Two

The Ungastronomical Me

In the month I insisted on taking off before starting work at the Times, I spent much of each day worrying about what lay ahead. I knew I was about to take a blind leap. My wife wouldn’t let me forget that. She knew that I was radically, hopelessly unqualified for the job, because she was an excellent cook, and she knew me to be an enthusiastic novice, at best. If I really did go to the Times, the world would assume, or expect, that I was an expert, self-taught perhaps, but with years at the stove behind me. There’d be no way I could fake that, not for long. If people came to our house for dinner, did I expect Margaret to pretend I’d made the dinner she’d actually prepared?

I’m a journalist, I countered—an observer, not a participant. Does anyone care if Clive Barnes can dance? As the Times ballet critic, his pirouettes were verbal.

Yes, she snapped back, but he’d spent his life studying pirouettes and arabesques. He was an informed observer. I was hardly his equivalent in food.

In fact, my fears were largely unfounded. After an initial bit of hazing from a couple of TV reporters, I settled into the job and discovered that both Times readers and even food professionals were eager for a fresh voice. Also, I had a test cook to make sure that the recipes published under my name actually worked.

The New Yorker salutes me with a cartoon that preserves my anonymity. (illustration credit 2.1)

Forty years later, I’ve been able to look back on my first thirty years of life and pick out strands and seams that connect with the person who jumped out into the public food arena in 1973 and stayed there from then on. But the embryonic gastronome I’ve been able to unearth with hindsight is a character no one back then could have predicted would remain anything but an intellectual with a side interest in food.

At a retirement brunch for an editor at the New York Times Book Review just after my appointment as food editor had been announced, Pauline Kael, the New Yorker’s movie critic, looked up from her bagel as I came into the room. “Since when did you become a food queen?” she asked.

If you had told me then that I would spend the rest of my life writing and reporting on food in major publications and in many books, I would have laughed at you. The real me was the guy checking citations in the library for his translation of Imperialism Now. I was the serious professional reviewer of books for Newsweek and the New York Times Book Review. The even more fundamental me was the Harvard and Oxford classics scholar, the polyglot, polymath culture maven, a journalist and man of letters, literally, a spelling champ.

My first-grade teacher, a charmless martinet named Smart, was the first to notice my gift. I had figured out how to read on the first day of school. It just hit me that the letters, which I’d already memorized at home, were clusters of sounds that made up words. But I quickly saw further that this was not always perfectly the case. Some letters were “silent.” Some combined in completely unphonetic groups, groups that themselves were not always pronounced in the same way. But unlike most beginning readers, I saw right away that the exceptions themselves usually formed patterns.

“Through” could not be sounded out if you relied purely on the basic sounds of its letters, but concluding that o-u-g-h always sounded like “oo” did not help you pronounce the words spelled t-o-u-g-h or b-o-u-g-h. One rule wasn’t enough, but three rules pretty much showed you the way to cope in this maze of muddling signs.

I saw this in a flash. I figured out, in an extremely exciting couple of days when I was barely six, that the apparently irrational business of spelling was not the chaos it seemed to everyone else struggling with it in my class. They were looking for a system to explain the deep mystery of Dick and Jane. I understood intuitively that there were many “systems” at work on those idyllically illustrated pages.

The more pages I read, the more little orthographic patterns emerged. So I read a lot, not consciously to bone up on spelling. I read because I could, and, because it was easy for me, I loved it. Mrs. Smart noticed and told other teachers. I had become what they thought of as a natural speller. This weird talent would not have been remarked upon if other children hadn’t needed classroom practice to improve their spelling. But I quickly emerged in those drills as some kind of prodigy.

Show me the word “antidisestablishmentarianism” and I could spell it right away, even though I had no notion of what it meant and couldn’t possibly have understood a dictionary definition without an hour of explanation of the history of the relations between church and state in nineteenth-century England. I doubt I had any firm idea of any of the parts of that phrase: century, nineteenth century, England, state, church. I was only a six-year-old, but I could spell “antidisestablishmentarianism” and a lot of other sesquipedalian jawbreakers, for the amusement and wonder of teachers and older children.

One day, I got taken into an eighth-grade homeroom to give a demonstration of my powers. The teacher was large and raven-maned, notorious in our school for, shall we say, threatening exuberance. Her students were giant thirteen-year-olds who looked to me like somebody’s parents. They called out words and I spelled them.

So at six I tasted fame, and liked it. Word of my skill got around. My classmates joined the rest of the school in regarding me as a little resident genius. Neither they nor I would learn the phrase “idiot savant” until years later. So from then on, in my little world at the Hampton School in affluent northwest Detroit, I was the smartest kid.

There was some truth to my reputation for intelligence. I had unconsciously analyzed the English language’s multifarious orthography, without having any sense of how all those vestiges of Latin, French and German—languages with more orderly but dissimilar spelling systems—had left their mark on the way our words looked. So I was intelligent when judged by real criteria, but in first grade I was rewarded for being able to perform a stunt. That was just the beginning.

