The Theoretical Foot (25 page)

6

He ran quickly up the stairs. At the first landing he stopped. He waited, a strange expression on his fine, goat-like face, and
—
as his left leg seemed to yawn
—
then he leaned his forehead against the cool plastered wall.

Too Terrible to Bear

M.F.K. FISHER AS NOVELIST

An Afterword by Jane Vandenburgh

In the last days of summer a stylish expat couple are welcoming guests to La Prairie, a glorious five-hundred-year-old Swiss estate perched in a meadow high above an alpine lake, surrounded by vineyards. Sara Porter and Tim Garton have removed themselves to Europe to avoid, in part, the approbation of small-minded American society. Though they are clearly spiritually bound, each is still legally married to somebody else.

The year is 1938.

Although the ambiance of their beautiful farmhouse—fountain on the terrace gurgling musically, daisies hanging heavily on their stalks—contributes to the feeling of timelessness, the writer is specific about the date. It is August 31 and the concrete manner in which the story is repeatedly anchored alerts the reader that this is not the summertime idyll it might first appear.

La Prairie functions as an island of beauty and calm seemingly exempt from temporal reality. Here Tim and Sara and their guests talk and drink and eat the magnificent food we'd expect in a book by M.F.K. Fisher, even as twin disasters—one personal, the other historic—bear down on them. As they sit at the long table in the
shade of an ancient apple tree, the countries surrounding neutral Switzerland are all moving ever closer to war.

In this powerful and evocative story, the coming war in Europe is the dark backdrop against which all foreground action is set. As storms gather all around them, Sara and Tim live simply and—with little by way of household help—grow flowers and fruit and vegetables, placing this bounty on the table for the pleasure of their guests.

Those who've come to La Prairie are the artistic, the beautiful, the fortunate: Honor Tennant and her brother Daniel, American college students studying languages in Europe. There, too, is Tim's sister, Ann Garton Temple, called “Nan” by her friends, an internationally famous poet travelling with her friend Lucy Pendleton, a painter. They're joined by Sara's old friend Joe Kelly. Orphaned as a child, Joe became a college football star and is now at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He and his girl from the States have spent the summer tramping around Europe, a lark that would pass today without comment but might then have ruined this coed's reputation.

We're carried along in the lightest of veins, as if all this story wants to be is a comedy of manners, yet at the edges cold reality begins to dawn: Joe Kelly and Sue Harper have just hitchhiked in from Munich where they've witnessed throngs of starving Jewish refugees. Joe, who's known privation, is sympathetic while Sue, seeing a begging child, cloaks herself in cynicism and looks away. No one here has any real sense of the dimensions of the advancing horror. How can they? In 1938 the word “holocaust” was not yet spelled with a capital
H
and no one could yet imagine the enormity of the coming evil.

Tim and Sara and their guests cannot yet grasp that all existence lies at a perilous edge in those final days of August and that they're about to be exiled from the paradise of La Prairie. They—and we—simply cannot know what disaster will look like when it arrives, only that it surely will.

T
HE DARK CHORD
with which the book begins is mysteriously struck at strategic intervals. Written lyrically, as if from the midst of an
opium dream, these passages tell of an anonymous man's agony at being suddenly stricken with a nameless condition that, progressing quickly, will cost him his leg. The lines appear without explanation or attribution and serve as section openers and to explicate the title.

One of the great strengths of this book is the manner in which the two almost inconceivable horrors—one intimate, the other global in scope—are kept tactfully at bay as Fisher's characters seek, as an anodyne, to concentrate solely on the beauty of their peaceful lives in which all grievous hardship can still be ignored or denied. In painting this story with the deep contrasts of chiaroscuro, Fisher has managed to write of personal losses so profound she might have otherwise been stunned into silence. The implacable sadness here is only glancingly alluded to, as if, faced directly, the pain would have proved unbearable.

M.F.K. Fisher worked always from autobiographical impulse, inventively depicting the places she lived and traveled to, where she shopped, those she sat with to eat her glorious meals, writing self-revealingly of the details of her own life long before anyone thought to call this kind of personal history “memoir.” She so effortlessly captured a specific time and place, working quickly and assuredly, that her storytelling strikes the contemporary ear as conversational and intimate, as if she's maybe confiding in (maybe only) you. If she were a painter we might say she worked
en plein air.

She was urged to write a novel by many people, including Dillwyn Parrish, the man who would—as soon as each was free to marry—become her second husband. Working from life as unapologetically as she did in her essays, Fisher gave little effort over to artful disguise. Each character here is readily identifiable—the houseman François being, in real life, a villager named François, Fisher's part-time help in the kitchen who was also the town undertaker. Her sister Norah, named “Honor” here, is affectionately called “Nor.” And Dillwyn Parrish was famously known to his intimates by the nickname “Tim.”

       
Whose life am I to remember,
as Fisher was known to say,
if not my own?

