American Oystercatcher
My immediate ancestors were all coastal dwellers. My father was born on the Adriatic Coast in Dalmatia and raised on the Pacific Coast in the Sunset district of San Francisco. My mother’s paternal ancestors were from Southampton NY and before that from the coast of Yorkshire, U.K. I grew up on the North Atlantic coast, in Amagansett NY. So fish and shellfish were always part of my diet.
I am also old enough to remember the pre-Balsamic age. That is to say, white bread America. I knew it was a sign of a simpler life, than say, that of France, but I knew little else about the American diet; though I did have a more than simple, pedestrian interest in the book The Air Conditioned Nightmare, written by Henry Miller and illustrated by Abraham Rattner, which I will go into in a future post.
I suppose that's part of my reasoning in my decision to write about molluscs* in a blog which is supposed to be about my father and me, (although it wanders off course), and how we managed our lives in a naturalistic/artistic environment that has surrounded us and metaphysically merged our combined lifetimes over the entire 20th century and on up until the moment when I must go to meet my maker and my mortal father in the next life. I’ll try to keep to some accurate chronology though I might get confused as I’m now reading Henri Bergson on his concept of duration.
*To spell with a k or a c ending? It seems to me there is a choice. Either seems to be allowed. Note: The formerly dominant U.K. spelling 'mollusk' is still used in the U.S. — see the reasons given by Gary Rosenberg (1996). …For the spelling mollusc, see the reasons given in: Brusca & Brusca. Invertebrates (2nd ed.)..
My father’s favorite sport was fishing, mostly surf-casting, because we lived near the ocean. So we ate lots of Striped Bass and Bluefish; sometimes some weakfish, and clams were plentiful and cheap. We had clams on the half-shell almost any time, just for the pleasure of it; and chowder, and clams casino. Oysters and mussels were not quite as easy to find so they were more of a rarity.
Growing up, my kid sister and I were pretty blasé about anything gourmet or even slightly fancy being served, though we loved clams and smoked bass; we were also quite fond of “kid food”, sandwiches and canned spaghetti; we wanted to be like “normal” people.
When Mom didn’t feel like
cooking, the family would usually go to one of the two or three Blue-plate special
places that were around, usually Rem & Mills, (Remington and Mildred) or
Dot’s Restaurant, where you could get a hot roast beef sandwich, or fried
chicken or whatever was the “special of the day”; pot roast, veal cutlet, that
sort of thing; with, of course, scallops in season. (If I say that the local scallops were the best tasting thing in the world, you'll just have to take it on faith.) Both places, usually on Friday, served clam pie with a cup of
chowder. Oh God, clam pie I miss you so! (The best clam pie-chowder combo though was reserved for weekend family trips to Montauk, when we would stop at May Dekow's little shack of a restaurant, at the half-way point on our trip. May served only burgers and fries and clam pie and chowder, with apple pie and ice cream for desert. )
Within the past year
I’ve read several books which contained some reference to molluscs. I think the
first one was Eleanor Clark’s great book The
Oysters of Locmariaquer. I read her book just after reading a bio of Mary
McCarthy in which I discovered that the two women were school-mates at Vassar. I
had a double reason for wanting to read something by Clark. First, I’d once
enjoyed getting quite drunk during a long conversation with Clark’s husband,
Robert Penn Warren. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a conversation between peers.
I was a twenty two year old Army Pfc. on leave from my post at Ft. Richardson
Alaska and he was a famous visiting novelist and poet. The place was Washington
and Lee University where my father was Artist in Residence. I’m sure the
faculty hosts thought I was rude and disruptive for monopolizing the guest; I was
only there because my parents brought me along. I wasn’t in uniform but had the
give-away G.I. haircut, particularly noticeable in 1965. I had several drinks
while talking to him and then we both agreed to adjourn to a bar just around
the corner on the main street of Lexington. I remember giving him my thoughts
on the domino theory of Communist intervention in Southeast Asia which was sort
of a JFK-‘Scoop’ Jackson* era way of thinking. I don’t remember much else;
slept on my parents couch for a couple of days and then headed off for a quick
tour of NYC and my hometown, East Hampton, N.Y., mainly the bars where my small
group of pot-head juicer friends hung out. (It’s an alcoholic’s story that I’ll
deal with someday.)
