Gastro-modernism: Food, Literature, Culture 9781942954682, 9781942954699, 2019010738, 2019021917

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© 2019 Clemson University All rights reserved First Edition, 2019 ISBN: 978-1-942954-68-2 eISBN: 978-1-942954-69-9 Published by Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press

For information about Clemson University Press, please visit our website at www.clemson.edu/press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gladwin, Derek, editor. Title: Gastro-modernism : food, literature, culture / edited by Derek Gladwin. Description: First edition. | [Clemson, South Carolina] : Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019010738 (print) | LCCN 2019021917 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942954699 (e-book) | ISBN 9781942954682 | Subjects: LCSH: Gastronomy in literature. | Food habits in literature. | Food in literature. | Modernism (Literature)--History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN56.F59 (ebook) | LCC PN56.F59 G36 2019 (print) | DDC 808.8/03564--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019010738

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Contents Gastro-Modernism

Acknowledgments

vii

List of Figures

ix

List of Contributors

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Introducing Le Menu: Consuming Modernist Food Studies Derek Gladwin

1

I  Culture and Consumption 1

Sweet Bean Paste and Excrement: Food, Humor, and Gender in Osaki Midori’s Writings Tomoko Aoyama

2

What Is Eating For? Food and Function in James Joyce’s Fiction Gregory Castle

3

A Woolf at the Table: Virginia Woolf and the Domestic Dinner Party Lauren Rich

21 35

53

II  Decadence and Absence 4

The Social and Cultural Uses of Food Separation Peter Childs

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5

Against Culinary Art: Mina Loy and the Modernist Starving Artist 83 Alys Moody

6

Cocktails with Noël Coward Gregory Mackie

7

Late Modernist Rationing: War, Class, Power Kelly Sullivan

99 117

III  Taste and Disgust 8

Objects of Disgust: A Moveable Feast and the Modernist Anti-Vomitive 135 Michel Delville and Andrew Norris

9

“We were very lonely without those berries”: Gastronomic Colonialism in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools Clint Burnham

153

10 From “Squalid Food” to “Proper Cuisine”: Food and Fare in the Work of T. S. Eliot Jeremy Diaper

165

IV  Appetites and Diets 11 “The Raw and the Cooked”: Food and Modernist Poetry Lee M. Jenkins

183

12 Weight-Loss Regimes as Improvisation in Louis Armstrong’s and Duke Ellington’s Life Writing Vivian Halloran

193

13 Kitchen Talk: Marguerite Duras’s Experiments with Culinary Matter Edwige Crucifix

209

Notes 223 Index 267

Acknowledgments Gastro-Modernism

W

ithout the tremendous effort of the authors, there would be no Gastro-Modernism volume to acknowledge. So, my first note of gratitude goes to them: for their incisive chapters, timely submissions, and willingness to write about a relatively new subject in modernism and food studies. Thank you! The kernel for this project began when, as a child, I found a love in food and cooking. Over the years my mother mentored me in the culinary arts and with her I watched many cooking shows with Julia Child, Jacques Pépin, Nick Stellino, and Caprial Pence, among many others. Cooking was also coupled with trips to vineyards in my early childhood, driving down dusty gravel roads to (at that time) modestly constructed tasting rooms. Wine culture, for example, contains this wonderful blend of geography, geology (terroir), arts and culture, and gastronomy. These early experiences of gastronomy propelled me to explore the interlinking networks of the humanities and environmental studies in university. It goes without saying, perhaps, that I remain grateful for the continued influence these experiences have on me. The critical and scholarly starting point for this project occurred when prepping my paper for the XXIII International James Joyce Symposium at Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin in Ireland, June 10–16, 2012. This conference provided the space and time for me to work through the importance (and at the time current absence) of food and modernist studies

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in my own presentation. I am grateful I was able to build on this experience to eventually organize and propose a volume to a publisher. I want to also thank the editors Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Mark Wollaeger of the Modernist Literature and Culture series at Oxford University Press for their support and enthusiasm at the outset of the project before OUP decided to cancel the series and I had to find another publisher for the volume. Somewhat serendipitously, this unfortunate setback with OUP provided an opportunity to work with Clemson University Press, in partnership with Liverpool University Press. Early conversations with the Director John Morgenstern showed his excitement for the volume. John helped me with the revision of the project while also giving productive feedback. I am also grateful for the peer reviewers for delivering constructive comments to improve the volume, as well as the Managing Editor Alison Mero for her prompt communications and support along the way. John, Alison, and their support staff at the press, have been massively helpful every step of the way during the publishing process. I cannot thank them enough for their support. Lastly, I want to acknowledge being allowed reproduction permissions for two images in the collection (see List of Figures) and I also gratefully acknowledge permission from Scott Freer and Paul Keers to reprint some sections of Jeremy Diaper’s chapter which appeared in an earlier article, “T. S. Eliot and British Organicism: Food, Health and Nutrition,” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society (UK) (2017): 25–48.

Figures

6.1 The Savoy Cocktail Book (1930), Smithsonian Libraries (Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Library, TX951.C76), with openaccess permissions under Fair Use Guidelines

103

7.1 Fougasse (Cyril Kenneth Bird), “Careless Talk Costs Lives: ‘Of course there’s no harm in your knowing!’” Color lithograph poster, 1940. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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Contributors Gastro-Modernism

Tomoko Aoyama is an Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her research focuses on parody, intertextuality, gender, and humor in modern Japanese literature. She is the author of Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature (2008), “The Divided Appetite: Eating in the Literature of the 1920s” (2000), and “The Cooking Man in Modern Japanese Literature” (2003), among other writings on food and modernism. She has edited (with B. Hartley) Girl Reading Girl in Japan (2010) and (with L. Dales and R. Dasgupta) Configurations of Family in Contemporary Japan (2015). Clint Burnham was born in Comox, British Columbia, Canada, which is on the traditional territory of the K’ómoks (Sathloot) First Nation, centered historically on kwaniwsam. He lives and teaches on the traditional ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including traditional territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam, and Kwikwetlem Nations. Since 2007, Clint has taught in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. Recent books include Does the Internet Have an Unconscious?: Slavoj Žižek and Digital Culture [theory] (2018) and Pound @ Guantánamo [poetry] (2016). Future published or forthcoming essays and reviews focus on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the politics of First Nations art, and  Tomson Highway.

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Gregory Castle is Professor of English at Arizona State University and the author of Modernism and the Celtic Revival (2001), Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman (2006), and The Literary Theory Handbook (2013). He has also published essays on the Bildungsroman and on Irish writers such as W. B. Yeats, John M. Synge, James Joyce, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, George Moore, and Emily Lawless. His edited volumes include The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory, vol. 1, A History of the Modernist Novel (2010), (with Patrick Bixby) Standish O’Grady’s Cuchulain: A Critical Edition (2016), and A History of Irish Modernism (2019). Peter Childs is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Newman University, Birmingham, UK. He has edited or written over twenty books on diverse subjects ranging from contemporary British culture to post-colonial theory. His early published works include Post-Colonial Theory and English Literature (1998), Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet (1998), The Twentieth Century in Poetry (1998), Modernism (2000), and Texts: Contemporary Cultural Texts and Critical Approaches (2006). More recent publications include Modernism, 3rd ed. (2016) and Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels (2015). Edwige Crucifix is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at Brown University and the previous Book Reviews Editor for the Graduate Journal for Food Studies. Across different languages and historical contexts, her research explores accounts of female experiences through written and visual texts, from novels to cookbooks, behavioral manuals, letters, magazines, and films. In her dissertation, she is studying the relationships among anti-imperial sentiment, socialism, and feminism in France and its North African colonies from the late eighteenth century to the contemporary period. Michel Delville is a Professor at the University of Liège in Belgium. He teaches English and American literatures as well as comparative literature and directs the Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Poetics. He is the author of many book, some of which include The American Prose Poem (1998), J. G. Ballard (1998), Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption: Eating the AvantGarde (2009), Crossroads Poetics: Text, Image, Music, Film & Beyond (2013), Undoing Art (with Mary Ann Caws) (2016), and (with Andrew Norris) The Politics and Aesthetics of Disgust (2017).

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Jeremy Diaper has published numerous articles on T. S. Eliot’s agrarianism and the history of the organic husbandry movement in Agricultural History, Agricultural History Review, Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society (UK), Literature & History, and Peer English. He is the author of T. S. Eliot and Organicism (2018) and is currently compiling a special issue of Modernist Cultures on “Modernism and the Environment” and an edited collection entitled Eco-Modernism. His research has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and he has reviewed widely for Notes and Queries, Modernist Cultures, Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies, and the Virginia Woolf Bulletin. Derek Gladwin is an Assistant Professor of Language and Literacy Education and a Sustainability Fellow with the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability at the University of British Columbia. His research and teaching focus on transformations in society and culture through environmental humanities and sustainability education. He has previously held visiting fellowships in the environmental humanities at the University of Edinburgh and Trinity College Dublin. Gladwin has authored and edited five books, including EcoJoyce (2014) and Contentious Terrains (2016). Vivian Halloran is Professor of English and American Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of The Immigrant Kitchen: Food, Ethnicity and Diaspora (2016) and Exhibiting Slavery: The Caribbean Postmodern as Museum (2009). She has written articles covering everything from competitive eating events and Top Chef, to the memory work performed by African American cookbooks. She is working on a book analyzing the prominent role Caribbean diaspora members have taken in shaping public discourse about how to build a more just and inclusive American society. Lee M. Jenkins is a Professor in the School of English, University College Cork. She is the author of Wallace Stevens: Rage for Order (1999), The Language of Caribbean Poetry (2004), and The American Lawrence (2015). She is the co-editor (with Alex Davis) of three critical collections: Locations of Literary Modernism (2000), The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry (2007), and A History of Modernist Poetry (2015). She is a member of the editorial board of The Wallace Stevens Journal and associate editor of the D. H. Lawrence Review.

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Gregory Mackie is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. He specializes in Victorian and modernist literature, drama, and book history. He has published in Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, ELT, and elsewhere. A monograph about the lost archive of Oscar Wilde forgeries that flooded the rare book market in the 1920s, “Beautiful Untrue Things”: Forging Oscar Wilde’s Extraordinary Afterlife, will appear from University of Toronto Press in 2019. Alys Moody is a Lecturer in English at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia and the 2018–19 Early Career Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism (2018), and (with Stephen J. Ross) the co-editor of Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology (2019). She is currently working on a second monograph, provisionally entitled, The Literature of World Hunger: Poverty, Global Modernism, and the Emergence of a World Literary System. Andrew Norris lives and writes in Belgium. He teaches translation at the Université libre de Bruxelles and is co-author (with Michel Delville) of The Politics and Aesthetics of Hunger and Disgust (2017). Lauren Rich is Associate Professor of English at Grace College, Winona Lake, Indiana, where she chairs the Department of Languages, Literature, and Communication. Her research interests include British and Irish modernism and food studies. Kelly Sullivan is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Irish Literature at Glucksman Ireland House, New York University. Recent publications include “Harry Clarke’s Modernist Gaze” in Éire-Ireland, “Unsaid, Unsent: Letters in Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices” in the Irish University Review, and a forthcoming essay on Elizabeth Bowen and the architecture of suspense in Modernism/ modernity. Her book project, Epistolary Modernism, considers the use of letters in late modernist fiction and poetry as a measure of concerns about privacy and surveillance. Her poetry chapbook, Fell Year, was published by Green Bottle Press in 2017.

Introducing Le Menu Consuming Modernist Food Studies Derek Gladwin

Les apéritifs

I

n the opening of A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf reflects that it is “a curious fact that novelists have a way of making us believe that luncheon parties are invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or for something very wise that was done. But they seldom spare a word for what was eaten.”1 This volume of essays titled Gastro-Modernism: Food, Literature, Culture aims to “spare” a few words not only for what was “eaten,” but also to highlight how gastronomy suffuses the literary landscapes of global modernisms from the specific to the broad from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. This introduction to Gastro-Modernism functions as a five-course French menu, which serves up a range of dishes clarifying how this collection theoretically and historically intervenes in the fields of modernism, gastronomy, and food studies, followed by a description of the chapters. For this opening portion of le menu, taking a few moments for l’apéritif, I want to begin with a brief anecdotal analysis. My own clarifying moment about the critical relationship between food studies and modernism occurred during one of many readings of James Joyce’s epic novel Ulysses (1922).

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In Ulysses, “Lestrygonians” has frequently been characterized as an episode pertaining to food, taste, and digestion.2 It is in this hour of the novel when Leopold Bloom wanders through what he refers to as “the very worst hour of the day” (1:00 p.m.), with constant reminders of food and eating.3 Bloom eats his lunch consisting of a Gorgonzola sandwich and Burgundian wine at Davy Byrne’s Pub. Although taste appears to be the most redolent sense for Bloom, as well as for readers, another sense is at work concurrently: both vision and taste intertwine. Bloom muses, “Sardines on the shelves. Almost taste them by looking.”4 “Synaesthesia,” which is the experience when multiple senses occur simultaneously, often ignites memory response. Our senses generate affective channels that produce memory. As Brian Massumi contends, “Affects are virtual synaesthetic perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by) the actually existing, particular things that embody them.”5 Is there a better substance to evoke the process of synaesthesia than Burgundian wine? As Joyce writes, “Feel better. Burgundy. Good pick me up.”6 The smell of the Pinot Noir grapes with a lingering aroma of white pepper and floral undertones, the taste of earth or terroir, strawberries, and herbs, the sweet, acidic, and bitter sensation on the tongue, and the hue of the deep burgundy rouge create an unforgettable impression on Bloom while in Davy Byrne’s. This lunch, and particularly the wine, brings together all of the senses and produces an affective response of reverie for Bloom in this episode. Bloom’s sensory-inspired reflections conjure memories of he and Molly on a romantic rendezvous a decade earlier in Howth, a coastal getaway just northeast of Dublin. Joyce writes, “Seems to a secret touch telling me memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered. Sudden under wild ferns on Howth below us bay sleeping: sky.”7 Bloom’s sensory responses to the food in the present moment invoke the past memory of he and Molly on Howth. One of Joyce’s many tools as a writer is focusing on one moment in time amidst thousands of moments in a day. Ulysses itself functions as a novel containing thousands of interconnected moments and encounters couched into one entire day, another small moment in a month or year. How does one begin to describe meta-instances—the instance before or after one moment in time that potentially becomes another moment and then moves on to yet another moment without distinct demarcations of transition? Each moment, moreover, contains variegated processes of sense, movement, memory, and emotion. Further complicating the transition between moments is the ability

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to measure each moment with poignancy and force so that each moment exists in its own space, simultaneously connected and separate from other moments in time. In this episode, food becomes the transmitter of memory, mediating among the body, time, and space. In addition to his visual sense, he moves to the tactile when recalling: “Coolsoft with ointments her hand touched me, caressed.”8 After touch, Bloom tastes: “full lips full open kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed.”9 And, fittingly, all of this is condensed into a Joycean neologism called “smellsipped,” which expresses synaesthesia again by combining smell and taste into one experience.10 Joyce later writes of Bloom, “Glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. Crushing in the winepress grapes of Burgundy. Sun’s heat it is.”11 These lines reinforce the simultaneity of affect—combining the touch, taste, smell, sound, and vision, all while producing memory. Ultimately, Bloom’s process of memory relies upon various stimuli throughout the episode, such as sensual responses to body movement of walking and consumption and digestion of food and drink. What struck me most about this scene was the way the entire process of gastronomy, consumption, aesthetic, desire, taste, and hunger supported the function of the chapter and provided shrewd insight into the interplay of space and time between two of Joyce’s protagonists: the character Bloom and the city of Dublin. In “Lestrygonians,” food becomes an affective response for Bloom to the physical space of Dublin, and Joyce painstakingly underscores the singular importance of each moment of Bloom’s journey in a simultaneity of other moments throughout the day. Food serves as the medium, transmitting memory by erasing the traditional boundaries of space and time, while at the same time guiding Bloom through this early afternoon hour of his perambulatory journey on the day of June 16, 1904. This brief overview of an episode in Joyce’s Ulysses, providing an introductory apéritif to sip on, illustrates the important role gastronomy serves in modernist texts.

Les entrées Gastro-modernism signals many social, cultural, and ecological concerns that emerge in the modernist period because of expanding food systems in factories and abattoirs, an enlarged social food culture, diet experimentation, changing domestic spaces, and rationed food supplies (mostly due to wars

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and economic depression). The obvious links among what we eat, how food is produced and represented, and the resulting cultural impact are increasing contemporary anxieties largely stemming back to the late nineteenth century. The period of modernity—with the residual agricultural practices and policies of colonialism morphing into developing forms of industrialized capitalism— produced a tension between two monolithic social orders.12 The result is that food production and consumption are both literally and metaphorically everywhere in modernist literature and culture, reflecting the relationship among colonialism, agriculturalism, and industrialism in the early twentieth century. These political and social circumstances surrounding the modernist period create cultural responses to social issues. To this end, modernists engage with the food culture known as gastronomy to express anxieties about modernity as much as to celebrate the excesses modern lifestyles produce. The response of modernist writers, playwrights, and poets to modernity and industrialization occurs not only through formalistic literary techniques, but also in the overt themes, histories, and settings related to food culture. Modernists famously explored and elevated public and domestic spaces where food and drink were prepared and served, such as cafés, restaurants, hotels, salons, nightclubs, pubs/bars, kitchens, or dining rooms. Artists and writers responded to these spaces as much as they created them in the modernist imagination. The idea of “eating out” did not exist previously, especially in such a public display, as it suddenly did with an enormous influx of cafés and restaurants available to an expanding middle class. The phenomenon of public gastronomic space became an iconic modern activity to observe and create. As a response, modernist literature and culture involve food as an integral part of narratives, plot, dialogue, and stylistic approaches. Some, for example, are revealed in Joyce’s famous introduction of Bloom in Ulysses, “who ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls,”13 Wallace Stevens’s lust-soaked kitchen in the midst of death in the poem “The Emperor of IceCream” (1922), Franz Kafka’s portrayal of fasting as a spectacle in “A Hunger Artist” (1924), Virginia Woolf ’s narrative alignment with a dinner party in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Claude McKay’s challenge to colonial agricultural labor after a legacy of slavery in Banana Bottom (1933), Ernest Hemingway’s early hipster “foodie” café culture in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933)— later more developed in A Moveable Feast (1964), or Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographic non-fiction about Black food culture in Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State (1939).

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Modernism as a literary and artistic movement also highlights excesses and absences in eating and consumption as political statements. Social movements during the modernist period amplified the use of hunger strikes, such as suffragette hunger protests starting in 1909 in Britain (and subsequent movements in Ireland and the USA), Indian demonstrations in South Africa guided by Gandhi in 1913, and Sikh resistance led by migrants in Canada in 1914.14 The character Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Ulysses refuses to eat food, suggesting an Irish tradition of political protest. Horrific tales of declining empire include countercultural forms of consumption, such as cannibalism discussed in Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon and Other Stories (1903). Writers themselves engaged in experimental forms of eating or experienced disorders associated with food, all in protest to excess and absence in social and cultural spheres, such as George Bernard Shaw’s and Aldous Huxley’s ardent vegetarianism, Woolf ’s suspected anorexia, and Louis Armstrong’s diet books. The politics of pleasure and food also emerge as a response to patriarchal culture in Woolf ’s and Katherine Mansfield’s writings. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) indicates that “food was all that she lived for; her comforts; her dinner, her tea.”15 Within Woolf ’s portrait of domestic oppression, women find remote pleasure in the quotidian because of culinary comforts. In “Pictures” (1917), Mansfield details the life of Ada, a woman who embodies desperation and paralysis from her social world. Trying to secure a job in the burgeoning film industry, her attempt to escape from the real into fantasy manifests not only in the pursuit of a film career, but also in the modernist spaces of cultural capital. Ada fantasizes about meeting a producer in Café de Madrid, a location symbolizing domestic escape involving pleasure and food. Other modernist works, such as Samuel Beckett’s novel Murphy (1938), express anxieties related to food and the body.16 In the opening of the novel, the protagonist Murphy acknowledges a disconnect between the body and mind, and as a result the burden of needing food and drink to fuel this process: “he would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping … until his body was appeased that he could come alive in his mind.”17 Here, reflecting many other modernist works mentioned throughout Gastro-Modernism, the body and its need for sustenance reflects the anxieties of an industrializing and urbanizing modern society. Another prominent text is The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (1954), which should be central to modernist food studies, but which has yet to receive similar critical attention in modernism as other aforementioned works. Functioning as

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part memoir, cookbook, and cultural and social analysis, Toklas creates a multigenre text about food culture, nodding to established tropes within modernism while also disrupting the certainty of these motifs, signalling a shift in social movements where food culture reveals answers to these transitions. Both a challenge to and subtle celebration of class distinctions, Toklas complicates assumptions about middle-class pleasure and ideas of taste.18 These are likely all notable names in modernism for readers. What continues to be surprising is the underrepresentation of M. F. K. Fisher’s contributions in new modernist studies, particularly since Fisher receives critical acclaim in gastronomy, food studies, and literary food studies.19 Her prose style captured the admiration of contemporary audiences to the extent that W. H. Auden announced: “Mrs. Fisher is as talented a writer as she is a cook. Indeed, I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose.”20 Fisher’s biographer Joan Reardon also hailed her the “poet of the appetites,” indicating her literary approach to food writing.21 Contemporary literary scholar Allison Carruth also recognizes how “Fisher inflects modernist forms—nonlinear narrative, montage, and irony” within an Anglo-American modernism.22 Fisher was born in California but lived in France as an adult for several stints of her life. During this time, she published dozens of non-fiction books—such as Serve it Forth (1937), Consider the Oyster (1941), How to Cook a Wolf (1942), and The Gastronomical Me (1943)—that include food essays, memoir, recipe analysis, and a creative economy of cooking and eating. She also wrote a somewhat autobiographical novel about the Second World War posthumously published as The Theoretical Foot (2012). Fisher’s tremendous output (twenty-seven books) has largely remained on the sidelines of modernist studies because the discursive field of “food writing” had yet to be fully developed as a credible literary style. Looking at Fisher’s style, approach, and influence, it is now clear she was not only a visionary in her literary output on food, culture, and society. She also remains pivotal in sculpting a modernist food literature as a subgenre, where preconceived notions of food as provincial or trite in modernism shift into a poignant subject in new modernist studies. Fisher noted the ways food culture influence our understanding of literature. In her introduction to The Art of Eating (a compendium of five of her books published in 1954), Fisher acknowledged how Ford Madox Ford once remarked that food is more talked about than love or heaven.23 Gertrude Stein similarly stated, “Nothing is more

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interesting than that something that you eat.”24 Fisher also wrote the Foreword to The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, where she, also as an Anglo-American writer living in France, claimed, “Conversation even in a literary or political salon can turn to the subject of menus, food or wine.” The French, she goes on to observe, “like to say that their food stems from their culture.”25 Fisher presented food as a lens for cultural and literary exploration, rather than viewing it as merely a prop or a backdrop for the scene. Take, for example, Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me. Fisher traces her appetite from America to France and back again several times, demonstrating the transcultural relationship with food and how her experiences build upon education, seduction, gender, communication, and location. Even the title of the book centralizes the self as a fragmented modernist subject of consideration, broken between geographies, people, and experiences, but held together by gastronomy. Developing credibility to the food memoir as a literary mode, Fisher’s “me” in the title inflects the gastronomy that influenced her as much as her production as a food writer and novelist influenced gastronomy during the modernist period. In the Preface to The Gastronomical Me, Fisher admits that people often ask her: “Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do?” Fisher acknowledges that in this question there exists an embedded accusation, as if she were somewhat “unfaithful to the honour” of her “craft” as a writer. Her reply to this question might best frame the approach to this volume, as well as to literary and modernist food studies. She simply acknowledges, “I am hungry.” That is the easiest way we can begin. But she goes on to write: It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it … and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied … and it is all one.26 Hunger serves as more than just a metaphor in this account. It motivates actions and responses to life. Similar to other examples mentioned earlier,

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such as The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, hunger underscores the artistic appetites that underpin much of modernist cultural production and, in particular, how these appetites continue unabated. New modernist studies tasks itself with spatial, temporal, and vertical expansion, which includes elongating the traditional historical boundaries of modernism (including “late modernism”), bringing globality into focus both in dialogue with and beyond traditional European and North American foci. The goal is to renegotiate traditional barriers between “high art” and popular forms of culture, refiguring the exclusive and privileged notion of canons, and magnifying matters of production, dissemination, and reception.27 Viewing M. F. K. Fisher as a case study in the introductory entrée exemplifies how modernist food studies aligns with the aims of new modernist studies. Initializing a sub-area in modernist food studies allows for such an expansion by re-examining authors, filmmakers, and artists who might benefit from a concerted thematic, theoretical, and methodological focus. Despite the ubiquity of food and its surrounding culture in modernist literature, the two as a conjoined topic remain underexamined as extensive scholarly studies. Gastro-Modernism appears as one larger analysis aiming to rectify this gap.28 In fact, this volume builds on an upswing in modernist scholarship incorporating food studies over the past few years.29 When early ideas of this volume began to form, including preliminary discussions with publishers, there were no special journal issues or collections on the subject of modernism and food, which seemed surprising considering the veritable feast of topics available. Creating a thematic volume to house a range of interrelated chapters not only provides ease for the reader (and student in class or seminar settings), but also reifies the legitimacy of modernist food studies, a sub-area of study that complements others, such as eco-modernism, modernist gender studies, or post-colonial modernism. Fortunately, the dearth of extensive studies is no longer a reality, with two excellent examples appearing in the past five years.30 A 2014 special journal issue titled “Tasting Modernism,” edited by J. Michelle Coghlan, stands out as the first example.31 Coghlan’s introduction and contributors’ articles build from an eponymous panel at the Modern Studies Association meeting in 2012. Paralleling the rise in food studies as a critical enterprise, “Tasting Modernism” skilfully explores “the spectacular nature of culinary modernism … to rethink modernist food writing in its broadest sense.” In particular, this journal issue questions “how the culinary

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life of modernism might speak to our own moment’s hypermediated obsession with—and no less charged anxieties about—how and what we eat.” Coghlan’s editorial objective underscores the contemporary link to “modernism’s gustatory designs.” To put it simply, gastronomy will always be a universal reference point for historical and cultural moments and modernism is no different. Modernism is always right now, fusing past and present into simultaneity of experience and the senses, time, and space.32 “Tasting Modernism” provides a perfect starting point for this discussion moving forward. In the years since “Tasting Modernism,” Jessica Martell, Adam Fajardo, and Philip Keel Geheber edited an exciting collection of essays titled Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant-Garde (2019).33 The editors include seventeen chapters that incorporate modernist writers such as Oscar Wilde, Katherine Mansfield, Ernest Hemingway, Alice B. Toklas, James Joyce, and Langston Hughes, as well as artists, painters, and filmmakers, covering a range of topics from cookbooks, food rationing, corporeal aesthetics, and nationalisms. As they state in the Introduction, “modernist texts, authors, and artists were just as engaged with food as they were with other social phenomena.” Building on this, the editors of this volume push “back against the recent unearthing in popular food discourse of the outdated and objectionable assumption that ‘modernist’ means ‘exclusive.’”34 Seeking to resist monikers of an outdated criticism situating modernism as elite avant-garde movement, Modernism and Food Studies establishes an “inclusive, nuanced, and responsible modernist food studies.”35 Recent comprehensive publications such as these should be viewed as complementary to Gastro-Modernism, and vice versa, affirming an increasing demand for contemporary researchers, students, and educated readers of modernism and food studies. In the intricate ways modernism and food studies align, there will no doubt be many other published collections and monographs, as well as journal articles and chapters, that examine subtopics of the larger field. Food criticism will no longer remain on the margins, considered ordinary, lacking aesthetic or formal sophistication; food as a critical medium continues to expand in many areas of literary and cultural studies.

Les salades ou les soupes The title Gastro-Modernism somewhat playfully refers to the historical arch of gastronomy in which modernism is firmly situated. This is partly why I use the

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prefix “gastro-,” which is often associated with gastro-pubs or gastro-cuisine in foodie culture indicating an artistic and aesthetic approach to dining or cooking experiences. Regardless, as this section points out, gastronomy and food studies arose in different historical contexts and yet often function interchangeably. Using the term “gastronomy”—an all-encompassing study to describe the art and science of food culture—encapsulates a range of subjects from preparation, production, and cultural influences, to regional differences, cuisines, and the science of nutritional health. Modernism similarly invokes wide-ranging subjects, periods, and themes through the broader social structures, movements, and cultures entangled in modernity. The unlikely fusion of gastronomy and modernism ultimately links contemporary social and scientific perspectives of food systems to one of the most prominent periods of literary history. In Eating Otherwise: The Philosophy of Food in Twentieth-Century Literature (2017), Maria Christou introduces the term “gastrocriticism,” which is the study of food in literary criticism that defies traditional disciplinary boundaries.36 Gastro-Modernism also employs a form of gastrocriticism in the broadest sense—which could also be labelled “food criticism” just as easily—by drawing on the qualifying “gastro-” to indicate a critical relationship with food history. Historicizing the term gastronomy takes us back to the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment, where the uses and complexities of foods were considered in light of physiological and psychological well-being. This enlightened approach considered food as part of a holistic process that influenced social interaction, cultural interpretation, and scientific understanding.37 Building on this social shift, the pioneer of the term gastronomy, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, defined it in 1825 as “the reasoned comprehension of everything connected with the nourishment of man.”38 Purposely vague and comprehensive, Brillat-Savarin’s definition provided a working base on which to examine food as necessary nourishment and its relationship to science and other sociocultural circumstances.39 While Brillat-Savarin insisted that gastronomy functions as a dynamic interdisciplinary enterprise rooted in the sciences, he also recognized it as encompassing the social sciences in natural history, commerce, and political economy.40 The origins and practices of gastronomy do, however, contain a problematic past that should be briefly acknowledged. Gastronomic culture shares a historical relationship with colonialism, where empires would siphon agriculture resources and appropriate food culture from the colonies. Unfortunately,

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this is not just in the past; industrialized food systems and agri-business continue this practice today. The famous food cultures of the world, such as France, China, Japan, Italy, and Spain, built their celebrated gastronomic reputations on the oppression of Indigenous people and dispossession of Indigenous lands. In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx spoke of this capitalist and imperialist dynamic as monstrous gastronomy, or a voraciousness without limit.41 This is partly why the critical term “food studies” attempted to reclaim and decolonize the historical term gastronomy that was initially rooted in imperialism and enlightenment thinking. When considering gastronomy in light of the more contemporary area of food studies, we can see comparable discussions. Other than reclaiming the term gastronomy, food studies developed a more expansive definition of gastronomy. The origins of food studies have been traced back to the anthropologist Sidney Mintz’s book Sweetness and Power (1988), which examines the social role of sugar.42 However, the perception that food studies is a new field, separate from gastronomy, is only partly true. Ken Albala, the editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Food Studies (2013), reminds us that food studies is not a “new academic field” at all; rather, it is a new name, or academic distinction, for a much longer gastronomic tradition about food culture writ large. Albala points out the focus on food supplies, patterns of eating, and the larger food culture coalesced since the late 1990s as a “field” rather than a discipline.43 One of the challenges with food studies involves marshalling a comprehensive list of disciplines, theories, methodologies, and approaches within it. Critical approaches in food studies often address as a starting point “food and eating as objects of study,” which underscores the importance of food and consumption.44 Those working in food studies largely focus on four overarching and interconnecting themes: (a) the politics of production and transport (e.g., genetically modified organisms and fair trade); (b) environmental concerns (e.g., soil, fossil fuels, pesticides, and industrialized production); (c) safety, quality, and security of food sources and supplies; and (d) population growth.45 Another recent approach, which this volume largely employs, considers the broad role of food in the formation of cultural production. For example, flavor might be examined as a cultural construction, determined by learned symbolic values. Eating as a practice influences meaning and values linked to larger cultural constructs of gender, family, nationality, or modernity.46 In this way, food serves as less of an object and more as a subjective lens for studying culture.

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Food studies, although positing a new name as an academic discourse aligned with other critical “studies” (e.g., American, gender, environmental, and post-colonial), largely aligns with Brillat-Savarin’s definition of and approach to gastronomy, but with obvious contemporary distinctions and amalgams.47 Both consider sociocultural foundations as a starting point, underscoring an array of critical directions, such as colonialism, decolonization, and globalization; history and popular culture (e.g., literature, film, other media); constructions of identity (e.g., gender and class); cookbooks and creativity; diets, disorders, and nutrition.48 Perhaps the primary difference between the two is that food studies contains more defined subcategories within it—such as agro-food studies, literary food studies, feminist food studies, nutrition, and molecular cuisine—and through these subfields an increasing number of critical approaches crystallize and take shape for discussion and analysis. When summing up this brief history of gastronomy and food studies, both could be loosely divided into two interconnected research objectives: (a) examining food from a disciplinary perspective, such as the sociology of food, historical study of agriculture, or nutrition; (b) exploring food from a social and cultural perspective as interdisciplinary practitioners, drawing on other disciplines simultaneously, such as the culinary arts, food systems and production, diet and health, ecological impacts of food, and forms of consumption.49 For the purposes in this volume, chapters explore food through both objectives but regardless of which approach authors employ they all use food and gastronomy as a way into modernist literature and culture. Food studies remains primarily investigated within respective academic fields, despite the inherent interdisciplinarity of it.50 One of such fields relevant to this volume is literary food studies, also called “literature and food studies” or “literature and food,” which isolates literature as a lens to examine food culture and, at the same time, uses food culture to provide expansive approaches to literary study. Rather than considering food an ordinary object relegated to the peripheries of the literary text, food and gastrocritics identify complex relationships among the body, subjectivity, social structures regulating consumption, material histories, communication, or intersectionality. References to food are more than background; they reveal something important about narrative, plot, motive, characterization, action, or form.51 Kyla Wazana Tompkins, who is one of the initial gastrocritics, argues that “food consistently disrupts written text as a sign

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of embodied existence, as a mark of the outer limits of language, and as a trope for written language’s inability to fully represent the life of the body.”52 Food also frames and structures narrative. Tompkins’s approach to “foodlanguage” offers another example of the dynamic way food magnifies our approaches to literary culture. From Plato to Woolf, meals mediate social discourse. In a more recent study, titled Literature and Food Studies (2018), Amy L. Tigner and Allison Carruth define literary food studies as an examination of “genres and rhetorical traditions that chronicle the local conditions and global migrations of cuisines, commodities, and agricultural systems.” The result of this critical enterprise is that “literary engagements with the edible demand complex ways of thinking about food because they interlace its cultural and corporeal meanings and move across the scales at which those meanings take shape.”53 Before critical food studies appeared, any study of food in a literary text or the ways a literary text informed the culture of food throughout a specific period or location would simply be called literary criticism. With the advent of food studies, people from other fields can now draw on representations of food in literary texts to support studies in anthropology, history, or geography without engaging in explicit literary criticism. As this brief critical survey attests, only over the past decade or so have scholars in the arts and humanities sculpted a literary food studies,54 incorporating and building on other qualitative social science disciplines in what we might now broadly refer to as the “food humanities.”

Les plats principaux Gastro-Modernism includes established authorities as well as some of the best new critical voices in modernism and food studies. It contains many diverse and distinct contributions from authors representing Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Ireland, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This range of expertise reflects the quality and variety of chapters in the volume. The following chapters should not be reduced purely to an à la carte study of modernism that contains food in them. Instead, as explained in the above sections of the introductory menu, this collection provides an interconnected network of subjects and topics in global modernisms and food studies where expansive notions of food serve as a lens broadly to explore literary and cultural production.

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As Marshall Berman famously posited, modernity is a term that suggests an interlocking relationship between the social and historical, as well as space and time, which assumes that people, cultures, and institutions produce certain conditions, often in extreme contrast to one another, highlighting the tremendous disparity of abundance and scarcity within the modern project.55 Modernism as a period yields many contrasts of opposites, or dialectics, rooted in a larger modernity from which it emerged and also responded to. This volume is broken into four distinct parts to reflect these extremes: Culture and Consumption; Decadence and Absence; Taste and Disgust; and Appetites and Diets. Part I, “Culture and Consumption,” presents three chapters about consumption, dining, and digestion within modernist food culture. It begins with Tomoko Aoyama’s comprehensive exploration of the Japanese modernist Osaki Midori, who subverts social, literary, and gender norms and conventions, as well as fusing the past with future, nostalgia with science, and the urban with rural. In “Sweet Bean Paste and Excrement: Food, Humor, and Gender in Osaki Midori’s Writings,” Aoyama surveys how Osaki uses intertextuality, involving both Japanese and European films and literature, such as the works of Chekhov, William Sharp/Fiona Macleod, Satō Haruo, and Charlie Chaplin. This opening chapter offers multiple readings of Osaki’s “written food” in the light of relevant theories concerning intertextuality, humor, and girl (shōjo) studies. Shifting from Japan to Ireland, Gregory Castle examines the role played by food and dining in “What Is Eating For? Food and Function in James Joyce’s Fiction.” Castle raises key questions about changing representational functions of “food objects” in literature. For Joyce, food objects find their meaning and value not as reflections of the concrete social world but as the aesthetic effects of what the phenomenologist Mikel Dufrenne calls the “world of the work.” Castle maintains that such a shift in function is clearly marked in Joyce’s use of free-indirect style, providing the reader an opening into both the world of the work and the inner lives of protagonists. Concluding the first section, Chapter 3 analyzes the middle-class domestic dinner party as a central site in Virginia Woolf ’s articulation of British modernity. In “A Woolf at the Table: Virginia Woolf and the Domestic Dinner Party,” Lauren Rich argues that shared meals in Woolf ’s novels often function as sites of surprising alienation, fragmentation, and

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disunity, where characters are more apt to turn against than to commune with each other. Rich provides a nuanced reading of Woolf ’s fiction and how it destabilizes facile equations of commensality with communion while it also challenges the common misperception that the symbolic power of food is ahistorical. Part II, “Decadence and Absence,” begins with Peter Childs’s chapter titled “The Social and Cultural Uses of Food Separation,” which provides a thorough overview of how the status of food, as a source of nourishment and as a cultural signifier, underwent a transformation from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Production and consumption continued to change in this period. Food was also avoided by, or lacked by, individuals and communities for a variety of reasons: hunger and famine; colonial prohibitions and cultural differences; illnesses and dietary resistance; economic realities amid the moral and social intersection of class and the cost of food. Childs ultimately considers the presence and absence of food in light of cultural distinction and separation in the lives and writings of canonical modernist authors. Alys Moody also addresses absence in her chapter “Against Culinary Art: Mina Loy and the Modernist Starving Artist.” Moody acknowledges how the starving artist is one of the most recognizable figures and a central feature of self-mythologization in the modernist period. Positioning the analysis on Mina Loy’s posthumously published novel Insel, this dynamic chapter critiques the modernist starving artist that moves fluidly between an understanding of its social and aesthetic dimensions and seeks to offer a feminist revision of this exclusively male figure. Moody ultimately argues that the starving artist uses abstention from food to dramatize the uncomfortable articulation between modernism as a social phenomenon and modernism’s characteristic aesthetic positions. In Chapter 6, Gregory Mackie spotlights some of the modernist decadence in “Cocktails with Noël Coward.” Coward noted in his play The Vortex (1924) that he “was seldom mentioned in the press without allusions to ‘cocktails,’ ‘post-war hysteria,’ and ‘decadence.’” Taking this cue from Coward, Mackie cleverly investigates the potent mixture of thematic and stylistic ingredients that situate the onstage cocktail as a signature of Coward’s brand of popular modernism. To sip a cocktail in a Coward play, as Mackie suggests, is to enact a self that is up-to-date, metropolitan, sophisticated—a concoction of ingredients whose flavor is indelibly modern.

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In “Late Modernist Rationing: War, Class, Power,” Kelly Sullivan examines how late modernist writers (ca.1945–1960) highlight food consumption as a palatable means of discussing their reactions to perceived shifts in class and power in British society. By surveying food in the works of Elizabeth Bowen, Barbara Pym, Henry Green, Olivia Manning, and Elizabeth David, Sullivan weaves together various interconnected topics, such as the innocuous egg trades as class currency in wartime fiction of Bowen and Green, the liberating effects of austerity for single women in Pym, and the depiction of elegant and unobtainable Mediterranean food that helped democratize “good taste” for the changed social landscape of post-war Britain in Manning and David. Part III, “Taste and Disgust,” is a challenging section to digest because of the explicit way authors account for the disuse of food. Michel Delville and Andrew Norris begin with their chapter titled “Objects of Disgust: A Moveable Feast and the Modernist Anti-Vomitive,” which explores the edible objects, the tastes they inspire and confirm, the conduits they open between the physical and the psychological or philosophical—together with the darknesses they reveal and temporarily resolve—as the quilting points of A Moveable Feast. With special attention paid to Ernest Hemingway’s troubled and uneasy relationships with Wyndham Lewis and Gertrude Stein and their interaction with the gustatory obsessions of A Moveable Feast, this chapter asserts that such issues are central to the permutations and interpenetrations of the emotional and the aesthetic which determine the cultural and gender politics of Hemingway’s memoir, of which the food porn of A Moveable Feast is both a symptom and a critique. In Chapter 9, Clint Burnham takes on a challenging and original topic involving Canada’s colonial policies with Indigenous peoples. In “‘We were very lonely without those berries’: Gastronomic Colonialism in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools,” Burnham reveals how experimental food deprivation and oppression on Indigenous people were a fundamental part of colonial Canadian practices. Building on historian Ian Mosby’s article detailing nutrition experiments in the mid twentieth century, Burnham cites telling testimony from survivors of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s arguments in A Singular Modernity, this chapter argues that modernism depends as much upon periodization as on rupture and therefore modernism can be conceived of as a post-colonial encounter. To this end, counter-hegemonic narratives from Indigenous artists and writers that have figured abusive gastronomic practices and subsequent Aboriginal interventions into colonial gastronomy should be thought of as modernist.

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Rounding out the relationship between taste and disgust in Part III, Jeremy Diaper’s “From ‘Squalid Food’ to ‘Proper Cuisine’: Food and Fare in the Work of T. S. Eliot” examines one of the iconic modernists and his relationship to food, health, nutrition, and taste. Diaper meticulously analyzes Eliot’s oeuvre in relation to the extensive allusions to food and fare while considering Eliot’s innumerable references to food in his poetry, plays, and social criticism. The chapter highlights that Eliot supported the predominant ideas of the British organic movement from the 1930s to the 1950s, from the nutritional benefits of fresh organic produce to the importance of proper culinary skills. The chapter also illustrates that Eliot’s attitudes ranged from a playful engagement with cooking in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, to the more putrid and pernicious connotations seen in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and Sweeney Agonistes. The final section of the volume, Part IV, “Appetites and Diets,” showcases a range of diets and appetites in both a specific and a broad sense. In “‘The Raw and the Cooked’: Food and Modernist Poetry,” Lee M. Jenkins posits that the appetites and allergies are paradigmatic of the dialectic in modernism between poets who align themselves with the party of nature (D. H. Lawrence) and those whose affiliation is to the party of culture (T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens). Drawing on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “categorical opposition,” this chapter pinpoints the binary between the “raw” and the “cooked,” providing a means of discriminating not only between the kinds of foods served up in modernist poems, but also between varieties of poetic modernism as well. In Chapter 12, “Weight-Loss Regimes as Improvisation in Louis Armstrong’s and Duke Ellington’s Life Writing,” Vivian Halloran creatively studies the “diet” sections of Armstrong’s and Ellington’s published life writing texts. Halloran argues that both popular musicians from the modernist era applied the same skillset they had relied upon for their musical success— creativity and improvisation—to tackle the most serious threat to their health and public image: obesity. Their respective self-designed alimentary regimes in Armstrong’s Swing That Music (1936) and Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1956) and Ellington’s Music is My Mistress (1973) reveal passages and chapters dedicated to food and, in particular, how their unique and idiosyncratic styles are reflected and captured in the popular imagination. Edwige Crucifix’s chapter “Kitchen Talk: Marguerite Duras’s Experiments with Culinary Matter” locates the appetite of women and matter in modernism. As the culminating chapter in the volume, Crucifix skilfully examines the link

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between literary experimentation and feminine matter/material experiences through the treatment of food, cooking, and gastronomy in two of Marguerite Duras’s early novels, Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia (1953) and Moderato Cantabile (1958). The modernist author Duras explores ways to dismantle traditional narratives and gender roles and, as Crucifix maintains, provides an invitation for us to rethink not only the relationship between language and the real, but also between women and matter in modernism.

Les desserts Bringing the opening apéritif of James Joyce and the entrée including M. F. K. Fisher together, there is an undeniable, even if unlikely, link between them, as well as other modernist writers in this collection: appetites drive our ability to produce and consume. Food is more than simply an object of inquiry, an à la carte order on the menu. Food and all of the ways we conceive of this word in the larger history of gastronomy and food studies open up the appetites of audiences, cultural producers, and characters across levels of the body, emotions, and memory to form some of the unexplored contours of modernist studies. In the Foreword to Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me, Bee Wilson writes, “The problem with most food writing is that it is too much about ingredients and not enough about appetite.”56 Perhaps it is not too far of a stretch to claim the same about modernism: it is often too much about ingredients and not enough about appetite, or the genesis and manifestation of personal and cultural hunger latent in the text. Gastro-Modernism upends this trend to consider an appetitive focus informed by ingredients, mirroring a similar reversal of how literary and cultural production might shape food culture as much as food culture has shaped those producing literary culture.

I Culture and Consumption

C HA P T E R ON E

Sweet Bean Paste and Excrement Food, Humor, and Gender in Osaki Midori’s Writings Tomoko Aoyama

F

ood, gender, humor, and literature all contain culturally and linguistically specific elements as well as more or less universal, or at least widely shared, elements. Discussions of any of these topics need to be conducted with this in mind, and a suitable balance found for any specific occasion, or for wider, more general purposes. When the language of discussion is different from that of the subject, there are additional issues. To write about food in selected texts by the Japanese modernist writer Osaki Midori (1896–1971), for example, it is necessary to gloss a number of terms: food items, cooking methods, and their cultural significance, and even the name of the author.1 Food and humor in literature may easily get lost or distorted in translation; annotations and explications may certainly aid our understanding and yet by no means do they guarantee the same degree and kind of amusement, interest, “flavor,” or “taste” as the source text. With all of these issues and limitations, however, we can still focus on the gains rather than the losses and “hope for an afterlife and new life for both the source and the translated texts” and the food and humor in them.2 This chapter examines food in Dai nana kankai hōkō (Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, 1933) and other works by Osaki Midori.3 Food in Osaki’s texts functions to estrange and subvert social, literary, and gender norms and conventions. It also fuses past with future, nostalgia with science, and urban with rural. Seemingly ordinary food, such as cucumbers, persimmons, and bread, is juxtaposed with, and likened to, something incongruous, inedible, and/or sensuous, thereby creating humor.

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Osaki started writing short stories, essays, and poetry for literary magazines in 1914. She moved from her home in Tottori, in the northwestern part of Honshu, to Tokyo to study at the Japan Women’s University in 1919, but the publication of her story in a commercial magazine forced her to withdraw from the university, which prohibited students from engaging in such activities. From the late 1920s to the early 1930s she published prolifically in major literary magazines, including the newly established Nyonin geijutsu (Women’s Art, 1928–32).4 However, mental illness triggered by the side effects of migraine medications interrupted her very promising literary career. In September 1932, she returned to Tottori, accompanied by her older brother, and by the mid-1930s she had stopped writing for publication. Although forgotten for decades, Osaki is regarded today as one of the most important and original modernist writers in Japan. The most important contributor to the revival of Osaki’s literature is the avant-garde writer–critic, Hanada Kiyoteru (1909–74). His 1960 essay and the 1969 anthology Black Humor that he edited, including in it Osaki’s Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, have set the scene for the re-evaluation of Osaki. She has become seen as a brilliant writer whose writing displays arresting imagery and a quaint sense of humor, which is in fact far from “black,” but light and cheerful, while also embracing pathos and melancholy.5 Livia Monnet considers Osaki’s works “highly polished modernist pieces displaying a subdued but mordant irony and humor and a somewhat morbid imagination.”6 Osaki’s writing rejects the naturalistic notion of art as a representation of life and reality and shows a strong affinity with a number of contemporary and earlier writers and artists, ranging from Edgar Allan Poe, Anton Chekhov, and William Sharp/Fiona Macleod (1855–1905) to Satō Haruo (1892–1964), Alla Nazimova (1879–1945), and Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977). This is by no means a case of imitation or influence; rather, Osaki shared with these and many other writers around the world an interest in doppelgänger and aimless wanderings (flâneur), a putatively nonsensical obsession with numbers and science, and a fascination with cinematography, androgyny, and queering as well as devices such as parody, pastiche, intertextuality, metafiction, and humor.7 Food, too, appears frequently in her texts, and, as we see below, it is closely linked to all of these other themes and devices. One distinct characteristic of the renewed general and critical interest in Osaki’s writing, especially from the mid-1980s, is the recognition of the significance of the girl (shōjo) by feminist scholars and critics. The period

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around 1990 saw the rapid development of literary shōjo studies,8 which takes a different approach from anthropology, sociology, and history and focuses, in particular, on the reading and writing of the girl within texts. Osaki Midori has been regarded as a pioneering writer who explored literary representations and expressions of the girl, who, through reading and writing, subverts and transgresses the patriarchal norm of the musume, or “daughter of the house.”9 Subversion is achieved not through an overtly combative form or manner but through humor and parody. Closely aligned with this recognition of the “reading/writing girl,” there is a clear shift in the critical discourse about Osaki. The myth propagated earlier that regarded Osaki as a tragic woman writer who could not fulfill her literary ambitions has been replaced by a much more positive interpretation of her decision to stay away from literary production and media in the second half of her life, during which she supported and looked after her aging mother and extended family members in Tottori, literally feeding them in her everyday life. Osaki’s works continue to attract scholars of modernism, women’s literature, feminism, and gender studies and to inspire writers, film makers, and artists, as we will see below.

Grandma’s Green Cucumber Comb Let us begin our discussion of Osaki’s “written food” with one of her earliest published works, a nine-line piece entitled “Aoi kushi” (“Green combs,” 1914), written when she was still a teenager living in Tottori. The text describes the grandmother/old woman next door rhythmically slicing cucumbers: “From under the shiny silver blade/teeth of a kitchen knife, comb after comb is born, each with a green rim like the one that a beautiful woman puts in her forelock.” The old woman continues cutting, “repeating the same action like a machine.”10 The poet captures the visual beauty of the cucumber combs, the rhythm, and the skill of the old woman, as well as the mechanical repetition—as if to predict the 1936 film Modern Times by one of her future heroes, Charlie Chaplin.11 The composite aesthetic senses are also connected to a faintly uncanny and disturbing feeling. It is remarkable that nine simple lines can suggest a number of budding modernist themes, which invite readers to deeper and wider readings. The image of a comb in the forelock of a beautiful woman, for example, recalls the celebrated short poem, “Hatsukoi” (“First love,” 1897), by Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943):

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Tomoko Aoyama When I saw you under the apple tree With your hair swept up for the first time I thought you were the flower In the flower comb you wore in front12

Osaki’s short piece is neither a direct parody nor even an allusion to Tōson’s poem, but there is no doubt that Osaki knew this famous poem about young love. Pinning the forelock up for the first time was an old custom to indicate a girl child’s entry into puberty. In Tōson’s poem, which is written in the traditional 7–5 meta from a male point-of-view, the young male persona meets a young woman in an apple orchard. In the second stanza she gives him an apple, gently extending her “soft white hand,” and the third and the last stanzas suggest that their youthful love develops into courtship and sexual pleasure. Osaki’s free verse, on the other hand, has no romantic connotations (or Romantic diction). Even though a beautiful woman is mentioned, the focus is placed on the old woman, who is not the persona’s own grandmother but a neighbor, hence free of blood ties and patriarchal restrictions. The second line of “Green Combs” consists of an onomatopoetic phrase “kachi kachi kachi,” which represents the cutting sound. The phrase, which contains two repetitions, is repeated twice, in lines five and seven. These repetitions correspond with the continuous production of numerous beautiful green combs. However, there are eerie elements and transgressions. For the knife’s blade, for instance, Osaki uses not the normal Chinese character 刃 ha for blade/edge, but its homophone 歯, which means tooth/teeth. This adds a visual uncanniness to the otherwise everyday scene of cooking an ordinary fresh cucumber dish—probably a sunomono salad with salt, vinegar, and sugar dressing. Horror hidden in everyday food also reminds us of the maneating old crone, yamauba (mountain witch), and her variations in Japanese folklore and theatre. Furthermore, when the character for “tooth” is combined with the character for car/wheel, 車, the compound 歯車 means cogwheels, which play an iconic role in Modern Times. “Cogwheels” is also the title of the last work by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), “Haguruma” (1927). Akutagawa’s text, written just before his suicide, is filled with disturbing imagery, including the vision of translucent turning cogwheels with eyes and noses. Repetition and the visual effect of Chinese characters are common features too of the Japanese Dadaist poet, Takahashi Shinkichi (1901–87).13 The nineteen-year-old Osaki’s “Green Combs” contains no brutal or neurotic

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images and yet it suggests almost prophetically modernist themes and motifs as well as something like cinematographic devices such as montage, closeups, and effective juxtaposition of sound and vision.

Food and Love in a Queer Family The figure of the grandmother or old woman appears frequently in Osaki’s texts. Kawasaki Kenko pays special attention to the close relationship between the girl protagonist Ono Machiko and her grandmother in Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense and other texts in the Machiko cycle: “the ‘girl’ is directly linked to her grandmother, ignoring the Oedipus family triangle.”14 “Wandering” begins with these lines: “Some time in the distant past, I spent a brief period from autumn to winter as a member of an odd family. And I seem to have had a certain experience of love.”15 Machiko feels uncomfortable about her full name as it is reminiscent of the ninthcentury poet Ono no Komachi. Unlike Komachi, the legendary beauty and woman of many loves, Machiko is a shy, skinny girl with frizzy red hair who secretly aspires to “write poems that would reverberate in the human seventh sense.”16 The red hair and the interest in literature may remind us of the heroine of the classic girls’ novel, Anne of Green Gables (1908), but Machiko is shy, modest, and hesitant rather than a tomboy, and Osaki’s text itself is, as we shall see, much more radical and modern than Montgomery’s. Machiko leaves the grandmother’s home to live in Tokyo with her elder brothers Ichisuke and Nisuke, and her older male cousin, Sangorō.17 The four young people are described as “grandmother’s grandchildren.” The unnamed grandmother in an unnamed hometown is physically separated from the young protagonists in Tokyo but she still plays a pivotal role in gathering these four grandchildren together. The theme of love appears frequently in this and many other Osaki texts, almost always in association with food, and often in association with literature, art, and science. Although each character falls in love with someone, unlike in Tōson’s “First Love,” or in the Ono no Komachi legends, none of the yearning develops into a fully fledged romantic or sexual relationship. In this “odd” household Machiko lives in a “maid’s room” and her role is to do the cooking, cleaning, and washing. Although this may seem to comply with the conventional gender role, before Machiko’s arrival these tasks were assigned to Sangorō, who lives in a small room by the main entrance, which

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is usually occupied by an apprentice or a student worker. Furthermore, while Machiko aspires to write poems, her cousin wants to study music at a conservatorium. Thus, the girl and the boy are almost interchangeable in many ways. Kawasaki connects this “odd” (henna) family to a kind of “queering” of the patriarchal family norm as well as the modern scientific interest in the hentai (abnormal, perverse).18 Ichisuke is a psychiatrist working in a mental hospital who has a special interest in schizophrenia and doppelgänger. Nisuke is a science student working on two projects: “On Utilizing Soil from the Foot of Mount Wasteland” and Changes in the Erotic Behavior of Plants in Response to Fertilizer Temperatures.19 The first project involves the indoor cultivation of radishes whereas the second includes an experiment on the “loving feelings” of moss. In both projects, fertilizer, or to be more precise, human manure, is used as an essential material: for the first project radishes are cultivated in test tubes filled with diluted fertilizer, whereas for the second project Nisuke heats manure and examines what temperature is most effective in encouraging moss’s “loving feeling.” Since the experiments are conducted in Nisuke’s room in an old, rented, Japanese-style house, the strong stench permeates the whole house. The blurring and subversion of the distinction between food and excrement appear again and again. Nisuke heats the night soil collected by poor Sangorō in a large earthenware pot (nabe). Although this type of nabe is normally used for cooking stews and other dishes for family and friends to share at the table, in this story it is used for inedible things such as the manure for Nisuke’s scientific experiment and the grandmother’s special potion to fix Machiko’s frizzy red hair. After Machiko breaks the test tubes while cleaning Nisuke’s room, he suggests that she pick up the scattered radish shoots and wash them carefully to use in a dish for supper. Although this idea amuses Machiko for a moment, she is still upset about her blunder. The hungry Nisuke turns to Sangorō, and asks him to perform the task, emphasizing that his “greens should be delicious” since they have been growing in the fertilizer.20 When Sangorō finds this idea rather disgusting, Nisuke tries to “enlighten” him: “There is nothing as sacred as fertilizer. And human excrement is the most sacred kind. Try comparing the sacredness of excrement and that of music.” Despite Sangorō’s protests, Nisuke insists: “Tolstoy, among others, said that music stimulates obscene passions. And he sprinkled fertilizer over his farm.”21 Hearing their argument, Machiko cheers up and goes into the kitchen.

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In this mild but subversive scatology, Osaki does not use the strategically plain and violent styles of the proletarian literature of the 1920s and 1930s. Even though her humor does have erotic, grotesque, and nonsensical elements, her writing is clearly different from the popular culture of the period that is characterized by ero-guro-nansensu (eroticism, grotesquery, and nonsense).22 Reading plays an important role within the text. Both Machiko and Sangorō are interested in Nisuke’s papers, as they contain something lyrical, and, according to Sangorō, “Plants’ love, against expectations, inspires people.”23 The pollen emitted by moss “in love” affects these young human beings. In one of the highlights of the novella, Sangorō cuts Machiko’s frizzy red hair in Nisuke’s room, as it is much better lit than his own or her room. However, in this laboratory, thanks to the heated fertilizer, moss is “falling in love,” and emitting loving pollen. Sitting next to the sound, sight, heat, and smell of the boiling manure, Machiko feels drowsy. The puffs of the liquid gradually boiling down and thickening in the ceramic pot were similar to the sound of the sweet red bean paste my grandmother used to make. This took me back to when I was a child of six or seven, when I gazed holding on to her sleeve, at the paste in the pot.24 Although omitted in the translation, it is mentioned in the Japanese text that the grandmother’s anko (sweet red bean paste) was for the sweet dish called ohagi, which is steamed glutinous rice rolled into small balls and coated with anko or other ingredients such as kinako, sweetened soybean flour. Traditionally, ohagi was regarded as a treat for special occasions such as the Bon Festival and Autumn Equinox Day. Bon is the time when the spirits of the dead are supposed to return, and on equinox days people visit their family graveyards. Ohagi and anko thus have a strong association with family gatherings and ancestral worship. We may note that it is the grandmother’s cooking that Machiko remembers; there is no sign of the mother. Osaki never uses the colloquial and childish term unko (poo) in her text, but the comic subversive overlap of unko and anko is obvious. That Machiko is a child of six or seven in this remembrance is significant. As the scholar of childhood studies and pioneer of shōjo studies Honda Masuko pointed out, children are fascinated by poo-poo, wee-wee, and other things that are regarded as dirty and even taboo in modern adult society.25 They play with

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real or imagined poop, and, as Bruegel’s painting “Children’s Games” and Rabelais’s Gargantua show, there is something universal and fundamental in this fascination. The fascination may be put down to the anal stage eroticism, “the ‘inside’ overblown outside,” and/or “the most fundamental human relationship” in which little children get the assistance of adults when needed.26 Honda also argues that while children love the sticky muddy state, not limited to that of excrement but also encompassing cream, jam, paint, and many other things, the chaotic “indeterminacy and the premonition of the self ’s outflow make [adults] anxious.”27 The junior members of the “odd” family, Machiko and Sangorō, are, in a sense, somewhere between adult and child. As Nisuke’s experimental pot of manure brings a nostalgic food memory to Machiko, Sangorō kisses Machiko. Given that Machiko reads Ichisuke’s books on psychology in his room during his absence in the daytime, it is not at all far-fetched to regard this episode as representing the oral and anal stages of Freudian psychosexual development.28 However, what makes this text interesting is, as Kawasaki and Doi emphasize, not the application of modern scientific knowledge but the parodic distance and difference from the parodied texts and genres. Doi also reads Osaki’s text as an example of ecological comedy. Referring to Charles Darwin’s study of the bioturbation (reworking of soil) of earthworms (1881) and the ecological work of Kumazawa Banzan (1619–91), Doi points out that Nisuke’s research shares the notion of the ecological cycle with these pioneers.29 Needless to say, however, the “sacredness of manure” itself is not the point of the text; it is only one of many layers, or tastes, of the anko/unko association.

Food, Love, and Texts The juxtaposition of love, food, and texts appears again and again in Osaki’s fiction. In “Hokō” (“Walking,” 1931), which was published several months after “Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense,” Machiko is living with the grandmother, who cooks ohagi for her granddaughter to deliver it to the Matsuki family. The grandmother believes walking will be a good remedy for Machiko’s melancholy, which was caused by her unrequited love for Kōda Tōhachi (with the number eight hachi in his name). Tōhachi is Ichisuke’s friend and colleague and is traveling around in Japan to collect data for his psychology project. In his experiment (which would never pass an ethics committee in today’s science), he reads passages of various plays with a “model” or an

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informant and subject. Machiko guesses that this is to “study in-depth human psychology through observing the tone of voices and utterances.”30 He tries this with the grandmother first, but she refuses to participate, saying that the text is too difficult, although it may also be because it consists of dialogues between lovers. His next informant, Machiko, too, finds it impossible to read the text aloud at first, but as they move from the common living room to her room, which has been temporarily turned into a guest room for him, and then to the attic where she sleeps instead, she gradually becomes relaxed enough to utter her lines. Attics are an important topos in modernist literature as well as in gender studies. Here the attic provides privacy and isolation from the everyday living space. Besides the location, there are two props that aid Machiko’s recitation. One is the persimmons that Tōhachi picks from the attic window. They eat them together while reading the texts. Another is an old basket for drying baby diapers which Tōhachi uses as a stool while reading. Eating the fruit with him and his relaxed attitude help to ease Machiko’s embarrassment about reading some of the passionate lines aloud. As Kawasaki points out, “it is widely known that sharing food increases intimacy and that eating stimulates or compensates for sensuality.”31 The diaper basket also reinforces the oral/ anal motifs surrounding Ozaki’s texts, which Kawasaki regards as an expansion of erotic sensuality from a narrow focus on sexual intercourse to a much wider range and variety including eating and excretion. Interestingly, one of the texts the pair read is Goethe’s Faust. “When I became Margarete, Dr. Kōda became a persimmon eating Faust.”32 After a few days of eating and reading, Tōhachi moves on to another place. Machiko feels the emptiness acutely: “My mouth missed reading the lines, and so I ate many persimmons to fill my lonely mouth.”33 To match this mood, Machiko writes on a table dusted with flour a slightly modified version of the first line she read in the experiment—namely, instead of “Ah, Mr. Humor [Humooru-sama], are you going away?,” “Ah, Mr. Humor, you have already gone.”34 This is not from Goethe but must be Osaki’s creation. Nevertheless, the name, which matches the Japanese transcription of the German word Humor rather than the English “humor,” yūmoa, suggests that it is a respectful tribute to Goethe and the celebrated Japanese translation of his Faust by Mori Ōgai. Without Mr. Humor, Machiko cannot help but suffer mild depression. Unlike for Gretchen, however, there is no pregnancy, no sin, no death, or tragedy. This may be because, as Kawasaki suggests, Kōda Tōhachi’s sitting on the basket symbolically sealed it, and, like her grandmother, Machiko will never need to put it to practical use.35

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Kōda’s experiment is mentioned in another short story, “Kōrogi-jō” (“Miss Cricket,” 1932), with mock criticism: “He was a doctor who blasphemed against the mystical gods.”36 The protagonist of this story is the eponymous Miss Cricket, whose real name is not mentioned, for “few readers, perhaps, would know the heroine of our tale.”37 Miss Cricket is addicted to a certain kind of medicine whose side effects include “a sensitivity to sunlight and an aversion to crowds.”38 Just as Machiko fell in love with Tōhachi while they read romantic plays aloud, Miss Cricket, too, falls in love after reading about “the love of a peculiar poet,” William Sharp, and the poetess Fiona Macleod.39 Miss Cricket’s love, however, is directed not toward a living man but toward the poet/poetess, or their love. Finally, some moths after Sharp passed away, people heard that she had been called to eternal heaven on the same day and at the same hour as William Sharp. It was even in the same bed and from the same illness as he. Yet, only one body was ever found. The one, male body of William Sharp.40 Miss Cricket is eager to find out more about the object of her admiration. Her search at the library, however, reveals little. Disappointed, she leaves the reading room and goes to the women’s cafeteria in the basement of the library. There, she finds a woman in a dark corner, and without actually exchanging any words, Miss Cricket imagines that the other woman is a widow studying midwifery, and starts a wordless conversation with her, while eating a chocolate cornet bread roll she has bought at a kiosk. In her silent conversation, Miss Cricket wishes the “Widow” well: “May you become a midwife by autumn. And as you step on a cricket at dawn, may your work flourish each morning. You may laugh at me for mentioning crickets. But let me make a quiet confession to you. I always worry about things like crickets.”41 Instead of the girl–grandmother relationship, we now have a heroine struggling to communicate with other women, though in an imagined conversation. Apart from the “Widow,” the shop assistant is a young woman. The bread is clearly a reminder of reality: Miss Cricket is aware that even to think about useless things, she needs bread and that for that she needs to “surprise [her] mother with telegrams all year long.”42 The mother is mentioned as the supporter of the “useless” daughter. In Miss Cricket’s imagination, the Widow will assist mothers as a midwife. In her silent conversation she asks the Widow if her

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mother is well, and while wishing that she will live for a hundred years, she remarks, “But Widow, mothers have never, in any age, had a pleasant role to play.” She then asks Fiona Macleod if she ever wanted to ask a scientist to invent a way to live without eating: “I am always hoping for such a thing. But I don’t wish to keep clamoring for bread all the time.”43 Kondō Hiroko notes that in the 1920s bread became more popular in Japan than it had been in the previous era for four main reasons. First, the government encouraged eating bread to counter the steep rise in the price of rice, the traditional staple food. Second, bread was introduced as part of military and school meals. Third, sweet bread rolls became popular consumer items in the growing cafe culture. And fourth, since Japanese companies had developed yeast, home baking was actively promoted. In other words, while bread represents economy and reality, it also has modern European associations as well as being a fashionable consumer food.44 Miss Cricket does not buy toast or a plain bread roll but a chocolate cornet.

