Word: authors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...even more individualized approach to food can be found in Sylvia Thompson's Feasts and Friends (North Point Press; $21.95), a beautifully evocative memoir recounting the author's dining adventures in California and Europe. The daughter of actress Gloria Stuart, Thompson learned good cooking at home in Hollywood, where dinner guests included Groucho Marx and Robert Benchley. Traveling around Europe, cooking while in and out of love, she developed an eclectic repertoire: from Russian fish soup to French vegetable soup with white wine, from Southern "transparent pie" -- made with quince jelly -- to an opaque Dutch apple pudding. The icing...
...HIGH ROAD by Edna O'Brien (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $18.95). The Irish author made her reputation writing about headstrong girls dashing toward the flame of maturity; her tenth novel portrays women who have come out on the other side, badly burned...
...appeared: a memoir by his daughter Susan, Home Before Dark (1984), and Scott Donaldson's John Cheever: A Biography, published earlier this year. More collections are on the way. After legal wranglings, a compromise between the Cheever estate and a Midwestern publisher has been reached: a selection of the author's uncollected stories will appear next spring. And Cheever's private journals will surely be made public soon. All of this activity prompts a question. If Cheever's early obscurity was unjustified, might not these posthumous publications be a compensatory case of too much too late...
...Letters of John Cheever provides a quick, easy answer: no. The author believed, as he once wrote a friend, that "the common minutiae of life" are "the raw material of most good letters." Cheever's letters are crammed with everyday details, although such information does not shed much new light on his fiction, which was luminous enough to begin with. To learn more about Cheever is to take a refresher course in the pleasure of his company. He could toss off a letter that made even a motel remarkable: "The furniture was of no discernible period or inspiration...
Although he was a faithful letter writer, Cheever assumed that his pen pals would destroy his missives as casually as he did theirs. He was thus startled in 1959 to hear from author Josephine Herbst that she had been saving his mail. "Yesterday's roses," he wrote back, playfully dismissing her collection of his work, "yesterday's kisses, yesteryear's snows." Cheever's unselfconscious approach allowed his imagination and love of language free play. The supposedly ephemeral results of this process were, paradoxically, often memorable. Here is a 1946 description of his surroundings during a vacation in New Hampshire...