Biographies and Memoirs

The artist and writer Mervyn Peake,
the subject of  both memoir and biography
in this post.

This little compare-contrast is purely for my own amusement, dear reader. I expect there are very few people in this world who share my love of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books (although those that exist tend to be remarkably passionate about it.)

I read Gormenghast in high school for no reason that I can now recall. In A. Langley's proposed division between

those who wallow in the murky shadows of Gormenghast like hippos in the mud, and those who listlessly let Titus Groan fall from their fingers in the middle of the first sentence

... I was one of the former. I read that entire gargantuan puzzlebox of a book, then I tried to make my friends love it like I did. I watched the terrible BBC miniseries. I wrote Peake-themed essays for my college applications. I sought out every scrap of his writing I could find and plunged into his biography, as if I could trace this man's imagination and somehow find another story.

More recently, just for kicks, I picked up A World Away, the memoir written by his wife, the artist Maeve Gilmore, about her life with Peake. I had read the memoir before, but forgotten--or perhaps, never fully respected--what a remarkable storyteller Gilmore is in her own right. (It may also be possible that I was not an unbiased reader.) I reveled in the details Gilmore shares and mourned with her as her brilliant lover fades into early senility and untimely death. I made my roommate sit still while I read her the last few pages, in which Gilmore abandons the detached tone which she has been using and instead writes an direct and heartbreaking narration of a visit to him in the nursing home.

Immediately afterward, I picked up Peake's official biography, Malcolm Yorke's My Eyes Mint Gold, with the intention of using the two back-to-back to further my understanding of Peake and on his novels, which I planned to read again afterward.

Mervyn Peake and his wife Maeve Gilmore.

The experience of reading these two books--about the same subject--could not be more different.

While at first, I appreciated Yorke's more expanded view of Peake's life (as Gilmore begins her story with their first meeting, and only summarizes Peake's early life later), I soon became disappointed in Yorke's execution. My Eyes Mint Gold is exhaustively researched, and the exhaustion carries over to the reader. At far too many points, the narrative of Peake's life devolves into Yorke listing off the other quasi-famous figures with whom he may have had the briefest of contact. It is as if by this tedious name-dropping, Yorke attempts to persuade the reader of Peake's significance. A better portrayal might have let him stand alone on his own two unusual feet, rather than tying him to a laundry list of other nearly important people. It makes for very dull reading, and fails to convey any meaningful depiction of the subject.

Moreover, Yorke takes a bizarre bent against Maeve Gilmore. When he cannot elide her presence from the record of her husband's life, he castigates her as a "spoiled little rich girl" and blames her for Peake's abysmal money management, at one point demanding to know why it did not "occur" to her to get a job to support her struggling husband. In Yorke's telling, Gilmore's own artistic career is overlooked as a babyish imitation of her superior partner. He also suggests repeatedly that Peake was unfaithful to his wife, although he eventually admits that no one he interviewed in the course of researching his biography could substantiate such rumors. It is as if Yorke deliberately wished to besmirch his subject's legacy.

The experience of reading the two books one after the other made Yorke's bias shockingly apparent. With A World Away still fresh in my mind, I could see how [name] quoted selectively from Gilmore's own memoir, leaving out key contexts or even changing the meaning of entire sequences. It's a cruel treatment and one which has me far more alert to the less-obvious prejudices held by other biographers--the information they deliberately withhold, misrepresent, or present in damning fashion.

Mervyn Peake surrounded by his paintings. His wife
was the muse and model for most of his work.

My Eyes Mint Gold claims to be the most "factual" telling of Peake's life, shading certain of Gilmore's personal memories as being unreliable or impossible. It is nevertheless a bone-dry and soulless account of a man's colorful and brimming life. Its most tantalizing contents are the excepts from Peake's less popular works, both poetry and fiction, and the descriptions of his art, most of which is not actually reproduced within the pages. As an attempt to convey the life of Mervyn Peake, however, I would have to say that it fails. 

Perhaps one could take these two divergent tellings of the same man's life as the difference between autobiographical writing and memoir.

Or, perhaps, the difference between a book that was written out of love and one that was commissioned for a paycheck.

Review: "The Devil in the White City" by Erik Larson

"I was born with the devil in me. I could not help that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing."

Occasionally I have a craving for really solid narrative nonfiction. In The Devil in the White City (subtitle: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America), Erik Larson chronicles the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and the serial killer in its midst. It wasn't a particularly filling "meal" of a book, but it gave me a taste of the weird and unusual history which I love.

If the 1893 Chicago World's Fair was mentioned in any history class of mine, it was swiftly overlooked. Larson's loving chronicle brings to vivid life an era and a spectacle which I find now hard to forget. The number of visitors to the park on October 9th of that year set the record for highest attendance at any peaceable event in history!

