APPETITE FOR LIFE:
The Biography of Julia Child
By Noel Riley Fitch
Doubleday, 569 pages, $25.95
Recipe for a biography of Julia Child:
Take 60 years’ worth of Filofax entries, outdated desk calendars and old birthday cards. Do not sift.
Chop up an equal amount of Christmas-card lists, including street numbers and change-of-address notices. Mix in thoroughly.
Sprinkle with dropped names and tangential political events. (Readers’ eyes should be thorough glazed over.)
With “Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child,” Noel Riley Fitch serves up an earnestly researched but rather flat
book about an extremely colorful personality: Julia Child, a 6-foot-2-inch, red-haired, would-be spy, whose passion for French cuisine helped transform the way Americans think about food. Nowhere in these pages do we find a fully rendered portrait of the ebullient personality and cheerful eccentricity that endeared Child to her devoted readers and TV viewers. And that raises some potent questions about the art of creating a biography.
Ideally, biographer and subject should share some basic affinities; a composer’s life, for example, should not be attempted by a tone-deaf writer. But while Fitch and Child are enthusiastic fellow Francophiles, the author seems to have been born with an empty spoon in her mouth. In Fitch’s hands, Child’s love affair with food is boiled down to a meticulous listing of countless dinner menus, several incarnations of Child’s favorite chocolate-cake recipe and an appalling list of ingredients for little Julia’s childhood treat: codfish balls in white sauce. Fitch lacks a visceral understanding of the pleasures of the table, so she’s unable to explain how the discovery of great food transformed Pasadena, Calif.-raised Julia McWilliams, the former codfish enthusiast with a legendary appetite for jelly doughnuts and chocolate sodas, into Julia Child, the internationally acclaimed American tastemaker.
More fundamentally, Fitch has dedicated herself to research to the exclusion of every other literary virtue, especially style. It’s obvious she has spent countless hours chronicling Child’s life, obsessively poring over every scrap of paper that ever crossed Child’s desk. But she never shapes all this raw material into a graceful or compelling narrative. It’s as though she had scrupulously risen before dawn and spent hours at the local market, carefully selecting only the finest, freshest ingredients–only to throw the scaly fish, raw meat and unwashed vegetables onto a bare table in front of her dinner guests.
Unfortunately, we have come to expect biographers to provide us with these laundry lists of secondary and tertiary details. And when they have obliged us with so very many facts, it seems almost churlish to ask that they provide us with imagination and insight as well. Yet the story of a life is more than the paper trail it leaves. Real lives are made up of thoughts, emotions, memories and wishes; it is those deeper meanings that we seek in biography, because they help us to understand more about our own inner lives.
Fitch may have been led astray by Child’s ability to disclose a great deal while revealing almost nothing. Although she gave her biographer access to all her records, files and date books, they yield only a snapshot of an outgoing, charming but essentially impenetrable woman, with a hearty love of dirty jokes and peanut butter, and an inexplicable flair for superb cookbook writing. As one longtime acquaintance told Fitch, Child ” `is a guarded, complex woman under the guise of a simple one. She has all this warmth, yet I do not know her after years of working with her. . . . She knows just what she wants and come hell or high water, she is going to get it. She has played all her cards right, yet the simplicity and bumbling make her no threat to anyone.’ ” That discerning little paragraph tells more about the essential Julia Child than all details massed in the preceding 470 pages.
It could be argued that, by presenting all the available details and letting the reader draw his own conclusions, the biographer is adhering to a scrupulous standard of intellectual honesty. Yet there’s an enormous difference between a hagiographer who edits out unattractive or inconvenient facts and a thoughtful biographer whose judicious selection of anecdotes and details illuminates her subject’s life. Instead of being guided by the saying “God is in the details,” biographers might better embrace the motto “Less is more.”
Take, for example, Fitch’s view of Child as a woman of enormous appetite for all of life’s physical pleasures. It’s true that Child, in happy midlife, was indeed smart, ribald, creative and lusty. (Her recipe for a happy marriage was summed up in ” `the three F’s,’ “
of which only two–“feed ’em” and “flatter ’em”–can be reprinted here.) Yet before her marriage to the worldly Paul Child, Julia had been a 34-year-old virgin, an extremely tall but otherwise rather typical young woman of her social class and generation, with an expensive education, a comfortable trust fund, a decent tennis game, some amorphous literary aspirations and few marketable skills. Fitch would have better served her readers had she deleted a few pages of date-book entries and really dug into the complex web of strengths, inhibitions, talents and ambitions that led to Child’s complete reinvention of her tidy, conventional life, first taking her to a wartime desk job with the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, then to the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that “biography is the falsest of the arts.” To a great extent, that’s true; no one can enclose the infinite variety of life within the narrow covers of a book. Nevertheless, we need biographers who will accept Fitzgerald’s challenge, and transform their piles of carefully accumulated facts, details, quotations and footnotes into thoughtful, thought-provoking books that dare to draw conclusions, make judgments and lend insight about their subjects’ lives, times and worlds.