The Realm of the Seventh Sense Revisited and Transformed As mentioned earlier, Osaki’s works were resurrected from their earlier oblivion while she was still alive, but the proliferation or, to use the Seventh Sense metaphor, pollination of her literature has markedly increased in the last three decades. Osaki’s texts are not just consumed but transformed into new texts and performances of a variety of genres and styles. Unsurprisingly, food, gender, and humor play roles that are just as important in these new texts as in the original. In Kanai Mieko’s novel Tama ya (Oh, Tama!, 1987), for example, there is a cameo appearance by a “girl with her hair in an Osaki Midori-style bob—‘in other words, it looked as if she’d chopped away at her hair herself with a pair of scissors.’”45 The haircut refers to the uneven cut Sangorō gives to Machiko in Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense as well as to the mental illness of Osaki and her protagonists. Just as Wandering is part of the Machiko cycle, Oh, Tama! is part of Kanai’s Mejiro cycle, set in the eponymous suburb of Tokyo, in which the queering of the family and girl themes play important roles. Like Osaki, Kanai effectively uses intertextuality, mock-pedantry, parody, and satire.46 Most of Kanai’s protagonists are as “useless” in a practical sense as Machiko and Miss Cricket. The narrator of Oh, Tama!, for example, is an unemployed photographer, who has been forced to share his apartment temporarily with his psychiatrist half-brother

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and another man, who is a mixed-race half-brother of the photographer’s ex-girlfriend. Thus, the trio form an odd and queer pseudo-family. These three male protagonists have neighbors, a middle-aged woman writer, her niece, and the niece’s friend, each of whom has family problems and appreciates the companionship of the others. Reading and writing as well as food and girl motifs are prominent in this novel. Murata Kiyoko’s novella “Nabe no naka” (“In the Pot,” 1987) has an even closer intertextual connection to Osaki. In this novella, the girl–grandmother motif is lovingly repeated but transformed. This, too, is the story of an odd temporary family, the grandmother and her grandchildren, two sets of brother and sister, during summer, while their parents are visiting a long-lost, and now dying, brother of the grandmother in Hawaii. As the title suggests, Murata uses food motifs as a respectful tribute to Osaki. Like Machiko in Wandering, the first-person narrator, Tami-chan, assumes the role of cook for this temporary family—because Grandmother’s cooking is “absolutely dreadful.”47 Tami guesses that it may be because of her false teeth that she overcooks everything, and that since her palate is covered by her dentures, she must have lost some of her sense of taste. The children realize that it is not only the sense of taste but the grandmother’s memories that are dimming: she cannot even remember anything about the newly discovered younger brother in Hawaii.48 In a keynote lecture delivered at the special forum held in Tottori to commemorate the 120th anniversary of Osaki’s birth, Murata discussed the special quality of grandmothers in Osaki’s texts. In the lecture Murata comments on the cinematographic quality of the scene in which the drowsy Machiko superposes Nisuke’s pot of manure on Grandma’s pot of red beans. In the “Green Combs” poem, Murata identifies a unique humor that transforms an ordinary comb into a cucumber. We may note the reversal here: it is a comb transforming into a cucumber. To Murata the topos of the comb, which, as we saw earlier, is usually associated with feminine emotions and sexuality, is estranged, as it is placed side by side with an old woman, who produces beautiful fresh cucumber combs.49 Apart from food, girl, odd family, and humor, Murata has another favorite motif that can be associated with Osaki—namely, toilets. In fact, pots and toilets are incorporated in several of her titles. One of her collection of short stories is called Yattsu no konabe (Eight little pots, 2007), which includes “In the Pot” and another story titled “Hyaku no toire” (One Hundred Toilets,

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originally published in 1989, and winner of the 1990 Women’s Literature Prize). Another collection of short stories is titled Jūni no toire (Twelve Toilets, 1995). These stories explore women’s and girls’ senses and sensuality, mixing realistic descriptions with fantastic, dreamlike imagery. As a final example of the “afterlife” of food, gender, and humor in Osaki Midori’s texts, I will discuss two films, written by Yamazaki Kuninori and directed by Hamano Sachi. Dainana kankai hōkō, Osaki Midori o sagashite (Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, In Search of Osaki Midori, 1998) was the first “general” film Hamano made after making more than 300 “pink” films (soft-core sex films) depicting women’s sex and sexuality from the women’s viewpoint.50 The film juxtaposes scenes from Wandering with fragments from various stages of Osaki’s life from the 1930s to her death. Osaki is played by the charismatic stage actress Shiraishi Kayoko, and her friends and sister are also played by acclaimed actresses. In the original film version, there was another level of narrative: before the fiction and the biography start, there is a contemporary queer party scene in which literary critics and writers such as Yagawa Sumiko and Katō Sachiko appear in video interviews within the scene and comment on Osaki Midori. In the currently available DVD version, these comments and the party scene are omitted, and the film is therefore less radically experimental or “queer,” but it is perhaps easier for a more general audience to follow two rather than three or four narratives. Hamano and Yamazaki present a positive interpretation of Osaki’s latter life after her writing career ended. Shiraishi convincingly plays both the tormented writer with a mental illness and the articulate modernist writer– critic, as well as the strong, matronly aunt looking after her extended family. Food-related motifs are effectively introduced in the later life scenes. For example, the middle-aged Osaki negotiates the price of fish with a woman pedlar in a jolly, relaxed manner. The ordinariness of this scene is in stark contrast to the scene immediately before it, which is the argument between Nisuke and Sangorō about the “sacredness of manure.” In another scene, the middle-aged Osaki serves breakfast to her young nieces, and after they have gone to school, she eats her own humble breakfast. In these scenes there is no sense of misery, sadness, morbidity, or frustration; Aunt Midori enjoys daily life, food, cooking, and eating as well as communicating with other people. The film does not avoid depicting problematic issues in Osaki’s life such as mental illness, poverty, and aging; and yet by juxtaposing these with ordinary and happy scenes and the fantastic scenes from Osaki’s writing, it

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contributes to the continuous multiple readings/writings of Osaki’s textual food. Hamano/Yamazaki’s second film based on Osaki Midori’s fiction is titled Kōrogi-jō (Miss Cricket, 2006), but it combines the title story with two other short stories. The film captures the melancholy, humor, and food in the original texts. The episode with William Sharp and Fiona Macleod is also included, with Western actors playing the roles and speaking in Japanese, which adds a certain humor. As we have seen, or tasted, Osaki’s written food has amused and nurtured generations of readers. Some have produced their own adaptations of her literary ingredients or recipes. There have also been careful and dynamic examinations of the texts, moving away from the conventional biological (and therefore naturalistic) approach to analysis of the socio-historical and cultural context on the one hand, and intertextual relationships with the preceding texts and the texts that follow. With the increased interest in inter-cultural, inter-generational, and global girl studies, ecology, and gender studies, the cucumber combs and Machiko’s stories will continue to reverberate within our seventh sense.

C HA P T E R T WO

What Is Eating For? Food and Function in James Joyce’s Fiction Gregory Castle

Food and Function

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t the advent of modernism in the novel, Tess Durbyfield, the protagonist of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), allows herself to be fed by Alex D’Urberville, whom she has just met. He “asked her if she liked strawberries”: “Yes,” said Tess, “when they come.” “They are already here.” D’Urberville began gathering specimens of the fruit for her, handing them back to her as he stooped; and, presently selecting a specially fine product of the “British Queen” variety, he stood up and held it by the stem to her mouth. “No—no!” she said quickly, putting her fingers between his hand and her lips. “I would rather take it in my own hand.” “Nonsense!” he insisted; and in a slight distress she parted her lips and took it in.1 Tess’s “slight distress” is a response to a forced sensual encounter, but it also registers the ambivalence of the strawberry, which is at once a “specimen” of fruit that she enjoys when “it comes” and a symbol of national identity. The

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fruit Alex tempts her with, a “British Queen,” serves blatantly as a symbol of sexual desire, of her place in a pastoral setting in which she labors as a dairy maid along with virile young men who work the land; but it also draws attention to the gulf between a D’Urberville and a Durbyfield. By the time Hardy published Tess, food in realist fiction no longer reliably served the function of marking social and economic status through the representation of consumption. From the exotic curry dinners served on middle-class tables in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair to the gruel ladled up for the poor children in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, nineteenth-century novelists used food and its consumption, like it did most objects, to strengthen the verisimilitude of the representation and thereby affirm the established order of social distinctions and rankings. Though it indexes agricultural labor and production in the manner of conventional novelistic realism, Hardy’s British Queen strawberry doubles as a stand in for something else; it behaves less like an index than a symbol, a conventional one about beauty and desire that is disoriented by Tess’s resistance so that it symbolizes something about her own sensibilities, her pride, her sense of rectitude.2 Hardy achieves this effect through a naturalist style of description that captures an ephemeral but charged moment when desire and uncertainty come together in a moment of eating. When Tess “took it in,” she did more than consume the strawberry, for what she ate “in a half-pleased, half-reluctant state” is transformed into a symbol of her ambivalent desire. The advance that Joyce makes on Hardy, beginning as early as Dubliners (1914), emphasizes the role of inner life in such transformative moments and suggests, as he does in Ulysses, that they find their meaning and value not as reflections of the concrete social world but as the aesthetic effects of a world that belongs solely to the work itself, a world in which food and dining take on significance that has little to do with hunger or nutrition. Joyce exemplifies a general modernist attitude toward food objects— more precisely, the image of such objects in narrative—and the conventions of dining, in which both yield to a crucial shift in narrative function from mimetic to symbolic that draws on the world-making capacity of fiction. “The Dead,” the culminating story in Dubliners, is an early expression of this shift, one that reaches an apotheosis in Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), in which food and dining remain linked to social status but simultaneously create an array of new functions and meanings when they are presented to the reader as part of the protagonist’s inner life,

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where the realist–naturalist indexical function is called into question and objects enjoy new grounds of recognition. This enjoyment is made legible to the reader through free indirect styles that reveal the world of the work in the contours of inner life.3 By inner life I mean the inner sense of reflection and memory, thought and speculation.4 In literature, inner life is manifested in a number of ways, from third-person narrative report of the protagonist’s inner world (a form of mimetic description) to non-mimetic forms of narrated monologue that occupy the entire terrain of the text. I follow the phenomenologist Mikel Dufrenne in describing this terrain as the world of the work, which is the result of a complex dialectic between two aspects of that world: the represented world, the part of the work that grounds meaning in what lies outside of it, and the expressed world, the part that belongs exclusively to the work and does not engage in mimetic imitation.5 The expressed world enjoys a certain primacy because it gives rise to and “transfigures the represented [object] and confers on it a meaning through which it becomes inexhaustible.”6 However, the world-making potential Dufrenne describes does not amount to a separation of the work from the “real world”: “The expressed world is not another world but the expansion of the represented objects to the dimensions of a world.”7 Indeed, the “aesthetic object” (i.e., the work) cannot be grasped without one’s “being in the world” and “feeling engaged in an inexhaustible given.”8 In this dialectical relation, the aesthetic object “surpasses itself toward its meaning” and thereby becomes “a quasi-subject”; as such, it comes into alignment with the creator and, it follows, the protagonist, who occupies a world which the reader experiences “as spatial and temporal density and as a peculiar style.”9 In Dufrenne’s formulation, realism and naturalism emphasize the represented world of the work, in which objects perform a denotative function of imitating, in language and narrative, the concrete social world.10 In experimental modernist fiction, this function is overtaken by a quite different one that subordinates denotation and mimesis (that is, imitation) to the expressive needs of the work itself, which are most evident to the reader in the depiction of inner life, where ordinary objects become extraordinary. These extraordinary objects function as pseudo-things or, to use Slavoj Žižek’s phrase, sublime objects. “We must remember,” Žižek writes, “that there is nothing intrinsically sublime in a sublime object—according to Lacan, a sublime object is an ordinary, everyday object which, quite by chance, finds itself occupying the place of what he calls das Ding, the impossible-real object of desire.”11 It stands in for

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what inevitably vanishes; and by doing so it serves, in the world of the work as in the world external to it, as a goad to desire, leading it into new dimensions of experience. Food and eating, because they are both necessary and ordinary, are exemplary in serving this symbolic function of sublimity that is predicated on not being sublime at all.12 For example, in Ulysses, Leopold Bloom remembers the time he shared a simple seedcake with Molly: “Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed.”13 At this point in the narrative, deep in Bloom’s inner life, the seedcake no longer corresponds to the food object Molly shared with her prospective husband that day on Howth Head, for on that day it vanished, “warm and chewed,” only to reappear in memory as the sublime object of his desire.14 The pleasure he experiences in memory (“Yum”) has little to do with the “physical sensation of hunger” but rather with, as David Kaplan puts it, “a specific food generated by something other than hunger, such as memory.”15 This prompts the reader to ask, with respect to literary texts in which food is an artistic device: if their function is not imitative, what do food objects signify and what relations do they form with characters and other objects in narrative? In other words, what is eating for? These questions are worth asking in part because they get to the heart of a larger question: what is the function of the object in general in modernist fiction? Bill Brown’s work in recent years has attempted to answer this question, primarily through a reconsideration of Kant’s phenomenon/noumenon distinction in which these two terms (typically rendered object and thing) are regarded in relation to each other, rather than as two mutually exclusive categories, one restricted to experience, the other to metaphysical speculation. The “temporal dimension” of this narrative experience transforms the object by telling “the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.”16 In the “universe of fiction,” Brown contends, this relation, fundamentally one of circulation, lies “at the heart of the novelistic enterprise.”17 On the one hand, in the represented world of this universe objects circulate, they are sought for and consumed, subject to the pressures of commodification and reification that take place in the concrete social world outside the work.18 On the other hand, in modernist works that experiment with the temporality of subject/object relations, such as those by Virginia Woolf, the “universe of fiction” is dominated by the expressed world where the “slippage or fluctuation” in the subject/object dyad signals another state of

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being.19 Food objects in fiction illustrate Brown’s point not only because they are ordinary but because they are easily accessible to the attentiveness that can discern in any object its vanishing point into something else. This “something else,” as Marie Christou notes in her study of food and eating in experimental fiction, is “the possibility of being otherwise.”20 At stake in the “engagements with eating” that she describes “is the question of subjectivity and agency.”21 A seemingly simple food object, such as an egg, can “raise questions of origin, causality, sexuality, reproduction, and destiny.”22 The state of “being otherwise” provoked by food is precisely what readers find when they encounter protagonists whose enjoyment of food and eating—that is, their allegiance to the “inexhaustible given” that Dufrenne describes—have enabled their passage to another world. Roland Barthes has written that “the function of narrative is not to ‘represent’; it is to constitute a spectacle still very enigmatic for us but in any case not of a mimetic order.”23 In Dufrenne’s thinking about fictional worlds, a claim like Barthes’s might apply most appropriately to the expressed world of experimental fictions, that aspect of the work that borrows objects from the world of representation but not in order to imitate them. When food objects and dining make their appearance in such fictions, they mark a new necessity and a new social vision, not the least because the modernist writer brings to literature an unprecedented interest in corporeality and the physical processes of being human, which makes for strikingly varied depictions of food and eating.24 They function as new points of attention and reflection, points de capiton that halt the protagonist’s desire the better to refocus it.25 They furnish the spectacle of inner life, which is also the spectacle of the world indigenous to the work.

Food and Desire in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man As Lauren Rich has shown in her study of public eateries in Joyce, “eating, as represented in modernist (and especially colonial) literature, is never a mere physical necessity but is always entwined with multiple meanings and constraints.”26 In her analysis, she explores Joyce’s use in Dubliners of “food metaphors and consumption imagery to describe the economic, sexual, and political exploitation of the colonial system that produces and then incorporates men like Corley and Lenehan,” the protagonists of “Two Gallants.”27 Lenehan,

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aging adolescent sycophant to the predatory Corely, finds nourishment for his battered self-esteem in a ginger beer and a “plate of hot grocer’s peas, seasoned with pepper and vinegar” at a “Refreshment Bar,” a temperance establishment designed to nourish both body and soul.28 “The meal and its hopeful promise of stability and belonging,” writes Rich, “temporarily restore [his] faith in himself and the world.”29 For despite his meager stores of social capital, he still longs for the easy life and “a good simple-minded girl with a little of the ready.”30 By adopting at this pivotal moment a free indirect style, the narrator provides the reader with an outsider’s report that is at the same time a self-revelation, for this longing introduces another level of necessity, another struggle to come to terms with desire.31 In Joyce studies, this effect is usually called epiphany and refers to a moment when a character is provoked by an object, an action, even a turn of phrase and experiences a flash of self-awareness that circumscribes aspiration, if it does not thwart it, as in “Araby” and “Eveline.” But there is another form, associated with Stephen Dedalus, in which the protagonist momentarily experiences an object’s thingness, its quidditas.32 In Stephen Hero, an early draft of Portrait, Stephen points to the “clock of the Ballast Office” in order to explain the concept to his friend Cranly: “It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany.”33 His perception of the clock (“I see it”) is meant to disclose its essence (“what it is”). The form of epiphany that dominates in Dubliners is less about this momentary provocation of objects than about the protagonist’s inner life in which this moment is experienced. In both varieties, objects become deliberately invested with meaning beyond what is given in experience—that is, they are misrecognized as things. Throughout Dubliners, epiphany occurs precisely when a failure of imagination has undermined the protagonist’s relation to others in the world, a relation that is often mediated by food and dining. In “A Painful Case,” for example, James Duffy, a diffident and self-abnegating bank cashier, inhabits a private world of objects—“He had himself bought every article of furniture in the room”—and leads a scrupulously mean life, for he “abhorred anything which betokened physical or mental disorder.”34 The meager midday meal he takes at Dan Burke’s—“a bottle of lager beer and a small trayful of arrowroot biscuits”—and the “plain honesty” of his dinners at “an eating house in George’s Street, where he feels himself safe from the society of Dublin’s gilded youth,” are not meant to indicate social or economic status; he could afford the small luxuries he disdains.35 He prefers such establishments because, as

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Rich notes, “they facilitate anonymity and discourage human interaction or sentimentality.”36 His meals become, in Joyce’s depiction of his inner life, the markers of his character, of his social isolation and anxiety, his sense of superiority in the midst of lesser beings. At dinner one evening, “as he was about to put a morsel of corned beef and cabbage into his mouth,” he reads of the death of Mrs. Sinico, a woman he had once known.37 Later, as he walks along the river, seeming “to feel her voice touch his ear,” he sees a “goods train winding out of Kingsbridge Station” but he does not see or let rise to significance the plenty it carries or the future towards which it moves; instead, he imagines “a worm with a fiery head winding through the darkness,” a “laborious drone” that repeats the name of the woman he has spurned.38 His mobilization of these images serves the emotional needs of a man who wishes to expel the external world from his horizon; why else would he preserve, “in an ironical moment, the headline of an advertisement for Bile Beans” (a laxative), unless he wanted to remind himself to void any evidence that he hungers and desires?39 His biscuits and ale, the morsel of corned beef and cabbage, the goods train, none of these objects rises to the level of sublime object; quite the contrary, like the advertisement, they are mere reminders to practice selfdenial and purgation, to gnaw away at “the rectitude of his life,” to become, in short, the object of his own hunger.40 In “A Painful Case,” the space opened by reflection during Duffy’s plain honest dinners fills with self-doubt and dubious self-justifications that foreclose any clear sense of what he wants and reduces inner life to an expression of bad conscience. Elsewhere in Dubliners, food and eating play a more dynamic role in the protagonists’ understanding of the limits of their own desire. This understanding is typically brought about by what is essentially a feint: in scenes of belonging at table, which Valérie Loichot calls “[t]he privileged site of ethical resistance,”41 where the sharing of food should betoken a communal bond, what matters is the way food objects serve the protagonists’ preoccupation with themselves on their very different pathways to self-awareness. Maria, in “Clay,” unlike Duffy, actively aspires to join others in a holiday feast, but a mislaid plumcake reveals not only the limits of her desire but the self-deprecating tenor of her reflections. Her daily life is almost entirely penitential; she serves tea to the other women at Dublin by Lamplight, a laundry run by a Protestant mission, and quietly accepts the niceties she receives from them: “Everyone was so fond of Maria.”42 She is of their shared situation (Catholic women under the moral authority of Protestants)

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but does not belong among them. Nor does she appear to have family of her own. Hence her need to maintain a sense of belonging among the only other people she knows. She buys a “thick slice of plumcake” on her way to see Joe and Alphy Donnelly, whom she had nursed, and their family, but on the tram she is distracted by an “elderly gentleman,” courtly and kind, who clearly had had “a drop taken.”43 When she realizes she had left her package on the train, she reflects on “how confused the gentleman with the greyish moustache had made her” and she “coloured with shame and vexation and disappointment.” But Maria’s epiphany does not arise so much from remembering the encounter as from the realization of “the failure of her little surprise” and the “two and fourpence she had thrown away for nothing.”44 The gift of food was to be the expression of her desire for love; it ends up being a missed opportunity that casts its shadow on her future. The plumcake quietly and unobtrusively becomes a sublime object and thus retains its power to signify the belonging that Maria desires; however, because it never inaugurates the event of giving, it fails to bridge the gulf that separates her from those she wishes to endow. The plumcake was meant to be an offering, so its loss deprives her of the social function she has defined for herself. For the rest of the evening she is subjected to sensations of disconnection and confusion, which Joyce dramatizes in the depiction of a party game in which blindfolded guests are given objects of unknown provenance to feel so that they might guess what they are. When Maria is given “a soft wet substance,” everyone around her obscurely realizes a mistake has been made and she is given a prayer book instead. Later, when she is enlisted to sing I Dream that I Dwelt, she skips the verse in which she dreams of a “noble host … my hand to claim”; but this attempt to save face only reduplicates the void that could not be filled by the plumcake or the substitute objects of the party game.45 This way of attending to the object world is conveyed with naturalist verve in “The Dead,” specifically in the depiction of the feast the Morkin sisters provide for their guests, which includes a “fat brown goose,” a “great ham,” and the “parallel lines of dishes” that ran beside them: two little minsters of jelly, red and yellow; a shallow dish full of blocks of blancmange and red jam, a large green leaf-shaped dish with a stalk-shaped handle, on which lay bunches of purple raisins and peeled almonds, a companion dish on which lay a solid rectangle of Smyrna figs.46

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This scene of beautifully rendered plentitude registers social distinction, specifically, the middle-class duty to be generous hosts, but the increasingly powerful centripetal force of free indirect discourse vacates this distinction when the entire scene is commandeered by the protagonist, Gabriel Conroy, whose eagerness to “carve a flock of geese if necessary,” solidifies his hold over the gathering, though he “takes no part in the conversation” at table.47 His reflections throughout the meal—fantasies of alienated self-regard, in which he justifies his ambivalence about family, friendship, love, and desire—tend to subvert, or at least challenge, the customary associations of the “fat brown goose” he is so eager to carve.48 Unlike the plumcake, whose absence relegates Maria to the margins, the goose allows Gabriel to be at the center. But the reader has no idea if it was tasty or if there was enough to go around or if “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter” had a portion.49 What matters is not the meal or the occasion or a sense of belonging; what matters is how the goose allows Gabriel to commandeer the gathering, which leads to new narrative coordinates, as the story’s conclusion reveals, for he comes to doubt his own self-assessment and the gibes he made at Miss Ivors, “the girl or woman, or whatever she was,” and the amiable drunk Freddie Malins, who was “hardly noticeable.”50 He finds himself drawn down into himself in a way that leaves him bereft of consolation, a foolish “penny boy” lost in a “grey impalpable world” of his own making, while “the solid world itself … was dissolving and dwindling.”51 Like the “heavy grey face of the paralytic” that seeps into the narrator’s dreams in “The Sisters,” a grey world seeps into Gabriel’s inner life to remind him of all that he has misrecognized and thoughtlessly dismissed.52 The limits of self-awareness in Dubliners are the result of the protagonists’ ongoing struggle to find meaning in the everyday world around them. Joyce uses food and dining in these stories to register this struggle and the point at which the protagonist’s orientation shifts, the point at which the social function of food gives way to a new one and the food object becomes (or pointedly fails to become) a sublime object of desire. With Stephen Dedalus, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the new function of food and eating that I have been illustrating rarely makes an appearance; when food does appear, it tends to exhibit the dual function, so evident in Dubliners, of marking social distinction and providing an opening to the world of another that is often missed or misunderstood. The Christmas dinner scene in the first chapter is the only fully drawn scene of eating in the novel. The Dedalus family has come together for Christmas dinner, but the sense of belonging that usually attends

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such occasions founders on political and religious differences that stake out quite different communities (roughly, clerical and Parnellite). At the beginning of the meal, we see the holiday turkey from young Stephen’s perspective, “trussed and skewered, on the kitchen table.”53 Joyce’s naturalism permits us to see how it came to be there (“his father had paid a guinea for it in Dunn’s of D’Olier Street”), but in Stephen’s reflections a struggle begins toward significance beyond the turkey’s givenness: he too is “trussed and skewered.” The word turkey alters his sense of the world, in part because it leads him to imagine another world, one that would invest the meal with the significance he craves: Why did Mr Barrett in Clongowes call his pandybat a turkey? It was not like a turkey. But Clongowes was far away: and the warm heavy smell of turkey and ham and celery rose from the plates and dishes and the great fire was banked high … and when dinner was ended the big plum pudding would be carried in, studded with peeled almonds and sprigs of holly, with bluish fire running around it and a little green flag flying from the top.54 Stephen’s imagined world, with its “little green flag,” is swiftly submitted to the reality principle of the world he occupies, but he is too young, too aesthetically ill-equipped to maintain the reflective space in which the “warm heavy smells” of memory could be shaped into sublime objects of his desire. The turkey cannot rise above its givenness to symbolize something else, such as a “pandybat”; it serves primarily to keep the narrative pivoting toward political themes, as when Mr Dedalus heaps “large pieces of turkey and splashes of sauce” on Mr Casey’s and Stephen’s plates while telling ribald stories about anti-clerical politicians or when he provokes Dante, an intensely Catholic family friend, by offering her the pygostyle, the fleshy protuberance on the turkey’s rear end, a “tasty bit … we call the pope’s nose.”55 The only other significant scene of food or dining occurs at the beginning of chapter 5, where the reader finds Stephen “drain[ing] his third cup of watery tea to the dregs” and “chewing the crusts of fried bread that were scattered near him.”56 As Helen O’Connell has noted, his “proclivity” for “cups of weak tea” distances him from Revival efforts to improve the Irish diet as well as from the “culinary traditions of nineteenth-century peasant culture.”57 In this opening scene, with its degraded and degrading milieu and its protagonist

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cut off from family and tradition, A Portrait offers the negative image of the imagined world of the villanelle that Stephen composes later in the chapter, in which the tea and crusts reappear in the form of the consecrated bread and wine of the Sacrament of the Eucharist. But these food objects are overdetermined to the point that their value as food can be assessed only at the expense of vacating the symbolic power that attracts him in the first place. Under the new conditions of recognizability that he creates in his poem, the Sacrament meant to signify the redemptive power of Christ’s sacrifice now serves the needs of a “priest of the imagination”: “[t]he radiant image of the eucharist united again in an instant his bitter and despairing thoughts.” The villanelle sustains a world in which the “broken cries and mournful lays” of a “eucharistic hymn” validate the artist’s power to “transmut[e] the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.”58

Food and Inner Life in Ulysses: “Joy: I ate it: joy” Stephen’s relation to food objects in Portrait is anomalous when considered alongside other modernist protagonists, for whom ordinary food (not overdetermined bread and wine) provides an access to memory and desire, an access exemplified by the madeleine in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. His relation to food in Ulysses is no different. The novel opens with a lusty morning feast, but he is peripheral to it. His friend Mulligan calls him into service: “Kinch, wake up! Bread, butter, honey. Haines, come in. The grub is ready. Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts. Where’s the sugar? O, jay, there’s no milk.” Meanwhile, in a parody of Gabriel’s carving of geese—and of Stephen’s appropriation of the Eucharist—Mulligan “hacked through the fry on the dish and slapped it out on three plates, saying: —In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.”59 Comic naturalism gives way to a mock ritual in which food (again, tea and bread) serves mainly to punctuate the anti-colonial gibes that Mulligan aims at the Englishman Haines: — When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water. … Begob, ma’am, says Mrs Cahill, God send you don’t make them in the one pot. He lunged towards his messmates in turn a thick slice of bread, impaled on his knife.

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As in the Christmas dinner scene in A Portrait, food objects register political attitudes (in this case, Mulligan’s disdain for ethnographic interlopers), but they do not rise to the level of sublime objects. Even Stephen’s attempt to recognize the milkwoman as otherworldly—a pseudo-thing with deep roots in Irish legend, “A wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal … a messenger from the secret morning”—founders when she is asked to calculate the bill, which she does, down to the twopence.61 When Ulysses turns to Leopold Bloom, food objects and eating figure quite prominently and are treated very differently; we see the myriad possibilities for food to serve as sublime objects whose function is to alter the direction of the protagonist’s desire and the narrative that charts it. Food objects—indeed, objects in general—are more radically privatized in Bloom’s story, bound over to his inner life where they cease to serve the “mimetic order.” From the pork kidneys in “Calypso” to Plumtree’s Potted Meat in the final episodes, Bloom’s relation to food is both visceral and abstract. In his experience, food mediates and opens the borderline between inner life and the concrete social reality that offers up foodstuffs for his imagination. He muses about and enjoys eating food and, in the process, goes through affective extremes—from disgust to delight— that are nowhere in evidence in Stephen’s experience. And while Bloom may envision himself helping the community by improving the food supply chain (“Of course if they ran a tramline along the North Circular from the cattle market to the quays value would go up like a shot”62), his main interest in food is to fill his inner life with pleasurable sensations as he makes his way through the sometimes hostile streets of Dublin. Rather than index the world of representation (that is, the realm of politics, religion, education, work, family, marriage), food registers the richness and strangeness of inner life, which in Ulysses is tantamount to the expressed world of the work. The reader’s first impression of Bloom, delivered by the third-person narrator, is of what he likes to eat: Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod’s roes. Most of all he

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liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine. Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray.63 Bloom’s inner life is determined by a free indirect style in which the narrator’s report (as in the above description) is overtaken by the first-person sensibility of the protagonist (beginning with “righting … the humpy tray”). This technique is already in place in “The Dead,” but its potential is more fully realized in Ulysses. In this passage, as in so many others in the novel, food objects orient Bloom’s desires perhaps more than they satisfy his hunger. His relation to his wife Molly is mediated by food, which he fastidiously prepares: “Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn’t like her plate full. Right.”64 He is equally fastidious in obtaining his own breakfast: “Thursday: not a good day either for a mutton kidney at Buckley’s. Fried with butter, a shake of pepper. Better a pork kidney at Dlugacz’s.”65 His visit to the butcher’s results in at least two different pivot points for the narrative. One involves the flier he picks up there, which advertises a “model farm at Kinnereth on the lakeshore of Tiberias” and becomes crucial for his developing understanding of his Jewishness and gives him fodder for his orientalist fantasies.66 Another involves a “nextdoor girl” he sees at the counter, buying a “pound and half of Denny’s sausages.” He imagines walking “behind her moving hams. Pleasant to see first thing in the morning,” and enters into a bawdy fantasy about her: “a constable off duty cuddled her in Eccles lane. They like them sizeable. Prime sausage. O please, Mr Policeman, I’m lost in the wood.” His musings are cut short only by the butcher’s “Threepence please.”67 In the purlieus of his inner life, the woman Bloom actually sees, as well as the heft of her sausages, becomes part of a baroque structure of alienated desire that, in this instance, erupts into a ribald melodrama. His reflections are likely to shift into an entirely different direction, depending on what he notices. For example, in the next episode, “Lotus Eaters,” he reads a letter from Martha, a woman he has been flirting with through the mail under the moniker Henry Flower. At a pivotal moment, when he decides to tear up the letter, he enters into a romantic fantasy in which he likens himself to Lord Iveagh, of the Guinness family: “Henry Flower. You could tear up a cheque for a hundred pounds in the same way. Simple bit of paper. Lord Iveagh once cashed a sevenfigure cheque for a million in the bank of Ireland. Shows you the money to be made out of

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porter.” Then he tries to calculate the million pounds that Lord Iveagh banked from selling porter, stumbling over the equations: A million pounds, wait a moment. Twopence a pint, fourpence a quart, eightpence a gallon of porter, no, one and fourpence a gallon of porter. One and four into twenty: fifteen about. Yes, exactly. Fifteen millions of barrels of porter. What am I saying barrels? Gallons. About a million barrels all the same.68 Bloom’s reflections create a bulwark against reality precisely by failing to account for it accurately. He eases his agitation over the affair with Martha by way of a stabilizing misrecognition, which puts his own largesse (a gift of stamps tucked into his last letter to her) on the same level as Lord Iveagh’s check. Porter has nothing to do with any of this, except in Bloom’s reflections, where the pints and gallons running through his mind displace the ambiguous longing he feels for Martha. This function of the food object, to open the border between inner life and social life, achieves canonical expression in “Lestrygonians,” in which Bloom’s initial disgust with public eating drives him to a milieu in which erotic memory leads to speculation about the immortality of goddesses. As elsewhere in Ulysses, he explores his motivations and intentions while immersed in the “inexhaustible given” of the concrete social world around him. His reaction to the diners at Burton’s restaurant, and his attempt to invoke a different kind of dining experience, one that could transport him out of his environment, underscores the function of food and eating in Ulysses, which is to make possible new forms of narrative orientation and disorientation, new lines of development for hunger and desire. This way of presenting food and dining helps to sustain Bloom’s inner life and to align it more closely with the expressed world of the work. The event of Bloom’s retreat into himself and away from the forms of communal belonging at mealtime on offer in Dublin is triggered by a kind of primal disgust: Couldn’t eat a morsel here. Fellow sharpening knife and fork, to eat all before him, old chap picking his tootles. Slight spasm, full, chewing of cud. Before and after. Grace after meals. Look on this picture then on that. Scoffing up stewgravy with sopping sippets of bread. Lick it off the plate, man! Get out of this.69

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The sensations Bloom experiences, the harsh reality of the workingman’s cafe, overwhelm him and drive him out of the place.70 Once he relocates to Davy Byrne’s pub, a madeleine-like gorgonzola sandwich and glass of Burgundy send him into a long (and typically polyvalent) meditation on food that ranges from fifty-year-old Chinese eggs to scruff-eating royalty, from “Curly cabbage à la duchesse de Parme” to a “platter of pulse,” from “filleted lemon sole” to the “ripped” fish sold by “old Mickey Hanlon of Moore street.”71 None of these images, formed from very different social strata juxtaposed haphazardly in Bloom’s thoughts, rises to the level of sublime objects; there are too many of them jostling for his attention, so none takes over his gaze and directs his aimless desire, as the goose does for Gabriel. That is, not until the “Glowing wine on his palate” summons the sensation of grapes crushed under the same sun that just then seemed “to a secret touch telling me memory.”72 Bloom’s sunny Mediterranean repast frees him from his environment into an imagined world of strange delicacies and infinite variety, a secret world of food that enables new memories, pleasurable and erotic reflections. He recalls the moment he proposed to Molly under the rhododendrons on Howth Head, and at the core of his memory is the seedcake they shared, a sublime object of desire that stands in for their bodily union. The eroticism of the description charts the passage of the actual seedcake through its transformation, by way of an image called up by a memory of eating, into a present sensation in inner life: “Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweet and sour with spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy.” Bloom’s capacity for joyous reflection invests this vanishing object, which “Touched his sense moistened remembered,” with its sublime quality.73 Later that evening, Molly reveals the same capacity when she recalls the same moment in an ecstatic performance, a reunion in the world of the work of what they have both lost: “the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath.”74 For both of them, desire and necessity commingle in the sublime object and offer to narrative an innovative catalyst for character development and character relations. The turn to abstraction immediately after his erotic reflections alerts us to yet another direction for Bloom’s desire, another aim for it. His downcast eyes followed the silent veining of the oaken slab. Beauty: it curves: curves are beauty. Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world admires. Can see them library museum standing

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Gregory Castle in the round hall, naked goddesses. Aids to digestion. They don’t care what man looks. All to see. Never speaking. … Quaffing nectar at mess with gods, golden dishes, all ambrosial. Not like a tanner lunch we have, boiled mutton, carrots and turnips, bottle of Allsop. Nectar, imagine it drinking electricity: gods’ food. Lovely forms of women sculpted Junonian. Immortal lovely. And we stuffing food in one hole and out behind: food, chyle, blood, dung, earth, food: have to feed it like stoking an engine.75

After refusing to sit with others and eat in a rude, lascivious manner, after having his salutary gorgonzola and Burgundy, after lingering in imagination over all manner of pleasurable food images, including the seedcake, Bloom admires the curve of the “oaken slab” of Davy Byrne’s bar and moves along the curve of his own reflections, in which the realities of eating are transcended in a meditation on the being of goddesses. The reference to “golden dishes, all ambrosial” draws our attention, with little ambiguity, away from the naturalist description of food as social marker (“a tanner lunch”) to the fantastic question of its function for “naked goddesses”: “They have no. Never looked. I’ll look today. Keeper won’t see. Bend down let something fall see if she.”76 Bloom knows that “gods’ food” differs absolutely from human food, that goddesses lack the human necessity to eat because they are not burdened with “chyle, blood, dung”; still, he wonders if they leave anything behind after they dine on “golden dishes.” He never does find out, though in “Sirens” we learn, “Goddess I didn’t see,” which is a suitable outcome of his peculiar quest, for it leaves open the question of her being and, in a curious way, it also raises the question of his own.77 At the end of the episode, trying to avoid Molly’s lover Blazes Boylan, Bloom finds solace in the statues of goddesses in the National Library museum, “His eyes beating” as he “looked steadfastly at cream curves of stone.”78 His steadfast attentive gaze seeks an opening into the world he has already imagined, where “curves are beauty,” a safe world where he finds new aims for his desire. But, in a sense, he already inhabits this world of goddesses, for they are all equally denizens of his inner life as they are of the world of Ulysses, a world in which pork kidneys and cheese sandwiches function like “god’s food.” He eats for the same reason the goddesses do not: to provide sustenance for his inner life, which at moments like the ones I have been describing invite the attentive reader into the world of the work, the space of the “non-mimetic”

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spectacle to which Barthes refers. For the reader, Bloom is like the goddesses he imagines: he too drinks electricity. As we see in “Lestrygonians,” the ties that bind him to the represented world—which Joyce meticulously arranges, in a well-known attempt to replicate the “Dublin street furniture” of 1904— come loose from their cleats and leave him free to occupy the world of his own reflections.79 The ties persist, however, in the sense that his attempt to engage the world of the goddesses’ marble avatars in the National Museum frankly acknowledges the “inexhaustible given” that supplies his inner life. The statues, like the goddesses in his reflections, are impossible beings occupying a possible world. Throughout the day, images of food have provoked Bloom’s thought, transported him to the precincts of inner life, where food objects, like most other objects, take on a destiny that has its meaning and purpose in the world of the work. Bloom’s vision of a goddess who does not need to eat is meant to overcome the gross carnality of the diners he had fled earlier. It reorients his passage in the world by taking him out of it. He regroups in inner life, and in this reflective space he becomes “Immortal lovely.” This space belongs to the world of the work, that is to say, belongs exclusively to it; but this belonging could not be achieved without Bloom’s immersion in the world of sense, which sends him careening into his own reflections and from there to the otherworldly milieu of the goddesses. In this way, the episode exemplifies a general method in Ulysses, which is to build a form of autonomy based on the dimension of lived experience indigenous to the work.

Conclusion In Joyce’s fiction, food and eating are presented from a double perspective: they are the objects of naturalist report, but at the same time they enter his protagonists’ inner lives and alter the text’s relation to the social world from which images of food objects are formed in order to furnish the world of the work, the “universe of fiction” that Bill Brown explores. As I have tried to show, food objects (images in narrative) re- or dis-orient protagonists’ desire in a variety of ways, from engineering retreats into inner life to enabling imaginative acts of world-making, in which objects, people, and the relations between and among them are founded on new grounds of recognition. In Joyce’s fiction, as in the work of so many other modernists, this new foundation arises in inner life, which affords the reader an opening to the expressed

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world of the work. The free indirect intimacy thus established with the protagonist gives shape to the expressive capacity of fiction, even as it grounds the text in the reader’s experience in the “real world,” which, as Dufrenne says, must “always be experienced in its rigidity.”80 This double responsibility—to the sensual world and to the world of the work—is quietly dramatized when Bloom climbs into bed with Molly and encounters evidence of her dalliance with Blazes Boylan that afternoon. Plumtree’s Potted Meat, whose advertising jingle had become bound up with Bloom’s reflections early in the day, now reorients his thoughts toward equanimity and acceptance of his wife’s infidelity: What did his limbs, when gradually extended, encounter? New clean bedlinen, additional odours, the presence of a human form, female, hers, the imprint of a human form, male, not his, some crumbs, some flakes of potted meat, recooked, which he removed.81 Bloom’s removal of the “flakes of potted meat” stands out as a gesture of compassion. That such a banal product as Plumtree’s should help orient Bloom through the stations of his own peculiar cross—“Envy, jealousy, abnegation, equanimity”82—serves as a potent reminder that the sublime object achieves its status not because it possesses the qualities of sublimity but because the protagonist, by chance or design, nominates an object to serve as a stand-in for what he really wants, the impossible real “object of desire.” Though he may rhapsodize about goddesses who drink electricity, and though he may imagine himself on the same diet, what Bloom desires is simpler, more human, more accessible. With simple foodstuffs—a seedcake, a cheese sandwich, “something in the shape of solid food, say, a roll of some description”—he hopes to reach across the void of existence, to sustain a bridge between the world in which the work persists and the autonomous world of the work.83

C HA P T E R T H R E E

A Woolf at the Table Virginia Woolf and the Domestic Dinner Party Lauren Rich

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irginia Woolf ’s famous pronouncement in Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown that “on or about 1910 human character changed”1 is usually understood in reference to developments in literature, but Woolf specifically describes changes in what we might call, following Michel de Certeau, the “everyday.”2 In her essay, Woolf half-apologizes for citing so “homely” a figure as the household cook as evidence of larger change in society. She writes, “the Victorian cook [who] lived like a leviathan in the lower depths” has been replaced by a figure whose appearance and tastes are indistinguishable from those of any middle-class lady: “Do you ask for more solemn instances of the power of the human race to change?”3 Woolf goes on to suggest that transformations in ordinary people, mundane activities, and daily life—in women’s domestic responsibilities and in the relationships “between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children”— lie at the heart of radical cultural shifts.4 Read in the context of her fiction, Woolf ’s example of the family cook is central to her articulation of modernity and modernism. Subtle alterations in everyday activities, Woolf suggests, change the way people experience life and interact with each other and, consequently, the way that life is transmuted into literature. Woolf reminds us that everyday activities are susceptible to change: even the long-standing association of women with cooking and “scouring saucepans,” which she refers to as “the horrible domestic tradition,” was altered by modern economies and technologies.5 Woolf ’s observations on

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the changing status of women—particularly the family cook—are reflective of the many ways that food, cooking, and dining, and their attendant cultural meanings, were rapidly changing during the first decades of the twentieth century, and of the ways in which these developments affected interpersonal relationships—those very relations Woolf claimed were so radically altered “on or around 1910.” This chapter analyzes the middle-class domestic dinner party as a key site in Woolf ’s articulation of British modernity. Long viewed by critics as occasions for forming, renewing, and nurturing relationships, I argue that shared meals in Woolf ’s novels often function as sites of surprising alienation, fragmentation, and disunity, with characters more apt to turn against than to commune with each other. Moreover, the collapse of the domestic dinner party as a basis for human relationships in Woolf ’s fiction may be traced to modernity’s influence on food and dining through such phenomena as changing roles for women, class tensions, the mechanization of the middleclass kitchen, developments in food processing and marketing, rationing, and changes in etiquette. These historical developments left their marks on psyches as well as stomachs, altering the cultural, emotional, and social significance of food, appetite, and dining in complex ways. Woolf ’s fiction, I argue, helps to destabilize facile equations of commensality with communion and challenges the common misperception that the symbolic power of food is ahistorical.6 Anthropologist Sidney Mintz observes that “food and eating afford us a remarkable arena in which to watch how the human species invests a basic activity with social meaning—indeed, with so much meaning that the activity itself can almost be lost sight of.”7 Rarely in British history is this more evident than in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the midnineteenth century, food had achieved sociological importance as a marker, medium, and symbol par excellence of middle-class Victorian domestic ideals, due in part to the proliferation of domestic manuals, cookbooks, and women’s magazines by writers such as Isabella Beeton (popularly known as Mrs. Beeton, a matronly title that disguised her youth and lack of practical experience). In her highly influential Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (first published in 1861), Beeton employs a contradictory discourse prevalent in late nineteenth-century domestic literature: on the one hand, she constructs food preparation as a timeless, mystically feminine, and supremely powerful art form on which the “weal or woe” of individuals’ physical health,

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the family unit’s moral and emotional well-being, and the security of the Empire itself depend; on the other hand, she asserts that cooking is a scientific enterprise that, with the right kind of modern, laboratory-style kitchen and cookbooks, can be satisfactorily performed by anyone with consistent and reliable results.8 Adding to the confusion, most middle-class Victorian households would (ideally) employ servants to do the actual purchasing and cooking of food, thus releasing the housewife from—or perhaps robbing her of—this most important and recognizable of her functions as the Angel in the House. Woolf writes about the persistent influence of this unattainable, constricting, and paradoxical model of Victorian womanhood in “Professions for Women.” The Angel in the House, she writes, “excelled in the difficult arts of family life” and “sacrificed herself daily”; she also “never had a mind or a wish of her own,” and so had to be slain and her ghost excised before Woolf, as a woman, could become a professional writer.9 If nineteenth-century views on food, its preparation, and its consumption were already riddled with contradictions, the social and economic changes of the early twentieth century put even greater strain on the belief that the dinner table could be an adequate nutritional and symbolic base on which to found a family, a social community, and a nation. One of these was the shortage of household servants throughout England—a problem referred to euphemistically in women’s magazines and newspapers as the “Servant Question.” At the onset of the First World War, domestic staff left their posts to take on better-paying and more dignified work in new industries ranging from munitions to food canning. After the war, writes food historian Colin Spencer, former servants simply “failed to return preferring to work in offices and shops. … For the most part, the middle classes were now reduced to one maidservant … and only some households also had a cook.”10 The problem of finding and retaining “good help” is a frequent—almost obsessive—theme from the 1910s on, dominating women’s magazines and middlebrow novels, but also appearing regularly in Virginia Woolf ’s private diaries.11 A new domestic ideal emerged as capitalism’s response to the changing size and staff of the British middle-class home. The “Servantless Home,” first featured in women’s magazines of the 1910s, was the product of advertising and mass culture as much as of the Servant Question. A number of “labor-saving” devices were marketed to middle-class consumers with far-reaching effects. Among the most important were the gas oven with its precise temperature controls, and the refrigerator, though smaller gadgets like electric blenders

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and coffeemakers also emerged. Often, these new appliances were explicitly marketed as a “‘new servant,’ capable of liberating [housewives] from household drudgery,”12 thus implicitly undercutting Victorian narratives about the practical, social, and spiritual value of women’s domestic labor. Another catalyst was the rapid rise of the mass-produced and convenience food industries. Products introduced in the late nineteenth century, such as baking powder, quick-acting yeast, powdered eggs and milk, and gelatin sheets, simplified labor-intensive cooking processes and became even more popular due to the food rationing brought on by the First World War.13 By the 1930s, a variety of processed foods were widely available, and the proliferation of brand names and marketing promised a predictable (if still pretty lamentable) level of quality. Early twentieth-century British literature is filled with biting critiques of the new industrial food complex, often adopting a nostalgic tone that conflates the decline in food quality with a decline in human intimacy. In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell despairs over the omnipresence of new food technologies and their displacement of a more “authentic” British cuisine: “Wherever you look, you will see some slick machine-made article triumphing over the old-fashioned article that still tastes of something other than sawdust.”14 Both T. S. Eliot and James Joyce use processed food as shorthand for the alienation of modern urban life. In The Waste Land, Eliot’s typist “lays out food in tins” before engaging in a similarly distasteful, depressing, and compartmentalized sexual encounter with a “young man, carbuncular.”15 Most famously, in Ulysses, Leopold Bloom savors the irony of an advertisement for Plumtree’s Potted Meat, with its promise of domestic “bliss,” placed alongside the obituaries.16 We get an insipid taste of food brand advertising early on in Mrs. Dalloway, as all of Bond Street is briefly captivated by an indecipherable—and terribly banal—airborne advertisement for Kreemo Toffee: “All down the Mall people were standing and looking up into the sky,” but the letters quickly dissolve into nothingness, leaving the crowd as confused and fragmented as before.17 In light of the transformations taking place in British foodways during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we can begin to understand how and why so many climactic or epiphanic moments in British modernist fiction unfold around the dinner table. For Woolf in particular the domestic dinner party proved a compelling site for exploring the difficulty of intimacy under the conditions of modernity.

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In a diary entry from April 27, 1925, shortly before the publication of Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf writes: [My] present reflection is that people have any number of states of consciousness: and I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness, etc. The fashion world of the Becks … is certainly one: where people secrete an envelope which connects them and protects them from others, like myself, who am outside the envelope, foreign bodies.18 Woolf ’s metaphor of the envelope suggests possibilities of both community (the envelope “connects” the people enclosed within it) and isolation (the envelope “protects” its inhabitants from other people—those “foreign bodies”—outside of it). Most analyses of Woolf ’s treatment of “party consciousness” (including most readings of Woolf as a domestic modernist) have focused the former function of the dinner party and minimized the latter—a somewhat surprising trend given that the diary entry above emphasizes the tendency of parties to alienate people rather than to draw them together. Woolf ’s choice of words is suggestive: the secreted envelope seals its occupants behind an impermeable barrier, while the people outside of this barrier are ominously reduced to “foreign bodies.” The description seems more appropriate to warring amoebas or insect life (some spiders secrete “envelopes” to entrap and digest their prey) than to human beings at a party.19 Tellingly, Woolf identifies herself as a permanent outsider to whatever form of communion such social gatherings may offer to others. These exclusionary and threatening aspects of the dinner party, also strongly present in Woolf ’s fiction, are almost totally absent in Woolf criticism and scholarship. When critics have looked at the dinner parties in Woolf ’s fiction at all, they have generally focused on Woolf ’s hostesses, praising their “feminine” and “artistic” ability to bring people together into transformative moments of community in an otherwise alienating and war-marked (read: masculine) modern urban landscape. Suzette Henke’s “Mrs. Dalloway: The Communion of Saints” in New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf offers an early such reading, which is expanded by Christopher Ames in his chapter on Woolf in The Life of the Party: Festive Vision in Modern Fiction.20 For Henke and Ames, dinner parties in Woolf ’s fiction demonstrate an optimistic “belief in the redemptive potential of the secular festive communion and in the work

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of art as crucible for that problematic communion.”21 Emily Blair’s chapter on the hostess in Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel is a more recent example of such a reading. Blair’s more nuanced approach interprets Mrs. Dalloway as a debate over the value of Clarissa’s parties and the role of the hostess “in the thoughts of Peter Walsh, who oscillates between a romantic idealization and a critique of Clarissa.”22 Like Henke and Ames, Blair ultimately argues for a positive view of Clarissa’s party, emphasizing its power “to combine, to create”23 as both an artistic achievement expressive of the creativity of the hostess and as a communal event that “brings people together and allows them to realize hidden affinities,”24 and therefore part of Woolf ’s larger project “to reclaim feminine creative force.”25 More recent trajectories in Woolf studies have shifted away from the middle-class hostess and dinner party to focus on larger contexts and peripheries of Woolf ’s writing. A sampling of research illustrates this movement away from the domestic sphere and towards issues of race, empire, and transnational concerns. Recent issues of the Woolf Studies Annual include a number of essays focusing on non-Western contexts for Woolf ’s fiction, from Latin American economies26 to ancient Egyptian artifacts.27 Several scholars, such as Ashley Nadeau and Valerie Reed Hickman, have examined the complicated relationships of Woolf ’s female protagonists (and Woolf herself) to the British Empire.28 Most notably, Pamela Caughie and Diana Swanson’s edited collection Virginia Woolf: Writing the World situates Woolf as a writer of the world and global issues.29 Such work is certainly valuable; however, it largely ignores Woolf ’s dinner party scenes. Part of my aim in this chapter, then, is to revive interest in Woolf ’s dinner parties and to approach these scenes in a way that is attentive to the material, cultural, and social significances of food and food rituals, and is consequently skeptical of the transcendent communion described by Henke, but also richer and more nuanced than the passing treatment found in more recent Woolf scholarship. Such a return will, I hope, shed light on an important element of everyday life as it is represented in early twentieth-century literature, without idealizing or ignoring the domestic sphere. Woolf ’s most famous exploration of “party consciousness” is, of course, Mrs. Dalloway. According to her compositional notes, Woolf began writing Mrs. Dalloway in October 1922 as “a short book consisting of six or seven chapters, each complete separately” to be titled “perhaps, At Home: or The Party.”30 In 1923, the first of these independent “chapters” was published in

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The Dial as the short story “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street.” But even after the novel assumed its final shape—in fact, after its publication—Woolf continued to write about Clarissa’s party. In her editorial introduction to Mrs. Dalloway’s Party, Stella McNichol notes that Woolf ’s writing process reveals a lasting fascination with the modern dinner party: It is particularly uncharacteristic of Virginia Woolf ’s normal writing habits that she should have allowed her completed novel’s central concern to retain the hold on her imagination that it obviously then had. On finishing the novel she wrote out several of the short stories about Mrs. Dalloway’s party. Usually when she had finally revised a novel, Virginia Woolf was only too anxious, as it were, to shut it out of her mind.31 The persistent hold that Clarissa’s party had on Woolf ’s attention indicates that the party scene is worthy of careful attention and suggests that Mrs. Dalloway should be studied within the context of these short stories. What becomes clear once we read Mrs. Dalloway within the context of its surrounding short stories is that the ending of the novel—which reveals the party just getting under way, having apparently recovered from the shocks of Septimus’s suicide and Sally’s unexpected arrival—is anything but conclusive. The stories, most of which focus on individual guests at the party, undercut the sense of unity and wholeness that most critics have derived from the novel’s closing description of Peter’s view of Clarissa from across the party: “It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.”32 The short stories are formally suggestive of fragmentation, shifting as they do among different groups of characters and revealing Clarissa’s party from multiple perspectives, none of them particularly positive. This disconnectedness in Woolf ’s depictions of “party consciousness” is thematic as well as formal. While the novel focuses primarily on Clarissa and Peter’s perceptions of the party, the short stories present an even starker picture of the guests’ failure to commune, which is explicitly linked with food in at least one story. In the ironically titled “The Man Who Loved His Kind,” the ice Miss O’Keefe haughtily demands from Prickett Ellis embodies the coldness and insubstantiality of their encounter at Clarissa’s party. Rather than uniting these two “lovers of their kind,” this sharing of food (if an ice can be called such, given its ephemerality and lack of nutritive qualities) leaves the

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two guests more alienated than ever before. Popularized in the 1920s by the advent of home refrigeration and the “Domestic Scientists’ nonfood approach to food,” the ices at Clarissa’s party communicate status rather than conviviality.33 Miss O’Keefe abandons Prickett Ellis and her half-eaten ice: “Hating each other, hating the whole houseful of people who had given them this painful, this disillusioning evening, these two lovers of their kind got up, and without a word, parted forever.”34 Throughout the short stories and the novel, there is a conspicuous absence of food in Woolf ’s descriptions of Mrs. Dalloway’s party, which coincides suggestively with the absence of companionship among the guests; after all, “companionship” is literally impossible without the breaking of bread, or the Latin panis.35 In the absence of consumable food, Clarissa’s guests figuratively prey on one another, attacking each other through their words and actions. In “The Introduction,” young Lily Everitt cowers before Bob Brinsley’s masculine arrogance, the butterfly wings of her confidence shriveling as she watches Brinsley sadistically tear the wings off a fly.36 In “Together and Apart” Woolf uses Animal Planet-esque imagery to describe two middle-aged guests’ interactions. Ruth Anning sends “tentacles” toward Roderick Serle in a gesture that variously appears self-defensive (it is one of her “automatic devices for shielding mind and body from bruises”) and aggressively invasive (Roderick is shocked by the “invincible assault” that occurs when Ruth’s tentacular conversation probes his private memories and desires).37 The most vulnerable guest, though, is Mabel Waring. Born into a large family and now married to an underling in the Law Courts, lonely, self-loathing Mabel feels acutely that she, like a fly trapped in a saucer of milk, is at the very bottom of the food chain at Clarissa’s party.38 Believing that “a party makes things either much more real, or much less real,” Mabel spends the evening paralyzed by her growing awareness that her new dress is “not right” and makes her a target for criticism.39 Within the novel, too, there are indications of the party’s failure as a unifying force. One fact that readers frequently overlook is that Clarissa’s party is actually, like many fashionable gatherings of the 1920s, two distinct parties. The first is an elaborate multi-course dinner in the dining room, to which a handful of intimate friends are invited. This is followed by a second—much larger—party in the drawing room, where light refreshments are served. The guests at the second party include those from the first as well as many others, and represent a broader spectrum of the social scale, from the elusive Prime

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Minister on one end to mousy Ellie Henderson (invited, reluctantly, at the last minute) on the other. This two-party structure poses a problem if you are trying to read Clarissa’s party as a triumph of communion. Far from serving as a “means to human synthesis, dissolving barriers and creating community” through the sharing of a meal (as one critic claims),40 Clarissa’s dinner functions more like the secreted envelope Woolf describes in her journal, enclosing some guests and separating them from the “foreign bodies” invited at a later time. The potential for tension between the two groups is underscored by the maids’ anxiety when the first party fails to disband before the second begins: “There was a motor at the door already! There was a ring at the bell—and the gentlemen still in the dining-room, drinking tokay!”41 Such poor timing would create awkwardness between the two categories of guests. Significantly, food is used at Clarissa’s party not to unite guests, but to distinguish between them. The heartier, more expensive soup, salmon, pudding, and Imperial Tokay are reserved for the guests of the first party, while guests at the second party are served insubstantial cocktails and ices. As structural anthropologist Mary Douglas points out, the decision to share a meal or beverage with someone was a loaded one in twentieth-century British society: “Drinks are for strangers, acquaintances, workmen, and family. Meals are for family, close friends, honored guests. The grand operator of the system is the line between intimacy and distance. … Those we only know at drinks we know less intimately.”42 One aspect of the “party consciousness” Woolf explores through Mrs. Dalloway, then, is the way in which foods and beverages can be used to discourage intimacy by subtly reinforcing social hierarchies and boundaries. Another difficulty with reading Clarissa’s dinner party as a communion feast is that, even during the dinner portion of the evening, very little consumption is recorded in either the novel or the short stories. The dinner, carefully prepared by the Dalloway’s Irish cook, appears to have been served and eaten off the page, lost somewhere in the page break between the description of Peter defensively opening his pocketknife as he enters the Dalloway house and Lucy’s last-minute tidying before the arrival of the second wave of guests. Our only glimpse of the meal comes from the perspective of the harassed cook and kitchen staff who must cope with the resulting mounds of “plates, saucepans, cullenders, frying-pans, chicken in aspic, ice-cream freezers, pared crusts of bread, lemons, soup tureens, and pudding basins.”43

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Presumably, the food is eaten and enjoyed: Lucy tells the cook that “some lady with fair hair and silver ornaments” paid Clarissa the indirect compliment of asking whether the entrée was “really made at home.”44 The emphasis of this passage, however, is not, as we might expect, on the guests’ shared enjoyment of the food, but on the servants’ labor and anxieties; the underdone salmon is particularly worrisome to the cook, and the pudding makes her “nervous.”45 Not only is food portrayed as a potential source of disappointment and conflict, but it is also used to reinforce class (and perhaps ethnic) barriers. A firm distinction is maintained between those who prepare and serve the food (the Irish cook and maids) and those who consume it (the upper-middle-class guests Lucy thinks of as “ladies” and “gentlemen”). What the novel does describe of the dinner party tends to speak to the importance of manners, casting them as a minefield of potential faux pas and intentional or unintentional slights. Margaret Visser argues in The Rituals of Dinner that all table manners function to disguise the fact that eating is fundamentally connected with violence, from the slaughtering of animals to the sharing of scarce resources among a group of competitive individuals. In a very real sense, we always eat with (dinner) knives drawn, though social customs such as placing the knife on the table with blade turned inward and serving others first are designed to subdue or at least disguise this violent self-interest.46 In Mrs. Dalloway, Peter’s unmannerly entrance at Clarissa’s party—pocketknife at the ready—does not bode well for the ability of this particular meal to subsume the guests’ self-interests within a larger sense of community. We also know, from Clarissa’s encounter with Peter earlier that morning, that toying with his pocketknife is one of Peter’s most characteristic behaviors: “He had his knife out. That’s so like him, she thought.”47 It is also, of course, a phallic gesture—a defensive assertion of masculine identity and power. Though Peter enters the Dalloway house anxious to defend himself against “foreign bodies,” he is not the only character who feels the vulnerability of being an outsider. It is unclear, however, whether it is preferable to be inside or outside of the envelope secreted by such parties. In the middle of her own party, Clarissa escapes to an empty room where she sees her uninvited neighbor through the window: “how surprising!—in the room opposite the old lady stared straight at her!”48 Clarissa is startled by this sudden encounter with an unreadable body that is clearly outside of the envelope and therefore enigmatic to her. Earlier in the day, Clarissa herself was the outsider; she was

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hurt by her exclusion from Lady Bruton’s lunch parties, which are rumored to be “extraordinarily amusing.”49 Again, Woolf ’s recourse to an insect metaphor to describe a social occasion adds a sinister note to her depiction of “party consciousness”: And [Lady Bruton’s guests] went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin thread (since they had lunched with her) which would stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked across London; as if one’s friends were attached to one’s body, after lunching with them, by a thin thread, which (as she dozed there) became hazy with the sound of bells, striking the hour or ringing to service, as a single spider’s thread is blotted with rain-drops, and, burdened, sags down.50 Here, the modern hostess appears as a predatory spider whose hospitality is part of a fragile but manipulative web of social obligation. In “A Summing Up,” Woolf ’s final published treatment of Clarissa’s party, Sasha Latham also thinks of herself as an outsider, “applaud[ing] the society of humanity from which she was excluded.”51 Sitting in the garden and observing the party, she first views it as a gold-suffused triumph of human civilization. Suddenly, though, “the illusion vanished” and the party becomes “nothing but people in evening dress” surrounded by “the vast inattentive impersonal world: motor omnibuses; affairs; lights before public-houses; and yawning policemen.”52 The Dalloways’ “half lit up, half unlit” house becomes a metaphor for Sasha’s attempt to assess the party and its potential to offer meaningful communion under the conditions of modernity; she wonders, “which view is the true one?” The answer she receives is not encouraging: “At that moment, in some back street or public-house, the usual terrible sexless, inarticulate voice rang out; a shriek, a cry.”53 Woolf revisited the domestic dinner party yet again in her 1927 novel, To the Lighthouse. It is significant that this novel, which traces the changes and challenges confronting nineteenth-century ideals of domesticity in the twentieth century, opens with an image of cutting-edge food technology: a picture of a refrigerator in an Army and Navy catalogue, fringed by a halo-like glow of “bliss” imparted by the nurturing Mrs. Ramsay (herself a nostalgic version of the Victorian “Angel in the House” modeled on Woolf ’s mother, Julia Stephen).54 This fusion of nostalgia for an elusive Victorian domestic

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ideal with desire for a new kind of overtly mechanized and commodified domesticity results in a bizarre displacement of the Angel in the House by a sort of Saint Frigidaire. Woolf ’s later novel goes even further, however, to question the solidity and stability of the dinner table itself so that the table and its attendant ideologies—substantial even if covered with doilies in the Victorian era—begin to wobble under the pressures of the twentieth century. Mr. Ramsay’s great contribution to modern philosophy, explains Andrew to Lily, is to prove that the kitchen table does not actually exist except in relation to an observant subject. For a fraction of a moment at the climax of the first section of the novel, Mrs. Ramsay’s table does exist, and as the dinner candles flicker into flame, the guests are drawn together almost mystically by it: “Now all the candles were lit up, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candlelight, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table.”55 But the narration makes clear that whatever tenuous communion Mrs. Ramsay’s party achieves is due to the fact that it, like Mrs. Ramsay herself, is anachronistic—a nostalgia-tinged remnant from a rapidly disappearing time. The meal is strongly identified with the past: the Bœuf en Daube was prepared by Mildred according to Mrs. Ramsay’s grandmother’s French recipe, and she has “spent three days over that dish” in a cooking method that is clearly incompatible with the ethos of the new Servantless Home. The meal also clearly situates this scene in pre-war Britain, as the lavish quantities of meat, wine, and “olives and oil and juice” in the main dish would be impractical once food prices inflated and rationing began during the First World War. Finally, even Mrs. Ramsay seems to acknowledge that her old-fashioned dinner party represents a futile, perhaps illusory, last stand against modernity. As she leaves the dining room, she senses that “it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.”56 Mrs. Ramsay’s party takes on a ghostly quality, as does Mrs. Ramsay herself; her death, bracketed off from the main text and described after the fact, haunts the “Time Passes” section of the novel: “Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.”57 In “Professions for Women,” Woolf writes about the power of past ideals, especially those that were never real to begin with, in similarly spectral terms. She writes of her own “need to do battle with a certain

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phantom” she calls The Angel in the House, and of her realization that “it is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.”58 Similarly, in exposing the failures of secular communion in modern life, Woolf ’s dinner party scenes “do battle with” the powerfully seductive ideal of commensality as a universal and ahistorical solution to alienation.

