A Bistro of One's Own

"There was the scent of the sea as we passed the display of oysters on their bed of crushed ice, the rich whiff of butter warming in a pan, and, coming through the air every time the kitchen door swung open, the pervasive–and to my untraveled nose, infinitely foreign–hum of garlic." Mayle, French Lessons








One of the great consistencies of Mayle's work (with the exception of a Dog's Life, I suspect) is that his protagonists tend to personas of Mayle himself, as mentioned before, middle age or beyond, usually once or twice divorced, and an eloquent wannabe hedonist.  For their time, his books captured, I believe a sort of sentiment of the age, a desire to use a little extra cast to travel and live the good life for the man of charm and semi-means. For the likes of me, I have tried to capture this persona myself, most successfully with a series of food writings that resemble his Provence A-Z, which, in turn, took its inspiration from MFK Fisher's own title of the same name.  Even the wonderfully inquisitive short essays were rooted in the Mayle charm of the well seasoned traveler, seeking the high points of culture and some anecdotal findings. I had wondered yesterday if, in order to reach a voice that was compelling and well worth writing, if it wouldn't be quite fun to turn such a type of character – the amateur food sleuth that is – to something more of a young adult's book, what I would certainly categorize as otherworldly departure from the standard fare of that age which seems to be quite generally hollow and far too often menacing and needlessly exploitative of some flashier forms of contemporary culture. I really have to say I like the idea of our protagonist as a sort of independent minded young foodie who hires himself to seek out these little mysteries around the neighborhood. We used to get this sort of unsentimental mystery of youth in the Great Brain Series, books that I always loved, in which the young protagonist was always a bit of the fray, seeking out his assignments from others.  The idea that a young man would want to create and establish his own restaurant is very fascinating. A little with, a little wisdom, a little Maylian.

"One piece of advice was a model of clarity: I should never attempt to get involved with what he referred to as 'their lingo.' Speak English forcefully enough, he said, and they will eventually understand you." – Mayle, from French Lessons







Playing the novice to a new culture takes a delicacy of sensibility that not everybody has.  Sam might have to tip toe around the fact that he had never been a chef per se, only a chef domestique, otherwise known as a stay at home dad whose favorite parts of the day usually had something to do with reading a gourmet recipe, planning a menu, and then off to the grocery store with a kid or two to pick over the produce. Was this chefing? In his mind, yes, and, after all, isn't that in the end all that counts? When the gravestone is laid over at the end, will the words say that everybody knew precisely who he was and they all knew there was no way he was ever a great cook. Or, he often wondered, could he fudge it a little bit, and put on that stone that he "always loved cooking?" This gave him some ideas for the Bistro of One's Own – to make a sign out of stone with some immortal words scribbled all over it.  He thought again...maybe this was a little bit morbid, especially he was in essence starting from scratch. Wait, that was it! "From Scratch!" How clever he could be sometimes, he thought to himself while nobody else was looking, of course.

He looked back over to Clara. If she was to be his partner in this little escapade of an adventure, she would have to see the future of the place for herself.  Sam looked over her light and loose hair, bubbling in the wind a little, and could see the very tip of a sailboat off along the northern shore of Lake Mendota, deep, blue, and pleasant.

A Bistro of One's Own

"Like many of his generation, he had very little good to say about the French – an odd lot who couldn't even understand cricket. But he did admit that they knew their way around the kitchen..." Mayle, from French Lessons








The Mayle character has several things in common each of his books, whether fiction or non-fiction. There is always the past career, which seemed to swallow protagonist whole, often hectic, very demanding, quite chatty and seemingly hollow altogether but that held the attention of Simon, or whatever name, because of its creative promise. He was a creative trapped inside a popularity contest, always with one wishful eye on a future life that might allow for that creative self to full emerge, be what it needed to be...and it had to have the place! Here is where the Provence books come in – they are deceivingly real, despite the cover make-up and despite the subject material of coming to a new land, full of potential romance. We can't forget that the book is actually stocked with complaint: the mistral, the leaky pipes, the slow to action workmen, the visitors (the very ones that they had tried to escape). Escape, of course, being the key concept throughout: to escape the gray drudgery of the English Channel and moving toward the mostly sunny delights of the south  of France. It's this nugget of desire that informs Mayle's work: it is grown up romance in this way. Adults do continue to hold on tightly to those remote nuggets of romance left in the mind but that we often don't have it in is us to full realize these because so much of it has been drained by...previous careers, for example. It is the place itself that becomes the romance, the characters are new, if often somewhat disgruntled; they are not depicted as necessarily menacing but harbor a certain instinctual locality that cannot be pierced by your own foreign projections onto them. And there is the food and the drink...this also helps. What better way to preserve the romance of place than to sing along the journey with the assistance of a little French wine and dabbling away at every charcuterie you find on the web of rues? All of this is captured by a voice that tries to charm not harm. Cultural criticism never makes it much further than a jocular ribbing. It is universally accepted to make fun of self and other as long as it is not intended to either elevate oneself too far or denigrate the other too low. Mayle does this superbly, with a witty but innocent voice, humorous but not simple gunnery or sentiment. These are cultural cues that are no doubt hard to create for oneself. It is either there or it is not. For my own Bistro of One's Own, it becomes an investment in time and energy. The world circles around in its slapdash way, full of plans and difficulties, but underneath it the writer has to stave those things off long enough to shoe horn in the light voice of the mild humorist. We need luck, time, and a lot of commitment.

