The Hour by Bernard DeVoto

Author:Bernard DeVoto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tin House Books
Published: 2011-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

3

The Enemy

WE CAN’T SIT AROUND ALL AFTERNOON; THERE IS EVIL to be dealt with. We might as well begin with the soda fountain, for that is where a lot of it begins and I have already shown you the distressing spectacle of people trying to get back there by way of cointreau and white mint or rum and Coca-Cola. Americans are too indulgent to their children; they give them too much money to spend on sweets. I don’t suppose the stuff does them any immediate harm but it does give them false values. Chocolate, maple syrup, two dozen other syrups; marshmallow, fudge, butterscotch, two dozen other goos; the whole catalogue of pops, tonics, phosphates, and trademarked soft drinks that would corrode any plumbing except a growing child’s—they may seem innocent but they aren’t. An ice cream soda can set a child’s feet in the path that ends in grenadine, and when you see someone drinking drambuie, créme de menthe, Old Tom gin, or all three stirred together and topped with a maraschino cherry, you must remember that he got that way from pineapple milkshakes long ago. Pity him if you like but treat him as you would a carrier of typhoid. For if the Republic ever comes crashing down, the ruin will have been wrought by this lust for sweet drinks.

Then there are publishers. They are usually regarded as servants of the good life and it’s true that many of them, as individuals, do live soundly, with impeccable observances, with marked devotion to good liquor. But that only shows that we can never relax our vigilance anywhere, in any circumstance of life. For there is no publisher in the United States who has not spread infection far more widely than all the typhoid carriers who ever lived. That they have succeeded in getting the virus into your home and mine doesn’t matter for we are immune to it. But they have got it there. Go out to the kitchen and look at the books your wife keeps on the shelf. Pick up one and glance through it. Then think of the American homes that have not been immunized.

I’m talking about cookbooks. Every publishing house has from three to a dozen of them and they are money in the bank. Soon or late, usually not very late, this season’s novel about the bitch with the compassionate heart in rural Georgia or the court of Louis XV stops selling. A cookbook never does. In season or out, fat years or lean, it is the mainstay of the publishing business. The grandchildren of the author, who lived in the era when recipes began “take four pounds of butter and four dozen eggs,” set up trust funds for their grandchildren, and the publisher loves them more warmly than the novelist who makes Book-of-the-Month Club every time. I don’t know how many cookbooks are sold but it must be upwards of a million copies a year. Every copy has enough virus in it to infect a city of fifty thousand; every copy is a recruiting office for the enemy.

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