Larson splits his narrative into three paths. One follows the architects, engineers, artists, and showman who attempted to surpass the glory of France's "Exposition Universelle" in 1889 in a fraction of the time. Another tracks the mentally ill man whose delusions led him to assassinate Chicago's leading figure in his hour of triumph. The third, and most riveting, closes in on H.H. Holmes and the dozens--possibly hundreds--of women he murdered during the days of the fair.

Review: "Old-School Comfort Food" by Alex Guarnaschelli

I've said before that no one will ever love me as much as I love food.

I love eating food. I love preparing food. I love shopping for groceries to make food. I love copying out recipes for exciting new food I haven't tried to make before. I love watching shows about people who have way more skills than I do making (and then eating) food.

My favorite food show is Chopped, in which pro and semi-pro chefs are handed a basket of mystery ingredients and challenged to whip up an appetizer, entree, or dessert before time runs out. Invariably, the basket contains something weird and terrible like squid brains or a bag of gummy bears.  I've learned a lot about cooking from watching these chefs tear through the kitchen, turning disaster into deliciousness.

(If you haven't ever been forced to watch Chopped with me, dear reader, you can watch a few full episodes here to get the idea.)

On this my favorite show, I have a favorite judge: celebrity chef Alex Guarnaschelli. Alex (to use the familiar form of address) is a little grouchy and a little ridiculous. She likes her food to be "whimsical" and has a very disconcerting habit of staring unblinkingly at a contestant while she lifts a forkful of food to her mouth. (She also apparently has a 'thing' for burly firemen, but one must watch a lot of Chopped before that become clear.) As the executive chef at two top New York restaurants, and the daughter of another famous cookbook editor, she released her own cookbook earlier this year--entitled Old-School Comfort Food: The Way I Learned To Cook.

On Christmas Eve I read this cookbook cover to cover. I texted my favorite lines to fellow Chopped lover Traci of Traci J. Brooks Photography, who had given me the book as a present. I snapped phone photos of the food and of Alex's goofy illustrations, which I suppose is the foodie equivalent of sexting. And I cried a little bit, but that might have just been the Christmas Eve talking.

Food is love, isn't it? I bet every chef has talked about food being love (and love being food) at some point in their life--whether in their kitchen or in their cookbook, in an interview or on a TV show about stealing blenders, or in a dim booth in some late-night dive over one too many glasses of whatever fancy-schmancy wine chefs are supposed to drink.

(As I type this, I'm imagining some outraged chef, red-faced and spittle-flecked, pounding the table and insisting that food is food and nothing else, and also that love is a lie. Then my imaginary outraged chef begins crying into a beurre blanc, whatever that is. It's Christmas Eve for him inside my head, too.)

But I digress.

Yes, food is love. If you take the much-discussed Five Love Languages, you'll find that they are about food, too. Food is time; food is a gift; food is an act of service. Food is about touch, intimately so: the sizzling touch of meat to a hot pan, the delicate touch of a knife blade against the fragile skin of a tomato, the seductive touch of caramel melting over the tongue.

And food is definitely about words. From "I'll have the soup of the day" and "What's the recipe for this" to "Brown already, the guests are almost here" and "Please don't be burned, please don't be--AUGH" and lastly, the three most sublime words in the English language: "om nom nom."

Even in solitude, food is love.

While I'm cooking alone, it's an act of generosity to myself. I want to take care of the body that putters around all day. I want to treat my palate to the flavors it likes best. (Sometimes that's nothing more than ramen noodles with eggs stirred in. Other times, I'll go for broke and make cider vinegar steak with roasted asparagus and goat cheese-stuffed mushrooms on the side. This love is unconditional.)

While begging the egg whites to just turn to stiff peaks already before my hand gets a cramp, I'm thinking about the friends to whom I'll be serving those meringues. I think about the time I made them from memory for my grandfather, who passed earlier this year, and the rum balls one of my aunts brought to the same Christmas. As the cookies go into the oven I dwell on the memory of that lovely time.

While meticulously copying out recipes from cookbooks to put into my file, I look for gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free treats I can share with the people who matter most to me, whose allergies make cooking for them a challenge. It's a challenge I want to rise to meet, because cooking for them is--here we go again--a labor of love.

So food is love. Let's take that a step further and say that love is family.

Family is a concept that has a much broader embrace than we usually think. It's grandmothers and grandfathers, parents and children, but it's also that small family of two lovers hand in hand. It's the boss who has your back and the friend who brings you soup when you fall ill. It's the barista who recognizes you and slips you a free drink. It's the online buddy who sends you care packages when your beloved cat dies.

