The third triumph came after he received his first paycheck for Information Please. He specified that he didn’t feel victorious when he received it. “I was happy to get it, but no more than happy,” he wrote. The glory was yet to come.
Without hesitation I bolted from my Manhattan apartment, hailed a taxi (an unheard-of extravagance) and was driven to my parents’ humble living quarters in Brooklyn. The weather was warm, the sun shone. Almost conspiratorially I asked my mother and father to come out on the porch, where family conversation was traditionally set. Dramatic pause for effect. Then, awed by my power, I said, “You will never be poor again.”
He confessed to his journal that he was jubilant not because he would be able to make his parents’ lives more comfortable but because he had just refuted their long-held assumption that he would never find work when he grew up because all he could do was read.
I believe these three moments of triumph were inextricably bound up with his recurrent feeling that his outer life was merely a dream and his shy, awkward, afraid-to-fight seven-year-old self was the real Clifton Fadiman. He claimed they were his only moments of triumph. That sounds absurd, but if they allowed him to transcend that inferior self without feeling like a fraud, it makes sense. You might expect that his successes at Simon & Schuster, The New Yorker, and Information Please—even the pleasure of receiving his first big check—would have counted for more than a couple of knocked-out teeth, a talcum-powder can, and a conversation on a Brooklyn porch. No.
When he was eighty-seven, he selected his favorite journal entries (including “Triumph and Humiliation”), sorted them by theme, and mailed them to his agent. He titled the manuscript Worth a Jot. He dedicated it TO SUSANNAH.
Susannah is my elder child, born when my father was eighty-five. By that time, I’d moved up in the world from the apartment with the broken kitchen window to a SoHo loft, acquired when lofts cost less than expensive cars, in a former box factory whose freight elevator still bore the koan-like sign WE KNOW YOU ARE OLD AND FORGETFUL, BUT PLEASE RETURN THIS ELEVATOR TO THE GLUEING DEPARTMENT. My father ascended in that elevator to pay us a visit whenever he came to New York for a Book-of-the-Month Club meeting. He was an excellent grandfather. In a sense, he’d been prepping for the role for decades, through his research on children’s literature, his work as a founder of Cricket magazine, and his insistence that small children were “a superior race, possibly Martian invaders who under our influence are gradually assumed to lose the memory of their native land.” When Susannah was a baby, George and I were so anxious to keep her happy that we exhausted ourselves by changing our shtick every fifteen seconds: a new song, a new funny face. My father just kept on doing whatever he was doing, slowly and calmly, whether it was drawing from his impressive repertoire of Mother Goose rhymes, alternately tapping his nose and hers with the tip of his finger, or mesmerically chanting her name over and over again like an elderly Jewish swami in a suit from Saks. She stared into his black-rimmed glasses with an intent expression for improbably long stretches, as if she had forgotten that babies cry. A few days before her first birthday, as he crouched before her in an attitude of tranquil expectancy, she took her first steps, straight into his arms. In Worth a Jot, he wrote, “I, close to death, am without ambition for myself and, in her way, Susannah has no ambitions for me. We are well-satisfied with each other. Peers.”
Worth a Jot was never published. His agent sent it out; it was rejected. I’ve run the 421 pages through a three-hole punch and put them in a loose-leaf binder, but I wish there were a good-looking hardback, with a photo on the back, to place on my shelves with the rest of my father’s books: four collections of essays and criticism, four children’s books, four translations, twenty-three anthologies, a high school textbook, a book of anecdotes, and nearly a hundred books to which he wrote forewords or afterwords. The books he wrote himself are all compilations of shorter work; aside from his slim volumes for children, he never wrote what he called “a whole book.” He never completed his critical history of children’s literature, though the books on which he hoped to base it sat reproachfully in his study for more than two decades; or Outside, Looking In; or a cultural critique called Technobarbarism he planned to write when he was in his seventies; or a book called American Novelists and American Life he planned to write when he was in his thirties; or a novel “about a boy and a girl” he planned to write when he was in his twenties. Why not? It had nothing to do with his work ethic, whose kilowattage could have powered his entire neighborhood. I think that in some way he felt he didn’t deserve to write a whole book, just as he once turned down a job as editor-in-chief of the Encyclopædia Britannica because he felt he didn’t deserve it. He felt he deserved to review books, and translate books, and collect other people’s work into books, and write short pieces that could be aggregated into books, but not to sit down at his desk, like the authors he reviewed, and watch three hundred pages—which, because he had such high critical standards, would have to be deathless—flow from his fountain pen.