II Decadence and Absence

C HA P T E R F OU R

The Social and Cultural Uses of Food Separation Peter Childs

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here are those for whom abstinence from food is a conscious decision and those for whom access to food is restricted. James Vernon believes the major transformation in the understanding of hunger from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, from roughly the “hungry forties” of the 1840s to the Great Depression of the 1930s, was the shift from perceptions of a moral failure, through lack either of work or of God’s favour, to an understanding of poverty as a social problem—the result of food production and distribution, of war and structural unemployment, or of weakening economic systems despite the more-celebrated growing wealth of nations.1 Much of this change in perception sits alongside the history of urbanization and industrialization: of factory work that took people away from the land and agriculture but enabled the mass manufacturing that could lead to a flourishing economy capable of sustaining population growth. This was the case in those countries able to support the expansion of cities but not in those that were unable. After the catastrophe of the Irish hunger, further famines struck throughout the many territories yoked together in the British Empire while the domestic picture was one of a divided nation of rich and poor against a backdrop of generally improving nutrition based on cheap foods, such as sugar, extracted from colonial possessions. Yet, in the early twentieth century, social inequalities and the demands of the “war effort” meant that poverty, malnutrition, and the hunger marches, which began in England with the 1905 Raunds March of impoverished army bootmakers

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from Northamptonshire to Parliament, continued into the 1930s. Other individuals consciously chose not to eat, or to restrict their eating, such as hunger strikers, vegetarians, fasters, and dieters, who often also sought to make an ethical point within the context of the social mores around food consumption. Protestors continued the idea of sacrifice long associated with food deprivation but reversed the accepted morality of the nineteenth century by taking the principled high ground through a refusal to consume state-provided food. Which is to say that while Vernon’s argument applies well to those whose hunger was not chosen, ethical considerations around the rights and wrongs of eating remained central for those who made a conscious decision to go hungry or to go without. The significance of food absence or abstention is the subject of this chapter, which considers a range of ways in which the want or avoidance of food(s), for social, economic, dietary, cultural, or other reasons, impinged on modernist writing. It is notable, for example, that key formative years of the high modernist period coincided with the rise of the political hunger strike, from the suffragette hunger protests that began in 1909, to their counterparts in Ireland in 1912 and then in the USA, to Indian protests in South Africa led by Gandhi in 1913 and in Canada by Sikh migrants in 1914, to Irish nationalists in the years before Independence.2 The significance of this development as an anti-authoritarian and often anti-imperial protest underpinned by moral convictions is illustrated in A Passage to India when, after the arrest of Aziz, it is reported that “a number of Mohammedan ladies had sworn to take no food until the prisoner was acquitted,” with Forster seemingly alluding to both the suffragette protests and Gandhi’s hunger strikes (the first of which in India took place in February 1918 to support striking mill workers in Ahmadabad).3 The earliest suffragette food-refusal by Marion Dunlop in 1909 was in fact a protest at not being treated as a political prisoner—after more than three days she was released and Sylvia Pankhurst realised a broader opportunity had presented itself because the police appeared reluctant to let a female prisoner fast to death.4 Consequently, suffragettes that summer such as the avant-garde editor and anarcho-feminist Dora Marsden used the direct threat of hunger strike as a strategic move to intimidate their jailers.5 The subsequent campaign of hunger protesting while held in captivity was met with a brutal regime of force feeding, involving great pain and degradation, as Woolf noted in The Years, when Rose is remembered in 1914 “Sitting on a three-legged stool having meat crammed down her throat!”6 The authorities’

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reluctance neither to create martyrs nor to be known for excessive brutality against women ultimately led to the infamous “Cat and Mouse” Act that allowed authorities to release hunger strikers and then reimprison them later to complete their sentences. In the context of the focus of this chapter, such politicization of undernourishment in the interstices of moral action and social behaviour complicated the view of hunger as a result of failure of character or individual lassitude; here, the self-starving separated themselves out as morally superior to those who sought to feed them. Also, the complex of ethical principles and social attitudes, if only imagined, surrounding the spectacle of famished women built on many nineteenth-century precedents familiar to the public from reports of famine to the performances of starvation artists alongside the “living skeletons” and fasting women exhibited in Victorian carnivals (presented as “freaks” prior to the widespread recognition of anorexia nervosa, a term first used in 1873 by William Gull).7 At the time of the suffragette hunger strikes, starvation for the purposes of spectacle was seen as an endurance test, and far more common among men, but there were women competitors such as the “Apostle of Hunger” Clare de Serval, who fasted on show in a glass box in 1910.8 As suggested by Serval’s attributed nickname, this practice might be aligned with Christian asceticism, and the association of bodily self-denial with inner struggle was a trope surfacing in several modernist texts that consider the separation of the artist from the ordinary citizen. Ultimately bathetic in its portrayal of starvation, and based on real-life examples such as the performer Giovanni Succi, Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” (1924) describes a persistent faster in the late nineteenth century who displays himself in a cage for amusement. The entertainer becomes a minor attraction in a large circus, which moves from town to town with the hunger artist encouraged to recover between shows. He is in fact reluctant to do this and confesses that his preference is not to eat at all because he can find no food that he likes. Consequently, he is allowed to fast to death on a bed of straw and is replaced in the cage by a panther who exudes life and has a voracious appetite for food. The hunger artist had sought admiration for his self-control, but the sight of the animal pleases the spectators more than that of the starving man, who asks for forgiveness when he confesses that his fasting in fact came naturally to him. While the story is told in retrospect, looking back over decades from the 1920s to a time when hunger artists were in vogue, not long after the publication of “A Hunger

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Artist” the entertainment regained popularity. Six such fasters performed in Berlin in 1926, with one display staged in a huge bell jar in a fashionable restaurant.9 Inevitably provoking moral questions about the division between those who have and those who have not, such an exhibition of the starving individual beside paying diners mirrors the social partition between those with an abundance of food and those without, but “A Hunger Artist” also suggests a different kind of separation relevant to modernism. The insinuation of Kafka’s story, that the artist lives apart from society and is misunderstood by the audience, underpins still more starkly Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890). The novel introduces an unnamed narrator in the midst of his period of enforced near-starvation, leading to a state he likens to insanity. This is a condition in which, in addition to vomiting, despair, fever and depression, he experiences euphoria, heightened sensory awareness, feelings of intoxication, and an emptiness beyond pain. Here in Hamsun’s portrayal lies a perceived association between malnutrition and creativity, with the sufferings of hunger linked on the one hand to enlightenment, of the kind associated with privation and renunciation in mysticism, and on the other hand to heightened access to unconscious imagination. This is the opposite to the similarly autobiographical portrayal in Down and Out in Paris in London, in which, despite the didactic intentions of Orwell’s asceticism, the narrator sees nothing ennobling or enlightening in enforced hunger, only a grind of boredom and a fixation on the next source of food. Yet, the distinctions about hunger made by the two writers may also be understood as ones about art and its relation to material conditions. Returning to a text mentioned earlier that features a hunger strike to protest against injustice, the use of food by Forster to signal cultural distinctions in A Passage to India occurs on several occasions to point up the divisions and hierarchies that Forster portrays as decisive in the Empire. The meal to which Aziz sits down with his friends at the start of the novel is notable for its informality, including belching to compliment the host on the food; by contrast, Adela reflects on the depressing reality of colonial meals: Julienne soup full of bullety bottled peas, pseudo-cottage bread, fish full of branching bones, pretending to be plaice, more bottled peas with the cutlets, trifle, sardines on toast: the menu of AngloIndia. A dish might be added or subtracted as one rose or fell in the official scale, the peas might rattle less or more, the sardines

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and the vermouth be imported by a different firm, but the tradition remained; the food of exiles, cooked by servants who did not understand it. Adela thought of the young men and women who had come out before her, P. & O. full after P. & O. full, and had been set down to the same food and the same ideas.10 Different again, Godbole, the Brahmin professor invited by Fielding expressly to meet his other guests, has to separate himself from them to avoid food contamination and so takes “his tea at a little distance from the outcasts.”11 For the trip to the Marabar Caves, food epitomizes the central message of the novel concerning the impossibility of connection across the muddle of cultural separation: There was the problem of Professor Godbole and his food, and of Professor Godbole and other people’s food—two problems, not one problem. The Professor was not a very strict Hindu—he would take tea, fruit, sodawater and sweets, whoever cooked them, and vegetables and rice if cooked by a Brahman; but not meat, not cakes lest they contained eggs, and he would not allow anyone else to eat beef: a slice of beef upon a distant plate would wreck his happiness. Other people might eat mutton, they might eat ham. But over ham Aziz’ own religion raised its voice: he did not fancy other people eating ham. Trouble after trouble encountered him, because he had challenged the spirit of the Indian earth, which tries to keep men in compartments.12 In Howards End, Forster also uses food to express the separation between the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes. The colonial businessman Mr. Wilcox hosts Margaret Schlegel at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand to enjoy old English fare (he chooses mutton though Margaret wants fish pie). The socially conscious intellectual Margaret returns the favor by inviting him to lunch at Mr. Eustace Miles’s restaurant, which specializes in meatless, nutritious food: “It’s all proteids and body-buildings,” says Margaret, but the vegetarian restaurant on Chandos Street was also famous as a meeting-place for the suffragette movement with which Miles sympathized.13 The fundamental social barrier created by diet is a colonial staple exploited repeatedly by Conrad, who uses it to delineate and then subvert stereotypes in the contact zone. In the Lingard trilogy, this is most apparent in the way that

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the eating of pork is an insult to the Malayan population: hence such accusations as “thou eater of pig’s flesh” or “a thief and a pig-eater.”14 The other side to this dietary coin is alluded to when the isolated Willems is sent food by Lingard, but it is “a little rice and dried fish; quite unfit for a white man.”15 The implied assertion that only meat is suitable for European males is reinforced by the long story “Falk: A Reminiscence,” collected in Typhoon and Other Stories. Utilizing a familiar Conradian structure, this is a sea-yarn with an embedded narration about an enigmatic figure whose gradually revealed extraordinary experience resonates throughout the tale. Falk is considered to be a miser by the Alsatian hostelry owner Schomberg because he is satisfied by rice “and a little fish” prepared by a chef “not fit to cook for white men. No, not for the white men’s dogs either.”16 This outburst occurs because Falk, who the inner narrator wonders is perhaps a vegetarian, refuses to dine on the chops the others devour at Schomberg’s restaurant, such that the hotel-keeper, whose business Falk is perceived to have slighted, concludes that “A white man should eat like a white man, dash it all. … Ought to eat meat, must eat meat.”17 Falk is thus established, like Lord Jim or Kurtz, as a figure of intrigue, suspicion, and incomprehension to others. The events recounted in the subsequent narrative reinforce this viewpoint but Falk’s separation from the rest of the characters complicates both their perceptions of him and their perceptions of meat-eating. While Heart of Darkness repeatedly toys with questions of starvation, cannibalism, civilization, and restraint, it is “Falk” that is the most direct of Conrad’s yarns to address the ingestion of human flesh.18 The tale of a wrecked ship on which near-starvation in the southern ocean leads to survival cannibalism, it bristles with broader cultural questions concerning what is fit for consumption: “The lamp oils had been drunk, the wicks cut up for food, the candles eaten.”19 The unfolding story, which at least one critic argues is principally about dining,20 becomes one of horror involving the eating by the remaining crew of the ship’s carpenter, who is shot by Falk after the carpenter is the first to speak “of the last sacrifice.”21 Yet, though centred on Falk’s ordeal on the Borgmester Dahl, repeated images of food and eating suffuse the story from the opening scene in the restaurant beside the Thames: and the chops recalled times more ancient still. They brought forcibly to one’s mind the night of ages when the primeval man, evolving the first rudiments of cookery from his dim consciousness, scorched lumps of flesh at a fire of sticks in the company of other good fellows;

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then, gorged and happy, sat him back among the gnawed bones to tell his artless tales of experience—the tales of hunger and hunt— and of women, perhaps!22 The primal appetite depicted throughout the story is again associated with a craving for human flesh in the sexual ache Falk feels for the niece of the German ship-conductor Hermann: “He was hungry for the girl, terribly hungry, as he had been terribly hungry for food.”23 When Falk declares he has resorted to cannibalism in order to survive, Hermann concludes that “Falk must have gone mad quite recently; for no sane person, without necessity, uselessly, for no earthly reason, and regardless of another’s self-respect and peace of mind, would own to having devoured human flesh.”24 As elsewhere in Conrad, it is here not the act that appals, because after all “a white man … must eat meat,” but the admission: recounting the act.25 In “‘Gnawed Bones’ and ‘Artless Tales’: Eating and Narrative in Conrad,” Tony Tanner emphasizes the parallels in “Falk” between the acts of narration and of cooking and eating. Both, Tanner argues, are ways of making sense of the world: “We must eat to live, but we must also narrate to live.”26 Tanner builds on Lévi-Strauss’s suggestion that “the cooking of any society is a kind of language which in various ways says something about how that society feels about its relations to nature and culture” to argue that “Falk” is a tale about “the breakdown of categories,” including that of the edible within cultures, but also of the effable within narration.27 For reasons of health, morality, and good diet, several writers of the high modernist period avoided food, most commonly meat. Aldous Huxley, introduced to Indian philosophy, became a vegetarian in line with the principle of ahimsa; George Bernard Shaw, before the Fabian Society was founded, took to the eschewal of meat, which he later attributed to reading Shelley,28 while Fabianism itself was founded on a philosophy of good living, in which was included vegetarianism; Woolf suffered from anorexia, according to Julia Briggs, among others,29 and during one of her rest cures, her husband Leonard wrote that “left to herself, she would have eaten nothing at all and would have gradually starved to death.”30 D. H. Lawrence declined to eat pork after his experience of what he saw as over-indulgent German dining (lambasted in his 1929 poem “Food of the North”) and as early as The Rainbow (1915) he had included pointedly meatless dishes in his fiction (with Ursula deciding, “If all vegetarian things were as nice as this, she would be glad to escape the slight

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uncleanness of meat”).31 Similarly, Mansfield’s “Germans at Meat” (1910), the first of the stories in In a German Pension, underlines a separation between two European cultures on the brink of war when the narrator declares she is vegetarian, only to be asked if she has a family: “Who ever heard of having children upon vegetables? It is not possible. But you never have large families in England now; I suppose you are too busy with your suffragetting.”32 There is a similar incredulity around the dining table, first, that the narrator does not know what is her husband’s favorite meat though they have been married three years, and, second, that “he is not at all particular about his food.”33 Mansfield and Woolf both changed their diets under the direction of doctors. While restricting their eating, both also dwelt on the ceremony and comfort of food in their fiction, especially when drawing on memories of childhood. Mansfield’s “Prelude” contains an elaborate make-believe banquet concocted by Kezia and her siblings, while Mansfield herself became increasingly emaciated as an adult after she contracted tuberculosis. Food pervades her writing, both fictional and autobiographical, and she often wrote of literature in terms of the sense of taste. Lorna Piatti-Farnell argues that the shift in Mansfield’s presentation of food coincided with her change of continents: “her European fiction offers a bleaker view of eating as an activity that emphasizes the pain of post-war separation, solitude and social neglect.”34 Diane McGee similarly writes that “in Mansfield’s short stories, dining and attitudes to food in general are linked to the modern predicaments and modernist themes of homelessness, rootlessness, alienation and isolation.”35 This is conveyed in the way that food is associated with domesticity, comfort, security and habits ingrained in childhood such that characters are shown as unsatisfied and often still hungry when eating outside of a meaningful social context. Woolf ’s writings are notable for their attention to the differences in menus, as with the contrasting accounts of eating meals at a men’s and a women’s Oxbridge college in A Room of One’s Own, or the bloated hotel meals in The Voyage Out: “Lunch went on methodically, until each of the seven courses was left in fragments and the fruit was merely a toy, to be peeled and sliced as a child destroys a daisy, petal by petal.”36 In Woolf ’s writing, good food is a comfort and a delight, even for the resentful Doris Kilman, who cannot buy beautiful clothes like the Dalloways but focuses on eating pleasurably as an affordable indulgence: “her food was all that she lived for; her comforts; her dinner, her tea.”37 Woolf ’s use of food to suggest pleasure in her fiction is indeed something noticed by Forster:

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It is always helpful, when reading her, to look out for the passages which describe eating. They are invariably good. They are a sharp reminder that here is a woman who is alert sensuously. She had an enlightened greediness which gentlemen themselves might envy, and which few masculine writers have expressed. There is a little too much lamp oil in George Meredith’s wine, a little too much paper crackling on Charles Lamb’s pork, and no savour whatever in any dish of Henry James, but when Virginia Woolf mentions nice things they get right into our mouths, so far as the edibility of print permits. We taste their deliciousness.38 The most well-known description of delicious food in Woolf ’s novels occurs in To the Lighthouse, with the serving of the Bœuf en Daube: an exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice rose from the great brown dish as Marthe, with a little flourish, took the cover off. The cook had spent three days over that dish. And she must take great care, Mrs. Ramsay thought, diving into the soft mass, to choose a specially tender piece for William Bankes. And she peered into the dish, with its shiny walls and its confusion of savoury brown and yellow meats and its bay leaves and its wine … “It is a triumph,” said Mr. Banks, laying his knife down for a moment. He had eaten attentively. It was rich; it was tender. It was perfectly cooked.39 Again, a cultural distinction is being made. The choice of dish is indicative of a persistent belief in the superiority of French over English cooking: “Of course it was French. What passes for cookery in England is an abomination (they agreed). It is putting cabbages in water. It is roasting meat till it is like leather. It is cutting off the delicious skins of vegetables.”40 Of a like mind, Mansfield, living in Menton in the south of France in 1920, wrote in a letter to Middleton Murry about her maid’s cooking: “The food is far better than any possible house we go to in England. I don’t know to whom to compare it—and all her simple dishes like vegetables or salads are so good.”41 Breakfasting on a boat train from Tilbury to London in 1939, Forster found similar reasons to bemoan the English national attitude to diet in his essay “Porridge or prunes, sir?”

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Arabella Boxer maintains that there was a discreet revolution in food in the 1920s and 1930s, based on a simplicity and elegance that owed nothing to austerity and everything to “a high level of epicurean taste.”43 However, Boxer later observes that though the Bloomsbury Group members loved to eat fine food they “lacked the funds” to do so in a traditional way.44 She argues that, having thrown off “class distinctions,” they ate simply and became familiar with the French domestic cooking championed by Mrs. Ramsay. This is also apparent in Ford Madox Ford’s account in 1937 of his diet in Provence, where he ate “astonishingly little” but did “not lose weight—which I put down to the olive oil and fines herbes which accompany or assist at that cuisine.”45 Someone drawn to the Mediterranean diet is Joyce’s Leopold Bloom. As a man used to mixing in Dublin’s street life and able to visit its seedier haunts, Bloom frequents pubs and bars throughout his June day, but he is of course in many ways an outsider. Hence his repugnance in the Lestrygonians episode towards dining in the Burton restaurant, where the men are “swilling, wolfing gobfuls of sloppy food.”46 He instead eats a gorgonzola sandwich at Davy Byrne’s and even contemplates vegetarianism after his experience at the Burton. Otherwise he is portrayed as an intense lover of strong meat flavors, from his fascination with the advertisement for Plumtree’s Potted Meat near the announcement in the paper of Paddy Dignam’s funeral, to Joyce’s famous introduction of him: “Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod’s roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly

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scented urine.”47 His appreciation of food stretches back to one of his happiest memories, of the seedcake that Molly once passed to him from her mouth. If Ulysses relishes food, there are also textual allusions to the significance of hunger in Ireland, and some critics have seen the great famine as an underlying presence throughout the novel from the shrivelled potato Bloom carries in his pocket to Deasy’s challenge to Stephen in his assertion “I remember the famine,”48 such that “the memory of the Famine operates centrally to delineate a boundary between cultural insider and outsider.”49 Joyce thus accords it a central place in the Citizen’s rhetoric: “the Sassenach tried to starve the nation at home while the land was full of crops that the British hyenas bought and sold in Rio de Janeiro.”50 O’Kane notes that “close reading of Joyce’s work also reveals characters who restrict their food intake in particular social and political situations, and in doing so, draw complicated connections between food, politics, and gender in Ireland. For instance, within both “The Dead” and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, women refuse food during important holiday dinner scenes.” Stephen Dedalus also displays a complex relationship with eating throughout the day in Ulysses, eventually refusing solid food completely, in a gesture that focuses on identity, and according to O’Kane “builds upon an Irish historical and cultural tradition of food refusal as a form of political speech.”51 In a comparable delineation of political separation in relation to hunger, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot has the gluttony of Pozzo (with chicken and wine in his picnic basket) contrasted with the hunger of Vladimir and Estragon, who is eventually allowed to “gnaw” on the scraps of Pozzo’s meal.52 At one point in the play, Gogo simply announces “I’m hungry!”, after which there is a verbal exchange over whether he and Didi might have a carrot or a turnip to eat. Vladimir eventually finds a root vegetable, of which kind it is unclear, and he declares they need to make it last as there are no more. A blackened radish is all that they have in the second act. Like recent readings of Ulysses, in the Irish context it is hard not to think of this aspect of Waiting for Godot in relation to the history of famine in the country: “even before the famine of 1845, an estimated two million Irish periodically went hungry as a matter of course, every season, every year.”53 When the potato blight was imported in the mid-nineteenth century, leading to a failure of a third of all Irish crops in the first year but mass starvation only subsequently, several British officials saw it in terms of God’s will,54 along the lines of the moral failure James Vernon thought prevailed at this time in

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attitudes to hunger. By the time of the final devastating crop failure in 1850, the Great Hunger had also led to widespread death from typhoid and cholera as well as starvation. Despite this, the government allowed corn and barley to be exported: Convoys of grain on their way to harbour had to be guarded by military detachments. Then, as now, hunger was a matter of entitlement. Food was available, but the poor were not entitled to that food. They did not grow it. They did not have a legal claim to it as a pension or form of social welfare.55 Also, as Nuala O’Faolin puts it, “Anyone who had a field of cabbages or turnips put a guard on it to keep off the starving.”56 Indeed, as Cleary argues, for literature as well as the wider culture, the Great Famine “arguably represented in the Irish case a pulverization of society at least as drastic and as consequential in effect as the First World War was later to be for other European countries.”57 One such country was of course the oppressor of Ireland, Britain, and even in the pre-war years, many who aspired to gentility had to turn to simplicity out of necessity. In Howards End, Leonard and Jacky Bast thus sit down to a frugal three-course meal that differs in nutrition and cost to the lunches enjoyed by the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels: They began with a soup square, which Leonard had just dissolved in some hot water. It was followed by the tongue—a freckled cylinder of meat, with a little jelly at the top, and a great deal of yellow fat at the bottom—ending with another square dissolved in water (jelly: pineapple). … Leonard managed to convince his stomach that it was having a nourishing meal.58 Such basic repasts would be prized at the coming of war, when the Minister of Food Control  (1916–21) was deemed necessary to be established as a British government ministerial post alongside the Minister of Agriculture. In the Great War itself, the Ministry sponsored a network of canteens known as National Kitchens, each feeding up to 2,000 people a day, for ordinary citizens to take a meal while there were reductions in Britain’s food resources. As much as 60 percent of food stocks had come from abroad pre-war and food queues were common as German submarine attacks attempted to stem

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the import of grain. Eventually, rationing was introduced in Britain in 1918, partly in an attempt to ensure some degree of equality of distribution to protect the most vulnerable, a policy which failed with the post-war slump and rising unemployment. Near the start of the major Anglophone Modernist phase, at the time Conrad and James were formulating new narrative techniques, Rowntree is widely regarded as having originated in his 1901 York studies the “scientific” definition of poverty as the minimum income level required for physical subsistence, in distinction from secondary poverty above this income level, which might still be deemed worthy of censure if thought to be the result of financial mismanagement. Rowntree helped to inspire modern liberalism and Lloyd George’s welfare reforms from 1906 to 1914.59 It was, perhaps, with the intercession of the war, after the political campaigns that preceded it, that the shift Vernon observes from hunger as a moral to a social concern was principally cemented, issuing in, on the one hand, further interwar government measures, and, on the other, protests and marches at the lack of work and food. This would be fictionalized most directly in the early-1930s literature that addressed the privations of that decade as a social phenomenon, from Lionel Britton’s Hunger and Love (1931) to Water Greenwood’s better-known Love on the Dole (1933). In such ways, the issue of hunger had shifted by the 1930s to a social issue from a predominantly moral one as government realized that the unemployed needed support from central taxation. Yet, traces of the moral view of hunger remained in the humiliation of the means test, an inspection officially designed to identify the haves and the have nots, but perceived to be separating the deserving poor from the undeserving, and many of the undeserving from food. This could be seen as a shift in the overall focus of concern with food from Church to State, alongside the decline in religion and the acceleration of government intervention, culminating in the post-war Welfare State, which would aim to make the basic provision of food and health a national obligation. Yet, within such overarching social change at the macro level, diet and food would continue for many to define important separations between individuals in terms of cultural and moral distinction.

C HA P T E R F I V E

Against Culinary Art Mina Loy and the Modernist Starving Artist Alys Moody

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eminiscing about the glamorous poverty of interwar Paris, Ernest Hemingway remembers looking at Cézanne’s artworks on an empty stomach:

There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty and hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat.1

For Hemingway, the aesthetic begins, not with Cézanne’s paintings, but with the author’s own hunger. Elevating this state to the precondition of a special kind of aesthetic experience, Hemingway implies that it structures both his own aesthetic receptivity and Cézanne’s creativity—that it constitutes the hidden structure of his landscapes and the shared substratum of the aesthetic experience that holds Hemingway and Cézanne in a provisional kind of relation. In this sense, hunger establishes a kind of sociality among modernist artists, joined together in their shared merging of aesthetic experience and physical starvation. In this central text of the modernist period’s self-mythologization, Hemingway offers us starvation as both a social fact and an aesthetic principle. He gives us a starving artist who, by starving,

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not only makes art new but joins a society of artists for whom hunger is the aesthetic state par excellence. Hemingway’s account of hunger’s role in aesthetic experience animates whole swathes of modernism. Arthur Rimbaud’s sonorous, “Ma faim, Anne, Anne,” which opens his 1872 poem “Fêtes de la faim” (Feasts of hunger), perhaps inaugurates this tradition, but the image—if not the rhyme—resonates through the period. For Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, it was the foundation of his first semi-autobiographical novel. For Kafka, it provided one of his most potent metaphors of artisthood in his 1922 short story, “A Hunger Artist.” The trope was taken up by many of their successors, both in their fiction and in their memoirs. Henry Miller’s scandalous self-portraits merge sexual excess with gustatory deprivation and aesthetic revelries, and with Hemingway’s own work, help to make the starving artist the central protagonist of “lost generation” self-mythologization. Surrealists, from André Breton to Joan Miró, similarly portray themselves as figures whose starvation underpins and motivates their artistic achievements. By the 1930s, the starving artist had become modernism’s defining protagonist, a figure who is both lauded and satirized in Mina Loy’s posthumously published novel Insel. Hunger’s significance for modernist writing reflects its double status as both the physical manifestation of a socioeconomic reality and the embodied origin of aesthetic experience. In this sense, the starving artist embodies one of modernism’s central tensions, caught as he is (these artists are presumptively male) between the demands of an increasingly professionalized literary marketplace on the one hand, and a newly serious call for the autonomy of art on the other. As Joyce Wexler argues, the modernists’ dilemma was rooted in an ideological contradiction between art and money that pervaded their culture, as it continues to dominate our own. This contradiction posed the Romantic ideal of the writer as genius who expressed an inviolable inner vision without regard for its rhetorical effect or market value against a new definition of the author as professional who earned a living by writing.2 The starving artist is the figure who embodies this ideological contradiction between art and money, manifesting the irreconcilability of these values in his wasted frame.

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In this sense, the starving artist is the persona that embodies and dramatizes the fraught dynamics of the modernist literary field. As Pierre Bourdieu has suggested, the late nineteenth century saw the emergence of a new literary field, characterized by its relative autonomy from the social and economic dynamics of the larger cultural field. The logic of the restricted subfield of literary production produces the opposition between art and money that Wexler highlights. It generates a new set of standards for literature, as art’s purity and seriousness, as well as its structural role in the production of the literary field, comes increasingly to be defined by its refusal of economic success. In this context, Bourdieu argues that the literary field invents “a new social personality, that of the great professional artist who combines, in a union as fragile as it is improbable, a sense of transgression and freedom from conformity with the rigour of an extremely strict discipline of living and of work, which presupposes bourgeois ease and celibacy.”3 The starving artist typifies this new professional artist, his starvation signifying both prongs of this “personality”: starving as simultaneously a form of discipline, as in the practice of fasting; and the visible manifestation of the poverty that signals the artist’s refusal to conform to the strictures of the marketplace. The starving artist is therefore the distinctive social personality of the autonomous literary field, which finds one of its most canonical expressions in modernism. Modernist memoirs like Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast have been central to popularizing the starving artist as the figure who lives out the heroic impossibility of art’s autonomy from the market, even as it disavows that “bourgeois ease” that Bourdieu takes to be this personality’s precondition. The lines with which I open, however, go beyond a meditation on writerly poverty or even a straightforward presentation of Hemingway’s transgressive persona. Cézanne’s capacity to move Hemingway, as told in this passage, arises from the experience of hunger itself—from its physiological as much as its socioeconomic aftermath, and from its specifically aesthetic effects. In a self-consciously aesthetic, almost Joycean, turn of phrase, uncharacteristic for Hemingway, it is the experience of being “belly-empty and hollow-hungry” that undergirds hunger’s capacity to shape his experience of art. In this account, the experience of not eating has its own phenomenology, its own distinctive aesthetics. Hunger as an embodied, physiological state becomes the point of mediation between the author as a sociological figure, taking a position in the literary field, and the author as a literary one, the exemplary producer of aesthetic experience. Hunger in modernism thus links the

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aesthetic principles generated by the modernist literary field to an aestheticized form of the embodied state of starvation. In doing so, it installs the starving artist as one of modernism’s exemplary personalities. This chapter seeks to place this modernist personality in a longer history of aesthetic thought, from Kant to Adorno, which defines “pure art” against its culinary other, and which excludes eating from the domain of the aesthetic. Attending to this history of aesthetic thought’s skepticism of food helps to clarify the social stakes of the starving artist as a figure for the aesthetic, underscoring the anxieties about class and gender that help to animate this figure and inform the category of art in the period. In this chapter, I approach this topic from two angles: the first half traces the disgust for “culinary art” as it develops in aesthetic thought from Kant to modernist criticism. The second half follows this notion into the representation of the starving artist in modernist literature, taking Mina Loy’s Insel, a sardonic but sympathetic portrayal of the starving artist, as its animating example. Taken together, this chapter suggests that the opposition between food and art, dramatized through the figure of the starving artist, plays a central role in shaping how modernism imagined art’s social dimensions.

The Opposition to Culinary Art: From Kant to Modernism The philosophical groundwork for the starving artist is laid by a long tradition of aesthetic philosophy, which pre-dates the emergence of the autonomous literary field. For aestheticians from the eighteenth century onwards, eating emerged as the paradigmatic example of that which is excluded from the aesthetic. Kant’s Critique of Judgement, usually taken as one of the foundational philosophical statements of aesthetic autonomy, repeatedly invokes food and physical taste, from canary-wine to well-seasoned dishes, as the paradigmatic examples of the “agreeable,” which, for Kant, is a category entirely excluded from the aesthetic.4 This claim depends on his definition of aesthetic judgement, which is characterized by four qualities: it is disinterested, universal, purposive without purpose, and necessary. The agreeable, typified by that which we desire to eat, has none of these qualities, and therefore marks the boundary of aesthetic experience. Eating, as the paradigmatic case of the agreeable, therefore also becomes that which is not art. In this opposition between eating and art, Kant breaks from eighteenth-century British aesthetic philosophers like David Hume, who developed the notion of aesthetic taste (a term that Kant retains) through analogy

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to bodily taste (an analogy he shuns).5 For Kant, in contrast to the British taste philosophers, the specialness of aesthetic experience and especially of the experience of the beautiful is premised on its evasion of the debasing interestedness of bodily taste. Post-Kantian philosophy followed Kant’s lead in defining art through its opposition to the pleasures of the table. For Hegel, art is opposed to desire, which he defines as an “appetitive relation to the outer world.”6 As his editor Michael Inwood notes, he describes this desire in terms “more appropriate to the desire to eat than to e.g. sexual desire,” defining art through its opposition to the culinary.7 Schopenhauer similarly sees the value of art in its suspension of what he calls the “hungry will,” which he takes to be the source of all misery in the world.8 His reading of the aesthetic relies on this association between hunger and the will, claiming that art’s primary function is to temporarily suspend both. In fact, he goes so far as to insist that paintings that too realistically depict food must be excluded from the category of art, for they “necessarily excite the appetite” and thus produce “a stimulation of the will which puts an end to any aesthetic contemplation of the object.”9 Throughout Kantian and post-Kantian aesthetics eating marks the limits of the aesthetic; art is defined by its refusal of food. This philosophical tradition leaves deep marks on mdernist aesthetic thought, and nowhere more clearly than in modernism’s pervasive scorn for art that strays too far into the domain of the culinary. Brecht’s contempt for his period’s “culinary opera,” for instance, reflects his outrage that “to every object it adopts a hedonistic approach,” echoing Kant and Schopenhauer’s association of food with the non-aesthetic categories of the agreeable and the charming.10 His refusal of the culinary in art steeps into German aesthetic and literary critical writing, from Hans Robert Jauss, who condemns “‘culinary’ or entertainment art,” to Theodor Adorno, who advocates resistant, difficult forms capable of “oppos[ing] the culinary consumption of art.”11 For this tradition of post-Kantian Marxist aesthetics, the culinary signals a particular kind of interestedness: art that fails to achieve a critical distance from the operations of capitalism. Instead, the culinary threatens to turn culture into complicity, by giving in to simple pleasures that anaesthetize workers and bourgeoisie alike and block a rigorous critique of capitalist oppression. Modernists did not need to be Marxists, however, to be suspicious of art that seemed too digestible, too readily consumable. The disgust for edible art became a mainstay of modernism’s rhetorical posture against mass culture

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and in favour of art that professed its autonomy from commerce. As early as 1884, Henry James could complain that, “The ‘ending’ of a novel is, for many persons, like that of a good dinner, a course of dessert and ices, and the artist in fiction is regarded as a sort of meddlesome doctor who forbids agreeable aftertastes.”12 His own preferred endings, he suggested, were decidedly less digestible. Bloomsbury’s chief aestheticians were similarly united in their insistence that art and appetite belong to irreconcilable realms. Roger Fry wrote dismissively of mass-market novels, “which supply every day their pittance of imagined romantic love to hungry girl clerks and housemaids,” while Clive Bell argued, against a position he attributed to psychoanalysis, that, “if Cézanne was forever painting apples, that had nothing to do with an insatiable appetite for those handsome, but to me unpalatable, fruit.”13 Katherine Mansfield—on the whole more receptive to food imagery than her male peers—complained of “these little predigested books written by authors who have nothing to say.”14 Even George Orwell linked mass-market writing to overly digestible food in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, where Gordon Comstock expresses his disgust for the “soggy, half-baked trash” of the popular novel, imagining it as “pudding, suet pudding. Eight hundred slabs of pudding walling him in—a vault of puddingstone.”15 The modernist distaste for culinary art may not be universal in the period, but it is nonetheless surprisingly widespread, providing one of the rhetorical set pieces used to shore up the relative autonomy of the modernist literary field. In the process, it condenses the period’s anxieties about gender and class into a single image whose circulation becomes the guarantor of the category of the aesthetic. Carrying forward the Kantian critique of the agreeable and the Schopenhauerian attack on the charming, culinary art nauseates because it reflects the masses’ too-ready acquiescence to simple pleasures. For this reason, culinary art is most often figured through recourse to “predigested” (a term used variously by such improbable bedfellows as Adorno and Mansfield) or easily digestible food, lacking in nutritional content: Orwell’s suet pudding or James’s dessert course. As such, it can signify both Marxist anxieties about a mass society too readily diverted from the serious business of revolution by frivolous cultural delights, and more bourgeois or patrician anxieties about the masses as an unreflective consuming hoard. Art in either account is defined by its capacity to achieve a degree of relative autonomy from the culinary delights of mass society. It thus belongs to that class of people possessed of the discipline to resist the temptations of

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such superficial joys: a revolutionary avant-garde for whom art is critique, as in Brecht and Adorno; or a bourgeois elite for whom art is refinement, as in James or Bloomsbury. Kant himself is clear about the class politics of his anti-culinary aesthetics, arguing that, “only when people’s needs have been satisfied can we tell who among the crowd has taste or not.”16 While Marxist critics, in particular, would hesitate to follow Kant in such an overtly classbound account of the aesthetic, the widespread modernist rejection of art that is too closely allied to appetite inevitably reactivates this older claim. It suggests that taste and the forms of aesthetic experience that it allows rely upon the aesthete’s autonomy from food as both an immediate need and an immediate want—a position that in an unequal society relies upon a position of relative affluence, as well as a posture of self-restraint. At the same time, modernism’s disgust for culinary art also reflects the gender politics of modernist aesthetic autonomy. As Andreas Huyssen has argued, modernist autonomy is premised on a gendering of culture, whereby “mass culture is somehow associated with woman while real, authentic culture remains the prerogative of men.”17 While the claim of an opposition between mass culture and high art in modernism has been subject to extensive critique and revision over the last several decades, the rhetorical force of this opposition—and its gendered nature—was nonetheless central to modernist self-presentation throughout this period. In this context, and given the long-standing association of food in general, and sweet, sticky foods in particular, with women, the repeated dismissal of mass art’s sickly culinary delights inevitably assumes a gendered cast. Thus, when Fry suggests that culinary art is the province of “hungry girl clerks and housemaids,” he makes explicit the more widespread assumption that such readily consumable culture is the stuff not only of the lower classes, but more specifically of the women of these classes. In so doing, he surfaces the intertwined gender and class politics that underpin the modernist distaste for culinary art.

The Modernist Starving Art: From the Lost Generation to Surrealism The modernist starving artist is the personality whose refusal of culinary art becomes a lifestyle and a mode of being. By valuing eating below his aesthetic pursuits, he chooses a side in the opposition between art and eating, in order to dramatize his commitment to aesthetic autonomy. This choice is not, of

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course, what culinary art’s early opponents had in mind. When Kant makes having one’s needs already satisfied a precondition for aesthetic experience, he is insisting not that hunger is the truest aesthetic state, but the opposite: that hunger and eating both interfere with the aesthetic, because aesthetic experience relies on a different order of experience, one that is more concerned with mental states than the messy urges of bodily needs and wants. As autonomy evolves away from a philosophical proposition into a structural fact of the literary field at the end of the nineteenth century, however, it ceases to be imagined as a passing experience, as it is for the German aestheticians, and becomes a determinant of artists’ positions in their social world. In this context, questions about whether one eats, and when, and how—which the aesthetic philosophers could bracket in their accounts—acquire a new urgency. The starving artist is a figure that allows the autonomous literary field to imagine the implications of this translation of aesthetic autonomy into a way of life. He is the figure who embodies and dramatizes aesthetic autonomy, inhabiting it as a material fact of his existence. In these new social circumstances, it is, contra Kant, precisely when the artist’s needs are not satisfied that he has the greatest access to aesthetic experience. Paradoxically, however, this aesthetic experience retains its capacity to affect a kind of out-of-body experience, dissolving the artist’s starving frame under the force of an encounter with art that cannot be confined to a body. Henry Miller, for instance, describes hunger as providing this state of aesthetic receptivity in Tropic of Cancer, his fictionalized memoir of lost generation Paris. Describing the experience of attending a concert hungry, Miller writes: It’s as though I had no clothes on and every pore of my body was a window and all the windows open and the light flooding my gizzards. I can feel the light curving under the vault of my ribs and my ribs hang there over a hollow nave trembling with reverberations.18 Miller experiences the music as a dissolution of the boundaries of his body, an experience of art-as-light that shoots through him in such a way as to undo his body’s coherence. His ribs and gizzards persist as reminders of the starving body that is the precondition for this experience, but they are transfigured by the force of the aesthetic, by the music’s capacity to open and rearrange his body. Miller contrasts his receptivity, grounded in hunger, to the response of his fellow audience members, who are “stuck in their seats like carrots,”

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immersed in “a quiet vegetable sort of repose.”19 These audience members are not only blandly consumable, but dutifully consuming, as Miller suggests when he goes on to criticize Ravel, the composer of the concert’s last piece, for having “sacrificed something for form, for a vegetable that people must digest before going to bed.”20 The other listeners, Miller implies, take the wrong lesson from the modernist horror of culinary art’s easy digestibility when they reject the too-digestible sweets and puddings of culinary art for the hard-to-swallow vegetables of high art. The aesthetic experience they end up with is still too digestible to really count as art, but now also stripped of the easy pleasures of delectable popular forms. In this scene, the only person to have a truly aesthetic experience is not the audience member who dutifully eats his vegetables, but the artist who, starving, finds himself outside of bodily consumption entirely. Miller’s account portrays one’s preferred cultural diet as a key signifier of one’s position in the literary field and locates the cutting-edge of art in the position that fails to eat at all. This position-taking relies both on his disdain for the material comfort of the bourgeois concert-goers, against which he poses his unruly, hungry body, and on his superior aesthetic appreciation, driven by his “empty belly” and its heightened and embodied mental states.21 His starving body does double duty in establishing his position in this field, distinguishing his aesthetics from both the culinary ices of mass culture and the uninspiring vegetables of consecrated autonomous art. In so doing, it serves as the mark of his commitment to a more edgy—and, he argues, a fuller—form of aesthetic autonomy. But if the artist’s starving body is central to locating him within a field, both materially and symbolically, it is also the first thing to go. His experience of the aesthetic is rooted in the dissolution of his body as much as it is in its materialization, replaying a theory of art, inherited from post-Kantian philosophy, that takes aesthetics as the interplay of material form and the experience of the immaterial or transcendent. Embodying the aesthetic as simultaneously an experience of transcendent disembodiment and a position in a literary field, Miller’s starving artist is nothing if not typical among his peers. Hemingway’s account of his experience of famished communion with Cézanne offers one such account, simultaneously asserting his privileged relation to the painter, as part of what Bourdieu calls the “society of artists,” and hunger’s dissolution of the usual borders of physical situatedness or perspective. The surrealists similarly place hunger at the centre of their practice as a warrant of both their autonomous

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commitment to art and their transcendent encounter with the aesthetic. André Breton speculates in his first surrealist manifesto that the practices of automatic writing may originate in starvation, for, as he observes parenthetically, “The fact is I did not eat every day during that period of my life.”22 He turns immediately to quote a long (though not entirely representative) passage from Knut Hamsun’s 1890 novel Hunger, in which the protagonist experiences starvation as a rush of inspiration that leads him to write “as if possessed.”23 Joan Miró has similarly written and spoken at length about the role of hunger in the creation of his 1925 painting Harlequin’s Carnival, which he records in a 1939 surrealist reconstruction of his frame of mind at the time of painting: my great hunger that gave birth to the hallucinations recorded in this painting beautiful bloomings of fish in a poppy field marked down on the snow-white page shuddering like a bird’s throat against the sex of a woman in the form of a spider with aluminum legs coming back in the evening to my place at 45 rue Blomet.24 For all these writers and artists, hunger functions simultaneously as the imprimatur of the seriousness and purity of their commitment to art, and the physical state that exceeds its own physicality, unlocking the secrets of the aesthetic, whether they are located in the depths of the unconscious, the play of distorted perception, or the dizzying reaches of the body’s own dissolution. Hunger becomes the site at which the social prestige of the pure artist’s position in a literary field and the economic suffering of his poverty are mythologized as aesthetic transcendence, via the intermediary of the wasted body.

Towards a Feminist Starving Artist: Mina Loy’s Insel Perhaps the most perceptive chronicler of the vicissitudes of the starving artist, however, is Mina Loy, a writer who by virtue of her gender is excluded from this presumptively male form of position-taking. In her posthumously published novel Insel, Loy records the friendship between the eponymous character, a starving German surrealist painter, and the narrator, Mrs. Jones, an American woman enlisted as the representative of an art gallery and charged with the unhappy task of eliciting some form of saleable product from

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the dissolute artist. Insel thus offers a portrait of the starving artist through the admiring but often ironic eyes of a figure charged with integrating him into the economy of art. As a result, the novel offers a unique vantage on the starving artist, allowing us to grasp him not only through the self-mythologizing lens of his own self-presentation, but also through the narrator’s external perspective, which locates him as an apparition that simultaneously inhabits the economic and social relations that make him possible and allow him to survive, and the unworldly state of the aesthetic. Like other starving artists from Miller and Hemingway to Breton and Miró, Insel is a charismatic figure whose artistry lies more in his way of living than in his production of actual artworks. Indeed, like the narrator of Hamsun’s Hunger—whose hunger prevents him from writing for most of the novel—Insel rarely paints. Instead, his status as an artist is reflected in his whole mode of being, a mode that is heavily conditioned by his persistent starvation. Insel is introduced in the novel’s opening lines as “a madman, a more or less surrealist painter, who, although he had nothing to eat, was hoping to sell a picture to buy a set of false teeth,” and his poverty and starvation, as much as his questionable life choices and his ambivalent surrealism, persist as his defining features throughout the novel.25 As the novel progresses and Insel fails to paint, Mrs. Jones increasingly emphasizes his art as residing in his very being: “He had no need to portray. His pictures grew, out of him, seeding through the inter-atomic spaces in his digital substance to urge tenacious roots into a plane surface.”26 His starvation is central to his charisma, making him “luminous,” as the narrator observes on multiple occasions, and giving him the mysterious transcendental quality that she describes as his “Strahlen” or his “rays.”27 Early in the novel, Mrs. Jones speculates of Insel that “this skeletal symbol of an ultimate starvation had need of a food we knew not of.”28 Her imputation of his desire for another kind of food echoes the claim in Kafka’s Metamorphosis that Gregor Samsa is “hungry enough … but not for that kind of food.”29 It inserts Insel (himself a great fan of Kafka) into a line of modernists whose writing is motivated by what Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson describe as their “hunger for another food, a feverish, insatiable hunger, like that of a weasel sucking eggs.”30 This hunger reflects what they argue is modernism’s perpetually frustrated desire for transcendence, for a mode of being that would take sustenance not from the worldly stuff of actual food, but from some immaterial, otherworldly nourishment. Read in this light, Insel’s hunger

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comes to reflect his orientation towards a higher state, another order of experience—his orientation, that is, towards the kinds of experience promised by post-Kantian theories of art, which bracket the body, and by the luminous dematerialization of aesthetic experience, like Miller’s in the concert hall. The transcendent charisma of Insel’s Strahlen is met by Mrs. Jones’s horrified glances at his rotting, repulsive body, ravaged by the starvation that both unleashes and threatens to eclipse his rays. Mrs. Jones recalls how, “In sitting so close to Insel at the small terrace table all the filaments of what has been called the astral body, the network of vibrational force, were being drawn out of me towards a terrific magnet, while I sat unmoved beside the half-rotten looking man of flesh.” Caught between this rotting flesh and the artist’s vibrational force, she finds herself torn, “as though he had achieved an impossible confusion of his positive and negative polarity.”31 Later, Insel sets upon this flesh and begins to divest himself of it, “dropp[ing] the scabs of his peculiar astral carbonisation upon the table,” until he “exposed the ‘manof-light’” underneath.32 “He might be using this body,” she reflects, “—with its interwoven identity of the living remains of a dead man and the dead remains of a man once alive—as a medium, from a distance to which his fluctuant spirit had been temporarily released.”33 Throughout the novel, Insel flickers unpredictably between luminescent dematerialization and grotesque embodiment, as if parodying the post-Kantian understanding of art as the sensuous embodiment of a transcendent ideal. The experience of starvation simultaneously lifts him outside his body and makes it grotesque, obtrusive, unignorable. The instability of his physical form suggests that to really see this figure of art made life requires a double vision, one which can simultaneously recognize the otherworldliness that guarantees Insel’s curious autonomy, and the hideous embeddedness of this autonomy, its unavoidable embroilment in the artist’s decaying flesh. This oscillation between grotesque embodiment and transcendent disembodiment is the source of Insel’s charisma and the medium through which he engages the social world around him. Its flickering ambivalence allows him to manifest an unstable disidentification between the starving artist and the starving masses, who share his poverty-induced hunger but not his glowing redemption. When Insel receives an eviction notice early in the novel, Mrs. Jones produces a fragile analogy between her friend and the homeless of the city. As he sits in her drawing room, she imagines him already unhoused: “In spite of the ceiling a pitiless rain seemed to be falling upon him already.”

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This premonition of Insel, outside although he is inside, leads immediately to a memory of another “superposition,” of “poor people asleep on stone seats in the snow,” whom she mentally transplants into “unusued ballrooms and vacationers’ apartments whose central heating warms a swarming absence.” The analogy gets its force through the identification between starving frames: between that of Insel, whom Mrs. Jones describes as “this thin man,” and “all men who are over-lean.” Insel in her apartment and the homeless in the snow both share the quality of dissolving the segregation of space on which the modern city’s class hierarchy depends, through the force of their hunger and their dispossession.34 As such, the social power of Insel’s presence lies in his surrealist collapse of social distinctions—an aesthetic gesture that also entails a radical redistribution of wealth and resources. In this sense, Insel’s refusal of culinary art in favor of his commitment to a transcendent aesthetic momentarily acquires the force of critique, echoing the Marxist resistance to digestible aesthetics. For Mrs. Jones, however, Insel’s identification with the starving masses is a problem. While, “to the pure logician this association of ideas might suggest a possible trans-occupation of cubic space,” she concludes that “mere experience will prove that the least of being alive is transacted in space, so much does sheer individuality exceed it; that providing a refuge for a single castaway brings results more catastrophic than a state of siege.”35 If the starving artist trails the starving masses with him, the real question for Mrs. Jones is not how to effect social change, but how to hold the artist apart from the masses—or, in other words, how to justify Mrs. Jones’s willingness to help this man and not all the others. The answer is already given in her formulation of the problem, lying as it does in Insel’s “sheer individuality,” which is the individuality of the brilliant artist. Even the analogy between Insel and the starving masses asserts itself not as a straightforward comparison, but as a surrealist dissolution of boundaries and categories. In this sense, the analogy is possible only because of Insel’s surreal and destabilizing—because supremely aesthetic— mode of being. It is ultimately not his grotesque body but his glowing Strahlen that provide the foundation for the analogy; but, at the same time, it is his Strahlen that constitute his individuality, that preserve Insel’s difference from the masses. If his refusal of culinary art is tempted by solidarity with those denied access to the realm of the culinary, his individuality—his art—ultimately reinforces the exceptionality that exempts the starving artist from the normal meaning of poverty.

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Insel’s difference from the masses, however, is not merely some intangible side effect of his aesthetic luminosity. What he has that they lack is not just artistic virtuosity but, more lucratively, Mrs. Jones herself. It is ultimately she who, in housing him and denying the pressing masses, allows his precarious existence to continue. Indeed, Loy insists throughout Insel that the brilliance of the starving artist relies for its shine on the network of women who feed him. These patronesses create, she writes early in the novel, “mossy refuges” for these “révoltés,” providing a “soft if ragged lining to the cage of practical mankind” that allows them to live the life of refusal and transgression that forms the character of the starving artist.36 These “oases of leisure,” Mrs. Jones observes, “mostly materialize as the hospitalities of modest little women who find a temporary relief from their innate anxiety in association with an irresponsible man in whom the honest desire for survival of his creative impulse gets dishonestly mixed up with his amatory instinct.”37 If modernism’s horror of culinary art is bound up with its horror of women and their foolish consuming ways, Loy emphasizes that the starving artist—the figure who lives out his rejections of culinary art—also, paradoxically, relies on women to “solve the problem of keeping alive without any money.”38 This system of support is fundamentally gendered; it is only women who appear in the patronage role, and part of their task is to shore up the always-threatened “virility of the starving artist.”39 It is therefore significant that Mrs. Jones typically feeds Insel meat, for meat is the food most strongly associated with virile masculinity, and the one furthest from the too-digestible sweets associated with culinary art.40 Indeed, Insel’s avid consumption of Fleisch ohne Knochen (boneless meat) appears in the novel as completely compatible with his existence as a starving artist. As Mrs. Jones observes after one such meat-heavy meal, “however much food you sunk in him it no more seemed to amalgamate with him than would a concrete mass with a gaseous compound.”41 And, later, we learn that his preference for boneless meat in public situations—in the presence of women—has as its complement an impossible meal: “When I am alone … I do not eat like this—I have to drag bones into a corner—to gnaw.” This despite the fact that, as Mrs. Jones notes in the next paragraph, gnawing seems beyond the realm of possibility for this toothless man.42 Mrs. Jones’s central role in this consumptive economy is dramatized in several extraordinary, surrealistic passages where her relationship with Insel transforms her into a piece of meat. “I felt myself growing to the ruby

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proportions of a colossal beef steak,” she writes.43 Later, “I felt myself sag; become so spineless, so raw—. I, a red island with its shores of suet.” Mrs. Jones imagines this as a quasi-religious experience: “I did not find it extraordinary that my condition as an undiminishable steak should make me feel almost sublime, or that the man intensely leaning towards me should pray to it.”44 Insel and Mrs. Jones’s shared hallucination transforms the patronage relationship into a divine sacrament. In her steak form, Mrs. Jones makes flesh her role in feeding Insel (as well as supporting his masculinity), even as it suggests that this relationship transfigures and makes sublime the woman-as-meat. If Mrs. Jones begins as Insel’s “undiminishable steak,” however, she closes the novel by usurping Insel’s own position as starving artist. While Insel understands Mrs. Jones as his patroness and support, she cannily refuses this role, confessing as the novel nears its conclusion that everything she gave him was “fully covered” by a painting that he gifted her earlier in the novel.45 Thus liberated from her role as patroness, Mrs. Jones aspires instead to the role of starving artist. Her claim to this is first manifested through the abstention from food. Throughout the novel, Mrs. Jones rarely eats, instead substituting her desire for food with a “craving for the ‘potted absolute’” that only Insel seems capable of satisfying.46 At one meal, for instance, “we sat in felicity around an enormous plat anglais, which I could not touch for my absorption in Insel and of which, as Insel ate of it, the rosy meats seemed to drop uselessly into void.”47 If Insel becomes a starving artist by his avid but unnourishing consumption of meat, Mrs. Jones is the character who really abstains, satisfying herself on Insel’s immaterial Strahlen rather than any earthly food. This inversion finds its fulfilment in the novel’s climax, where Mrs. Jones finds herself “unexpectedly disintegrated”: “I cognized this situation as Insel’s. A maddening with desire for a thing I did not know—a thing that, while being the agent of his—my—dematerialization alone could bring him together again.”48 Mrs. Jones—who throughout the novel is writing the biography of Insel that presumably finds its end in the text we read—becomes an artist by writing the portrait of the artist. Her absorption in him, which substitutes for food, leads her to starve even as it provides the fodder for her art. In so doing, Mrs. Jones turns the gendering of aesthetic creation on its head. Earlier in the novel, Insel had silently told her that while “the invisible dynamo of growth” will “as a rule … only grow if planted in a woman,” “my brain is more exquisite manure.”49 By the end of the novel, however, Mrs. Jones detects in Insel “the incredible handicap of only being able to mature

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in the imagination of another,” reclaiming the feminine privilege of growth and creative generation for herself.50 At the same time, her growing role as a starving artist is amplified and perhaps facilitated by her growing pain from a stomach ulcer, which, in the “Visitation of Insel,” a kind of postscript to the novel, is described as “behaving like an insupportable hunger.”51 Indeed, by the novel’s addendum, she has completed her transformation into a starving artist, and now lives parasitically off her daughter, as Insel lived parasitically off her. Thus, by the novel’s end, Mrs. Jones has managed to leverage the feminized role of patroness to transform herself into a starving artist, a position that would otherwise have been inaccessible to her in a context where the figure of the starving artist was, with vanishingly few exceptions, imagined to always be a man. Insel, then, begins as a sardonic portrait of a male starving artist and ends as a feminist parable of the making of a female starving artist. In the process, Loy offers an extended analysis of the starving artist as a position of both disidentification from the starving masses and of masculine creation that relies upon a network of female patrons for its sustenance and support. She reveals in the process a vision of the starving artist as the figure who repairs the sins of culinary art, producing a trope for the aesthetic life whose sickly manliness and whose aesthetic distance from the poor guards against the indiscriminate consumption attributed to both women and the masses. That Mrs. Jones’s transfiguration into a starving artist relies so heavily on her own hunger—her pain, her exemplary abstention from food, and her insatiable craving for Insel’s Strahlen—suggests that even in the inversion of gender roles, the horror of culinary art remains. Mrs. Jones becomes an artist, not by embracing the culinary, but by asserting that women too can shun it. In so doing, she dramatizes the signature socio-aesthetic position of modernism, which personifies its distaste for culinary art in the luminous figure of the starving artist.

C HA P T E R SI X

Cocktails with Noël Coward Gregory Mackie

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t’s never too early for a cocktail,” remarks the aging but youth-obsessed Florence Lancaster in Noël Coward’s 1924 hit play The Vortex.1 This suave utterance, with its characteristic inflection of camp exaggeration and domesticated decadence, signals the highly stylized territory that equally defined Coward’s plays and his public persona in the 1920s and 1930s. Commenting on the immediate celebrity (and notoriety) that play afforded him, Noël Coward (1899–1973) observed that he “was seldom mentioned in the press without allusions to ‘cocktails,’ ‘post-war hysteria,’ and ‘decadence.’”2 Over a long career as an actor, director, playwright, and songwriter, Coward certainly received ample media attention, which, as far as The Vortex was concerned, was “very good for business.”3 Indeed, his status as a representative of the interwar generation has proven durable and influential, with the cocktail figuring as one of that image’s defining attributes. According to his contemporary, the fashion photographer Cecil Beaton, “all sorts of men suddenly wanted to look like Noël Coward— sleek and satiny, clipped and well-groomed, with a cigarette, a telephone, or a cocktail at hand.”4 In the aggregate, this catalogue of masculine attributes (we might liken it to a list of cocktail ingredients) inventories more than the mere stage props reinforcing Coward’s well-polished persona. Its emphasis on the up-to-date also captures his approach to dramatic modernism in both its execution and its popular reception. In the world of Coward’s plays, modernity consists in being fully (and stylishly) present in the contemporary moment. Peter Raby, for example,

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identifies Coward as the definitive British comic playwright of the 1920s and 1930s in a lineage stretching back to modern drama’s origins in the late nineteenth century. Similar to his predecessor Oscar Wilde, according to Raby, “he defined a decade; and, again like Wilde, he enjoyed a huge popularity— although it was a fragile one, balanced precariously on a razor edge of taste and fashion.”5 His era’s fashion for the cocktail, it turns out, is reflected in the plays that secured Coward’s reputation: Coward even memorably described the critical reception of Private Lives (1930) as a list of ingredients that “connoted, to the public mind, ‘cocktails,’ ‘evening dress,’ ‘repartee,’ and irreverent allusions to copulation, thereby causing a gratifying number of respectable people to queue up at the box office.”6 Glamorous, sophisticated, even vaguely louche in its celebration of self-indulgence, the cocktail is modernity’s quaffable talisman. And Noël Coward—whose plays served up dialogue as dry as the “perfect” martinis of which he was so fond—is its master mixologist. Coward frequently acted lead roles in his own plays, including The Vortex, Private Lives, and (for a period of two weeks) Blithe Spirit. As does the playwright himself, the cocktail in a Coward play crosses the West End stage’s fourth wall. For their author and his characters alike, it is a distilled form of self-presentation, and represents modernism as style: streamlined, nonchalant, and irreverent. This chapter explores the potent mixture of thematic and stylistic ingredients that render the onstage cocktail the signature of Coward’s brand of popular modernism. It does so by situating his refined drinkers within the gastronomic culture of the interwar period, when drinking cocktails (an American import to elegant hotel bars such as London’s Savoy) became, like the type of masculinity memorably described by Cecil Beaton, suddenly fashionable. Coward’s characters imbibe cocktails, moreover, in some of British modernism’s defining settings: the smart London flat (The Vortex), the international grand hotel (Private Lives), and the country house (Blithe Spirit). Staged in these locales, cocktails in Coward’s plays accompany ostensibly casual sociability; they are bibulous counterparts to the deceptively simple dialogue described in 1936’s Shadow Play (one of the ten one-act numbers in the cycle Tonight at 8.30) as “small talk—a lot of small talk, with other thoughts going on behind it.”7 An early onstage arrival in each of these plays’ first acts, the cocktail contributes to theatrical world-making by establishing and encapsulating a sensibility, namely Coward’s own. Stylish and dispassionate, Coward’s sensibility literalizes the temperature metaphor of the jazz age concept of “cool.” And, like the cocktail, it is best enjoyed chilled.

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Drinking Modernism In his self-appointed role as chronicler of the “jazz age,” F. Scott Fitzgerald remarked in 1931 that cocktails accompanied (or fueled?) a newly hedonistic post-First World War sensibility, as “a general decision to be amused” “began with the cocktail parties of 1921.”8 William Grimes distils this linkage between concoction and chronology into an even more streamlined formula, finding that “in the popular imagination the 1920s and the cocktail are synonymous [and] its career as a symbol of modernity was only beginning.”9 Noël Coward’s method of both citing and staging the cocktail, a practice that echoes contemporaneous popular culture trendsetters such as his friend Cole Porter, who released songs with titles such as “Cocktail Time,” “Say it with Gin,” and “Make it Another Old Fashioned, Please,”10 reminds us that the cocktail’s symbolic capacity to encapsulate modernity was a product of the period itself, and not some nostalgic re-creation that developed over the course of the twentieth century. But why was this the case? And how can a focus on an apparently ephemeral cultural product, such as the cocktail, help us to reframe British theatre’s engagement with modernism along more bibulous lines? In pursuing the question of what the cocktail contributes to characterization and dramatic form in Coward’s drama, we need to look first into the cultural status of the cocktail during the very period in which he rose from enfant terrible of the commercial West End stage to achieve the status of “Master” in British comic drama. As much as Coward remains a British cultural icon—or, more precisely, a symbol of a particular kind of Englishness marked by restraint, playfulness, and a quick wit—cocktails, by contrast, are quintessentially American. Culinary historian David Wondrich proclaims the cocktail an art form whose sensuous appeal has yet to be properly acknowledged, since “a proper drink at the right time … is better than any other made thing at giving us the illusion, at least, that we’re getting what we want from life.”11 This statement’s tacit acknowledgement of the fleeting nature of human happiness is one with which many of Coward’s characters would undoubtedly agree. Wondrich also argues that it cannot “be disputed that this facility with mixing drinks was the first legitimate American culinary art, and … the first uniquely American cultural product to catch the world’s imagination.”12 Although mixed drinks have a lengthy history, the origins of the cocktail, as we would now recognize it (the etymology of the word itself remains subject to dispute13), are most firmly

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associated with bars and bartenders in the mid-nineteenth century in three US port cities: New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco.14 Although the basic ingredients in a cocktail (spirits, bitters, sugar, and water) have remained largely consistent since its earliest days, the mid-nineteenth century witnessed the rise of new refrigeration technologies that enabled the mass production of the modern cocktail’s most essential ingredient: ice.15 Whether stirred (like a Manhattan), or shaken (like a martini), a proper cocktail must always be served (and consumed) cold. “Cold, clean, slightly astringent, the cocktail represents a decisive break from the pre-industrial past, when liquors were seen as a kind of food.”16 Speedily made and served ice cold—and, crucially in what Europeans have named an “American” bar, delivered directly to a patron’s table—such speed, snappy service, and reliance on technology have always aligned the cocktail with a distinctly American sense of commercial progress, prosperity, and cosmopolitan culture.17 For their part, British cocktail drinkers during the 1920s and 1930s imbibed their concoctions with an extra ingredient that Coward himself would have relished: irony. For if the USA defined itself by a mythology of freedom and openness and relatively fewer social restrictions when compared to the ossified class structures of Europe, in legal terms, under Prohibition, it was acutely more restrictive where drinking was concerned. Begun in 1920, this disastrous social experiment ended with the election of cocktail-loving President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932 (assuming the presidency in 1933), who was later to make “a perfect martini” for Noël Coward when the playwright visited the White House in 1940.18 By contrast, British “bibulophiles” could enjoy a cocktail in an American bar, which existed as places of business in Britain since the late nineteenth century. According to bartender and mixographer W. J. Tarling, the “first real American bar to be opened in London was at the Criterion Restaurant [in] about 1878. … Both the bar and the bartender were imported from America.”19 With the cocktail an exile (at least in the legal sense) from its homeland, Prohibition only accelerated the fashion in Britain for American bars and drinks, to say nothing of making celebrities of bartenders. The famous bartender Harry Craddock (1876–1963), credited with compiling The Savoy Cocktail Book (1930), is exemplary in this respect (Fig.  6.1).20 He honed his trade in Cleveland, Chicago, and at some of the grandest hotel bars in gilded-age New York, but the onset of Prohibition impelled him to return to his native Britain. By 1924, when The Vortex opened in the West End, and modernist writer Alec Waugh claimed to have hosted

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Figure 6.1. The Savoy Cocktail Book (1930), Smithsonian Libraries (Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Library, TX951.C76), with openaccess permissions under Fair Use Guidelines

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the first cocktail party in London,21 Craddock was head bartender at London’s luxurious Savoy Hotel.22 Craddock was particularly adept at marketing the cocktail, and “brought to England the American trick of creating cocktails for special occasions, or naming them after celebrities.”23 These creations included the “Strike’s Off Cocktail,” which was “created by Harry Craddock on May 12, 1926, to mark the end of the General Strike,”24 and the “Frank Sullivan Cocktail,” named for the American humorist and member of the Algonquin Round Table. The Savoy Cocktail Book—published the year that Private Lives was first performed—thus qualifies as period-defining literature as much as do any of Coward’s plays. So too does its striking cover design that features a drinker enjoying a gratifying electric jolt of alcoholic dynamism, thereby visualizing how art deco angularity and hedonism combine in a potent formula for glamour. And, indeed, it is in its literature that the cocktail culture of the 1920s and 1930s has left a material legacy beyond its iconically shaped glassware and silver shakers. Today, that legacy is certainly palpable to any patron of the Savoy’s American bar, who enters the establishment through a museum-like display of the “Savoy archives.” The “archives” highlight Art Deco graphic design in carefully preserved old menus and posters advertising dancing and other entertainments, along with numerous photographs of celebrities from Craddock’s era. The archival impulse to preserve extends to liquids, too, and the Savoy has preserved classic spirits from decades (and centuries) past, many of which are exhibited in their original bottles. (During a 2016 visit to the Savoy bar, I was given a cocktail menu that proposed a “vintage” Sazerac to its upmarket patrons. This drink, made using an 1858 New Orleans recipe containing Sazerac de Forge cognac of that precise vintage, was offered at the price of £5,000. I did not order one.) At the center of this remarkable display is a bronze bust of Noël Coward, a life mask dating from the height of his fame in the 1930s. His presence in this setting is not glossed by explanatory labels; it is taken as given. Like its near contemporary, W. J. Tarling’s Café Royal Cocktail Book (1937), The Savoy Cocktail Book also testifies to the growing diffusion of the cocktail into the culture of interwar Britain. If one could enjoy a cocktail (or several) in the opulent environs of either the Savoy or the Café Royal, the generous dedication in Craddock’s book, in the form of a toast—“This book is dedicated to you”—suggests that such glamour was easily transferable to a drinker who followed the recipes at home. By inviting its readers and newly minted mixologists to imagine themselves as a part of the art deco world

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of the Savoy, Craddock’s book thus collapses the distance between the chic public spaces of the grand metropolitan hotel and the private intimacy of the domestic realm. Although stylish, The Savoy Cocktail Book is also nothing if not practical in assisting its users to create their own American bar experience. Its recipes are prefaced, for instance, with a list of tips in the form of “A Few Hints for the Young Mixer”: 1. Ice is nearly always an absolute essential for any Cocktail. 2. Never use the same ice twice. 3. Remember that the ingredients mix better in a shaker rather larger than is necessary to contain them. 4. Shake the shaker as hard as you can: don’t just rock it: you are trying to wake it up, not send it to sleep! 5. If possible, ice your glasses before using them. 6. Drink your Cocktail as soon as possible.25 Simultaneously an advertisement for the Savoy and a work of reference, Craddock’s compendium further demonstrates an open-minded and welcoming attitude toward its readers by concluding with several “blank pages for additions.”26 Like modern life itself, the cocktail must accommodate adaptation and reinvention in the form of new recipes.27 In addition to some 750 cocktail recipes, The Savoy Cocktail Book is replete with amusing illustrations by the aptly named Gilbert Rumbold. These witty caricatures include images of a thoroughly modern female racecar driver, a group of bright young things drinking cocktails in a swimming pool, and an ambiguously gendered lounge lizard sporting a tuxedo and a cigarette holder in the manner of Marlene Dietrich. Certain cocktail recipes are bolstered by chatty footnotes. For instance, the guidelines for assembling the Corpse Reviver #2, one of Craddock’s signature drinks, come with this droll warning: “Four of these taken in swift succession will unrevive the corpse again.”28 These stylings, and frequent references to a contemporary moment pervaded by “drinks, known and vastly appreciated in this year of grace 1930,” illuminate the book’s construction of its own audience.29 They assume a readership (drinkership?) of irreverent, pleasure-seeking transatlantic sophistication. In other words, they imagine the book’s reader as a particular kind of connoisseur: a knowing member of a self-consciously modern, cocktail-drinking in-crowd. The hip cocktail drinker, in a word, is as cool as the drink itself.

