Novelists From The United States

"We went away, away ... in this case to the , where we consumed s and s according to our natures, and as returned amateurs seemed to grow like water-flowers under the greening buds of the s, in the flowing tides of that street."

"WH Auden’s famous observation on the writer MFK Fisher – “I do not know of anyone in the States who writes better prose” – has been pressed into service on the cover of this reprint of Fisher’s most beloved book The Gastronomical Me (1943). The power of the puff lies in the fact that Auden wasn’t praising another poet or even a novelist but a food writer, a species conceived at that time as a domestic science teacher with a fail-safe recipe for . Implicit in Auden’s praise was the suggestion that Fisher should be removed from this category and set alongside Hemingway or Faulkner as a literary practitioner in her own right. These days we would get around the whole vexed business by saying that Fisher’s hybrid of culinary and memoir writing falls into the category of the personal essay, the kind of thing that has launched a thousand blogs and become a staple of the New Yorker’s annual food issue. The only hitch with this is that Fisher – or, to be formal, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher – was on record as hating the idea of the personal essay. To the proud daughter of a California newspaper man, the term signalled self-importance and, worse, over-writing. Fisher prided herself on never doing more than one draft which, if true, means she was a genius. Here she is on the food she encountered in Burgundy as a newlywed in the 1930s ..."

"Food for the soul is a part of all religion, as ancient savages know when they roast a tiger's heart for their god, as Christians know when they partake of Body and Blood as the mystical feast of . That is why there can be an equal significance in a sumptuous banquet for five thousand heroes, with the king sitting on his iron throne and minstrels singing above the sound of gnawed bones and clinking cups, or in a piece of dry bread eaten alone by a man lifting his eyes unto the hills. That is why, to my mind, there can be nothing irreverent or illogical about putting together in one collection of feasts such apparently disparate things as St. Luke's story of the and Lewis Carroll's tea-part for , the and 's gluttonous orgy in decadent Rome."

"... it's not an accident that the creative imagination is the first thing that's punished when tyrannies take over …"

"B is for Bachelors ... and the wonderful dinners they pull out of their cupboards with such dining aplomb and kitchen chaos. Their approach to gastronomy is basically sexual, since few of them under seventy-nine will bother to produce a good meal unless it is for a pretty woman."

"… Mrs. Fisher herself believes that strolling is a lost art these days, but in fact she is the perfect rambler. A Considerable Town is one long ramble. It rambles through the city, its monuments, its quays, its shops and its cafes, but more important, it rambles through the author's mind and memory—she has known since 1932, and seems to have forgotten nothing. … Mrs. Fisher loves ships, s and s. She likes fresh fish with dry white local wine at lunchtime. She has a susceptible fondness for rogues and vagabonds, and a Dickensian taste for the scramble, the rasp, the blarney and even the petty pretensions of city life. Nobody can describe the sound of bells or the feel of churches better than Mrs. Fisher, and surely nobody in the history of has more exactly defined the pleasures of eating."

"I never set out to be a writer. I write compulsively. I am like a drug addict. I can't help it. I do what pleases me."

"If you walk along the main street on an August afternoon there is nothing whatsoever to do."

"Next to music beer was best."

"Love is a joint experience between two persons—but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto."

"I do not have any home. So why should I be homesick?"

"The curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain."

"The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow."

"She wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud. Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram full of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house."

"Because of the insolence of all the white race he was afraid to lose his dignity in friendliness."

"The way I need you is a loneliness I cannot bear."

"The hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things."

"In his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise."

"I'm one who knows. I'm a stranger in a strange land."

"Wherever you look there's meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss. A fellow can't live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness. Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear—and nobody seems to know. Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed—stupid and mean."

"This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in the doorways, and she was afraid."

"It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the rollercoaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or the country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known."

"Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them."

"I want—I want—I want—was all that she could think about—but just what this real want was she did not know."

"It is far better for the profits of our purse to be taken from us than to be robbed of the riches of our minds and souls."

"All we can do is go around telling the truth."

"The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone."

"And how can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?"

"He knew the time for burning and plowing had ended the day before, but there still lingered in the warm March air something of the new season. The smell of freshly turned earth and the odor of pine and sedge-smoke hovered over the land even after burning and plowing was done. He breathed deeply of it, filling his body with the invigorating aroma."

"It was still not too late to begin, but Jeeter did not have a mule, and he did not have the credit to purchase seed-cotton and guano at the stores. Up until this year, he had lived in the hope that something would happen at the last moment to provide a mule and credit, but now it seemed to him that there was no use hoping for anything any more. He could still look forward to the following year when he could perhaps raise a crop of cotton, but it was an anticipation not so keen as it once had been. He had felt himself sink lower and lower, his condition fall further and further, year after year, until now his trust in God and the land was at the stage where further disappointment might easily cause him to lose his mind and reason. He still could not understand why he had nothing, and would never have anything, and there was no one who knew and who could tell him. It was the unsolved mystery of his life."