In 1938 M.F.K. Fisher and Dillwyn Parrish were living at Le Paquis, a farm outside the Swiss village of Vevey on which La Prairie is vividly based. The real-life events of late summer directly underlie the story told in
The Theoretical Foot,
as they relate Dillwyn Parrish's swift descent into the agony of Buerger's disease, a circulatory condition causing blood clots in the extremities and resulting in gangrene. His first attack of thrombophlebitis came in the earliest days of September of that year, directly following a night of revelry in which he'd enchanted their houseguests with the grace of his dancing.

As is described in the six hallucinatory passages, Parrish's left leg above the knee was lost to amputation within two weeks of that first attack. The pain in his phantom limb was so excruciating it could be mediated only by the powerful opiate analgeticum, available in Europe but not in the US. When their dwindling finances and the advancing chaos of the Second World War forced them to sell their Swiss estate, the two set about amassing as much of the drug as possible before returning to California. They bought land in rural Hemet, Riverside County, and—in what may have been wry comment on the lushness of the life they'd left in Europe—they called the place in Hemet “Bareacres.” They moved into the caretaker's cottage and set about doing renovations, and here Fisher finished the book she'd started at Le Paquis.

Throughout her life M.F.K. Fisher resisted writing fiction. While she was a quick study on sights, sounds, and tastes—all the authentic texture of the sensual world she so easily inhabited—she may have felt she simply didn't resonate on the particular frequency that allowed the thoughts and feelings of others to be readily known to her. In
The Theoretical Foot
she seems to have almost not understood what to do with the autobiographical impulse and so takes the comic tack of subverting it. Sara Porter, as the writer's stand-in, occupies this story's center serving as its dynamic hub, each of the other characters then radiating directly outward from her. As vital as she is to the souls of the others—each indeed seems to even define himself or herself in relationship
to Sara—she is herself seen only in their points of view so her own interior life remains mysterious, all but unknown to us.

And the others
do
seem to think about Sara continually, with Honor and Daniel and Tim's sister Nan, and Joe and Sue each wondering who and what Sara
really
is—as warm and charming as she seems or mean, snobbish, aloof? The terrible Lucy Pendleton, as Sara's foil, reveals herself as a self-deluded hypocrite who entertains salacious fantasies even as she sets herself up to judge the other woman's morals.

Fisher always described Dillwyn Parrish as the one true love of her life. The story's mechanism demonstrates how this works in that in the novel Sara, the Fisher character, is known intimately only by Tim.

A
FTER THEIR RETURN
to Riverside County, the two were finally married in the county clerk's office in May of 1939. Struggling with the inevitability of further amputations and the fact that the one efficacious drug was in short supply, Dillwyn Parrish shot himself in August of 1941. Fisher's brother David Kennedy, upon whom the character Daniel Tennant is closely based, hung himself in his parents' barn in Whittier, California, in July of the following year. There is no evidence in the pages of its typescript that Fisher ever so much as looked at
The Theoretical Foot
again.

But the book we have in hand was finished, so why, with all its beauty and thematic power, wasn't it published while M.F.K. Fisher was alive, maybe brought out later when her fame was in its ascendency? Much of that complicated story is lost to time but surely both the layerings of her personal tragedies and family pressure played a part.

Dillwyn Parrish, as illustrator, had collaborated with his sister Anne on a series of children's books and the two were exceptionally close. Her books for adults, escapist romances, sold well in a bleak Depression mileau in which even sophisticated literary people were starved for the easy wit of light entertainment. Her bestsellers had made Anne Parrish rich enough that she could help her brother buy
the Swiss estate, which they'd originally conceived of as an artists' retreat. It was to Le Paquis that M.F.K. Fisher and her husband, Al Fisher, had come as guests.

The household in Hemet was supported in part by Anne Parrish's generosity. Motivated by her success, Dillwyn Parrish and M.F.K. Fisher collaborated on a novel, a comedy of manners in the same light vein as his sister's books. Their own concerned a group of travelers gathered in a pension on Mont Pèlerin high above Lake Geneva.
Touch and Go
was published in 1939 under the pseudononym Victoria Berne. Though they'd hoped to make heaps of money, sales were disappointing.

If Fisher had thought to write another lightly witty, pleasant, and pleasing story in
The Theoretical Foot
—as its weightless tone does sometimes suggest—her more truthful and biting nature immediately got the better of her. The book's intial scene has Joe Kelly and Sue Harper—“naked as they were born” as Fisher was fond of saying—having just had sex. They then blow off their meeting with Sara Porter in order to fall back into bed and make love again.

It was during the 1930s, we remember, that James Joyce's
Ulysses
had been embargoed, its import into the US banned by customs officials who had deemed the book obscene.
The Theoretical Foot
—written by a woman and depicting smart, stylish, educated, in all ways enviable women who clearly enjoy their own sexuality—would have been published into times that held that any woman “living in sin” relinquished all claim to respectiblity. Men in these same circumstances would have been seemingly exempt from at least the virulence of such criticism, of course.