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In making the cocktail the symbol of tasteful discrimination by generation and sensibility, The Savoy Cocktail Book recapitulates a maneuver that Coward had honed in his plays. “Coward’s best dialogue,” according to David Edgar, “consists either of insiders speaking in inverted commas to outsiders who don’t understand them, or two insiders playing off each other, picking up each other’s phrases, coding and recoding them, and batting them back.”30 Private Lives, for example, engages such verbal patterning from the first act, which is set on two adjacent hotel terraces. In conversation with their respective new spouses, Elyot and Amanda (still unaware that the other is present, let alone remarried) both decline to blame the other party for the collapse of their earlier marriage. The structural parallelism in this display of residual loyalty marks Sibyl and Victor (the new and more conventional spouses) as outsiders who will never really understand Amanda and Elyot’s shared inner world. The dialogue’s paired references to “sunburnt women” reinforce the common sensibility that links Amanda and Elyot. Sun tanning (like cocktail-drinking) had only become fashionable in the 1920s; it had formerly been associated with peasant field labor, and we encounter it in Private Lives marking a moment of cultural transition. (Coward, for his part, was a devoted sun-worshipper.) Sibyl, Elyot’s new wife, “hate[s] it on women”: she holds to an antiquated stylistic double standard that disapproves of tanned female flesh, while accepting it on men.31 Elyot replies to this with a reproving sneer that prefigures their mutual incompatibility: “You’re a completely feminine little creature, aren’t you?”32 Meanwhile, Amanda and her “hearty” new husband Victor are also contemplating a swim and a day at the beach. Amanda tells her Victor “I want to get a nice sunburn,” but she is surprised by his reply: “I hate sunburnt women … It’s somehow, well, unsuitable.” Not yet realizing that this difference in opinion over an apparently trivial matter of personal style stands in for larger (and incompatible) views about gender and sexuality, Amanda gamely responds “It’s awfully suitable to me, darling.”33 For Amanda and Elyot, both “jagged with sophistication,” being fashionably au courant is not only an index of taste; it also signals their rejection of stylistic and sexual conservatism.34 Their world view embraces (indeed, assumes) social change, complexity, irony, and a “common disregard for accepted gender decorum.”35 In short, Amanda and Elyot are distinctly modern, and their new spouses are not. Instead of honeymooning in Deauville, perhaps the scrappy pair should have saved trouble and expense by staying (and drinking) at the Savoy in London.

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Staging the Cocktail In Coward’s plays, the cocktail proves both a potent metaphor for modernity, and, as we shall see, an efficient mechanism for advancing plot and theme. If served straight up in a clear glass, a cocktail usually takes the form of a translucent liquid.36 As such, cocktails can appear deceptively simple, and yet they are often quite complex, depending on their multiple contents and the method employed to assemble them. (During a performance, it is likely that the actors would be drinking water on stage.) This illusory minimalism provides an instructive metaphor for Coward’s dialogue. As we have seen in the dual conversations about “sunburnt women” in Private Lives, details that might seem superficially trivial—mere matters of taste and fashion— can prove subtle registers of character. There are, indeed, quite a few “other thoughts behind” this “small talk.” The dramatic function of small talk—the sprezzatura of an actor and playwright who “preferred to construct himself as an effortlessly successful purveyor of ephemera”—can thus be usefully paired with the dramatic function of small drinks.37 Compared to other alcoholic beverages such as wine or beer, cocktails are relatively slight in terms of their volume. But again, appearances can be deceptive, for a cocktail can prove surprisingly potent. That strength in a small volume brings to mind the modernist intensity of, say, an imagist poem: its power derives not from its bulk but from its concentration. We could go further in delineating metaphorical linkages between the cocktail and some of modernism’s familiar aesthetic strategies. If the cocktail is a blend of disparate ingredients, we could also identify a structural parallelism between its status as a mélange of various liquids and the modernist practice of generating new creations by combining fragments. This technique, which brings to mind the 1920s modernist literary experimentation of such writers as Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce, tends to be associated with an orientation toward audiences that Coward, however, emphatically did not share.38 Having grown up in the commercial theatre, Coward never questioned the centrality of entertainment to dramatic form, and his drama’s consistent orientation toward pleasure eventually came to brand him as a staunch conservative. In the 1950s, and especially in the wake of the aggressive realism of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, modern British drama adopted a more challenging (and class-conscious) attitude vis-à-vis its audiences that Coward

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found alienating. In a much-quoted Sunday Times article, he admonished the post-war theatrical world for its uncompromisingly serious turn by observing that “in spite of much intellectual wishful thinking to the contrary, the theatre is now, always has been and, I devoutly hope, always will be, primarily a place of entertainment.” Coward concluded this riposte to the “pioneers” of British theatre’s new wave with the patronizing advice of his “fifty years of activity in the profession”: Consider the public. Treat it with tact and courtesy. It will accept much from you if you are clever enough to win it to your side. Never fear it nor despise it. Coax it, charm it, interest it, stimulate it, shock it now and then if you must, make it laugh, make it cry and make it think, but above all, dear pioneers … never, never, never bore the living hell out of it.39 Modernism may be difficult, but Coward, as we shall see, preferred to make it go down rather more easily. If he could stimulate his audiences, he could also charm them. After all, even if bitter or overly potent, a cocktail’s ultimate effect is (or ought to be) satisfaction. Noël Coward’s first substantial hit, The Vortex (1924), with its challenging themes of neurosis, drug use and intergenerational sex, would seem to hew close to this (later) advice. It afforded its audiences a distinctly stylized edginess. Coward marshalled his personal charm to great effect when he had to convince the official stage censor to permit the production of so “unpleasant” a play, which he managed—somewhat disingenuously—by “persuad[ing] him that the play was little more than a moral tract.”40 The play’s (generally positive) critical reception emphasized its modish adaptation of mildly controversial material. As James Agate put it with a whiff of camp, “here is a piece which is the dernier cri in the theatrical mode, un peu schoking, perhaps, but no less popular on that account.”41 Despite a title that recalls Wyndham Lewis’s 1910s avant-garde movement Vorticism, The Vortex is actually a compendium of familiar dramatic antecedents. In the slow peeling away of mutual self-deception between a middle-aged mother and her adult son, for instance, The Vortex pays thematic homage not only to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but also to modern dramatists of an earlier generation, such as Ibsen, whose Ghosts is a clear influence. In this play’s swirling vortex of decadent bad behavior and recrimination, the truths of Florence’s promiscuity and Nicky’s drug

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addiction are ruthlessly revealed, but in a manner that sustains the artifice of genre conventions. The play, ultimately, is nothing if not melodrama, where “to realize the truth [is their] only chance”;42 indeed, Florence swoons in the play’s final line (“Oh, my dear –!”), with tears rolling down her cheeks.43 Both Florence and Nicky are thus always performing—as was Coward himself, who produced and directed the play while also portraying Nicky. During the initial run of The Vortex, Coward’s personality suffused the entire theatre in an exercise of what we might now identify as branding. “From the outset [of Coward’s career],” writes Frances Gray, “he gave his audiences not just plays but a self-assembly kit, a way of speaking, moving, and thinking that allowed them to become Noël Coward; the young of the 1920s were confident that they could not only adopt the kit but challenge their elders with it.”44 In The Vortex, the cocktail, as a device, is a central component of this “self-assembly kit.” The sexually voracious Florence, who “still retains the remnants of great beauty,”45 literally imbibes youthfulness by quaffing cocktails. For her, ritualized social drinking is an enactment of a desired (younger, modern, sexually attractive) self. Cocktails appear relatively early in the play’s first act, once the audience has been primed for Florence’s arrival by the establishing chit-chat of the grouped friends waiting in her flat. (“Pawnie,” whom the stage directions describe as “an elderly maiden gentleman,” is a particularly bitchy chatterer.) After her entrance on the arm of the “athletic and good-looking” Tom—who, at 24, is the same age as her son—she asks the group to stay for tea: Florence: […] Does anyone want tea? Helen: No thanks, dear. Florence: Cocktails, then? Pawnie: It’s too early. Florence [ringing bell]: It’s never too early for a cocktail.46 The fact that none of her guests seems to want a cocktail is immaterial to Florence: she wants one, and the sociability of her impromptu cocktail party provides her with a stage on which to perform the part of carefree hostess. Signaling her bohemian willingness to drink at any hour, Florence dispatches conventional decorum with a neo-Wildean epigram that underscores her defining flaw of self-absorption. Her “it’s never too early” is a self-characterizing catch-phrase that grandly extends her sense of taste to encompass the entire world; that it’s never too early for her means that it ought never

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to be too early for anyone. When the cocktails (made by a servant) arrive, Florence gets to boast of her mixological acumen: “this is special—my own invention.”47 (She is a female Craddock, or better yet she is Ada Coleman, the female head bartender who preceded him at the Savoy.) The cocktail thus affirms both individuality and artifice as Florence has “invented” this drink that remains unnamed in the play in the same manner that she has “invented” her diva-esque persona. In point of fact, her glamorously decadent personality makes her something of a cocktail herself, as she tells her guests, “I’m such an extraordinary mixture. I have so many sides to my character.”48 The cocktail’s arrival just as The Vortex’s first act is getting going proved such an effective structural device that Coward recycled it six years later in Private Lives. Here, too, the timely appearance of drinks saturated with cultural significance deftly achieves short cuts in characterization. The hotel terraces of the first act of Private Lives frame their honeymooning inhabitants drinking identical champagne cocktails that visibly extend the structural parallelism (and shared emotional sensibility) that the earlier discussion of sun tanning had established. In this early scene, neither couple appears onstage at the same time, so the audience’s anticipation of a collision between the newlyweds produces ample situational humor. As she is about to return inside their room, into which her new husband, Victor, has retired, Amanda assures him that she will handle the imminent arrival of some drinks and will “bring the cocktails out here when they come.” Immediately following her exit in search of the drinks, however, Elyot (played in the first production by Coward) “steps carefully onto [his side of] the terrace carrying a tray upon which are two champagne cocktails.”49 The visual gag of Elyot performing the action Amanda has set up furthers the doubling motif: two couples; two terraces; two pairs of cocktails; two divorced people who cannot escape each other. This maneuver also allows the audience a moment to acknowledge and process the scene’s proliferating repetitions as they’re laughing at Elyot’s somewhat awkward entrance. Members of Coward’s audience are thus permitted to enjoy themselves while simultaneously congratulating themselves on their perceptiveness. These dueling cocktails generate more than a mere sight gag, however, for they sustain the play’s argument that even apparently trivial indicators of taste and sensibility can define (and even entrap) a person. Of course, both Amanda and Elyot would arrange to have cocktails on their respective honeymoons; they are both cocktail sorts of people: they can seem shallow

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and flippant, but behind that self-protective veneer they are considerably more complex. It is directly after Amanda’s arrival on the terrace with her set of cocktails that she hears Elyot humming “Some Day I’ll Find You,” the song Noël Coward wrote for the play. They recognize each other, and, in the temporary absence of their new spouses, the play moves ineluctably into its thematic and structural groove of repetition with variation. “Nothing’s any use. There’s no escape, ever,” Elyot gloomily opines. “Don’t be melodramatic,” Amanda replies, adding a metatheatrical insight that paradoxically deflates and sustains the artificiality of the situation.50 The cocktails that had been intended to celebrate the new marriages now help secure the divorced pair’s old intimacy, preparing the way for their quasi-adulterous elopement. As the conflicted erotic energy between the two builds into bickering, Elyot cuts the tension by offering Amanda a repurposed cocktail: Elyot: Do you want a cocktail? There are two here. Amanda: There are two over here as well. Elyot: We’ll have my two first. [Amanda crosses over into Elyot’s part of the terrace. He gives her one, and keeps one himself]. Amanda: Shall we get roaring screaming drunk? Elyot: I don’t think that will help. We did it once before and it was a dismal failure. Amanda: It was lovely at the beginning. Elyot: You have an immoral memory, Amanda. Here’s to you. [They raise their glasses solemnly and drink].51 The cocktails suddenly take on new shades of meaning as familiar tokens of world-weary and “solemn” experience. Elyot and Amanda’s joint participation in the stylized action of the toast not only confirms that they inhabit the world in the same way; it also adapts the ritual’s content while preserving its form. In this way, an ostensibly superficial remark about the potential adverse effects of drinking (“roaring screaming drunk”) mutates imperceptibly into a wistful commentary on their doomed marriage that prefigures an equally doomed reconciliation. As the play soon demonstrates, they hardly needed cocktails to fuel their roaring and screaming. This cocktail-drinking sequence also introduces the possessive pronouns that punctuate and set the tone for the dialogue that follows. Elyot’s “my two,”

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referring to the cocktails, migrates first into a flippant reference to his new wife (“mine”), and then almost immediately into Amanda’s dialogue (“yours”). Elyot picks it up, and the pronouns volley back and forth between them as a kind of insider shorthand, thereby diminishing and excluding the outsiders, the absent Sibyl and Victor: Elyot: Are you in love with him? Amanda: Of course. Elyot: How funny. Amanda: I don’t see anything particularly funny about it; you’re in love with yours aren’t you? Elyot: Certainly. [. . .] Elyot: How’s yours? Amanda: I don’t want to discuss him. [. . .] Amanda: What’s happened to yours? Elyot: Didn’t you hear her screaming? She’s downstairs in the dining room I think. Amanda: Mine is being grand, in the bar.52 During this conversation, Amanda and Elyot presumably consume both sets of newly repurposed cocktails: they now serve to soothe the ex-spouses’ jointly frayed nerves, and decisively to divide the play’s characters into insiders and outsiders. Relegated to the status of unnamed, absent possessions, the new spouses are redundant outsiders to the insider world of Amanda and Elyot, who share cocktails, bittersweet nostalgia, and a mutual sense of vulnerability. The pair soon decamp for Amanda’s convenient apartment in Paris, but for the rest of the play they remain trapped—however glamorously—in a champagne world all of their own. Just as champagne cocktails confirm irony to be one of the keynotes of Private Lives, the cold, clear certainty of the martini enhances Blithe Spirit’s thematic concern with (mis)perception. More immediately, the martini functions as a critical taste marker in the play. The drink that William Grimes describes as “the quintessential cocktail, the standard by which all others are judged” has often inspired strong feelings about its contents (gin or vodka?), proportions (how much vermouth?), and methods of preparation (shaken

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or stirred?).53 Noël Coward was certainly susceptible to the martini’s subtle allure: he liked his martinis dry—that is, mostly gin, with only the slightest hint of vermouth.54 Indeed, one of the most memorable quips attributed to Coward—a characteristic compound of savoir-faire with a dash of camp—is a cocktail recipe for the “perfect martini.” According to folklore, he mused that a “perfect martini should be made by filling a glass with gin, then waving it in the general direction of Italy”—Italy being the source country for this particular drink’s spectrally absent vermouth. Spirits of both kinds haunt Blithe Spirit, where modernity is once again measured out in cocktails, and whose central character, Charles Condomine, shares his creator’s taste in dry martinis. As do The Vortex and Private Lives, Blithe Spirit employs drinks as tonesetters, this time in another classic modern dramatic setting, the drawing room of a country house. Although the play premiered in 1941, it seems as if it were set in the late 1930s, or perhaps even earlier. Indeed, its comic exploration of spiritualism and mediumistic communication with ghosts, a popular pastime earlier in the century, might well make it seem even more dated. (Coward’s mother Violet, for one, was a great believer in the occult, and was persuaded in 1913 to keep her young son on the stage by a mind-reader.55) In the event that Blithe Spirit’s premise might come across as somewhat stale, the martini gets recruited to modernize the comedy that Coward subtitled an “improbable farce.” As the play opens, Charles and Ruth Condomine are discussing the arrangements for an imminent dinner party to be followed by an evening at a séance table. Cocktails are such a fixture in this household that their preparation requires a specific piece of furniture: the cocktail table. The dim-witted maid, Edith, is having difficulty with the ice required for making cocktails and seems to require the instruction which Ruth loftily provides. Both Ruth and Charles, we soon learn, have been married before, and, like Amanda and Elyot in Private Lives, they find themselves bickering over absent spouses— especially Charles’s dead but “attractive” wife Elvira. Awaiting their guests, who will include the exotically named spiritualist medium Madame Arcati, Charles proposes they have a drink: Charles [at the cocktail table]: A dry martini I think, don’t you? Ruth: Yes, darling—I expect Madame Arcati will want something sweeter.

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These drinks prove “awfully strong,”57 in Ruth’s view, but their alcohol concentration aptly matches the exchange’s high joke density. Charles is a writer, and the subtle witticisms culminate in a toast to an unwritten novel whose title anticipates the play’s many sight gags that involve seeing (and not seeing) Elvira’s ghost. Even cocktail culture’s preferred adjectival opposition (“dry” versus “sweet”) becomes fodder for snappy wordplay, as Ruth’s sipping action invites us, momentarily, to gaze at the paradox of consuming a liquid as “dry as a bone.” The attentive cocktail drinker watching this exchange will notice, however, that the Condomines make a sweeping assumption about their spiritualist guest-to-be. If Ruth’s line “I have a feeling that this evening’s going to be awful” has one musing about her own psychic capacities, she turns out to be quite wrong in her prediction that Madame Arcati will prefer “something sweeter” than a dry martini. Taste indexes the Condomines’ age-related expectations for this “old girl,” and the dry martini mixed onstage seems initially set up to divide the play’s characters into opposing camps: on the one hand, there are the sophisticated, rational, and modern, or those who take their martinis “bone dry,” and on the other, the superstitious, irrational, and passé, who prefer sweeter drinks (perhaps a sweet vermouth, or a cream sherry?). It’s a variation on the familiar Coward opposition between insiders and outsiders, here with a somewhat cruder ‘with-it versus out of it’ inflection. What, one wonders, would what Elvira’s jealous ghost have if she could drink?

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When the daffy Madame Arcati enters (the stage descriptions render her “a striking woman, dressed not too extravagantly, but with a decided bias toward the barbaric”58), her appearance, conjoined with her age and name, initially appear to confirm the Condomines’ assumptions. But, just as quickly, those taste-based assumptions prove inaccurate, as taste itself is discredited as a way of making life choices, especially in wives. When Charles asks her, “Would you like a cocktail?” her response compels the audience, too, instantly to revise its expectation of this character’s outlook and capabilities: Madame Arcati [peeling off some rather strange-looking gloves]: If it’s a dry martini, yes—if it’s a concoction, no. Experience has taught me to be wary of concoctions. Charles: It is a dry martini. Madame Arcati: How delicious. Accepting and neatly polishing off the cocktail Charles hands her, Madame Arcati then proceeds to discuss her (also unexpected) penchant for vigorous bicycling. When she proclaims the drink “the best dry martini I’ve had in years,” the dictates of hospitality require that Charles offer to refresh her drink, whose potency has already been established by Ruth. Madame Arcati surprises us again not only by accepting, but by saluting Charles’s mixological abilities: Charles: Will you have another? Madame Arcati [holding out her glass]: Certainly. [Charles takes her glass and refills it at drinks table] You’re a very clever man. Anybody can write books, but it takes an artist to make a dry martini that’s dry enough.59 It is not merely her robust physicality and breezily high tolerance for alcohol that inspire her slightly astonished hosts’ respect. Rather, her connoisseurship of the dry martini rearranges the vectors of taste that would have discredited her mediumship. Her preference, in other words, indicates that she’s not a sherry-tippling “real professional charlatan” that Charles wants to exploit for his new book at all.60 Instead, she’s authentic, and ghosts, as Charles soon comes to discover, can be very real. Although Madame Arcati doesn’t turn out to be the channeling medium, this martini-drinking spiritualist isn’t a fraud,

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either, for she has the capacity to identify real occult abilities. She has a vision that proves Edith, the maid, to be “a Natural,” and the unconscious cause of the hauntings Charles suffers.61 She also possesses the spiritual generosity not to be jealous of Edith’s ability—perhaps the gravest sin in Coward’s moral universe, and a characteristic with which the pettier Charles, Ruth, and Elvira are amply provisioned. If any character comes off well by the end of Blithe Spirit, it is definitely Madame Arcati. The genial “old girl” is a thoroughly modern medium. Although she can’t resolve the play’s ghostly love triangle, she does prove capable of channeling another disembodied presence: that of Coward himself.62 In complimenting Charles’s cocktail artistry by telling him, “You’re a very clever man. Anybody can write books, but it takes an artist to make a dry martini that’s dry enough,” she pronounces a witticism akin to an incantation that momentarily summons another blithe spirit into the theatre. In doing so, she subtly reminds us all of the predominating presence in the play, onstage but invisible, of Noël Coward’s own dependably “clever” personality— a personality gifted with what his biographer Sheridan Morley called a “talent to amuse,”63 and equally adept at writing books and making sufficiently dry martinis. Bottoms up!

C HA P T E R SE V E N

Late Modernist Rationing War, Class, Power Kelly Sullivan

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had caviare for dinner,” writes an upper-middle-class London widow in her war diary for Mass Observation in July 1941. “I felt somewhat guilty over so doing, but after all if it is continuing to be imported that is the government’s funeral, and if—as I imagine—what we are offered is part of pre-war stock, it might just as well be eaten up.”1 The diarist, a mother of two who manages her household alongside two maids, is not the typical working-class Londoner we imagine sacrificing for the Second World War effort under British rationing. Yet her remarks about obtaining expensive food, and her ambivalence about her ability to do so, help establish a sense of the class differences and competing themes of control and power wartime and post-war restriction brought. Alongside her sometimes glib excitement over caviar and being a “gross self-indulgent goumandizer [sic],” her diary reveals a temporary obsession with obtaining and hoarding eggs when they grow scarce: her interest in the availability of food parallels a society-wide concern for everyday markers of consumption.2 Late modernist literature of the war and immediate post-war years likewise reflects this attention to the friction between government and social control, changes in class, and the ensuing shifts in structures of power. In fiction written between 1939 and 1960 (considered the late modernist period)—and set either in the war years or the years of post-war rationing from 1945 to 1954—writers highlight food and food consumption as a palatable means of discussing their reactions to perceived shifts in class and power in British society.

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In this chapter I consider the visceral and oftentimes symbolic place of food in late modernist work by Elizabeth Bowen, Barbara Pym, Henry Green, Olivia Manning, and Elizabeth David. In the wartime fiction of Bowen and Green, the innocuous fragile egg trades as class currency, and the writers’ attention to the presence or loss of eggs indicates deep concerns about a decline in class privilege. Pym also traffics in eggs and omelettes in her post-war novel Excellent Women, but her depiction of middle-class consumption and single womanhood indicates a sometimes-ambivalent satisfaction with the enforced austerity of post-war food control as it mirrors the ostensibly austere but ultimately liberating choice to remain a single woman. In Manning’s postwar The Balkan Trilogy set in wartime Eastern Europe, the opulent stores of food in Romania and their depletion and restriction highlight both the rise in power lower-middle-class Britons feel in an economy where their wages go further than at home, and the converse loss of power—and ensuing descent in ethical decision-making—the once-wealthy feel when they are stripped of money and the decadent gastronomic indulgence it brings. Manning’s novels pair with David’s post-war cookbook depicting elegant and unobtainable Mediterranean food that helped democratize “good taste” for the changed social landscape of post-war Britain. For Manning and David, writing from opposite sides of the British class system, austerity first highlights the shifting ground of class and consumer power in wartime and post-war Britain, and subsequently helps formulate a new middle-class taste.3

Second World War Rationing Drawing on the largely successful rationing programs used in the Great War, the British Government began planning for wartime rationing well before the Second World War started. For the first months of the conflict, there was relatively little effect on food supply, but as continental countries that had supplied England with food fell to German invasion, food rationing and restriction gradually became important. As Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska explains, “While only a limited range of foodstuffs, clothing, and petrol were actually rationed, all consumer goods became subject to comprehensive regulations issued under emergency legislation and administered by a sizeable bureaucracy.”4 The Ministry for Food enacted the first food rationing in January 1940, regulating consumer purchases of butter, sugar, bacon, and ham, with all meat rationed in March of that year.5 “Controlled distribution

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or quasi-rationing schemes for milk and eggs were launched in 1941,” and because availability of these foodstuffs varied greatly depending on the season and perishability, they came under “distribution schemes” aimed at getting them to groups deemed most in need—pregnant women, adolescents—with “no definite quantity … guaranteed to ordinary consumers.”6 Due primarily to shipping losses, in the spring of 1941, “the diet of the people dropped to the lowest average of the whole war.”7 Some historians argue war rationing had a greater impact on the wealthier classes, but this, as Alan Sinfield points out, is likely only because “most lower class people survived wartime conditions because materially they were in many ways no worse off ” than before the war.8 For the wealthy, wartime restrictions generally meant paying more for what they wanted, or finding black market channels to get it. Sinfield summarizes what he calls Evelyn Waugh’s “gleeful” claim in Unconditional Surrender that “even under wartime restrictions he and his friends had ways of getting oysters, salmon, gulls’ eggs, caviare and French cheeses.”9 More anxiety-producing than access to luxury foods, Sinfield notes, is the “disruption in class relations” the war brings to Waugh and his ilk.10 Others argue wartime restriction affected the poorest the most. George Orwell emphasized wartime rationing as disproportionately impacting the poor: in an August 1941 Partisan Review letter, he writes that the middle classes experience “no real food shortage” because it is the heavy laborers who miss “the lack of concentrated foods (meat, bacon, cheese and eggs).”11 Either way, it was clear that food restrictions made people of all economic classes uneasy. Most complaints and concerns about rationing had to do with equity under the “Fair Shares” policy of flat-rate distribution. Zweiniger-Bargielowska points out that these “widespread doubts about the fairness of flat-rate rations became a major source of discontent during and after the war.”12 Eating out was one way of getting around food restrictions since such meals were not included in the rationing scheme and, according to Heather Creaton, were: a popular alternative with Londoners who could afford them. The conspicuous ability of the rich to enjoy almost pre-war levels of gastronomy at top hotels led to such resentment from Londoners at large that the government prevented restaurants charging more than 5/- a meal from 1942. This curbed the most ostentatious examples, though it did not completely solve the problem.13

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The ability to obtain expensive food may have made the better-off more aware of the power money bought, but the enactment of food regulations and the decline in availability of foods, particularly after the war, induced anxiety at the possibility of future restrictions and even more emphatic distribution— both of foodstuffs and of power. Thus, wartime restrictions raised concerns about equity and shifts in class structure and power from both ends of the spectrum. Far from thinking it a “people’s war,” ordinary citizens sensed they might be fighting “primarily in the interests of the ruling elite; that both fascism and the way it was being fought might be consequences of the international capitalist system. One magistrate acknowledged this perception by remarking, innocently: ‘There is a war on and it is a people’s war as well as ours.’”14 On the other hand, as Sinfield argues, writers like Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, and Henry Green fell into a category of literary intellectuals sent into “panic” at the notion “that the working classes were about to take over” post-war.15

The Wartime Egg Mass Observation diarist 5427’s 1941 war journal emphasizes the scarcity of eggs in the summer months just after the Blitz in London. The Ministry for Food enacted its first egg rationing that June, restricting them to one per person per week, and “subsequently to about 29 per person a year in 1942 and 30 per person a year in 1943.”16 Although overall tallies of egg consumption for war years show them to have remained near pre-war levels, this was because of a “remarkable increase in the consumption of dried egg.”17 For ordinary citizens (as opposed to “priority” groups like pregnant women and adolescent children), annual egg consumption had fallen, by 1944, to 31 per person from a pre-war figure of 153.18 The diarist, identified in the file as Mrs. O. Smith, flippantly plays on the metaphor and symbolism of eggs even as she voices her concerns about their availability: The egg shortage seems to be getting a bit serious. I’ve heard of one or two people who have had difficulty in getting any eggs at all. It looks as though those of us who were foolish virgins and did not lay any eggs down when they were cheap are going to suffer for our folly.19

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Yet Smith’s concerns about eggs come paired with an increasing attention to issues of censorship, propaganda, and other forms of government control enacted on a civilian population in the name of war. In a long entry for 11 July, she couches a concern about the scarcity of eggs in an embittered story about a squabble with her dentist after he censures her for voicing doubt about fifth columnism in England. “Heaven’s above! What good could such a remark be to an enemy spy!”20 Immediately after this, she notes the egg shortage is “getting a bit serious.”21 The sense of being wronged both through censure and rationing seems to fester for her. Smith writes with increasing anxiety about both the shortage of eggs and the Government’s and other citizens’ censoring of conversation and opinion. She complains for several days about toothache, attributing it to her dentist’s anger with her and implicitly linking her bodily pain to the censorship she experienced with him. Smith’s narrative of the egg shortage and restrictions on speech soon morphs into a discourse on illegal ways around egg rationing. First it is a friend who got eggs from her milkman who made her promise not to tell the shopkeeper he sold them to her; then, a week later, Smith herself “actually managed to collect three dozen eggs, mostly in threes from each shop … What a triumph!”22 She writes that a local delicatessen offered her a dozen eggs—a boon—at four shillings, well above the government-controlled legal price. She reports that she is “so absent-minded that it never occurs to [her] that this is monstrously illegal” and that she “felt most uncomfortable when [she] suddenly realized what [she had] done. … It isn’t my first naughtiness in regard to the larder in this war, either, though I think it’s the biggest.”23 Although the diarist reports her discomfort with black market goods, her language echoes her first stubborn delight in eating caviare simply because she can. Furthermore, she explains, it has been relatively easy for her and for others to obtain more than their fair share of rations—in short, because she is wealthy, she can work around government control. Nonetheless, Smith’s diary shows her recognition that she cannot necessarily work around censorship of speech, or the real-life restrictions and horrors of war. That eggs become her abiding concern in this two-month-long diary reveals them to be both a vital element of the so-called Kitchen Front, and also symbolic of more serious restrictions and hardships and the potential deprivations a full shift in class relations could bring. Eggs become the language through which she describes wartime horrors; in one entry she remarks a friend’s loss over “P.B’s death” and describes the soldier as “Shot down while bravely trying

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to shoot other humans down to crash like broken eggs, perhaps to be burnt alive in their flaming machines.”24 In later entries she marks reports of citizens arrested and imprisoned for speaking in ways that might lower morale: “It really is the limit—just like the Gestapo. What are we fighting for but the human being’s right to freedom of opinion and of expression of opinion?”25 Soon after she notes that other friends have been offered eggs at cutthroat prices, and, later, on a trip to Surrey, reports that friends queue with forty others to purchase six eggs, remarking they “have cost a good deal in time and petrol.”26 She concludes, almost comically, by noting that on July 27th, “All the local shops have produced quantities of eggs at once, so that having had none at the beginning of the week we have now got 40 to eat our way through!”27 Egg shortages appear as a genuine preoccupation for this wealthy Londoner, yet the fluctuation in their availability tells us more about the discomfort of a seeming loss of control than it does about hunger or gastronomic restriction. In this personal diary, the slippage between food rationing and other forms of control indicates both the way that wartime concerns infused and seemed to threaten ordinary life, and the way that elements of ordinary life stand in for anxieties about larger shifts in British society. Eggs play a significant role in work by two central late modernist authors, Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green. In Green’s 1945 Loving, stolen peacock eggs form a major narrative through-line in this novel set in a Big House in neutral Ireland and staffed by English servants. When some of the cook’s waterglass goes missing, she believes it has been stolen in order to preserve eggs and ship them back from Ireland to war-torn London as sustenance for some of the staff ’s family. Contemporary readers might be forgiven for their unfamiliarity with waterglass, a substance made of sodium silicate and used for preserving eggs and other foods. Waterglass was developed as a food preservative in the First World War, and has the added dramatic element of being poisonous to drink. That the precious peacock eggs are in fact preserved by the particularly fair-skinned maid Edith as a skin treatment, and hidden in her room—not a benevolent act of supporting rationed family back home, but a bid at gaining herself a husband in the butler, Charlie Raunce—adds to our sense that wartime rationing functions as a language of control in literature of this period. The stolen eggs and the stolen waterglass set off a series of near-comic plot points that unsettle notions of possession and power; the peacocks are sacred birds at Castle Tennant, evidence of abundance and plenty in an Irish Big House under threat of extinction. When another maid asks the Irish

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groundskeeper O’Conor, who carefully guards the peacocks, “Can a person eat them eggs?” he “answered excitedly,” defending the birds. She has to scold him: “no need to get worked up.” Later she tells Edith “He’s a terrible state about them eggs.”28 The cook furiously guards her waterglass for fear that the toxic substance may be ingested by her grandson, a rambunctious child evacuated from blitzed London, and out of concern that the staff are stealing to support those more directly involved in the conflict; but its theft parallels her own scheme in illicitly purchasing and drinking vast amounts of gin. Charley Raunce, the butler, tries to pin the blame on his second-in-command, a teenage boy. When Albert denies he took anything, Raunce insists and comes up with a likely story: “It’s because you overheard me say what my old mother had written that they was on the very brink of starvation over in London with the bombing. You must’ve idea’d you’d go get hold of some to send ’em a few eggs in.”29 Albert continues to deny taking the waterglass, claiming, “I couldn’t even name what that glass is for.”30 The novel devolves into a series of thefts, lies, cover-ups, and absurdities, with the servants variously prospering by taking from the ironically named Tennants, while the working-class English relatives of the servants suffer restrictions and danger in the war, implicitly for the benefit of the landlord class. Characters above stairs and below deceive each other for personal gain, most often for a grab in power. In the final pages of the novel, Raunce convinces Edith to run off with him without telling anyone; she protests that she wants to say goodbye to the young daughters of the wealthy landlords. In language commenting on the girls’ mischievous plotting, but aimed at the class from which they come, Raunce concludes, “Once they get hold of something it’s taken right out of control.”31 In his 1940 autobiography Pack My Bag, Green famously begins by stating he was “born a mouthbreather with a silver spoon.”32 He goes on to explicate his attitude toward the class system in English society and his own privileged place within it. His family took in wounded soldiers in the First World War, and Green claims he spoke with them “to learn the half-tones of class” and to understand something of “those narrow, deep and echoing gulfs which must be bridged.” In this passage, he likens his family’s generosity to wounded officers as a kind of “self-preservation”: “people in our walk of life entertained all sorts of conditions of men with a view to self-preservation, to keep the privileges we set such store by, and which are illusory, after those to whom we were kind had won the war for us.”33 If waterglass was an important home front preservative in

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both the First and Second World Wars, it is no error that in Loving it preserves decadent peacock eggs instead of modest hens’ eggs. In Elizabeth Bowen’s “Careless Talk,” likely written and set in 1941, eggs and their connection to the peaceful countryside reach their fullest metaphoric capacity, pointing to censored language as well as class-based assumptions. The aesthetic choices Bowen makes in this story already censor the language and tone for readers. Presented almost entirely in reported speech, the story follows the “careless talk” of a group of friends dining at a fancy London restaurant. One friend newly up from the country for a visit keeps both “evacuees” and hens at her country house, and brings a gift of eggs for Mary, the dominant voice at the table. At the outset of the story, Mary passes the eggs to a waiter, ordering him to put them somewhere “‘Carefully’ […] ‘I do hope they will be all right,’” she adds, “looking suspiciously after him.”34 What follows is a conversation that subtly blends discussion of wartime food restrictions, the relative splendor of expensive restaurant food, and the censorship on information requiring “careful” talk. The story’s title recalls the British Propaganda campaign—illustrated by Fougasse (Cyril Bird)—“Careless Talk Costs Lives.” Fougasse’s posters depict couples dining in restaurants or talking in train cars with Hitler hiding under the table, embedded in the print of the wallpaper, and gracing the beer steins behind the bar (Fig. 7.1). Much of the diners’ talk revolves around the rich foods available to their class, and the inconveniences (rather than extreme deprivations) of wartime restrictions. The wine they order is no longer available en carafe so they must buy by the bottle. This leads to complaints that, dining last night, “they already had several numbers scratched off the wine list.”35 Their talk of the scarcity of the most opulent of foodstuffs parallels the control and censorship they feel they must use in talking about their work and their lives. The “careful talk” exercised throughout the brief story excises any reference to emotional loss, with questions about missing friends queried and dropped all at once. Yet by the end of their meal, the controlling Mary asks, “You do know about Edward and the Free French? I hope it didn’t matter my having told you that.”36 The text abruptly breaks at this point, leaving us to wonder if this is the “careless talk” of the title. In its final paragraph, Mary again dominates the conversation and brings it back to the “lovely eggs” Joanna brought from the country. “I tell you one thing that is worrying me: that waiter I gave Joanna’s lovely eggs to hasn’t been near this table again. Do you think I put temptation right in his way?”37 Mary’s comment reveals worries well beyond the temporary safety of three

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Figure 7.1. Fougasse (Cyril Kenneth Bird), “Careless Talk Costs Lives: ‘Of course there’s no harm in your knowing!’” Color lithograph poster, 1940. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

eggs. What passes unspoken in the conversation is the humanizing concern for friends killed or displaced in war, alongside anxieties about shifting class. Mary frets the waiter may have absconded with the eggs: that is, stolen something of her privilege. In the concluding lines of the story, she admits she has been thinking all along of the omelette she might make with those eggs, a rare treat during the 1941 egg shortage.

Post-war Austerity and Educating Taste If rationing during wartime could be understood as a part of the war effort, post-war food rationing was a far more politically fraught restriction. The reasons for continuing rationing varied, but had much to do with on-going scarcity due to low food production, the need to maintain troops, feeding and aiding European countries devastated by war, and the imposition of a new centralized government planned economy. The continued and even augmented restrictions of food lasted nearly another decade, fully ending only in July 1954. This legacy of restriction and regulated sharing worried

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the wealthiest who sensed the Labour Government was imposing a socialist welfare state on Britain. Thus, the connection of food rationing with censorship and other forms of social and political control continued—often in a comic vein—in works of the post-war period. Barbara Pym’s 1952 Excellent Women describes one of the less “foolish virgins” of the rationing years, the spinster Mildred Lathbury, in a text imbued with and fascinated by food, cooking, the availability of food, and the roles women play post-war. The protagonist puts herself to sleep by reading cookery books, and comically learns not recipes but methods to avoid censorship and spying: “a package or an envelope sealed with white of egg cannot be steamed open.”38 The connection between wartime rationing and wartime surveillance (and ways around it) comes implied in these lines, but Mildred comically undermines such piercing connections by remarking, in these frugal but peaceful post-war years, “what the use of this knowledge would ever be to me I could not imagine.”39 Now that the war is over, even the suggestion of covert means to defy surveillance seems comic; doubly so couched in this self-conscious study of single womanhood. Mildred similarly tries to imagine what use she thought she might have for an “egg poacher,” an item she finds on an old shopping list that also includes “Rations.” That the egg poacher indicates extravagance—and by extension absurdity—she makes clear: “that was an unfulfilled dream or ambition to buy one of those utensils that produce a neat artificial-looking poached egg. But I had never bought it and it seemed likely that on the rare occasions when I had a fresh egg to poach I should continue to delve for it in the bubbling water where the white separated from the yolk and waved about like a sea anemone.”40 In framing a mere egg poacher as an “unfulfilled dream” she undermines our own impulse to belittle what seems to be her circumscribed life working for an aid organization and volunteering at her church. Yet in pointing out restrictions on ordinary food, she simultaneously shows us the vast meaning and power in an egg that can imaginatively become a “sea anemone.” Much as Mary dreams of the omelette she will make in “Careless Talk,” Mildred describes a lunch of scrambled eggs as “extravagant.”41 Pym gives Mildred Lathbury multiple love affair plotlines but allows her character strength enough to show that she prefers to control her own affairs and preserve her autonomy. Time and time again this sense of fastidious selfsufficiency comes through the language of food. When her would-be suitor asks her to dinner at his house, she “could feel [her] aching back bending over

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the sink.”42 She declines and asks if he will be able to cook the “meat” he has purchased, and he rebuts, “well, I have a cookery book.”43 When she accepts the man’s second invitation some time later, she runs into a friend on the way. Sensing social protocol requires he invite her to dinner, he hesitates nonetheless, telling her he has only a small bird in the oven. She says she is already on the way to dinner elsewhere and indicates she will likely have to help with the cooking. “‘How very anxious for you,’ responds her friend. ‘I always like to have full control of a meal or no part in it at all.’”44 Mildred might well agree except that as a woman in 1950s England she feels restricted by social and class rules that make her the sort of “woman who was always making cups of tea.”45 By controlling her private life so that she can have an “extravagant” lunch of scrambled eggs, she avoids what she sees as the control enacted upon her as a single working woman in post-war England. Mildred may also enjoy “full control of a meal,” but in post-war society her solitary eating is a far more suspicious activity than her male friend’s. Access to opulent foods and wine generally pairs with male suitors in this novel, and it is rejecting extravagance for the austere, measured life of solitude that offers feminine power to Mildred Lathbury. Food writer Elizabeth David lived a life much different from the fictional Lathbury’s austere severity. David spent the war years traveling both for personal pleasure and as a researcher for the British Ministry of Information. Between 1939 and 1946, she moved progressively south “from Marseille and Antibes to Athens, Corsica, and the Greek Island of Syros to Alexandria and, finally, New Delhi—each move prompted by the advances of the German and Italian armies.”46 When she returned home to London she began writing down the recipes she had gathered in her travels, not with a book in mind, but, as she explains in the 1988 Preface to the 1950 A Book of Mediterranean Food: as a personal antidote to the bleak conditions and acute food shortages of immediate post-war England. Looking back to those days when meat, butter, cheese, sugar, eggs, bacon, milk, and even biscuits, sweets and chocolate were rationed, when fresh vegetables and fruits were scarce, lemons, oranges and tomatoes as rare as diamonds … I see that it was also largely in a spirit of defiance that I wrote [them] down.47 The shift from pre-war luxury to post-war austerity must have been acute for David who grew up in a wealthy, aristocratic English family. But she had

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already rebelled against class restriction and the social control it brought, first by going to the continent to study art, then joining the Oxford Repertory Theatre, and later by living and traveling in Europe with a man to whom she was not married.48 Clarissa Dickson Wright, in her Foreword to the 2002 reprint of the cookbook, offers a way for us to read David’s self-ascribed “defiance” in relation to her class. “The Mediterranean was about far more than food,” Wright says, “it was her escape both mentally and physically from the restrictions of an English upper-class family in the chilly confines of Wootton Manor in Sussex.”49 Wright remembers the author as “autocratic,” and argues that the sharpness of her prose reflects “the precision of her age and class.”50 For David, writing about then-exotic foods was a way of imaginatively combatting food restrictions while simultaneously breaking free from the social restrictions class-based life demanded. David’s sharply drawn Mediterranean world was one at odds with the austerity and gastronomic philistinism of post-war England, and because of this, as Write argues, it is her “imagination which has shaped our food, our dreams, and our thinking over the past fifty years.”51 David herself suggests her cookbook was an antidote to austerity, a way of controlling governmentimposed measures. But we can also read it as a way of pushing back against class restrictions and reacting to the supposed democratizing of British culture that was to come subsequent to the war. In her 1955 Preface, written just after rationing ended, she notes the book was written when almost every essential ingredient of good cooking was either rationed or unobtainable … but even if people could not very often make the dishes here described, it was stimulating to think about them; to escape from the deadly boredom of queuing or the frustration of buying the weekly rations.52 David’s series of Prefaces to the book also reflect what we might interpret as a changing attitude toward class shift. If she was born to a family that could assume it held power, by 1950, when the book was first published, she had to note the inclusion of a chapter on “cold food, fine dishes which are particularly suitable to our servantless lives.”53 In the immediate post-war years, the wealthiest English may have felt a contraction of their power, but David’s emphasis both on the imaginative possibilities of exotic food and the distinction of “servantless lives” indicates her desire to hold onto power even as she

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loses the accoutrements of class. Perhaps like Pym’s Mildred Lathbury, David imagines freedom in a democratized England liberated from the restrictions of classed behavior. David’s reaction to her book’s distribution and cost indicate her interest in garnering a wide and even populist base of readers. In the 1950s, she enthusiastically took a change of contract to Penguin when her publisher was bought out: “A Penguin would mean a vastly increased readership, and in all probability a younger one which would include students, young married couples and many professional women sharing flats or living on their own.” The cheaper paperback, she notes, would be “within the reach of nearly everybody.”54 Thus a cookbook that advocated for the “etiquette” of cooking and serving eggs (through a long quotation from Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas), explains how to prepare octopus, and offers a recipe for Aubergines Dolmas with mutton, tomato, lemon, pine nuts, and olive oil, democratized the taste for such foods—they were equally unavailable to wealthy aristocrats and poor students alike.55 If the wealthy were to lose class status, the middle class must be educated into taste so that by the time post-war rationing ended, they might demand a better diet. Olivia Manning came from a very different background to Elizabeth David, but she too traveled across Europe during the war and wrote about her travels in the lean post-war years. Manning was born into a workingclass Portsmouth family; when as a young woman she set out to be a writer, she moved to London and worked a series of jobs for low pay in order to write. She married a man who worked for the British Council during the war, and together they traveled to Romania, Greece, Egypt, and finally Palestine, often moving, like David, when a country fell to the Axis powers.56 Manning’s approaches to class and power differ in kind from David’s, but she similarly uses food—particularly plentiful, exotic, and gourmet food—as a way of discussing shifts in class, social restrictions, and power dynamics. In her immediately post-war novels, food becomes a symbol of material plenty, of control, and of the security afforded to certain classes at the expense of others. Approaching food and class from the angle of impoverishment and frugality, Manning similarly claims middle-class taste for her characters, and associates the once-elite with rationing and austerity. In the first two books of The Balkan Trilogy, The Great Fortune (1960) and The Spoilt City (1962), Manning describes the wartime experiences of Guy and Harriet Pringle, a newly wed English couple—clearly modeled on

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Manning and her husband—who move to Romania in 1939 and stay until the fall of Bucharest to the Nazi powers. On the way to Bucharest on the Orient Express the couple voluntarily ration themselves for financial reasons, eating only one meal a day.57 But in Bucharest Harriet finds Romania the land of plenty, and her husband wants to live opulently—and they can, relative to their lives in England, even on a modest teaching salary. The restaurants thrive, and Manning describes them as chaotic, almost warlike places, but with immense displays of food: The heart of the display was a rosy bouquet of roasts, chops, steaks and fillets frilled round with a froth of cauliflowers. Heaped extravagantly about the centre were aubergines as big as melons, baskets of artichokes, small coral carrots, mushrooms, mountain raspberries, apricots, peaches, apples and grapes. On one side there were French cheeses; on the other tins of caviare, grey river fish in powdered ice, and lobsters and crayfish groping in dark waters. The poultry and game lay unsorted on the ground.58 When Harriet asks Guy what they can afford to eat at this overwhelming restaurant, he tells her “Oh, anything.”59 Yet the abundance of food in 1939 already hints at the possibility of its shortage. For English readers in 1960, the memory of post-war rationing would have been acute, and such a description of decadence all the more linked to coming austerity. In this early scene in The Great Fortune, set in Pavel’s restaurant, a Romanian couple identifies the Pringles as English, and the woman vehemently argues that England must protect Romania. She sagely foresees shortages— “there will be many scarcities,” she says, “How terrible if Rumania were short of food!” Guy responds by gesturing toward the display of opulence: “Could Rumania be short of food?”60 Manning marks even this early exchange in free Romania with ambiguities of class and power. The waiters tell the Pringles there are no free tables, but Harriet asserts a middle-class English right, her husband proffers a bribe, and they are awarded a special reserved space. The Pringles’ colleague Clarence ominously says, “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may be starving to death.”61 If food still seems available to everyone through the chaotic plenty symbolized by Pavel’s, Manning implies a desperation underlying its consumption: a feeding frenzy before shortage.

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Manning’s brilliant invention, the White Russian Prince Yakimov, may not be “starving to death,” but when we first meet him he hasn’t eaten in forty-eight hours. Yakimov’s impoverished yet still debonair quality emphatically calls into contrast the exigencies of wartime restriction and class chaos. Yakimov arrives in Bucharest with no money, and very hungry—he also arrives on the Orient Express but hasn’t eaten for two days. By the end of the first novel, he has taken up possession of the Manning’s spare room and resents that they eat only middle-class foods and do not purchase caviar, beautiful asparagus, and other opulent dishes. He begs, borrows, and even steals money at every opportunity, almost always spending it on fancy restaurant meals and whisky. Horrified that his life of opulence and ease has been destroyed by revolution and war, his desire for food signifies his discomfort with diminishing power. That Manning creates Yakimov to represent a despicable, wasteful entitlement on the part of the elite she makes clear when he travels as a journalist to Cluj, a Romanian city on the cusp of a Nazi-sponsored Hungarian takeover. When a Jewish resident of Cluj tells him shops are boarded up, there is violence in the streets, and “no one has food …” Yakimov immediately runs to his “friend” Freddi Von Flugel, a high-ranking Nazi officer.62 Yakimov passes information about an allied plot to dismantle oil wells in Romania in the case of a Nazi takeover—information he has taken from the Pringle’s home while their guest—as well as names, including that of Guy and his friends. In exchange, Yakimov enjoys all the luxuries of Nazi power: “The coffee was pre-war, the food was excellent,” while in a side street, “a queue of people could be seen outside a shuttered bakery. From somewhere in the distance came a sound of shooting.”63 Desperate to enjoy the decadent power and class he has always had, Yakimov acts with no scruples, not even a moral twinge. Manning implies that Yakimov’s sell-out for the luxuries of his class parallels Romania’s own vying for protection from whatever force is most powerful at the beginning of the Second World War, and its eventual fall to a fascist coup and dictatorship under Antonescu. By the conclusion of The Spoilt City, the middle-class English no longer enjoy the power that came with their nationality when neutral Romania was under allied protection. In Bucharest, everyone abides by rationing restrictions, including meatless days. The once opulent food markets now have “nothing but cabbage,” and Harriet Pringle, in search of sherry for an important British guest, can buy only imitation madeira.64 Like Yakimov and the wealthy and powerful, Romania seems to have squandered the “great fortune” it first enjoyed—by trading it for fascist protection.65

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The Spoilt City concludes with a dinner scene designed to contrast the decadent plenty of the opening one in The Great Fortune. The Pringles and their English friends go to Capşa’s, one of the best restaurants in the city, known for the quality of its food even now when “food was not only meagre, it was often bad, as though shortage had led to hoarding and hoarding to decay.”66 But at Capşa’s, a favorite of the German community, the Pringles have no power at all. Although the restaurant is half empty, they are told—in German—that there are no tables. Harriet tells the others it is no use—they will not get better treatment anywhere else in the respectable parts of the city. So they end up at a down-and-out restaurant with no guests at all, where the proprietor urges them to order the house specialty, friptură (steak): “It was not a meatless day, but he spoke as though suggesting a forbidden pleasure.”67 “In its day,” their friend David says, “this restaurant served the best steaks in Europe.”68 Now, with Romania rationed and restricted and soon to be under Nazi control, David eats his steak and remarks “apparently some trăsură [carriage] has lost its horse.”69 The striking contrast between resplendent tables laden with food present at the outset of Manning’s post-war novels, and the severity of restriction under rationing that leads to horse meat served in place of gourmet steak, highlights not only the real-life experiences of Europeans who lived through the War, but also the tangible fears about changes in class, power, and social life. The English Pringles who found themselves enjoying improved status in Romania because of their nationality now suffer in a country soon to fall to the Nazis. There may be a small irony available to readers at the novel’s late publication in 1962—England, of course, does not suffer under fascist rule, but the brief rise in social status the Pringles experience abroad seems unlikely to be replicated in the changing class structure and restricted England to which they will someday return. Like the late modernist works that came before her novels, Manning uses food to explore anxieties about power, government restriction, austerity, and shifts in class. For late modernist writers, gastronomy marks changes in consumer power, and helps define new, post-war middle-class taste.

III Taste and Disgust

C HA P T E R E IG H T

Objects of Disgust A Moveable Feast and the Modernist Anti-Vomitive Michel Delville and Andrew Norris

T

he question of whether Hemingway was a modernist or not is rather too academic unless its terms and tenets can be fed back into an understanding of the various modernisms we have at our disposal— be they high or low, canonical, or marginal—and the ways in which they fit together—or fail to. In this connection, A Moveable Feast is a very useful text—part cultural history, part autobiography, part retrospective travelscape. It traverses these generic definitions, driven on by a cultural and psychological symptomology of its own. Written (or compiled) at the end of the author’s life, the Hemingway who remembers his Paris days attributes the experiences to his former self, a young writer who, though he frequented Pound, Ford, Joyce, and Stein, was forging an aesthetic vision to supersede the grand experiments of the high modernists even as they were coming to fruition around him. Without the constant of Hemingway’s symptomatic obsessions to provide a principle of continuity, A Moveable Feast might read like mere nostalgia or score-settling. The tension in the text derives from the fact that Hemingway is still grappling with the issues which preoccupied him back in the twenties. His doubts and vulnerabilities have been exacerbated by the intervening experiences to such an extent that by the time the book was published its author was two years away from death by suicide. Hemingway’s desire to recapture the felicities of his life with Hadley and the excitement of his creative labors amongst the expatriot artists of Paris somehow fixes on the consumption of food and drink and the enjoyment

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thereof as its objective correlate. The enjoyment of eating and drinking looms so large in the text that it would be fair to suggest that it is this gastronomical pleasure which allows the ill and depressed Hemingway of the late 1950s to connect with the hearty young Hemingway, seizing life and shaking it for experience in the early 1920s. So why should Hemingway’s reminiscent testimony to his part in this evolution depend so heavily on the food and drink available in Paris at the time, its affordability, its variety, and the wholesome pleasures it offered?

Eating Well and Cheaply One obvious way of reconciling the cultural and the culinary in Hemingway’s memoir is to focus on the idea of taste. Knowing what is good to eat is of a piece with knowing what is good to write, what it is good to have written. It is interesting therefore that A Moveable Feast should begin with an evocation of the putrid underbelly of Paris: the Café des Amateurs, which Hemingway presents as “the cesspool of the rue Mouffetard.”1 While all the other sewers of the quarter are pumped out, “no one emptied the Café des Amateurs.” This “evilly run café where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together” is shunned by Hemingway and stands at the outset of the text as the antithesis of all that is good and wholesome in Paris and life in general.2 This disgusting evocation over and done with, the litany of comestible joys and goodness begins. The first café au lait arrives on the second page, washed down with a “good Martinique rum.”3 Two pages later the writer indulges in a plate of oysters and a half carafe of dry white wine. Here the invigorating sensuality of the experience is underlined: As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.4 Written from the mouth, as it were, this passage establishes a hinge between the physical and the psychological. Good food here is the key to a good mood. We are moving rapidly on from the rolling cesspit and the first cold rains of winter which strike a note of desolation on the opening page. The progress of

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Hemingway’s memorial, its evolution through shades of eulogy and revolt, is already keyed to the consumption of food and drink and the double sense of taste—the literal sensuality of nerve receptors but also the notion of refinement, discernment, quality, value, a recoiling from the inferior, the unclean, the reviling. Two pages further on and we are in Hemingway’s writing room at the top of a hotel. The cold, the walking, and the work combine to make Hemingway permanently hungry and he manages this state by eating mandarins and roasted chestnuts and rewarding himself for a successful day’s work with a nip of kirsch. Ten pages later a cold beer on the way home from Gertrude Stein’s studio creates the space for a complex reflection on beauty and justice, which leads to a resolution: Hemingway will serve Stein as best he can and try to ensure that she gets “justice for the good work she had done” in spite of her “lost-generation talk and all the dirty, easy labels” she seems ready to repeat.5 The word “dirty” here seems to be a ripple from the still disturbing lesson Stein had given him on his homophobia, of which more will be said later. Crucially, though, the word arrives as a counterpoint to the cold beer he is drinking, inverting the movement at the opening of the text where the turpitude of the cesspit is cancelled out by the warming rum. Food and drink, the tastes they inspire and confirm, the conduits they open between the physical and the psychological or philosophical—together with the darknesses they reveal and temporarily resolve—are the quilting points of A Moveable Feast, those semantic pins which, according to Lacanian theory, are driven vertically through the different layers of discourse to keep them in some kind of fixed relation to each other. Whenever a new memory begins the reader can be sure that within a few sentences it will be associated with a drink or a meal. The places of the text and the people compete for importance with the wine, beer, bread, cheese, sausage, and so on. Even the verification of the size of Scott Fitzgerald’s penis is mediated by a cherry tart.6 So why this obsession? Why this need to anchor experience in the satisfaction of hunger and thirst? Is there an obverse to this litany of taste and quality? And what do these dynamics tell us about Hemingway’s stance as a young writer in modernist Paris and as a seasoned writer looking back at the moment? Beyond the question of taste lies a hedonistic or epicurean approach to life as a happy composite in which all aspects, submitted to the single goal of pleasure, mutually reinforce each other, creating a harmony which is pleasurable in itself, perhaps even pleasure itself. In this way the writing must concord with

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the eating and drinking, all of which must be “good.” A successful concordance, especially if we throw in some good love-making and some good luck at the races, makes for a good life, fine living. It is clear how a discordant note in the form of the distasteful or the repellent can throw this system off its mark. But perhaps the repellent was a necessary evil, structurally indispensable to Hemingway’s distillation of writing from life. It is in this light that we might approach the famously discordant passages in A Moveable Feast when Hemingway evokes his encounters with Ford Madox Ford and Wyndham Lewis. It is extraordinary, after all, that he should have chosen to keep these vituperative outbursts in the final text when, one might have imagined, the social shock, the sheer disgust with Lewis and Ford as bodies with whom he found himself sharing space, would have long since worn off leaving only a trace of personal animosity. A writer of Hemingway’s stature might well have judged such episodes unworthy of account had they not retained their symptomatic potency to destabilize the calculus according to which Hemingway converted experience into writing.

Knowledge and Truth While A Moveable Feast insists almost to the point of self-parody on what it was good to eat and drink in Paris in the twenties, the gastronomical obsession was in fact a constant of Hemingway’s writing life, and thus a constant of his ambivalent relationship with modernism. What sits most oddly, perhaps, within the revolutionary ethos of modernism is Hemingway’s guiding criterion of fidelity to the object. Writing is best when it is most truthful. To succeed it must approach ever more closely and encompass ever more broadly a pre-existing reality. Any thickening of texture or gathering of association in the process must be resisted; form must not be allowed to assert itself beyond the limits authorized by the object. To begin a new story Hemingway’s method, as revealed in A Moveable Feast, was to write “one true sentence,” a sentence that pre-exists the story since “there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.”7 To interrogate this truth for its terms of reference would be to “write elaborately” and thus to stray from the “simple declarative” mode which should be sustained from the beginning to the end. This is a “severe discipline” which might also betray an urgent need to frame experience within the confines of connoisseurship where the quality of something is self-evident (or is so to the initiated).8 To test the authentic quality of food and drink one places it in the mouth and tastes, and Hemingway’s conviction that truth can be stated in

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language suggests a form of gustatory control where the writing is rolled around in the mouth and savoured for its irreducibilities. Hemingway expressed this conviction in his introduction to Men at War. When writing about war in particular a writer should avoid anything which is misleading or dishonest, his job is to “tell the truth. His standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.”9 Writing, then, can enhance the merely factual until it is raised to the level of the true. In this tension between the factual texture of reality and the higher or poetic value of truth through creation we can again locate something of Hemingway’s ambivalent relation to modernism. It is difficult to imagine Joyce, Eliot, or Lewis committing themselves to an aesthetic of truth through form. The formal experiments of Joyce and Eliot were surely aimed more at a deconstruction/reconstruction of reality through the dislocation of traditional form; Ford’s narrative experiments were similarly motivated by a desire to test the reality of experience through ­achronology and discontinuity, while Lewis harped back to a satirical tradition and modernized it, creating an instrument with which he could probe at the pleats where fashion overlaps with ideology. In none of these writers was there an ambition to adjust their art to some kind of transcendent pre-existing truth. And yet, Hemingway was at the same time a formal innovator fixated like Cézanne or Braque on the object before him and its sensual impact. This belief in the truth of representation as an elective criterion of fine writing, one imagines, could also become overbearing. The reduction of experience to a toothsome knub of superbly concocted prose could become quite sickening. And it is in this connection that we can discover a logic to the return of the repellent in Hemingway’s art whether it be Ford and Lewis and his own betrayal of Hadley as recounted in the controversial final chapter of A Moveable Feast, or the stillborn baby in A Farewell to Arms, which is likened to a “skinned rabbit,” or indeed the moral repugnance of Pablo’s treachery or Don Faustino’s funk in For Whom the Bell Tolls.10

The Anti-Vomitive in Modernism One way of theorizing the negative potential of the repellent in Hemingway is provided by disgust theory and the notion of the “anti-vomitive” which, according to Winfried Menninghaus, can be traced back to the eighteenth century when modern aesthetics were founded on the exclusion of the

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disgusting.11 This principle proved to contain an error in its understanding of the psychology of disgust: a system from which disgust is excluded will prove excessive in its beauty (or “fineness” to use the key term from the Hemingway lexicon): The absolute other of the aesthetic thus returns as the inmost tendency of the beautiful. Aesthetic theory, therefore, had to offer a kind of antivomitive, a remedy for the disgusting satiation brought on by the merely sweet or purely beautiful.12 It is to be noted here that when Hemingway praises Stein’s “natural distilled liqueurs” in A Moveable Feast it is on account of their purity and traceability.13 In the history of the food novel, this pursuit of authentic gustatory pleasures recalls the loathing of adulterated wines and food experienced by the protagonists of J. K. Huysmans’s fiction (which The Torrents of Spring references unfavorably and associates with Stein’s post-Decadent “experiments in words”14). It also betrays the fear of becoming disgusted (or jaded) by the beauty and pleasure of “fine” art and foods due to the absence of the antivomitive virtues of that which negates (or exceeds) the merely pleasurable and beautiful. Just as Stein’s liqueurs are always in danger of converting attraction into repulsion towards the “sweet that is all too sweet,” art becomes kitsch (rather than kirsch) when it is not mitigated or contaminated by “something dissonant and other than itself.”15 Hemingway’s sublimation of the base, the mean, the impure, the banal, the cowardly, the ignoble, all of these qualities intermingling and suggesting themselves as a confusion or turbidity antonymic to the clarity he sought in language, was a distinctive force in his writing. It remained a necessity to the end. If such was the case, and if we credit the theory of the anti-vomitive, then Hemingway’s writing required a homeopathic infusion of the repellent to prevent it from disgusting itself. Menninghaus translates this idea into social terms, citing Nietzsche as his primary source: while there is plenty to be disgusted with in modernity, it is only the man who can register a genuine disgust with these revolting aspects who can offer resistance to the universal “disgust with humanity.”16 Something of this can again be felt in Hemingway’s encounter with Lewis as reported in A Moveable Feast. David Trotter notices a dichotomy of dirty and clean in this episode. Hemingway is washing himself after sparring with Ezra Pound; in the healthful afterglow of this manly

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exercise, a combination of skill, discipline, and courage, Hemingway makes up his mind about Pound’s visitor. “What is startling,” observes Trotter, is the way in which [Hemingway’s recollection] uses all this washing-down and towelling-off as the basis for an assault on Lewis’s character. Hemingway remembers himself as  clean, above all; and clean, furthermore, after his carefully controlled exertions, in a thoroughly modern way. Lewis, on the other hand, wearing the kind of bohemian “uniform” favored by the “prewar artist,” remains somehow archaic and insalubrious.17 The cleanliness of skill, discipline, and courage applies as much to writing as to boxing. Lewis on the other hand is shifty and degenerate: “Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.”18 Having registered this disgust, Hemingway attempts to surmount it in an heroic effort to be nice to Pound’s friends. A similar effort is made with Ford, who disgusts Hemingway so much that the latter is relieved to meet Ford on a terrace and not in an enclosed space. The insistence on the good things in life, most notably food, drink, work well done, or love, underpins this heroic refusal to surrender to mere personal distastes. The persistence with which Hemingway insists on these good things reveals perhaps that he is never quite able to carry off the heroic sublimation of disgust necessary to shore up his sense of forthright masculinity. The revolting objects of modernity insist as symptoms; and even in his last unfinished work he is still striving to break through symptomatic disgust to a point where he can absolve humanity of its native repugnance. He is still also insisting on drinks taken and meals enjoyed: “They ate a steak for dinner, rare, with mashed potatoes and flageolets and a salad and the girl asked if they might drink Tavel. ‘It’s a great wine for people who are in love,’ she said.”19 This might be compared to the meal shared by Bertha and Tarr in chapter 4 of Lewis’s novel. Tarr is trying to free himself from his relationship with Bertha and the food is a tactical weapon deployed with cunning in the battle of wills. He relies on lunch to satisfy a basic physical drive in his adversary and to give himself time to gain a slight psychological advantage: if she eats the strawberries, which he has craftily introduced into their showdown, she can’t be that upset by the prospect of their parting. He himself eats robotically, possessed by a will to thoroughness in seeing off his share, abstracted from all

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notions of taste and pleasure: “The strawberries were devoured mechanically, with un-hungry itch to clear the plate: he was a conscientious automaton, restless if any of the little red balls still remained in front of it.”20 Tarr is written from a standpoint of disgust and contempt for food and sex and, by extension, for all “the conditions of creation of life.”21 His fraught relationship with food aligns him with the ascetic modernism of T. S. Eliot, for whom “eating and drinking rituals [one thinks, for instance, of the “cups, the marmalade, the tea,” the “cakes and ices” and “coffeespoons” of “Prufrock”] are always associated with the futility and false consciousness of modern social life.”22 The mechanical hurriedness with which Tarr proceeds to eat his meal is symptomatic of what Lucy Ricaud has described as his tendency to oppose “negative values such as meat, sex, women, emotions and positive ones such as anorexia, emotional or physical frigidity and indifference”23 In the last analysis, Tarr’s antibourgeois rejection of the pleasures of the table also reveals the links established between misogyny and anorexia, a term which Lewis’s novel as a whole extends to “loss of appetite both for food and sex and aesthetics.”24 The “Men of 1914” identified as such by Lewis in a proclamatory gesture typical of the militant modernism in which he excelled, haunted Hemingway’s aesthetic like a return of the repressed, but also served it, introducing the dissonant “something” of which it stood in need. Without the anti-emetic properties of Lewisian modernism and the memory of Ford’s wheezing infirmity, Hemingway’s writing life might well have retched itself out long before 1961.25 A work like Tarr, for instance, is full of abrasive shocks of style and characterization which leave no space for an exaltation of the object. Lewis liked to characterize himself as the “Enemy” and Tarr personifies the anticonsensuality of this stance; he is an anti-vomitive prophylactic for canonical fine writing dyspeptic with beauty and truth. Later in the novel, as he continues to rationalize his culinary aversions and develop his obsession with conformity and mediocrity, Tarr acknowledges that there is no alternative to the crudeness of “creation” except the “second rate.” His definition of the antivomitive is clear and irrevocable. Responding to Anastasya’s suggestion that his aesthetic philosophy relies on a Rousseauistic hostility to “the tidy rabble,” Tarr counters that, far from “preach[ing] wild nature and unspoilt man,” his philosophy of moral and aesthetic detachment acknowledges the disgusting crudity and formlessness which are necessary to art creation (“the birth of a work of art is as dirty as that of a baby”).26

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Lewis attempted to pick apart the premise of truth to the object so central, it would seem, to Hemingway’s art and life in his 1934 essay “The Dumb Ox, A study of Ernest Hemingway.” During the course of a vitriolic and frequently hilarious polemic Lewis claims, “It is difficult to imagine a writer whose mind is more entirely closed to politics than is Hemingway’s.”27 Hemingway, according to Lewis, is interested in war “but not in the things that cause war, or the people who profit by it, or in the ultimate human destinies involved in it.”28 Such statements invite us to consider again the breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and assorted drinks that loom so insistent in Hemingway’s texts. Are they not, in the light of Lewis’s antagonistics, the very indices of a lack of history in Hemingway’s oddly unretrospective memoir? “History” is to be understood here as the forces which shape destinies and the events through which this shaping is achieved or, in other words, the politics of times and situations, lives and societies. To borrow Lewis’s term, the Paris comestibles and all the other sensual objects in Hemingway’s oeuvre for which they might stand are really the dumb oxen of his poetics. They are the constants, the valeurs sûres, the definite evocation of which is key to Hemingway’s writing and the beauty it strives to summon. It is the concrete constancy of these objects, the enduring goodness of the sensual experience they sustain, which, in the end, congeals and cloys and requires the relief of the anti-vomitive, which, whenever it erupts into the text, does so as the revolting other of Hemingway’s aesthetic of demarcation and definition.

