Spokesman was an intriguing voice
Clifton Fadiman, wine and the book of the month club
A recently published book awakened some of my early literary memories, many of them now blurred recollections. “The Wine Lover’s Daughter: A Memoir” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017) by Anne Fadiman is sure to make the reading list of many book clubs in North America. Daughter-father memoirs are often popular fare. Anne Fadiman is the daughter of ‘wine-lover’ Clifton Fadiman (190499). A prize-winning essayist with a growing reputation, she is—or in 2017 was-- the Francis Writer-In-Residence at Yale University.
I remember Clifton Fadiman as an important and authoritative literary voice from New York when I began prepping myself for what has turned out to be my own life in books. Raised in Toronto’s west end in the 1950s, I was quite naïve about the intellectual and cultural activities then dominating North America. Nevertheless, I kept coming across Fadiman’s name both as a radio and television personality and a literary presence, especially in his role as a judge and reviewer for the Book-of-the-Month Club. It was evident that he was one of the most influential players in the burgeoning American book industry; if we think back to the 40s and 50s, he likely had a say in the books that our parents chose to read and made available to us.
Stepping back in time, we find a young Clifton Fadiman, a poor Brooklyn boy of Russian-Jewish descent completing his degree in 1925 at Columbia College (now Columbia University). Part of an extraordinary graduating class that included Jacques Barzun, Whittaker Chambers and Lionel Trilling, he stood out among his peers for the wide range of his reading and knowledge. Jacques Barzun described him as “the bearer of all Western culture since the Greeks.” But for all his learning, he struggled financially. When he graduated Phi Betta Kappa, he was so poor that he had to rely on a kindly professor to purchase his Kappa key. Then, on applying for a teaching position at Columbia, he suffered a telling setback--he found himself ranked below Lionel Trilling by the English department. Its Chair told him that the department “could hire only one Jew.”
Sliding by such restrictions, he made his own way in the publishing business, spending a decade with the firm of Simon and Schuster. But those early years were mere prologue. He caught on as Book Review Editor for the New Yorker magazine (1933-43) and then in 1943 became a judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club. By then the BOMC could claim a membership of nearly half a million readers. Relatedly, his own ventures in writing quickly succeeded. Children’s books, books about books, and numerous anthologies followed. His Books Are Weapons in the War of Ideas (1942) is an example. Thus, while Lionel Trilling went on at Columbia to become one of America’s leading academic intellectuals (I followed his critical essays closely), Fadiman became a popular public intellectual, affecting far more readers than Trilling could ever reach.
The book business was only a part of Fadiman’s range of influence. He began to work in radio in New York, hosting a trio of panelists on a program called “Information, Please” (1938-48).
So popular was he as an ebullient host that he successfully took the show to television; another weekly television program called “This is Show Business” (later “This is Broadway”) ran from 1949 to 1954. As his daughter informs us, his mellifluous voice, as carefully self-trained as his eye for books, “attracted an avalanche of mash notes from female listeners during his years as a radio host.”
Arguably, Fadiman invented the role of the charming, well-informed television moderator; he was known for his ease of manner and his engaging wit. Fadiman ‘sayings’ were often in the news and can still be found on internet lists. He once defined cheese, for instance, as ‘milk’s leap toward immortality.’
Another clever definition is enduringly accurate: ‘One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss but the number of things they need no longer mention.’
But all this time Fadiman was also developing a knowledge and taste for wine—French wine in particular. This passion led to books, many purchases (by the case), and much pleasure. His daughter recalls both important family events built around wine menus and her own struggles to live up to her father’s passion.
“Relationships with parents wax and wane, according to their own natural cycles” writes Anne, who loved and respected both of hers. The ‘Memoir’ is rich in interactions between father and daughter, especially as Anne moved beyond being a youthful witness to his cultural triumphs and began her own family and literary career.
Inevitably, she worried. “His life might be on the decline, and mine on the rise.”
As readers we watch that process of diminution and development, feelingly depicted in the context of her personal struggles to understand her father’s passion for wine, given her differing sense of taste. We see, quite dramatically, how her father resisted the changes that befell him in ageing--first, bouts of depression and, at age 90, blindness. Initially helpless and hopeless, he recovered his balance thanks to the efforts of his daughter and wife, and the sympathetic folks at BOMC who sent him books on tape so that he could carry on with his valued evaluations of books.
Anne’s loyalty to and love for her father informs the book. Years earlier she had written a feature article about him for Life magazine. We learn, for instance, that her father was what I would call a speed reader. He could cover 70-80 pages an hour; he needed to, given his BOMC duties.
That kind of pace astounds me as a reader. It helped him appear to be a savant as a young man and later, when he became the congenial voice of middle America, a well-informed intellectual. Cultural critics later identified as a “middle brow” authority. He despised “the low brow” and was at odds with “the high brow.” These descriptive terms suggest how America saw -- and still sees -- itself.
Clifton Fadiman always felt himself an outsider, but he nevertheless shaped himself into a spokesman of and for American values in the middle years of the twentieth century. I read, for instance, a dismissive review he wrote of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom and could readily see the way that he situated himself as a cultural gate-keeper. He would have read Faulkner too quickly, skipping over the intricacies of style and idea in favour of plot and character. Faulkner was not for everyone, and Fadiman knew it.
He knew the tastes and interests of America and carried them forward in his media work and his evaluation of books.
Thus, he remains an intriguing voice and power in the development of American cultural values. His daughter brings him alive in her ‘Memoir.’ And he valued her care. In a late note, he wrote, “I think often of how much you have done for your ancient father. This particular Lear has more sense than the original. I know a Cordelia when I see one.”
Arguably, Fadiman invented the role of the charming, well-informed television moderator; he was known for his ease of manner and his engaging wit.