WHAT WE HUNGER FOR

DOUGLAS BAUER

M. F. K. Fisher fed the addiction of an exceptional life

I am, as often, tempted to start a personal book, mais a quoi bon? I think my present life is a strange, complicated, interesting one. But my deep distrust—or is it timidity, cowardice even?—of such self-revelations will, perhaps, always prevent me from thus relieving myself.

—M. F. K. Fisher, March 4, 1937

 

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher died fifteen years ago last summer, in the bedroom of her small, graceful, white stone house tucked in a hillocky pasture in the Sonoma Valley, and I suppose it’s that anniversary that has heightened my many memories of her. I’m thinking especially of the week when I first met her, and she showed me how to taste and savor life in ways I’d only started to sense I was hungry for; and also of the time, two decades later, when her life, as I saw it, was a vivid example of how to receive the meaner sustenance of age.

She was just twenty-eight years old when she wrote the entry in her journal I’ve quoted above. She’d left California the previous fall with her husband Al Fisher. The two planned to share a house in a vineyard above the Swiss village of Vevey with its owner, their friend, the painter Dillwyn Parrish, whom everyone called by his nickname, Timmy. And by the following early spring, when she made this entry, her marriage was ending and Al was returning to the States to teach at Smith. Mary Frances would return as well, but only briefly, to tell her parents she was divorcing Al Fisher and marrying Timmy Parrish and that the two of them would continue in Vevey. A strange, complicated, interesting life indeed.