The Gatekeeper Emotion Susan B. Miller has described disgust as a “gatekeeper emotion” conducting real and imaginary mediations between the inside and outside, life and death, the personal and the public, the organic and the non-organic.29 Disgust is also the expression of “a nearness which is not wanted” and the threat of leakage across accepted cultural, psychological, as well as physiological boundaries.30 One such capital moment of ontological destabilization occurs in A Moveable Feast when Hemingway’s exposure to the intimacy of Stein’s sadomasochistic homoerotic rituals causes his definitive estrangement from number 27 rue de Fleurus. The following exchange between Stein and Alice Toklas causes the much lauded eau-de-vie to turn sour in Hemingway’s mouth, dissipating and neutralizing the virtues of the otherwise soothing and revitalizing drink:

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Michel Delville and Andrew Norris The colorless alcohol felt good on my tongue and it was still in my mouth when I heard someone speaking to Miss Stein as I had never heard one person speak to another; never, anywhere, ever. Then Miss Stein’s voice came pleading and begging, saying, “Don’t, pussy. Don’t. Don’t, please don’t. I’ll do anything, pussy, but please don’t do it. Please don’t. Please don’t, pussy.”31

This passage is central to the permutations and interpenetrations of the emotional and the aesthetic which determine the gender politics of Hemingway’s memoir, of which the food porn of A Moveable Feast is both a symptom and a critique. According to Hemingway’s and Stein’s own accounts of their relationship in A Moveable Feast and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, their unlikely and fraught friendship provided the anti-vomitive tension required to keep it amicable, albeit “a little dangerous,” notably because of the feeling of unease caused by Stein’s “dark” and “frightening” friend.32 Hemingway’s confrontation with the full obscenity of Stein’s sexual games, however, evidently proved too dissonant to stomach, as did the figure of the vetula, the depraved and abject aging woman, a long-standing paradigm of disgust throughout the centuries.33 This sudden and unexpected breach of intimacy prompts Hemingway’s departure from the house as well as his subsequent rejection of a friend and ally whom he had come to regard as unacceptable on a personal level and aesthetically worthless. Hemingway’s exposure to the latent violence of Gertrude and Alice’s relationship brings to the fore an aversion inspired by the sheer physical “messiness” of a homoerotic relationship he has so far learned to tolerate and understand. It returns us to the specifics of Stein’s attack on Hemingway’s “prejudices against homosexuality” expressed earlier in the chapter.34 According to Hemingway’s account, Stein’s own homophobia struggled with the need to establish the superiority of lesbianism over male homosexuality, the former being perceived as healthy and clean and utterly devoid of the “ugliness” of anal intercourse and the neurotic self-disgust it generates amongst male homosexuals: “You know nothing about any of this really, Hemingway,” she said. “You’ve met known criminals and sick people and vicious people. The main thing is that the act male homosexuals commit is ugly and repugnant and afterwards they are disgusted with themselves. They drink and take drugs, to palliate this, but they are disgusted with

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the act and they are always changing partners and cannot be really happy.” “I see.” “In women it is the opposite. They do nothing that they are disgusted by and nothing that is repulsive and afterwards they are happy and they can lead happy lives together.”35 It is precisely this idealization of lesbian sexuality as a pure, clean, and stable (i.e., monogamous) activity unencumbered by guilt or self-disgust which is compromised by the revelation of Gertrude’s and Alice’s “dirty secrets.” Janet Malcolm has written of this episode that it was part of “a regular repertoire of sadomasochistic games the couple played,” some of which are documented, albeit in a coded or euphemized fashion, in works such as Tender Buttons or, perhaps more explicitly, in selected passages of “Lifting Belly” or “Pink Melon Joy.”36 Whether this infamous passage reflects Hemingway’s own anxieties about the fate of masculinity in “gay Paris” and/or was intended as a retaliation against Stein’s own put down of Hemingway in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (which dismisses him as a “rotten pupil” and “a ninety percent Rotarian”37) is less important than the fact that the end of Hemingway’s friendship with his mentor and patron was caused as much by the latter’s increasingly militant lesbianism as by what he describes as a decline of the aesthetic standards prevailing at her salon. After the incident, Hemingway reports that it “was sad to see new worthless pictures hung in with the great pictures” in Stein’s drawing room.38 He also deplores his mentor’s transformation from “a woman from Friuli,” which is how Picasso depicted her, into a “Roman emperor,” a transgendered icon of influence and authority which becomes a further source of estrangement for Hemingway, who fondly remembers her former, innocent, pre-hubristic self, that “of a northern Italian peasant woman with her clothes, her mobile face and her lovely, thick, alive immigrant hair which she wore put up in the same way she had probably worn it in college.”39 Hemingway’s disparaging remarks about Stein’s writing, which he supported without fully and genuinely endorsing throughout his Paris years, are also revealing of how much of Stein’s output he could take, or claim to admire and support: after having “forced” Ford Madox Ford to publish The Making of Americans in The Transatlantic Review, he admits to finding it unbelievably long and repetitive.40 The pun-ridden and free-associational dynamics of Stein’s prose in The Making of Americans—a thousand-page-long

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book deploying Stein’s emblematic “repetition-with-variation” technique and attempting to define nothing less than the essential nature of the American people—must have proved hard to digest for a writer who was in the process of establishing concreteness and brevity as his main stylistic trademarks.41 With the threat of textual satiety and indigestion looming, it is hardly surprising that Hemingway thought that the book should be published “serially, knowing that it would outrun the life of the review.”42 While food remained for Hemingway the vehicle of a solid, literal relationship to matter, the clarity and solidity of his proto-minimalist prose functioned as an antidote to the repellent stickiness and messiness of human relationships. As for Stein, she remained evidently unencumbered by considerations of disgust or notions that such feelings should be overcome or sublimated through art. Much of her writing endeavours to give euphemized expression to the author’s relationship with Alice Toklas, displaying an interest in various linguistic displacements which suggest so many ways of exploring transitional states between the psychosexual and the physiological. This is particularly true of her relationship to foodstuff in Tender Buttons, in which edible matter is subjected to squeezing, pinching, teasing, heating, melting, chewing, and other forms of physical manipulation conveying the intricacies of lesbian sexuality (potatoes, cabbage, butter, milk, and other culinary ingredients evoke various bodily fluids and erogenous zones in the female anatomy). One of the keys to an understanding of this process is mentioned in passing in A Moveable Feast when Hemingway remarks that Alice Toklas was “working on a piece of needlepoint when [he and Hadley] first met them.”43 Elizabeth Fifer has argued that one of the pivotal secret codes governing Stein’s poetics lies in its fusion of oral and genital imagery which largely “borrows from Alice Toklas’s sphere of influence, the domestic,” insofar as Alice’s cooking and sewing activities “offered particularly available sources for sexual imagery (and indeed always have been part of sexual lore in folk and popular literature).”44

Innocence Corrupted Behind the notion of fine living which pervades A Moveable Feast lies a horror of corruption; and behind that perhaps a love of innocence and a revulsion at its oppositional other, guilt. We have suggested that what Hemingway is constantly trying to avoid or correct with his ethic of fineness is infidelity to

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the object, and his struggles with the sexuality and poetics of Gertrude Stein suggest as much—as does his condemnation in A Moveable Feast of Scott Fitzgerald’s willingness to compromise with the market and write less well for a less discerning public.45 The controversial last chapter of A Moveable Feast seals a transition in fact from innocence to guilt as the days of poverty and creative togetherness amongst the modern artists of Paris give way to a sense of corruption and betrayal as Hemingway records his susceptibility to the blandishments of the rich and glamorous. In the light of this last chapter the early episodes of the book acquire innocence like an investment coming to fruition. The food enjoyed as wholesome frugality or occasional luxury consumed in celebration plays strongly in this dichotomy of integrity and lapse. The simplicity of its enjoyment is the key. Either relished in company or as a solitary but healthy self-indulgence, food marks these innocent years in which the work, the writing, was forging ahead in the expectation of success. From the moment success arrived Hemingway and his innocence of enjoyment was sliding, inexorably perhaps, towards less wholesome, guiltier versions of itself marked by excess and obsession, a consumption in the absence of appetite. A measured prophylactic of revulsion was required somewhere to alleviate all that encumbering innocence and prevent it from curdling into self-loathing. The change which arrives in the final few pages of the Paris memoir delimits the innocence of enjoyment and suggests a note, attitude, or tonality that Hemingway struggled to exclude from his writing throughout his life. While Lewis could write the Apes of God and satirize the rich and their tendency to corrupt art and artists with their parasitical patronage, Hemingway could only lament the loss of blameless enjoyment. Or the enjoyment of innocence. This postlapsarian note is congruent with the thematics of The Garden of Eden, the unfinished novel Hemingway was grappling with in the last years of his life while he was also putting together A Moveable Feast. Catherine’s bisexual imagination imposes itself on David and Marita and the gathering complicatio of erotic experiment and the social fallout occasioned is mediated by the meals taken by the principal actors. As in A Moveable Feast, it is difficult to pin down exactly why so much is made of the food and drink taken by the characters. Is it simply the tic of an aging writer clinging to the hedonism of his youth, or do the meals provide a base level of predictable enjoyment grounded in an unshakeable knowledge possessed by each character of what he or she actually enjoys? As love is pushed through a series of permutations and confronted with jealousy, hate, and a banal but

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corrosive irritation, the enjoyment of a well-prepared martini with a garlic olive plunked in provides subjective continuity and social cohesion whenever the pleasure is shared. Here, it seems, it is the food and drink which save the characters from disgust with themselves and with each other. They enjoy what it is normal to enjoy while losing themselves and their relations through a series of psychosexual experiments imposed by the will to follow their desires, however fugitive these might be. The pleasures of the table (or the bar) free the subjects to seek out other potential pleasures. Once again, food and drink are the quilting points which hold the shifting layers together. When Marita enters the frame and David starts working again in The Garden of Eden, a rhythmic tension takes over: David rises early to work and labours until mid-morning trying to get his stories right, bringing order to the impulses of the imagination. At the same time the two women are off together testing and transgressing the limits of their intimacy. When David finishes work, he is possessed by a desire to see the two women, veering as it were from the will to order towards a reckless desire to share the psychosexual anarchy that Catherine is stoking up with Marita. During the waning of one state and the awakening of another David drinks; and the precision with which this drinking is recorded underlines its structural significance. Alcohol, the great disinhibitor, here provides some kind of demarcation between order and chaos. It plays a similar role to the Asiatic cholera in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice which saves Aschenbach from having to choose between the principles of ordered harmony and the anarchy of paedophile lust. It is drink which allows David to be ambivalent rather than confused. And in this staged ambivalence we can again read something of Hemingway’s stance towards modernism, his courting of extremes within a classical line.

The Object War A technical corollary of Hemingway’s poetics of the true is that the translation of experience into writing requires that description should be strictly controlled; every adjective (and perhaps adverb) risks detracting a measure of this truth. A tension between presentation unencumbered by adjectival superfetation and degenerate description which confuses object with subject can be felt throughout A Moveable Feast where life is good or, at the opposite extreme, rotten. The eruption of Ford and Lewis into the disciplined world of work and pleasure disturbs Hemingway inordinately. The need to describe these figures,

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to avenge their presence with harsh words, betrays the revulsion Hemingway seeks to contain with his cult of the concrete. At bottom, Hemingway seeks to perfect a practice of good taste applied to the objects he encounters and is able to enjoy. This seems reactionary in the sense that it is set against the inward turn towards free association, dream, multiple perspectives, and mysterious voices which characterizes much modernist experimentation. To resist these currents is a point of honour with Hemingway and this is evident in his war writing where acts must be attuned to a virtuous respect of the necessary— cowardice, unwonted violence, technical incompetence, these are all revolting signs of the subjective corruption of the object war. Hemingway’s attitude to life and work could be understood by analogy with a person who comes across a mortally wounded animal and undertakes to do what must be done. The respect of the necessary thing to be done (in this case a mercy killing) is also an assertion of will in the face of disgust—there can be no squeamish compromise with reality. Nothing could be further removed from Hemingway’s unsentimental commitment to the concrete than the neurotic modernism of Lewis’s Tarr. Towards the end of the novel, in a dinner scene in which he finds himself overwhelmed by the sheer energy of Anastasya’s forceful, life-affirming appetite, Tarr, the ascetic, Rousseauesque vegetarian, feels threatened as Anastasya tries to make him eat oysters, a delicacy Tarr confesses never to have eaten before because “[t]he fact that they were alive has so far deterred [him].” In the argument that follows, Anastasya accuses Tarr of being “afraid of everything that is alive” and having “a marked prejudice in favour of what is dead.”46 She concludes that his failure to become a great artist is due to his incapacity to “hunt and kill his material so to speak just as primitive man had to do his own trapping butchering and cooking”; “it will not do to be squeamish,” she concludes, “if you are to become a great artist, Mister Tarr!”47 Tarr is both defeated by his own gustative and sexual impotence and terrified by the viscous female sexuality embodied by the mollusc. His culinary humiliation consolidates his conviction that an artist must realize himself in art, not in the life of the senses. Holding on to his belief that, unlike the common people, whose vitality “goes into sex if it goes anywhere” (“during their courtship they become third-rate poets, all their instincts of drama come out freshly with their wives”), Tarr concludes that the artist must have a “more discriminating” sex instinct and develop a severe “ascetic rather than sensuous” character which is “divorced from immediate life.”48

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The personal disaffinity of Hemingway and Lewis is interesting only insofar as it highlights a contrast of ethos in their writing; and nowhere is this contrast more sharply drawn than in their respective war writings. The heroic note of Hemingway’s war writing, where danger, injury, death, sacrifice, and violence are by no means incompatible with a sincere and unwavering presentation of the beauty which envelops the experience and which the experience itself makes real, is poles apart from the Lewisian treatment of his war experiences where the sardonic smile of Blast (rendered visible in the extraordinary self-portrait “Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro”) dominates in the presentation of horrors and their accompanying idiocy, the litany of human stupidity writ large on a vainglorious scale and infused with an enthusiasm for the new technology of destruction and its capacity to robotify the human both physically and emotionally. The war chapters of Blasting & Bombardiering are full of this tone. A pill box evacuated at sunset is described as “an empty concrete easter-egg, in a stupid desert”; and the enemy’s artillery blasts bursting on the evacuated ridge are likened to “the twitching of a chicken after its head had been chopped off.”49 The mindlessness of the war is the characteristic Lewis seeks to emphasize and, coincidentally or not, it is also the chief accusation levelled at Hemingway in the “Dumb Ox” polemic. Lewis’s denunciation of the “squalid serio-comedy of the Great War” functions in part through an exclusion of the notion of heroic sacrifice.50 He fulminates against Lloyd George’s rhetorical evocation of a “‘War to make England a place fit for heroes to live in’”; “What a terrible felicity of expression to convey, with a merciless blatancy, all things that are not!,” Lewis comments.51 If sacrifice is excluded by the absurdity of the phenomenon, the next question is what about innocence? Can that survive in a system from which meaning has been withdrawn? War poets such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg, while reluctant to glorify the horror with heroics, found innocence in the comradeship of shared suffering—the innocent lips beneath the “vile cud” of war, or an angelic burst of song while passing through the Menin Gate, the sudden music of larks or the serried ranks of the doomed youth. It is difficult to imagine Lewis resorting to such motifs without also working in a sneer, a blast, or a hint of desire grown mechanical and sinister. Owen’s last letter from the dugout dated October 31, 1918 reads in places like a Hemingway evocation celebrating the joys of communal privation. There is the same emphasis on the simple pleasures of food: “My servant and I ate the chocolate in the cold middle of last night, crouched under a draughty

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Tamboo, roofed with planks. I husband the Malted Milk for tonight and tomorrow night”; the same emphasis on the innocence of his companions: So thick is the smoke in this cellar that I can hardly see by a candle 12 inches away, and so thick are the inmates that I can hardly write for pokes, nudges and jolts. On my left, the Coy. Commander snores on a bench, other officers repose on wire beds behind me. At my right hand, Kellett, a delightful servant of A Coy. in The Old Days radiates joy and contentment from pink cheeks and baby eyes. … Splashing my hand, an old soldier with a walrus moustache peels and drops potatoes in the pot.52 This might be usefully compared with the following passage from Lewis: Upon a duckboard track as we tramped forward, we came across two Scottish privates; one was beheaded, and the leg of another lay near him, and this one’s arm was gone as well. They had been killed that morning—a direct hit I suppose: the Scottish battalion to which they belonged having lost a number of men, I later heard, on the way up. As we approached them my party left the duckboards and passed round the flank of this almost sardonically complete tableau of violent death. Averting their heads, the men circled round. Their attitude was that of dogs when they are offered food they don’t much like the look of.53 In Blasting & Bombardiering there is camaraderie, but the dominant note is one of dark comedy and generalized deprecation. To Lewis, the war was devoid of beauty either physical or moral, it was an ultra-violent farce, interesting from a technical point of view, but hardly enjoyable. While Hemingway might seek to embrace the romantic qualities of courage and devotion to a cause, Lewis’s anti-heroic stance seems designed to create some distance between the author’s experience and its inscription. He is in revolt from his memories and in this he achieves a degree of continuity with his revolutionary pre-war Blast period with its comic-destructive urge for a cultural tabula rasa. It was this spirit of revulsion, perhaps, which shocked Hemingway when he perceived it in Lewis, and which might help us to pinpoint a crux in Hemingway’s ambiguous relation to modernism. Embedded within the shock of modernism

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is the shock of the war, and within war the anti-vomitive of death. It is a shocking idea that Western civilization actually required the purgative of the war to accelerate the demise of its smug conservatism, yet many artists of the modernist period, from the Italian futurists to D. H. Lawrence, were prepared to at least flirt with the idea. Could it be that Hemingway’s food consciousness and the repellent other it calls forth bear witness to an acute sensitivity to this dangerous object war? The obsessive return to the enjoyment of eating and drinking allows us to locate Hemingway’s stance towards modernism within a precarious dialectic of hunger and attraction versus repulsion and death. Precarious in the sense that the emergence of a new equilibrium underwritten by a new round of pleasures is by no means guaranteed given the tensions between event and style which structure Hemingway’s writing so profoundly.

C HA P T E R N I N E

“We were very lonely without those berries” Gastronomic Colonialism in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools

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Clint Burnham

anadian self-regard holds as one of its sacrosanct myths that its government has treated Aboriginal people—“our Indians”—in a more humane way than did the Americans to the south of us.1 This myth of bien-pensant liberals will contrast, for example, the genocidal missions of the US Cavalry with the more benign North-West Mounted Police—the latter seen as “protecting” Canadian Aboriginals from the depredations of American whiskey-dealers.2 But thinking about the role of the gastronomic in settler-colonial relations—from starvation policies on the nineteenth-century prairies to food experimentation on Indigenous schoolchildren in the midtwentieth century—gives the lie to such a comfortable myth. I will look at two accounts of such a history in particular: nutrition experiments that have been documented by food historian Ian Mosby, and, more fully, testimony by Indigenous Survivors of Canada’s residential schools as to how they were fed in those institutions. And so, in this chapter I seek to understand the role that food played in the colonial practices of the Canadian state. But even a cursory examination of such a history is incomplete if we do not take account of how Aboriginal people have resisted precisely those forms of gastronomic colonialism. Before looking at Mosby and Survivors’ testimony, then, I will examine some ways in which Inuit, Cree, and West Coast Indigenous groups have figured the gastronomic: from the word escheemau that Cree used to mark the Inuit (then mispronounced into English as “Eskimo”),

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to the modern Cree word for pizza, pwâkamo-pahkwêsikan (or “throw-up bread”), to oral stories of colonial “pizza tests,” to the artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s Haida Hot Dog. My argument will be that these Aboriginal interventions into colonial gastronomy should be thought of as modernist. That is, to conceptualize this complex history of colonial force and Indigenous playfulness, we require an equally robust theory of modernism. I begin, therefore, with Fredric Jameson, who, in A Singular Modernity, not only argues for a periodization of modernism qua break (thereby reminding us of the notion of colonialism as a break or rupture), but, intriguingly, that modernism can be conceived of as a post-colonial intervention.3

Dialectic of Modernism In A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, Jameson put forward four maxims. First, “We cannot not periodize.”4 Then, “Modernity is not a concept, philosophical or otherwise, but a narrative category.”5 Followed by: “The narrative of modernity cannot be organized around categories of subjectivity; consciousness and subjectivity are unrepresentable; only situations of modernity can be narrated.”6 And, finally, “No ‘theory’ of modernity makes sense today unless it comes to terms with the hypothesis of a postmodern break with the modern.”7 Now, what is striking about these formulations, before we even encounter their content, is how they are all some kind of negative dialectic: “we cannot not,” “modernity is not,” “the theory of modernity cannot,” and “no theory makes sense.” It is this negative theorizing of modernism and modernity I want to evoke here, as a way of framing the following discussion of gastronomic colonialism. That is, I want to propose that modernism be thought of both as an anti-colonial force (as Jameson himself argues) and as a form of colonialism. In order to do so, I will first return to these maxims and examine their logic, then turn that logic to the anti-colonial/colonial senses of modernism, and, finally, use that argument as a way of setting the stage for my reading of gastronomic colonialism with respect to Canadian Indigenous texts. Jameson’s argument that “we cannot not periodize” is both a warning against not periodizing (which we cannot or should not do), but also a working through of a “dialectic of the break and the period,” seeing in the notion of the modernist rupture (later metastasized, since Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault, into a full-blown post-structuralist fetish) a matter of choosing

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between continuity, or periodization, and that very rupture, a choice that is historiographic, or theoretical, and not locatable “in the historical material or evidence.”8 This is germane to our project in two senses: first, I argue that we must see the colonial arrival or “contact” not as a break or rupture with preexisting Aboriginal societies—not an exceptional moment; second, in a more reflexive fashion, that very positing of a modernist or colonial rupture must itself be periodized. This is not, it should be added, a turning to periodization or historicization as a narrative that solves all problems; no less should such questions be an excuse for smuggling in older, European, or settler-colonial narratives of superiority.9 And in this light, the second maxim makes more sense: for if modernity is not a concept, but rather a narrative, then that narrative itself, Jameson adds, is “little more than the projection of its own rhetorical structure onto the themes and content in question: the theory of modernity is little more than a projection of the trope itself.”10 What I take Jameson to mean here is that modernity functions, in theory, as a colonial force, “projection” here being not so much a Freudian-optical metaphor—projecting one’s desires onto the other—but an invasive/extractive one, whereby the trope of modernity comes to subsume a colonized terrain. And then just as modernity is not a concept, it is not a matter of subjectivity: for just as the concept of modernity turns out to be an invasive force, the “situation”—which in the Jamesonian lexicon always carries a whiff of Sartre and Guy Debord, and so thus is a matter of contingent history—trumps the subject. Subjectivity’s unrepresentability, then, has to do with a fairly Lacanian notion of the subject—Jameson refers to “the Lacanian tenant-lieu,” or the idea of the subject as a placeholder, what in spy lingo is called the “cut-out.” The subject is there by not being there. But this resorting to the situation surely is puzzling when we arrive at the fourth maxim, which posits the necessity of a postmodern break to conceiving of modernity; but here again the devil is in the details of the negative dialectics at work in Jameson. That is, rupture or break is now periodizable, now we can or must think of the situation of the rupture. For postmodernism is, Jameson famously argued, the situation whereby we attempt to think historically when we no longer have the conceptual tools to do so. And, thus, it is this dialectic of period and break that frames Jameson’s rather startling proposition that modernism—the aesthetic formation that should be distinguished from the properly sociological or historical concept of

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modernity—may be thought of in an anti-colonial fashion. This proposition turns out to be only a minor filigree in Jameson’s study, but it does connect with his argument elsewhere that modernism arises as a result of incomplete modernization (or even what Ernst Bloch called “simultaneity of the non-simultaneous”); in a striking image of “realities from radically different moments of history,” Jameson invokes “handicrafts alongside the great cartels, peasant fields with the Krupp factories or the Ford plant in the distance.”11 And so, Jameson reminds us, “Ulysses is an epic set in a city under foreign military occupation”; in the “scandal of Spanish usage,” it is a Nicaraguan poet, Rubén Darío, who first spreads the term modernism; and even Anglo-American modernism turns out to be secretly post-colonial, albeit via the underdeveloped US South.12 There are therefore two sets of concepts that can be usefully turned from Jameson to help us in understanding the relationship of the gastronomic to colonialism on the one hand and modernism on the other. First, the dialectic of rupture and period; second, the argument that uneven development accompanies modernism as anti-colonial force. But this second proposition can only be seen in its full force if the opposite is also true: that modernism is no less a colonial project.

Food, Colonialism, and Modernism In Mini Aodla Freeman’s memoir My Life among the Qallunaat, Freeman gives an entertaining etymology of how her people, the Inuit, came to be called Eskimos: Inuit, too, gave themselves an identity. To me the word “Eskimo” does not mean anything at all. It is an Indian word—“escheemau”— that qallunaat [the Inuit word for Southerners, or whites] tried to say at one time. It is a Cree word: “Escee,” yagh, sickening, can’t stand it; “mau,” human. At first encounter Cree Indians got sick at the sight of the Inuit eating raw meat (and Indians do not eat raw meat). Today, the Inuit still eat raw meat and it’s yam yam as far as I am concerned. When we lived in Old Factory amongst Indians, we had to be very careful that we did not eat raw meat in front of them. When people eat raw fish or any meat that we eat raw, we had to keep looking if the Indians were coming so that they would not see us—not because we were ashamed but so that we would not sicken them.13

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It seems to me that there are any number of ways we can think the gastronomic logic at work here. First of all, the relation between naming and food. Then, food at the border between different cultures. Finally, the colonial appropriation of said term—one marking difference—as an imposition of identity. For the Cree Indians (to use Freeman’s anachronistic term), Inuit people’s food, or their way of eating it, was troubling enough as to justify an appellation based on that disgust. A visceral reaction, feeling disgust, becomes a master signifier. But also, as a way of marking, or enforcing, difference, even as the indeterminacy of the phrase belies its very contingency. That is, we are all of us, no doubt, at some point disgusted by something someone else does. But not everyone is called an escheemau. So a certain logic of stereotyping, or even racism, is at work in the Cree use of the term, let alone its transformation, via colonialism, into a global term, used for sports teams (the Edmonton Eskimos, a Canadian football team), snacks (Eskimo Pie), huskies (Eskimo dog), and other less polite locutions.14 Here we should backtrack slightly, and ask ourselves whether it is possible to find one’s own actions disgusting. I think not (or perhaps when we do, we are experiencing a moment of self-alienation). The escheemau then is that same cut-out or placeholder subject we encountered with Jameson: it marks the subject qua Other. This notion of disgust is also flipped in another Cree word, a modern one, documented in Neal McLeod and Arok Wolfengrey’s 100 Days of Cree, where they offer the word pwâkamo-pahkwêsikan, or “throw-up bread,” for pizza. The compendium is very much an attempt to demonstrate the vitality of Cree as a modern language—many other contemporary terms, from Wi-Fi to Johnny Cash songs, are translated. But pwâkamo-pahkwêsikan turns around the stereotype of escheemau, for surely the purpose of the modern word is not to make pizza seem disgusting. Rather, the locution blurs boundaries, not only between traditional and contemporary, or Indigenous and settlercolonial, but also the very boundary marked by disgust. A form of humor, pwâkamo-pahkwêsikan shows us that disgust need not be disgusting. And there is another reading possible here: that McLeod and Wolvengrey are also making a compelling argument that Indigenous people are not some vanishing or vanquished, race, whose cultural objects, from languages to regalia, must be salvaged by white anthropologists. This interpretation can be better teased out if we think about the “pizza test.” Robin Ridington provides this account:

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Clint Burnham Oral tradition has it that in a case involving the demonstration of aboriginal rights by a First Nations group, lawyers for the Crown asked a plaintiff about what foods she ate: fish, moosemeat, berries, grease—“Yes.” Then came the clincher. What about pizza? “Well, yes, I eat pizza sometimes.” Voila! The lawyer argued that she could no longer claim aboriginal rights because pizza is not an authentic aboriginal dish. This argument has entered folklore shared by participants in land claims issues as “the pizza test.”15

Ridington goes on to note that until the 1950s, the colonial Canadian government stripped First Nations people of their Indian status if they attended university; and in the 1990s, a Supreme Court justice ruled that the Gitksan and Witsuwit’en people should lose their claims “for ownership and jurisdiction over the territory and for aboriginal rights in the territory” because they participated in the cash economy. In Ridington’s parsing of “the pizza test” as a folkloric trope, pizza stands in metonymically for modern or commodified cultural practices that, in the eyes of the colonizer, negate First Nations peoples’ identity. Returning to pwâkamo-pahkwêsikan, the colonized “writes back” (or talks back) to the empire. A similar trope is at work in the artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s painting Haida Hot Dog. The story goes that Yuxweluptun, seeing his native carver friends at work while they cooked some hot dogs on the beach, took out his sketch pad and drew a hot dog in the style of Haida art—with formlines and ovoids (Yuxweluptun is of Coast Salish and Okanagan descent, different North West Coast First Nations from the Haida people). “A wiener in an Indian hand is an Indian hot dog,” Yuxweluptun told art historian Charlotte Townsend-Gault. “Hot dogs are food on the reserves. We do our food hunting in the supermarkets now, the same as everybody else.”16 These notions of pwâkamo-pahkwêsikan, and Indian hot dogs, can stand as markers of an anti-colonial appropriation of modernity, of the degraded commodities of industrial food production, but evidently situated in opposition to colonial notions of Indigenous authenticity and tradition. Just as the anti-colonial import of pwâkamo-pahkwêsikan can be ascertained by thinking about the “pizza test,” so the politics of making up new Cree words for pizza or painting a Haida hot dog can be better understood in the context of colonial food and nutrition policies and experiments. These last are depressingly documented in two recent texts, the first of which, James Daschuk’s Clearing

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the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life, argues that famine policies in the 1870s and 1880s were instrumental in pushing Indigenous people onto reserves during that period.17 A similar governmental use of food is described by Ian Mosby in his article “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952.”18 Here I want briefly to summarize Mosby’s article as a way of segueing from these accounts of gastronomic anti-colonialism to a more in-depth look at the role of food in Canada’s Indian residential schools. Mosby’s research reveals two ways in which malnourished First Nations and Inuit peoples were subjected to varying degrees of experimentation and observations of their gastronomic conditions: first, that government health and scientific officials carried out “an unprecedented series of nutritional studies of First Nations communities and Indian residential schools” in the 1940s and 1950s—usually, Mosby argues, without the informed consent of Aboriginal populations.19 These experiments were without exception under the guise of developing nutritional science as a discipline and managing Canada’s “Indian problem,” and not in any meaningful way either changing the structural conditions (depletion of traditional hunting prey, economic poverty, austerity government programs) that contributed to that malnutrition or improving the health of the Aboriginal people. In this context, the “discovery” of poor nutrition among students at Indian residential schools (a discovery, Mosby notes, not due to parents complaining about those conditions for decades, but only following official inquiries in the mid-1940s) led to a Red Cross inspection. Those inspections, regarding kitchen facilities and staff training, were opposed in some cases by the schools themselves, pleading budgetary constraints. But an account by a residential school Survivor, the acclaimed Anishnaabe writer Basil H. Johnston, testifies to how schools would temporarily improve the students’ diet the better to impress inspectors: “instead of lard, there were pats of butter on a tin plate, and the soup was thicker than usual, with more meat and vegetables—almost like a stew.”20

Canada’s Indian Residential Schools: A Brief History Some readers of this chapter may be unfamiliar with the historical context that Mosby and Johnston describe—the era of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools—and so a brief contextualization may be necessary. But this

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contextualization also does theoretical work: that is, an argument that these culinary or gastronomic forms of colonial intervention as occasioned in the residential schools also must be seen in terms of modernity. Like other settlercolonial societies, Canada from the mid-nineteenth century until the very late twentieth century operated schools for Aboriginal students that sought to educate them in Western, Christian formations. The public statements of Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald, could not be clearer: When the school is on the reserve the child lives with its parents, who are savages; he is surrounded by savages, and though he may learn to read and write his habits, and training and mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly pressed on myself, as the head of the Department, that the Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.21 While a few residential schools pre-date Canadian Confederation (1867)—the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ontario operated from 1834 to 1970—most historians see the establishment of Industrial Schools in the North-West in 1883, and the final closure of schools in 1996 (when there were still eleven schools operating in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Québec, and Ontario) as constituting the start and end dates. Schools were usually operated by churches (predominantly the Catholic, Presbyterian, Anglican, and United churches); over 150,000 students attended the schools, with 86,000 still alive in the early twenty-first century. Attendance was compulsory, and there are many accounts of police or Indian Agents arriving unannounced to remove children from their families. Conditions at schools were uniformly poor, with inadequate buildings, poorly trained staff, and minimal budgets for food, supplies, and operation. These structural conditions, accompanying condescending attitudes towards students’ Aboriginal heritage, beliefs, and rights, contributed not only to prejudicial conduct but also, perhaps most (in)famously, on the one hand, children being punished for speaking or writing their own languages, and, on the other, forms of punishment and abuse that range from emotional abuse and student-on-student bullying to the most grievous forms of sexual ­predation, abuse, and rape. Finally, health conditions of students suffered

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under such conditions to the extent that mortality rates approached 60 percent, and there are still hundreds, if not thousands, of unmarked children’s graves on the sites of former residential schools.22 Beginning in the 1980s, Survivors of residential schools were meeting and agitating for greater public awareness of the history and abuse. Key to this timeline was the phenomenon of Survivors acknowledging publicly their abuse at the schools: Phil Fontaine, then head of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, talked frankly about his abuse in a 1990 television interview, calling specifically for an inquiry which would document the students’ experiences.23 By the early 2000s, Canada’s largest class-action lawsuit sought recompense for Survivors, the settlement of which led to the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which toured the country from 2009 to 2015, taking testimony from over 6,000 Survivors, and publishing a sixvolume report in 2015. One volume from that report is titled The Survivors Speak.

Food in the Residential Schools: Survivors’ Testimony Methodologically, Basil Johnston’s story of how his school improved students’ food for an inspection plays an important role in Mosby’s article, showing the role played by Indigenous narrative; it is not unlike the role of the “pizza test” as an oral folkloric intervention in anti-colonialism, or Yuxweluptun’s Haida Hot Dog as an artistic repudiation of notions of Indigenous authenticity. My argument in this section of the chapter will be that testimony in The Survivors Speak allows us to better understand the role of gastronomic colonialism. A 260-page document, The Survivors Speak is broken up into 32 sections, which range both chronologically (“Life before residential school,” “Forced departure,” “The end”) and also thematically (“Language and culture,” “Strange food,” “Classroom experience”). Located in the different sections are also photographs of Survivors, 112 in total. Within the sections, testimony varies in length, sometimes presented as a block quote of 5 to 10 lines, and sometimes embedded grammatically into the expository framing conveyed to the reader, summing up Survivors’ experiences. All quoted speech is identified in the text by the speaker’s full name, as are the photographs. All text is also footnoted; there are 740 endnotes, which repeat the speaker’s name, the date of the statement to the TRC, a statement number, and, sometimes, a note on translation.24

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Food is mentioned often in the testimony: both the “country food”— game, fish, herbs, and berries—that children enjoyed before attending residential schools, and the conditions of food at those schools. The quotation in the title of this chapter comes from the testimony of Daisy Diamond: “When I was going to Shingawauk, the food didn’t taste very good, because we didn’t have our traditional food there, our moose meat, our bannock, and our berries. Those were the things that we had back home, and we were very lonely without those berries.”25 Other testimony supported Mosby’s findings as to the poor conditions under which food was cooked or served. Ellen Okimaw, speaking of the Fort Albany school, said that when family members would bring fish for the students, the school cook simply “dumped the whole thing, and boiled them like that, just like that without cleaning them.”26 But it was also the inadequate amount of food, the near-starvation diet, that was consistently reported by the Survivors. Johnston, for example, is also quoted by Mosby as attesting to how students were fed “just enough food to blunt the sharp edge of hunger for three or four hours.”27 Woodie Elias also testified that “You didn’t get enough; hungry.”28 Andrew Paul said, “we cried to have something good to eat before we sleep.”29 Doris Young recalled, “I was always hungry. And we stole food.”30 Food was described as “rotten,” “rancid” and “full of maggots,” burnt toast and porridge. But it was not only the quality and quantity of the food that was so troublesome: rather, as testimony after testimony documents, it was the ways in which staff would punish students: for not eating poor food or for stealing extra food. Victoria McIntosh’s account is, lamentably, typical: And there was an incident where I couldn’t eat porridge, and, the first time, and I looked down, and there was a bowl in front of me, and I noticed there was worms in it, and I wouldn’t eat it, and the nun came behind me, and she told me, “Eat it,” and I wouldn’t eat it, just nope, and she, she slammed my face in, in the bowl, and picked me up by my arm, and she, she threw me up against the wall, and she started strapping me.31 Finally, in numerous accounts, students told of being forced to eat their vomit. Bernard Catcheway attested to how at the Pine Creek school, “There was a lot of times I seen other students that threw up and they were forced to eat their vomit.”32 Bernard Sutherland, speaking of Fort Albany school, too

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said, “I saw in person how the children eat their vomit.”33 Mary Beatrice Talley spoke of seeing children force-fed and vomiting at the Assumption school.34 There are two ways in which to situate this testimony which, in its raw, unedited syntax, conveys well the trauma and retroactive outrage of the Survivors. The first is to think about the gastronomic in terms of what is inside and outside the body. Eating brings food into the body, vomiting removes it, violently. So, the disgust that marks, for the Cree, the Inuit as other— escheemau—a disgust that is then humorously redacted in the Cree word pwâkamo-pahkwêsikan, or pizza as “throw-up bread”—now finds it properly colonial tenor. In vomiting, the child symbolically rejects the offering, the Christianity that is being, as Mary Beatrice Talley puts it, “shoved … in her mouth.” When the colonizer then forces the child to eat their vomit, the obscene underside of a Christian mission is revealed: now we see Christianity, or the Canadian state, for its true self.

Conclusion But we need as well to situate these accounts of gastronomic colonialism (Mosby, The Survivors Speak), and gastronomic anti-colonialism (Freeman, pwâkamo-pahkwêsikan, the Haida Hot Dog) in the framework offered by Jameson, for that framework can, I argue, allow us to understand what might otherwise appear to be a bewildering panoply of examples, historical accounts, and dubious etymologies. Modernism, it will be remembered that Jameson argued, is not a concept or a subjectivity: rather, it is on the one hand a dialectic of rupture and period, and it also constitutes the subject as lack, as place-holder; finally, modernism can be situated in a post-colonial ethos. Here, then, surely the escheemau is that subject of lack: not “Eskimo,” the colonial appropriation of a Cree word, but rather escheemau as a marker of two societies’ encounter, and encounter based on a visceral response, a mark of the other. The subject, Mini Aodla Freeman’s account tells us, is marked by the other—both in the sense that the Inuit person is (mis)named, but also that the Cree, in turn, is marked by his or her disgust. So, too, in this reading, the residential school students’ vomit marks the otherness of the colonial education apparatus, a marking that is then reaffirmed in its denial by the brutality of forcing children to eat their vomit. Then, if modernism is not so much a concept as a narrative, a narrative of the dialectic of rupture and period, how can we think about

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pwâkamo-pahkwêsikan, or the pizza test, or the Haida Hot Dog? Here, I think, that dialectic comes into play. Just as the “pizza test” constitutes, according to Ridington, a talking back to colonialism—that is, an assertion of the absurdity of the colonizer deciding on the Aboriginal person’s status via a question of diet—so too the Haida Hot Dog further asserts the validity of Aboriginal people consuming industrial food. But pwâkamo-pahkwêsikan is the key here, for the Cree word and its formation both marks the “pizza test” as a colonial gesture and reinstates disgust as a marker of the other. The key here, then, is the status of Jameson’s dialectic of break and period. Colonialism qua rupture would seem to be a modern break, a force of modernity. But just as escheemau joins together the Cree and the Inuit in its very mis-naming, in its marking of the other, so too we can argue that pwâkamo-pahkwêsikan, and the Haida Hot Dog, and the “pizza test” mark a difference or rupture even as they periodize it. This dialectic of rupture and period then is met by the dialectic of modernism as simultaneously colonial and anti-colonial. As a violent attempt to remove Indigenous people from their land, residential schools can be seen as a modernizing force par excellence. But a resistance to colonialism is also modern: pwâkamo-pahkwêsikan, and the Haida Hot Dog refuse a nostalgia for pre-colonial tradition even as they draw on that tradition (Haida art styles, the Cree language). Gastronomic modernism, in all of its violent, eat-yourvomit forms, is met by throw-up bread: pwâkamo-pahkwêsikan is a perfect example of anti-colonial modernism.

C HA P T E R T E N

From “Squalid Food” to “Proper Cuisine” Food and Fare in the Work of T. S. Eliot1 Jeremy Diaper

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. S. Eliot has been a noticeably absent figure in recent studies of modernism and food.2 Yet, far from being apathetic towards eating and nourishment, Eliot had a sustained fascination with health, nutrition, and the consumption of food, which is clearly identifiable throughout his body of work and warrants closer examination. This chapter will begin by highlighting the variety of Eliot’s wide-ranging references to food in his creative output—from the playful to the putrid—before providing a detailed examination of Eliot’s engagement with food specifically within the context of his sympathy with and affiliation to the British organic husbandry movement. Through contextualizing the presence of food and fare in Eliot’s work in relation to organicism, I shall demonstrate that his engagement with issues such as nutrition, fresh organic produce, and culinary skills was in conformity with the predominant concerns of the British organic husbandry movement from the 1930s to the 1950s. Crucially, this examination of Eliot’s engagement with organicism will serve to elucidate our understanding of his prose writings but will also provide a basis for an “organic” reading of Eliot’s poetry. From his earliest collection of poetry, Inventions of the March Hare, Eliot regularly mentions food in his creative output which becomes symbolic of a monotonous ennui devoid of spiritual sustenance. In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” for example, there are continual references to bites to eat and snacks, including “tea and cakes and ices,” “marmalade,” and “toast.”3 Similar allusions to food and fare are also appreciable in Eliot’s later plays such

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as The Cocktail Party, which includes frequent mention of nibbles, ranging from “Potato crisps” and “delicious olives” in Act One, Scene One, to “a few biscuits” and “cheese” in Act One, Scene Two.4 In the opening act of The Cocktail Party, Alex even attempts to rustle up a meal using the limited ingredients contained in Edward’s cupboard. This ability to concoct “something out of nothing” (CPP, 372) is a “special skill” (CPP, 368) which Alex claims to have acquired from Eastern Asia. With nothing but “a handful of rice and a little dried fish,” he professes to be able to “make half a dozen dishes” (CPP, 368). Although mealtimes can hardly be said to take center stage in Eliot’s other plays, the act of eating and dining can still be seen to inform the central narrative. In The Family Reunion, the play is structured around “tea” and “dinner” respectively (CPP, 285, 317), with the conclusion of the play following the extinction of candles on a birthday cake. Elsewhere, The Elder Statesman commences with a prandial conversation, during which Eggerson recollects a “cheap lunch” in a restaurant in a London store (CPP, 445). In Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, there is an altogether more playful attitude to food which brings the cheerful and jocular poems to life in the animal world. Unlike Eliot’s denizens of the “Unreal City” (CPP, 62), who remain trapped in their lifeless routines, there is a freedom and enjoyment associated with food amongst the Practical Cats. The Rum Tum Tugger, for example, is caught feasting on food in the store cupboard which he “finds for himself ”: “So you’ll catch him in it right up to the ears, If you put it away on the larder shelf ” (CPP, 214). Elsewhere, the Mysterious Macavity is also suspected to have “looted” the larder (CPP, 226). This same sense of mischievous liberation characterizes Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer, who are both held accountable for the “dining-room smash” and “loud crash,” which result from their uninhibited raids for food in the “pantry” (CPP, 219). On one particular Sunday afternoon, this “notorious couple of cats” even interrupts a family dinner of “Argentine joint, potatoes and greens” by running away with the joint of meat (CPP, 219). It is “The Cat About Town,” though, who most clearly delights in the excesses of food in the numerous clubs of which he is a member. Indeed, the conspicuously rotund Bustopher Jones enjoys “the season of venison” at Pothunter’s, a “curry” at the Siamese or the Glutton and the “cabbage, rice pudding and mutton” at the Tomb (CPP, 230). The over-indulgence and relishing of food evidenced in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, though, by no means replaces the general sense of repugnance which pervades the allusions to food in the majority of Eliot’s

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poems and plays. From the “morsel of rancid butter” in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” (CPP, 25) to the rank image of “living lobster, the crab, the oyster, the whelk and the prawn” which “spawn” in the “bowels” (CPP, 270) in Murder in the Cathedral, food is often an unappetizing prospect in Eliot’s work. It is even at times distinctly menacing—with the cannibalistic Sweeney threatening to “gobble up” Doris and “convert” her into “a nice little … missionary stew” in Sweeney Agonistes (CPP, 121). Interestingly, in Eliot’s oft-cited list of “fragmentary” experiences which stimulated the modern poetic sensibility in his essay on “The Metaphysical Poets,” he included “the smell of cooking” and this is another aspect of culinary experience which pervades his poetry.5 At the outset of “Preludes,” the “winter evening” is enveloped “With the smell of steaks in passageways” (CPP, 22) and in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” the “Smells of chestnuts in the streets” alongside “cocktail smells in bars” (CPP, 25) conveys a memorable aroma to the reader. Whilst Eliot’s poetic mind absorbed a variety of “disparate experience,” the olfactory and comestible regularly informed his own poetic and dramatic mind and provided a consistent source of inspiration. The striking regularity with which Eliot refers to food in his work, whilst previously undiscussed in the recent renaissance of criticism on modernism and food, has historically been commented on by Eliot scholars. In T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (2003), for example, David Chinitz briefly noted Eliot’s criticism of canned foods, whilst Kenneth J. Reckford even went so far as to suggest that “food and drink alone are inexhaustible subjects for research; one could write a monograph just on ‘Eggs in Eliot’s Oeuvre.’”6 Exploring Eliot’s perspectives on food specifically within the context of the British organic husbandry movement from the 1930s to the 1950s, though, highlights that Eliot was frequently drawn to a consideration of everyday issues such as adequate nutrition and the importance of organic, fresh produce and culinary skills. In counter-argument to Ellis’s recent assertion that Eliot’s ruralism was “far from cosy, or ‘organic’ in any farmers’ market sense,”7 we shall see that Eliot’s stance was, in fact, in close conformity with organic concerns of the period. The emergence of an organic movement in Britain can be traced back to the late 1920s, when a wide variety of farmers, scientists, doctors, and ruralist writers warned of a direct correlation between the decay of society and the neglect of agriculture. One of the key beliefs of the organic movement was that “the living soil”—a fertile soil teeming with organic waste matter and

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humus—was the fundamental basis of existence.8 Their particular emphasis on the importance of organic agriculture and the avoidance of artificial fertilizers was based on the belief in the rule of return. In this respect, the organicists maintained that returning organic waste to the earth and utilizing manure would create a fertile soil and in turn produce healthy and nutritious crops, which would consequently have a positive impact on the health of humans. This central tenet—that a fertile soil was essential to growing healthy foodstuffs—led the organicists to be increasingly concerned with nutrition and fresh produce. Furthermore, many of the organicists widely denounced tinned and processed foods. They placed an emphasis instead on freshness, wholeness, and the importance of consuming local produce.9 For the organicists, these concerns were all interrelated into a “Wheel of Life” and “Wheel of Health,” in which the cyclical flow of recycling organic matter to the soil and maintaining soil fertility became the cornerstone of human health and nutrition.10 Eliot’s own concern with agriculture and organicism was deep-seated and it remained a notable element of his social criticism, correspondence, and editorial duties for several decades.11 His facilitation of agricultural discussion in the pages of the Criterion (which included contributions from organic authorities such as Rolf Gardiner and Viscount Lymington) and his role on the editorial board of the New English Weekly ensured that he was well-informed of the key organic debates of the period. Eliot routinely began Wednesday mornings by reading the New English Weekly and his “Commentaries” continued as a regular feature in its pages following the final issue of the Criterion in 1939. Not only was the NEW the foremost journal for discussion of agricultural issues, but it also acted as a forum for discussion of health and nutrition. Another important aspect of Eliot’s connection with organicism was his role as a director of Faber and Faber for over forty years. During this period, Faber was one of the most prolific publishers of organic texts and their authoritative agricultural lists included E. B. Balfour’s The Living Soil (1943) and Viscount Lymington’s Horn, Hoof and Corn (1932). Eliot was a member of the Wednesday committee that discussed proposals and decided which books to publish. His duties also extended to writing book blurbs, reports, and contacting agricultural authorities for second opinions on manuscripts. Alongside the series of important books on organic farming and composting that Faber produced, they also published a series of influential books on health and nutrition, such as Robert McCarrison’s Nutrition and National Health (1944).12

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Eliot’s interest in food also extends beyond his editorial duties and involvement in organic circles at the NEW and Faber. Indeed, a close inspection of Eliot’s letters reveals that a common theme to permeate his correspondence is his pervading sense that the quality of food in the UK is substandard. In a letter of May 1915 to J. H. Woods, for example, Eliot discussed his time at Oxford and bemoaned the state of British cuisine in passing: “Oxford is very charming at this time of year and rather more healthy than at most times (of) year—I have found the climate (and the food!) very difficult.”13 Eliot later lamented the poor flavor of food in South Kensington in a letter to Henry Eliot of January 1935, and highlighted the questionable standard of meat in particular. In indicating to his brother that the “food is not very good,” he observed that “it is surprisingly difficult to tell whether the meat is beef, veal or mutton.”14 Interestingly, Eliot’s abiding sense of dissatisfaction at inferior foodstuffs was not limited to English cuisine. He took equal issue with the standard of food in other countries. Writing to Ezra Pound in a letter of December 28, 1934, Eliot stated that although he welcomed the opportunity to visit Italy, this desire for a brief break was “in spite of the climate & the Food.”15 The next year Eliot would also inform Pound of his distaste for Asian cuisine: “I had to eat that vile Chinese food for nothing and they bring it in half cold and half warm.”16 Whilst Eliot was also disparaging of food from other cultures, it was his poor opinion of the quality of British food in particular which led him to draw a direct correlation between poor food and ill health in a manner akin to the organicists. The nucleus of this aspect of Eliot’s thought can be seen to emerge in an earlier letter of February 1915 to his Harvard friend and correspondent, Conrad Aiken: Oxford I do not enjoy: the food and the climate are execrable, I suffer indigestion, constipation, and colds constantly; and the university atmosphere … I do not think that I should ever come to like England—a people which is satisfied with such disgusting food is not civilized.17 Eliot was not alone in expressing concerns surrounding the correlation between poor food and ill health. McCarrison’s Nutrition and National Health, which comprised the 1936 Cantor Lectures he delivered to the Royal Society of Arts, took as its main thesis the fact that “the greatest single factor in the acquisition and maintenance of good health is perfectly constituted

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food.”18 According to McCarrison, the “freshness of food” had a “healthpromoting influence” and this freshness was dependent upon a healthy cultivation of soil manured through composting rather than treated with chemical fertilizers. Listing the “train of evils” which resulted from “impoverishment of the soil,” McCarrison included “poor quality foodstuffs” and “faulty nutrition with resultant disease in both man and beast.”19 Amongst the examples of “ill health” to which McCarrison referred, he also included indigestion and constipation, as experienced by Eliot; the cause of which, according to McCarrison, was “faulty nutrition.”20 In 1939, the same year that Eliot lamented “the health of our nation” and expressed dismay at the “evils” of “mal-nutrition” and “the decay of agriculture” in The Idea of a Christian Society, McCarrison published the Sanderson-Wells Lecture on “Food, the Foundation of Health” in which he indicated that “deficiency diseases” resulted from “faulty agricultural conditions,” “soil deficiencies,” and “faulty nutrition.”21 McCarrison concluded this book with a citation from the Medical Testament (which first appeared as a special supplement in the NEW in April 1939); it reaffirmed that “illness results from a life-time of wrong nutrition.”22 The poor state of English cuisine and the lack of culinary skills in the city became a prominent preoccupation amongst the organicists in the 1930s and 1940s and was one which resonated with Eliot’s own anxieties. The inability of British society to prepare nutritious and wholesome food was a particularly prevalent topic in the work of Viscount Lymington, who was one of the key figures in the origins of the organic movement and a close friend and correspondent of Eliot’s. For example, in Famine in England (which Eliot read and praised in a letter to the author of 1938), Lymington stated that the health of the unemployed had worsened more rapidly as a result of their deteriorating cooking skills: “the effect of living on the dole has been twice as bad as it would have been in the days when women baked wholemeal bread and did not confine their cooking to the use of a tin-opener.”23 Lymington considered good cooking and a general knowledge of wholesome food to be so integral to health that he went on to suggest that “no palliatives can be found to save us from the effect of bad food and bad cooking.”24 Lymington extended his views on the issue of cooking in a chapter titled “The Policy of Husbandry,” in which he stated that “few housewives know how to order economically in person or to cook palatably” and argued that there was a desperate need “to teach the girls the

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value of housecraft in every aspect.”25 In fact, Lymington viewed the need for educating women on cooking and housecraft skills to be so important that he referred to it as “the foundation of husbandry.”26 This organicist concern with the deteriorating standards of cooking skills was one which exercised Eliot himself. When reflecting on the “standard of living” in light of recent political policies implemented by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Phillip Snowden, Eliot’s thoughts were drawn towards a consideration of food and cooking skills in a Criterion “Commentary” of October 1930. “What is our standard of living?” Eliot questioned, “Is it shrimps for tea, or a gramophone or a wireless set?” Following on from a series of questions to which he posed no definitive answer, Eliot eventually concluded that the “true standard of living” entailed a series of “moral,” “spiritual,” and “economic” questions. Directly related to this same issue, though, was what Eliot considered a more “humble” matter—that of culinary skills: “The British standard of living would be higher if the British working woman knew a little more about cooking, and the British working man and woman a little more about eating.”27 For Eliot and the organicists, the importance of consuming a healthy, nutritious meal was inextricably linked to having the requisite knowledge and skills to create one. This particular emphasis on cooking skills and food preparation also emerged in Eliot’s undated Moot paper entitled “Notes on Social Philosophy.” Here Eliot stressed the need for “human nature” to “preserve its values” in an industrial society. Such “values,” Eliot maintained, extended beyond the obvious moral or religious values to incorporate the wider remit of a healthy cuisine: I include health and recreation, artistic appreciation, and a proper cuisine: I include everything necessary for salvation and everything necessary for the preparation and enjoyment of a good soup or salad. For the modern British do not even know what to eat and drink: their minds are too lazy.28 A dual emphasis on consuming “a proper cuisine” alongside the ability to cook emerges once again here. In keeping with the vehement tone of much organicist writing, there is also a clear sense of disdain for the culinary tastes of modern society which recalls Charles’s outburst in The Family Reunion: “Modern young people don’t care what they’re eating; / They’ve lost their sense of taste and smell” (CPP, 286).

