My Life in France Read online

  Simca and I had never much cared for Sumner Putnam’s title, French Home Cooking, and simply called our magnum opus The Book. By now, Paul noted, The Book was growing “with the sloth, but I think the strength, too, of an oak tree.”

  Our pattern was that we’d work on separate recipes at home (Simca in Paris, I in Marseille), and then we’d trade notes furiously through the mail, with the occasional in-person visit. Although Simca’s specialty was pastries, she had much to offer from her vast stores of culinary knowledge. I tested everything, and as the resident Yank was in charge of the actual writing. With all of this collaborative back-and-forth, our manuscripple had grown rather substantial.

  I did a quick calculation, and figured that—depending on font, page size, number of illustrations, and so on—the actual book might run as long as seven hundred pages. This worried us a bit: Would Houghton Mifflin want a book that long and detailed? Would America?

  We didn’t see any way around it. It was very difficult to tighten an explanation of a recipe while giving every step necessary for its successful making. We tried to pack our directions full of useful information, yet not make them so dense that the reader would have to keep turning back to notes on other pages. And we tried to present enough interesting themes and variations without any boring repetition.

  Writing is hard work. It did not always come easily for me, but once I got going on a subject, it flowed. Like teaching, writing has to be lively, especially for things as technical and potentially dullsville as recipes. I tried to keep my style amusing and non-pedantic, but also clear and correct. I remained my own best audience: I wanted to know why things happened on the stove, and when, and what I could do to shape the outcome. And I assumed that our ideal reader—the servantless American cook who enjoyed producing something wonderful to eat—would feel the same way.

  Houghton Mifflin hoped to publish our book by June 1954, but I didn’t honestly think it would happen until June of ’55 at the earliest.

  AUGUST 15, 1953, the day I turned forty-one, was as hot as a Turkish bath at La Brise. I inspected myself in the mirror for signs of decrepitude: my elbows looked as if they were withering away, but at least I didn’t have any gray hairs. My biggest problem was my continuing lack of worldliness. Maybe if you concentrate on the fact that you are forty-one years old, I scolded my reflection, you’d remember to be more worldly!

  While Paul was dragged away from his reading by friends for a “short hike” through the hot, prickly underbrush, Simca and I wrestled with our manuscript. We had gone over the first draft of the soup chapter at least twenty times by now, and I felt as though I were drowning in soup.

  Taking a break from the text, we decided to spend some time on the reality of soup. We made a marvelous aïgo bouïdo, or garlic soup, which used sixteen whole cloves of garlic, sage, thyme, and cheese-covered croutons. The garlic flavor wasn’t harsh: it was indescribably exquisite and aromatic. That evening we all feasted on it with lip-smacking gusto. Aïgo bouïdo was said to be good for the liver, circulation, physical tone, and even one’s spiritual health. After getting lost during their all-day trek, Paul and his friends had finally made it back to the house feeling famished. The garlic soup was a wonderful restorative, they said. With that, we added aïgo bouïdo to The Book.

  VII. BOULEVARD DE LA CORDERIE

  WE HAD TRIED without success to inspire our tubercular Swedish landlord to tell us whether or not he would be returning to Marseille. We loved his apartment, and you’d be hard put to find any place with the drama and intensity of the Vieux Port out your window. But it was so small that half of our household goods still remained in storage. Plus, it was cold, and I had taken to wrapping a big red bathrobe around my normal street clothes while working there.

  I’d heard about a bigger apartment for rent up on the hill, and decided to take a look. It was on the seventh floor of a newish building on the leafy Boulevard de la Corderie. It had a wide-spreading view over all the old city, a slummy area, the port, the sea, and the Vauban fortress. There were little balconies on the north and south sides, and sunlight flooded into the back all afternoon. It had six rooms, red-tiled floors, a big kitchen, enough room in the cellar for a wine cave; everything was bright, clean, workable, tasteful. But the rent was at the very top of our government allowance. We took it anyway.

