Have It Your Way
‘Always do as you please, and send everybody to Hell, and take the consequences. Damned good Rule of Life. N.’ I think we must both have been more than a little tipsy the evening Norman wrote those words on the back page of my copy of Old Calabria. They are in a pencilled untidy scrawl that is very different from the neat pen-and-ink inscription, dated 21 May 1940, on the flyleaf of the book, and from the methodical list of ‘misprints etc’ written on the title page when he gave me the book. ‘Old-fashioned stuff, my dear. Heavy going. I don’t know whether you’ll be able to get through it.’
I have forgotten the occasion that gave rise to Norman’s ferociously worded advice, although I fancy the message was written after a dinner during which he had tried to jolt me out of an entanglement which, as he could see without being told, had already become a burden to me. And the gentleman concerned was not very much to his liking.
‘You are leaving with him because you think it is your duty. Duty? Ha! Stay here with me. Let him make do without you.’
‘I can’t, Norman. I have to go.’
‘Have it your way, my dear, have it your way.’
Had I listened to Norman’s advice I should have been saved a deal of trouble. Also, I should not, perhaps, have seen Greece and the islands, not spent the war years working in Alexandria and Cairo, not have married and gone to India, not have returned to England, not become involved in the painful business of learning to write about food and cookery. And I should not now be writing this long-overdue tribute to Norman Douglas. Was he right? Was he wrong? Does it matter? I did what I pleased at the time. I took the consequences. That is all that Norman would have wanted to know.
When I met him first, Norman Douglas was seventy-two. I was twenty-four. It was that period in Norman’s life when, exiled from his home in Florence and from his possessions, he was living in far-from-prosperous circumstances in a room in the place Macé in Antibes.
Quite often we met for drinks or a meal together in one or another of the cafés or restaurants of the old lower town, a rather seedy place in those days. There was little evidence of that bacchanal existence that legend attributes to all Riviera resorts.
The establishment Norman chose when he fancied a pasta meal was in a narrow street near the old port. ‘We’ll meet at George’s and have a drink. Then we’ll go and tell them we’re coming for lunch. No sense in letting them know sooner. If we do, they’ll boil the macaroni in advance. Then all we shall get is heated-up muck. Worthless, my dear. We’ll give them just twenty minutes. Mind you meet me on the dot.’
At the restaurant he would produce from his pocket a hunk of Parmesan cheese. ‘Ask Pascal to be so good as to grate this at our table. Poor stuff, my dear, that Gruyère they give you in France. Useless for macaroni.’ And a bunch of fresh basil for the sauce. ‘Tear the leaves, mind. Don’t chop them. Spoils the flavour.’
Now and again Norman would waylay me as I was buying provisions in the market. ‘Let’s get out of this hole. Leave that basket at George’s. We’ll take the bus up toward Vence and go for a little stroll.’
The prospect of a day in Norman’s company was exhilarating; that little stroll rather less so. A feeble and unwilling walker, then as now, I found it arduous work trying to keep up with Norman. The way he went stumping up and down those steep and stony paths, myself shambling behind, reversed our ages. And well he knew it.
‘Had enough?’
‘Nearly.’
‘Can you tackle another half kilometre?’
‘Why can’t we stop here?’
‘Pazienza. You’ll see.’
‘I hope so.’
At that time I had not yet come to understand that in every step Norman took there was a perfectly sound purpose, and so was innocently impressed when at the end of that half kilometre, out in the scrub, at the back of beyond, there was a café. One of those two-chair, one-table, one-woman-and-a-dog establishments. Blessed scruffy café. Blessed crumbling crone and mangy dog.
‘Can we deal with a litre?’
‘Yes, and I’m hungry too.’
‘Ha! You won’t get much out of her. Nothing but bread and that beastly ham. Miserable insipid stuff.’ From out of his pocket came a hunk of salami and a clasp knife.
‘Do you always carry your own provisions in your pocket?’
‘Ha! I should say so. I should advise you to adopt the same rule. Otherwise you may have to put up with what you get. No telling what it may be, nowadays.’
Certain famous passages in Norman Douglas’ work, among them Count Caloveglia’s dissertation in South Wind on the qualities necessary to a good cook, in Siren Land the explosive denunciation of Neapolitan fish soup, in Alone the passage in which he describes the authentic pre-1914 macaroni, ‘those macaroni of a lily-like candour’ (enviable phrase – who else could have written it?), have led many people to believe that Norman Douglas was a great epicure in matters gastronomical, and so he was – in an uncommon way; in a way few mortals can ever hope to become. His way was most certainly not the way of the solemn wine sipper or of the grave debater of recipes. Connoisseurship of this particular kind he left to others. He himself preferred the study of the original sources of his food and wine. Authenticity in these matters was of the first importance to him. (Of this, plenty of evidence can be found by those who care to look into Old Calabria, Together, Siren Land, Alone, and Late Harvest.) Cause and effect were eminently his concerns, and in their application he taught me some unforgettable lessons.
Once during that last summer of his life, on Capri (he was then eighty-three), I took him a basket of figs from the market in the piazza. He asked me from which stall I had bought them. ‘That one down nearest to the steps.’
‘Not bad, my dear, not bad. Next time, you could try Graziella. I fancy you’ll find her figs are sweeter; just wait a few days, if you can.’
He knew, who better, from which garden those figs came; he was familiar with the history of the trees, he knew their age and in what type of soil they grew; he knew by which tempests, blights, invasions, and plagues that particular property had or had not been affected during the past three hundred years; how many times it had changed hands, in what lawsuits the owners had been involved; that the son now grown up was a man less grasping than his neighbours and was consequently in less of a hurry to pick and sell his fruit before it ripened … I may add that it was not Norman’s way to give lectures. These pieces of information emerged gradually, in the course of walks, sessions at the tavern, apropos a chance remark. It was up to you to put two and two together if you were sufficiently interested.
Knowing, as he made it his business wherever he lived and travelled to know, every innkeeper and restaurant owner on the island (including, naturally, Miss Grade Fields; these two remarkable human beings were much to each other’s taste) and all their families and their staff as well, still Norman would rarely go to eat in any establishment without first, in the morning, having looked in; or if he felt too poorly in those latter days, sent a message. What was to be had that day? What fish had come in? Was the mozzarella cheese dripping, positively dripping fresh? Otherwise we should have to have it fried. ‘Giovanni’s wine will slip down all right, my dear. At least he doesn’t pick his grapes green.’ When things did not go according to plan – and on Capri this could happen even to Norman Douglas – he wasted no time in recriminations. ‘Come on. Nothing to be gained by staying here. Can you deal with a little glass up at the Cercola? Off we go then.’
Well-meaning people nowadays are always telling us to complain when we get a bad meal, to send back a dish if it is not as it should be. I remember, one bleak February day in 1962, reading that a British Cabinet Minister had told the hotel-keepers and caterers assembled at Olympia for the opening of their bi-annual exhibition of icing-sugar buses and models of Windsor Forest in chocolate-work, ‘If the food you have in a restaurant is lousy, condemn it …’
At the time Norman Douglas was much in my mind, for it was round about the tenth anniversary of his death. How would he have reacted to this piece of advice? The inelegance of the phrase would not have been to his taste, of that much one can be certain. And from the Shades I think I hear a snort, that snort he gave when he caught you out in a piece of woolly thinking. ‘Condemn it? Ha! That won’t get you far. Better see you don’t have cause for complaint, I’d say. No sense in growling when it’s too late.’
Gourmet, February 1969