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In the context of Eliot’s position on the editorial board at Faber, though, it is also notable that he explicitly refers to salads and soups as specific examples of a “proper cuisine.” Amongst the wealth of wide-ranging books on agriculture, health, and nutrition, Faber also published a series of cookery books by Ambrose Heath (the nom de plume of Francis Gerald Miller), an acclaimed food expert and journalist who regularly wrote columns on food for the Morning Post and Morning Chronicle. Following the initial success of Good Food in 1933, Heath went on to write a whole series of cookery books in this same vein, from Good Soups to Good Vegetables.29 Also included in this series was a number of books on salads. In the Foreword to Good Salads and Salad Dressings, Heath was critical of English cuisine. Reflecting on the salads he used to eat as a small boy, with the “coarsely cut mixture of lettuce, beetroot, onion, cucumber, and tomato,” he indicated that he “could well understand” why the “English have never been salad eaters.” Bluntly put, Heath stated that “if ever a salad was invented as an awful example, that was the one.”30 Despite the historically poor quality of English salads, Heath considered “a pleasant salad” to be a “good enough meal for anyone” and cited the simple but wholesome fare of the traditional country laborer’s salad of bread, cheese, and onions. Heath’s book aimed to provide guidance on “the best methods of preparing a salad” and stressed that “to eat a salad at its best, a good deal of care should be exercised in the making of it.”31 Heath also provided a wide range of salad recipes along with detailed guidance on their preparation in Vegetable Dishes & Salads for Every Day of the Year and Simple Salads and Salad Dressings.32 Like Heath, Eliot was critical of the standards of contemporary salads and in a letter to the editor of the New Statesman and Nation in December 1935 he openly deprecated American Salads in particular: “Americans seem to prefer a negative cream cheese which they can eat with salad: and American salads are barbaric.”33 In a manner reminiscent of Heath’s impassioned pleas for the importance of properly prepared salads in Faber’s cookbooks, Eliot himself wrote an entertaining recipe to Enid Faber on “How to Prepare a Salad” (1936). “The practised salad-maker,” Eliot noted, regarded the “preparation of any salad” as “a matter of inspiration” and it was the elements of “uncertainty” and “personality” in its preparation which made “the great salad so memorable.”34 Whilst Eliot’s own focus on salads was another particular and identifiable aspect of his organicism, one should note that an interest in cookery books and culinary skills can be considered as part of the modernist sensibility more

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generally. A clear example of this is in Jessie Weston’s A Handbook of Cookery for a Small House, in which she drew on her own personal experiences to provide a “general guide” to “cooking and preparing an appetizing meal.”35 Chapters ranged in content from general observations on “kitchen requisites” to specific advice on the “treatment of vegetables” and, as such, Weston indicated that her book should be referred to as an “A.B.C. of Cookery.”36 Most significantly, Joseph Conrad wrote the Preface to his wife’s cookbook and endorsed the genre of cookery books in general. He maintained that only books which “treat of cooking” could be considered “above suspicion” from a “moral point of view.” For Conrad, the sole purpose of the cookery book was to “increase the happiness of mankind.” As with Eliot, Conrad’s definition of “good cooking” was focused on the “preparation”: “By good cooking I mean the conscientious preparation of the simple food of every-day life.”37 Even if the veracity of Ford Madox Ford’s claim that the great chef Escoffier stated “I could learn cooking from you, Ford” can be questioned, the fact remains that there was a gastronomic sensibility at the heart of modernism and a related concern with food and nutrition.38 As Virginia Woolf famously stated in A Room of One’s Own: “a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”39 From Eliot’s perspective, we could add to this that one could not “live well” without a wholesome form of sustenance. In fact, in Lord Northbourne’s organic text Look to the Land (which Eliot commended in a guest-edited issue of The Christian News-letter), he perceived a connection between the failure of the town’s population to consume “the right food” and their spiritual decay.40 This same correlation between unhealthy foods, poor culinary skills and spiritual decline, is a recurring theme throughout Eliot’s poetry up until the 1930s. In “Morning at the Window,” for example, the “rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens” are symptomatic of an urban environment in which the inhabitants lack the vitality gained from wholesome nutrients (CPP, 27). With the absence of fresh food produced from a fertile soil, this urban setting is only capable of cultivating spiritual despair: “I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids / Sprouting despondently at area gates” (CPP, 27). Likewise, in “Gerontion,” Eliot offers a particularly scathing portrait of housewives’ cookery skills in lines which clearly evoke the organicist polemic of Lymington and Lord Northbourne: “The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea, / Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter” (CPP, 37). The short, sharp description of her actions—“keeps the kitchen, makes tea”—suggests a mechanical and indifferent approach to the

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method of preparing food. Moreover, the striking juxtaposition of the kitchen alongside the gutter conjures up an image of uncleanliness and unhealthiness. In a typically organicist fashion, these lines convey the lack of wholeness in the woman’s diet which has in turn led to a disunited existence. Barry Spurr argues that we can read poems such as “Morning at the Window” in terms of the “impact of mundane domestic circumstances” on “physical and mental health.”41 Given Eliot’s sustained criticism of British cuisine and his engagement with organicism from the 1930s to the 1950s, we can also read the early poems specifically in terms of the organicist concern regarding the impact of poor food on physical, mental, and spiritual health. The correlation between poor food and undernourishment of the soul is evident in the passage set in the typist’s apartment in The Waste Land. In this section of the poem, Eliot vividly captures the general sense of squalor and spiritual weariness which characterizes the typist’s life: The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out food in tins. Out of the window perilously spread Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays, On the divan are piled (at night her bed) Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays. (CPP, 68) What is particularly noticeable is the food contained in “tins,” such foodstuffs that continually vexed the organicists. C. Alma Baker in The Labouring Earth, for instance, commented despairingly on the eating habits of society and took particular issue with “food in tins” which had replaced the “rough,” “simple,” and “wholesome” food of yesteryear.42 Likewise, in “The Policy of Husbandry,” Viscount Lymington maintained fresh produce should not be replaced by “tinned, imported, preserved or refrigerated foods.”43 Like the organicists, Eliot can be seen to be denouncing tinned foodstuffs in the typist’s scene in The Waste Land, and this is even more starkly apparent in the original draft of this section: The typist home at teatime, who begins To clear away her broken breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out squalid food in tins, Prepares the toast and sets the room to rights.44

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On this occasion the contents of the tins are denounced as “squalid,” and, similarly, in the draft version of “Death by Water” the “putrid stench” of “canned baked beans” is rendered equally loathsome.45 The description of her breakfast as “broken” conveys a distinct lack of wholesomeness, which is further reinforced by the fact that the “clear(ing) away” of these breakfast items does not commence until her return in the afternoon. As John Hayward forcefully remarked: “The early morning rush to the office prevented her from clearing away her breakfast … she has neither time nor inclination to cook proper meals and eats out of tins.”46 The sensibility that would lead Eliot to an increasing interest in organic issues during the 1930s and 1940s emerges in the typist scene in no uncertain terms and is equally pronounced in a typically forthright passage from his essay on “Religious Drama”: “Mechanisation comes to kill local life … just as food comes to be something you have got out of a tin, and not something you have grown for yourself.”47 We can also discern the relationship between malnutrition and mental impairment—which was often reiterated by the organicists—in the typist’s passage of The Waste Land. In the “Notes of the Week” section of the NEW in October 1936, it was stated decisively that: “canned thoughts appear as mental diet wherever canned food is prepared.”48 This can also be inferred from “The Fire Sermon,” as, once the typist’s meal has ended, rather than being revitalized, she is left “bored and tired” (CPP, 68). Following the departure of her lover this mental sluggishness continues: “Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass” (CPP, 69). Recalling the earlier scenes in “Morning at the Window” and “Gerontion,” the typist from The Waste Land illustrates the unhealthiness of urban society. In each of these references to kitchens there is no evidence of fresh produce or nutritious food and this is coupled with a dire lack of culinary skills. What is remarkable about Eliot’s poetry of the city (especially given the number of references to kitchens and food) is the absence of any substantial, satisfying, or balanced meal. The “hot gammon” (CPP, 66) and “ham and eggs” in the original draft of The Waste Land is the closest we come to a proper dinner.49 In place of wholesome meals there are instead frequent references to snacks and bites to eat—marmalade, ices, toast—which only serve to alleviate hunger briefly and bring no real nourishment, either physically or spiritually. This is particularly visible in “A Cooking Egg,” where the consumption of “buttered scones and crumpets” in a cafeteria chain is associated with misery

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and despair: “Weeping, weeping multitudes / Droop in a hundred A.B.C.’s” (CPP, 45). As Eliot’s notes to the poem testify, the Aerated Bread Company tearooms were commonplace in London. Interestingly, in a letter to Virginia Woolf in 1933, Eliot recalled that the American equivalent—the “Brown Bowler Hat,” which served “Buckwheat cakes and Maple Syrup”—was “just as normal as an A.B.C.”50 References to A.B.C.s recurred with regularity in modernist writing of the period, with the upper-class Katharine Hilbery and impetuous art student Florinda stopping off at them in Night and Day and Jacob’s Room respectively.51 Of particular significance to the organicist cause was their concern surrounding the lack of nutrients in white processed bread. They maintained that as a result of the introduction of steel roller-mills in Britain in 1872, wheat-germ had been removed from the flour, resulting in what Northbourne felt was mere “filling.” Commenting on the poor quality of white bread, he noted in Look to the Land that “it is probably no exaggeration to say that it generally does not nourish at all.”52 There was equal concern in organic circles regarding the dangerous ingredients being added to white bread, such as “chemical bleaching agents and improvers.”53 Central to the organicists’ vision of a self-sufficient agricultural society was a network of regional communities that baked their own bread using organic whole flour. Perhaps one of the biggest revelations to come from volume 6 of Eliot’s correspondence is that the city-dwelling man of letters had firsthand experience of baking bread. In 1933, following his separation from Vivien, Eliot spent the summer in a cottage at Pike’s farm (Lingfield, Surrey), which was a seventeenth-century farmhouse owned by his friend and fellow Faber director Frank Morley. Yet the recent volume of letters reveals that his time at Pike’s farm was not just a welcome retreat from his marital woes. Rather, Eliot used this as an opportunity to learn to bake bread and was so happy with his first attempt that he insisted on having a photograph taken to document the occasion.54 Earlier on in their marriage, Eliot had visited Vivien on a number of weekends whilst she was staying at a farm in Surrey near to Abinger Common. He observed to his father in a letter of October 1917 that the “farmer’s family were very kind” and that he enjoyed the home-grown produce: “the home made butter and fresh eggs and home killed fowl very good.”55 On that same day he also wrote to Eleanor Hinkley and observed how “the pigs play about, and we can have fresh milk, and home made butter.”56 These brief spells in the countryside were certainly the closest Eliot

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came to experiencing firsthand the agricultural way of life promoted by the organicists, and although he made other notable excursions to the idyllic English countryside he remained “a timid town bred child.”57 This chapter has highlighted the extent to which references to food and cooking pervade Eliot’s poetry, plays, and social criticism. Crucially, it has established that the key influence on Eliot’s ideas surrounding food, health, and nutrition was that of the British organic husbandry movement, whose ideas Eliot actively engaged with and helped to promote through his editorship of several journals and his position as a director at Faber. In a manner reminiscent of the organicist writing from the 1930s to the 1950s, Eliot’s presentation of food in his creative output and his comments in his social criticism convey a strong sense of contempt for British society’s attitude towards food and cooking. Throughout Eliot’s early poetry we are presented with a society characterized by unhealthy and innutritious foodstuffs (from “sandwiches and ginger beer” to “treacle and molasses”), which in turn has a detrimental impact on the spiritual and mental well-being of its inhabitants.58 As Reilly puts it in The Cocktail Party, we see in Eliot’s references to food and the denizens of his “Unreal City,” “the stale food mouldering in the larder” and “the stale thoughts mouldering in their minds.”59 Yet, with the recent publication of the complete editions of Eliot’s prose, Eliot’s relish of food and fare has emerged as a notable aspect of his life. An eagerness to discuss his culinary experiences is particularly prominent in the volumes of Eliot’s correspondence which have been published to date. Amongst the plentiful day-to-day letters which detail his quotidian duties as literary editor, his avid delight in food regularly comes to the fore and provides a welcome relief from some of his more mundane daily correspondence. Jason Harding has observed that Eliot was a “prolific but guarded letter writer” and it is noteworthy that this guard is dropped when discussing culinary matters.60 Thus, Harding’s statement that Eliot’s letters cannot be taken as “straightforward evidence of the poet’s personal experience” can be fruitfully challenged.61 A closer examination of Eliot’s correspondence reveals various aspects of his own “personal experience” of food, which should inform our understanding of his engagement with cuisine in his poetry and plays. Whilst Eliot regularly lamented in his letters the inferior taste of food, his reflections were not framed in exclusively negative terms. Several years earlier, whilst sojourning briefly in Cambridgeshire, Eliot was more positive

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about his culinary experience in England when writing to Frank Morley. In a letter of October 7, 1932, he remarked that the food was “not all bad” and that he was “getting used to tomato cocktails, fried pineapple, and strange salads.”62 Interspersed amongst Eliot’s frequent complaints about the unsatisfactory standard of food, there were also regularly indications of Eliot’s revelry and enjoyment of feasting on foodstuffs. Eliot wrote of his 1934 New Year celebrations, which involved “proper haggis” followed by “roast duck and champagne.”63 According to Eliot, the first-hand experience of the “last dinner given by the master” of his accommodation in 1932, also served to act as a “rouser.”64 Evidently, then, Eliot himself took a great deal of pleasure from dining well, as he noted in a letter of January 1943 to Dorothy Richardson: “people who think of the pleasures of taste as transitory have no palate: I get solid satisfaction still from the memory of meals eaten many years ago.”65 This focus on the everlasting pleasure of culinary experiences is a significant one, and again found memorable expression in Eliot’s letter to Geoffrey Faber of 1927: “The pleasures of dining well are not transitory, but abide forever.”66 In fact, contrary to Ellis’s estimation that material food and similar “secular pleasures” were separate from Eliot’s religious values, they should in fact be perceived as interconnected. In this respect, it is significant that Eliot was drawn back to a discussion of food when considering religious issues. Even when reviewing The English Missal on the Feast of St. Thomas of Canterbury, Eliot singled out “The Blessing of Eggs” amongst its section on “Various Benedictions.”67 Elsewhere, Eliot’s religious discussion was often framed in the language of food and drink. Quoting from the Beatitudes in his essay on “Catholicism and International Order,” Eliot lamented that “Very few people … want to be better than they are; or, to put it in more consecrated terms, hunger and thirst after righteousness.”68 Thus, Eliot concluded in a letter to Geoffrey Faber that, for the blessed who did strive for Christian righteousness, food could lead them to a Christian realization: It seems to me that you have divided the “good things of life” into material and intellectual. I should say that they were all, according to our capacity, spiritual. If we are rightly directed, a good dinner can lead us towards God, and God can help us to enjoy a good dinner.69 Eliot’s emphasis on the spiritual capacity of a “good dinner” was one that his period of ardent agrarianism and involvement in organic circles helped to

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verify. Indeed, the first sign of a wholesome meal in Eliot’s oeuvre is in Four Quartets and it is apposite that three of the Four Quartets (“East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding”) were first published in the pages of the NEW. That “The Dry Salvages” was published in the main forum of organic husbandry serves as a pertinent reminder of Eliot’s ongoing interest in food, health, and nutrition. Within the Christian and organic context of the NEW, we can perceive the “squalid food” of The Waste Land being replaced by the “sense of well-being,” “fruition,” and “fulfilment” which is occasioned by “a very good dinner.”70 The realization of the importance of health and nutrition to society’s spiritual well-being was integral to Eliot’s conception of a Christian society and resulted in a sustained focus on “a proper cuisine.” Although the Eucharistic sacrament always takes precedence in Eliot’s work and it is the spiritual sustenance of Christ which provides the ultimate enrichment— “The dripping blood our only drink / The bloody flesh our only food”71—he was still greatly preoccupied with everyday concerns such as the “fullness of stomach” and “the quality of the food.”72

IV Appetites and Diets

C HA P T E R E L E V E N

“The Raw and the Cooked” Food and Modernist Poetry Lee M. Jenkins

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odernist poetry’s polarized representation of and relationship to food anticipates Claude Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological binary of “the raw” and “the cooked.” Indeed, Lévi-Strauss’s “conceptual tools” may help us to discriminate not only between the kinds of foods served up in modernist poems but between varieties of poetic modernism as well.1 With reference to poems by D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens, this chapter posits that the appetites and allergies of this “culinary triangle” are paradigmatic of the dialectic, in modernism, between poets who align themselves with the party of nature (Lawrence) and those whose greater affiliation is to the party of culture (Eliot and Stevens).2 Like many of their modernist contemporaries, both Lawrence and Eliot raid the larder of vegetable lore that is J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (12 vols., 1890–1915): in his Notes on The Waste Land (1922), which appeared in the same year as the abridged edition of The Golden Bough, Eliot acknowledges that Frazer’s “work of anthropology … influenced our generation profoundly.”3 The antithetical ways in which Frazer’s compendium of vegetation myths is processed in The Waste Land (1922) and presented in the “Fruits” poems of Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) reveal a difference not only in aesthetic taste but also in the relation of the symbolic to the organic or natural order. Chacun à son goût, albeit that Eliot and Lawrence do share an aversion to “patent food” products—Eliot, in The Waste Land, to “food

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in tins,” and Lawrence, writing in the year of Eliot’s poem’s publication, to “tinned meat,” which, together with telephones and the movies, epitomizes for him the unappetizingly synthetic “reality” of the 1920s.4 In The Waste Land, too, mechanization is the mark of a debased modernity: in the third part of the poem, “The Fire Sermon,” the ancient Theban prophet Tiresias casts a cold eye on the Modern Girl, a London typist who comes “home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights / Her stove, and lays out food in tins.”5 A corrosive correlation is implied between the typist’s occupation (mechanical writing on a “typewriter,” a word which, in its late nineteenth-century usage, conflated its operator with the machine itself), her “food in tins” (mass-produced food for the masses), and the post-prandial sex that takes place between the typist and her boyfriend, the going-through-the-motions quality of which is replicated in her post-coital actions (“She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone”).6 To Lawrence’s no less jaundiced eye, tinned meat and the celluloid “reality” of cinema alike are “broken bits of [the] nightmare” of modern machine-age history that produced the first fully mechanized conflict, the First World War.7 Both The Waste Land and Birds, Beasts and Flowers are post-war texts, and both dip into Frazer’s storehouse of fertility myths in a bid to regenerate a world laid waste by war, with the difference that, in Eliot’s poem, the myths don’t work anymore. The “mythical method,” as defined by Eliot in his remarks on James Joyce’s Ulysses, is “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history,” but in Eliot’s poem, for all its allusions to Frazerian “vegetation ceremonies,” the cycle of the seasons and of the planting and harvesting of crops is out of joint. The mythical method points up, but cannot put right, a blighted modernity.8 What food there is in the arid waste land is either adulterated (“in tins”) or desiccated (like the shriveled currants in the pocket of the sexual degenerate, Mr. Eugenides). Even the Sunday dinner of “hot gammon” served at Lil and Albert’s house in the second part of the poem, “A Game of Chess,” is, as Sukhbir Singh has shown, “used to sustain two of [Eliot’s] major themes: the fall of humanity from eating and humanity’s moral degeneration through cheating.” Singh points out that “In addition to its gustatory significance [its reputedly aphrodisiac properties] ‘gammon’ as a verb means to deceive someone with the complicity of a third person.”9 In “A Game of Chess,” that third person or party is in the pub, gossiping about Lil and the newly demobbed Albert:

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Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said, What you get married for if you don’t want children? HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon, And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot— HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME10 The idle chatter is interrupted by the repeated calling of “TIME,” in a voice which is simultaneously that of Ecclesiastes (3:2: “A time to be born, and a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted”) and of the local London bartender, announcing closing time. Eliot’s poem thereby situates itself both in the biblical, trans-historical, sweep of the passing of the generations and the turning of the seasonal crop cycle, and in its own historical moment: licensing laws were introduced in Britain in 1914, shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. Clearly, casual adultery is meat and drink to Eliot’s woman in the pub, whose tittle-tattle about the hot gammon confirms the persistent and even pathological association, in The Waste Land, between food (and alcohol) and a tawdry, unfruitful, sexuality. As Michael Hollington argues, “in Modernist writing as a whole the negative representation of revolting food and disgusting eaters—where meat in particular is a prime focus of horror—functions as a means of conveying metaphorical criticisms of a society that offers only base forms of material gratification and little or none of the kind of soul food that is longed for.”11 In 1926, in the first of the Clark Lectures he delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, Eliot would define poetry, Metaphysical and modernist, in terms of its foregrounding of what Aquinas calls “sensible form”—or, as Eliot puts it, as “the Word made Flesh, so to speak.”12 The words of The Waste Land, however, make flesh (whether flesh that is eaten, like the gammon, or the Cockney “courtly” triangle that eats it) the emblem of a gross and unredeemed humanity: appropriately, the epigraph to Eliot’s poem is taken from Petronius’ Satyricon, the centerpiece of which is the stomach-churning display of conspicuous food consumption that is Trimalchio’s Feast.13 Notwithstanding that Eliot’s poem as a whole is subtended by a correlation—derived from Frazer and anticipating the poet’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism14— between eating and ingesting the godhead, localized reactions to food itself in The Waste Land stand in squeamish contrast to the “relish” with which

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Leopold Bloom, in Joyce’s Ulysses, eats “the inner organs of beasts and fowls.”15 His fellow Americans, too, like William Carlos Williams and Frank O’Hara, are less picky and more peckish than Eliot: the plums in the ice-box in “This is Just to Say” are Williams’s guilty pleasure (“they were delicious / so sweet / and so cold”), while in Lunch Poems, as the title of his book suggests, O’Hara finds materia poetica and manna alike in Manhattan fast food (“a cheeseburger … And chocolate malted”).16 Eliot’s dyspepsia is, in broader terms, queasily at odds with those fertility rituals collected by Frazer—the very function of which is to ensure an abundance of foodstuffs—from which The Waste Land derives its “mythical method” and draws much of its symbolic and structural, if not spiritual, sustenance.17 As Corey Latta argues, The Waste Land exposes “the inability of the present time to reveal salvific spiritual truth.”18 Eliot would not poeticize the doctrine of Incarnation—the Word made Flesh—until the composition of Four Quartets, in the period of the Second World War. In a reverse trajectory to Eliot’s, Lawrence rejects Christian theology early in his oeuvre, inverting the terms of Incarnation in the unpublished Foreword to Sons and Lovers (1913): “John, the beloved disciple, says, ‘The Word was made Flesh.’ But why should he turn things round?” Lawrence, for whom, Robert E. Montgomery explains, the Flesh “has a clear priority— temporally, causally, and ontologically—over the Word,” turns things back again, putting Flesh and Word not in a numinous but in their natural order: “the Flesh is not contained in the Word, but the Word contained in the Flesh.”19 For Lawrence, according to T. R. Wright, woman “is aligned with the Flesh, closer to nature and the natural cycle”: in Lawrence’s Foreword, woman, analogized to an apple pip, is “responsible for the whole miraculous cycle” of life.20 Lawrence’s “radically feminist” rewriting of the Book of Genesis continues through The Rainbow (1915) to the post-war poems of Birds, Beasts and Flowers.21 In the first poem in the “Fruits” section with which the volume opens, “Pomegranate,” Lawrence jettisons Eve’s apple— the apple of knowledge, the forbidden fruit embodying sin and fallen sexuality—for the pomegranate, the Arab’s “apple of love,” and Persephone’s fruit, not Eve’s.22 “That Lawrence chose to begin his account of a journey through the alien kingdom of Birds, Beasts and Flowers not with Eve’s fall but with Persephone’s [is] significant,” Sandra Gilbert says, most obviously because “it emphasizes the deliberately anti-Christian nature of the cosmology he is outlining.” Gilbert goes on to note that

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Eve wickedly ate the apple because she was angry, but Persephone only ate the pomegranate seeds because she was hungry. In other words, although Eve deserved punishment—falling!—Persephone did not deserve to “fall”: she simply fell, through the neutrality and energy of natural appetite, thereby both entering and creating the seasonal cycle of life and death that constitutes the essence of natural process.23 “Pomegranate” is a paean to the combined chthonic power of woman and fruit, or, as the Preface to “Fruits” makes explicit, to woman as fruit: “For fruits are all of them female, in them lies the seed.”24 Mostly derived from John Burnet’s Early Greek Philosophy, the prose prefaces were added by Lawrence to the 1930 illustrated edition of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, and are significant insofar as Burnet’s book, which he had read on Bertrand Russell’s recommendation in 1915, “alerted Lawrence to an earlier, less logocentric way of thinking,” a way of thinking in which the Word is anterior to, and so must struggle to articulate, the mystery of the Flesh.25 The “Peach,” for instance, in Lawrence’s poem of that title, is “Wrinkled with secrets / And hard with the intention to keep them,” begging the serial questions: Why the groove? Why the lovely, bivalve roundnesses? Why the ripple down the sphere? Why the suggestion of incision? The peach is not “round and finished like a billiard ball,” Lawrence tells us, as “It would have been if man had made it.”26 Lawrence, who divests the pomegranate, too, of its man-made meaning as a Christian symbol of kingship—“barbed, barbed with a crown”— is attracted instead to what Gilbert describes as the fruit’s “germinal brokenness”: The end cracks open with the beginning: Rosy, tender, glittering within the fissure. […] For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.27

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Lawrence’s “Fig” is likewise celebrated for its “fissure, the yoni, / The wonderful moist conductivity towards the centre.” Disregarding “The proper way to eat a fig, in society,” Lawrence would rather suck the fruit in “the vulgar way,” whereby you “put your mouth to the crack, and take out the flesh.” The fig is the “fruit of the female mystery,” “the female part”: in lusty contrast to Eliot’s prudish recoil from the interlarding of food with sex, Lawrence melds eating the fig—in “the vulgar way,” which connotes the act of cunnilingus—with the entry, through its “fissure,” into the fertile “realm of generation” itself.28 Where the mythical method of The Waste Land grafts nature onto the symbolic order of culture, Birds, Beasts and Flowers harnesses the cultural form of chthonic myth to assert the primacy of Flesh over Word, of food over food for thought. Lawrence’s acknowledgement that “even art is utterly dependent on philosophy: or if you prefer it, on a metaphysic” may imply that if food in Lawrence’s poetry is served raw, it is laced with symbolic meaning nonetheless.29 Yet, as Lawrence insists in his essay “Introduction to These Paintings,” the “appleyness” of Cézanne’s apple “is a great deal, more than Plato’s Idea.”30 To paraphrase Lawrence’s definition of it, poetry, in the “Fruits” sequence of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, is an act of botanical attention.31 Like Cézanne’s apple, Lawrence’s “Fruits” attempt “realization” of a kind that collapses the binary between art and life; like Cézanne’s, Lawrence’s is “a real attempt to let the apple”—or pomegranate, peach, or fig—“exist in its own separate entity.”32 Wallace Stevens, as Glen MacLeod has shown, would choose “still-life painting as a useful analogy for his own poetry” during the Second World War.33 “Study of Two Pears” and “Dry Loaf,” from the volume Parts of a World (1942), are less exercises in ekphrasis (poems about paintings) than poetic iterations of the still life that were probably prompted by the canvases— Cézanne’s “Fruit and Wine” and “The Table” among them—which, MacLeod tells us, Stevens had seen in 1938 at an exhibition of “The Painters of Still Life” at the Wadsworth Atheneum in his hometown of Hartford, Connecticut.34 In “Study of Two Pears,” Stevens insists that The pears are not viols, Nudes or bottles. They resemble nothing else.35 The pearyness of Stevens’s pears differs from what Lawrence calls the appleyness of Cézanne’s apple in that where Lawrence’s interest is in the

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physical materiality of the fruit, Stevens’s is in the painted pear. Both poets are concerned with what Joyce, after Aquinas, terms the “quidditas” of the thing or what Stevens calls “the painter’s problem of realization,” but with the crucial difference that sensible form, or what the Bloomsbury aesthetician Clive Bell dubbed “Significant Form,” consists, for Stevens, in the autonomy not of the natural object itself, but of the artwork.36 Accordingly, Parts of a World’s “Add This to Rhetoric” apposes the painterly or poetic apperception of nature with the mere being of natural growth: “You arrange, the thing is posed, / What in nature merely grows.”37 In Stevens’s earlier verse, “The plum survives its poems” and so “survives in its own form,” but, as Fred Miller Robinson suggests, Stevens would come to share what Merleau-Ponty identifies as “Cézanne’s Doubt”—doubt as to whether the natural object may be realized beyond the artist’s apperception of it.38 “A good deal of food appears” in Parts of a World, as Eleanor Cook observes, and yet the turn to still life in the volume is also a turning away from the vibrant collations of “good, fat, guzzly fruit” in Stevens’s first book, Harmonium (1923), a volume in which we taste such verbal and edible délices as the “concupiscent curds” whipped up by “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” and take “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon.”39 The poetry of Harmonium, according to Marxist critic Stanley Burnshaw’s review of Stevens’s second, Depression-era volume, Ideas of Order (1935; 1936), “is remembered for … its words and phrases that one rolls on the tongue. It is the kind of verse that people concerned with the murderous world collapse can hardly swallow today except in tiny doses.”40 MacLeod suggests that The worsening situation in Europe may help to explain the appeal of still-life painting for Stevens in 1938. In “Dry Loaf,” the speaker is painting an ordinary still life with a loaf of bread, but behind this nature morte, “soldiers [are] moving, / Marching and marching in a tragic time.”41 The exigencies of life during wartime—following on from the lean years of the Great Depression—enforce a kind of verbal rationing on Stevens, an equivalent, perhaps, of the food rationing that was introduced in the USA following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.42 The “hunger” that impinges on the painterly landscape in “Dry Loaf ” effaces the zest with which the Harmonium poems had displayed their tropical wares:

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Into the late 1940s, Stevens was still shopping for exotic fruits in place of run-of-the-mill “fruits du jour,”44 but in his post-Harmonium poetry fruits are more often framed, as in “Study of Two Pears,” or on tables, as in “Paisant Chronicle” (“a pineapple on the table. It must be so”).45 Stevens sets a table for two in Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, a poem-sequence first published, like Parts of a World, in 1942. The diners, the poet-speaker and “the Canon Aspirin”—who is the representative not of canon law but of the limits of Stevens’s secular credo of imaginative or poetic transcendence—“drank Meursault, ate lobster Bombay with mango / Chutney.”46 Notes concludes with a Coda which, using “the trope of words as food,” attempts to reconcile “pure poetry” with the “pressure of reality.”47 Defending poetry’s frontline position in a time of war, Stevens analogizes the métier of the poet to that of the combatant, telling the soldier that, unlike the poet’s “war between the mind / And sky,” or between imagination and reality, which is “a war that never ends,” […] your war ends. And after it you return With six meats and twelve wines or else without With or without these viands and vins—quintessentially Stevensian spoils of war—“The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines.”48 Stevens—who confessed “I like Rhine wine, blue grapes, good cheese, endive … as much as I like supreme fiction”—reverts to food to conclude his defense of the role and relevance of poetry in wartime.49 In contradistinction to the Anglo-Catholic invocation of the Eucharist in the third of Eliot’s Four Quartets, East Coker (1940), Stevens deploys transubstantiation as a trope, to prove his adage that “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence that takes its place as life’s redemption”:

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How gladly with proper words the soldier dies, If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.50 Despite the mutual antipathy between Stevens and Eliot, and notwithstanding the routine classification of Stevens and Lawrence as belated Romantics rather than bona fide modernists, what Edward Ragg describes as Stevens’s “gastronomic imagination” places him dans le restaurant with Eliot, not outside in the organic world with the Lawrence who may have been a dab hand in the kitchen in life, but who in his poetry is an advocate of “rude food.”51 Like the Crispin of his “The Comedian as the Letter C,” Stevens is a “foodie” who, if he has “a fig in sight,” demands “cream for the fig and silver for the cream.”52 For Stevens, among whose Adagia we find such amuse-bouche as “A poem is a café” and “Parfait Martinique: coffee mousse, rum on top, a little cream on top of that,” even fruits—like the pear that “should come to the table popped with juice”—are not so much raw as au naturel.53 If, in “Fruits,” Lawrence proposes a naturist poetics, Stevens prefers his fruit to be dressed: “Slice the mango, Naaman, and dress it / / With white wine, sugar and lime juice.”54 In a cluster of Stevens’s late and uncollected poems, however, food offers a hearty alternative to the insubstantiality of poetry and the imagination, proving Stevens’s point, in a 1952 letter, that “the bread of life is better than any souffle [sic].”55 In “As You Leave the Room,” for example, Stevens looks back at “The poem about the pineapple” and wonders if his appetite for poetry means that he has “lived a skeleton’s life.”56 “Dinner Bell in the Woods,” from the same period, is a homely Connecticut déjeuner sur l’herbe; the centerpiece of this sylvan scene is a rustic table “on the grass,” to which “The picnic of children came running” when “the fattest women belled the glass.” The poet, who “was facing phantasma when the bell rang,” is saved by the (dinner) bell, and remains “In the green, outside the door of phantasma.” In the poems of his old age, Stevens reconsiders his preference for “that which is apprehended” over “that which is,” fortifying himself against the spectral and even sinister dimension of “phantasma” with the wholesome materiality of food.57 Communal meals in modernist writing inevitably “invite comparison with traditions of symbolic communion, both Christian and pagan, where the dinner table carries rich and complex cultural meaning.”58 “Dinner Bell in the Woods” is a bucolic Last Supper, which, whether or not Stevens converted to Catholicism on his deathbed, is neither sacramental, like Eliot’s Four Quartets,

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nor profane, like Lawrence’s so-called “Last Supper,” the farewell dinner he held for his British disciples at the Café Royal in London in December, 1923.59 In his discussion of food in Lawrence’s fiction, Hollington not only notes “the oppositions so frequently encountered when Modernists write about food” but also “points at which [those oppositions] seem to collapse … and go beyond binary thinking.”60 Food in modernist poetry is not a set menu but rather an à la carte affair: and yet the food that Eliot, Lawrence, and Stevens bring to the table, whether it is raw or cooked, has a common and core ingredient: the consuming concern, in modernist aesthetics, with the relation of art to ritual, and to the “real.”

C HA P T E R T W E LV E

Weight-Loss Regimes as Improvisation in Louis Armstrong’s and Duke Ellington’s Life Writing Vivian Halloran

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ouis “Satchmo” Armstrong and Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington were two of the Jazz Age’s greatest eaters. Jet magazine described the elderly trumpeter, as “quite a scarfer (eater)” in a feature speculating about the nature of his latest diet secret in 1968;1 and not even death spared Duke Ellington from being commemorated as “a prolific diner” by a posthumous profile in the New Statesman upon the occasion of what would have been his 100th birthday.2 Both musicians described their meals fondly in the context of their published life writing. Armstrong’s food and laxative references function as leitmotifs in the volumes that created the genre of the jazz autobiography with the publication of his ghostwritten Swing That Music (1936) and Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1956). Ellington followed suit in his 1973 autobiography, Music is My Mistress, but he confined his musings on the subject to just one chapter. Born into poverty and deprivation, both musicians rose out of their humble circumstances due to their immense talent, dedicated work ethic, and a series of lucky breaks. Despite these hardships or, perhaps, because of them, Armstrong and Ellington carried a torch for their respective mothers’ cooking and this appreciation for comfort food eventually manifested itself physically in the form of obesity, something each man experienced throughout adulthood. Though their approach to public disclosure differed significantly, both Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington applied the same skillset they had relied upon for their musical success—creativity and improvisation—to tackle the most serious threat to their health and

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public image: obesity. Neither Ellington nor Armstrong was content to follow another’s lead in terms of modifying their alimentary behavior and, thus, each devised idiosyncratic eating regimes during the 1950s and then shared these with the reading public. When they did, they found an eager audience. Despite the Victory Gardens and food rationing that characterized domestic efforts to support the troops in the USA during the First and Second World Wars, and regardless of the bread lines, soup kitchens, and other nutritional deprivations that occurred due to Depression and the Dust Bowl, weight-loss regimes became enormously popular during the interwar period as Louise Foxcroft explains in Calories & Corsets: “By the 1930s, dieting was everywhere.”3 Diet books sold extremely well and Foxcroft points out that in the jazz world, narratives of extreme weight loss can be traced back to Margaret Livingstone Whiteman’s 1933 publication of a tell-all book explaining how she helped “the King of Jazz,” her fiancé Paul Whiteman, lose over one hundred pounds before their wedding.4 However, this account was about, rather than by, the jazzman who dutifully followed his intended’s nutritional advice to slim down successfully. As an established white musician married to a Hollywood actress, Whiteman could afford to indulge his spouse’s inclination to caricature him while portraying their dietetic experiment as having the ultimate Hollywood ending. In contrast, Armstrong and Ellington did not have that luxury since discrimination and Jim Crow laws impacted their daily lives and performance careers. Neither the trumpeter nor the bandleader was willing to delegate the task of devising a new way of eating to anyone else; instead, each man adapted nutritional advice from other sources to devise their own food combinations and shed the problematic pounds. Satchmo combined some of the tenets and signature products of diet guru Gayelord Hauser, along with diet regimes published in the popular press, into an idiosyncratic eating program that reflected his reliance on folk remedies. For his part, the Duke took his physician’s advice to lose weight but utterly rejected the menus he offered. Instead, he figured out a simple combination of foods he enjoyed and stuck to it. In their shared concern with their weight and their digestive troubles, the Duke and Satchmo were thoroughly “Modern.” By riffing on the work of others, and then sharing their personalized diet solutions with their fans, Ellington and Armstrong engaged in a more dynamic call and response relationship with their readers than would have been possible on stage. Since neither of the eating regimens spelled out by the jazz greats requires much kitchen

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know-how, anyone who wanted to “answer back” or “heed the call” of Satchmo’s or the Duke’s diet secrets could do so by following their simple advice and waiting to see results.

Genre Conventions in Weight-Loss and Diet Book Narratives Weight-loss narratives are first-person testimonial accounts of how someone deployed a combination of self-discipline and ingenuity to overcome the perceived problem of obesity. They are written from the perspective of victory, a temporal marker that conveys that the narrative arc that led the writer to this point in time has concluded and thus what follows is a retrospective account of the trials and tribulations that led the writer to transform him or herself from a lapsed, unhealthy person into one newly baptized in the gospel of good eating. Regardless of their secular subject matter, weight-loss accounts are, thus, redemption narratives, as Michelle Mary Lelwicka argues in Shameful Bodies: Religion and the Cult of Personal Improvement.5 Duke Ellington’s and Louis Armstrong’s respective weight-loss narratives exhibit two of the criteria Lelwicka outlines as key elements of what she terms “the devotion to thinness”: “the moral codes designating which foods (and how much) you should/shouldn’t eat” and “and the salvation myth that promises ‘you’ll be happy when you’re thinner.’”6 While their musical artistry and showmanship initially secured their fame, their celebrity status rendered other aspects of their lives as exemplary or as fodder for lifestyle magazine articles such as the ones mentioned at the beginning. Thus, the musician’s constant struggle to live up to an ideal male physique was something their audiences could understand. Notwithstanding the public interest in their private lives, as public entertainers, Satchmo and the Duke had to convey a sense of happiness or satisfaction regardless of the numbers on their scale because the paying audience wanted to celebrate and enjoy a good time. In describing their new lives as thinner people within the context of their self-designed nutritional regimens, Ellington and Armstrong also needed to sound an encouraging note so that others would follow their lead. Diet books constitute a different narrative genre altogether. Though they also incorporate the weight-loss testimonial, it serves a secondary purpose as qualitative proof of the effectiveness of the eating regimens they promote. These self-help manuals are proscriptive rather than testimonial. The basic premise behind the presentation of a specific branded eating regime is to

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outline an ideological description of the role of eating vis-à-vis the individual’s overall bodily health; the next step is to laud the inherent virtues of one set of food items over the negative qualities associated with another. In displacing blame and praise away from the personal and reassigning it upon the items to be consumed, diet books thus validate the dieter’s desire to change, and promise that strict adherence to this particular eating program will guarantee the desired outcome: thinness. Any diet plan’s set of rules echo the biblical story of the Garden of Eden, wherein God instructs Adam and Eve about which foods they are allowed to partake from as well as those from which they shall not eat. Thus, overdetermined with the weight of Judeo-Christian moral authority, diet books set out to make converts to this new way of eating and thus ensure the propagation of the principles they cherish. The more popular a diet book’s advice proves, the more demand there will be for subsequent editions and related cookbooks, thereby fattening the author’s wallet. Neither Armstrong nor Ellington profited at all from their accounts of battling obesity. And none of their discussions of dieting constitutes a fulllength diet book. However, their respective weight-loss narratives were influenced by the general interest in weight reduction during the post-war era in the USA. Armstrong self-published his diet how-to manual, Lose Weight the Satchmo Way, and would hand it out freely to anyone he encountered or mail it to fans who asked for it.7 He had the zeal of an evangelist and shared his nutritional advice in his memoirs, personal correspondence, fan mail, interviews, and whenever he could make anyone listen. For his part, Ellington was much more reserved; sharing private matters was not his style. It is not by coincidence that his preferred way of dealing with his excess weight was to wear “a corset” so he would look better in his clothes.8 The discussion of his personal diet regime, embedded within the autobiography published more than twenty years after the fact, was not at all designed to change anyone else’s eating habits. Instead, the anecdote of his weight loss served as a useful bookend to a more substantive and rewarding discussion of his gourmandism.

Modernist Fad Diets: Upton Sinclair and Louis Armstrong During the Modernist era, Upton Sinclair became one of the master lay evangelists for a variety of fad diets, from fasting to vegetarianism to raw foods to meat diets and everything in between. Rather than disowning previous eating habits entirely, Sinclair used the Prefaces to his new diet books to attest to his

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ongoing nutritional and behavioral evolution, as he does in the front matter to The Fasting Cure (1911). Retracting the raw-food nutritional counsel he had proffered as the co-author of an earlier book, Good Health, Sinclair declares: The book contains a great deal of useful information; but later experience has convinced me that its views on the all-important subject of diet are erroneous. My present opinions I have given in this book. I am not saying this to apologize for an inconsistency, but to record a growth.9 Throughout his many diet books, Sinclair emphasized the preservation or improvement of his overall health, rather than weight reduction. Yet, though somewhat tempered in The Fasting Cure, his language in Good Health absolutely displays the religious overtones Lelwicka describes: the second chapter of this later tome is called, “How to Eat: the Gospel of Dietetics According to Horace Fletcher.”10 Fletcher was the man who popularized the technique of “the mechanical act of mastication” for health—his secret was to chew food until it was completely liquefied before swallowing.11 Besides Sinclair, Fletcher also counted Rockefeller among his disciples. Louis Armstrong’s discussion of his culinary adventures, whether these included his accounts of buying groceries for his mother, learning to cook at the Colored Waif ’s home as a child, or lauding the virtues of a series of digestive aids he relied upon to maintain his health, echoes the same sense of personal evolution as evident in Sinclair’s statement to his readers. Armstrong also left a legacy of his thoughts on his personal growth—both professional and physical—in the candid responses he gave to interview questions as well as throughout his memoirs and other autobiographical writings. Though he never strayed far from the advice his mother Mayann gave him about having weekly intestinal cleansings to improve his health, Satchmo later incorporated nutritional advice from another Fletcher devotee, the celebrity diet doctor Gayelord Hauser, into his repertoire of home-remedies. In his preface to “Lose Weight the Satchmo Way,” Joshua Berrett traces the impetus for Satchmo’s own regime to his familiarity with Hauser’s writings: “influenced by the writings of Gayelord Houser, whose Diet Does It was among the books in Louis’s collection—Armstrong became obsessed with an herbal laxative called ‘Swiss Kriss,’ often taking it three times a day.”12 Though he trademarked and sold said herbal remedy, Hauser

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warns in Diet Does It, “when laxatives are used, they should be taken only as a temporary measure.”13 Nonetheless, Armstrong widely promoted the use of this product to which he attributed nearly magical qualities. The following anecdote shared by novelist William Kennedy in a posthumous feature of Armstrong published in GQ encapsulated the most basic tenets of the trumpeter’s approach to weight loss: [H]e signed my copy of his diet regimen, adding a line of his wisdom. With my Ebony pencil, he dedicated the diet on page one, “For Bill Kennedy,” and then on the bottom of page three wrote: “P.S. My slogan. The more you shit, the thinner you’ll git. No shit.” And he signed it, “Louis Armstrong.”14 The promise here is not one of redemption but of expulsion; in this metaphorical embodiment of the garden, excreting the forbidden food guarantees success rather than failure. And, expulsion is an apt metaphor for understanding Armstrong’s obsession with sharing his diet tips with everyone with whom he came in contact. He was equally compelled to share various recipes as well, including the one closest to his heart: for red beans and rice. This effort to distribute his own culinary/dietetic musings is comparable to his desire to perform for others. For a communicative act to be complete—either musically or metabolically—Armstrong’s musical hijinks or digestive advice had to be heard assimilated by an audience.15 Monetary exchange does not figure into the equation because the goal in both instances is aesthetic and, even, aural: the creation of beautiful sounds (even in a digestive context). Brent Hayes Edwards contextualizes Satchmo’s preoccupation with his digestion and his weight as part of the musician’s overall approach to singing: “the Armstrong scat aesthetic is equally a strategy of catharsis and physical (erotic) regulation. … It is something more akin to James Joyce’s identification of creativity with excretion.”16 Edwards goes on to support his claim by quoting an extended excerpt from Armstrong’s last published reminiscences in which he established the genealogy of both his diet regimen and his introduction to Swiss Kriss; the critic cites Armstrong’s use of musical terms to describe the tempo and cadence of his laxative-induced flatulence as proof that the trumpeter himself celebrated all aspects of his embodied performance—the artistic as well as the metabolic.

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As the comparison to James Joyce conveys, Edwards argues that Armstrong’s “ethics of discard” in all things, as musical and physical release, thereby “also provides the foundation for a poetics.”17 James Joyce likewise addresses the topic of Bloom’s bathroom habits in minute detail in the very chapter of Ulysses wherein that protagonist is introduced. Joyce scholars like Lindsey Tucker situate the Irish novelist’s concern with accurately depicting his protagonists’ preoccupation with culinary and bodily processes within the larger context of his meditations on craft: Joyce’s attention to meals and the digestive process, as well as his careful delineating the responses of Bloom and Stephen to functions of the body, are two ways in which he comments on the creative process, on aesthetic and kinetic types of creativity, and on the fertility and wholeness of the characters themselves.18 Though they may share their creator’s scatological proclivities, Bloom and Stephen are fictional creations, whereas Armstrong’s self-depictions were effective precisely because of their appearance of authenticity. As a persona, “Satchmo” did not put on airs; this was the trumpeter’s everyman, low-brow version of himself. True to his self-mythologizing impulse and his dedication to sharing his opinions openly with his admiring public, Armstrong’s approach to crafting a diet was disseminated to the masses via a carefully choreographed publicity campaign: Ebony celebrated the debut of Armstrong’s reducing regimen, “Lose Weight the Satchmo Way,” in a feature with photographs of a slim and smiling couple: the trumpeter and Lucille, his fourth wife. Ten years later, Jet magazine once again discussed Satchmo’s history of yo-yo dieting when they ran a speculative feature with the headline, “Is ‘Satchmo’ Using Mae West Secret to Lose Weight?” The tone of this latter article was more mocking than respectful. The juxtaposition of the aging jazz man and the bombshell actress was meant to feminize the former, especially when the gossip column suggests Armstrong is hiding the key to his recent success: “on the Joey Bishop Show Pops says he’s doing what he always did to lose weight: taking his homemade remedies. An intimate says Pops added another wrinkle—actress Mae (Why Don’t You Come Up and See Me Sometime) West’s beauty secret, which includes a secret diet formula.”19 The insinuation in this piece marks it as a hatchet job. The emasculation of Satchmo increases through diction: the

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use of “wrinkle” to convey a problem or unusual occurrence highlights the performer’s age of 67 already mentioned in the story. Likewise, the attribution to the gossip tidbit to an “intimate,” along with the inclusion of Mae West’s seductive tagline between her first and last name, and before the suggestion that home remedies might have failed old Satchmo, calls his virility into question. Despite the nasty ending, the story nonetheless affirms that Armstrong looked lean in a recent performance in the Academy Awards. Armstrong’s concern about his weight was intrinsically related to his ability to perform musically. He viewed diets like a musical solo: the process of slimming was both a performance to be commented upon and an achievement worthy of applause. Throughout his letters and the published autobiographical writings, the topic of weight loss manifests itself in two primary ways: the first is through the origin myth of his corpulence, and the second is by his situation of himself not as an unusually large individual but as a fat musician among other heavy performers. In his first autobiography, Swing That Music, Satchmo recalls that he first began putting on weight when he stayed with “Papa Joe” Oliver and his family in Chicago: “‘Mamma Stella’ was a good cook and used to feed me up. That is when I began to take on weight, trying to keep up with ‘Papa Joe’ in eating.”20 Twenty years later, by the publication of his second autobiography covering the same time period, Armstrong now traces his weight gain back to his use of a cod-liver oil supplement, “Scott’s Emulsion” to treat a cold, a remedy which, though effective, had the side-effect of making it so that within a week: “I had to buy a pair of fat man’s trousers. From that time on I never got back to my old fighting weight again.”21 These various attempts at establishing a genealogy of his obesity invert the narrative logic of the weight-loss testimonial in that they establish the problem to be surmounted later, rather than recounting the methodical overcoming of the same. In some ways, these accounts establish the narrative of Armstrong’s failure, rather than his triumph, but the tone is casually matter-of-fact rather than contrite or apologetic. The second narrative technique Armstrong deploys is the establishment of a physiological continuum wherein he is but one of many fat musicians trying to slim down. Rather than being negative, this self-portrayal fuels his desire to reduce his waistline and attests to how dieting was already part of popular culture, even for men. In a 1941 letter to Leonard Feather, the Britishborn music critic, Satchmo describes his ongoing adherence to a diet his wife, Lucille, found in a fashion magazine. He describes Lucille as “Alpha” to distinguish her from his mistresses:

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You remember me writing to Mr. Glaser (my personal manager) concerning the “Ten Days Diet Chart” Alpha dug out of a Vogue Magazine? Well Feather, that chart is the last word. No fooling. Ever since Alpha put me on this diet, which is the one that she’d gotten streamlined ’n’ everything, the whole band (my band) is now on the same diet.22 Armstrong does not seem at all bothered by the source of the diet—he only marvels at its effectiveness. And, because it is him telling the narrative, rather than Lucille (or the nameless Jet gossip columnist), Satchmo is not feminized or caricatured in the same way that Whiteman was by his spouse. Finally, the cause and effect implied in the three-sentence sequence above, which suggests that Armstrong recovered agency after being placed on a diet by his wife by imposing this particular eating regimen on his band-members or employees, is upended two paragraphs later, when the trumpeter tells his interlocutor, “Speaking of weight, as I said before, everybody in my band is weight conscious, that is the fat ones, us fat ones, I should say.”23 Here, Satchmo resists any note of disapproval or of being judgmental. This portrayal of masculine performers’ concern with the figure they cut in public accords with Foxcroft’s claim about the popularity of reducing regimens in the 1930s. Armstrong furthermore triangulates the discussion of virtue and agency when he avoids flattering descriptions of his own behavior in favor of praising his band members’ efforts at “eating more sensibly” and “getting their grapefruit together” as well as, “cut[ting] out all of their starches and stop[ping] eating at night.”24 By presenting himself as part of a group of men changing their behavior willingly, Armstrong then normalizes dieting, thereby removing the religious overtones from this generic diet. Even his closing catchphrase, “am dietingly yours,” presents this current state of being as matter-of-fact, rather than temporary. Satchmo saves his zeal for promoting his own regimen. In all their incarnations, the diet regimes that Satchmo favors promote the consumption of salad greens, sliced tomatoes with lemon juice, and coffee. Whereas Hauser’s protein-centric eating system discourages the consumption of “devitalized starches and sugars,”25 Armstrong’s approach is strongly improvisational, telling his readers they may, “eat from soup to nuts, eat as much as you want to” as long as they do not skimp on the tomatoes and, “[o]f course, the less you eat is in your favor.”26 There are three pillars to Armstrong’s nutritional advice: dieters should drink as much orange juice as needed for breakfast and

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between meals to stave off hunger; they should take the antacid Bismarex to counteract the resultant discomfort from gas; and they should take a nightly dose of the laxative Swiss Kriss to stay regular. Armstrong’s enthusiasm for orange juice is yet another way in which his dietetic advice is at odds with Hauser’s nutritional philosophy as expounded in Diet Does It. Hauser recommends whole fruit be eaten and fruit juice be avoided. Thus, this is one further example of Satchmo’s improvisational approach to his source material. This radical reworking of mainstream weight-loss advice is in keeping with what Thomas Brothers calls Armstrong’s second “modern formulation,” which he explains in a musical context as: “the result of efforts to succeed in the mainstream market of white audiences. The key here was radical paraphrase of familiar popular tunes,” which went beyond the nineteenth-century vogue of “ragging on a theme,” and instead demonstrated a sophisticated amalgam of multiple musical styles and genres all of his own: “part blues, part crooning, part fixed and variable model, plastic and mellow, the most modern thing around.”27 For Brothers, Armstrong’s musical modernism succeeds regardless of the race of its target audience, because he consistently demonstrates a “vigorous commitment to means of expression derived from the black vernacular he had grown up with.”28 In other words, Armstrong’s strong identity as an unpretentious Southern Black man is the constant which distinguishes his public persona from that of Duke Ellington and of other jazz greats, who cultivated a much more sophisticated and economically successful public persona. Other critics have traced the influence of rhetorical flourishes from the slave narrative genre in Armstrong’s “vernacular” written style. Together with his preference for home remedies over those prescribed by doctors, and his penchant for discussing the embodied pleasures of eating and digesting his food rather than describing his interest in cuisine per se, these are all the inimitable hallmarks Armstrong’s improvisational weightloss writings.

Diets in Retrospect: Duke Ellington and Alice B. Toklas Where Satchmo’s self-disclosures are part and parcel of his aesthetic of expulsion, Ellington’s reserve is more characteristic of the controlling impulse of which the corset was but a visual symbol. As a composer, his ingenuity was in coming up with, and preserving, unique and harmonious melodies and infectious hooks. Duke Ellington only revisited his career and its

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milestones towards the closing chapter of his life, whereas Armstrong’s life writing was published contemporaneously and privileged his childhood and young adulthood. Satchmo’s self-mythology was prolific and expanded across many media—musical compositions, film appearances as himself, collage art involving his publicity materials, and even his personal correspondence— Ellington was more circumspect about documenting his personal life and spent the bulk of his writing energies composing. The Duke’s writing style is anecdotal; he was not a born storyteller like Armstrong. The prose of Music is My Mistress is formulaic, episodic, and fragmentary in nature, though the volume weighs in at over 500 pages. If Satchmo’s diction and subject matter preserved his credibility as a writer of color, “Duke” Ellington’s autobiography, Music is My Mistress portrayed the composer as someone simultaneously proficient in white rhetorical styles and adept at leveraging the mythological genre conventions that framed narratives of success to make his life legible to mainstream audiences. Daniel Stein contends that the introductory sentences to Music is My Mistress, “code Ellington’s narrative of success ironically in ‘white terms.’ The ‘Duke’ is the son of a beautiful young lady and a handsome young man; in this Americanized fairy tale, the black musician invents himself as the chosen one, a visionary chosen to change the course of American music.”29 Rather than a critique of the text as an effort at passing, Stein portrays this recasting of Ellington’s life story as an example of double consciousness, wherein Ellington renders the foundational myth of the self-made man uncanny precisely by applying it to himself as a self-made Black man. Stein theorizes that jazz autobiographies, “narrate cultural myths and counter-myths at the same time.”30 The chapter where Ellington discusses his personalized diet serves as a perfect example of this type of narrative high-wire act. At first glance, the Duke’s discussion of his weight loss in the opening sentences of the chapter titled “The Taste Buds” seems to strike a discordant note. After all, what do the taste buds have to do with a diet except sit idle and long for the pleasures they have been denied? After the third paragraph, however it becomes clear that the discussion of diet serves only as a mere preface to Ellington’s preferred topic—a detailed and loving recollection of the specific dishes he enjoyed eating at fine dining establishments during his many trips abroad in the 1940s. In the closing paragraph, diet reemerges as a topic as if to reassure the reader, and perhaps the nostalgic writer, that the Duke has reformed his habits:

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Vivian Halloran Looking back on all this, I recall that in the ’40s I had become so food-conscious I would have my dessert as the first course—something delicate like pie à la mode. But now I prefer to have all my courses on the table at the same time. No wonder I have lost so much weight!31

This moment invokes yet another temporal shift—it begins with a nostalgic recollection of the indulgences of the 1940s, when the Duke would begin dinner by eating dessert—and then shifts back to the present time of 1972, when he favors a different presentation of his meal components. There’s somewhat more to the Duke’s weight-loss success story than merely the strategic timing of all elements of a given meal. The secret was to eat a proteinheavy repast accompanied by a citrus-infused beverage: “simply steak (any amount), grapefruit, and black coffee with a slice of lemon first squeezed and then dropped into it.”32 Taken together, these three elements can hardly be described as constituting one course, much less a multi-course meal. Thus, though unsaid, the implication in the chapter is that by the 1970s, the Duke is no longer adhering to his idiosyncratic eating regime, regardless of how successful it may have been, once upon a time. The narrative arc of Ellington’s weight-loss narrative does include a dramatic backstory, but in a much more condensed way than Satchmo’s various genealogies. The bandleader arrived at his perfect food combination after tearing up the menu his physician had prepared for him when he warned Ellington that he needed to lose more than twenty pounds. Like the opening paragraphs of his autobiography, this framing device also invokes fairytale narrative conventions: there is a crisis (obesity must be overcome); the authority figure gives the hero a draconian set of measures meant to curtail his freedom; the hero rebels and devises his own solution to the crisis; the authority figure recognizes the effectiveness of the hero’s approach; and the hero’s ingenuity is finally rewarded. Ellington recalls that Dr. Logan’s reaction upon seeing his newly svelte patient was to prescribe an immediate infusion of dessert: “Go get yourself a banana split quick!”33 The two references to ice cream in the context of the Duke’s diet—as both reward and temptation—reveal the jazz great’s predilection for this frozen confection. They also represent two distinct culinary traditions—French (pie à la mode) and American (banana split)—associated with different ends of the gastronomic spectrum, from refined topper to democratic excess. This same tension between high and low

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culture is in evidence in the amusing anecdote that follows this diet origin story. To illustrate the dramatic nature of his physical transformation better, Ellington next tells a self-deprecating anecdote about his pants sliding down during a performance of Night Creature, thereby deflecting the tinge of elitism in his acknowledgement of the insider status in the world of classical music (conducting the New Haven Symphony orchestra) through a juxtaposition of lowbrow physical comedy and some suspense: would his pants fall? Alas, no. A crisis was once again averted. Though Ellington’s approach to discussing his diet avoids the obsessive focus Armstrong (and Sinclair, for that matter) placed on the digestive process, this reticence does not stem from any squeamishness on the Duke’s part. On the contrary, the composer dedicates an entire chapter of his autobiography (“Doctors and Surgeons”) to recounting the multiple surgeries he underwent throughout his life. He even gloats about the beauty of his viscera. Writing much later, journalist Bree Wilson brings the legend of the Duke back down to size by contradicting the heroic portrayal of his victory over obesity in his autobiography. In “The Ducal Diet,” published to commemorate the band leader’s centennial, Wilson addresses Ellington’s fans and reminds them that the Duke’s adherence to his idiosyncratic diet was, at best, temporary. She contends that after Ellington’s initial weight loss, “it was back to fried chicken and mammoth doggy bags.”34 Supplementing the fairytale dimension of the Duke’s lineage with concrete biographical details, Wilson contextualizes his big appetite by explaining that “His father had been a caterer” and his mother was a great cook who made, “the world’s greatest cornbread.”35 Though Ellington did claim to be an expert in the kitchen, the article concludes with a recipe for cornbread inexplicably illustrated with a drawing of a white man chewing on the bottom of a wheat stalk. Talk about the simultaneous deployment of a myth and a counter-myth. In this fondness for recalling his various maladies and his nostalgic celebrations of the delicious repasts he enjoyed in his life, Ellington’s prose styling recall those of arguably the most iconic American Modernist food writer, Alice B. Toklas. Like the Duke, Toklas preferred to shine in her own type of stage—the kitchen of the home she shared with Gertrude Stein. However, after her death, Toklas kept her memory alive in part by recreating their decades together by combining the genres of the memoir and cookbook. From the very first paragraph of her self-titled cookbook, Toklas cites the almost unbearable blandness of the “narrow diet” meant to help her recover

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from “pernicious jaundice” as the inspiration for recreating on the page the meals she enjoyed preparing during her life with Stein.36 A few chapters later, Toklas recalls that among her first challenges she faced in the kitchen was to make a dish suitable for Picasso who, “was for many years on a strict diet”37 designed by his doctor. Said eating regimen discouraged the consumption of both beef and chicken in favor of mutton and veal, accompanied by spinach soufflé, since the painter’s physician celebrated the virtues of that green, leafy vegetable. Faced with such constraints, Toklas gives full rein to her culinary creativity and devises a tasty camouflage: sauces that would “make the spinach soufflé look less nourishing.”38 Toklas’s addition to Picasso’s limited nutritional repertoire results in a dish that was not only visually and aesthetically pleasing—through the incorporation of multiple colors: yellow (hollandaise sauce), white (cream sauce), and red (tomato sauce)—but also overwhelmed the taste buds and thus banished the thought that the meal was in any way a compromise. Medically supervised weight-loss regimes were a common feature of many a Modernist artist’s daily routine. As such, references to diets found their way into the life writing texts of the era. Though Toklas and Picasso were ill and changed their diets in accordance to their respective physicians’ orders, Stein herself was another example of a Modernist artist who designed a diet to suit her own peculiar nutritional needs. Toklas recalls that during the couple’s tour across the USA in the 1930s, Stein maintained a very strict eating regimen on days in which she was scheduled to lecture: Before her first lecture she ordered for dinner oysters and honeydew melons. She said it would suit her. In travelling to a dozen states she deviated as little as possible from that first menu. Occasionally the oysters had to be replaced by fish or chicken. … Gertrude Stein continued with her satisfactory régime on the days of lectures. On the other days we fared more lavishly with friends in their homes and restaurants.39 Stein’s austerity was motivated by a desire to calm her nerves rather than any vain desire to drop a few pounds. And though she understood Stein’s reasoning, Toklas’s ironic reference to the meal as “her satisfactory régime” makes clear that the blandness of said menu clearly offends the sensibilities of Toklas’s refined palate. Her tone seems giddy when remembering the breaks

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from these tedious meals on days when the couple would socialize with their friends. Like the Duke, Toklas appreciates the haute cuisine prepared by fine dining restaurants and has no qualms about stating this preference. While Toklas and the Duke share an unabashed appreciation for the culinary artistry of chefs de cuisine and accomplished home cooks, Upton Sinclair found himself unable to patronize most restaurants due to the austere nature of his most lasting diet fad. In “My Life in Rice,” his contribution to The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook (1961), a compendium of food writing and recipes from key players in the Modernist movement, featuring an introductory essay and recipe by Toklas, Sinclair reflects on his more than thirty years’ adherence to a rice-based eating regimen and laments that it is almost impossible to find something to eat at a restaurant. Like Toklas, the tale Sinclair tells is intrinsically connected with his spouse and their life together. Originally, the rice diet he so favors was medically prescribed for Sinclair’s ailing wife after her first heart attack. He only adopted the diet in solidarity and for the sake of expedience—he only had to cook one type of food if both of them ate the same way. What he found was that “the diet proved to be magical” in relieving the headaches Sinclair associated with his creative work (not unlike Stein’s nervous stomach and her oyster diet).40 The pain relief was the biggest factor which prompted him to remain compliant to it despite his wife’s inability to modify her eating habits permanently. She died, but he assures the reader at the outset: “There’s a lot more to the story now, and it has a happy ending; but I hope that won’t spoil the fun.”41 What passes for Sinclair’s happy ending in this essay has faint echoes of the Duke’s nostalgic longing for the pie à la mode of the 1940s: Sinclair claims he has a sweet tooth and thus prefers to combine his rice with fruit any time he wants. Such virtue is its own reward.

Conclusion The enjoyment of food, and the preoccupation with obesity in their life writing texts, are two topics that Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong share not only with one another, but also with a wide range of other American artists whose aesthetic sensibilities came to define the Modernist era, including Upton Sinclair and Alice B. Toklas. The first half of the twentieth century saw the pace of industrialization increase exponentially, first due to technological advances, and then eventually in support of the war effort for the two World Wars. The social fabric of the USA changed substantially due to increasing

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urbanization of its population—the northward shift in demographic during the decades of the Great Migration, and the increasing numbers of people moving west when the Dust Bowl hit. As the nation changed, technological advances in reliable radio technology and then the growing popularity of the film industry helped people share a common popular culture. The emergence of a mass audience with disposable income led to the development of popular niche industries, such as weight-loss book publishing, the growth of a national magazine industry, and the sale of musical records. As key players in this changing cultural landscape, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong captivated the imagination of Americans across both sides of the color line. Their celebrity rendered the most mundane aspect of their lives, such as their changing waistlines, as subjects of interest to many beyond their jazz audiences. Thus, because these two men lived so much in the public eye and they each carefully crafted a public persona that was instantly recognizable and had bankable appeal, it is not unreasonable to consider their thoughts on weight loss and appetite as part and parcel of their larger creative projects and thus look for areas of overlap between their physical self-fashioning and the distinctive approaches to make jazz music new and exciting, even as it was evolving.

C HA P T E R T H I RT E E N

Kitchen Talk Marguerite Duras’s Experiments with Culinary Matter Edwige Crucifix

I

n 1973, French writer and feminist Xavière Gauthier set out to compose a series of articles on women’s writing for the newspaper Le Monde. Unlike her other interviews, the conversation she had with Marguerite Duras morphed into a long series of recordings, leading Gauthier to Duras’s retreat at Neauphle-le-Château where the two spent an entire summer together, conversing and making jam. The recordings were ultimately compiled into a book, Les Parleuses, which opens with a discussion on the peculiarities of Duras’s literary language.1 Here, Duras explains that her perceived departure from traditional prose and narratives—which would make her one of the most prominent figures of French literary modernism—might be a way to draw the reader’s attention to what literature is actually unable to put into words.2 Her writing should be considered, she says, as an engagement with “blanks,” as an exploration of “the feminine” materializing an unvoiced female sensuality, marked by eroticism and pain.3 This aesthetic engagement with “the feminine” requires us to consider the sexual and emotional life of women alongside their material conditions since the depiction of women, Duras adds, must be a commitment to “the real” and even to materialism.4 To that effect, the textual embodiment of blanks is in fact one experimental technique among many that Duras uses to materialize the feminine, all the way to the most mundane details of domestic life, notably the preparation and consumption of food. This chapter recasts the connection between literary experimentation and feminine matter/material experiences through the treatment of food, cooking,

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and gastronomy in two of Duras’s early novels, Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia (1953) and Moderato Cantabile (1958), in which the author, searching for her literary voice, explores ways to dismantle traditional narratives. Recent publications in Durassian scholarship have rethought Duras’s engagement with matter by attending to the circulation of desire in her work, to her ethical commitments and to her depictions of mundane everyday life.5 This latter aspect, explored by Mireille Calle-Gruber in her 2014 monograph, Marguerite Duras: la noblesse de la banalité, is particularly interesting with regard to Duras’s treatment of the silent, hidden, domestic life of women. While not directly attending to gender, Calle-Gruber interprets Duras’s literary techniques as an attempt to embody the unexceptional, to create a new relation to things through a disorienting language, a feature aligned with Robbe-Grillet’s definition of the Nouveau Roman, central to French modernism.6 While apparently creating a distance with the “real,” Duras’s language does not try to do away with the signified. What Calle-Gruber calls Duras’s “noblesse de la banalité” is an invitation to rethink not only the relationship between language and the real, but also between women and matter in modernism. Accordingly, reading food in Duras with regard to her literary project and not simply as a realist leftover, a symbolic or contingent detail, reveals its experimental potential for literature. More than a mere referent, food in her work is both matter and language; it offers itself to be eaten up as well as spoken out, materialized in the body of the text. Culinary matter in Duras’s work is truly gastronomic—if gastronomy is to be understood as a sublimated experience of food science and culture—but her novels also enlarge the gastronomic experience to the kitchen and to its usually invisible female actors. From the “blanks” of the narrative, the kitchens, bedrooms, and dark corners of the house, arises a different literary discourse, a form of feminine kitchen talk, spoken by Duras herself or by her characters. This reading helps explain the peculiar position of cooking and eating in the depiction of the feminine in Duras’s work compared to other domestic tasks, in relation to the body and affect, but also in Duras’s own literary practice, a topic still surprisingly understudied.7

Nourishing Women As is commonly the case in Duras’s novels, Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia (LPCT) and Moderato Cantabile both focus on a bourgeois female central character struggling with the expectations of married life. The novels’

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respective protagonists, Sara and Anne Desbaresdes, are stuck in conventional marriages and unsatisfied with their functions as wives and mothers. Throughout their stories, they are shown enacting traditional familial roles: Sara bathing and overseeing the care of her son and of their rental house while vacationing in Italy, and Anne Desbaresdes taking her little boy to his piano lessons. Next to them, other female characters echo the same gendered portrayal: cooking, cleaning, and organizing domestic rituals. Alongside Sara in LPCT is Gina, the wife of boisterous Ludi, with whom she fights constantly. The novel narrates the vacation of a group of five friends in a desolate and sweltering Italian seaside town, haunted by the recent death of a young man who had been charged with clearing the mountain of landmines. The novel begins when the boy’s elderly parents arrive at the outskirts of the town, gather his remains, and refuse to sign the death certificate that would allow them to take their son’s body. Gina has made it her habit to visit the bereaved couple daily and bring them food. In this setting, the treatment of food in both novels has often been understood as a hyperrealist detail symbolizing oppressive bourgeois life and expectations, standing for social and sexual conventionality.8 The impulse to feed draws attention to the stereotypical divide between the men and the women in the story. While the men refuse all obligations to maintain the illusion of being on vacation,9 Gina, Sara, and the maid still worry about providing food and care to the weaker members of the community, like the little boy and the elderly couple.10 In doing so, they are regularly scolded by the men for not letting go, for caring too much. This is not to say that men in the novel do not care about food. They are, in fact, very much obsessed with it, and their apparent detachment from responsibility only strengthens their appetites. Ludi and Jacques (Sara’s husband) constantly worry about what food they will be served and discuss their culinary preferences in detail. As the novel evolves around cyclical repetitions—each of the four chapter starts with Sara waking up and remarking on the heat—the worry surrounding nourishment comes back regularly, carrying the entire novel and betraying the oppressive boredom of these repetitive vacation days. Indeed, in the novel’s cyclical chronology, where characters are always waiting for one another before they can actually do anything, meals alone structure the day and are therefore endowed with a ritualistic significance. While men take visible pleasure in discussing and anticipating future delights, meal scenes fail to satisfy their physical and aesthetic appetites. As a result, the men’s gastronomical obsession drives them to bursts of anger,

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only subdued by the scorching heat. Just like Sara’s little boy who is a picky eater, Ludi and Jacques successively make a scene at the table. Ludi is furious to have been denied his favorite meal and Jacques, after having had to endure the same grilled fish dinner at the town hotel every day, erupts publicly at the end of the novel, demanding to be served something else, because he’s had enough: “No, he said, not this time. That’s it. I can’t anymore.”11 If at first food appears as little more than an effet de réel anchoring the novel’s rhythm, the recurrence of the meal scene as the only real “event” in the narrative gives it a disproportionate diegetic stake. The meal, that most mundane of activities, becomes a catalyst for narrative tensions that slowly undoes the novel’s expectations and undermines the traditional gender roles it previously relied on. Instead of granting Jacques and Ludi power by grounding their status as aesthetes through gastronomic exigence, their table caprices are displays of childishness and selfishness. Without diminishing the symbolical value of male appetites, they put the characters in a somewhat passive, dependent position, problematizing the agency at play in the act of feeding. Feeding, in fact, is as much servitude as it is power, as Gina is certainly aware when dealing with her husband. She regularly brings Ludi’s favorite dishes—dishes that were prepared essentially for him—to the old couple just as much to satisfy them as to spite him. Notably, she has someone bring the couple her “pâtes aux vongole” to the histrionic chagrin of her husband.12 Gina’s impulse to feed is powerful insofar as it is selective and administers a semblance of justice in the novel: not only does it allow her to assert herself in her couple, but it also allows her to punish characters by refusing to feed them, as in the case of the customs officers guarding the old couple until they finally sign the death certificate. In spite of Ludi’s desires, Gina gives the vongole to the old couple and the leftovers are fed to Sara’s little boy by the maid. This redistribution of Ludi’s food by surrogate nourishing mothers reduces him to powerlessness. Gina’s nourishing abilities thereby mirror her husband’s sexual power over her: she is as dependent on his, confessing that she cannot leave him because she “still like(s) to make love,”13 as Ludi is on hers, admitting that “she is such a good cook … she was the one who made me like this. Now, I’m done for. I like to eat more than anything.”14 Though stereotyped, the relationship creates a reciprocity of sensual appetites: in spite of all their threats of separation, Gina could never be unfaithful to Ludi, and Ludi always goes back home to eat Gina’s food. Ludi’s desire for Gina is subsumed by his “appetite” (“gourmandise”):

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“When [Gina] feeds the old guys her vongole pasta … it’s to punish him for his appetite for her cooking, for her.”15

Consuming Women The narrative treatment of women as nourishers, while contesting the very patriarchal bourgeois structures it relies on, also allows the text to stage deeper tensions and in fact serves to exacerbate hunger’s destructive force. The apparent exclusion of women from a male-dominated, food-centered gastronomy dramatizes the constant deferral of female pleasure, only making female desire more apparent. While women don’t seem able to find satisfaction at the table, meal scenes actually unearth ravenous feminine appetites and explore novel ways of wording them. If women in both novels are not depicted eating, they express their inextinguishable hunger by drinking profusely, be it “bitter campari” in LPCT or red wine in Moderato Cantabile. In Moderato Cantabile, drinking is explicitly presented as the improper but appropriate response to inappropriate and unnamable hungers. For Anne Desbaresdes, the wife of a rich industrialist, stuck in a life contrary to devouring, “l’opposé de la dévoration”16 as Anne Graham puts it, “eating would be too exhausting” since “her mouth has been dried up by other hungers that nothing can appease, except for, barely, the wine.”17 Hunger serves as a motif for sexual desire as the novel recounts Anne’s weekly meetings with Chauvin in a café after her son finishes his piano lesson. An illicit attraction develops between bourgeois Anne and this ex-factory worker as they attempt to make sense of the murder of passion they both witnessed in the opening of the novel through a series of obsessive, drunken conversations. Anne’s insatiable hunger recalls Duras’s obsession with feminine silences, the “blanks” she mentions in Les Parleuses. Anne’s avidity, instead of calling for gastronomical or sexual completion, is essentially a deepening emptiness, as she remains both incapable of eating and of consummating her relationship with Chauvin. Completion is also denied from an extra-diegetic perspective: the novel refuses itself a narrative resolution and ends without answering any of the questions initially raised about the murder. Hunger, then, stands for something else, for the silences, the blanks between the lines, “for a discourse … of deconstruction and desire” and not for restoration.18 Like the wine Anne desperately consumes to feed this lack, language returns to absence obsessively, never successfully articulating it. This emptiness that cannot be filled

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therefore corresponds to an excess that cannot be contained, as displayed by Anne’s excessive drinking, her improper behavior, and the succession of chapters restaging the same conversation between the two protagonists. Chapter vii differs abruptly from the rest of the novel by suddenly moving the stage of the intrigue to the Desbaresdes’s home where the family hosts a gastronomic dinner for friends, marking the novel’s turning point.19 Anne arrives shockingly late to this event she is supposed to host, unkempt and intoxicated from her afternoon at the café. Incapable of eating, yet the center of attention during the meal, Anne’s scandalous refusal to feed herself, to partake in the gastronomic ritual, marks her social demise (Sherzer calls it a “social suicide”).20 In fact, it is Anne’s very starvation that makes her thoroughly excessive: she exceeds both the time allotted for her meetings with the man, and the boundaries of the dress she wears at dinner, her bosom immodestly flowing out of her gown. Even the maids whisper in the kitchen that “she is too much.”21 This contradiction is most palpable in the chapter’s concluding scene, with Anne vomiting her minuscule yet excessive dinner. Anne is both over-satiated and insatiable, reproducing the very paradox of gastronomical consumption, but in reverse, as she refuses food and derives no enjoyment from the experience. As with Gina, who tried to deny her husband satisfaction in LPCT, Anne desperately resists the imperative of nourishment which would require giving up part of herself for consumption. In this novel constructed around musical metaphors, the dinner scene, loaded with mortuary imagery, unfolds like a funeral march amidst the “mournful blooming” of the garden magnolias, likening Anne to the food on the table: she too is being executed and devoured by the bourgeois guests.22 This social cannibalism as a form of gastronomy, reminiscent of Ludi’s “gourmandise” for Gina in LPCT, echoes the opening chapter of the novel where female devouring is symbolically represented in the disturbing bloody kiss given by the murderer to his female victim and in Anne’s relationship to motherhood, as the child’s piano performance leads her to exclaim “he devours me” (“il me dévore”).23 If cannibalism is “the danger of sitting down to eat with others,” it also suggests a dark perspective on women’s social place, one where hunger, that is desire, is necessarily denied satisfaction, and is instead sacrificed to the pleasure of the group.24 Excess and lack, famine and nausea, are thus the two sides of the same feminine reaction against bourgeois plenty that translates into Duras’s rejection of novelistic conventions, also found in the rest of her oeuvre. In this respect, Anne’s refusal to eat is essentially different from Jacques’s in LPCT:

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Jacques’s is not a refusal to partake in the meal, but simply to eat bad food. As such, it remains within the range of acceptable eating behaviors, whereas Anne severs herself from conventions in a gesture that Richard-Laurent Barnett identifies as radically modern.25 Drawing a cultural, aesthetic, and historical parallel between the histories of gastronomy and of literature, Barnett likens the disgust of the “Modernes” for a rich traditional gastronomy with disgust for a “full-bodied literature.” He understands the writing style of the Nouveau Romanciers—where blanks and silences create narrative discontinuity— as a rejection of a cuisine extoling homogeneity by the use of heavy sauces and overcooking.26 In the same way, Anne’s hunger and Duras’s silences are attempts at preserving individual desires from being digested by the group.