"She was looking particularly witchy today in her most ruined cowgirl boots and stained apron, with three enormous cauldrons boiling on her old monster stove. Witchy with a country-western motif." – Kingsolver, Flight Behavior






4

The borrowing from Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter is really quite amazing in this book. By calling her mother in law Hester, we were given a little nod in this direction right away, called after, of course, Hester Prynne, Prynne itself carrying some meaning for Hawthorne in his own book. Hawthorne had settled into Salem Massachusetts after living in Concord Mass in the Old Manse, a house built for him by none other than Emerson's father. Hawthorne spends an enormous among of energy in trying to capture for us the patriarchal culture of Salem in his introductory notes to Letter, going as far as to say that he could not conceive of a more male oppressive caste than what he was finding there at the time. As we read Flight Bahavior, at any time that we might be thinking that this is a sort of tightly packed socially critical novel, full of symbols and religious allusions, really, think again; take a look at the allegorical Letter again and we can begin to see that Kingsolver actually does us the great great service of providing us all kinds of little narrative tidbits to actually keep this 400 page book quite readable, including many references to modern culture (she describes the Judd family, for example), and offers us a narrative voice that very often provides of us humorous relief, such as the line above "Witchy with a country-western motif." This all done for the sake of readability. I have virtually no doubts that Kingsolver could crucify the Cub and Dellarobia family if she chose; in fact, as it is set up against the beauty of the butterflies to come, their magestic visage and their unfortunate situation of having to fly north as a new flight behavior, this could become a true screed. Heck, you could turn this thing into a book of essays and just go after folks for their attitudes. That Kingsolver uses Pastor Ogle as a take on Dimsdale, for another example, gives us a little bit of playfulness, a sort of shot over the bow of the folks that are being skewered down there in Tennessee. We know that the author is thinking that this makes her personally mad, but to lay it all at the doorstep of a farming family who may or may not decide to lumber for money, well, this is a culture problem too, they are just wrapped up inside it and misguided. The scene that plays out as the congregation is a loose little narrative without much to give it substance or stability. Each family member goes off into their own little niche of the program, and each sort of seeks out their own 'home' in church. This is purposeful. All of it, I believe, is purposeful in how it is showing that, as opposed to the true miracle of the butterflies up on that mountain, traditional religion has lost its vitality, literally. Any religion that doesn't stop to smell the roses just isn't really very real to put it bluntly; and of course that is the essential problem with sustainability and religion today: religion exists still but for what purpose if it can't get its followers to dig in and love their land, their earth...their creation! Either traditional religion needs to redouble its mission or it is already lost. We presume that what is to come is a positioning of nature as potential religion, a kind of reversal of Scarlet Letter, because the call there was a need for a loosening of the strict standards of belief, to allow for a woman in crisis. Now a woman in crises, well she might be painted as famous, a kind of oddity to be believed or looked at as a spectacle.

A Bistro of One's Own

"The early part of my life was spent in the gastronomic wilderness of postwar England, when delicacies of the table were in extremely short supply. I suppose I must have possessed taste buds in my youth, but they were left undisturbed." – Peter Mayle, from French Lessons







To go from a cooking instructor and house husband to an owner of very small yet enchanting bistro is such a zig zagged road that I sometimes wonder whether I can retell it truthfully – almost as though parts of the story someone else has made up and kindly inserted into my real life without me knowing so that when I consider it myself I pick it up and examine it something like a stranger's scarf found in your closet. There is one moment, however, that I remember as well as I could any other. I was standing on the second level of a Barnes and Noble Bookstore at the sheik outdoor mall The Grove in Los Angeles looking through the food writing section, picking through some of the usual suspects that show up on the shelves with beautiful hardcover books and I realized that, within a year, I would open my own place come hell or high water. Now, these fellows with their own signature books and signature charm, they nearly all had gone through the long paces of chef's storyline: maybe skip high school, walk into the best restaurant you can when you are, say, 16, offer your services as bar back, perhaps become a sous chef at 19, then head into culinary school, experience behind you, and off you are into the restaurant biz, long nights, hard parties, and incomparable experience. Ten years later a book of your best craft made into a stately book with your very own face on it. Guys like me opening them up wondering if someday I could do it too, but without all the experience? Well it worked.

