The Wine Lover's Daughter: A Memoir

  23

  Port

  I learned that my father had cancer in October of 1998. He was ninety-four. Everything had been in readiness for years. Living Will. Durable Power of Attorney. DNR order. In Case of Death instructions (with revisions dictated frequently to his secretary and distributed to his family, each time with the directive to “Destroy All Previous Versions,” one iteration of which contained the sentence “As I have never died before, I do not know how the survivor manages these inevitable details”). Address and phone number of the Harvey-Engelhardt Funeral Home and Crematory in Fort Myers, at which we were enjoined to purchase the cheapest possible cremation and ask Mr. Harvey and Mr. Engelhardt to discard the ashes. What could be more gratifying for a man who liked to throw things out than to be thrown out himself? (In the event, I disobeyed him and, with Jono and his wife, Mary Lou, scattered some of the ashes on a few carefully chosen graves in their hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. This was almost certainly illegal, but it was nice to know that a few Fadiman molecules were in close proximity to those of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Bronson Alcott.)

  My father’s attitudes were also in readiness. For twenty-five years he had been copying stoic passages about death into his Worth a Jot journals and, after he lost his sight, scrawling summaries on Maxi-Aids pads. Homer on how a generation of men is like a generation of leaves that must fall so that new plants may grow. Socrates on the virtue of making one’s end in a tranquil frame of mind. Chuang-Tzu on how birth and death are like the rotation of the seasons. His favorite: George Bernard Shaw on the joy of being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap.

  Everything was in readiness, that is to say, except my father. Six years earlier he had been ready to commit suicide, but now nothing could have been further from his mind. There was simply too much enjoyment to be extracted from listening to books, reciting nonsense rhymes to Susannah and Henry, and drinking wine, about which he had once written, “Yes, we have had our ups and downs, wine and I, our misunderstandings and our reconciliations, our delights and our discords. On the whole, however, I think of ourselves as a model couple: faithful, mutually solicitous, still ardent, and, in the case of the lady, well preserved.” More than four decades had passed since he wrote those words. They were still true.

  I wasn’t ready either. When my mother called to say he had jaundice and might have pancreatic cancer, which indeed turned out to be the case, I was taken completely by surprise. He had lived so far beyond any reasonable expectation, rising Phoenix-like from the ashes of his blindness, that on some level I thought he was immortal. What did I expect? Not death. Nor would I have expected it if he’d been 104. In fact, part of me still believes that if he hadn’t gotten cancer, he’d be alive today at age 113, like a Russian Methuselah from a yogurt commercial, waiting for the next Talking Book to arrive.

  With Susannah, six months before his death, 1998

  He defied expectations again. We were told he’d be dead in three months, but he lasted for eight. I flew down from New York for three days every three weeks. Kim resigned from his several jobs in Wyoming and rented a cottage on Sanibel, ten minutes from our parents. Instead of sending cassettes, he read Book-of-the-Month Club manuscripts to our father in person and took down his dictated notes, one of the last of which, on a mediocre crime novel, contained the sentences “As a thriller it does not thrill. As a chiller it does not chill.”

  During the first three months, our father could still eat out at restaurants. Then he fell, and our mother knew she could no longer take care of him. She was sick too, though she hadn’t found out yet; after his death she would be diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and end-stage breast cancer, and would outlive him by only two and a half years.

  The day after my father’s fall, she and Kim drove him to a nursing home, took one look, turned around, rented a hospital bed, and moved him into Kim’s cottage. First he couldn’t walk, then he couldn’t stand, then he couldn’t bathe himself, then he had a series of transient ischemic strokes that robbed him of some easy words. One afternoon he couldn’t remember “carrot.” But on another, after I told him about an essay I was planning to write about Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and I thought he was asleep, he murmured, “Silas Tomkyn Comberbache”: the alias Coleridge used when he ran away from Cambridge and enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons. And one night, seemingly apropos of nothing, he said, “Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas.” Only after I found the wine folder and read “Remembrance of Drinks Past” did I understand that this was a line from The Faerie Queene. He’d quoted it when he described the 1927 Cockburn port that, on a stormy winter night, had offered him the consolation he badly needed. In his article, the double meaning of “port” was a witticism—a wine pun—but this time, in his last weeks, he had a different kind of port in mind. He must have been thinking of the line that followed: “Ease after war, death after life, does greatly please.” He was finally approaching readiness.

