Educating Mary Frances Kennedy:
M.F.K. Fisher Remembers Illinois
(c) Copyright (2017) by Kathleen
Spaltro
All Rights Reserved
Rambling obituaries in 1992 of the master prose
stylist M.F.K. Fisher clustered together her brief but all-too-recurrent
undergraduate experiences. Along with her matriculations at Whittier College,
Occidental College, and the University of California at Los Angeles, the
Californian Mary Frances Kennedy also attended Illinois College in Jacksonville
in Fall 1927. While Kennedy's brief sojourn in Illinois may seem surprising, she
was born in Albion, Michigan, to parents who both had Midwestern origins and
relatives. Restless and young, Mary Frances Kennedy of Whittier was in flight from her Californian family and her town,
but she did not yet know who she was or what she was good at. So, going to
college out of state seemed like a way out but was not. Marriage in 1929 to
doctoral student Al Fisher (whom she met in the UCLA library), in its turn,
seemed like a way out but was not. But her time in France with Fisher, and her
earlier memories of Illinois, did educate Mary Frances about her palate—a way
of measuring her powers as a unique memoirist of food or, more exactly, of the sensuous
ingestion and appreciation of food. Thus was Mary Frances Kennedy, future
author of The Gastronomical Me, introduced
to the Gastronomical She, M.F.K. Fisher.
Her recorded memories of both
Chicago and Jacksonville centered on what food she ate and how she ate it. Like
James Beard, who with lavish detail recalled the meals of his youth in his
autobiography, Delights and Prejudices,
she possessed a remarkable "taste memory," an ability to remember and
render the intense pleasure of eating. Of course, Mary Frances could have eaten
at far less expense to her parents if she had stayed in Whittier. Attending
college in the Midwest served as a way of escape: "as soon as I could
escape the trap, whatever it was, I fled family and friends and security like a
suddenly freed pigeon, or mole, or wildcat. I probably thought that I was at
last MYSELF." Almost 60 years later, Fisher analyzed her earlier self: "I
assumed that I was intelligent, because I had learned how to bluff.
Intellectually, I was a lazy zero, even though I had been reading everything
from Thomas à Kempis to The Oz Books
since I was not quite five"; "now I know how hard many of my peers
worked and studied while I played grasshopper." Despite her poor academic
performance at Illinois College, Mary Frances's real education nevertheless was
proceeding underground.
Uncle Evans and Cousin Bernard
"My favorite
relative," Mary Frances's maternal uncle Evans Holbrook, a law professor
at the University of Michigan who had been teaching law at Stanford University
while on sabbatical, suggested that he accompany 19-year-old Mary Frances to
Chicago. She would go on to Jacksonville, while Uncle Evans went home to Ann
Arbor. Fisher later perceived, "I now believe that he did this on purpose,
to help me into new worlds." By 1927, Uncle Evans had been traveling by
train to and from the West Coast for almost 30 years: "I paddled along
happily in the small sensual spree my uncle always made of his routine
travelings. I probably heard and felt and tasted more than either of us could
be aware of." Uncle Evans loved the breakfasts served at the Harvey Houses
on the train line. Devoted to their baked apple breakfast, he declared,
"The Harvey girls never fail me." He also knew how to obtain the best
food served on the train itself.
"Dazed at escaping
the family nest," Mary Frances ate lunch and dinner with her uncle both on
the train line and in the dining car, where he enticed his niece's appetite by
suggesting foods unfamiliar to her, such as Eastern scallops instead of lamb
chops. She realized that Uncle Evans "knew more about the pleasures of the
table than anyone I had yet been with." When the callow Mary Frances
replied that she did not care whether she ate a fresh mushroom omelet or a wild
asparagus omelet, Uncle Evans rebuked her uncharacteristic stupidity: "Let
[your host] believe, even if it is a lie, that you would infinitely prefer the
exotic wild asparagus to the banal mushrooms, or vice versa. Let him feel that
it matters to you … and even that he
does." He explained further, "All this may someday teach you about
the art of seduction, as well as the
more important art of knowing yourself."