Writing Feminine Sensuality The dinner in Moderato Cantabile is an archetypically bourgeois affair, from the food being served to the preceding ritual: the Desbaresdes’s personnel serve expensive wine, salmon, duck à l’orange, and sorbet to a group of elegant guests. While the meal is perfectly orchestrated, the narration of the dinner disrupts bourgeois and literary conventions by depicting the entire event in—sometimes quite improper—detail. This linguistic impropriety is explicit from the very opening of the chapter with the impersonal statement that food should be enjoyed in silence and has no place in conversation. In fact, “it is proper not to mention it.”27 This opening preterition underlines the scandal unfolding at dinner and the scandal of narrating it: not only does the entire chapter relate the event, but it also accounts for all that should normally remain hidden in the gastronomic ritual. Instead of limiting itself to the proper boundaries of the table, the bourgeois meal scene gestures towards the preparation of the food and its digestion: it is parasitized by incursions of the narrative voice into the kitchen and by physiological details, refusing the gastronomic sublimation of the body through consumption. As the food circulates among the guests, it is not only presented as a beautiful concoction but also as a disturbing superposition of temporalities that accentuates the transformation of alimentary matter from the living animal, like “the salmon from the open waters of the ocean,”28 to its defilement by the ingesting body. Switching to the future tense, the narrative voice presents gastronomy as a process whose end result is most off-putting. The duck is nothing but “fat (that) will melt into other bodies”29 and Anne’s

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meal a regurgitated refuse that “she will vomit here, at length.”30 The meal scene is also an opportunity for the writer to undo the traditional (gastronomic, social, and aesthetic) separation between the center of the meal (the table) and its margins (the kitchen and bathroom) through shifts in narrative focalization.31 The dinner scene unfolds through a kaleidoscope of points of view—what Lloyd Bishop describes as the “cinematographic technique of the simultaneous scene”—as if to mimic Anne’s ivresse [intoxication].32 Chauvin’s distanced understanding of the evening from the garden where he lurks and the servants’ perspective on the meal are thus added to Anne’s parsed perception. The juxtaposition of points of view in a series of short vivid vignettes effectively severs Anne from proper society, distinguishing her from two impersonal groups of women: the bourgeois ladies seated at the table and the kitchen maids. Against this background, the slightest of Anne’s actions is put in contrast with that of proper society through narrative mimicry, echoed by the group of bourgeois women gastronomes who perform it properly and are commented upon by the kitchen maids. Anne’s refusal to help herself to the food that goes around the table is echoed by the ladies accepting and enjoying the food, while her excessive drinking is immediately followed by the contrasted depiction of the ladies sipping wine sparingly and elegantly: Anne Desbaresdes drinks another full glass of wine, her eyes halfshut. She already can’t help it. She discovers, through drinking, a confirmation of what was until then her obscure desire and a shameful comfort in her discovery. Other women drink in turn, they likewise raise their naked arms, their delectable, irreproachable, but married.33 Anne stands alone against the group, not through a complete rejection of the gastronomic ritual but rather through a hollow performance of the bourgeois meal. As suggested by Sherzer, the true scandal of the meal is that Anne, by her ill-manners and inability to enjoy the meal, sets herself apart from the collective bourgeois eaters and, therefore, sets herself up for social rejection.34 Yet, the scandalous discrepancy is only made possible by the establishment of a form of communication—and maybe communion—between the various women evolving around the dinner scene. As the narrative focalization travels in the chapter, it underlines both the inadequacy of Anne’s

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performance and her insertion into various social groups. Nuancing Sherzer’s reading, Bruce Bassoff construes the dinner scene as emblematic of a tension between togetherness and division, expressed throughout the novel and unfolded through various textual motifs like motherhood or the music score (“partition” in French) from which the child plays.35 For rejection to happen, a certain form of communion has to be established, through the meal and most importantly through the recounting of the meal that suggests that Anne is both part of the community of other women and severed from them. Anne’s symbolical death at the end of the novel is thus only possible through an act of female communion performed through improper consumption. If we agree to read the scene as a suicide, it is an assisted suicide, made possible by the complicity of female actors. In this setting, the mirroring effect of repetition performed at the table (the group of women re-enacting the gastronomic behavior that Anne has failed to do properly) must be understood with respect to the linguistic (re)creation performed in the entire novel, with Anne and Chauvin’s attempting to (re)stage the murder scene through their eroticized conversations. Just as the blanks in the text convey the inevitable inaccuracy of literary imitatio, consumption too should be understood as an attempt at re-enactment that necessarily fails. The devouring of the dead animals at dinner, just like Anne and Chauvin’s faux-fatal kiss in the last pages of the novel, recalls the initial scene of death and desire—the murder of the woman—that launches and carries Moderato Cantabile. The excessive consumption of wine could then also be understood as a re-enactment of the opening murder scene, where wine symbolizes blood.36 By drinking the transubstantiated blood of the dead woman, Anne enters in communion with her, as with the kitchen girls spilling that wine and with the other women seated around the table, even though their manners differ so strikingly. Consequently, gender allows an unexpected overlap between social communities around the table. The break from narrative conventions in the chapter is also a disruption in social conventions: by penetrating into the Desbaresdes’s kitchen, where women cook, it symbolically invites workingclass women to the gastronomic table where the bourgeois guests are seated. This insight into the “back-kitchens” of gastronomy is thus as much a poetic as a sociological twist, bringing the nouveau roman closer to the nouvelle cuisine by opening the scene of aesthetic enjoyment to the kitchen and demanding the active participation of the reader–eater.37 Through the circulation of narration, women from different classes are brought together, as if

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Anne’s individual sensual experience gave her access to a communal female psyche, recalling the connection established through food between Gina, Sara, the maid, and the old woman in LPCT.

The Language of Female Gastronomy The capability of sensuality to account for a communal female experience recurs throughout Duras’s writings about food, where singular female domestic practice at its most material is often haunted by the ghosts of other women. Anne herself is haunted by the projected “memory” of the women who occupied her house before her: “Many women lived in this house before who already heard the privets, at night, instead of their hearts […] they all died in their room.”38 This description is strikingly similar to Duras’s personal account of domesticity. About her house in Neauphle-le-Château, she writes in La Vie matérielle: I saw it inhabited by these women. I saw myself preceded by these women in these same rooms, in these same twilights. There had been nine generations of women before me in between these walls, a lot of people, here, around the fire, children, valets, cow shepherdesses.39 Writing about the house and, most importantly, her domestic activities, cooking being the most developed, the writer is conscious of the connection between her personal, emotional, and sensual experience, and a communal female history, or even consciousness. The connection works both ways: the individual experience unlocks access to communal female consciousness while communal female consciousness accounts for the individual experience, as she declares, “So, you see, I write for nothing. I write as one should write, it seems to me. I don’t even write for women. I write about women to write about me, about me alone through the ages.”40 As a result, writing the feminine is always both individual and collective, a feature brought forth at the table and in the kitchen. In the case of Moderato Cantabile, the female connection established through the text has been understood by Marianne Hirsch as a feminine form of collective storytelling, circulating amongst the female community in the novel as well as amongst Duras’s readers. Informed by feminist psychoanalytical analyses of gender difference, she suggests that “the female sense of

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connection, fluidity, and receptivity becomes here the basis for a distinctive form of reading, ‘female’ in character,” which demands both reception and production to fill in the narrative gaps.41 Hirsch suggests that this communion manifests in the silences in the text. The wordless scream of the dying woman, even more than the bloody kiss, she argues, moves Anne from “separateness to connection” until she can become one with the murdered woman.42 Rather than reading Anne’s silence and inability to express her desire as a failure, Hirsch understands it as a way to merge her identity with that of the murdered—screaming but wordless—woman. If the novel recounts the demise of Anne’s many relationships, those are finally superseded by the female-bond that links her to the murdered victim. The haunting scream, then, echoed throughout the novel by its very absence from the text, is materialized through Anne’s hunger and silences. While Hirsch suggests that the echoes of the wordless female scream materialize “the death of language and literature,”43 they also invite us to reconsider the linguistic leftover, what is being said around the silences, what allows them to become salient. In these two early novels, as in later autobiographical texts, Duras’s narrative experiments with culinary matters are then also experiments with the language of food and gastronomy. Undoing the divide between gastronomic language and literature, the utilitarian prose of the kitchen merges with Duras’s literary voice. This is most striking in La Cuisine de Marguerite, the posthumous collection of recipes and thoughts about food and cooking. Although the book was not compiled by Duras herself, it brings together a series of recipes that she initially thought of including in La Vie matérielle, with excerpts of radio interviews, photos of her kitchen, and manuscript recipes. Written in Duras’s unmistakable style, the recipes sharply differ from what would be found in a typical cookbook. They are full of personal memories, confessed uncertainty, and Duras’s occasional cynical lyricism, as in her long, narrated recipe for cooking rice (“cuisson du riz”).44 Some of them are barely recipes and virtually unusable, like her “so-called Pojardski meatballs” (“boulettes Pojardski soi-disant”), which reads: “Mix together ground veal and milk-soaked bread, some kacha, some buckwheat flour (not much), one or two eggs, tarragon. I didn’t write down the rest. I wrote it only for the word kacha; I don’t know what it is.”45 This collection of recipes from different cultural traditions and sources also makes apparent the culinary community into which the writer is embedded. Through these recipes, attributed to the people who shared them with her, the little book also weaves a community of

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women cooks: “Melina Mercouri, la grand-mère de Michèle Muller, AnneMarie Derumier, Ingrid Therme, une certaine Maria…” Through these careful attributions, we are made to understand that the featured recipes have been cherished and time-tested, that they have previously been shared. If Duras’s recipes are meant to be read rather than cooked, or discussed rather than tasted, it is still important to assert their material existence and gustatory quality. The attribution of the recipes also emphasizes the connections established between women through the sharing of recipes. The importance of “kitchen talk” for female sociability depicted in these texts is central to the dinner in Moderato Cantabile as we have previously discussed. It is also central to LPCT, where the real axis of the intrigue is, arguably, a recipe. It is in fact the recurring motif of the “pâtes aux vongole,” deployed through the novel to crystalize sexual, generational, and social tensions that ends up bringing the old couple the peace they need to sign the death declaration and finally leave the village. The old mother speaks very little in the entire novel, her moaning and crying being “translated” by her husband or by the old grocer who has decided to keep them company. When the motif of the “pâtes aux vongole” comes back at the end of the novel, she suddenly speaks to ask Gina for her recipe. The unexpected ensuing conversation encourages the old woman, Gina, her maid, and even Ludi to try to reconstruct the recipe together. The introduction of kitchen talk marks a breaking point in the linguistic and narrative order of the novel, as underlined by the narrative voice, with the repetition of “suddenly” (“tout à coup” in the original French) and its insistence on exceptionality: He turned towards the old lady who had suddenly started to look alive again, when she heard them talk about vongole. “I meant to ask you, she said suddenly, the vongole, do you cook them before or after the tomato?” It was the first time since the child had died that she spoke in this almost casual manner. Gina shuddered from head to toes.46 Here, female solidarity in pain is manifested in the text by a merging of different forms, which are normally strictly separated. The entire novel unfolds to this point, with this mundane conversation between two women who share a recipe that will singly account for their charged summer together. The memory of shared pain is transformed into the recipe as a promise to

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keep sharing after their departure. The exchange leaves strong-headed and stone-hearted Gina in tears. Here, the novel suddenly takes on the aspect of a cookbook by accounting for all that weighs in the culinary experience, from the generosity of cooking to that of sharing a recipe, subsumed in another character’s enigmatic declaration that: “literature can be made just as well with vongole” (“la littérature se fait aussi bien avec des vongole”).47 Cooking, then, is akin to writing. In a 1980 interview for France Inter, Duras says so herself, declaring: “You want to know why I cook? Because I like it so much … [The kitchen] is the most contradictory place to that of writing and yet, one finds the same solitude when cooking, the same inventiveness … One is an author.”48 She refines this thought in La Vie matérielle, noting: “In Neauphle, often, I would cook in the early afternoon. It was at the same time a happiness and a very precise state of abandon to a thought in the making. It was a way of thinking or of not thinking, maybe—there isn’t much difference—and already, of writing.”49

Feeding on Words Reconciling the anguish of the meal scene in Duras’s fiction with the pleasure of eating and cooking manifest in her autobiographical accounts reveals an inherent tension surrounding consumption and hunger. Evoking food, Duras is conscious of an aspect of feminine life traditionally absent from literature, another feminine where nourishing and devouring are often recurring tropes. Around food, female sensuality is simultaneously marked by anguish, pain, desire, and pleasure. Cooking and gastronomy endow the modernist writer with a new literary and textual material with which to experiment. Cooking in fact is often presented as a match to writing, a mise en abyme of the female relationship to written and spoken language. Consequently, reading desire in the novel from the perspective of gastronomy, a codified and ritualized science of consumption, reveals how the circulation of improper hungers recasts the relationship between the subject and the community through language. Drawing the reader’s attention to language—through fault lines, discontinuities, incongruities, repetitions, silences—is a way to make heard and make seen the mute and the invisible. Duras’s self-designating silences draw attention to the act of hiding so what’s hidden can suddenly be seen anew, so silences can be heard. Sensuality comes from the omission of a direct, shown engagement with matter; it comes from an overabundant yet

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refrained language. Duras’s female characters are not depicted eating and we get no description of their own enjoyment of food. In fact, they are often sickened by food, on the verge of nausea or suicide. The sensual enjoyment comes from the language surrounding the meal. Duras’s kitchen talk, then—a form of feminine infra-language set at the margins of the text and in its glaring blanks—redefines the boundaries of the gastronomic and literary experience, undoing social, gendered, and aesthetic divides.

Notes

Introducing Le Menu: Consuming Modernist Food Studies Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929), 10. See, for example, Gregory Castle’s chapter in this collection titled “What Is Eating For? Food and Function in James Joyce’s Fiction”; Aida Yared, “Eating and Digesting ‘Lestrygonians’: A Physiological Model of Reading,” James Joyce Quarterly 46.3–4 (2009): 469–79; and Petru Golban, “James Joyce the Condition of Modern Man: Hunger, Food and Eating Revealing Self-Identity and Inter-Human Relationship in Lestrygonians,” Dumlupinar Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 31 (2011): 191–202. For more on Joyce and food, see Lindsey Tucker, Stephen and Bloom at Life’s Feast: Alimentary Symbolism and the Creative Process in James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984); Miriam O’Kane Mara, “James Joyce and the Politics of Food,” New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua 13.4 (2009): 94–110; Hsing-Chun Chou, “‘I Eat; Therefore I Am’—Molly and Food,” EurAmerica 42.3 (2012): 459–96; Helen O’Connell, “‘Food Values’: Joyce and Dietary Revival,” in James Joyce in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Nash (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 135; and Peter Adkins, “The Eyes of That Cow: Eating Animals and Theorizing Vegetarianism in James Joyce’s Ulysses,” Humanities 6.46 (2017): 1–15. 3 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Random–Vintage, 1986), 135: 494. 4 Joyce, Ulysses, 8: 741. 5 Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 96. 6 Joyce, Ulysses, 147: 1042. 7 Joyce, Ulysses, 144: 897–900. 1 2

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8 Joyce, Ulysses, 144: 904–5. 9 Joyce, Ulysses, 144: 906–7. 10 Joyce, Ulysses, 142: 795. 11 Joyce, Ulysses, 144: 896–97. 12 See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), ix–xiii. 13 Joyce, Ulysses, 45: 1. 14 James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 60. 15 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway ([1925] e-pub: University of Adelaide), accessed February 18, 2018, https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/ virginia/w91md. 16 Along with Joyce and Woolf, previous writings about modernism and food tended to focus on Beckett. In particular, see Laura Salisbury, “Bulimic Beckett: Food for Thought and the Archive of Analysis,” Critical Quarterly 53.3 (2011): 60–80; Chapter 2, “Samuel Beckett’s Alimentary Cogito,” in Maria Christou, Eating Otherwise: The Philosophy of Food in Twentieth-Century Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 57–90; and Younghee Kho, “Humans in the Food Economy: The Famine, Biopower, and Beckett’s Imagination of Post-colonial State in Watt,” English Studies 100.1 (2019): 75–89. 17 Samuel Beckett, Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1957), 1–2. 18 Pierre Bourdieu acknowledged the link between taste and middle-class values in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 19 One notable exception to this statement is Allison Carruth, “War Rations and the Food Politics of Late Modernism,” Modernism/modernity 16.4 (2009): 767–95, doi:10.1353/mod.0.0139 (accessed February 14, 2019), which was later turned into a chapter in her book Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 49–89. Carruth devotes a third of journal article (and chapter) to Fisher’s contribution to late modernism and in particular her transatlantic links to modernism, especially in connection with the politics of wartime gastronomy, and acknowledges Fisher’s “intervention in both culinary literature and literary high modernism” (777). Another notable chapter is “M. F. K. Fisher’s Culinary Memoirs,” in Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Donna Lee Brien, eds., The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food (New York: Routledge, 2018). While this chapter examines M. F. K. Fisher’s non-fiction as an intervention in literary food studies, similar to other scholarship of Fisher’s work, the connection to her contribution and placement within modernism and particularly modernist food studies remains largely tangential. See also Susan Derwin, “The Poetics of M. F. K. Fisher,” Style 37.3 (2003): 266–78. 20 W. H. Auden, “The Kitchen of Life,” Forewords and Afterwords, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1973), 485. For original publication, see

Notes to pages 6–8

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29

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W. H. Auden, Foreword to M. F. K. Fisher, The Art of Eating (London: Faber & Faber, 1963). Joan Reardon, Poet of the Appetites: The Lives and Loves of M. F. K. Fisher (New York: North Point Press, 2004). Carruth, “War Rations and the Food Politics of Late Modernism,” 777. Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, The Art of Eating ([1954] Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004), xxx. Gertrude Stein, “American Food and Houses,” in How Writing Is Written, vol. 2 of The Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1974). M. F. K. Fisher, Foreword to The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book ([1954] New York: Harper, 1984), 3. M. F. K. Fisher, Preface to The Gastronomical Me ([1943] London: Daunt Books, 2017), xv. Ellipses: author’s emphasis. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA 123.3 (2008): 737–38. Many disparate articles and chapters exist examining the links between modernism (see n. 29 for extensive list). Regardless, substantial studies (books, special issues, or collections) on the topic remain few and largely focus on literary representations of food in the twentieth century (including chapters with modernist writers). See Andrew Warnes, Hunger Overcome? Food and Resistance in Twentieth Century African American Literature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004); Tomoko Aoyama, Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature (Honolulu: Hawaii University Press, 2008); Michel Delville, Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption: Eating the Avant-Garde (London: Routledge, 2008); Andrea Adolph, Food and Femininity in Twentieth-Century British Women’s Fiction (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); Christou, Eating Otherwise; Catherine Keyser, Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). Notable articles and book chapters conjoining modernism and food that are not listed in other notes include: Lawrence S. Rainey, “Eliot among the Typists: Writing The Waste Land,” Modernism/modernity 12.1 (2005): 27– 84; Jennifer Fleissner, “Henry James and the Art of Eating,” elh 75.1 (2008): 27– 62; Harriet Blodgett, “Food for Thought in Virginia Woolf ’s Novels,” Women’s Studies Annual, vol. 3 (1997): 45–60; Janine Utell, “Meals and Mourning in Woolf ’s The Waves,” College Literature 35.2 (2008): 1–19; Michael Hollington, “Food, Modernity, Modernism: D. H. Lawrence and the Futurist Cookbook,” in The Pleasures and Horrors of Eating: The Cultural History of Eating in Anglophone Literature, eds. Marion Gymnich and Norbert Lennartz (Bonn: Bonn University Press, 2010), 305–21; Sonya Posmentier, “The Provision Ground in New York: Claude McKay and the Form of Memory,” American Literature 84.2 (2012): 273–300. Over the past five years, Catherine Keyser has written a few articles on modernist food studies: “An All-Too-Moveable Feast: Ernest

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Hemingway and the Stakes of Terroir,” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities  2.1 (2014); “Bottles, Bubbles, and Blood: Jean Toomer and the Limits of Racial Epidermalism,” Modernism/modernity 22.2 (2015): 279–302; “Candy Boys and Chocolate Factories: Roald Dahl, Racialization, and Global Industry,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 63.3 (2017): 403–28; “Visceral Encounters: Critical Race Studies and Modern Food Literature,” in Food and Literature, ed. Gitanjali G. Shahani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 147–68. 30 Another special journal issue titled “Modernist Food Studies” is due out with Modernism/modernity later in 2019. 31 See J. Michelle Coghlan, “Tasting Modernism: An Introduction,” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 2.1 (2014): 1–9. Coghlan, as well as others in n. 29, has referenced Maud Ellmann’s The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) as an early example where Ellmann locates hunger as an animation of artistic motivation and interlocution for the modernists Joyce, Yeats, and Kafka, among others. 32 See, for example, Nathan Myhrvold’s contemporary multi-volume series about molecular gastronomy titled Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, vols. 1–6 (Bellevue, WA: Cooking Lab, 2011). Resurrecting the term “modernist” as a contemporary marker of cuisine suggests the interplay between innovation, elasticity, and the avant-garde. See also Rachel Laudan’s use of modernism in a similar way in “A Plea for Culinary Modernism: Why We Should Love New, Fast, Processed Food,” Gastronomica 1.1 (2001): 36–44. 33 Modernism and Food Studies was released the same month as this volume went to press. This overview provides a context for Gastro-Modernism but, unfortunately, due to the timing, I could not extensively link the two volumes as building blocks on one another. 34 Jessica Martell, Adam Fajardo, and Philip Keel Geheber, Introduction to Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant-Garde, ed. Jessica Martell, Adam Fajardo, and Philip Keel Geheber (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2019), 3. 35 Martell, Fajardo, and Geheber, “Introduction,” 4. 36 Christou, Eating Otherwise, 4. 37 Lindsay Neill, Jill Poulston, Nigel Hemmington, Christine Hall, and Suzanne Bliss, “Gastronomy of Food Studies: A Case of Academic Distinction,” Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Education 29.2 (2017), 92. 38 Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Philosopher in the Kitchen, trans. Anne Drayton ([1825] Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 52. See also Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste: Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, trans. M. F. K. Fisher ([1889] New York: Everyman’s, 1949). 39 Other scholarship has claimed that gastronomy remains difficult to define in the context of consumption, tourism, regionality, and culture. See Cailein

Notes to pages 10–13

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53 54

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Gillespie, European Gastronomy into the 21st Century (Oxford: ButterworthHeinemann, 2001), 2 and Barbara Santich, “The Study of Gastronomy and its Relevance to Hospitality Education and Training,” International Journal of Hospitality Management 23 (2004), 15. Neill et al., “Gastronomy or Food Studies,” 92. Parama Roy, Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 12. Jonathan Deutsch and J. Miller, “Food Studies: A Multidisciplinary Guide to the Literature,” Choice 45 (2007): 392–401. See also Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985). Ken Albala, Introduction to Routledge International Handbook of Food Studies, ed. Ken Albala (New York: Routledge, 2013), 1. J. Brady, “Cooking as Inquiry: A Method to Stir Up Prevailing Ways of Knowing Food, Body, and Identity,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 10 (2011), 323. Richard Wilk, “The Limits of Discipline: Towards Interdisciplinary Food Studies,” Physiology & Behaviour 107.4 (2012): 471. Wilk, “The Limits of Discipline,” 473. Neill et al., “Gastronomy or Food Studies,” 94 and Charlotte Maberly and Donald Reid, “Gastronomy: An Approach to Studying Food,” Nutrition & Food Science 44.4 (2014): 272–78. Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber, “Feminist Food Studies: A Brief History,” in From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food, eds. A. V. Avakian and B. Haber (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 1–26. Maberly and Reid also provide a list of four main elements to gastronomy: food and drink: the relationship to people and place; the science of food; the system: from field to market; food communications and consumption. Notably, this list omits socio-cultural dimensions of gastronomy. See “Gastronomy: An Approach to Studying Food,” 275–76. Deutsch and Miller, “Food Studies,” 366. See also Neill et al., “Gastronomy or Food Studies,” 94. Wilk, “The Limits of Discipline,” 471–75. Joan Fitzpatrick, “Food and Literature: An Overview,” in Routledge International Handbook of Food Studies, ed. Albala, 123. Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “Literary Approaches to Food Studies,” Food, Culture & Society 8.2 (2005): 244. Amy L. Tigner and Allison Carruth, Literature and Food Studies (New York: Routledge, 2018), 1. See Tompkins, “Literary Approaches to Food Studies,” 243–58; Joan Fitzpatrick, Food in Shakespeare: Early Modern Dietaries and the Plays (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Donna Lee Brien, eds., The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food (New York: Routledge, 2018) and Gitanjali Shahani, ed., Food and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University

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Press, 2018). One exception to this timeline is the first primary study linking food and literature. See David Bevan, ed., Literary Gastronomy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988). 55 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1982). 56 Bee Wilson, Foreword to M. F. K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me, ix. Chapter One: Sweet Bean Paste and Excrement: Food, Humor, and Gender in Osaki Midori’s Writings Tomoko Aoyama 1

Osaki is the author’s surname and Midori is her given name. In this chapter I cite authors of Japanese-language publications according to the Japanese convention: the surname followed by the given name. Authors writing in the English language, including myself, tend to adopt the Anglicized name order, and such publications will be cited in English name order. In the endnotes, to avoid any confusion, a comma is placed after the surname (e.g., Osaki, Midori). Osaki is the correct reading of the Chinese characters for this author’s name, although the more common Ozaki has also been used, especially in older references. 2 Tomoko Aoyama, “Translating Humour in Kanai Mieko’s Texts,” in Translation, Transnationalism and World Literature: Essays in Translation Studies (2011–2014), eds. Francesca Benocci and Marco Sonzogni (Novi Ligure: Edizioni Joker, 2015), 43. The “afterlife” of translation refers to Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” [first printed as the Introduction to a Baudelaire translation, 1923], in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. and Introduction Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 69–82. 3 Only a small number of Osaki’s works are available in English translation: Midori Osaki, “Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense,” trans. Kyoko Selden and Alisa Freedman, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 27 (2015): 220–74; Midori Ozaki, “Shoes Fit for a Poet,” trans. Seiji Lippit, in Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913–1938, ed. William J. Tyler (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008), 83–91; “Miss Cricket,” trans. Seiji M. Lippit, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 12 (2004): 22–31; Midori Ozaki, “Osmanthus,” trans. Miriam Silverberg, Manoa 3.2 (1991): 181–90. 4 About this journal, see the special issue of Japan Forum 25.3 (2013). 5 Hanada, Kiyoteru, “Kaisetsu,” originally published in Shin’ei bungaku sōsho 2 Abe Kōbō shū (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1960), included with a new title, “Buraamusu wa osuki,” in Osaki Midori zenshū, Osaki, Midori (Tokyo: Sōjusha, 1979). 6 Livia Monnet, “Montage, Cinematic Subjectivity and Feminism in Ozaki Midori’s Drifting in the World of the Seventh Sense,” Japan Forum 11.1 (2007): 57–58.

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7 The most detailed and sustained discussion of humor in Osaki’s texts is found in Doi, Yoshihira, Osaki Midori to Hanada Kiyoteru (Tokyo: Hokuto Shuppan, 2002). 8 See, for example, Yagawa, Sumiko, Nomizo Naoko to iu hito: Arakeshi madoi (Tokyo: Shōbunsha, 1990); Kawasaki, Kenko, Shōjo biyori (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 1990); Takahara, Eiri, Shōjo ryōiki (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 1999). Each has a chapter on Osaki. Iida, Yūko, “Yūho suru shōjo-tachi: Osaki Midori to furanūru,” in Shōjo shōnen no poritikusu, eds. Shimamura, Teru, Takahashi, Osamu, and Nakagawa, Akihiko, 80–107 (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2009) cites Kawasaki and several other important critical studies including Ubukata Tomoko, Kotani Mari, Kurosawa Ariko, and Livia Monnet. In English, Kawasaki Kenko, “Osaki Midori and the Role of the Girl in Shōwa Modernism,” trans. Lucy Fraser and Tomoko Aoyama, Asian Studies Review 32.3 (2008): 293–306. 9 Kawasaki, Kenko, Osaki Midori: Sakyū no kanata e (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2010), especially its chapter 5, 331–433, is an engaging discussion of the reading–(re)writing within Osaki’s texts. Doi, Osaki Midori to Hanada Kiyoteru examines humor, parody, and intertextuality. Hitomi Yoshio’s Ph.D. thesis, “Envisioning Women Writers: Female Authorship and the Cultures of Publishing and Translation in Early Twentieth Century Japan,” Columbia University, 2012 has a chapter on Osaki, “Gender, Genre, and Global Imagination: The Modernist Writings of Osaki Midori,” 211–70. 10 Osaki, Midori, Teihon Osaki Midori zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1998), vol. 1, 26. My translation. 11 See Osaki, Teihon Osaki Midori zenshū, vol. 1, 15, 231–36; Ozaki, “Osmanthus.” 12 J. Thomas Rimer and Van C. Gessel, eds., Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 50. The translator of this poem is Leith Morton. Although Shimazaki is the surname of this writer, he is usually referred to by his pen name (gagō) Tōson. 13 See Tomoko Aoyama, “The Divided Appetite: ‘Eating’ in the Literature of the 1920s,” in Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s, eds. Elise K. Tipton and John Clark (Sydney: Australian Humanities Research Foundation, 2000), 164–65. 14 Kawasaki, Shōjo biyori, 42. Kawasaki expands her discussion in “Osaki Midori and the Role of the Girl,” 297–302 and Osaki Midori: Sakyū no kanata e, 281–93. 15 Osaki, Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, 224. 16 Osaki, Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, 224. 17 As many critics have noted, numbers ichi (one), ni (two), san (three), and go (five) are embedded in these names. Six, eight, and nine also appear in other names of the characters in the Machiko cycle. 18 Kawasaki, “Osaki Midori and the Role of the Girl,” 301. 19 Osaki, Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, 240. See also the translators’ note no. 14 about the word play involving the name of the mountain, ibid., 274. The translated title of the second project has been slightly modified.

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Notes to pages 26–32

20 Osaki, Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, 232. 21 Osaki, Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, 232. 22 For discussions of food in the proletarian and popular literature of the 1920s and 1930s, see Aoyama, “The Divided Appetite,” and Reading Food, chapters 2 and 4. 23 Osaki, Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, 240. 24 Osaki, Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, 238. 25 See the first chapter of Honda,Masuko, Ibunka to shite no kodomo (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, Chikuma gakugei bunko, 1992), 16–49. The book was originally published in 1982. 26 Honda, Ibunka to shite no kodomo, 38–39. 27 Honda, Ibunka to shite no kodomo, 45. 28 Kawasaki, Osaki Midori: Sakyū no kanata e, 170. 29 Doi, Osaki Midori to Hanada Kiyoteru, 88–96. 30 Osaki, Teihon Osaki Midori zenshū, vol. 1, 378. 31 Kawasaki, Osaki Midori: Sakyū no kanata e, 313. 32 Osaki, Teihon Osaki Midori zenshū, vol. 1, 379. 33 Osaki, Teihon Osaki Midori zenshū, vol. 1, 380. 34 Osaki, Teihon Osaki Midori zenshū, vol. 1, 379–80. 35 Kawasaki, Osaki Midori: Sakyū no kanata e, 314. 36 Ozaki, “Miss Cricket,” 38. Translated by Seiji Lippit. 37 Ozaki, “Miss Cricket,” 35. 38 Ozaki, “Miss Cricket,” 36. Fiona Macleod’s stories were translated by Matsumura Mineko (aka Katayama Hiroko, 1878–1957). See Kawasaki, Osaki Midori, 382–83, 431. Kawasaki believes that Osaki’s reference to Sharp/ Macleod is partly an homage to Katayama/Matsuura, who played an important role in running the literary magazine, Hi no tori (Firebird), which published “Kōrogi-jō.” 39 Ozaki, “Miss Cricket,” 39. 40 Ozaki, “Miss Cricket,” 40. 41 Ozaki, “Miss Cricket,” 44. 42 Ozaki, “Miss Cricket,” 44. 43 Ozaki, “Miss Cricket,” 44. 44 Kondō, Hiroko, “Modan toshi no gurume annaiki,” in Gurume annaiki, ed. Kondō Hiroko, Korekushon modan toshi bunka, 13 (Tokyo: Yumani Shobō, 2004), 649. 45 Mieko Kanai, Oh, Tama!, trans. Tomoko Aoyama and Paul McCarthy (Fukuoka: Kurodahan Press, 2014), 110. The novel was the winner of the 1988 Women’s Literature Prize. 46 For more, see Aoyama, “Translating Humour in Kanai Mieko’s Texts.” 47 Murata, Kiyoko, “In the Pot,” trans. Kyoko Iriye Selden, in Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction, eds. Noriko Mizuta Lippit and Kyoko Iriye Selden (Abingdon and New York: Taylor & Francis, 2015), 220.

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48 This novella, which was the winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, was adapted as Kurosawa Akira’s film, Hachigatsu no rapusodii (Rhapsody in August, 1991). While retaining the plot outline, Kurosawa added a significant new element: the memory of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Grandmother’s name in the story, Hanayama Nae, which literally means Flower-hill Seedling, is changed to Kane (bell, gong). Girl motifs, which are strongly evident in the texts of Osaki and Murata are absent in Kurosawa’s film. 49 Murata, Kiyoko, “Kinkotsu to hanataba: Osaki Midori seitan 120-nen kinen fōramu yori,” Subaru 39.5 (2017), 96–104. 50 A set of double DVDs with this film and Kōrogi-jō is available from Tantansha. Chapter Two: What Is Eating For? Food and Function in James Joyce’s Fiction Gregory Castle Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ed. John Paul Riquelme (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998), 63. 2 In Roman Polanski’s 1979 film adaptation of Hardy’s novel, Nastassja Kinski deftly captures this disorientation in Tess’s gestures and gaze: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=tbF6YoEsfKc. 3 On free indirect and narrated monologue, see Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 13–14. 4 On “inner sense,” understood as “the reality of myself and my state,” see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s, 1965), 80. 5 On the represented and expressed worlds in the aesthetic object, see Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. E. S. Casey (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 166–98. 6 Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, 187. 7 Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, 186. On possible worlds theory, which Dufrenne limns here, see Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978) and Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 8 Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, 155. 9 Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, 190, 170. “A subject always appears in the aesthetic object,” Dufrenne writes, “and that is why one is able to speak indifferently of a world of the creator or of a world of the work” (196). 10 According to Ian Watt, the transition to a realist attitude toward objects came about when writers ceased to treat style as a reflection of “the linguistic decorum appropriate to its subject” and chose instead to use language 1

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“almost entirely” in “a descriptive and denotative” fashion. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, 2nd ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 29. 11 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York and London: Verso, 1989), 194; first emphasis mine. The pseudo-thing, an enigmatic object misrecognized as a thing, is a species of the sublime object, one in which deliberation rather than chance plays the dominant role. 12 On the everyday quality of food and its aesthetic value, see Emily Brady, “Smells, Tastes, and Everyday Aesthetics,” in The Philosophy of Food, ed. David Kaplan (Berkeley and California: University of California Press, 2012), 69. 13 James Joyce, Ulysses ([1934. Reset and corrected 1961] New York: Vintage– Random, 1990), 176. 14 “The singular being of sense,” writes Hegel, “does indeed vanish in the dialectical movement of immediate certainty and becomes universality, but it is only a sensuous universality.” Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 77; author’s emphasis. The state of vanishing is the state of becoming, of transition and passage between subject and object; as such, it has “not merely a negative but a ­positive meaning” (479). 15 David Kaplan, “Introduction: The Philosophy of Food,” in The Philosophy of Food, 4. 16 Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2001), 4; my emphases. 17 Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), 169. 18 Brown, A Sense of Things, 155–68. 19 Bill Brown, Other Things (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 62. 20 Maria Christou, Eating Otherwise: The Philosophy of Food in TwentiethCentury Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 2. 21 Christou, Eating Otherwise, 21. 22 Christou, Eating Otherwise, 28. 23 Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,” in Image—Music—Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 124. 24 See, for example, the essays collected in Food and Literature, ed. Gitanjali Shahani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2018). 25 Jacques Lacan speaks of “the ‘button tie’ [point de capiton], by which the signifier stops the otherwise indefinite sliding of signification.” “Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2002), 291. 26 Lauren Rich, “A Table for One: Hunger and Unhomeliness in Joyce’s Public Eateries,” Joyce Studies Annual (2010), 73.

Notes to pages 39–43

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27 Rich, “A Table for One, 78. For a similar argument, see Deeprika Bahri, “Postcolonial Hunger,” in Shahani, Food and Literature, 335–51. 28 James Joyce, Dubliners: Text, Criticism and Notes, eds. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 57. 29 Rich, “A Table for One,” 81. 30 Joyce, Dubliners, 58. 31 According to Simon Joyce, in Modernism and Naturalism in British and Irish Fiction, 1880–1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), a form of “introjected naturalism,” whereby “external determinations get internalized,” allows Joyce to express his protagonists’ struggle to articulate their own experience (see 108–18). 32 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. John Paul Riquelme (New York: Norton, 2007), 187. 33 James Joyce, Stephen Hero, eds. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1959), 211. I explore Stephen’s changing attitude toward objects in my article, “The Consolation of Objects in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses,” Twentieth-Century Literature 63.3 (2017): 267–98. 34 Joyce, Dubliners, 108. 35 Joyce, Dubliners, 108–9. 36 Rich, “A Table for One,” 80. 37 Joyce, Dubliners, 112. 38 Joyce, Dubliners, 117. 39 Joyce, Dubliners, 108. 40 Joyce, Dubliners, 117. 41 Valérie Loichot, “The Ethics of Eating Together: The Case of French Postcolonial Literature,” in Shahani, Food and Literature, 170. 42 Joyce, Dubliners, 101. 43 Joyce, Dubliners, 102. 44 Joyce, Dubliners, 103–4. 45 Joyce, Dubliners, 475. 46 Joyce, Dubliners, 196. 47 Joyce, Dubliners, 198. 48 The best example of this tradition is Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”: “There never was such a goose. Bob [Cratchit] said he didn’t believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration” (A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books [New York: Vintage–Random House, 2011], 51–52). 49 Joyce, Dubliners, 175. 50 Joyce, Dubliners, 191, 185. On the problem of generosity and the function of Gabriel’s seemingly ungenerous persona, see Vincent Pecora, “‘The Dead’ and the Generosity of the Word,” PMLA 101 (1986): 233–45. 51 Joyce, Dubliners, 223.

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Notes to pages 43–52

52 Joyce, Dubliners, 110. 53 Joyce, A Portrait, 25. 54 Joyce, A Portrait, 25. 55 Joyce, A Portrait, 28. 56 Joyce, A Portrait, 151. 57 Helen O’Connell, “‘Food Values’: Joyce and Dietary Revival,” in James Joyce in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Nash (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 142. 58 Joyce, A Portrait, 195. 59 Joyce, Ulysses, 12. 60 Joyce, Ulysses, 12–13. Joyce’s emphasis. 61 Joyce, Ulysses, 15. 62 Joyce, Ulysses, 58. 63 Joyce, Ulysses, 55. 64 Joyce, Ulysses, 55. 65 Joyce, Ulysses, 56. 66 Joyce, Ulysses, 59. 67 Joyce, Ulysses, 60. 68 Joyce, Ulysses, 79. 69 Joyce, Ulysses, 169. 70 Rich suggests that there is “a political dimension to Joyce’s critique of the Burton that most critics failed to notice. Alongside the nauseating (as it seems to Bloom) imagery, runs a narrative of hunger. … [A] closer reading [of “Lestrygonians”] evokes colonial Ireland’s ongoing struggle against political oppression and famine” (“A Table for One,” 87). 71 Joyce, Ulysses, 174–75. 72 Joyce, Ulysses, 175. 73 Joyce, Ulysses, 175–76. 74 Joyce, Ulysses, 782. 75 Joyce, Ulysses, 176. 76 Joyce, Ulysses, 176. 77 Joyce, Ulysses, 285. 78 Joyce, Ulysses, 183. 79 Joyce, Stephen Hero, 211. 80 Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, 155. 81 Joyce, Ulysses, 731. 82 Joyce, Ulysses, 732. 83 Joyce, Ulysses, 622.

Notes to pages 53–57

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Chapter Three: A Woolf at the Table: Virginia Woolf and the Domestic Dinner Party Lauren Rich 1 Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (London: Hogarth Press, 1924), 4. 2 Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 2, Living and Cooking, trans. Timothy Tomasik (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 3 Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, 5. 4 Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, 5. 5 Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, 5. 6 Because the shared meals in The Waves take place in a public restaurant rather than at a domestic dinner party, they fall outside the scope of this chapter. In “Meals and Mourning in Woolf ’s The Waves,” College Literature 35.2 (2008): 10, Janine Utell makes a case for the consolatory power of meals in The Waves as death rituals. Although Utell does not historicize the ritualism of Woolf ’s meals, she notes that food, for Woolf, “can show communion or the lack thereof,” and she resists the facile notion that the novel’s shared meals provide satisfying closure to grief. 7 Sidney Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Power, and the Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 7. 8 Isabella Beeton, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management: Abridged Edition, ed. Nicola Humble (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 39. 9 Woolf, “Professions for Women,” in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1974), 237. 10 Colin Spencer, British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 304. 11 Alison Light’s remarkable book Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury (Bloomsbury Press, 2009) offers a detailed account of Woolf ’s complex attitude towards servant-keeping and her complicated relationships with the people whose labor enabled her own. 12 Spencer, British Food, 312. 13 Spencer, British Food, 284. 14 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1972), 204. 15 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Writings (New York: Random House, 2002), 45. 16 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Random–Vintage, 1986), 59, 138. 17 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1981), 20–21. 18 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, 1925–30, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1980), 12–13.

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Notes to pages 57–61

19 It is worth noting that several of Woolf ’s short stories explicitly compare partygoers to insects: fragile Lily Everit dreams of metamorphosing into a butterfly in “The Introduction,” and the self-conscious Mabel Waring compares herself to a drowning fly in “The New Dress.” 20 Suzette Henke, “Mrs Dalloway: The Communion of Saints,” in New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, ed. Jane Marcus (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1981); Christopher Ames, The Life of the Party: Festive Vision in Modern Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991). 21 Ames, The Life of the Party: Festive Vision in Modern Fiction, 82. 22 Emily Blair, Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 188. 23 Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 122. 24 Blair, Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel, 198. 25 Blair, Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel, 234. 26 Patricia Novillo-Corvalan, “Empire and Commerce in Latin America: ­Historicising Woolf ’s The Voyage Out,” Woolf Studies Annual 23 (2017): 33–60. 27 Brett Rutherford, “Virginia Woolf ’s Egyptomania: Echoes of The Book of the Dead in To the Lighthouse,” Woolf Studies Annual 24 (2018): 135–63. 28 Ashley Nadeau, “Exploring Women: Virginia Woolf ’s Imperial Revisions from The Voyage Out to Mrs. Dalloway,” Modern Language Studies 44.21 (2014): 14–35, accessed July 20, 2018, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24616749; Valerie Reed Hickman, “Clarissa and the Coolies’ Wives: Mrs. Dalloway Figuring Transnational Feminism,” Modern Fiction Studies 60.1 (2014): 52–77, accessed July 20, 2018, https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/29595. 29 Pamela Caughie and Diana Swanson, eds., Virginia Woolf: Writing the World (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015). 30 Virginia Woolf, compositional notes for Mrs. Dalloway from the Berg manuscript, quoted in Stella McNichol, Introduction to Mrs. Dalloway’s Party, ed. Stella McNichol (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2001), 8. 31 Stella McNichol, Introduction to Mrs. Dalloway’s Party, 2. 32 Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 195. 33 Sylvia Lovegren, Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 17. 34 Woolf, “The Man Who Loved His Kind,” Mrs. Dalloway’s Party, 33. 35 Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners (New York: Penguin, 1992), 3. 36 Woolf, “The Introduction,” Mrs. Dalloway’s Party, 42. 37 Woolf, “Together and Apart,” Mrs. Dalloway’s Party, 58. 38 Woolf, “The New Dress,” Mrs. Dalloway’s Party, 64. 39 Woolf, “The New Dress,” 62–64. 40 Allie Glenny, Ravenous Identity: Anorexic Eating and Eating Distress in the Life and Work of Virginia Woolf (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 138.

Notes to pages 61–74

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41 Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 166. 42 Mary Douglas, Implicit Meanings: Selected Essays in Anthropology (New York: Routledge, 1975), 41. 43 Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 165. 44 Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 166. 45 Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 165. 46 Visser, The Rituals of Dinner, 184–85. 47 Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 41. 48 Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 185–86. 49 Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 31. 50 Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 112. 51 Woolf, “A Summing Up,” Mrs. Dalloway’s Party, 78. 52 Woolf, “A Summing Up,” 78–79. 53 Woolf, “A Summing Up,” 80. 54 Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1981), 3. 55 Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 97. 56 Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 110–11. 57 Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 128. 58 Woolf, “Professions for Women,” The Death of the Moth, 236–38. Chapter Four: The Social and Cultural Uses of Food Separation Peter Childs James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 2–3. 2 Vernon, Hunger, 60. 3 E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), 250. 4 Sharman Apt Russell, Hunger: An Unnatural History (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 75. 5 Cary Franklin, “Marketing Edwardian Feminism: Dora Marsden, Votes for Women and the Freewoman,” Women’s History Review 11.4 (2002): 633. 6 Virginia Woolf, The Years (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), 163. 7 See Sigal Gooldi, “Fasting Women, Living Skeletons and Hunger Artists: Spectacles of Body and Miracles at the Turn of a Century.” Body and Society 9.2 (2003): 27–53. 8 Russell, Hunger, 55. 9 Russell, Hunger, 5. 10 Forster, A Passage to India, 67. 11 Forster, A Passage to India, 61. 12 Forster, A Passage to India, 140–41. 13 E. M. Forster, Howards End (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 110. 14 Joseph Conrad, Almayer’s Folly (London: Dent, 1995), 78 and 162. 15 Joseph, Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 276. 1

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Notes to pages 74–77

16 Joseph Conrad, “Falk: A Reminiscence,” in Typhoon and Other Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 133–34. 17 Conrad, “Falk,” 134. 18 See Tracy J. R. Collins, “Eating, Food, and Starvation References in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness,’” Conradiana 30.2 (1998): 52–64. 19 Conrad, “Falk,” 192. 20 See Paul Vlitos, “Conrad’s Ideas of Gastronomy: Dining in ‘Falk,’” Victorian Literature and Culture 36.2 (2008): 433–49. 21 Conrad, “Falk,” 192. 22 Conrad, “Falk,” 105–6. 23 Conrad, “Falk,” 184. 24 Conrad, “Falk,” 182. 25 Conrad, “Falk,” 134. 26 Tony Tanner, “‘Gnawed Bones’ and ‘Artless Tales’: Eating and Narrative in Conrad,” in Joseph Conrad: A Commemoration, ed. Norman Sherry, 17–36 (London: Macmillan, 1976), 35. 27 Tanner, “‘Gnawed Bones’ and ‘Artless Tales,’” 26. 28 George Bernard Shaw, The Diaries 1885–1897, ed. Stanley Weintraub (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), accessed October 25, 2016, http://www.ivu.org/history/shaw/diaries.html. 29 Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 2005), 21. 30 See Roger Poole, The Unknown Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 148–49. 31 D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 354. 32 Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 684–85. 33 Mansfield, The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, 686. 34 Lorna Piatti-Farnell, “A Taste of Conflict: Food, History and Popular Culture in Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction,” Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (2012): 79. 35 Diane E. McGee, Writing the Meal: Dinner in the Fiction of Early TwentiethCentury Women Writers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 81. 36 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Grafton, 1989), 24 and Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (London: Grafton, 1978), 95. 37 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (London: Grafton, 1976), 115. 38 E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941), 18. 39 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 150. 40 Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 151. 41 Katherine Mansfield, Selected Letters, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 176.

Notes to pages 78–87

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42 E. M. Forster, “Porridge or prunes, sir?” in Food and Wine, 21–24 (April 1939), reprinted in The Faber Book of Food, eds. Colin Spencer and Claire Clifton (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), 81–83, 82. 43 Arabella Boxer, Book of English Food: A Rediscovery of British Food before the War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 2. 44 Boxer, Book of English Food, 23. 45 Ford Madox Ford, Memories and Impressions (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 396. 46 James Joyce, Ulysses (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 168–69. 47 Joyce, Ulysses, 57. 48 Joyce, Ulysses, 37. 49 Julieann Ulin, “‘Famished Ghosts’: Famine Memory in James Joyce’s Ulysses,” Joyce Studies Annual (2011): 20. 50 Joyce, Ulysses, 328. 51 Miriam O’Kane Mara, “James Joyce and the Politics of Food,” New Hibernia Review 13.4 (2009): 92. 52 Cited in Allison Carruth, “War Rations and the Food Politics of Late Modernism,” Modernism/modernity 16.4 (2009): 790–91. See also Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber, 1956). 53 Russell, Hunger, 222. 54 Russell, Hunger, 223. 55 Russell, Hunger, 226. 56 Quoted in Russell, Hunger, 228. 57 Joe Cleary, Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Joe Cleary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 8. 58 Forster, Howards End, 66. 59 See B. Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life (London: Macmillan, 1901). Chapter Five: Against Culinary Art: Mina Loy and the Modernist Starving Artist Alys Moody Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (London: Arrow Books, 2000), 39. Joyce Piell Wexler, Who Paid for Modernism? Art, Money, and the Fiction of Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997), xii. 3 Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 111. 4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, ed. Nicholas Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 39–40, 43. 5 David Hume, Four Dissertations, Eighteenth Century Collections Online (London: printed for A. Millar, 1757), 216–17. For a fuller account of the relationship between physical and aesthetic taste in the eighteenth century, 1 2

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see Denise Gigante, Taste: A Literary History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 6 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, ed. Michael Inwood, trans. Bernard Bosanquet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 41. 7 Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, 126. 8 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, vol. 1 (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 154. 9 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1:207–8. 10 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (London: Eyre Methuen, 1964), 35. 11 Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), 25; Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 1997), 121. 12 Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” in Norton Anthology of Theory and ­Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2010), 747. 13 Roger Fry, The Artist and Psycho-Analysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1924), 11; Clive Bell, “Dr. Freud on Art,” The Nation and the Athenaeum 35 (1924): 690. 14 Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, eds. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, vol. 5, 1922–23 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 225. 15 George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1956), 4–5. 16 Kant, Critique of Judgement, 42. 17 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 47. 18 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 74. 19 Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 74, 76. 20 Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 77. 21 Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 74. 22 André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924),” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 33–34. 23 Knut Hamsun, Hunger (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2006), 34, quoted in Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924),” 33–34. 24 Joan Miró, Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. Margit Rowell, trans. Paul Auster and Patricia Mathews (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986), 164. 25 Mina Loy, Insel, ed. Elizabeth Arnold (New York: Melville House Publishing, 2014), 3. 26 Loy, Insel, 83. 27 Loy, Insel, 5, 87.

Notes to pages 93–100

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28 Loy, Insel, 12. 29 Franz Kafka, The Trial (New York: Penguin, 2000), 129. 30 Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson, As a Weasel Sucks Eggs: An Essay on Melancholy and Cannibalism (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2008), 170. 31 Loy, Insel, 38. 32 Loy, Insel, 77. 33 Loy, Insel, 79. 34 Loy, Insel, 21. 35 Loy, Insel, 21. 36 Loy, Insel, 7. 37 Loy, Insel, 7. 38 Loy, Insel, 6. 39 Loy, Insel, 138. 40 For the classic account of the relationship between meat and masculinity, see Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1990). 41 Loy, Insel, 31. 42 Loy, Insel, 84. 43 Loy, Insel, 34. 44 Loy, Insel, 45. 45 Loy, Insel, 115. 46 Loy, Insel, 40. 47 Loy, Insel, 73. 48 Loy, Insel, 127. 49 Loy, Insel, 86. 50 Loy, Insel, 132. 51 Loy, Insel, 158. Chapter Six: Cocktails with Noël Coward Gregory Mackie Noël Coward, The Vortex, in Collected Plays, vol. 1 (London: Methuen, 1999), 80. 2 Coward, quoted in Sheridan Morley’s Introduction to Coward, Collected Plays, 1:xix. 3 Coward, quoted in Sheridan Morley’s Introduction to Coward, Collected Plays, 1:xix. 4 Cecil Beaton, The Glass of Fashion (New York: Doubleday, 1954), 184. 5 Peter Raby, “A Weekend in the Country—Coward, Wilde and Saki,” in Look Back in Pleasure: Noël Coward Reconsidered, eds. Joel Kaplan and Sheila Stowell (London: Methuen, 2000), 132. 6 Coward, quoted in Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson, Theatrical Companion to Coward, 2nd ed. updated by Barry Day and Sheridan Morley (London: Oberon Books, 2000), 215. 1

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Notes to pages 100–104

7 Coward, Shadow Play, in Play Parade, vol. 4 (London: Heinemann, 1954), 179. 8 See F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age” [1931], in The Crack-Up (New York: New Directions, 1956), 15. 9 William Grimes, Straight Up or On the Rocks: The Story of the American Cocktail (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), 84. 10 The songs “Cocktail Time,” “Say it with Gin,” and “Make it Another Old-Fashioned, Please” appear in the Cole Porter musicals Mayfair and Montmartre (1922), The New Yorkers (1930), and Panama Hattie (1940) respectively. See Robert Kimball, ed., The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983). 11 David Wondrich, Imbibe! From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash: A Salute in Stories and Drinks to “Professor” Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar (New York: Perigee, 2015), 10. 12 Wondrich, Imbibe!, 11. 13 On the origin and definition of the cocktail, see Grimes, Straight Up or On the Rocks, xviii–xix; Wondrich, Imbibe!, 209–27; Joseph Lanza, The Cocktail: The Influence of Spirits on the American Psyche (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 4–8; The Savoy Cocktail Book (London: Constable, 1930), 12–15; W. J. Tarling, Café Royal Cocktail Book (London: Pall Mall, 1937), 11–16. 14 On these cities’ respective claims to the development of the cocktail, see Grimes, Straight Up or On the Rocks and Wondrich, Imbibe!, passim. Jerry Thomas, author of the first cocktail book, How to Mix Drinks, or the BonVivant’s Companion (1862), made a career mixing drinks in all three. 15 On the role of commercial ice production in the rise of the American cocktail, see Grimes, Straight Up or On the Rocks, 46–47, and Wondrich, Imbibe!, 47–52. 16 Grimes, Straight Up or On the Rocks, xv. 17 On the Americanness of ice and its relative absence from the annals of British drinking, see Henry Jeffreys, Empire of Booze: British History through the Bottom of a Glass (London: Unbound, 2016), 163–65. 18 Philip Hoare, Noël Coward: A Biography (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995), 308. 19 Tarling, Café Royal Cocktail Book, 13. 20 The Savoy Cocktail Book does not explicitly indicate a single author. Its title page indicates that “The Cocktail recipes in this Book have been compiled by Harry Craddock of the Savoy Hotel London.” The book’s Foreword and Historical Note refer to Craddock in the third person, which suggests a more collaborative form of authorship. 21 On the first cocktail party in London, see Alec Waugh, “They Laughed When I Invented the Cocktail Party,” Esquire 82.1 (1974): 103–5; 164–68. Describing the period more generally, Waugh tellingly mentions Coward: “There was a general atmosphere of lighthearted, sophisticated disenchantment […] In

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tiny nightclubs, close-clasped couples were swaying to Noël Coward’s dance tunes. Anyone under forty and in reasonable health had ample cause for feeling grateful that he had survived the war” (103). 22 The Savoy’s American bar had opened in 1898. See Grimes, Straight Up or On the Rocks, 69. 23 The Savoy Cocktail Book, 69. 24 The Savoy Cocktail Book, 155. 25 The Savoy Cocktail Book, 9. 26 The Savoy Cocktail Book, 26. 27 New readers can now access The Savoy Cocktail Book electronically on a scrupulously researched and annotated blog devoted to crafting every one of its recipes. See https://savoystomp.flannestad.com/index.html. 28 The Savoy Cocktail Book, 52. 29 The Savoy Cocktail Book, title page. 30 David Edgar, “Noël Coward and the Transformation of British Comedy,” in Look Back in Pleasure: Noël Coward Reconsidered, eds. Joel Kaplan and Sheila Stowell (London: Methuen, 2000), 7. 31 Noël Coward, Three Plays: Blithe Spirit, Hay Fever, Private Lives (New York: Vintage, 1999), 188. 32 Coward, Three Plays, 188. 33 Coward, Three Plays, 192. 34 Coward, Three Plays, 193. 35 Penny Farfan, “Noël Coward and Sexual Modernism: Private Lives as Queer Comedy,” Modern Drama 48.4 (2005): 682. 36 This generalization necessarily leaves out cocktails such as Flips and Fizzes, which can require egg whites. 37 Frances Gray, “Always Acting: Noël Coward and the Performing Self,” in A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama, 1880–2005, ed. Mary Luckhurst (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 226. 38 Leonard Diepeveen succinctly captures the construction of modernism’s reputation for being hard on its audiences: “Difficulty,” he writes, “was the most noted characteristic of what became the canonical texts of high modernism; it dramatically shaped the reception of Faulkner, Joyce, Stein, Moore, Eliot, Pound, and Woolf.” See Diepeveen, The Difficulties of Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2003), xi. 39 Coward, “These Old-Fashioned Revolutionaries,” Sunday Times (January 15, 1961), 23. 40 Coward, Autobiography (London: Methuen, 1999), 134. 41 Agate quoted in Mander and Mitchenson, Theatrical Companion to Coward, 96. The eccentric spelling is Agate’s. 42 Coward, The Vortex, in Collected Plays, 1:132. 43 Coward, The Vortex, in Collected Plays, 1:137. 44 Gray, “Always Acting,” 225.

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Notes to pages 109–18

45 Coward, The Vortex, in Collected Plays, 1:80. 46 Coward, The Vortex, in Collected Plays, 1:80. 47 Coward, The Vortex, in Collected Plays, 1:82. 48 Coward, The Vortex, in Collected Plays, 1:85. The italics are Coward’s. 49 Coward, Three Plays, 196. 50 Coward, Three Plays, 204. 51 Coward, Three Plays, 204–5. 52 Coward, Three Plays, 205–6. 53 Grimes, Straight Up or On the Rocks, 3. 54 The vodka martini was a later development, partly popularized by the Cold War-era tastes of James “Shaken-Not-Stirred” Bond, the creation of Coward’s friend Ian Fleming. 55 Violet Coward was deeply impressed by the pronouncement of Anna Eva Fay, a professional mind reader, who told her “Mrs. Coward, Mrs. Coward […] You ask me about your son Noël Coward. Keep him where he is, keep him where he is, he has a great talent and will have a wonderful career!” See Hoare, Noël Coward: A Biography, 26. 56 Coward, Three Plays, 13. 57 Coward, Three Plays, 14. 58 Coward, Three Plays, 21. 59 Coward, Three Plays, 22. 60 Coward, Three Plays, 19. 61 Coward, Three Plays, 105. 62 Unlike The Vortex and Private Lives, Coward did not act in Blithe Spirit for the extent of its initial theatrical run. He replaced Cecil Parker in the role of Charles for two weeks in 1942. 63 See Sheridan Morley, A Talent to Amuse: A Biography of Noël Coward (London: Heinemann, 1969). The phrase comes from the 1929 operetta Bitter Sweet and the song “If Love Were All”: “But I believe that since my life began / The most I’ve had is just / A talent to amuse.” See Coward, The Lyrics of Noël Coward (London: Heinemann, 1965), 73. Chapter Seven: Late Modernist Rationing: War, Class, Power Kelly Sullivan 1

Diarist 5427 [Mrs. O Smith], War Diary, June 25–July 31, 1940. Mass Observation Archive, Mass Observation Online, 7, accessed January 9, 2018. 2 Diarist 5427, 18. 3 For more on consumer culture, shifts in class, and capitalism in Britain in the wartime and post-war period, see Peter Gurney, “The Battle of the Consumer in Postwar Britain,” Journal of Modern History 77.4 (2005): 956–87. 4 Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls and Consumption, 1939–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1.

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5 Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain, 18. For more on the way rationing shaped consumer and domestic life, see Maureen Waller, A Family in Wartime: How the Second World War Shaped the Lives of a Generation (London: Conway Publishing in association with the Imperial War Museums, 2012). 6 Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain, 32. 7 Great Britain Ministry for Food, How Britain was Fed in War Time: Food Control, 1939–1945 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1946), 9. 8 Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain ([1997] New York: Continuum, 2004), 10. Italics in the original. 9 Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture, 14. 10 Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture, 14. 11 Quoted in Allison Carruth, “War Rations and the Food Politics of Late Modernism,” Modernism/modernity 16.4 (2009): 784. 12 Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain, 15. 13 Heather Creaton, Sources for the History of London, 1939–1945: A Guide and Bibliography. (London: British Records Association, 1998), 86. Five shillings in 1942 would be approximately £11 in 2017, according to https://www. measuringworth.com, accessed April 2, 2018. 14 Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture, 9. 15 Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture, 50. 16 Waller, A Family in Wartime, 148. 17 How Britain was Fed in War Time, 3. 18 How Britain was Fed in War Time, 3. 19 Diarist 5427, 23. 20 Diarist 5427, 22. 21 Diarist 5427, 23. 22 Diarist 5427, 27, 31. 23 Diarist 5427, 31. 24 Diarist 5427, 25. 25 Diarist 5427, 35. 26 Diarist 5427, 36. 27 Diarist 5427, n.p. 28 Henry Green, Loving [1945], in Loving; Living; Party Going (New York: Penguin, 1993), 91, 176. 29 Green, Loving, 62–63. 30 Green, Loving, 63. 31 Green, Loving, 201. 32 Henry Green, Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait ([1940] New York: New Directions, 1992), 1; quoted in John Updike, Introduction to Loving; Living; Party Going, 9. 33 Updike, Introduction, 9; Green, Pack My Bag, 64.

