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Now Olney's misreading of the situation is telling: it highlights a streak of real nastiness that runs through his memoir, an unwillingness to pass over human foibles or to give people the benefit of the doubt. For me, at least, this limits the pleasure I can take in the book's other considerable charms.
His responses to wine are beautifully, even seductively recorded; his descriptions of food are, surprisingly, less frequent and less memorable.
I found the admiration he records for his brother James's achievements as a capable but generally unremarkable academic touching. Here is this fellow, a good friend of the likes of Auden and James Baldwin, reverently noting the publication of his sibling's dutiful scholarly tomes. This is what true brotherly love looks like.
Olney's life was fascinating and in some respects enviable, but I can't say that overall I particularly warmed to him.
Keep in mind that for all his meticulous recording of his social life, he lay dead in his home for three days before anyone found him--and even then it was the gardener. There is a sort of grim pentimento here beneath this self portrait--the artist as lonely, besotted misanthrope. How sad!
If you want to know more about Richard Olney (as I also did), you may be unsatisfied. The impression the book gives is of a very private man who never really reveals himself and who was in the end disappointed by life. Also, the writing is, to be honest, not really up to the standards that he sets in his other books: this reads more like a draft than a finished book, which it may very well be, since he died before publishing it - but even so, I suspect that he was simply not very comfortable with autobiography as a genre.
While he is, for instance, perfectly frank, and even quite charming about his sexuality (the episode with Auden and the little pots of jam is worth, by itself, the price), you never learn, for instance, what his conservative middle class, middle-american parents thought (or if they knew). Neither, for that matter, do you ever find out how he earned his living (yes, life was cheaper, but a cellar full of Romanee-Conte and 60 year old d'Yquem must be based on some sort of income).
I found the most touching parts to be about his friendship with Elizabeth David, and that is maybe revealing, since she was another loner (or simply lonely)...
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Simple french food doesn't mean simple cooking; it actually takes real work. But this is the best overall treatise I have read (among hundreds). My second copy is falling apart, I have given it to many friends and I will go on buying it until they take me to the great restaurant in the sky. Don't be without it.
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