My Madeira bottle
What I think of as my Madeira was shipped in a barrel by John Howard March, a wine trader who also served more than four decades as the island’s U.S. consul. The label called it “HOPE” MADEIRA, referring to the ship in which, during the same year that Charles Darwin sailed to the Galapagos Islands on the Beagle, it sailed to America by a deliberately roundabout route—N. Y. VIA EAST INDIES—because it was believed that a long, hot passage, coupled with the rocking motion of the ship, ripened and mellowed the wine. Well-traveled Madeiras commanded much higher prices than Madeiras that had matured on their home island and then hightailed it across the Atlantic. The Hope carried my Madeira across the equator twice. After it was transferred from barrel to demijohn to bottle, it ended up, as the label proudly attests, in the cellar of Elbridge T. Gerry, Jr., the son of the Massachusetts statesman who left one of the smallest and most unassuming signatures on the Declaration of Independence. Gerry never drank it, but more than a century later, my father did.
He could have waited. In 1950, Winston Churchill drank a 158-year-old Madeira that had once belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte. As he poured it, he asked the assembled guests, “Do you realize that when this wine was vintaged, Marie Antoinette was still alive?” Madeira is one of the longest-lasting of all wines. Like the 1840 port (sans nom) served at my brother’s birthday party, it is fortified with brandy before it has finished fermenting. The high-proof jolt kills the yeast that would otherwise continue transmuting the grape sugar into alcohol. High temperatures—whether on shipboard, in casks stored in sun-warmed rooms, or in hot vats—contribute to its mettle, as does deliberate oxidation. The result is stability bordering on immortality. Madeira doesn’t have to cool its heels in a thick-walled cellar, nor does it have to recline on its side, lest oxygen sneak in through a dried-out cork and turn it to vinegar. The sediment pattern of my bottle shows it was stored upright. Heat, air, time: Madeira serenely weathers them all.
My father wrote that wine is “not dead matter, like a motorcar, but a live thing.” It moves through the same life cycle as a human being: infancy, youth, prime, old age, senescence. Unfortified wines have shorter life spans than Madeira, but a great red wine, properly stored, can last a century, evolving with each passing decade. It’s not like a bottle of Coca-Cola or vodka, exactly the same no matter when you open it. The aging process begins in the barrel, in the presence of oxygen, and continues in the bottle, in its absence—or near-absence, since infinitesimal amounts of air penetrate the cork. The wines that last the longest are those with the most acid and the most tannin, a natural preservative that comes from grape skins, seeds, and stems and is responsible for the astringent quality that made Art Buchwald’s mouth pucker when he sampled Château Latour. With the exception of sweet dessert wines, white wines are less durable because the tannin-rich grape skins are removed from the juice before fermentation—which is also why they’re white, since the juice of all grapes, both red and white, is nearly colorless; it’s the skins that provide the pigment. Most wines made today are meant to be consumed immediately: storage is expensive, attention spans are short. But as a vintage Bordeaux or Burgundy matures, its tannins mellow, its acids soften, its bouquet develops, its character deepens. It ages well.
As did my father. He had started off his career as the youngest man to hold his multihyphenated jobs; he eventually became the oldest. “I can’t retire,” he said. “I wouldn’t know what to do.” Long after his blond pompadour turned gray, he continued to work as a judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club, serve on the board of editors of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and assemble anthologies, including a collection of literary and historical anecdotes he described as “appropriate for my anecdotage.” In his seventies, he learned child-level Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, and Dutch in order to research his long-planned critical history of children’s literature, the one for which, decades earlier, he had interviewed P. L. Travers while I poured tea from the set that had once belonged to an earl. Despite his fondness for radio and his distaste, as he put it, for “reacting, like a conditioned animal, to a teleprompter and a little red light,” he delivered weekly commentaries for a PBS book series. He still worked at his eighteen-square-foot steel desk seven days a week, as he had throughout my childhood, but taking off Christmas morning to open presents no longer seemed so difficult. His tannins were mellowing.
