Book Review: The Wine-Lover’s Daughter
Jul. 16th, 2018 07:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerThere are few writers I would follow if they decided to write a history of the life and times of dust bunnies, but if Anne Fadiman decided to do so, I would not only read it, but consider myself honored to have the opportunity.
Therefore I leapt at the opportunity to read Fadiman’s memoir, The Wine-Lover’s Daughter, about her father the book critic, essayist, radio host, television guest, etc. etc. Clifton Fadiman.
Now, full disclosure: I read an introductory essay Clifton Fadiman wrote for a book - it was a manly Western of some variety; I forget exactly which because I didn’t end up reading it, because I found Fadiman’s jocular male chauvinism completely insufferable. He kept going on - in far more graceful prose than this; I take nothing away from him as a stylist - about how this was a MANLY book for MEN and if any little ladies happened to find themselves reading this, they might want to find something more suitable, but if they persevere they might find the book a refreshing delight from the effete tea party books they usually read, etc. etc.
Barf and gag me.
Fadiman fille acknowledges her father’s chauvinism, and notes the complicated way that his chauvinism interacted with raising an actual daughter. He supported not only her writing career but her growth and development as a person: the letters he wrote to her while she was in France on a class trip as a teenager are a delight to read.
(Although the book is mainly about Clifton Fadiman, there’s a good bit about the rest of the family as well. I feel that I got to know them all in Ex Libris and it’s nice to have, as it were, a reunion with them in this book.)
She also writes movingly about the inferiority complex that dogged Fadiman père’s life, which stemmed from growing up poor and Jewish in Brooklyn. There’s a sequence when Fadiman fille is writing magazine article about père and he asks her not to mention that he’s Jewish. If he were missing both legs, he argues, he wouldn’t want her to write about that either.
And I very much enjoyed the book’s discussion of wine and wine connoisseurship, not least because I, like Anne Fadiman, have always liked the idea of wine without being able to get into wine itself (although wine is not a family legacy so I was not nearly so heavily invested in the idea of one day learning to like it.) The discussion of the biology of taste is fascinating, as well as the meaning that we invest in certain tastes, and - in the context of her father’s wine cellar - the fact that there are some legacies that you can’t pass on.
It’s not a thick book but there’s quite a bit in it. Highly recommended, particularly for people who like memoirs.
***
A lagniappe: The Wine-Lover’s Daughter led me to look up Caroline Heilbrun, who - aside from a book in which she dissects Fadiman père’s sexism - wrote a study called Writing a Woman’s Life, in which Heilbrun “builds an eloquent argument demonstrating that writers conform all too often to society’s expectations of what women should be like at the expense of the truth of female experience.”
(So, for instance, a biography of a woman will often focus heavily on her relationships with men while all but ignoring her relationships with other women, because society deems relationships with men - familial as well as sexual - more important than relationships with women. I’m not sure if this is actually part of Heilbrun’s argument, actually, that’s just what came into my mind when I read the summary.)
This book was published in 1988, so I suspect a lot of its critique has entered into the mainstream, but I may read it anyway. It has a section on Sayers! How can I resist?
***
Heilbrun also wrote (under the pseudonym Amanda Cross) a series of mystery novels with a female English professor as the protagonist. (Death in a Tenured Position is evidently particularly scathing in its indictment of the way academia treats female professors.) I repeat: how can I resist!
Therefore I leapt at the opportunity to read Fadiman’s memoir, The Wine-Lover’s Daughter, about her father the book critic, essayist, radio host, television guest, etc. etc. Clifton Fadiman.
Now, full disclosure: I read an introductory essay Clifton Fadiman wrote for a book - it was a manly Western of some variety; I forget exactly which because I didn’t end up reading it, because I found Fadiman’s jocular male chauvinism completely insufferable. He kept going on - in far more graceful prose than this; I take nothing away from him as a stylist - about how this was a MANLY book for MEN and if any little ladies happened to find themselves reading this, they might want to find something more suitable, but if they persevere they might find the book a refreshing delight from the effete tea party books they usually read, etc. etc.
Barf and gag me.
Fadiman fille acknowledges her father’s chauvinism, and notes the complicated way that his chauvinism interacted with raising an actual daughter. He supported not only her writing career but her growth and development as a person: the letters he wrote to her while she was in France on a class trip as a teenager are a delight to read.
(Although the book is mainly about Clifton Fadiman, there’s a good bit about the rest of the family as well. I feel that I got to know them all in Ex Libris and it’s nice to have, as it were, a reunion with them in this book.)