  On our first day at 113 Boulevard de la Corderie, we sat on the sunny back balcony with our shirts off and ate lunch. It was such a nice feeling that we planned to do it every chance we got. That afternoon, I hoisted up a big empty crate, tottered a few steps, tripped on a pile of books, and fell with the box against one of the tall French windows leading to the front balcony: Wham! Crash! . . . Tinkle . . . winkle . . . inkle. Ah me, $21.50 worth of glass gone in a blink. To add insult to injury, we were startled awake at five o’clock the next morning by a series of wretched bugle calls squawking from the nearby fortress through the glassless door. The reveille came again at five-fifteen, six, six-fifteen, and at seven, when we finally rousted ourselves.

  Here we were again, establishing new patterns about where to hang clothes or turn on the heat, where to store food, and how to decorate the walls. The settling in would take time, but one thing that could not wait was the kitchen. Most French kitchens were designed on the assumption that a household domestic would be working in there—ergo, the place wasn’t attractive, convenient, or well lit. But my kitchen was my office. I liked to have my pots and pans hanging within easy reach, my cookbooks in the kitchen, and my counter layout to make sense (my kind of sense). So Paul and I designed a new layout of lights, shelves, countertops, and drawers to make it a useful space. After so many moves, we were becoming rather expert kitchen-designers by now.

  View from our apartment on Boulevard de la Corderie

  The first dinner guests to have the honor of an invitation to our new apartment were Clifford and Leonie Wharton, the new American consul general and his wife. They were a warm, honest, comfortable pair. They had a look that was hard for us to place at first. Then we learned that they were both mulatto: Cliff was said to be “the first Negro consul general” in the Foreign Service; he was a big, voluble, energetic lawyer who tended to bull his way through situations without bothering with nuances—“Ya! Ya! I get it!” he’d say, charging ahead. But he was smart and dynamic, and quickly befriended everyone. Leonie was smaller, quieter, and more instinctual. We served four kinds of wines that night—the first as an apéritif, the second with oysters, the third with chicken, and the last with cheese. Conversation was lively, especially once we got into the whole FBO mess.

  Thanks to a typical bureaucratic snafu, the Whartons were living in a hotel. This arrangement was the responsibility of the U.S. government’s Foreign Buildings Office (FBO), a group of architects, interior decorators, engineers, and real-estate agents whose job was to buy, sell, and equip buildings for U.S. diplomatic operations all over the world. Sometime in 1947, the FBO had bought two pieces of land in Marseille: one to build a consulate on (the current building was a rented, temporary space), the other to build the consul general’s residence on. For the former, the FBO bought a parcel of nice cheap land right smack in the center of Marseille’s stinkingest, most bar-and-whorehouse-infested red-light district. For the latter, they bought a plot at the very top of the most inaccessible, roadless, waterless, granite Annapurna for miles around (“But it has such splendid views!”). Now the U.S. government was stuck with these two white elephants, which had become the joke, and curse, of the entire Foreign Service.

  One day an FBO type showed up from Paris, theoretically to help settle the Whartons’ housing problem. When this chap started to go on about the value of the FBO’s white elephants, Wharton let him have it with a couple of wonderfully earthy zingers, including: “You can’t fertilize a five-acre field by farting through the fence!,” which stunned the man into silence. Later, after the FBOer had left, Wharton cracked: “Listen, I can stand it if a man pees on my foot, but, by God, when he tries to
tell me it’s raining, that’s too much!”

  OUR NEW APARTMENT was wonderful in many ways, but rarely had I known a place that suffered so many leaks, loose wires, smoke in the elevator, and other strange problems. There was a period when turning on the stove made the lights go out. We got an electrician over to investigate, and he fooled around with it for a bit. Somehow he fixed the problem, but even he didn’t know what he’d done. As he put on his beret and lit up his cigarette, he said, “Mais, il y a des mystères dans la vie.”

  One day, our downstairs neighbor trotted up in her brown bedroom slippers and said, “Madame, nous ne savons plus que faites-vous toute la nuit, c’est comme un tambour chez vous!” (“Madame, we don’t know what you are doing all night, but it sounds like a drum in your place!”)

