Sunlight, long and yellow: M.F.K. Fisher in Hemet, California

The brilliant writer M.F.K. Fisher and her second husband, the painter Dillwyn Parrish, bought a "shack-y" house, along with a "ninety acre hell of red-hot rocks and rattlesnakes" (as a guest once had it) on the southeast edge of Hemet in January 1940. There were springs too: $2,750. They had left their life in Switzerland, fleeing the war, and seeking treatment in the U.S. for Parrish, whom she called by his nickname, Timmy.

They called their new place Bareacres.

A stop three days ago at the Hemet Museum finally satisfied a four-year quest --- I wanted to see what Mary Francis saw, hear what she heard, smell what she smelled. Or try to, after 70 years. Telephone directories from the 1940s at the museum led me to
South Cornell Street. I was thrilled.

The 1916 wooden house the couple bought and remodeled was pulled down around 1969, but the footprint of the new house seems to follow the old. There is still a patio, overlooking the Valley, the "heart of the place," M.F.K. Fisher would recall four decades later. There are eucalyptus and sycamore trees, still, perhaps some cottonwoods along the springs, if they still run, but I couldn't see them.

Crows wheeled and cawed overhead.

M.F.K. Fisher, 17 November, 1940, in her journal:

Just now T. and I went out from the warm lighted study and the whuddering firelight of the living room to the porch and watched a half rainbow grow and die against the hills. Sunlight, long and yellow, flung itself into the middle distance of San Jacinto in an intense blot --- San Jacinto hills, not the mountain, which was blue and far from us. The hills showed their folds and meadows like old elephant hide, and in front of them the valley and the little lizard of land blazed with arsenic, Paris gray, as violent as dying California leaves can be, yellow and hideously beautiful.

This photograph was taken from the road next to the new-ish house. This is what she describes --- only the road in 1940 was unpaved and curvy, and instead of houses, the famous apricot orchards of Hemet rich with jeweled fruit. The locals call this not-too-distant ridge the Rim of the World.

From M.F.K.F.'s 1984 essay, "Spirits of the Valley":

In front of the house, which stood about a thousand feet up off the dry riverbed that separated us from Hemet Valley, the land was steep, but with fewer big rocks, almost like a meadow, covered with sage and mesquite and low cactus.

It was just as I had imagined over three decades of reading her work.

Timmy Parrish had already lost a leg to a severe and fatal circulatory disease, called Buerger's. He couldn't sleep, was never free of pain. Mary Francis injected him several times a day with Analgeticum.

2 September, 1940:

Now and then I think my heart will break, listening to T.'s low weeping under the sound of the radio or watching him try two or three times to get up from a chair. He slept about an hour last night and is quite weak now and depressed. There is nothing I can do, nothing ---

Nonetheless, they kept working. Dillwyn Parrish painted in his studio, and M.F.K. Fisher was at work on her book, The Gastronomical Me.

They celebrated Mary Francis's thirty-third birthday on July 3, 1941.

On August 6, her beloved T. left the little wood house before dawn. His stuttering step took him further down the canyon, where he shot himself.

She was bereft, bereaved, but not surprised. They had discussed it. She would never blame him.

Mary Francis would come back to Bareacres again and again over the next dozen years or so, coming from New York, Los Angeles, France, or from Whittier, bringing her parents, sisters, friends, lovers, a new husband, her two daughters, until she eventually sold her ninety acres of red-hot rocks.

I felt thankful for everything I had learned there, and when I said it was no longer mine, I withdrew forever from it, even though the ashes of my love and my mother may still blow from under some of its great rocks. I know the wind still sings over the Rim of the World and always will.

She died in 1992, in a much beloved home in the Sonoma Valley, which she called Last House.

J.D. Salinger, 1919-2010

Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger's third book, was published in 1961. The the two long stories had been published previously in The New Yorker, in the Fifties.

I had a hard-cover copy. I suspect I had requested it as a Christmas gift. I was in the eighth grade; I can't imagine where I had heard of it. The New Yorker was unknown. No books in the house of my youth. I had schoolbooks. I used the library.

I wore my hair in a long bob that required sleeping in painful brush curlers. I loved clothes, and boys, and peacock blue ink, which I spilled on the hall carpet. I loved Franny and Zooey above all else. I had never been to New York, known anyone who had been near Yale or Princeton, in fact barely knew any adult who had gone to college at all. But that Glass family. Were people really like that? And could someone really tell stories like that?

Yes. Yes.

Read the three essays in this week's New Yorker, in "The Talk of the Town" section, one of them by Lillian Ross, a memoir of her fifty year friendship with the writer. (http://www.newyorker.com)

But don't miss Adam Gopnick either:

"Writing, real writing, is done not from some seat of moral judgment but with the eye and ear and heart; no American writer will ever have a more alert ear, a more attentive eye, or a more ardent heart than his."

A Dream Bird Called Boredom

Amazing things can come your way if you allow yourself to wander, especially through footnotes. Real footnotes, in books. Which is how I was introduced to the celebrated German critic, Walter Benjamin, and his essay, "The Storyteller."

