Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [10]
Setting up war rooms was exactly the sort of thing Paul did best. In fact, he would do it many times in his life with Julia, organizing her high-performance kitchens at home and in the television studio. He was passionately analytical and took deep pleasure in trying to pin down the unwieldy universe in images, designs, and language. One of the many subjects that fascinated him was general semantics, a philosophy of language that he studied for years. Followers of general semantics, which emphasized the perpetually inexact relation between words and things, were fond of the abbreviation etc., because it implied that however much had been expressed, there was always something left unsaid. Paul tried to say it, all of it. He wrote constantly to his brother, Charlie, page after page of graceful calligraphy describing his days, his thinking, and his work with such dedication that he might have been the Homer of his own lifelong odyssey.
Paul was largely unsentimental, but his emotional life was always in full gear, and during the war years, he was deeply absorbed in the problem of women. He had lived for seventeen years, in Paris and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a woman named Edith Kennedy, who was some twenty years older than he. Widely accomplished, brilliant, and sophisticated, Kennedy had died of cancer in 1942. Three years later, Paul was still longing hopelessly for her. “I am really spoiled for other women and I realize it over and over,” he wrote mournfully to Charlie. Before he left the United States, an astrologer in whom he put considerable faith had revealed his future to him. “Sometime after April 1945” was the predicted time frame; at that point he could expect to fall in love with a woman who would be, according to the astrologer, “intelligent, dramatic, beautiful, a combination of many facets, can keep house, yet is a modern woman.” By the spring of 1945, Paul was lonely, grieving, sexually deprived, and waiting impatiently for the prediction to come true.
There certainly were enough candidates. Was it Nancy, code-named Zorina in his letters? Zorina was the name he and Charlie gave to certain women who physically resembled the famous ballet dancer while exuding a kind of essential female quality that greatly appealed to both twins. “They possess what is lacking in this warring, man-ridden world: a sense of the continuity of life and perpetual sympathy, fellow-feeling and consolation,” Paul once said about their Zorinas. But Nancy was in love with another man, and Paul finally gave up on her. Perhaps Janie? “Une Bohémienne, of a fine sort. She adores animals and people, draws with great style and is worldly and often witty. She speaks Malay and French, both well.” But it didn’t last. “The woman could be Rosamond,” he wrote excitedly. “No Zorina she, but a wonderfully interesting and alive person, speaking French and Chinese and in spite of a woman-hockey-player’s figure, very attractive physically.” But Rosie was in her twenties and too young to be very interesting for very long. “When am I going to meet a grown-up dame with beauty, brains, character, sophistication, and sensibility?” he exclaimed in agony. Finally, she appeared—Marjorie, definitely Marjorie. “She has a first class brain and is widely informed, is wonderfully quick, subtle and humorous, but very earnest about life and its problems and possibilities. You begin to love women like that the moment you see them, almost.” But Marjorie went off with someone else.
This barrage of failure, and the possibility of spending the rest of his life alone, prompted a bleak poem.
These prison-wires strung round my bones
Bear cryptic messages from the heart.
Wasteland, wasteland—never a bush—
No gushing coolness under the rock,
Devoid of butterfly and buttercup.
Vacant as an idiot’s eye.
These pipes, pulsing in my flesh,
Water no garden, fertilize no flower.
Bitter, bitter on the sand is love.
Love lost, love never gained, love unfulfilled.
The teeming world is lonely as a mooreland,
As a bird in the middle of the sea.