  So I went downstairs to her apartment to see what the noise sounded like. When I gave the signal, our nice bonne à tout faire, Paulette, clattered about a bit up there, and, indeed, the noise sounded quite drumlike indeed. I apologized to the neighbor, and bought little rubber caps for the legs of our chairs, stools, and tables, plus some real French house-slippers so that Paul and I could shuffle about like an old bourgeois couple. Now we would be so quiet that no one would even know we were home.

  At about ten-forty-three one evening, while I was ever so quietly rinsing the dishes, a piece of the stove suddenly fell off. Trying to catch it, I knocked over the iron garbage can and screamed. Paul, who thought I had fallen out the window, came charging in to rescue me and knocked over two kitchen stools. Ha! So much for the New Quietude.

  VIII. ADIEU

  ON JANUARY 15, 1954, I surprised Paul at his office with a cute little cake that had a single candle stuck in the middle. It was his fifty-second birthday, and he was trying to ignore it. But when his staff all joined in singing, he was thrilled. I gave him a book about Brueghel, which so stimulated him that he declared he wanted to quit his job and just paint for the rest of his days.

  On February 1, a four-inch-thick blanket of snow covered the ground, and Marseille now looked strangely like Prague. It was twenty degrees outside, and everything that could freeze did, including water pipes, the oysters in front of the fish shops, and a few of the clochards huddled in alleyways. The trams couldn’t get up the hills. The taxis had no chains, so they stopped running. Buses skidded, so they stopped. Disconsolate householders were out huffing and puffing in the arctic chill, trying to clear the snow away from the cobblestoned streets and drooping palm trees.

  We were getting depressed about McCarthy again. From what I had read in Look, The Reporter, and other magazines, it seemed that this desperate power-monger was supported by Texas oil millionaires and that everyone in Washington was scared to death of him. It was beyond me how anybody with any sense of what our country was supposed to stand for could have anything to do with him, no matter how many votes he brought in. When I expressed my shock to Pop, he wrote:

  You are all steamed up about what Europe thinks of America. . . . You are falling right into the plan the Reds are developing—that of creating dissension and distrust among their enemies—ridiculing all efforts to break up their underground machines operating under cover all through every government body. . . . These people carrying the red badge have to be exposed. It’s a hard dirty job that has to be done and it takes a rough and ready person like McCarthy to do it. In his zeal he gets out of bounds now and then but that’s our business. It’s safe to say that a large majority of people here at home believe as I do. I think it’s time you two had a vacation at home and got the American idea and forget what the Socialistic element of Europe are trying to sell you.

  Pop was a congenital Republican; he and Phila simply didn’t know any Democrats other than us, nor did they want to. To Pop, the New Deal was a kind of New Death. He absolutely boiled and seethed with hatred for socialism. He considered “that man Roosevelt!” a socialist. And Ike had gone over to the enemy, too. In fact, everything was going to the dogs, and it was all the fault of the eggheads and left-wingers who liked foreigners. If the U.S.A. somehow got back to the “sound footing” of our isolationism of 1925, Pop felt, then everything would be all right.

  This was a primitive way of thinking, which didn’t take into account the ways in which the world had changed. To me, this battle of ideologies in America was the most fateful of all the wars under way around the world.

  Even my alma mater, Smith College, had gotten itself gummed up by the McCarthy witch-hunters. A Mrs. Aloise B. Heath, who headed the college’s Committee for Discrimination in Giving, issued a letter that, without any proof, accused five faculty members of being associated with organizations that were “Communist dominated,” or “Communist fronts.” Not only did Mrs. Heath’s committee accuse these five of being “traitors,” and the college of “knowingly harboring” turncoats, but she released her accusations to the public without first presenting them to Smith’s president or board for investigation, as the school’s rules require.

  I was so incensed that I doubled my annual contribution to Smith and wrote Mrs. Aloise B. Heath a scathing letter—which, in a way, was also a bitter denunciation of my father:

  In Russia today, as a method for getting rid of opposition, an unsubstantiated implication of treason, such as yours, is often used. But it should never be used in the United States. . . . I respectfully suggest that you are doing both your college and your country a disservice. . . . In the blood-heat of pursuing the enemy, many people are forgetting what we are fighting for. We are fighting for our hard-won liberty and freedom; for our Constitution and the due processes of our laws; and for the right to differ in ideas, religion and politics. I am convinced that in your zeal to fight against our enemies, you, too, have forgotten what you are fighting for.