In fifth grade, ever more adept at spelling ever more difficult words, I moved up from being a local prodigy to the higher and far more confusing status of national celebrity.

Every spring, all students in the five counties of the Detroit area who were enrolled in grades five through eight competed in a spelling bee sponsored by the Detroit News. First there was a competition for each grade, then for the entire school, then for a group of schools in the same district. District winners competed for the Detroit title. And the Detroit winner went to Washington, D.C., for the National Spelling Bee.

I was ten. I won my grade. I won my school bee and the district bee, and then the city bee. As I moved up the ladder, I got progressively more attention in the News, which paid for the whole circus as a promotional effort to attract readers.

After I was city champion, I came to know the Boys and Girls page editor of the News, a lively, smart, single, behatted, old-fashioned newshen named Virginia Schnell. Her most important assignment every year was the spelling bee, a sweet sinecure involving a week in Washington on the News’s tab, but the downside was spinning out usable copy about that year’s city champion speller again and again, which meant spending many days with the moppet and his parents. But with me, Schnell hit the jackpot: I was quotable and often got her on the front page of the News. It got me fatally interested in journalism.

In Washington, I did better still for her. In 1952, at ten, I was the youngest contestant in the history of the bee. So I was mentioned in all the stories written by dozens of reporters for papers from coast to coast, and they were careful to say that I was representing the Detroit News. That was the protocol, since the reporters all understood that the real point of the exercise was to sell newspapers. They therefore attached each speller’s newspaper sponsor to his name like some Homeric epithet: Minnie Mintz (Akron Beacon Journal), Billy Batson (New York World-Telegram and Sun).

Not only was I the youngest, I was also up to the competition. I finished twenty-second, and would have gone further if the pronouncer (the man who spoke each word we had to spell) hadn’t mispronounced the word I missed. He looked at “assonance,” a word he confessed he didn’t know, and then said “A-sonance.” He was quickly corrected but I, never having seen the word either, thought he’d unwittingly given me a clue. If it had two s’s, then any fool would have pronounced its first syllable to rhyme with “lass.” But the pronouncer’s first impulse had been to give it a long a, something normally possible only if there were only a single s following the a. Or so I reasoned before I went down misspelling “assonance” a-s-o-n-a-n-c-e.

This was not the end of it. In 1953, I returned to Washington as the Detroit champion and finished second, once again a casualty of official mispronunciation. That year the word was “spermaceti,” pronounced by the very same official pronouncer as if it were a pasta: “spermacetti,” like “spaghetti.” I cried briefly before taking cover in the basement of the Commerce Department building, where the bee took place, among aquariums filled with salamanders slumbering in green-tinged tanks. My tears got on national television. I appeared on the front page of the New York Times, a distinction I never achieved while working there.

Since I was much better copy than the fourteen-year-old from Arizona who came in first, the Bee’s administrator offered to send my mother and me to New York to be on The Ed Sullivan Show with the winner. We said no thank you, reminding him that the New York junket was supposed to be a special treat for the winning speller.

I was also told the name of the proofreader’s manual from which the bee selected the words that contestants had to spell. This was, for someone at my level as a kid speller, a dead giveaway. If I returned the following year, as the man who leaked the word list source to me hoped, all the other children would be spelling words they’d never heard or seen, words such as “vigesimal,” which I had guessed correctly that week had an s like “infinitesimal,” instead of a c like “decimal.” But with that secret list in hand, I’d have no more need for guessing. I could easily memorize every possible word they’d use in the next bee. It wouldn’t matter if the pronouncer mangled every one. Only a slip of the tongue by me could keep me from the title.

But that would have been wrong. We went back to Detroit without going on The Ed Sullivan Show, and I never entered another spelling bee. I had retired.

But my reputation lived on. There I was in 1954 with two other thirteen-year-olds on a Woodward Avenue bus, making a racket. A dour biddy got up and came over to me. “Everyone knows who you are,” she said. “So behave. What one Jew does reflects on all other Jews.”

I switched to private school and escaped the community that knew my saga best. So my life as a teenager was fairly normal, but my academic résumé was stellar, and I believed in it.

If you graduate first in your class in high school and continue on to get a summa in classics at Harvard (picking up the undergraduate thesis prize and a junior year Phi Beta Kappa key along the way), you can be pardoned for thinking your brain is in good working order and ought to be the tool you use to make your way in the world.

That was my working theory of me. But as I reached adulthood and had to decide more precisely what to do with that tool, I began to doubt that my future lay in the classroom teaching Greek and Latin. I looked around myself, at the other graduate students and, with panic, at my teachers. My strings did not vibrate sympathetically with theirs. I loved Greek literature, and I had given it my best, for seven years. Now I needed a way out, and Newsweek came to the rescue.

Thank God for those movie reviews in the Harvard Crimson, which legitimized me in the eyes of the Newsweek recruiter. Without them, I would now be a disappointed retired professor of Greek at some provincial university. Instead, I landed a job in big-time journalism, where destiny put me in the way of Alex Keneas, who deftly put me in the way of Charlotte Curtis, who mistook me as the answer to her urgent need to hire a food man.