In his fifties, he wrote, “When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.” In his eighties, there was more in him than there was before. Most people narrow as they age; he broadened. Perhaps his sense that he was regressing to his seven-year-old self enabled him to access a child’s openness to new experience. Though he was suspicious of computers, he was also curious, and during a visit in the early days of the Internet, I searched his name on my laptop. His eyes widened when nearly a hundred entries popped up. (Now there are 240,000.) “Remarkable,” he said, referring not only to the number but to the Internet itself and my astonishing ability to use it.
His literary tastes expanded. A section of favorite quotations in Worth a Jot included plenty of the usual suspects—Montaigne, Henry Adams, Francis Bacon—but also a sentence by June Jordan (“The street set up that way so cars can clip the people easy kill them even”) whose grammar and punctuation would once have caused him lasting pain. He collaborated with a specialist in Asian culture on a new edition of The Lifetime Reading Plan, a guide, originally written solo nearly forty years earlier, to one hundred books he believed everyone should read over the course of his or her life as “a source of continuous internal growth.” The initial list of authors, many of them drawn from John Erskine’s General Honors course at Columbia, included only three women—Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, and George Eliot—and not a single non-Western author. The revised list included Lady Murasaki, Sei Shōnagon, Valmiki, Kālidāsa, Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in, Omar Khayyam, R. K. Narayan, Yukio Mishima, and Chinua Achebe, among many other interlopers who would undoubtedly have caused Professor Erskine to raise an eyebrow.
The back cover of the original Lifetime Reading Plan
When my father was eighty-seven, he flew to New York to have surgery for spinal stenosis. I’d chosen a distinguished neurosurgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital, whose Jewishness mildly annoyed him—were there no doctors at Columbia Presbyterian?—but into whose custody he grudgingly remitted himself. I hired a private nurse to take care of him there for several days after his operation. Of course, because he was an insomniac, he couldn’t sleep. He was damned if he wasn’t going to get his money’s worth, and damned if he wasn’t going to find a point of intellectual commonality. Where did the nurse live? Harlem. Was she by any chance familiar with the Harlem Renaissance? Of course she was. What about Langston Hughes? One of her favorites, as well as number 36 on the “Going Further” list at the end of The New Lifetime Reading Plan, a sort of honorary purgatory for authors who might someday join the canon. And so, between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m., a light glowed in an eighth-floor room above 101st and Madison while two tired people discussed “Dream Deferred,” “April Rain Song,” and “Madam and the Rent Man.”
My father had long associated books and wine: they both sparked conversation, they were both a lifetime project, they were both pleasurable to shelve, they were the only things he
collected. The Joys of Wine called wine cellars “wine libraries.” As his taste in books broadened, so did his taste in wine. “Brief History of a Love Affair,” written when he was fifty-three, mentioned thirteen French and five German wines. That was it for Europe. North America was represented by a single vineyard in New York State. In his late sixties, after he and my mother moved from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara—closer to wine country—he started exploring California wines with, as he put it, “an open mind and a catholic palate.” At seventy, he wrote, “What a charitable provision of God or physiology to design our palates so that they remain, one hopes to the very end, not only educable but eager for education.” By his mid-eighties, his wine cellar, which had previously been an exclusive French club with an occasional German or Italian admitted on sufferance (but only if he was very well behaved), had become a multicultural potluck. Greece! Chile! Australia! Corsica! Yugoslavia! Everyone’s welcome! Come on in! Take off your coats!