Together with his son
Bernard, who met them in Chicago, uncle and niece ate together in a Fred Harvey
restaurant in the newly opened Union Station. Intimidated by the brainy
Bernard, Mary Frances erred again in saying "Oh, anything, anything" in
response to the menu. Uncle Evans returned "a cold speculative somewhat
disgusted look in his brown eyes." Stung by the look, Mary Frances recovered
her equanimity: "I knew that it was a very important time in my life."
She looked at the menu with intelligence, "really looked, with all my
brain, for the first time," and ordered her meal with care and discretion.
"Never since then have I let myself say, or even think, 'Oh, anything,'
about a meal, even if I had to eat it alone, with death in the house or in my
heart." Her memory of this episode in Union Station motivated Fisher to
revisit the Harvey restaurant in the station years later "to find satisfaction
there where I first started to search for it."
Uncle Walter
and Cousin Nan
Mary Frances's paternal
cousin Nancy Jane Kennedy, a daughter of Uncle Walter Kennedy, planned to
attend Illinois College for a year before matriculating at the University of
Chicago. Self-described as "very shy and rather snobbish," Mary
Frances spent most of her time in Jacksonville with her "very
intelligent" and "fascinating" cousin as well as with Nan's
roommate, Rachel, "comforting—like a great warm woman who smells
cinnamonly and feels soft—like a tender-eyed bitch."
"We three have had a
lot of fun this year. I've spent most of my time in their room—mine was so
hideously colored and so empty of humanity." They gorged on movies, hot chocolate, food:
"We must have bought twenty-five packages of cream cheese, quarts of
ginger ale, hundreds of crackers, a whole garden of lettuce, barrelsfull of
jam. It was fun to eat the pale green leaves, and the richly colored jam, and
the suave cheese, and drink the exciting ginger ale—on a candle-lit table, with
the Victrola moaning blues in the corner of the room." She remembered
buying rolls, anchovy paste, as well as French dressing and the girls' baring
their little breasts at the cold open window, defying pneumonia.
In this winter of gluttony,
despite generally bad food at the college dining room, the Hall, the girls wore
their Sunday morning church clothes while they devoured delicious hot cinnamon
rolls, and then they went back to bed instead of to services. Often, they
celebrated at the Coffee and Waffle Shop on 311 West State Street, which
served them 4 waffles and unlimited
coffee or hot chocolate, or they bought a
five-course meal for 40 cents. Invited out to the Colonial Inn, 1213 West State
Street, for Sunday dinner, Mary Frances noticed "dishes of pickled peaches
like translucent stained glass." At local Jacksonville homes, "The
food was always divine": "There were fine cooks in that part of Illinois,
most of them colored, and I regret that I knew so little then about the way
they handled chickens and hams and preserves and pickles." Alternating
bites of pie and ice cream taken from separate plates, she admired Jacksonville
pumpkin pie, and mince pie, as well as very rich and homemade eggnog ice cream.
Although Mary Frances felt
"interested in these people, their looks, conversation, everything," and
she partied vigorously, homesickness for
California, hatred of "skidding on icy walks and looking at mangy, sooty
snow," and hospitalization at Chicago's Passavant for a bronchial
infection curtailed her stay at Illinois College to a single semester. She
liked the enthralling history professor, Mr Smith, who gave
"thrilling" lectures; the "garrulous old lady," Miss Elly,
reminiscing in "a fascinating stream of sometimes almost incoherent
chatter"; and the affectionately remembered Miss Moore and Miss McCune
"and their beautiful old house and their delicious things to eat."
However, man does not live
by bread alone, nor can a scholastic career be sustained solely by eggnog ice
cream, even if homemade and very rich. Mary Frances freely admitted her academic
laziness on her biology final, "To
state and define the characteristics of protoplasm is a thing I should know how
to do. Once I did know how—two or three months ago, perhaps. Now, in the final
examination, I do not know—and I do not care. I am losing five hours of credit.
Too bad, isn't it?" While she ignored her biology exam, she noted in her
journal on January 30, 1928, "This year has been an amazing adventure in
many ways but thank God I'm ending this part of it tomorrow. My train leaves
for dear old California at noon."
"Going as
unexpectedly and with as little cause as I came, [I am] leaving a few marks of
myself which will soon rub out or remain faint smudges—taking a few permanent
lines on my own—what shall I say? blackboard? I took much more of Jacksonville
than I gave or that it took from me. That is as it should be, perhaps."
First published in The Woodstock Independent