I was in the Round Reading Room at the British Library in Bloomsbury, reading about fairy tales. I did this for almost two years. It wasn't the 19th-century. It was 1994. I was reading a book of Angela Carter's, and I followed her thinking through her footnotes.

It was before most of us were hooked by the Internet. There were cell phones, though, but not many people on e-mail. There was the fax machine. No one twittered.

"The Storyteller" is an elegy for the real storytelling -- the oral tale. It is about many other things, but one passage has stayed with me all these years, what Benjamin wrote about boredom. He wrote it in the 1930s. That was the era of the telephone, the overseas cable, and the postage stamp.

Benjamin was very upset about the ravages of the first two decades if the 20th Century. He realized that after the World War (he was writing about the first, of course, the second was yet to come) and the destruction and horror of mechanized warfare, that the helplessness of the "tiny, fragile human body" against killing machines was on this Earth to stay.

I was reminded of Walter Benjamin when I read Sean Kernan's blog post on the salutary effects of boredom on the human spirit (see www.seankernan.squarespace.com)
in response to a recent piece in the New York Times Book Review by Jennifer Schuessler.

Neuroscientists are praising the effects of boredom. I regret it is too late for Walter Benjamin, who would have wondered why it took them so long. (He took his own life, in 1940, fearing capture by the Nazis.)

But here is the poetry of it, from eight decades ago:

"Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places --- the activities that are intimately associated with boredom --- are already extinct in the cities and declining in the country as well. With this the gift of listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears."

(You can find this essay in Illuminations, a collection of his writing.)

Wrap this metaphor around any of the arts that come from the hand, eye, heart and mind of the fragile human being.

Writing in the dark, watching light

Writers are notorious for their superstitions and fixed habits. Certain pens, chairs, desks, talismans, even teacups. I'm at work on a novel, set in 1932 Hollywood. I seem to have to start working in the dark. If I can see the dawn, the day is already making its claim on my imagination.

A disadvantage is that one may feel sleepy at 10:00 a.m. The real payoff though is watching light. When I am in my writing cottage, dawn slips through two big pine trees across the street. A glory.

Right now the cottage is too damp. So I write in the house, and watch the light advance through the mullioned windows in the living room. For a few moments, it lies silky across the dining table, like a scarf.

What Julie and Julia Have to Do With You

On Saturday, January 23, I taught a writing workshop at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanical Garden in Arcadia, in the San Gabriel Valley.(www.arboretum.org)

It was the first day of sun after several of rain, and it looked as though the world were new. As my friend Judy Horton says, winter in Southern California: oranges on the trees, aloes and cybidiums in bloom --- and snow on the mountains. There was snow on the mountains. And this is an aloe in bloom.

The workshop was about writing about what you love. (That's where the Julie and Julia come in.)

Debra Prinzing, that lively and fine writer and speaker, had a guest turn. Saved the day! (www.shedstyle.com)

Writing about what you love with clarity and brio takes practice, and that is also what the workshop was about. Or at least was its intent. The proof will be if most of the twenty-five souls braving four hours in chairs have gone home to hand over hearts and minds to what we used to call "the page" -- but may now be the tweet. Sweet. Maybe.

Happy 150th Birthday, Anton Chekhov!

My forty-year affair with Chekhov began innocently enough, with the plays. Perhaps it was The Cherry Orchard. Not quite sure. But when I read his short stories, and then the letters --- oh those letters --- no retreat was possible. He was mine.

We had a 150th birthday party for him here in Los Angeles, on January 17. Twenty people; herring, beet borscht, stuffed peppers, chicken paprikash, a zakooska table with piroshki, pickled everything, and sour cream above all. Shots of vodka, Russian champagne. Desserts with sour cherries, apples, poppyseed.

(Russian sour cherries are small, and tart. Chekhov liked to eat them by shoving five or six in his mouth, juice running.)

White flowers, many white flowers, and branches of barely awakened quince and forsythia.

We might have bored him. But --- we had gardeners in attendance. Gardening was his great passion. That cherry orchard was just the beginning.

I read his story, "Fish Love" aloud. Short, and witty. Rain was falling. We could hear it through open windows.

Through the window could be seen grey sky and trees wet with rain; since there was nowhere to go in that kind of weather, there was nothing to do but tell stories and listen.

Autumn in Montisi --- Southern Tuscany

The sky a perfect Mediterranean blue; layered, complex birdsong, dusky fragrance of wild thyme; a big spider lazily scuttling across the narrow village road. I sit in front of the village's only bar-cafe, closed now at 11:00 a.m. for the day, this being low season, and a Monday. The church bell chimes, once. On the other side of the wall, across the road, olive trees, a big spyria, two old apple trees, two enormous cypresses. The tiny Postitalia car putt-putts down the road. Two men in quiet conversation by the wall, the rhythm of their modulated voices rising and falling. One is much younger than the other, is pierced by two earrings in his right ear. A couple of hours ago I saw him shepherd his little boy to the village school. The village awakens slowly, the children not due until 9:00. A man on an old green bicycle wheels by with a tip of his white cap. Buongiorno.

The sweetest morning you can imagine.