Over his bed he hung—or, more likely, given his uneasy relationship with hammers, asked my mother to hang—a red-framed excerpt from a thousand-year-old Anglo-Saxon poem called The Battle of Maldon:
Hige sceal þe heardra
heorte þe cenre
mod sceal þe mare
þe ure mægen lytlað
He had asked me to copy the lines for him. I obliged, in the same pretentious calligraphy I used on my brother’s menu. They meant: “Mind shall be firmer / Heart be keener / Mood shall be more / As our might lessens.”
The indoorsman outdoors, 1982
Most of the time he rose to that anonymous poet’s challenge. When he was eighty, he told me, “If you are not a nuisance to other people and you are not really sick, all you are is old. Therefore, you don’t lift heavy weights, you don’t go on ten-mile hikes, and”—he flashed a sardonic grin—“you confine yourself to three or four fornications a day instead of fifteen.” But beneath his customary high spirits, which were unfeigned, lay a darker strain, like a somber cello that lurks beneath a chorus of jaunty violins. That cello was not the dominant tone during my father’s later years, but there were times when it had been. Once every decade or so, like a comet with an irregular orbital period, depression made an appearance. The first episode that I know about took place while my father’s marriage to Polly was disintegrating. He called this unhappy period “my dark night of the soul” and medicated it, on a winter evening, with what he later remembered as a 1927 Cockburn port. He was alone in his office, the wind was howling outside the window, and after two hours and half the bottle, he felt much improved. “Not that my troubles were forever dispelled,” he wrote. “But the wine, in every sense generous, had so illumined my spirit that I could now contemplate those troubles—not with self-pity, but instead with irony and some serenity. As Edmund Spenser says in The Faerie Queene: ‘Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas.’”
Later bouts of depression were less easily subdued, perhaps because his doctors prescribed antidepressants rather than port. For several months, he would be brought low by sadness, fuzzy concentration, nighttime anxiety, loss of appetite, and baseless worries about money. And then, as if tied to a helium balloon that was just waiting for the right wind, he would rise again, and his essential joie de vivre would prevail for many years, though always with a trace of melancholy under the surface, lending him a measure of gravity not found in completely happy men.
When life was sweet, as it often was, what fun he could be! His exhilaration never had a manic edge; he was simply merry, like Fezziwig or Tom Bombadil. He walked around the house singing nonsense songs and chanting macaronic rhymes to whose significance only he held the key. (A favorite was “Corry botkin, corry botkin / Old Professor Plotkin!” We always wondered who Professor Plotkin was. I pictured him with a white beard, a mittel-European accent, and an ear-to-ear smile.) After a tonsillectomy for which I’d returned home from New York, he alternated reading aloud to me from War and Peace and talking (or, in my case, passing him notes), and as the puns flew and the air crackled with his real and my pantomimed laughter, I forgot that my throat was too sore to speak. When we went to Europe, he fairly fizzed with excitement as he puzzled out newspapers in languages he was learning, taught me handy expressions from Berlitz phrase books (I can still ask for the bathroom and the Lost and Found Bureau in Italian), combed his Temple Fielding guide for regional specialties (horchata in Madrid, almond pastry in Pithiviers), and in Paris—his favorite place in the world—took the Métro with me to the last stop on Ligne 3 because he loved A Sunday on La Grande Jatte and wan
ted to stand where Seurat had stood. On a Florida vacation when he was eighty-three, we rented bicycles; I was afraid he’d crash, but he threw his leg over the saddle for the first time in three or four decades and, with an expression first of intent concentration and then of pure glee, teetered off down the driveway of our rented condo. The topmost rung of his hedonistic hierarchy was occupied by food, wine, and the activities that surrounded them: painstakingly arranging the cheese and pâté on a brass-handled porcelain tray on the one evening each week he was responsible for “cooking” dinner; opening a menu and spotting something he really liked—mulligatawny soup, veal goulash, osso buco—and exclaiming “Hotsy totsy!”; taking the first sip of the wine he’d chosen and, after a brief pause in which one could feel the entire world aligning with his aspirations, turning to the waiter and saying, “Thank you. That’s very nice.”
