We writers are all familiar, from our days of rote memorization back when we were apprentices just starting out in MFA programs, with the list of those legendary novelists who would, and did, consume everything under the sun. The canon of the gourmands starts with Rabelais and moves on down to Cervantes, L'Abbé Prévost, and, not the least among them, Defoe. Who can forget how our writing instructors drilled these giants into our minds? Who doesn't remember their names on the chalkboards, their images raised up before us as icons, beacons of how we, too, should grow up to write everything and eat everything, our words spilling off the page like our fatty soups, our bellies gorgeously bursting the confines of our pants?
For writers, we are taught, excess is second nature. We devour the whole enchilada; we disgorge the kitchen sink; we admire most those novelists who set the bar of superabundance high. But in our private moments, we worry: Can any of us novices ever really be Dos Passos, eating everything and vomiting it all back out again on the page? Why bother aspiring to models like Melville, when it is now not just inadvisable but actually illegal to eat whaling ships in their entirety, from the hard tack to the sea anchor to the first mate to the mizzen? We throw up our hands; we cry out: We will never be Bellow!—consuming great platters spilling over with feasts of blood and offal, fabulously obese widows and skinny young shop girls, juice-soaked copies of The Forward and the Declaration of Independence—and so we hide in our basements, jotting down self-loathing haiku in pencil, weeping softly, nibbling on leftover matzo.
But the truth! The truth liberates. And time reveals all. So many of the models our writing programs hold up for us—these spectacular, all-devouring gods of the world of letters—were, in reality, we discover much later, considerably more human than the myths that have been built up around them. Young writers all know that Joyce's hunger was legendary—but are any of them ever taught that his taste was limited, quite literally, to the scatological? Tanizaki liked vast, seven-course meals prepared for him by gangs of prostitutes, it's true; but as scholars have recently discovered, he only ate the appetizers. Alas, if only more young writers knew that, although Kerouac indeed did swallow all the road kill he could find from New York to San Francisco, he didn't chew, more of them might still be around to tell the tale! Balzac claimed that he ate, drank, smoked, slept with dozens of women, and wrote—all at once—for sixteen hours a day, but almost all of his ninety-seven novels, as recent biographies have pointed out, were outsourced to Bulgarian temp agencies. Are any young writers ever taught that Hemingway, in all his many adventures around the world, only ever ate dry toast? And Dickens—magnificent Dickens!—ate anything he could find lying about in the streets of London, or abandoned in the gutters, or stuck to the insides of his chamber pot—but only if it was thinly spread on a sliced-open half of a muffin.
And what of the less omnivorous novelists? The picky eaters, the allergics in the attic, the vegetarians squirreled away in their garrets? These careers—the lives and diets that do not humble us into inaction—are even less well known. If only our writing programs would make mention of, say, the life of Fielding, who ate a reasonable three square meals a day, or Sterne, whose only dietary sin was a minor addiction to mercury! Then there's Diderot, who abused nothing but oyster shells, or Rousseau, who occasionally ate small parts of himself. Writing teachers! Don't you see that we are all of us particular in our sins, each of us unique in word, deed, and food? Thomas Wolfe smoked banana peels, had a thing for French girls wearing paper bags on their heads, and never did like the taste of anise seed; Wallace Stegner loved turned milk, smoked Gauloises from the age of six, and all his life insisted that his mother cut the edges off his sandwiches. Steinbeck was a lifelong virgin who bit the heads off ducks; Iris Murdoch painted Communist slogans on the flanks of cows as they slept in their fields; Conrad couldn't get enough of his beloved Mexican-jumping-bean-and-French-fry stew. Willa Cather led a double life as a born-again traveling icebox saleswoman with four husbands in three states and a fondness for opium; Flaubert started each day with whiskey on his corn flakes; Edith Wharton repeatedly contracted bad cases of the clap from shared bottles of near beer.
We could go on—we might mention the secret dinner parties thrown by James, Proust, Mann, and Woolf, where the four greats ate and drank nothing but air; or the cookie recipes swapped back and forth between Nabokov and O'Connor, their ingredient lists limited to ground chickpeas, sand, and the shorn wings of insects. But we'll stop here. Perhaps knowing the truth could give you some comfort; perhaps these examples could offer the young writer shoes that his or her human feet might actually fit? Perhaps this realistic glimpse of mortal, restrained, dietetic lives might provide some of you with solace—as it has done for us.
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