Gotham Diary:
Brevis?
17 December 2014

Yesterday, after hours spent unpacking the last of the non-book boxes and somehow finding new places for everything that had been stashed temporarily in the linen closet, I had an hour or two for reading, and I thought for a while that I would knock off a few chapters of Penelope Fitzgerald. I had five to go. Nearing the end of the first of these, “Innocence,” however, I realized that I must put the book down, and not pick it up again until I’d read Fitzgerald’s last four novels, one of which is the subject of each but the last of those chapters. It’s all very well, when you’re young, to read about things before you read the things themselves; but, as an old man, I look forward to the surprise of an unread novel. I’ll have heard something about it, something about what happens in it — but I’m talking about a more subtle kind of surprise.

Hermione Lee’s chapters about what she considers to be Fitzgerald’s most important work are essays in literary criticism. They’re more heavily accented with biographical associations than the usual literary essay is, but they’re also far more concerned with the novels than with Fitzgerald’s life, which has been dealt with in other chapters. These appreciations of Innocence, The Beginning of Spring, The Gate of Angels, and The Blue Flower are clearly intended to demonstrate that Penelope Fitzgerald was not a minor English novelist but a great one, despite the somewhat unprepossessing cast of her life story. The books are examined closely, and their artistry subjected to lively analysis. Themes are teased out, and what is implicit in the stories Lee makes quite explicit. I’d like to have a crack at this sort of thing first. I don’t want to read the novels like a well-informed tourist, checking off the things that I’ve been told to look for. I want to be surprised, not by the novels themselves, but by Hermione Lee — by her telling me all the things that I missed.

So the novels were ordered; I don’t have three of the four. I thought about buying Innocence in the Kindle edition as well, so that I could get started right away, but then I took a look at my teetering book pile. There’s a new novel, Samantha Harvey’s Dear Thief, that I’ve yet to begin, as well as half a dozen books that I’m halfway through. While I attend to them, my thoughts about Fitzgerald, which are as murky as the muck into which her houseboat sank, will settle somewhat, or perhaps even sort themselves out.

What I find least congenial about Penelope Fitzgerald is the blend, in her character, of the traces of an austere evangelical family traditions with what, at second hand, I take to be an ungenerous disposition. She displays the habitual tendency to be disappointed by other people that is all too common among educated Britons. What saves this discontent from narcissism is that the self is its primary object of scorn (the evangelical influence), but it remains a habit, and, like all bad habits, it quickly becomes tiresome. Yes, we could all be better people; we could all do better. But harping on this, as Fitzgerald implicitly does when she focuses unlovingly on the foibles of people she encounters, is not encouraging. It is a cup of tea too bitter to drink, or at any rate enjoy. As I say, however, I have all this at second hand. I don’t believe that Lee has set out to stress the unattractive side of Fitzgerald’s personality; she seems if anything inclined to downplay it. But it emerges in extracts from Fitzgerald’s notes and letters.

I know nothing of Marilynne Robinson’s private life (her notes and letters), but I gather from her essays that the same sort of evangelical tradition works itself out in the context of a very different  — very generous — outlook. There would be worse ways to spend 2015 than in savoring the contrasts, the different faults and virtues, of the British novelist and the American.

***

On Monday afternoon, I baked two loaves of sourdough bread. Ever since reading Michael Pollan’s Cooked earlier this year, I’ve wanted to make sourdough baking a regular part of my life, but the undertaking has been thwarted, not least by my own lack of aptitude for regularity. Three times have I ordered sourdough starter from the King Arthur Flour website. The first time, I let the starter sit unopened for nearly two weeks. It never quite recovered from this neglect. The second time, I followed directions scrupulously and was all set to go, before I’d been home from Fire Island for a week — but I went to the hospital instead. By the time I was well enough to consider taking the crock of starter out of the refrigerator, what I found when I opened it was not pretty. The third time, I ordered the starter too soon after moving into the new apartment. Well, during the move. The starter has been in and out of the refrigerator a number of times, usually without my doing anything to it. But on Monday afternoon, it looked nicely bubbly, so I dove in.

Sourdough bread is easier to make than other breads, for the simple reason that the yeast is already active and rising. There’s no need to proof anything. And, at least in the recipe that I’m using, there’s no butter to melt and let cool. Everything gets tossed into the mixing bowl, boom boom boom, kneaded by the mixer, and then dumped into the rising bucket. I was a bit lazy, I’m afraid; I threw in the five cups of flour called for as if I were digging sand at the beach. I ought to have weighed the flour and reserved a portion of it for the last stage of kneading. Because I used too much flour, the loaves did not rise spectacularly, and the crumb was dense. But the bread still had a nice spring to it. It makes delicious toast. I’ll have finished off the loaf by next week, just in time to divide the starter again.

(I always try to give the second loaf away. If my upstairs neighbor weren’t traveling, I’d have taken it up to her. Instead, I sent it to the office with Kathleen. Things have been so hectic there that she couldn’t tell me how long it lasted, or indeed if anyone was even tempted to try it.)

Then, last night, I made a new chicken dish — new to me, anyway. Chicken Thighs Normande, I think it was called. I got the recipe out of Classic Home Cooking, one of the handful of cookbooks that I keep in the kitchen. Like sourdough bread, it’s very simple to make. You toss sliced leeks, smashed garlic, and diced Canadian bacon in a roasting pan, and put the thighs on top of them. Then you pour in a cup and a half of hard cider, season with thyme and salpep, and bake for twenty-five minutes. The cider is then reduced, and thickened with sour cream.

I didn’t have any hard cider, so I flamed half a cup of Applejack — I don’t really know why I didn’t use Calvados, although now I think of it it’s much more expensive — and poured it, still flaming, over the chicken, and then added a cup of water. When the chicken was supposedly done, it didn’t look cooked to me, so I put the thighs on a baking sheet and ran them under the broiler. From a culinary point of view, this was a very good idea. But then I botched the sauce. I neglected to reduce it before adding the sour cream. The recipe had pointedly said not to let the sauce boil after adding the sour cream. So I added some heavy cream as well, and turned up the heat. It thickened nicely. I spooned the leeks and whatnot into stew plates, topped them with chicken, and filled out the plates with miniature farfalle. The sauce I poured mostly over the chicken.

Somehow dinner got to the table in good form, despite a contretemps with the smoke alarm. I am still learning how to use the new stove, and the broiler feature is presenting me with a steepish learning curve. (It’s also the case that I removed the batteries from the smoke alarm upstairs.) Because I hadn’t really planned on broiling anything, because the decision to give the chicken some color by running it under the fire was made on the fly, I didn’t prepare for smoke. I left the kitchen doors open, and the kitchen window closed. When the alarm sounded, I rushed to fetch the ladder from the broom closet, to “reset” the alarm, and was instantly tangled in pratfalls also attributable to the unfamiliarity of our new arrangements (and to the extremely narrow broom closet in particular). The ladder caught on the legs of the ironing board, which opened, pinning the ladder in the closet as well as the ironing board itself, so that I had to grope blindly for the catch that would unlock the legs and allow them to close. There followed several moments of maximum fuss, and, long before I managed to restore order, the alarm fell silent. There was never any need for the ladder at all.

Is life too short?