Notes on A Bistro of One's Own

"The best house, everybody had said, in central London–large, elegant, almost secluded at the end of a quiet Kensington square. Caroline had spent three years and God knows how much money decorating it until it had reached that state of mannered perfection which made the disorder of normal daily life unthinkable." – Peter Maybe, from Hotel Pastis







June 27

Well now to plan out a novel...let's see, first and foremost you must pick out a few things, a little like a wish list, I suspect. There are those people that you decide to characterize for the next year or so – you can't forget that you will have exhibit both patience and some generosity if you plan to wake up in the morning to say hello to them over and over again. And let's not forget about voice and tone – better pick out the right textures there also. Who wants to write a dark tragedy when the soul is actually crying out for some humor? Action, point of view, context...what point are you trying to make? With all of this, I know from the past that I might of course crave the contours of a social novel – reading Kingsolver right now, Flight Behavior, which is a take off on the Scarlett Letter, the social novel of that century – or that a farce would be fun, but at the end of the day, I really can't stand living inside the grind of either radical departure of all things gloomy or all things hilarious. I've gravitated toward the writing of Mayle ever since A Year in Provence, probably the most important book I've ever really read because it captures something of the spirit of things that I share – it's a sort of desire for lightness against the usual norms we set out for ourselves of the serious. To put it another way, I tend to spend my days listening to smooth jazz, all the while the Wisconsin weather trapping around the neighborhood a little like a fiend, literally. I think Mayle (now so sadly passed, as of 2018), was very much a recipient of the same inner genetic tendency to see need to see bright colors and smell the wafts of the baguette carried along the waves of the Mistral, despite (and against) a British backdrop of a previous life. Let's not forget that to take the broad leap across the pond and shuck the Brits for the Provencial is really quite a step. Yet Maybe does a wonderful job of not turning his past life as ad exec into some trap of cultural mores and psychic disenchantment; instead it always receives a humorous past, as if to say, yes, I was indeed trapped inside poor weather and poor hours for many years, but this great escape is not necessarily something to be found only in the Provencale sunshine, but something to be rebound inside my very own voice and perceptions. His plots are relatively loose and his little sly criminals full of human humor, just like us. These are light and full of watercolors, not deep green and brown Dutch Masters. Of all the literature I have read, Mayle is the only writer I have ever fully depended on and understood, over and over again. An old friend...seemingly – my own fault here – my only friend, really in this way. To be a romantic in a world gone either mechanical or digital is close to a full time job. How do you do it? You can listen to smooth jazz; you can cook it out; you can write it out; or maybe live it out if you are extraordinarily nimble in the matters of balancing real life with that of the fantastic.

"I've never planted anything outside this early, so I'm curious to see what will come of them." – Carl H. Klaus, from My Vegetable Love: A Journal of a Growing Season








June 25


To say its summer now feels far more genuine that if we would have said it a week or ago, or a week before that; it seems that any date past the school year for children constitutes summer, although we all have to wait for the magical 21st of the month when, if all goes well, the rain disappears for awhile, the sun blankets the earth for more days in a row, folks hold on with a bit more security those natural smiles because they know they can count on getting outside and living their lives more fully again. Here in Madison – the midwest in general – we are experiencing expectations a little different this year, as others. We experienced some profound beauty in months previous, the kind of stuff that makes the gardener and the outdoorsy type make that secret wish with the devil: I promise I will do everything I can to be good if this dreary spring goes away and the sun comes on in to settle. Didn't really happen this way; June has been wet; for those of us who need the green, it becomes a kind of crawling period of time, always waiting for the days of expectation. Now, I will say this, as June 21 hit, so too did a nice patch of clean weather and this city has been alight for a few days now by foot traffic and festivals, bright colors and, whether we all like it or not, a lot of pale untanned skin poling through those shorts legs. Yesterday was as fine a summer moment as I can truly boast: we put on a writing workshop at Tenney Park, which is positioned at the south edge of Lake Mendota, where the lochs let lake water down into the Yahara River, which then travels through the isthmus to Lake Monona, where I live on a classic corner sporting a bridge and arching trees.