  Whenever I left to fly back to my family, his last word, as it had always been, was “Blessings.”

  On his ninety-fifth birthday, sitting next to a window with a view of palmettos and bougainvillea (not that he could see them), we ate Nova and sturgeon I had ordered from a New York delicatessen. After a lifetime of pushing Jewish food away, he craved it. It was as if he’d crossed the river in the other direction and was coming home to Brooklyn.

  Brillat-Savarin wrote that when his beloved great-aunt was dying, he told her it would do her good to drink some fine wine. She gratefully swallowed half a glass of the best his cellar had to offer, instantly grew stronger, uttered some suspiciously articulate last words, and expired. My father wasn’t so fortunate. He had once written that the palate was one of the last of the organs to decay. True, perhaps, but eventually the cancer trashed his sense of taste. He lost his desire for wine. It just didn’t taste right. The only drink he wanted was Guinness, which, he told Kim, “tastes like something.” His appetite evaporated when he saw too large a plate, too full a glass. He asked Kim to pour an ounce at a time, fifteen times a day.

  Every hour he was more worn out and ready for the scrap heap, in proper Shaw fashion, though Shaw had died at only ninety-four and my father went him one year better. Visiting nurses came, and he talked with them late into the night, just as he had in his room on the eighth floor of Mount Sinai Hospital. Kim cooked for him, changed his sheets, carried him to the bathroom, occasionally bathed him, and gave him eleven different kinds of pills each day. The physical care was harder for Kim than it was for me when I spelled him, perhaps because he’d never taken care of babies. Not that our father looked anything like a baby. He had always been mildly pudgy but now weighed less than a hundred pounds. His skin was translucent, and his back was covered with skin tags and cherry angiomas and iffy-looking moles of the kind you might have wanted a dermatologist to take a look at if the patient hadn’t been about to die of something else.

  I flew in from New York on my father’s last night. He was unconscious and breathing loudly and irregularly. I climbed into his hospital bed. It was the second time in my life that we’d spent the night in the same room. His breaths became less labored as soon as I lay down next to him: the sort of thing I’d read about but never put any stock in, because Fadimans, as you know, are a rational, secular bunch.

  The next morning, I walked out to the living room to talk to Kim. My father chose to die in that ten-minute window of privacy, as if not to be bothersome or overdramatic. It was Father’s Day.

  It is not true that people become something other than themselves as soon as they die. I kissed his forehead. I talked to him for a while even though I knew he couldn’t hear me. I told him what a good father he had been and that I loved him. I thanked him.

  Ten years later, I found the Cellar Book. He left me his papers and he knew I’d find it.

  The first sentence of “Brief History of a Love Affair,” which he wrote when he was younger than I am now, is “Like most love s
tories, mine will mean something to lovers; rather less to those merely capable of love; to the incapable, nothing.”

  That turned out not to be true. It did mean something to me.

  Notes on Sources

  Any memoir, especially one dealing with events that took place both before and after the author was born, relies on a mixture of personal and public sources.

  The essential grist was my memories of the just-under-forty-six years that my life overlapped with my father’s, along with the eighteen years I’ve spent since then continuing to try to figure him out. Memories are fallible, so I cross-checked them as much as possible with my brother Kim, who enriched the book with many of his own. I also looked through dozens of boxes of memory-triggering family photographs.

  As my father’s literary executor, I had access to all his files, which included, among many other things, the résumé on which he listed his hobbies as wine and the avoidance of exercise; his excessively complete medical records; his “In Case of Death” documents; and his WINE MEMORABILIA folder. His files also contained the letters he had received from dozens of writers, copies of a handful he wrote himself, and all the letters I had ever sent him, including those from my homesick summer in France in 1969. I also kept all the letters he sent me in France, in addition to hundreds he wrote to me over the next three decades. My mother saved many of his letters as well, including those he wrote to her nearly every day, both on board the RMS Queen Elizabeth and in England, during his month-long reporting assignment for Holiday magazine in 1958.

