller, circa 1901

rich shaw, poor shaw

Irwin Shamforoff, better-known as Irwin Shaw, was born on February 27, 1913 and grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where he most likely did not live in the lap of luxury.  Shaw followed a similar path as other NYC-connected literary men of his generation (J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Herman Wouk):  sons of immigrant families who attended college then served in World War II, with the war experience later providing inspiration for acclaimed fiction and/or film and theater adaptations. 

In Shaw's case, his 1948 novel The Young Lions put him on the literary map, with a later movie version starring Marlon Brando, Dean Martin and Montgomery Clift earning its share of award nominations.  Shaw, who also wrote for radio, theater and film himself, continued to have success on the big and small screen, and while this and particularly Rich Man, Poor Man surely boosted his bank accounts, he did seem to lose some of his purely writerly reputation along the way.  He produced some very well-crafted short stories, however, including "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses" and "The Eighty-Yard Run," the latter of which -- about the downward slide of a 1920s college football hero -- is excerpted here:

That was the high point, Darling thought, fifteen years ago, on an autumn afternoon, twenty years old and far from death, with the air coming easily into his lungs, and the deep feeling inside him that he could do anything, knock over anybody, outrun whatever had to be outrun...[h]e had practiced the wrong thing, perhaps.  He hadn't practiced for 1929 and New York City and a girl who would turn into a woman.

Irwin Shaw died in 1984 in Switzerland.  Unfortunately, the troubled marriage and heavy drinking of "The Eighty-Yard Run" were also reflected in his life beyond the typewriter, but if Shaw's boyhood dream was to be a successful writer, he surely managed that long football pass.

rest in peace miss lee

I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.

To Kill a Mockingbird -- Harper Lee (April 28, 1926 - February 19, 2016) 

dumas and the duel

I had wished the duel to be one with swords; M. Gaillardet insisted it should be with pistols. I have a strong repugnance to that weapon; it seems to me brutal and more that of a highway robber, who attacks a traveller from the shelter of a wood, than that of the honourable combatant defending his life. The thing I dread most in pistol-duelling (but I have only fought twice with this weapon) is unskilfulness, much more than dexterity. Indeed, two or three years before the period in which the events I am relating took place—namely, before 1834—I had had a pistol-duel; I have not spoken of it, not being able to give the name of the man against whom I fought, nor to tell the reasons why I was fighting. In that duel, which took place at seven in the morning in the Bois de Boulogne, in the neighbourhood of Madrid, my adversary and I were placed at twenty paces distance from one another. Lots were drawn as to who should fire first and the advantage fell to my adversary. I planted myself, with pistol loaded, at a distance of twenty paces and I waited for the firing with the muzzle of the barrel of my weapon in the air....

My Memoirs, Vol. VI -- 1832-33 -- Alexandre Dumas (The Macmillan Company, 1909) 

Pictured: Alexandre Dumas circa 1832 (from Wikimedia Commons)

the fountainhead's fascinating semi-sideliners

Today author and philosopher Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, with her major claims to fictional fame being 1943's The Fountainhead and 1957's Atlas Shrugged.  Interpretation of Rand's Objectivist philosophy and subtext can turn controversial -- discourse she probably would have enjoyed --  but it is interesting to note that Rand is rarely pigeonholed as a "female writer" and is generally referred to as just a writer.

For me The Fountainhead made a major impression when I first read it in college, but then some years passed and I started to think that Howard Roark and Dominique Francon were rather extreme and I also started feeling less pitiful contempt for Catherine Halsey and even Peter Keating.  Now I read it and get distracted by all the side characters in the many-peopled plot and wonder about their more detailed backstories.  (And kudos to Rand for making them resonate so vividly, whether she intended to or not.)  Like the weak-willed, porcelain-obsessed Lucius Heyer or wily newspaperman Alvah Scarret, or the misguidedly violent sculptor Steven Mallory.  Or the Chinese student artist who works with Roark at John Erik Snyte's architecture office.  The Chinese student never says a word because minorities don't really factor into The Fountainhead, but this nameless artist with no dialogue is as memorable as some of the novel's more heavy-handed characters.  Snyte has the student on staff to draw up plans for final presentation to clients.  In another scene, the Chinese artist steps aside "diffidently, in silence" when a client is brought into the drafting room by Snyte, then he returns to his desk and keeps on drawing unobtrusively, unacknowledged.  You have to wonder about this Asian man living in New York in the 1920s and his artistic training, and what it was like for him to work at a high-pressure Manhattan architectural firm where no one seemed to ever call him by -- or perhaps no one ever really knew -- his actual name.

And let's not forget Jules Fougler, New York drama critic, his voice "slow, nasal and bored."  Fond of wearing gloves and carrying a cane, he resembles two "sagging circles" set on top of each other in a beautifully tailored suit the color of goose shit or merde d'oie as Fougler describes it.

"Examine my case, if you will [Fougler said]...What achievement is there for a critic in praising a good play?  None whatever.  The critic is then nothing but a kind of glorified messenger boy between author and public.  What's there in that for me?  I'm sick of it. I have a right to wish to impose my own personality upon people.  Otherwise, I shall become frustrated--and I do not believe in frustration."

Do we see Fougler again or is he crucial to the plot?  Not really.  But is it interesting to wonder where he went afterwards and/or if he had Waldorf salad for lunch?  Yes, I kind of think so.