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Book Review: The Wine-Lover’s Daughter
Jul. 16th, 2018 07:22 amThere 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!
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