  I could not have written this book without the 194-page transcript of a series of taped conversations I had with my father in New York and Santa Barbara, ostensibly in preparation for “Clifton Fadiman at Eighty,” the article for Life (October 1984). My editors knew that the piece hardly required such exhaustive research and that most of the material would never make it in. (Magazines could afford to be more generous in those days. Thanks, Life.) This book contains no reconstructed or imagined quotations. When my father told me, apropos of his trip to Paris to retrieve his first wife, “There was nothing else to do but eat and practice our French and screw,” I recorded it; when he registered his horror of the lettuce garnish at the Quilted Giraffe, I wrote it down; when he smoked a panatela while showing me his wine closet, his cigar-muffled intonations were preserved on tape. The article itself also provided much useful material.

  Which brings me to the topic of writing about events one has written about before. When I began this project, I thought that if I had mentioned an incident in Life, however briefly, or in one of my later essays (for instance, my lunch at La Pyramide or my father’s attempt to reconstruct the Milton sonnet at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute), it had to be retired forever, even if I wished to tell it differently or at greater length. My family eventually convinced me that this was a bad idea—that this book was the thing I was going to write about my father, and leaving out anything good would be foolish.

  All extended quotations not from written sources are quoted verbatim or close to verbatim from those 1984 conversations; from notes I took, mostly in 1993, after my father lost his sight (I thought that I might want to write about his blindness someday or that the notes might prove useful for an essay of his own); and from the transcript of two marvelous conversations he had with the literary critic Diana Trilling, a close friend for more than half a century, mostly about Columbia in the 1920s but also about his childhood and his early career, recorded for the Columbia Center for Oral History Archives at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library on April 21 and June 7, 1976.

  The heart of this book is my father’s writing. Almost all his books are out of print, so I derived enormous pleasure from the prospect of sharing (one of his least favorite gerunds) his witty, articulate voice with readers who might not otherwise have the chance to hear it. His work also provided useful background information and occasionally, by some form of associative sorcery akin to that worked by the old photographs, stirred long-buried memories. I drew on his three essay collections, Party of One, Any Number Can Play, and Enter, Conversing; the introductions to two of his anthologies, Reading I’ve Liked (“My Life Is an Open Book: Confessions and Digressions of an Incurable,” the essay that made Carolyn Heilbrun vow to become “a Fadiman”) and Party of Twenty; both The Lifetime Reading Plan, which guided readers through a hundred Great Books, almost all by dead white males, and The New Lifetime Reading Plan, co-authored with John S. Major, which substantially broadened the list; The World Treasury of Children’s Literature (he never finished his critical history on the subject, but he published a dandy three-volume anthology of his favorite gleanings from his years of research); two collections he edited in his late eighties and nineties, The Treasury of the Encyclopædia Britannica and (with co-editors Katharine Washburn and John S. Major) World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time; and “To the Curious, Intelligent Reader,” a booklet-sized reprint of his remarks on accepting the National Book Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. I cannot omit mention of Wally the Wordworm, the children’s book, based on stories our father told to Kim and me, about the bookworm who ate his way through a dictionary. If you can find it, I recommend the original edition, illustrated by Arnold Roth, in which Wally wears a red baseball cap, rather than the later (and, in our family’s view, inferior) edition in which he wears a far-too-fancy yellow top hat and also, strangely, resembles a sperm. A Bede Productions audiocassette of my father reading the book aloud is occasionally available from used-book sites.

  I also made use of my father’s unpublished work: the manuscript of Worth a Jot, the compilation of journal entries he wrote in his eighties; the also-ran entries; and the notes he made when he was blind—some dictated to his secretary and some written in Magic Marker on Maxi-Aids pads—for his unfinished book When I Consider.