  IN THE COURSE of devoting so many hours to The Book, Paul and I came up with a new way to illustrate the making of recipes: rather than the standard depiction of a cook working away at a table, we thought, why not illustrate, say, the trussing of a chicken from the cook’s standpoint? Paul pointed out that an artist would practically have to sit in the cook’s lap to achieve the right combination of technical exactitude and ideal point-of-view; the answer, clearly, was to use photographs. It would be too expensive to print hundreds of step-by-step photos in the book. But the photos could be the basis for simple line drawings that showed the cook’s hands and whatever food and tools were required. Besides, a drawing can actually be simpler and clearer, not to mention more aesthetically pleasing with type, than a photograph.

  As we talked, a plan evolved: I would cook something, Paul would photograph over my shoulder, and we’d send the resulting prints to an artist who would make drawings for the book. We spent a very enjoyable two hours experimenting on this in the kitchen. We discussed light angles, camera angles, proper backgrounds, how to position my hands to show a technique properly, exposure times, and all the other variables we’d have to bring into harmony. Then Paul hoisted his Graflex and flicked on his new bright floodlights, and we shot eight exposures as a trial run. (He would have loved to do the drawings himself, but simply didn’t have the time.)

  A few days later, we spent an entire afternoon shooting photographs of the various steps in cleaning and cutting up a chicken. The salon was tangled with light-wires, chicken gizzards, rolls of film, notebooks, knives, and a big tarpaulin. The camera was high up on a tripod. Paul stood behind it on a stool, attempting to focus without toppling over. Far below, a chicken was splayed on a cutting board on the floor, and I was lying on my stomach with my arms outstretched as I strained to demonstrate proper knifework.

  We were impatient to see the results of all this. But when Paul took his film to the local photo lab, we discovered it was run by a bunch of nincompoop amateurs. Upon seeing his negatives ruined by clipmarks, the photos besmirched with thumbprints and printed on yellow paper, Paul grew so upset he momentarily lost his French.

  “That does it!” he sputtered. “The next batch is going to Paris!”—where Paul�
�s favorite printer, Pierre Gassman, would work his magic. (Gassman was world-renowned, and did much of the printing for famous photographers like Capa, Cartier-Bresson, and the like.)

  THE USIS WAS NOW called USIA (U.S. Information Agency), and its RIF (reduction in force) had trimmed Paul’s staff from twelve to four—two of whom were out sick while the other two were away on business. That left Paul alone on the consulate’s second floor, with five telephones to answer and no one to help with a torrent of letters, wires, aerograms, operations memos, and special requests.

  One of the “sick” ones was Henri Pousset, the press assistant, who was non compos mentis because his father had disappeared. The old man was a former merchant seaman with a temper. It seems he had envied and/or hated Henri’s older brother, who couldn’t or wouldn’t get a job. When the mother protected the older brother, the father grew jealous. That, plus a lack of money and who knows what else, built up tension for two years, until the father just walked out the door and vanished.

  Henri was a sweet bourgeois man, and hated to admit all of this to Paul, who immediately forced him to go to the police. “What if your father is considering suicide, Henri?” Paul asked.

  “No, that’s not possible,” Henri replied. But in the next morning’s post, he intercepted a letter to his mother from his father containing all of his identification papers and a note on which was printed one word: ADIEU.

  Henri phoned the police.

  Later that day, the consulate received a call from the police in Menton, a town five hours away. They had just nabbed the old man on a cliff as he was about to throw himself into the sea! Henri leapt onto a train to retrieve his father. When they returned to Marseille, the whole family had an emotional reconciliation. A few days later, Henri said to Paul: “You have no idea how it is vonderfool at my home. My favver now is shacking hends wiv my bruvver for first time since two year!”