Resurrection
Francis King
Not Now But NOW and Sister Age M.F.K. Fisher (Chatto and Windus £8.95 each) The best way to describe the sep-
tuagenarian American writer M.F.K. Fisher is to say that she stands in the same relationship to food as Robert Burton to melancholy.-In each case the subject is nar- row; but the author brings to it a vast, if ir- regular, learning, a wealth of literary reminiscence and a fastidiously calculated style.
In addition to such works as Consider the Oyster, The Gastronomical Me and The Cooking of Provincial France, M.F.K. Fisher has also written a novel, Not Now But NOW, first published in the United States way back in 1947 and at last issued here, and a number of autobiographical essays and short-stories, collected together under the title Sister Age.
About the novel, the author is more modest than it deserves. She only wrote it, she declares in her Afterword, because 'two men I dearly loved told me to'; at its first publication it proved to be 'a commercial turnip'; any publisher must be 'zany' to reprint it. In any case, it is not really a novel at all but a string of short-stories, she con- fesses.
At the centre of each of these four short- stories, widely separated from each other by time and place, is a femme fatale, Jennie, who, beautiful and heedless, brings disaster to everyone, old or young, male or female, rich or poor, who is sucked into her slipstream. The epithet most commonly used of her by the author is 'cold'. Thus, travelling to Lausanne by train in the 1930s, Jennie strikes up an acquaintance with an unhealthy Swiss burger, once perhaps dashing. From this man, a successful elec- trical engineer, she learns about his invalid wife, his neurasthenic daughter and his son, who has just returned from Algeria with a Little Thing of unacceptable colour and morals. Jennie at once sets about devastating all these lives. That accomplish- ed, she slips away from them, blaming them for not being worthy of her. `Good-by, good-by, she called, Good-by, all you clowns. I hate you, with your selfish gabble, with your thoughts all for your own puny, stupid lives.'
In the next and, because of its insecure conversational idiom, least successful of the episodes, Jennie finds herself in Victorian England, where, having survived an abor- tion, she is given haven in the mansion of a rich and philanthropic old woman, whose personal maid eventually she becomes. At once she begins to plot against both her benefactor and the rest of the staff. Next, in
the American Mid-West in the 1920s, Jen- nie sets about snaring the bored, discontented and emotional daughter of a doctor, once more with catastrophic results. In the final and best episode, set in San Francisco in 1882, Jennie is the poule de luxe of a rich, lecherous, cynical English nobleman, whom she betrays — without his knowledge, she mistakenly imagines — in a series of liaisons with his closest buddies.
Since Jennie clearly shares her creator's love of food and drink, one wonders how she manages to keep so trim; but this im- probability apart, this is a chilling study of the kind of woman who can make the blithe declaration: '1 have one religion, if any. There is me. And there is nothing.'
The subject of the majority of the pieces in Sister Age is either dying or the loss of love that is often a form of it. These are most memorable when they record — as in an account of a stay in a spartan French household in the Massif Central with a centenarian whose motto is Vive la gate!' and his reticent, prissy professor of a son some incident from the author's own peripatetic life. There are also some fine stories about the rejection of the old by their children and grandchildren. In one, 'A Kitchen Allegory', a widow buys quantities of food, 'madly and stupidly', for a tran- sient daughter and grandson, who barely touch it. In another, another widow slowly drifts out of her mind under the oppression of a loneliness in which people often even do not remember her name. Though written in such a way that it might also be fiction, one guesses that the brilliant 'The Weather Within' is a real-life reminiscence of how the author, travelling on a freighter from the States to Antwerp with her daughters, was involved in the macabre business of coping with the death of a fellow passenger at the moment of docking. In comparison, two ghost-stories, 'The Lost, Strayed and Lot 666: the biro Hitler used to write his Diaries Stolen' and 'The Reunion', are too manipulative in their glib fancy to be whollY successful.
The final impression left by this, beautifully written collection is one 01 stoical bleakness. 'Children and old people and the parents in between should be able to live together, in order to learn how to die with grace together,' the author declares. But, at least for the moment, another course is set for us: 'We grow up fast, work hard while we are strong, and then die in a premature limbo.'
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