  One of my most crucial sources was, of course, my father’s wine writing. The New Joys of Wine—the revised, souped-up descendant of the original Joys of Wine, both co-authored with Sam Aaron—was open on my desk (leaving little room for anything else) during much of the time I worked on this book. I turned to it for information, for images so ravishing they temporarily made me forget I didn’t love wine, and for three of my father’s wine essays: the oft-quoted “Brief History of a Love Affair” (which originally appeared in Holiday, then in Any Number Can Play); “Seventeen Years Later”; and “Four Wine Epiphanies” (which originally appeared in GQ, under the title “Remembrance of Drinks Past”). Wine Buyers Guide, another Fadiman-Aaron production, gave me a sense of the wine world of the mid-1970s. I also drew on my father’s introduction to Dionysus: A Case of Vintage Tales about Wine, in which, among other things, he described the birthday dinner at Maud Chez Elle whose wine list I found in the WINE MEMORABILIA folder.

  From this point on, I will note sources by topic. This isn’t an exhaustive list. I’ve included only the works that were most helpful to me or potentially most interesting to readers. On occasion I’ve mentioned a discrepancy between accounts.

  On wine: Among the books I inherited from my father, my favorites were Notes on a Cellar-Book, by George Saintsbury (my father once wrote that it would still be read when all the author’s scholarship had turned to dust, though he later reassessed it with less enthusiasm); The Story of Wine, by Hugh Johnson; The Great Wines of Europe, by Ernst Hornickel; The Signet Book of Wine, by Alexis Bespaloff; and the Encyclopædia of Wines and Spirits, by Alexis Lichine, which I always liked opening because of its lavish inscription to my father. I enjoyed The Complete Wine Book, by Frank Schoonmaker and Tom Marvel, which my father published at Simon & Schuster soon after the end of Prohibition, though I had to buy a copy myself, since he’d kept only the pages he used as his first Cellar Book and, characteristically, thrown out the rest. Among more recent works, The Wine Bible, by Karen MacNeil, and The Science of Wine, by Jamie Goode, were particularly useful.

  On Roald Dahl: “Taste,” the story that fascinated me in the fi
fth grade, was from Dahl’s collection Someone Like You. The tan-and-lavender edition I originally read in the early sixties was also among the books I inherited from my father. “Taste” is reprinted in Dionysus and both editions of The Joys of Wine.

  On my father’s family: The spellings of my grandparents’ first names, like many names transliterated from Russian, differ in various sources. I’ve used “Isadore” because that’s how it appeared in the U.S. Federal Census for many decades, starting in 1900, as well as in Social Security and draft registration records, though elsewhere I’ve found “Isidore” and “Isidor.” The spelling of my grandmother’s original first name is even harder to pin down, because she called herself Grace for most of her adult life. The most reliable source available is the State of New York record of her 1898 marriage, which she signed “Bettemi,” though I’ve seen “Betteni” in other sources. She was also sometimes called Bessie.

  On my father’s childhood: “A Note on a Brooklyn Drugstore Childhood” (in Enter, Conversing) provided useful details. The early achievements of my father and his formidable elder brother, Ed, came from 1916 and 1920 editions of the Boys High School Recorder, as well as from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the Brooklyn Standard Union. An amusing discrepancy between accounts of my father’s first encounter with alcohol: In “Brief History of a Love Affair,” he wrote that when he was “about eleven,” he drank an excess of kümmel at “the house of a family friend.” When he told me about the incident, he said he was about fourteen—a likelier age, given that the “family friend” was actually Ed, whom he presumably wished to protect from accusations of child endangerment.

  On my father’s experience as an undergraduate at Columbia: I learned a great deal from Diana Trilling’s memoir, The Beginning of the Journey, which also discussed my father’s relationship with her husband, Lionel Trilling. Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, by Sam Tanenhaus, and Cold Friday, by Whittaker Chambers, described my father’s circle of friends. The Columbia Daily Spectator and The Columbian provided a useful picture of student life. Tuition and room fees were from the Columbia University Bulletin of Information: Columbia College Announcement 1922–1923: midway through his time at college. I read about John Erskine’s General Honors course in An Oasis of Order: The Core Curriculum at Columbia College, by Timothy P. Cross, and in Erskine’s own My Life as a Teacher.