"All you boys seem to think about is the things you can see and touch—that ain’t living. It’s the things you can feel inside of you—that’s what living is made for."

"I think you must remember that a writer is a simple-minded person to begin with and go on that basis. He's not a great mind, he's not a great thinker, he's not a great philosopher, he's a story-teller."

"I think acceptance of human rights is going to progress from one day to the next. I don't think there's going to be any violent revolution about the whole thing anywhere. Of course, it looks like it every once in a while. You hear about it on television and in newspapers: riots here and there. But that is a passing phase."

"I was not a writer to begin with; I was a listener."

"Though it sometimes looks like a rich man will never help the poor; whereas the poor people will give away everything they has to help somebody who ain’t got nothing. That’s how it looks to me. Don’t seem like it ought to be that way, but I reckon the rich ain’t got no time to fool with us poor folks."

"Preachers has got to preach against something. It wouldn't do them no good to preach for everything. They got to be against something every time." "I never looked at it that way before," Jeeter said, "but there might be a lot in what you say. Though, take for instance, God and heaven—you wouldn't preach against them, would you, Sister Bessie?" "Good preachers don’t preach about God and heaven, and things like that. They always preach against something, like hell and the devil. Them is things to be against. It wouldn’t do a preacher no good to preach for God. He’s got to preach against the devil and all wicked and sinful things. That’s what the people like to hear about. They want to hear about the bad things."

"Many Southern writers must have learned the art of storytelling from listening to oral tales. I did. It gave me the knowledge that the simplest incident can make a story."

"It ain't no sin to look like that, Ellie May," Jeeter had told her. "You came into the world that way from God, and that's the way He intended for you to look. Sometimes I think maybe it would be a sin to change it, because that would be doing over something He made." "Well, all I got to say," Ada had stated, "is that it's a shame He didn't make Dude with the slit instead of Ellie May. A gal ain't got no business looking like that. Women ain't good for nothing but to marry and work for men, and when one of them has that kind of thing on her, there ain't no man I ever heard of who's going to use her. If it was Dude who had the slit, it wouldn't make no difference at all. Men ain't noticed as much in the face as women is, noway."

"There were always well-developed plans in Jeeter’s mind for the things he intended doing; but somehow he never got around to doing them. One day led to the next, and it was much more easy to say he would wait until tomorrow. When that day arrived, he invariably postponed action until a more convenient time. Things had been going along in that easy way for almost a lifetime now; nevertheless, he was again getting ready to burn off the fields and plow the land. He wanted to raise a crop of cotton."

"Here is hard-core unemployment, widespread and chronic; here is a region of shacks and hovels for housing; here are cliffs and ravines without standing room for a cow or chickens. In this region of steep mountains, a person is exceptionally fortunate if he is able to hack out two or three ten-foot rows of land for potatoes or beans."

"To me there is no such thing as creative writing. It's either good writing, whatever the subject, or it's not creative."

"She could sometimes stand the pain of it in her stomach when she knew there was nothing to eat, but when Lov stood in full view taking turnips out of the sack, she could not bear the sight of seeing food no one would let her have."

"I'm not interested in plots. I'm interested only in the characterization of people and what they do."

"The spring-time ain’t going to let you fool it by hiding away inside a durn cotton mill. It knows you got to stay on the land to feel good. That’s because humans made the mills. God made the land, but you don’t see Him building durn cotton mills. That’s how I know better than to go up there like the rest of them. I stay where God made a place for me."

"Jeeter could never think of the loss of his land and goods as anything but a man-made calamity. He sometimes said it was partly his own fault, but he believed steadfastly that his position had been brought about by other people. ... An intelligent employment of his land, stocks, and linpiements would have enabled Jeeter, and scores of others who had become dependent upon Captain John, to raise crops for food, and crops to be sold at a profit. Cooperative and corporate farming would have saved them all."

"It’s funny now to think that we were ever confused by extreme action taken in the name of God."

"Behind him shines the blinking neon of a casino:"

"But I can’t justify the act to myself, no matter how much I like making out with the boy I’d be trying to save. That would be playing by Believer rules—telling myself that violence and the threat of it is okay, if that’s what it takes to get you what you want. “For God so loved the world,” says the Book of Frick, “that he sent us guns with which to protect our homes and women.”"

"I wonder if this is what bravery is: adrenaline plus love plus absolute stupidity."

"I’ve always believed Frick to be detached from reality, but I thought he was just a megalomaniac, a manipulator, a con artist. Now I begin to slowly understand. He’s far more dangerous than any of those things. He’s a true Believer."