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Notes to pages 124–30

34 Elizabeth Bowen, “Careless Talk,” in The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (New York: Knopf, 1981), 667. Italics in the original. 35 Bowen, “Careless Talk,” 669. 36 Bowen, “Careless Talk,” 670. 37 Bowen, “Careless Talk,” 670. Italics in the original. 38 Barbara Pym, Excellent Women ([1952] New York: Plume, 1978), 171. 39 Pym, Excellent Women, 171. Kate M. Nash shows how the “repurposed foods and food spaces” in Graham Greene’s wartime novel The Ministry of Fear become “very real weapons that have the possibility to undermine the war effort from within,” a kitchen front offensive that sheds some light on the potential wartime usefulness of such knowledge. Nash, “Consuming War in Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear.” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 2.1 (2014), DOI: 10.5250/resilience.2.1.004. 40 Pym, Excellent Women, 183. 41 Pym, Excellent Women, 217. 42 Pym, Excellent Women, 218. 43 Pym, Excellent Women, 219. 44 Pym, Excellent Women, 252. Italics in the original. 45 Pym, Excellent Women, 222. 46 Carruth, “War Rations,” 784. 47 David, Elizabeth. A Book of Mediterranean Food ([1958] New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2002), 4. 48 Artemis Cooper, Writing at the Kitchen Table: An Authorized Biography of Elizabeth David (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), chapters 3–6. 49 Clarissa Dickson Wright, Foreword to A Book of Mediterranean Food, ix. 50 Wright, Foreword, ix. 51 Wright, Foreword, ix. 52 David, Mediterranean Food, 2. 53 David, Mediterranean Food, xvi. 54 David, Mediterranean Food, 11. 55 David, Mediterranean Food, 14, 130. 56 For a complete account of the connections between Manning’s writing and her real-life experiences, see Eve Patten, Imperial Refugee Olivia Manning’s Fictions of War (Cork: Cork University Press, 2011), particularly chapter 1. Manning and David at least briefly traveled in the same social circles in Cairo. Cooper suggests the possibility that David and Manning’s husband, Reggie Smith (on whom her character Guy Pringle was closely modeled), may have had an affair (Kitchen Table, 102). 57 Olivia Manning, Fortunes of War: The Balkan Trilogy ([1960, 1962, 1965] New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2010), 12. 58 Manning, Fortunes of War, 32. 59 Manning, Fortunes of War, 32. 60 Manning, Fortunes of War, 32.

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61 Manning, Fortunes of War, 39. 62 Manning, Fortunes of War, 427. 63 Manning, Fortunes of War, 436. 64 Manning, Fortunes of War, 505. 65 Manning, Fortunes of War, 287. 66 Manning, Fortunes of War, 567. 67 Manning, Fortunes of War, 568. 68 Manning, Fortunes of War, 570. 69 Manning, Fortunes of War, 570. Chapter Eight: Objects of Disgust: A Moveable Feast and the Modernist Anti-Vomitive Michel Delville and Andrew Norris Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast ([1964] London: Granada Publishing Limited, 1977), 11. 2 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 11. 3 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 13. 4 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 14. 5 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 29. 6 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 125. 7 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 17. 8 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 17. 9 Ernest Hemingway, Men at War ([1942] New York: Random House, 1991), 9. 10 Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms ([1929] London: Arrow Books, 1994), 286 and Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls ([1940] Frogmore: Triad/Panther Books, 1976), 105–7. 11 Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003). For a broader discussion of the politics and aesthetics of disgust in modern and contemporary literature and the other arts, see Michel Delville and Andrew Norris, The Politics and Aesthetics of Hunger and Disgust: Perspectives on the Dark Grotesque (London: Routledge, 2017). 12 Delville and Norris, The Politics and Aesthetics of Hunger and Disgust, 7. 13 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 18. 14 Ernest Hemingway, The Torrents of Spring (New York: Scribner, 1998), 68. 15 Menninghaus, Disgust, 7 and 31. 16 Menninghaus, Disgust, 9. 17 David Trotter, “Apoplectic Gristle,” London Review of Books 23.2: 16–18, January 25, 2001, accessed on September 16, 2017, https://www.lrb.co.uk/ v23/n02/david-trotter/apoplectic-gristle. 18 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 76. 19 Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1986), 16. 1

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Notes to pages 142–46

20 Wyndham Lewis, Tarr ([1928] Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 68. 21 Lewis, Tarr, 240. 22 Marjorie Perloff, 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (London: Blackwell, 2002), 66. 23 Lucy Ricaud, “Anorexia and Misogyny: The Aesthetics of Wyndham Lewis’s Novel Tarr,” in Food for Thought, ou, les avatars de la nourriture, ed. MarieClaire Rouyer (Bordeaux: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 1998), 218. 24 Lewis, Tarr, 213. 25 While Hemingway clearly admired Joyce’s work, referring to Ulysses in a letter to Sherwood Anderson as a “most god-damn wonderful book,” he also felt a need to denigrate him, writing to Pound in 1924: “the more meazly and shitty the guy, i.e. Joyce, the greater the success in his art.” See Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters, 1917–1961 (London: Panther Books, 1981), 62 and 119. Whether Hemingway is genuinely disgusted by something in Joyce or rather by his own tendency to identify with the established modernists against the tenets of his own evolving poetics, remains an open question. 26 Lewis, Tarr, 240. 27 Lewis, Wyndham, “The Dumb Ox: A Study of Ernest Hemingway,” American Review 3.3 (1934): 290. 28 Lewis, “The Dumb Ox,” 290. Original emphasis. 29 Susan B. Miller, Disgust: The Gatekeeper Emotion (Hillsdale: The Analytical Press, 2004), 4. 30 Menninghaus, Disgust, 1. 31 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 80. 32 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 23 and 19. 33 Menninghaus, Disgust, 7. 34 Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in Selected Writings, ed. Carl van Vechten (New York: Random House, 1967), 21. “Disordered” and “clammy” sexuality constitutes an important category in Aurel Kolnai’s foundational essay on the phenomenology of disgust. See Aurel Kolnai, On Disgust (London: Open Court, 2013), 67. 35 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 23. 36 Janet Malcolm, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 63. 37 Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 207. 38 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 80. 39 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 81 and 18. 40 Hemingway writes, “This book began magnificently, went on very well for a long way with great stretches of great brilliance and then went on endlessly in repetitions that a more conscientious and less lazy writer would have put in the waste basket,” 21. 41 Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 88. 42 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 21.

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43 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 18. 44 Elizabeth Fifer, “Is Flesh Advisable? The Interior Theater of Gertrude Stein,” Signs 4.3 (1979): 480. 45 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 101. 46 Lewis, Tarr, 310. 47 Lewis, Tarr, 311. 48 Lewis, Tarr, 20 and 21. 49 Wyndham Lewis, Blasting & Bombardiering ([1937] London: John Calder, 1982), 159. 50 Lewis, “The Dumb Ox,” 207. 51 Lewis, “The Dumb Ox,” 207. 52 Wilfred Owen, Selected Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 362. 53 Lewis, Blasting & Bombardiering, 155. Chapter Nine: “We were very lonely without those berries”: Gastronomic Colonialism in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools Clint Burnham 1

In this chapter, following contemporary usage, I use Aboriginal or Indigenous to refer to First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people in Canada. See https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/home/ for a full discussion of terminology with respect to Indigenous people in Canada. With respect to common settler phrases such as “our Indians,” please see Greg Younging’s Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing by and about Indigenous Peoples (Edmonton: Brush, 2018), where, discussing “possessives that offend,” he remarks, “these possessives imply that Indigenous people are ‘owned’ by Euro-colonial states.” 2 An excellent dramatic treatment of this history, which is nonetheless symptomatic, can be found in Sharon Pollock’s 1973 play Walsh. 3 I was born in Comox, British Columbia, Canada, which is on the traditional territory of the K’ómoks (Sathloot) First Nation, centered historically on kwaniwsam. I live and teach on the traditional ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including traditional territories of the Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw), Tsleil-Waututh (səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ), Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm), and Kwikwetlem (kʷikʷəƛ̓əm) Nations. I write as a settler scholar, or perhaps, to give it an edge, a colonial scholar, given my family’s history in the military occupation of Indigenous lands in Canada (I was an Air Force brat). My family also participated in Canada’s “Sixties Scoop,” having adopted my youngest sister from out of her Indigenous family. 4 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), 29. 5 Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 40. 6 Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 57. 7 Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 94.

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Notes to pages 155–61

8 Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 23. 9 The debate over Jamesonian historicism has taken two forms lately. On the one hand, it has come under attack from proponents of “surface reading”: see Carolyn Lesjak, “Reading Dialectically,” Criticism 55.2 (2013): 233–77 for an excellent summary of that debate. On the other hand, various Lacanian critics have argued precisely against such symptomatic or historicist readings, such as in Todd McGowan, “The Bankruptcy of Historicism: Introducing Disruption into Literary Studies,” in Everything You Wanted to Know about Literature But Were Afraid to Ask Žižek, ed. Russell Sbriglia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 89–106. 10 Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 34. 11 Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 103–4. But see also Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 306–10. That image (handicrafts … Krupp) has been foundational for the recent work by the Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015); see 12 and 110. 12 Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 100–103. 13 Mini Aodla Freeman, My Life among the Qallunaat (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2016), 87. 14 The Inuit singer Willie Thrasher’s 1981 song “Eskimo Named Johnny,” is answered, in his own work, by a song from the early 2000s in which he sings “Don’t call me Eskimo / Just cuz I sing in an Inuit band.” See the record album Native North America. 15 Robin Ridington, “Re-Creation in Canadian First Nations Literatures: ‘When You Sing It Now, Just like New.’” Anthropologica 43:2 (2001): 221–30, 223–24. 16 Charlotte Townsend-Gault, “Hot Dogs, a Ball Gown, Adobe, and Words: The Modes and Materials of Identity,” in Native American Art in the Twentieth Century, ed. W. Jack Rushing (New York: Routledge, 1999). 17 James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2013). 18 Ian Mosby, “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952,” Histoire sociale/Social History 46.91 (2013): 145–72. 19 Mosby, “Administering Colonial Science,” 147–48. 20 Basil H. Johnston, Indian School Days (Toronto: Key Porter, 1998), 40, cited in Mosby, “Administering Colonial Science,” 159. 21 Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, official report of the debates of the House of Commons of the Dominion of Canada, 9 May 1883, 1107–8. I am grateful to Jordan Abel for bringing this text to my attention. 22 Accounts by Survivors, in addition to Johnston’s Indian School Days, include other novels and memoirs such as Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998), Bev Sellars’s They Called Me Number One (2013), and The Education

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of Augie Merasty (2015). For a historical overview, see Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, vol. 1, The History, Part 1: Origins to 1939, and TRC Final Report, vol. 1, The History, Part 2: 1939 to 2000. 23 The interview took place in October 1990, following the summer of the Oka crisis, a conflict between the Mohawk First Nation and the Quebec police/ Canadian military. For the interview, see https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/ phil-fontaines-shocking-testimony-of-sexual-abuse. 24 Please see, for a fuller discussion of The Survivors Speak, Clint Burnham, “Is the TRC a Text?” in Canlit across Media, eds. Katharine McLeod and Jason Camlot (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2018), 252–78. 25 Daisy Diamond, Statement to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Winnipeg, Manitoba, June 18, 2010, Statement Number SC110, cited in The Survivors Speak, 69. 26 Ellen Okimaw, Statement to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Timmins, Ontario, November 8, 2010, Statement Number 01-ON-46NOV10-022, cited in The Survivors Speak, 70. 27 Johnston, Indian School Days, 141, cited in Mosby, “Administering Colonial Science,” 159. 28 Woodie Elias, Statement to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories, September 12, 2012, Statement Number 2011-0343, cited in The Survivors Speak, 71. 29 Andrew Paul, Statement to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Paulatuk, Northwest Territories, April 17, 2012, Statement Number SP067, cited in The Survivors Speak, 71. 30 Doris Young, Statement to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, June 22, 2012, Statement Number 20113517, cited in The Survivors Speak, 72. 31 Victoria McIntosh, Statement to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Winnipeg, Manitoba, June 16, 2010, Statement Number: 02-MB16JU10-123, cited in The Survivors Speak, 75. 32 Bernard Catcheway, Statement to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Skownan First Nation, Manitoba, October 12, 2011, Statement Number: 2011-2510, cited in The Survivors Speak, 74. 33 Bernard Sutherland, Statement to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Fort Albany, Ontario, January 29, 2013, Statement Number: 20113180. Translated from the Cree; cited in The Survivors Speak, 74. 34 Mary Beatrice Tally, Statement to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, High Level, Alberta, July 3, 2013, Statement Number: 2011-2680, cited in The Survivors Speak, 75.

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Notes to pages 165–68 Chapter Ten: From “Squalid Food” to “Proper Cuisine”: Food and Fare in the Work of T. S. Eliot Jeremy Diaper

1 I gratefully acknowledge permission from Scott Freer and Paul Keers to reprint some sections of this chapter which appeared in an earlier article, “T. S. Eliot and British Organicism: Food, Health and Nutrition,” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society (UK) (2017): 25–48. 2 For recent discussions of modernism and food, see Miriam O’Kane Mara, “James Joyce and the Politics of Food,” New Hibernia Review 13.4 (2009): 94–110; Helen O’Connell, “‘Food Values’: Joyce and Dietary Revival,” James Joyce in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Nash (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 135; Harriet Blodgett, “Food for Thought in Virginia Woolf ’s Novels,” Women’s Studies Annual, vol. 3 (1997), 45–60; Janine Utell, “Meals and Mourning in Woolf ’s The Waves,” College Literature 35.2 (2008): 1–19; Michael Hollington, “Food, Modernity, Modernism: D. H. Lawrence and the Futurist Cookbook,” in The Pleasures and Horrors of Eating: The Cultural History of Eating in Anglophone Literature, eds. Marion Gymnich and Norbert Lennartz (Göttingen: Bonn University Press, 2010), 308. 3 T. S. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), 16, 28. 4 T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), 355, 377, 375. The following references to Eliot’s poems and plays taken from this edition are cited as CPP unless otherwise noted. 5 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), 287. 6 David E. Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 156, 177; Kenneth J. Reckford, “Eliot’s Cocktail Party and Plato’s Symposium,” Classical and Modern Literature 11 (1991): 305. See also Steve Ellis, “An Under-Nourished Universe: Food and Drink in T. S. Eliot’s Plays,” Yeats Eliot Review 31/1.2 (2015): 22. 7 Steve Ellis, “Eliot and Earth,” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society (UK) (2012), 3. 8 This was the title of E. B. Balfour’s seminal book that was first published by Faber in 1943. The Living Soil was one of the most influential organic texts (with eight editions published within five years) and served as the catalyst for the formation of the Soil Association. 9 For more on the organic movement, see Philip Conford, The Origins of the Organic Movement (Edinburgh: Floris, 2001); Matthew Reed, Rebels for the Soil: The Rise of the Global Organic Food and Farming Movement (London: Earthscan, 2010), 33–70; Philip Conford, The Development of the Organic Network: Linking People and Themes 1945–95 (Edinburgh: Floris, 2011). 10 See G. T. Wrench, The Wheel of Health (London: C. W. Daniel, 1938) and Albert Howard, An Agricultural Testament (London: Oxford University Press, 1940).

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11 See Jeremy Diaper, “The Criterion: An Inter-War Platform for Agricultural Discussion,” Agricultural History Review 61.2 (2013): 282–300 and Jeremy Diaper, T. S. Eliot and Organicism (Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2018). 12 See, for example, Maye E. Bruce, From Vegetable Waste Soil to Fertile Soil (London: Faber & Faber, 1943); Donald P. Hopkins, Chemicals, Humus and the Soil (London: Faber & Faber, 1945); Friend Sykes, Humus and the Farmer (London: Faber & Faber, 1945). 13 T. S. Eliot to J. H. Woods, May 6, 1915, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 107. 14 T. S. Eliot to Henry Eliot, January 9, 1935, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 7, 1934–1935 (London: Faber & Faber, 2017), 459. 15 T. S. Eliot to Ezra Pound, December 28, 1934, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 7, 430. 16 T. S. Eliot to Ezra Pound, April 4, 1935, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 7, 587. 17 T. S. Eliot to Conrad Aiken, February 25, 1915, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 95. 18 Robert McCarrison, Nutrition and National Health: Being the Cantor Lectures Delivered before the Royal Society of Arts, 1936 (London: Faber & Faber, 1944), 5. 19 McCarrison, Nutrition and National Health, 11 and 12. 20 McCarrison, Nutrition and National Health, 15. 21 Robert McCarrison, “Food, the Foundation of Health: ‘Deficiency-Disease’” (London: 1939), 21 and 23. 22 “A Medical Testament,” NEW, April 6, 1939, 1–8. See also Lionel Picton, Nutrition and the Soil: Thoughts on Feeding (New York: Devin-Adair Co., 1949), 26. 23 Viscount Lymington, Famine in England (London: Right Book Club, 1938), 76. 24 Lymington, Famine in England, 83. 25 Viscount Lymington, “The Policy of Husbandry,” in England and the Farmer: A Symposium, ed. H. J. Massingham (London: Batsford, 1941), 28. 26 Lymington, “The Policy of Husbandry,” 28. 27 T. S. Eliot, “A Commentary,” Criterion (October 1930): 192. 28 “Notes on Social Philosophy,” Records of the Moot, Institute of Education, University of London, MOO/123, file 17, paper no. 123, undated, 1–2. 29 Ambrose Heath, Good Soups (London: Faber & Faber, 1935); Ambrose Heath, Good Vegetables (London: Faber & Faber, 1949). 30 Ambrose Heath, Good Salads and Salad Dressings (London: Faber & Faber, 1948), 11. 31 Heath, Good Salads and Salad Dressings, 12, 12–13. 32 Ambrose Heath, Vegetable Dishes & Salads for Every Day of the Year (London: Faber & Faber, 1938); Ambrose Heath, Simple Salads and Salad Dressings (London: Faber & Faber, 1943).

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Notes to pages 172–76

33 T. S. Eliot, “Cheese,” Letter to the editor of the New Statesman and Nation (December 21, 1935), 977. 34 T. S. Eliot, How to Prepare a Salad (1936), Letter to Enid Faber, August 11, 1936, cited in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, Practical Cats and Further Verses (London: Faber & Faber, 2015). 35 Jessie Weston, A Handbook of Cookery for a Small House (London: William Heinemann, 1933), 4. 36 Weston, A Handbook of Cookery for a Small House, 4 and 10. 37 Weston, A Handbook of Cookery for a Small House, v. 38 Cited in Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, vol. 2, After-War World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 439. 39 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929), 18. 40 Lord Northbourne, Look to the Land (London: Dent, 1940), 65, 66. 41 Barry Spurr, “Anglo-Catholic in Religion”: T.  S.  Eliot and Christianity (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2010), 52. 42 C. Alma Baker, The Labouring Earth (London: Heath Cranton, 1940), 117–18. 43 Lymington, “The Policy of Husbandry,” 18. 44 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1971), 45. 45 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile, 57. 46 John Hayward, quoted in T. S. Eliot, The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, Collected and Uncollected Poems, eds. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), 664. 47 T. S. Eliot, “Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern,” University of Edinburgh Journal 9 (1937), 17. 48 “Notes of the Week,” NEW, October 29, 1936, 41. 49 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile, 5. 50 Cited in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 515, 516. 51 Virginia Woolf, Night and Day ([1919] New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2005), 383–84; Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room ([1922] Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), 65. 52 Northbourne, Look to the Land, 61. 53 Jorian Jenks, The Stuff Man’s Made of (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), 191. 54 See T. S. Eliot at Pike’s Farm, Lingfield, Surrey (photograph by Frank Morley, July 1933), Cambridge, MA, Houghton Library, Harvard University MS Am. 2560 (196a). See also Frank Morley, “A Few Recollections of Eliot,” in T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work, ed. Allan Tate (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967), 108–9. 55 T. S. Eliot to his Father, October 31, 1917, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 228. 56 T. S. Eliot to Eleanor Hinkley, October 31, 1917, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 229.

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57 T. S. Eliot, “The Country Walk,” published as “Cows,” in The Times, June 6, 2009. 58 T. S. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare, 27; Eliot, “Among the various middle classes,” in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, Practical Cats and Further Verses (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), 177. 59 Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 62, 367. 60 Jason Harding, “Unravelling Eliot,” in The New Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, ed. Jason Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 3. 61 Harding, “Unravelling Eliot, 3. 62 T. S. Eliot to Frank Morley, October 7, 1932, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 6, 1932–1933 (London: Faber & Faber, 2016). 63 T. S. Eliot to Henry Eliot, January 9, 1935, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 7, 457. 64 T. S. Eliot to Ezra Pound, December 26, 1932, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 6. 65 T. S. Eliot to Dorothea Richards, January 9, 1943, cited in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 973. 66 T. S. Eliot to Geoffrey Faber, September 18, 1927, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 3, 713. 67 T. S. Eliot, “Notes on the Way (I),” Time and Tide, 16 (January 5, 1935): 6–7. 68 T. S. Eliot, “Catholicism and the International Order,” in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: English Lion, 1930–1933, eds. Jason Harding and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 535. 69 T. S. Eliot to Geoffrey Faber, September 18, 1927, 713. 70 Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 186. 71 Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 182. 72 T. S. Eliot, “Full Employment and the Responsibility of Christians,” The Christian News-Letter, 230 (March 21, 1945), Supplement 7–12, cited in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: The War Years, 1940–1946, eds. David Chinitz and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 598–99. Chapter Eleven: “The Raw and the Cooked”: Food and Modernist Poetry Lee M. Jenkins Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology (1964), trans. John and Doreen Weightman (London: Pimlico, 1994), 1. 2 See Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Culinary Triangle,” trans. Peter Brooks. Partisan Review 33 (1966): 586–96. 3 T. S. Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), 76. 4 Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays, 68; D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, eds. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 389. 1

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Notes to pages 184–86

5 Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays, 68. 6 See “typewriter (2),” Oxford English Dictionary, eds. John Simpson and Edmund Weiners, vol. 12, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 789; Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays, 69. 7 Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 389. 8 T. S. Eliot, “‘Ulysses,’ Order, and Myth,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), 175–78, 177; Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays, 76. 9 Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays, 68, 66; Sukhbir Singh, “Gloss on ‘Gammon’ in The Waste Land, II, Line 166,” Journal of Modern Literature 20.2 (1996): 259–61 (259, 260). 10 Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays, 66. 11 Michael Hollington, “Food, Modernity, Modernism: D. H. Lawrence and The Futurist Cookbook,” in The Pleasures and Horrors of Eating in Anglophone Literature, eds. Norbert Lennartz and Marion Gymnich (Bonn: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), 305–22 (308). 12 T. S. Eliot, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, ed. Ronald Schuchard (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), 54. See Kimberley Jones, Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 163. 13 A working draft of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novelistic reworking of The Waste Land, is titled Trimalchio: “On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors d’oeuvres, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, Trimalchio: An Early Version of The Great Gatsby, ed. James L. W. West III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 33. 14 The subject of Chapter 50 of Frazer’s 1922, abridged edition of The Golden Bough is “Eating the God.” For a post-colonial revision of Frazer and of Eliot’s eucharist poetics, see Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite’s “Eating the Dead,” The Arrivants (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 219–21. 15 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 53. 16 William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, vol. 1, 1909–1939, eds. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 372; Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems (San Francisco: City Lights, 1964), 18–19. “Set in the window” of a New York grocery store, the immigrant Claude McKay sees “Bananas ripe and green, and gingerroot, / Cocoa in pods and alligator pears, / And tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit,” making the poet “hungry for the old, familiar ways,” of his native Jamaica, as he translates the exploitative economics of the United Fruit Company in the Caribbean colonies into the affective economy of his home thoughts from abroad poem, “The Tropics in New York” (1920). In “The Mango of Poetry,” McKay’s fellow Jamaican Lorna Goodison says, “I’m still

Notes to pages 186–88

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not sure what poetry is,” only to “think of a ripe mango / yellow ochre niceness / sweet flesh of St Julian.” Claude McKay, Complete Poems, ed. William J. Maxwell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 154; Lorna Goodison, Guinea Woman: New and Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2000), 103. 17 Eliot, “‘Ulysses,’ Order, and Myth,” 178. 18 Corey Latta, When the Eternal Can Be Met: The Bergsonian Theology of Time in the Works of C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014), 129. 19 D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, eds. Helen Baron and Carl Baron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 467; Robert E. Montgomery, The Visionary D. H. Lawrence: Beyond Philosophy and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 64. 20 T. R. Wright, D. H. Lawrence and the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 83; Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, 470. 21 Wright, D. H. Lawrence and the Bible, 83. 22 D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 229. 23 Sandra M. Gilbert, Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence, 2nd ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 335–36. 24 Lawrence, Poems, 230. 25 Wright, D. H. Lawrence and the Bible, 171. 26 Lawrence, Poems, 232. 27 Gilbert, Acts of Attention, 135; Lawrence, Poems, 231. 28 Lawrence, Poems, 232–34; Gilbert, Acts of Attention, 336. If the eating of his “Fig” connotes oral sex, this is notwithstanding Lawrence’s aversion to the clitoris; when the fig shows “her crimson through the purple slit,” it is “Like a prostitute, the bursten fig, making a show of her secret,” Poems, 234. 29 D. H. Lawrence, Psychanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 65. 30 D. H. Lawrence, Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 212, 203. 31 D. H. Lawrence, Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 109. 32 Lawrence, Late Essays and Articles, 201. 33 Glen MacLeod, Wallace Stevens and Modern Art: From the Armory Show to Abstract Expressionism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 84. 34 See MacLeod, Wallace Stevens and Modern Art, 83. I would like to thank Glen MacLeod, and Gene Gaddis, archivist at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, for helping me to identify the Cézanne still lifes in the 1938 exhibition. “Fruit and Wine” (ca. 1890; also known as “Still Life—Pears and Brandy”) and “The Table” (ca. 1900; also known as “Still Life—Apples and Jug”). 35 Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, eds. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), 180.

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Notes to page 189

36 James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 179; Wallace Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1981), 316; Clive Bell, Art (1914) (London: Forgotten Books, 2015), 20. “Significant Form” is pilloried by Lawrence in the “Snow” chapter of Women in Love, and in “Introduction to These Paintings,” in which Lawrence argues that Cézanne’s aesthetic of “thereness” breaks through “the mental consciousness” that “intervene[s] like a complete screen between us and life.” Late Essays and Articles, 211, 215. On Lawrence and the Bloomsbury art critics, see the chapter “Cézanne’s Apple,” in Anne Fernihough, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 117–29. 37 Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 182. 38 Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 33; Fred Miller Robinson, “Poems That Took the Place of Mountains: Realization in Stevens and Cézanne,” Centennial Review 22.3 (1978): 281–98 (281). See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in Sense and Non-sense: Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, trans. Patricia Allan Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991) and see Benedict Leca, Philippe Cézanne, Benedict Leca, Paul Smith, Richard Shiff, and Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, The World is an Apple: The Still Lifes of Paul Cézanne (Lewes: Giles Books, 2014). 39 Eleanor Cook, A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 18; Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 33, 50. 40 Stanley Burnshaw, from “Turmoil in the Middle Ground,” in Wallace Stevens: The Critical Heritage, ed. Charles Doyle (London: Routledge, 1985), 137–40 (139). 41 MacLeod, Wallace Stevens and Modern Art, 84–85. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 183. 42 “Food, U.S. propaganda director Elmer Davis suggested in 1942, was a profoundly political matter during the Second World War. As global famine conditions and national rationing programs came to define the daily lives of most people, agriculture and eating became fraught emblems of military power, war trade, and political allegiances.” Allison Carruth, “War Rations and the Food Politics of Late Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 16.4 (2009): 767–95 (767). Two striking, and strikingly similar, literary responses to food scarcity during the Second World War may be found in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) and Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos, composed in the same year. Waugh was writing in “the period of soya beans,” he explains in his Preface, and “in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine.” Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), 7. Compare Waugh’s nostalgia for pre-war plenty with “the wonderful catalogue of restaurants and cafés” that Pound, writing from his cage in an American military detention center near Pisa, includes in his sequence. Jean-Michel Rabaté, Language, Sexuality, and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 120.

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43 Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 44. 44 In a 1948 letter to his Cuban correspondent, José Rodriguez Feo, Stevens complains, “When I go into a fruit store nowadays and find there nothing but the fruits du jour: apples, pears, oranges, I feel like throwing them at the Greek. I expect, and you expect, sapodillas and South Shore bananas and pineapples a foot high with spines fit to stick in the helmet of a wild chieftain.” Letters, 622. 45 Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 294. 46 Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 347, 348. 47 Cook, A Reader’s Guide, 18; Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, rev. ed., Milton J. Bates (New York: Knopf, 1989), 222; Stevens Collected Poetry and Prose, 656. 48 Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 351, 352. 49 Quoted in Paul Mariani, The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016), 276. 50 Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 901, 352; Patricia Ranft notes that AngloCatholicism, to which Eliot would convert in 1927, preserves the “intimate relationship between the Eucharist and the doctrine of Incarnation.” Patricia Ranft, How the Doctrine of Incarnation Shaped Western Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 103. 51 Edward Ragg, “Bourgeois Abstraction: Gastronomy, Painting, Poetry, and the Allure of New York in Early to Late Stevens,” in Wallace Stevens, New York, and Modernism, eds. Lisa Goldfarb and Bart Eeckhout (New York: Routledge, 2012), 144–61 (145). 52 Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 34. 53 Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 909, 125. As Thomas Lombardi remarks, “Stevens enjoyed eating and had a weight problem for the greater part of his life. In the Pennsylvania Dutch tradition, he stored large quantities of food at home, ordering and purchasing delicacies from all over the world.” Thomas F. Lombardi, Wallace Stevens and the Pennsylvania Keystone: The Influence of Origins on His Life and Poetry (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1996), 262. 54 Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 256. The African American Naaman Corn often acted as a chauffeur for Stevens. See Mariani, The Whole Harmonium, 347. 55 Stevens, Letters, 741. 56 Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 597–98. 57 Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 471, 295. Ragg relates the domestic scene in the woods to a 1940 letter, in which Stevens, responding to “People [who] say that I live in a world of my own,” pleads, “I see that there is a center. For instance, a photograph of a lot of fat men and women in the woods, drinking beer and singing Hi-li Hi-lo convinces me that there is a normal that I ought to try to achieve,” Letters of Wallace Stevens, 352. see Ragg, “Bourgeois Abstraction,” 157.

260

Notes to pages 191–97

58 Hollington, “Food, Modernity, Modernism,” 308. 59 For an account of Lawrence’s “Last Supper,” see Catherine Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage: A Narrative of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 204–13. Other modernist dinner parties include the Imagist dinners thrown in 1914 at the Berkeley Hotel in London by Amy Lowell, upping the gastronomic ante on Ezra Pound, who had founded the school of Imagisme in the British Museum tea room in 1912. On the “peacock” dinner of 1914, attended, among others, by Pound, W. B. Yeats, Augusta Lady Gregory, and Wilfred Scawen Blunt, see Lucy MacDiarmid, Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Stevens’s most recent biographer, Paul Mariani, accepts the conversion narrative as told, after the poet’s death, by Father Arthur Hanley, chaplain at St. Francis, the Catholic hospital in Hartford where Stevens underwent surgery for stomach cancer. See Mariani, The Whole Harmonium, 401. 60 Hollington, “Food, Modernity, Modernism,” 305. Chapter Twelve: Weight-Loss Regimes as Improvisation in Louis Armstrong’s and Duke Ellington’s Life Writing Vivian Halloran “Is ‘Satchmo’ Using Mae West Secret to Lose Weight?” Jet 34.7 (May 23, 1968): 61. 2 Bree Wilson, “Ducal Diet,” New Statesman 26 (April 1999): 41–42. 3 Louise Foxcroft, Calories & Corsets: A History of Dieting Over 2,000 Years (London: Profile Books, 2011), 143. 4 Isabel Leighton and Margaret Livingston Whiteman, Whiteman’s Burden (New York: Viking Press, 1933). The book is told from Mrs. Whiteman’s point of view and contains caricatures good-naturedly mocking her husband’s formerly portly frame. 5 Michelle Mary Lelwicka, Shameful Bodies: Religion and the Cult of Personal Improvement (NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) (Kindle ed.). 6 Lelwicka, Shameful Bodies. 7 Armstrong, “Lose Weight the Satchmo Way,” The Louis Armstrong Companion: Eight Decades of Commentary (New York: Schirmer Books, 1999), 99–101. 8 Terry Teachout, Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington (New York: Penguin, 2013) (Kindle ed.). 9 Upton Sinclair, The Fasting Cure (London: W. Heinemann, 1911), 11. 10 Upton Sinclair and Michael Williams, Good Health and How We Won It, with an Account of the New Hygiene (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1909), 41. 11 Horace Fletcher, Fletcherism: What It is, or How I Became Young at Sixty (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1913), xi. 12 Joshua Berrett, Preface to “Lose Weight the Satchmo Way,” The Louis Armstrong Companion (New York: Schirmer Books, 1999), 99.

1

Notes to pages 198–205

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13 Gayelord Hauser, Diet Does It ([1944] New York: Coward-McCann, Inc. 1950). 14 William Kennedy, “Music Don’t Know No Age,” GQ 62.8 (1992): 196. 15 My use of “communicative act” is indebted to Sidonie Smith’s and Julia Watson’s notion of the importance of “communicative exchange” in their explanation of the truth value of life writing: “If we approach such self-referential writing as an intersubjective process that occurs within a dialogic exchange between writer and reader/viewer rather than a story to be proved or falsified, the emphasis of reading shifts from assessing and verifying knowledge to observing processes of communicative exchange and understanding.” Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 16–17. 16 Brent Hayes Edwards, “Louis Armstrong and the Syntax of Scat,” Critical Inquiry 28.3 (2002): 632. 17 Edwards, “Louis Armstrong and the Syntax of Scat,” 633. 18 Lindsey Tucker, Stephen and Bloom at Life’s Feast: Alimentary Symbolism and the Creative Process in James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984), 2. 19 “Is ‘Satchmo’ Using Mae West Secret to Lose Weight?” 61. 20 Louis Armstrong, Swing That Music (New York: Longman’s, Green and Co., 1936), 70. 21 Louis Armstrong, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans ([1954] New York: Da Capo, 1986), 193. The irony of this statement is that cod liver oil was administered to relieve constipation, so it would have been unlikely to have resulted in significant weight gain. 22 Louis Armstrong, “Letter to Leonard Feather (1941),” The Louis Armstrong Companion, 112. 23 Armstrong, “Letter to Leonard Feather,” 113. 24 Armstrong, “Letter to Leonard Feather,” 113. 25 Hauser, Diet Does It, 7. 26 Armstrong, “Lose Weight the Satchmo Way,” The Louis Armstrong Companion, 100. 27 Thomas Brothers, Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014), 9. 28 Brothers, Louis Armstrong, 9. 29 Daniel Stein, “The Performance of Jazz Autobiography,”  Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 37.2 (2004): 177. 30 Stein, “The Performance of Jazz Autobiography,” 177. 31 Duke Ellington, Music is My Mistress (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973), 400–401. 32 Ellington, Music is My Mistress, 390. 33 Ellington, Music is My Mistress, 390. 34 Wilson, “The Ducal Diet,” 42. 35 Wilson, “The Ducal Diet,” 42.

262

Notes to pages 206–10

36 Alice B. Toklas, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook ([1954] London: Serif, 1994), xi. 37 Toklas, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, 30. 38 Toklas, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, 30. 39 Toklas, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, 124. 40 Upton Sinclair, “My Life in Rice,” The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook, eds. Beryl Barr and Barbara Turner Sachs (Sausalito, CA: Angel Island Publications, Inc. 1961), 230. 41 Toklas, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, 228. Chapter Thirteen: Kitchen Talk: Marguerite Duras’s Experiments with Culinary Matter Edwige Crucifix 1

For a recent, very detailed stylistic study of Duras’s language, see Sandrine Vaudrey-Luigi, “La Langue romanesque de Marguerite Duras: ‘une liberté souvenante’” (Ph.D. dissertation, Université Paris 3, 2011). 2 On the importance of Marguerite Duras for French Modernism, see Kimberley Healey’s contribution to Eysteinsson and Liska’s volume on modernism for their Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages: “Although by 1958, literary modernism may have reached its peak in other cultures, we have in the example of Duras proof that French literature was continuing to explore the possibilities of a modernism that did not embrace the new but negotiated constantly and carefully with the past.” Kimberley Healey, “French Literary Modernism,” in Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, vol. 21, Modernism, eds. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007), 813. 3 Marguerite Duras, Les Parleuses, Œuvres complètes, vol. 3, ed. Gilles Philippe (Paris: NRF, Gallimard, 2014), 7–12. 4 Duras, Les Parleuses, 46. 5 About the Duras’s engagement with desire, see Sylvie Bourgeois, Marguerite Duras: une écriture de la réparation (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007); Madeleine Borgomano, Marguerite Duras: de la forme au sens, eds. Claude Borgomano and Bernard Alazet (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010); Angelica Werneck, Mémoires et Désirs: Marguerite Duras-Gabrielle Roy (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010); JeanFrançois Laguian, La Douleur du chaos et de la subversion dans l’œuvre de Marguerite Duras (Paris: Publibook, 2012); Joëlle Pagès-Pindon, Marguerite Duras: l’écriture illimitée (Paris: Ellipses, 2012); Laetitia Cénac, Marguerite Duras: l’écriture de la passion (Paris: La Martinière, 2013); Anne-Marie Reboul and Esther Sánchez-Pardo, L’Écriture désirante: Marguerite Duras (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2016). Concerning Duras’s ethical commitments, see John Paul Ricco, The Decision between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Zahi Anbra Zalloua, Reading Unruly Interpretation and Its Ethical Demands (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,

Notes to pages 210–13

6 7

8

9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

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2014); Laurent Camerini, La Judéité dans l’œuvre de Marguerite Duras: un imaginaire entre éthique et poétique (Paris: Garnier, 2015); Robert Harvey, Sharing Common Ground: A Space for Ethics (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017) and about Duras’s depictions of the everyday, see Mireille Calle-Gruber, Marguerite Duras: la noblesse de la banalité (Paris: De l’incidence, 2014). About the Nouveau Roman’s capability to gesture toward the real in a new, more-genuine way, see “Du réalisme à la réalité,” in Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2013), 171–83. Duras herself is remembered as a gourmande, and a great cook by her friends and family. In La Cuisine de Marguerite, a posthumous collection of recipes compiled by her son Jean Mascolo, he notes that cooking was his mother’s joy and pride (9). However, no in-depth account exists of Duras’s rapport with cooking and writing beyond what she has herself confided in some of her autobiographical works and in radio interviews. La Cuisine de Marguerite (Paris: Benoît Jacob, 2016), first published in 1999, was for a long time withheld from distribution by her literary executor, supposedly for its “inappropriate” interviews and badly edited sources. See Dina Sherzer, “Violence gastronomique dans Moderato Cantabile,” French Review 50.4 (1977): 596–60 and Ruth Cruickshank, “Eating, Drinking and Re-Thinking: Marguerite Duras’s Moderato Cantabile,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 49.3 (2013): 300–13. At some point in the story, the little boy tells Ludi he is hungry and gets violently dismissed and sent back to his “slut of a mother” (“salope de mère”). Marguerite Duras, Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia (Paris: Gallimard, 2013), 78. About her own role as a provider, Duras writes: “J’ai ce goût profond de gérer la maison. J’ai eu ce goût toute ma vie. Et il m’en reste encore quelque chose. Maintenant encore, il me faut savoir ce qu’il y a à manger dans les armoires, s’il y a tout ce qu’il faut, à tout moment, pour durer, vivre, survivre. Moi aussi, je cherche encore l’autarcie du bateau, du voyage de la vie, pour les gens que j’aime et pour mon enfant.” Marguerite Duras, La Vie matérielle: Marguerite Duras parle à Jérôme Beaujour (Paris: POL éditeur, 1987), 55. “Cette fois, non, dit-il. C’est fini. Je ne peux plus.” LPCT, 205. LPCT, 45–48. “Ce qu’il y a […] c’est que j’aime encore faire l’amour.” LPCT, 35. “Elle fait tellement bien la cuisine […] que c’est elle qui m’a rendu comme ça. Maintenant c’est foutu pour moi de ce côté-là. J’aime bouffer comme je ne sais pas quoi.” LPCT, 67. “Quand elle donne des pâtes aux vongoles aux vieux […] c’est pour le punir de la gourmandise qu’il a de sa cuisine, d’elle.” LPCT, 156. Anne Graham, “Le ‘baiser ensanglanté’ ou la dévoration sublime? Lecture de Moderato Cantabile,” Dalhousie French Studies 88 (2009): 67. “[N]ourrie de ce vin, exceptée de la règle, manger l’exténuerait”; “Sa bouche est desséchée par d’autre faim que rien non plus ne peut apaiser qu’à peine,

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Notes to pages 213–16

le vin.” Marguerite Duras, Moderato Cantabile (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1958), 131; 134. 18 Sanford Ames, “Mint Madness: Surfeit and Purge in the Novels of Duras,” SubStance 6/7.20 (1978): 38. 19 Lloyd Bishop observes the importance of this chapter, noting that it summarizes the novel’s significance with a “memorable-although muted moment of crisis and anagnorisis” that serves as the climax and resolution of the entire novel (222–23). To Bishop this change is affected through a “stylistic shock” with the language becoming precious, the syntax periodic, and the present tense taking over. Lloyd Bishop, “The Banquet Scene in Moderato Cantabile,” Romanic Review 69 (1978): 222–35. 20 Sherzer, “Violence,” 599. 21 “À la cuisine, on ose enfin le dire … qu’ elle exagère.” Duras, Moderato Cantabile, 126–27. 22 Duras, Moderato Cantabile, 125. 23 Duras, Moderato Cantabile, 22. 24 Ames, “Mint Madness,” 41. 25 Richard-Laurent Barnett, “Cauchemars culinaires, nausée narrative: les enjeux esthétiques de la rétrospection,” Revista Letras 60 (2003): 13–27. 26 Roland Barthes also writes about the homogeneity of sauces and shiny surfaces as a feature of bourgeois ideals translated into cuisine. See, for instance, Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1970), 120–21. 27 “Il est bienséant de ne pas en parler.” Duras, Moderato Cantabile, 125. 28 “[L]e saumon des eaux libres de l’océan.” Duras, Moderato Cantabile, 126. 29 “La dévoration du canard commence. Sa graisse va se fondre dans d’autres corps.” Duras, Moderato Cantabile, 136. 30 “[E]lle vomira là, longuement, la nourriture étrangère que ce soir elle fut forcée de prendre.” Duras, Moderato Cantabile, 140. 31 Through a psychoanalytical analysis of the modern home, Noëlle Châtelet argues that the architectural relegation of the kitchen to the “margins” of the house—with the bathroom and the bedroom—is telling of a general discomfort regarding the body exemplified by gastronomy. Noëlle Châtelet, Le Corps à corps culinaire (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 37. 32 Bishop, “The Banquet Scene,” 224. 33 “Anne Desbaresdes boit de nouveau un verre de vin tout entier, les yeux mi-clos. Elle en est déjà à ne plus pouvoir faire autrement. Elle découvre, à boire, une confirmation de ce qui fut jusque là son désir obscur et une indigne consolation à cette découverte. D’autres femmes boivent à leur tour, elles lèvent de même leurs bras nus, délectables, irréprochables, mais d’épouses.” Duras, Moderato Cantabile, 133–34. 34 “Pour Anne Desbaresdes la table et le repas, au lieu de créer une cohésion, une communion, sont des instruments de séparation: c’est à table qu’Anne se fait rejeter socialement par les autres.” Scherzer, “Violence,” 599.

Notes to pages 217–21

265

35 Bruce Bassoff. “Death and Desire in Marguerite Duras’s Moderato Cantabile,” MLN, 94.4 (1979): 720–30. 36 See Nancy Arenberg, “Resurrecting Desire: Wine and Dramatic Imitation in Marguerite Duras’s Moderato Cantabile,” Dalhousie French Studies (2002): 63. 37 Sherzer, “Violence,” 601. 38 “Beaucoup de femmes ont déjà vécu dans cette même maison qui entendaient les troènes, la nuit, à la place de leur cœur. […] Elles sont toutes mortes dans leur chambre.” Duras, Moderato Cantabile, 78. 39 “Je la voyais habitée par ces femmes. Je me voyais précédée par ces femmes dans ces mêmes chambres, dans les mêmes crépuscules. Il y avait eu neuf générations de femmes avant moi dans ces murs, beaucoup de monde, là, autour des feux, des enfants, des valets, des gardiennes de vaches.” Duras, La Vie matérielle, 50. 40 “Donc, voyez, j’écris pour rien. J’écris comme il faut écrire il me semble. J’écris pour rien. Je n’écris même pas pour les femmes. J’écris sur les femmes pour écrire sur moi, sur moi seule à travers les siècles.” Duras, La Vie matérielle, 53. 41 Marianne Hirsch, “Gender, Reading, and Desire in Moderato Cantabile,” Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 28.1 (1982): 71. 42 Hirsch, “Gender, Reading and Desire,” 72–74. 43 Hirsch, “Gender, Reading and Desire,” 83. 44 Duras, La Cuisine de Marguerite, 13. 45 “Mélangez du veau haché avec du pain trempé dans du lait, de la kacha, de la farine de sarrasin (peu), un ou deux œufs entiers, de l’estragon. Le reste je ne l’ai pas noté. Je l’ai noté seulement pour le mot kacha, je ne sais pas ce que c’est.” Duras, La Cuisine de Marguerite, 23. 46 “Il se tourna vers la vieille qui avait repris un air de vivante, tout à coup, en entendant parler de vongole. —Je voulais vous demander, dit-elle tout à coup, les vongole, vous les faites cuire avant ou après la tomate? C’était la première fois, depuis que l’enfant était mort, qu’elle parlait de cette façon presque dégagée. Gina frémit de la tête aux pieds.” LPCT, 200. 47 LPCT, 70. 48 “Vous voulez savoir pourquoi je fais la cuisine? Parce que j’aime beaucoup ça […] C’est l’endroit le plus antinomique de celui de l’écrit et pourtant on est dans la même solitude, quand on fait la cuisine, la même inventivité […] On est un auteur.” Quoted in Duras, La Cuisine de Marguerite, 16. 49 “A Neauphle, souvent, je faisais de la cuisine au début de l’après-midi […] C’était à la fois un bonheur et un état très précis d’abandon à une pensée en devenir, c’était une façon de penser ou de non penser peut-être—ce n’est pas loin—et déjà, d’écrire.” Duras, La Vie matérielle, 48–49.

Index Gastro-Modernism

Aboriginal 16, 153–54, 155, 158–60, 164, 249n absence 5, 15, 28, 43, 60, 70, 95, 111, 140, 147, 173, 175, 213, 219 abstinence 69 Adorno, Theodor 86–89 aesthetic 3, 9–10, 14–16, 23, 36–37, 83–98, 107, 124, 135, 139–40, 142–45, 155, 183, 192, 198–99, 202, 207, 209, 211, 215–17, 222 affect 2–3, 90, 210 agriculture 12, 69, 80, 167–68, 170 Albala, Ken 11 alienation 14, 54, 56, 65, 76, 157 American 6–8, 12, 58, 92, 100–102, 145, 153, 156, 172, 176, 186, 203–5, 207–8 American bar 102, 104–5 anti-vomitive 16, 139–40, 142–44, 152 appetite 6–8, 14, 17–18, 54, 71, 75, 87–89, 142, 147, 183, 187, 191, 205, 208, 211–13 Armstrong, Louis 5, 17, 193–203, 205, 207–8 art deco 104 Auden, W. H. 6

autonomy (aesthetic) 84–86, 88–91, 94, 189 Beckett, Samuel 5, 79 Murphy 5 Waiting for Godot 79 Beeton, Mrs. (Isabella) 54 Bell, Clive 88, 189 Berman, Marshall 14 Bloomsbury 78, 88–89, 189 body 3, 5, 12–13, 18, 30, 40, 45, 60, 62–63, 73, 90–92, 94–95, 163, 199, 211, 215 bourgeois 85, 87–89, 91, 142, 210–17 meal 211, 213–17 Bowen, Elizabeth 16, 118, 120, 122, 124 “Careless Talk” 124–26 bread 21, 30–31, 44–45, 47–48, 60, 61, 137, 154, 157, 163–64, 170, 172, 176, 189, 191, 194, 205, 219 Brecht, Bertolt 87, 89 Breton, André 84, 92–93 Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme 10, 12 British 14, 16, 17, 35–36, 55–56, 58, 61, 69, 79–80, 86–87, 100–102, 107–8,

267

268

Gastro-Modernism

117–18, 122, 124, 127–29, 131, 165, 167, 169–71, 174, 177, 192, 200 propaganda 124 camp 99, 108, 113, 114 Canada 5, 13, 16, 70, 153, 159–61 cannibalism 5, 74–75, 214 Carruth, Allison 6, 13, 224n censorship 121, 124, 126 Chaplin, Charlie 14, 22–23 Christou, Maria 10, 39 class 4, 6, 12, 14–16, 36, 43, 53–55, 58, 62, 78, 86, 88–89, 102, 107, 117–21, 123–25, 127–32, 176, 217 cocktail(s) 15, 61, 99–116, 166–67, 177–78 Coghlan, J. Michelle 8–9 colonial gastronomy 4, 10, 12, 16, 154 colonialism 4, 10, 12, 16, 153–61, 163–64 communion 15, 54, 57–58, 61, 63, 65, 91, 191, 216–17 Conrad, Joseph 5, 73–75, 81, 169, 173 “Falk: A Reminiscence” 74–75 Heart of Darkness 74 Typhoon and Other Stories 5, 74 consumption 3–5, 11–16, 36, 39, 61, 70, 74, 87, 91, 96–98, 117–18, 120, 130, 135, 137, 147, 165, 175, 185, 201, 206, 209, 214–15, 217, 221 cooking 6, 10, 17–18, 21, 24–27, 32–33, 53–56, 64, 75, 77–78, 126–29, 146, 149, 167, 170–71, 173, 175, 177, 193, 209–11, 213, 218–19, 221 Coward, Noël 15, 99–103, 104, 106–14, 116 Blithe Spirit 100, 112–13, 116 Private Lives 100, 104, 106–7, 110, 112–13 Shadow Play 100 Tonight at 8.30 100 The Vortex 15, 99–100, 102, 108–10, 113 Cree 153–54, 156–58, 163–64

cuisine 10, 12–13, 17, 56, 78, 169–72, 174, 177, 179, 202, 207, 215, 217, 219, 226n culinary art 12, 15, 86–91, 95–96, 98, 101, 207 culinary skills 17, 165, 167, 170–73, 175 David, Elizabeth 16, 118, 127–29 decadence 14–15, 99, 130 deprivation 84, 124, 193–94 desire 3, 36–52, 60, 64, 86–87, 93, 96–97, 109, 128, 131, 135, 139, 148, 150, 155, 169, 196, 198, 200, 206, 210, 212–17, 219, 221 dialectic 14, 17, 37, 152, 154–56, 163–64, 183, 232 diet 3, 5, 12, 14–15, 17, 44, 52, 70, 73–78, 81, 91, 119, 129, 159, 162, 164, 174–75, 193–207 diet books 195–96 Diet Does It 197–98, 202 dinner party 4, 14, 54, 56–65, 113 disgust 14, 16–17, 46, 48, 78, 86–89, 138–46, 148–49, 157, 163–64, 215 domestic 3–5, 14, 53–60, 63, 69, 105, 146, 174, 194, 209–11, 218 domesticity 63–64, 76, 218 drama 100–101, 107, 149, 175 drinks 51, 61, 101–2, 105, 107, 110, 113–15, 141, 143, 148, 216 Dublin 2, 3, 40–41, 46, 48, 51, 78 Dufrenne, Mikel 14, 37, 39, 52 Duras, Marguerite 17–18, 209–10, 213–15, 218–22, 262n, 263n La Cuisine de Marguerite 219 Moderato Cantabile 18, 210, 213, 215, 217–18, 220 Les Parleuses (with Xaviere Gauthier) 209, 213 Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia 18, 210 La Vie Matérielle 218–19, 221

Index eggs 49, 56, 73, 93, 117–27, 129, 167, 175–76, 178, 219 Eliot, T. S. 17, 56, 107, 139, 142, 165–79, 183–86, 188, 190–92 The Cocktail Party 166, 177 “A Cooking Egg” 175 “Death by Water” 175 The Elder Statesman 166 The Family Reunion 166, 171 Four Quartets, East Coker 179, 186, 190–91 “A Game of Chess” 184 The Golden Bow 183 Inventions of the March Hare 165 “The Metaphysical Poets” 167 Murder in the Cathedral 167 Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats 17, 166 “Preludes” 167 “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” 17, 167 Sweeney Agonistes 17, 167 The Waste Land 56, 174–75, 179, 183–86, 188 Ellington, Duke 17, 193–96, 202–5, 207–8 embodied 13, 84–86, 91, 116, 149, 198, 202 embodiment 91, 94, 198, 209 empire 5, 10, 55, 58, 69, 72, 158 Eucharist 45, 179, 190, 259n Eve 186–87, 196 excess 4–5, 71, 84, 147, 166, 196, 204, 214 experiment 3–5, 16–18, 26, 28–30, 33, 38–39, 102, 107, 135, 139–40, 147–49, 153, 158–59, 209, 219, 221 fare 17, 73, 165, 172, 177 First World War 55, 64, 80, 101, 122–23, 185 Fisher, M. F. K. 6–8, 18, 224n The Art of Eating 6 Consider the Oyster 6 The Gastronomical Me 6–7, 18

269

How to Cook a Wolf 6 Serve it Forth 6 The Theoretical Foot 6 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 101, 137, 147, 256n food humanities 13 food studies 1, 5–13, 18, 224n, 225n critical 8–13 foodstuffs 46, 52, 118–20, 124, 168–70, 174, 177–78, 186 Ford, Ford Madox 6, 78, 138, 145, 173 Forster, E. M. 70, 72–73, 76–77 Howard’s End 73, 80 A Passage to India 70, 72 “Porridge or Prunes, sir?” 77 fossil fuels 11 France 6–7, 11, 13, 77, 221 free-indirect 1, 37, 40, 43, 47, 52 French modernism 209–10, 262n Fry, Roger 88–89 gastrocriticism 10 gastronomy 1, 3–4, 6–7, 9–12, 16, 18, 119, 154, 210, 213–15, 217–19, 221, 224n, 227n gender 7–8, 11–12, 14, 16, 18, 21, 23, 25, 29, 31, 33–34, 79, 86, 88–89, 92, 96–98, 105–6, 144, 210–12, 217–18 Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) 11 glamour 104 grandmother 23–30, 32, 64 Green, Henry 16, 118, 120, 122–23 Loving 122, 124 Pack My Bag 123 Hamsun, Knut 72, 84, 92–93 health 10, 12, 17, 54, 75, 81, 140, 144, 147, 159–60, 165, 168–75, 177, 179, 193, 195–97 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 87, 232n Hemingway, Ernest 4, 9, 16, 83–85, 91, 93, 135–52, 248n “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” 4

270

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A Farewell to Arms 139 For Whom the Bell Tolls 139 Men at War 139 A Moveable Feast 4, 16, 85, 135–40, 143–44, 146–48 hostess 57–58, 63, 109 humor 14, 21–23, 27, 29, 31–34, 104, 110, 157, 163 hunger 2–5, 7–8, 15, 18, 36, 38, 41, 47–48, 69–72, 75, 79–81, 83–85, 87, 90–96, 98, 122, 137, 152, 162, 175, 178, 189, 202, 213–15, 219, 221, 234n hunger strike 5, 70–72 Hurston, Zora Neale 4 Huxley, Aldous 5, 75 ice 59–61, 91, 102, 105, 113, 130, 142, 165, 175, 189, 204 improvisation 17, 193, 202, incarnation 186, 201, 259n Indian Residential Schools 16, 153, 159–62, 164 Indigenous 11, 16, 39, 51, 153–54, 157–59, 161, 164, 249n interdisciplinary 10, 12 intertextuality 14, 22, 32, 34 interwar period 81, 83, 99, 100, 104, 194 Inuit 153, 156–57, 159, 163–64, 249n Ireland 5, 13–14, 47, 70, 79–80, 122, 234n James, Henry 77, 88 Jameson, Fredric 16, 154–57, 163–64, 250n Japan 11, 13–14, 22, 28, 31 Jauss, Hans Robert 87 jazz 100–101, 193–94, 199, 202–4, 208 Joyce, James 1–5, 9, 14, 18, 35–36, 39–44, 51, 56, 78–79, 107, 135, 139, 184, 186, 189, 198–99, 223–24 Dubliners 36, 39, 40–41, 43 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 39, 43, 79

Ulysses 1–5, 36, 38, 45–48, 50–51, 56, 79, 156, 184, 186, 199 Kafka, Franz 4, 71–72, 84, 93 A Hunger Artist 4, 71–72, 84 Metamorphosis 93 Kant, Immanuel 38, 86–90 Keyser, Catherine 225n Kiyoko, Murata 32 Kiyoteru, Hanada 22 Lacan, Jacques 37, 232n Lacanian 137, 155 language 13, 18, 21, 37, 75, 121–24, 126, 139–40, 157, 160–61, 164, 178, 197, 209–10, 213, 218–22, 228n late modernism 8 Lawrence, D. H. 17, 75, 152, 183–84, 186–88, 191–92 Birds, Beasts and Flowers 184, 186, 188 “Fig” 188 “Food of the North” 75 “Introduction to These Paintings” 187 “Peach” 187–88 “Pomegranate” 186–87 The Rainbow 75, 186 Sons and Lovers 186 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 17, 89, 197, 269n Lewis, Wyndham 16, 108, 138–43, 147–51 Apes of God 147 Blasting & Bombardiering 151 Tarr 141–42, 149, 219 life writing 17, 193, 203, 206–7, 261n literary field (Bourdieu) 85–86, 88, 91–92 literary food studies 6, 12–13, 224n literature 4, 6, 8, 10, 12–14, 21–23, 25, 27, 29, 31, 33, 37, 39, 53–54, 56, 58, 81, 85–86, 104, 117, 122, 146, 209–10, 215, 219, 221

Index London 63, 72, 77, 100, 102, 104, 106, 117, 120, 122–24, 127, 129, 166, 176, 184–85, 192 Loy, Mina 15, 84, 86, 92, 96, 98 Insel 15, 84, 86, 92–98 Macdonald, John A. 160 Manning, Olivia 16, 118, 129, 130–32 The Great Fortune 129–30, 132 The Spoilt City 129, 131, 132 Mansfield, Katherine 5, 9, 76–77, 88 A German Pension 76 “Germans at Meat” 76 “Pictures” 5 martini 100, 102, 112–16, 148, 244n Marx, Karl 11 Marxist 87, 89, 95, 189 masculinity 96–97, 100, 141, 145 mass culture 55, 87, 89, 91 Massumi, Brian 2 materialism 209 McKay, Claude 4, 256n meals 13–14, 31, 41, 48, 54, 61, 72, 76, 131, 141, 147, 175, 178, 191, 193, 199, 202, 207, 211, 235n meat 46, 52, 56, 64, 70, 73–78, 80, 96–97, 118–19, 127, 132, 142, 156, 158–59, 162, 166, 184–85, 190 Menninghaus, Winfried 139–40 middle-class 4, 6, 14, 36, 43, 53–55, 58, 117–19, 129–32 Midori, Osaki 14, 21, 23, 31, 33–34, 228n Aoi kushi (“Green combs”) 23 Dai nana kankai hōkō (Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense) 21 Mieko, Kanai 31 Miller, Henry 84, 90–91, 93–94 Ministry for Food 80, 118, 120 Mintz, Sidney 11, 54 Miró, Joan 84, 92 modernism 1, 3, 5–6, 8–10, 13–18, 23, 35, 53, 72, 84, 86–87, 89, 93, 96, 98–101, 107–8, 135, 138–39, 142, 148–49, 151–52, 154, 156, 163–65,

271

167, 173, 183, 202, 209–10, 224n, 262n Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant-Garde 9 modernist 3–9, 12, 14–18, 21–23, 25, 29, 33, 36–39, 45, 51, 56–57, 70–71, 75–76, 81, 83–89, 91, 93, 102, 107, 117–18, 122, 132, 135, 137, 149, 152, 154–55, 172, 176, 183, 185, 191–92, 196, 205–7, 221 Modernist Studies Association 8 modernity 4, 10–11, 14, 16, 53–54, 56, 63, 99–101, 107, 113, 140–41, 154–56, 158, 160, 164, 184, 224n Mosby, Ian 16, 153, 159, 161–63 Music is My Mistress 17, 193, 203 mythology 102, 203 New York 102 Nouveau Roman 210, 217 Nouveau Romanciers 215 nutrition 12, 16–17, 36, 69, 80, 153, 158–59, 165, 167–70, 172–73, 177, 179 nutritional 10, 17, 55, 88, 159, 194–97, 201–2, 206 obsession 9, 16, 22, 117, 135, 137–38, 142, 147, 198, 211, 213 organic farming 168 Orwell, George 56, 72, 88, 119 Down and Out in Paris in London 72 Keep the Aspidistra Flying 88 The Road to Wigan Pier 56 Paris 72, 83, 90, 112, 135–38, 143, 145, 147 parody 22–24, 31, 45, 94, 138 patronage 96–97, 147 periodization 16, 154–55 Persephone 186–87 pesticides 11 pizza 154, 157–58, 161, 163–64

272

Gastro-Modernism

place 4, 29, 36, 49, 73, 79, 86, 91–92, 108, 118, 123, 130, 137, 150, 168, 191, 214–15, 221 pleasure 5, 6, 24, 38, 76, 78, 87–88, 91, 105, 107, 127, 132, 136–37, 140, 142, 148, 150, 152, 178, 186, 202–3, 211, 213–14, 221 poetry 17, 22, 165, 167, 173, 175, 177, 183, 185, 256–57n post-colonial 8, 12, 15–16, 154, 156, 163 postmodern 154–55 Pound, Ezra 135, 140–41, 169, 258n poverty 33, 69, 81, 83, 85, 92–95, 147, 159, 193 production 4, 7–8, 10–11, 13, 15, 18, 23–24, 36, 69, 85, 93, 102, 108, 110, 125, 158, 219 Prohibition 102 Pym, Barbara 16, 118, 126, 129 Excellent Women 118, 126 queer family 25–26, 31–32 rationing 54, 56, 64, 81, 117–22, 125–26, 128–32, 189, 194, 258n raw 17, 97, 156, 163, 183, 188, 191–92, 196–97 Roy, Parama 227n Sachi, Hamano 33 salads 77, 172, 178 Savoy Hotel 100, 104–6, 110 scatology 27 Schopenhauer, Arthur 87–88 Second World War 6, 117–18, 124, 131, 186, 188, 194 servants 53, 55, 62, 73, 122–23, 216 sexuality 32–33, 39, 106, 145–47, 149, 185–86 Shahani, Gitanjali G. 226–27, 232–33 Shaw, George Bernard 5, 75 shōjo (girl) 14, 22–23, 27 significant form 189, 258n Sinclair, Upton 196–99, 205, 207

The Fasting Cure 197 Good Health and How We Won It, with an Account of the New Hygiene (with Michael Williams) 197 “My Life in Rice” 207 snacks 157, 165, 175 space 3–5, 9, 14, 29, 41, 44, 50–51, 93, 95, 105, 130, 137–38, 141–42 spatial 8, 37 starvation 71–72, 74, 79–80, 83–86, 92–94, 123, 153, 159, 162, 214 starving artist 15, 71–72, 83–86, 89–98 Stein, Gertrude 6, 16, 129, 135, 137, 140, 143–47, 205–7 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas 144–45 The Making of Americans 145 Tender Buttons 145–46 Stevens, Wallace 4, 17, 183, 188–92 “Add This to Rhetoric” 189 “As You Leave the Room” 191 “The Comedian as the Letter C” 191 “Dinner Bell in the Woods” 191 “Dry Loaf ” 188–89 “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” 4, 189 Harmonium 189–90 Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction 190 Parts of the World 188–89 “Study of Two Pears” 188, 190 suffragettes 70 surrealism 89, 93 surveillance 126 Swiss Kriss 197–98, 202 synaesthesia 2–3 taste 2–3, 6, 14, 16–17, 21, 28, 32, 34, 53, 56, 76–78, 86–87, 89, 100, 106–7, 109–10, 112–15, 118, 125, 129, 132, 136–38, 142, 149, 162, 171, 177–78, 183, 189, 203, 206, 220 temporal 8, 37–38, 186, 195, 204, 215 terroir 2 Tigner, Amy L. 13

Index time 2–3, 9, 14, 27, 61, 64, 74, 101, 110, 122, 141, 143, 175–76, 185–86, 189–90, 200, 204 wartime 16, 117–26, 129, 131, 189–90 Toklas, Alice B. 6, 9, 143, 146, 202, 205–7 The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book 5, 7–8 Tompkins, Kyla Wazana 12–13 transcendence 92–93, 190 transubstantiation 190 United Kingdom 13 Victorian 53–56, 63–64, 71 technology 63 violence 62, 131, 144, 149–50 wandering 21–22, 25, 28, 31–33, 46 women 5, 16–18, 22–23, 30, 33, 41, 50, 53–56, 64, 71, 73, 76, 79, 89, 96, 98, 106–7, 118–20, 126, 129, 142, 145,

273

148, 170–71, 191, 209–11, 213–14, 216–18, 220 Woolf, Virginia 1, 4–5, 13–15, 36, 38, 53–61, 63–70, 75–77, 107, 173, 176 “The Introduction” 60 To the Lighthouse 36, 63, 77 The Man Who Loved His Kind 59 Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown 53 Mrs. Dalloway 4–5, 36, 56–59, 61–62 “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” 59 Mrs. Dalloway’s Party 59, “Professions for Women” 55, 64 A Room of One’s Own 1, 76, 173 “A Summing Up” 63 “Together and Apart” 60 The Voyage Out 76 The Years 70 Yuxweluptun, Lawrence Paul 154, 158, 161