His democratic enthusiasm was not boundless. “I would have been no less happy had some of the labels and the contents remained unfamiliar,” he wrote. That meant he hated them. English good manners, of course, demanded more diplomatic phrasing. “On the other hand, I am grateful for a dozen new experiences, journeys into hitherto unknown wine worlds, little astonishments, minuscule enhancements of life.” One of his most attractive qualities was his ability to change his mind. Half a century earlier, when he was reviewing books for The New Yorker, he used to reserve his final column each year for reappraisals of books he had underestimated, overestimated, or ignored on the first go-round. He called it his annual donning of sackcloth and ashes. Many books got a second chance, and so did he. His openness to wines he’d previously written off was another second chance.
On occasion, he even ignored the classic rules of wine pairings. I knew he’d really loosened up the night he drank a German white with a large plate of spaghetti.
18
Birthday
My father had two eightieth birthday parties. Both were thrown by the Book-of-the-Month Club, which had been among his many employers for precisely half his life. During those forty years his fellow judges had come to look forward to his comments on potential BOMC selections. On a book about Mount Everest: “We should take it because it’s there.” On a memoir by a Jesuit priest: “A hundred pages of virtue is all right, but 750 pages is too much.” On a book about bees: “It would be all right if our membership were made up of bees, but we have only a small number of bees—not enough to make any money out of them.” On Catcher in the Rye, whose greatness he recognized months before it was published: “That rare miracle of fiction has again come to pass: a human being has been created out of ink, paper, and the imagination.” Forty-six years later, J. D. Salinger joined Langston Hughes in the list of classics-in-waiting at the end of The New Lifetime Reading Plan.
Bow-tie assistance before his eightieth birthday party, 1984
Celebrating later with Jono, who likes champagne, and Kim, who doesn’t
The first party was a black-tie dinner for sixty at the Four Seasons, a New York restaurant, known for its Carrara marble pool and its Picasso tapestry, that was even more famous than La Pyramide, though its cognoscenti may have been more cognizant of money than of gastronomy. My father was in an excellent mood because earlier that day, after he called room service at the Hotel Intercontinental and ordered a ham sandwich without garnishes, a very large white plate had been delivered with two small naked triangles in the center: no lettuce, no tomato, no pickle, no potato chips. “That’s the most beautiful sandwich I ever saw,” he said in an awed voice. “I’ve been waiting eighty years for this.” A few hours later, when my mother knotted his bow tie from the front, he cheerfully observed, “That’s how morticians do it.”
This time I did not calligraph the menu. It was printed on a facsimile of the front page of The New York Times from May 15, 1904, the day of my father’s birth. The headlines included CHINESE RISING AGAINST RUSSIANS, HOLY WAR PREACHED IN TIBET, and CLIFTON FADIMAN BORN: BROOKLYN STUNNED BY GREAT EVENT. That last story, a collaboration between Sam Aaron and me, had been inserted into the two left-hand columns. Among its scoops: “Fadiman’s mother, Grace, was heard to complain that her son had turned down a bottle of milk and asked instead for a bottle of Château Mouton Rothschild ’29. His father, Isadore, explained that this request would be difficult to fill because it was only 1904.”
The center of the page listed the six courses and their accompanying wines—or perhaps I should say the five wines and their accompanying foods. The wines were chosen by Sam. One of them—Boyer Brut, a quasi-champagne akin to the Brut Crémant on which I got tanked at fifteen with Monsieur Cosnard des Closets—was described on the menu as “Cuvée Fadiman” (Special Batch Fadiman) and merits a bit of exegesis. By some feat of legerdemain, Sam had arranged to have the real label on every bottle replaced with one that bore my father’s photograph, flanked by bunches of grapes. On the left, the label read: “Won Gold Award as best French Sparkling Wine produced in the 1981 Vintage.” On the right, it read: “Won Double Gold Award as best human being produced in the 1904 Vintage.”
