Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, December 29, 1993 TAG: 9401040006
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ELEANOR OSTMAN KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The biography is a feast of details about Beard's 82-year life in Portland, New York and Europe. Furthermore, Clark's writing style is full of exceptional grace, perception and wit, and the joy of reading his entertaining biographic prose is reason enough to explore Beard's life.
In the book's first chapter, Clark seemingly drifts off the tracking of Beard's story into essays about the home-economics movement and community cookbooks, but by Chapter Two, the format clarifies; these asides about the development of American food are collateral to the story of Beard the man. Linked to Beard, and before that, to his British mother, a great cook of eccentric lifestyle who shaped her son's food style and artistic future, is a narrative of food progress for the past century.
Interwoven in the story of Beard's culinary ascendancy is Clark's assessment of the decline of American eating, moving away from the best of regional foodstuffs to commercially produced foods promoted by the ``home ec'' contingent, so that everyone in America was persuaded to put marshmallows in their salads. It was Beard's lifelong passion for regional fare that helped remind America of what we had lost and where we should go to regain foods' basic pleasures.
James Beard always has seemed to be with us, and surely by the late 1960s he was sublimely established on the summit of food expertise. But, as Clark's book painfully recounts, his was not an overnight success. He was in his late 40s, living on the largess of friends, by the time he'd written his first cookbook and achieved some measure of renown.
Clark also tells how Beard was the very first in the world to appear on a regular televised cooking show. While the show, ``I Love to Eat,'' was not commercially successful in those fledgling days of TV, it certainly was the forerunner for legions of other television cooks following Beard's lead.
From his earliest forays beyond his Portland birthplace, when Beard sought to be an opera singer, then an actor - both with negligible rewards - his life was a constant economic struggle. Yet survive he did, despite setbacks and scandals, on what everyone who knew him agreed was a generous measure of wit and charm.
Clark never met Beard, who died in 1985, and that's surprising to the reader because the details of Beard's life are written with such intimate focus. The idea to write a Beard biography drifted into Clark's consciousness as he lazed in a hammock in Tuscany, perhaps his last idle moment before several years of intensive research into food history, interviewing Beard's closest colleagues and writing about the intriguing epicure.
``The only people who didn't want to be interviewed were the few who didn't feel Beard's homosexuality should be discussed,'' said Clark, who bares that predilection from its earliest onset in Beard's Oregon youth to its being the reason he was expelled from Reed College in Portland to a lifetime of liaisons. ``It is an awfully frank book,'' says its author.
Such details were gleaned from Beard's letters and from the recollections of his friends.
Through Clark's research, he came to realize the impact that the food impresario had on so many lives, and the number of careers he nurtured. ``The average person in American may not even be aware that he's dead,'' Clark said, since Beard's books remain in print and his presence is evoked through constant activities at the James Beard House in New York, where the food faithful come to dinners cooked by the world's best chefs.
Clark's own interest in food can be traced to his childhood in St. Paul, Minn., ``where my family was eating asparagus and artichokes in the 1950s, deep in what was Minnesota's hot-dish era.'' His grandmother, Mrs. Benjamin Griggs, cared not for culinary pursuits, so his grandparents hosted weekly family meals in the best Twin Cities restaurants.
After taking a master's degrees in London and working on his doctorate at York University, Clark says, ``I was an academic for a while in England, and then the bottom fell out of that job market, so I started writing restaurant reviews.''
Later, he started a newsletter, European Food and Wine, catching the attention of Julia Child, who later invited him to write for the American Institute of Food and Wine's publication. He went on to edit The Journal of Gastronomy. ``That's how I got into food writing - sideways,'' he said.
Now, Clark and his family live in Seattle, where he is working on his next book about the Columbia River and its environs.
by CNB