She also writes movingly about the inferiority complex that dogged Fadiman père’s life, which stemmed from growing up poor and Jewish in Brooklyn. There’s a sequence when Fadiman fille is writing magazine article about père and he asks her not to mention that he’s Jewish. If he were missing both legs, he argues, he wouldn’t want her to write about that either.
And I very much enjoyed the book’s discussion of wine and wine connoisseurship, not least because I, like Anne Fadiman, have always liked the idea of wine without being able to get into wine itself (although wine is not a family legacy so I was not nearly so heavily invested in the idea of one day learning to like it.) The discussion of the biology of taste is fascinating, as well as the meaning that we invest in certain tastes, and - in the context of her father’s wine cellar - the fact that there are some legacies that you can’t pass on.
It’s not a thick book but there’s quite a bit in it. Highly recommended, particularly for people who like memoirs.
***
A lagniappe: The Wine-Lover’s Daughter led me to look up Caroline Heilbrun, who - aside from a book in which she dissects Fadiman père’s sexism - wrote a study called Writing a Woman’s Life, in which Heilbrun “builds an eloquent argument demonstrating that writers conform all too often to society’s expectations of what women should be like at the expense of the truth of female experience.”
(So, for instance, a biography of a woman will often focus heavily on her relationships with men while all but ignoring her relationships with other women, because society deems relationships with men - familial as well as sexual - more important than relationships with women. I’m not sure if this is actually part of Heilbrun’s argument, actually, that’s just what came into my mind when I read the summary.)
This book was published in 1988, so I suspect a lot of its critique has entered into the mainstream, but I may read it anyway. It has a section on Sayers! How can I resist?
***
Heilbrun also wrote (under the pseudonym Amanda Cross) a series of mystery novels with a female English professor as the protagonist. (Death in a Tenured Position is evidently particularly scathing in its indictment of the way academia treats female professors.) I repeat: how can I resist!
no subject
Date: 2018-07-16 11:42 am (UTC)The fact that someone can be such a sexist and chauvinist and yet love and value one's female child is ... something that everyone should remember; that people's personalities have straight-up contradictory elements.
And the thing about women's relationships with other women: YES.
I had to re-look up the word lagniappe; it's one of those words that just never remain in my head. Did you know it ultimately comes from Quecha? So cool.
no subject
Date: 2018-07-16 01:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-16 11:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-16 11:17 pm (UTC)I think this applies with a lot of women, but I was thinking particularly of Louisa May Alcott wrt biographers focusing on a woman's relationships with men at the expense of her relationships with women. Her most popular book is all about her mother (who is depicted as practically a saint) and her sisters and her father makes but a shadowy appearance, but what do the older biographers write about? Her relationships with her father and Emerson and Thoreau.
And it's not that they were unimportant, but. There's got to be some balance here.
no subject
Date: 2018-07-16 11:22 pm (UTC)Louisa May Alcott biographers who want to focus on her relationships w/her dad and Emerson and Thoreau should just GO WRITE BIOGRAPHIES OF THEM for crying out loud. And yeah, I get wanting to hitch your Louisa-May-Alcott wagon to the Emerson-and-Thoreau stars (pretty sure Louisa tows Bronson rather than the other way around, so not including him), but yeah! Let's look at what's important to **her** if we want to understand her.
no subject
Date: 2018-07-16 12:26 pm (UTC)I think the only thing of Anne Fadiman I've read is Ex Libris, which I read around the time it came out and found delightful.
no subject
Date: 2018-07-16 11:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-16 01:25 pm (UTC)Heilbrun is amazing, I love her. I also love the Amanda Cross books, they start out a little stuffy but warm up into fantastic. Players Come Again is probably my favourite, altho they do reward being read in order.
no subject
Date: 2018-07-16 11:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-16 11:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-19 12:18 pm (UTC)I forget where, but not long after his death I read someone talking about how he and his intellect were much touted, but nothing much emerged aside from anthologizing and prefacing.
It sounds as if I'd like those biographies a ton.
no subject
Date: 2018-07-19 04:27 pm (UTC)The issue of why he never completed a book-length work is one that Anne Fadiman considers in The Wine-Lover's Daughter. He apparently planned to write a book about the history of children's literature, but if that preface to At the Back of the North Wind is any guide, then maybe it's just as well he didn't.
no subject
Date: 2018-07-19 12:19 pm (UTC)After she died I read an essay in, I think, The New York Times Magazine, about how she'd let down all her students by choosing suicide. What an ironic kicker.