Because of the pandemic, I have Vincent Canby’s desk. Millions of witty words must have drummed from his fingertips where I now slouch, stalled and mostly unproductive, without deadlines to drive me.
I had spoken to passengers who were about to board the first Genting cruise in November. It was the first time in 10 months I had looked into an interviewee’s eyes, and I had almost forgotten how powerful eye contact is as a means of connection. I was — and am still — doing all of my reporting through the telephone and a mix of scouring the news and social media from China. Those interviews were another reminder that all of the things I used to rely on to report — the sights, sounds and smells — are all lost by my not being on the ground.
The prohibitions on Christmas dining would have particularly aggrieved Robert May. One of the most skilled chefs in the land, the English-born, French-trained chef cooked Christmas dinners fit for a king—a doubly unwelcome skill in a time of republicanism and puritanism. May connected the medieval traditions of English country cooking with the early innovations of urban French gastronomy, and was at the height of his powers when the Puritan Revolution took effect. During those years, he compiled The Accomplisht Cook, an English cookbook of distinction and importance that was eventually published in 1660. In more than a thousand recipes, May recorded not only the tastes and textures of a culinary tradition, but a cultural world that he feared was being obliterated—including the Christmas dinner, an evocative sensory experience that links the holiday of four centuries ago with that of today.
All the second lockdown did was reinforce my love of being cooked for. In fact, a plate of food made by a chef and placed in front of me with a smile is certainly one of the great joys of being human.
There is, Shirley Hazzard fans will know, something sublime in hearing the perfect truth, no matter how bad it is. As a child during the second world war, Hazzard learned from listening to Winston Churchill that simple words, arranged in just the right rhythm, could be devastating. In 1940, when Churchill announced Germany’s invasion of France, he said: “The news from France is very bad.” It was, she declared later, “an immortal sentence”.
Within the first few pages of Farewell, Ghosts, our narrator dreams that she is drowning. There’s no struggle in the act, only a wordless glide between living and dying: “A moment before, I was walking; a moment after, I was drowning.” The sequence serves less as a portent than as a credo; everybody in the novel is suspended in this change of state, neither living nor dead, unable to move on.
Young buck tapping
its velvet against the
bathroom window in