During his old age, my father spent a good deal of time thinking about his early life on both sides of the river he’d crossed. Part of him still felt tethered to his family’s triple-locked apartments in Brooklyn. Part of him still belonged to Hartley Hall at Columbia, his dorm during the semesters he could afford to live on campus, in which he had stayed up till dawn discussing Plato and Rilke with A, C, D, E, F, and G. He did not miss Brooklyn; he never spoke nostalgically about the gaslights or the horse-drawn delivery wagons or the steep basement stairs he had descended in order to shake the ashes in the coal-burning furnace. He missed Columbia tremendously, along with the academic career it had falsely promised. Neither of those selves belonged to the place he currently lived: late-twentieth-century America, home of the sitcom and the ketchup-slathered fast-food burger. He felt that the world of WASP cultivation he had worked so hard to master—Western literary canon, smoked salmon on toast points—had slipped from his fingers and been replaced by vulgarity and ugliness.
Late in his life, he told Kim that among the many things he loved in the Galsworthy story “Quality” (“Id is an Ardt”), the scene he thought about most often was the one in which the old shoemaker looks sadly at a pair of newfangled boots, bought elsewhere, that a customer has worn to his shop. His finger instinctively finds the spot where the left boot, endeavoring to be fashionable, is a shade too tight, and says quietly, “Id ’urds you dere.”
My father frequently spoke of feeling out of place, out of sync, as vestigial as an appendix. Id ’urd him, dere and dere and dere, when he was instructed by waiters to “Enjoy!”; was urged (apropos of his feelings, his money, or the contents of his dinner plate) to “Share!”; bided his time on hold while recorded pop singers caterwauled in his ear; tried to write on hotel desks whose surfaces were covered with magazines, video guides, health-club notices, and leatherette-bound directories to services he didn’t want; found himself unable to understand young movie actors who omitted consonants and swallowed one word out of three; witnessed the debasement of the English language, both written and spoken. When he heard someone on television employ correct grammar and enunciation—William F. Buckley, for instance—he said the speaker stood out from the multitude “like a baboon with a blue behind.” He made lists of words and phrases he particularly disliked, many of them with roots in business or advertising: viable, parameters, timeframe, feedback, breakthrough, target area, quality time, in-depth, cutting-edge, counter-productive, in terms of, in the context of, crispy, crunchy, zesty, have a good one, there you go, you better believe it. “I am quite convinced,” he wrote, “that should I live to be 120, I would be unable to understand 90% of what I would hear, unless I spent my life attending meetings of the Modern Language Association. This bleak prospect has its silver lining. It helps reconcile me to death. This is not a joke.” He worried that America was descending into a phase similar to the Dark Ages, in which humanism would be replaced by technology. Computers had encouraged people to think like machines, reducing human interactions to “problems” in need of “solutions”—hence the rise of “No problem” (instead of “Certainly, sir”) as a catchphrase used in situations, such as reserving a restaurant table, in which no problem could possibly exist.
He reported two related, recurrent sensations. The first was that his outer life (events, career, achievements) felt like a dream, whereas his inner life (thoughts, intuitions, emotions) felt more real every day. This wasn’t a metaphor; he told me the experience was as concrete as putting a hand on a hot stove. The second was that his seven-year-old self felt like him, whereas the man he had become over the intervening decades felt like an impostor.
He described these feelings in his journal:
Many small children, naturally enough, are socially shy. Anyone would be, if forced to join a game of whose rules he was ignorant. But I remember that I was unusually shy, awkward, ever on the alert for an alcove of retreat.… While at the time (age seven or so) I did not understand this, the fact was that there were only two ways to go: retreat even further or compensate.
He chose compensation, became an adult, and spent fifty or sixty years working successfully in the public eye. “The shy seven-year-old was repressed,” he continued,
while I engaged in “experience,” an elaborate process of faking it. Now, in my dotage, he has re-emerged, fundamentally unchanged. I am again shy, awkward, retreating.… It is as if the imminence of the final fact of death has made it possible for me to rid myself of the Impostor Syndrome. Some force, quite incomprehensible, is quietly divesting me of my costume, acquired or manufactured over more than a half-century, leaving me both naked and free.