Three weeks later, the Book-of-the-Month Club hosted a smaller but in some ways even more memorable celebration at its monthly luncheon meeting. As usual, my father sat at the head of the table. As usual, there was good food and wine. Not as usual, the wine included a Château Lafite Rothschild 1904. It was a gift from Sam. He had chosen nothing less than the most famous wine in the world, a Premier Cru Bordeaux from a property on which vines had grown since 1234, a liquid “comparable to the ambrosia of the gods of Olympus” (according to the Duc de Richelieu, who credited to its frequent consumption the sexual vigor he maintained until his death at ninety-two).
My father and the wine were exactly the same age. I know the bottle well because he gave it to me. I keep it in my study, next to the 1835 Madeira: a wine library of two, though without the wine, displayed on a shelf above a large library of books. The scene on the label is as layered as a Japanese landscape painting: a grand château in the background, with two towers, one conical and one shaped like a pepper pot; then a wide terrace; then a line of trees; then a slender pond; then two laborers wielding rakes; then two gentlewomen in voluminous skirts, serenely taking it all in.
The eightieth-birthday menu at the Four Seasons
The bottle was shown to the table, but its contents had wisely been decanted. An octogenarian Premier Cru Bordeaux could be forgiven for throwing a little sediment.
My father said, “I don’t think we’ll get much of a bouquet.” He stuck his nose cautiously into his glass.
He raised his head. “I think it won’t have gone, but it may have gone lifeless,” he said. His voice grew reflective, a signal that he was entering storytelling mode. “I was once invited to a wine tasting with seven or eight people at Gene Tunney’s. He’d recently bought the wine cellar of a German baron. Great Moselles from 1899 and 1900. Rheingaus from 1878. We were agog. But they had all gone flat, every one. Every time we took a sip, we looked up at this great prizefighter, six feet one and a half, and said, ‘Interesting.’”
He rolled his glass.
He sipped.
“Interesting, Mr. Tunney?” said Wilfrid Sheed, one of his fellow judges.
“Better than interesting,” said my father. “I can’t say it’s great. But it is quite healthy. Of course, I’d drink as much as possible in any case, just to have it inside me as an historic relic.” (Leave it to my father to say “an historic relic,” not “a historic relic.”) “Of course, it’s amazing when anything survives to the age of eighty.”
My father had once written about Gene Tunney’s interesting wines. He described them as “noble ectoplasms.” For reasons of discretion—or perhaps because he feared that if he offended Tunney, he might end up with a left jab to the jaw—he transformed the boxer into a nameless football player who “could have demolished any seven of us poor indoor creatures at a blow.?
??
When I drank my allotted inch of Château Lafite Rothschild 1904, I couldn’t have said whether it was great, or healthy, or a noble ectoplasm. Of course, I had no idea what it should have tasted like. But the name stirred me. It meant something to me, too, to have the wine inside me as an historic relic.
As my father drank his half glass, I looked at him carefully. He had dropped the banter and had a strange expression on his face. He was concentrating hard. His social smile, in which his lips were pursed slightly as if to form the ideal passage for an incipient witticism, had been replaced by the smile of a child, guileless and wide. But he also looked as if he might cry.
A month later, I visited my parents in Santa Barbara. I drank wine with them at dinner every night. My father was pleased that the three of us could get through a whole bottle, since for years he and my mother had been able to manage only a half, and he usually had to recork it and finish the rest the next evening. One night he served us a ’79 Bandol red from Provence. He asked me if I liked it. I said yes.
I was lying. Or hoping. Or a combination of the two.
I’m pretty sure he knew that. He never said he was disappointed, just as he had never said he was hurt when I ditched him at the Father-Daughter Picnic. And I never confessed. It was more like a daughter feeling sure that her kind but conservative father knows she’s gay even though she hasn’t come out to him. And that makes me sad, because during my father’s old age so many other truths were exchanged.
When he was fifty-three, he had written:
I cannot leave much, but I have carefully seen to it that I own more wine than I can possibly drink before I die. (This is not hard to do; forgo a suit of clothes—no man needs to buy more than one every five years or so—and you have the wherewithal for three cases.) What good will three thousand dull dollars, which can at best yield five or six percent, do my son as compared with a thousand inherited bottles of wine, guaranteed to generate cheer and laughter and good talk long after my last swallow?