Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child by Noel Riley Fitch

Author:Noel Riley Fitch
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Cooks, Cooking, Julia, General, United States, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Cooks - United States, Child, Biography & Autobiography, Biography, Women
ISBN: 9780385493833
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1999-04-13T19:56:55.683204+00:00

BREAD LOAF AND

THE CAMBRIDGE CIRCLE

For the second year, before the Child family holiday in Maine, Julia and Paul went to Bread Loaf, this time for the full term of the writers’ conference, from August 14 through August 29 (the third in her pilot series aired while she was in Vermont). The day after her arrival they celebrated her fiftieth birthday. For the fun of being with Avis and sitting in on the lectures and readings, Julia worked as “assistant deputy typist” to Mary Moore Molony, managing editor of The American Scholar and secretary in the summers at Bread Loaf (it was she who typed the Houghton Mifflin draft of Julia and Simca’s first, rejected version of the cookbook). Paul was official photographer, “the Photographic Consort,” as assistant director Paul Cubeta called him, the man who captured Robert Frost against the clear Vermont sky. “Julia is an absolute dreamboat,” he added in a letter that year. In recompense for their work they paid no room and board. Julia loved the classes: “I learn so much from the lectures, even the poets,” she told James Beard without apparent irony.

The Bread Loaf environment was both intellectually heady and physically relaxing. The writers’ conference, founded in 1926 and directed by John Farrar (then at Doubleday), was a summer camp for professors and writers, with the lure of drinking and fishing. Even the waiters were writers, unpublished but “highly promising.” Isolated and peaceful on acres of tranquil green grass, Bread Loaf offered only intellectual stimulation, and that was dulled nightly by alcohol. In truth, it had the reputation for alcoholic and sexual stimulation, earning the name Bed Loaf among insiders. The summer literary colony was also, at that time, “exclusively New England,” says Peter Davison. Julia and Paul became friends of poets Richard Yates, David McCord, John and Judith Ciardi, John Nims, Robert Frost, who lived just down the road, and Carlos Baker (Hemingway’s future biographer). They all gathered in the soft evening air, laughter emanating through the bushes of Treman House, which Avis oversaw. Here was the scene of the late afternoon alcoholic socials, much like Bernard DeVoto’s Sunday evening “hours” in Cambridge. Indeed, many of the people at Bread Loaf were connected to Cambridge circles.

Ciardi was the director, though Paul Cubeta made all the arrangements. The great poet was called “Big Daddy” behind his back, and his national reputation and hauteur kept him from being questioned about any decision. Frost, who was considered the unofficial poet laureate of the country, especially since his reading at the Kennedy inauguration the year before, was always the guiding light of the writers’ conference. Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Louis Untermeyer attended in past years, as did Wallace Stegner (Stegner and DeVoto had been boys together in Utah). Bernard DeVoto taught at Bread Loaf for decades before his death, after which Houghton Mifflin endowed a fellowship in his name. DeVoto insisted on teaching fiction, though David H. Bain, whose history of Bread Loaf is

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