A man who is naked and free has no reason to conceal anything and could not do so even if he wished. Our father had always been the more private of our parents, telling Kim and me only about the aspects of his life that made good stories. But as an old man, he was suddenly seized with an almost frenzied need to figure himself out and the urge to transmit his findings to us, whether or not they were entertaining. This was the idea behind Outside, Looking In, the book-length essay, intended for his children, that he described in his letter to Dorothy Van Doren. It was also a major theme of the taped conversations we had when I was writing the Life story about him: hour after confessional hour about his fears and his failings. Perhaps he felt close enough to death that he could smell his obituaries, which he knew would focus on the successful adult rather than the trembling seven-year-old, and wanted to cut through the bullshit (or horseshit) before it was too late.
He had suffered from insomnia all his life, but the older he became, the worse it got. Sometimes he whiled away the small hours by setting himself word problems, such as naming trees that began with each letter of the alphabet (acacia, baobab, chestnut, dogwood…); naming authors beginning with A whose names continued with each letter of the alphabet (Aanrud, Abelard, Ackerley, Addison, Aeschylus…); making up humorous aphorisms (“How pleasing that the Milky Way is both lactic and galactic”); composing clerihews (“Harry Houdini / Sawed a woman in two, the meanie / Leaving neither fraction / Feeling any great satisfaction”); and inventing alternate definitions for common words (“tapioca” should be a Latin-American dance; “Migraine” should be a character in an Arthurian legend).
And sometimes he just lay in the dark, trying to answer the question Who am I? Around 3:00 a.m., he’d turn on his bedside light and write in his journal, which is to say he scrawled something on a scrap of paper that would eventually be typed up by his part-time secretary. His journal reminded me of Darwin’s “Recollections of the Development of my Mind and Character,” written near the end of his life for his children and grandchildren, which skated lightly over the voyage of the Beagle but dwelled at length on his essential but not always admirable traits, including gullibility, squeamishness, incapacity for abstract thought, and a tin ear for music. Like Darwin, my father had little interest in recounting his outer life; he was trying, through self-description and reminiscence, to pin himself down. He was neat. He was fussy. He was easily humiliated. He could spot typos from a mile away but was a poor general observer. He viewed objects
as enemies. (I once heard him mutter, as he tried to remove his Aquascutum raincoat from an overfull closet, “I hate your guts, Coathanger, and I wish you were dead.”) He flustered easily except when he was on the air or on a lecture platform, in which case his desire to call favorable attention to himself trumped his anxiety. He preferred instrumental to vocal music, short poems to long. He was physically clumsy. He was afraid of computers, fax machines, and cigarette lighters—he always lit his cigars with a match—but courageous in matters of honor.
He titled one journal entry “Triumph and Humiliation.” He wrote that the memory of dozens of humiliations could be evoked by the slightest of stimuli, but it had taken several nocturnal hours to summon up three memories of authentic triumph. Two of them involved aggression. (This was a trait I never witnessed except when he was watching televised boxing matches, during which he chomped fiercely on a cigar, grunted with every punch, and whenever a particularly good one landed, shouted, “Oh, baby!”) When he was ten, a local bully named Beebee falsely accused him of spying on the prettiest girl in their grade. He knocked out two of Beebee’s teeth and was carried home on an American flag by a dozen cheering classmates: perhaps the proudest half hour of his life.
Twenty years later, a Fifth Avenue department store substituted an inferior model for a fur coat his first wife had taken in for repairs. “The store became another Beebee,” he wrote.
It took only a few minutes to devise a fight plan. I snatched up the fur coat, thrust a can of talcum powder into my right-hand pants pocket, proceeded to the store, contorted my face into a mask of insane rage, frightened a salesgirl into leading me to the vice-president’s office, excoriated him and his associates, and jiggled the hidden talcum can in what I considered the proper gangster manner. The bluff worked. Convinced that he was dealing with a lunatic toting a concealed weapon (he was 50% right), he allowed as how the store had made an unfortunate mistake. The original purchase, perfectly repaired, arrived in good time.