A MUSE BOUCHE

I’ve been rereading (in some cases reading for the first time) parts of Francine Prose’s book The Lives of the Muses: Nine women and the artists they inspired.

It turns out – and very possibly we knew this all along – that it’s very hard being a muse.  And it’s no picnic having a muse, either.  Prose discusses Alice Liddell and Lewis Carroll, Gala and Dali, Hester Thrale and Samuel Johnson, Yoko Ono and John Lennon, Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, among others It’s surprising how often food crops up.

There’s John Lennon baking his own bread, taking Polaroids of it (way ahead of the Instagram game there, John) and bringing all the staff in for lunch.  Yoko says, ‘He makes the bread, and if they don’t eat it it’s a personal insult.’  Muses are, I suppose, allowed to make the occasional snide remark.

There’s Hester Thrale, Samuel Johnson’s muse, even while she was married to Henry Thrale, a brewer and MP. After Henry had had three strokes he started to eat and drink compulsively.  I haven’t been able to find exactly what he consumed but Johnson, who was no stranger to heroic eating, was so appalled that he said, ‘Sir—after the Denuriciation of your Physicians this Morning, such eating is little better than suicide.’  True enough.  Thrale didn’t stop eating and he died.  Johnson apparently though that Hester would then marry him, but in fact she married an Italian tenor named Gabriel Piozzi.   Muses, eh? Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.

Gala and Salvador Dali we know were sufficiently food-obsessed that there were two books: Les Diners de Galaand The Wines of Dali. (Gali?), though they never looked as though they did much actually eating. And yes, that is Gina Lollobrigida

I had some idea about all the above people but I didn’t know the full story of Lee Miller.  I knew her as a model (OK, muse) for Man Ray, then a collaborator, then as a photographer in her own right, photographing fashion, portraits, and then by force of circumstances becoming a war photographer, largely for Vogue. I knew that she’d married Roland Penrose but I didn’t know that after the war she suffered terribly from depression and alcoholism, (and probably boredom) and had developed a new, consuming interest in cooking, as a partial consolation.

There’s even a recent book. Lee Miller: A Life of Food, Friends and Recipes. Recipes include champagne and camembert soup, marshmallow-cola ice cream, carrots in whiskey, and chicken in edible gold and pink cauliflower breasts. I guess you could describe this as influenced by Surrealism.

Francine Prose finds this ‘dismaying’ and quotes from Roland Penrose’s Scrapbook to reinforce her point.  ‘Devoted to parlour games, she found a fascinating pastime in kitchen games, competitions which she often pursued with success, winning countless gadgets for the kitchen and at one time a triumphant tour of Norway … as a reward for a most startling and succulent open sandwich.’

Yes, this does sound like a bit of a comedown after Miller’s previous activities, but then, if you’ve washed yourself in Hitler’s bathtub, and photographed at Dachau and Buchenwald, well, what wouldn’t be?

         

The internet being the fine thing it is, I was able to find a description of her tour-winning entry, in an article in Gastronomica magazine by Becky E. Conekin.  It’s for something called a Penrose; mushrooms stuffed with pink foie gras mousse, seasoned with paprika and Madeira, and made to resemble roses.  I gotta say that doesn’t sound like quite enough to merit a triumphant tour, still according to the article, Miller won first, second, and third prizes, which I suppose does deserve some serious recognition.

2 SMALL THINGS ABOUT 2 BIG MEN

Sad to hear of the passing of Clarence Clemons, he of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, universally known as The Big Man.  That's him above on the left.  He was one of those people and presences you somehow thought would always be there, but given his size and his weight, his problems with his knees and his back, he did heroically well to last to 69. 

I haven’t been able to find out much about his food appetites, though I assume they were prodigious.  And I’ve been thinking what an advantage it is to be thought of as The Big Man, so much better than being known as The Fat Man or The Pudgy Man or The Morbidly Obese Man.

His quasi-autobiography, written with Don Reo is, titled Big Man (no “the”): Real Life and Tall Tales.  Some sections are in Clemons’s voice, some in Reo’s.  In one of the latter Reo writes, “If I’m in a crowded restaurant with Clarence, I believe I could pick up my knife and stab our waiter in the neck and nobody, including the waiter, would be able to give an accurate description of me.  I would appear in all reports as ‘some guy with Clarence Clemons’.”  Given some of the waiters I’ve met, it must have been tempting to put it to the test.

 Now, in the way that opening a book at random so often provides a moment of wonderful synchronicity, I opened Boswell’s Life of Johnson, the section for Spring 1766. Boswell describes how he and Oliver Goldsmith  dropped in at Johnson’s house intending to take Johnson down to one of the local pubs, the Mitre Tavern.  It turned out, however, that Johnson was ill and not in a drinking mood, at which Goldsmith says, “Come then, we will not go to the Mitre to-night, since we cannot have the big man with us.”  They order in a bottle of port instead.