On Chopped, the great majority of the contestants list their family as both the reason they started cooking and the reason they want to win. They tell stories about the girlfriend who postponed grad school in order to support her partner's cooking career. The children whose favorite dish is the very same one the chef has just offered for the judge's critique. The grandmother in Guatemala, whose delectable recipes comprise the chef's earliest memories, never written down and now lost to time.

The memoirs of cooks are never a listing of what dishes they served at which restaurant. Instead, they talk about the great chefs who trained them, and the people who worked on either side of them in the steaming hell of a line kitchen. That is a family of a sort, too: a temporary one, where blood is shared (remember: the worst accidents are caused by a dull knife) even if genes are not. These memoirs are punctuated by the food they ate with this white-hatted family; each dish mentioned has a human story behind it. The food is the memory, and the memory lives on in the food.

Food is love, and love is family. Why not take it full circle to say that family is food? Family, whatever its shape in your life, is what fuels you. It gives you strength to get up out of bed. Family is the flavor that sets your people apart from the faceless crowds of the world. Family is sweet, overpowering, sour, smoke-filled, cold, comforting, full of zest... all in turn and all in time.

Food is love, and love is family. and family is food.

Now, about the cookbook in question: Alex Guarnaschelli wrote a really good cookbook. It's full of funny anecdotes and Alex's little cartoons of food (the sad parsnips were my favorite.) She offers recipes that are delicious without being absurdly complicated, and doesn't have her knickers in a twist about storebought ingredients. Her approach to flavors uses a lot of "brightness," which I like in my own food--bringing the flavors out of a dish with just a touch of acidy citrus, or a dollop of sour cream, or a splash of vinegar. I'm a big fan. It's a good book. The end.

Review: “Heat” by Bill Buford

Bill Buford is successful and happy in his career as a reporter when he befriends the famous New York chef Mario Batali. What was meant to be a simple interview spins out of control as Mario invites Bill to work for him. Untrained but eager, Bill begins work as a lowly assistant in the kitchen of Mario’s three-star Italian restaurant.

A classic comedy of errors ensues--but Bill’s perseverance and maniacal need to Understand Food sees him rise in skill and rank through the kitchen. He is sanctified (as it were) by the hellish fires of the grill.

Mario contemplates setting up the onetime reporter with a restaurant of his own, but Bill has caught the cooking fever. New York is no longer enough for him. He wants to go to Italy and learn where Italian food began. There are little old women in the hills with pasta-making secrets no one else remembers. There are butchers whose handling of meat is said to be operatic. Bill trades the typewriter for the filleting knife--perhaps for good.

***

  5 out of 5 stars (grump below the cut) ***

Review: “A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains” by Isabella Bird

To escape the unhealthy climate of her homeland, English writer Isabella Bird travels the globe, from Hawaii to Tibet, Australia to Turkey. When she visits the mountains of Colorado in 1873, she is already a fearless veteran traveler.

In the newly settled state, there are a hundred miles of untamed wilderness for every town, and hotels are an even rarer sight than English gentry. Her letters to her sister describe a world rough-hewn and ungentle, populated by desperadoes and consumptives. The bleakness of human life is placed in sharp contrast to the timeless magnificence of the Rocky Mountains that surround them.

But the staggering radiance of the landscape is not the only source of beauty that Bird discovers on her journey. In the lonely sanctuary of Estes Park, human generosity reaches a sublime state. By necessity, doors are thrown open to the traveler, for a night or for a month. Here is a world with no space for tourists, only participants.One's neighbors are one's lifeline, and bitter feuds and intense rivalries are laid aside in the face of the mutual need to survive.

Bird plans to visit Colorado only for a short time, but her departure is delayed at every turn. In an economic downswing, the frontier banks refuse to cash her English banknotes, leaving her dependent upon the charity of her newfound friends. Thunderous winter storms close the mountain passes for weeks on end while supplies run scarce. Her hosts, initially dubious of this well-bred foreigner, recognize Bird's skill as a rider and employ her on the roundup of their far-ranging mountain cattle. Meanwhile, the notorious outlaw "Mountain Jim" Nugent, a fellow Englishman in exile, courts Bird with magnificent style, desperate to keep her near him.

Bird describes her time in Colorado in vivid detail, from the shifting colors of the sunset on Long’s Peak to the firelight on Mountain Jim's scarred face, her eyelids freezing shut on a snowy night and  her ride of eight hundred miles in the dead of winter. She writes with keen criticism of human folly and foibles, but also with compassion and wonder. She punctuates it all with that particular dry English humor that makes her tale a delight to read.

*** 4 out of 5 stars (grump below the cut) ***