Odilon Redon - Seashell
I think the Clark-Warrens were social drinkers not drunks; that part of society that can “handle” alcohol; (I wasn’t part of any such group). In that successful writer’s heaven that was and maybe still is Fairfield County, Connecticut their New Year’s Eve party was famed as the booziest, best celebration of the season.
Though she is mentioned
in the biography Writing Dangerously,
Mary McCarthy and Her World, by Carol Brightman, (1992, Clarkson Potter, NYC); there isn’t the aura
of sexual intrigue around Clark that generally hung over McCarthy’s life; our Mary was always having these interesting affairs; so I just wanted to know,
“What’s up with Eleanor?” I’d seen a few photos which confirmed that she was
beautiful; I also knew that she was part of the Partisan review crowd; and that
she had been briefly married to an assistant of Trotsky’s; if only, perhaps, to
facilitate a move to the U.S. by the Trotsky assistant.*
*Henry
Martin "Scoop" Jackson (May 31, 1912 – September 1, 1983) was an
American lawyer and politician who served as a U.S. representative (1941–1953)
and U.S. senator (1953–1983) from the state of Washington. A Cold War liberal
and anti-Communist Democrat, Jackson supported higher military spending and a
hard line against the Soviet Union, while also supporting social welfare
programs, civil rights, and labor unions. [Wikipedia]
*Clark was involved with the literary magazine Con Spirito at Vassar, along with Elizabeth Bishop, Mary McCarthy, and her sister Eunice Clark. She also associated with Herbert Solow and helped translate documents for the 1937 "trial" of Leon Trotsky. During World War II, [she] worked in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Washington, DC. Clark wrote reviews, essays, children's books, and novels. In the late 1930s, [she] married Jan Frankel, a secretary of Trotsky; they were divorced by the mid-1940s. In 1952, [she] married Robert Penn Warren and [for the rest of her life] lived in Fairfield, Connecticut, with him and their two children, Rosanna and Gabriel. On February 16, 1996, [She] died age 82 in Boston, Massachusetts.[Wikipedia]
Before I get more specific about Oysters including the specific type that Eleanor Clark wrote about, let me lay out the rest of the group of books that have bunched up on my shore. The second mollusc-informed book, which I read around the same time that I read the Clark book, is The Lost Girls; Love & Literature in Wartime London, by D.J. Taylor; Pegasus Books, New York London – c. 2020. (Taylor is a wonderful writer who's written more than a dozen novels and and 10 non-fiction at last count; criticism, humor, (The New Book of Snobs), bios of Thackeray and Orwell, and literary history. I mentioned the Taylor book in another post, 'Leaves Clem Marries Laurence', in which I dwell on the literary magazine Horizon.
Lost Girls is about the women who worked and clustered around Cyril Connolly while he was the editor and cult leader of that magazine during and after WWll. Cyril is the cyclonic center of the story in spite of the attraction of the sexy, smart and useful girls. In discussing Cyril’s upbringing Taylor noted that the young Connolly's father had been a student of Molluscs. Here's Taylor briefing us on Connolly and the old man:
“Guilt, Deception, Boredom, Lofty ideals and promise unfulfilled. All these were Connolly’s stock in trade, part of a coruscating personal myth that, carefully burnished up throughout his adult life, went back to the world of his far from promising upbringing. For a man who spent much of his career on the fringes of the beau monde, enjoyed hobnobbing with duchesses and regarded the Ritz Hotel as his second home, his background was notably obscure. His father Matthew (‘British soldier, conchologist, stamp collector, expert on pedigree racehorses and lover of the culinary arts’, as a scientific data base once put it), was an officer in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, who spent his long retirement living in a hotel that adjoined the Natural History Museum, the better to pursue his lifelong hobby of collecting snail shells. His son’s widely reviewed Enemies of Promise (1938) was followed a year later by his own much less well-publicized A Monographic Survey of South African Non-marine Molluscs, which took up all of 600 pages of Annals of the South African Museum. Well before this date Major Connolly had been deserted by his wife, Maud, who by the 1930s was living in South Africa with her husband’s former commanding officer, General Christopher Brooke. Mother-fixated Cyril kept constantly in touch.”
In that previous post I discussed Cyril’s life and his books, of which Enemies of Promise is the most well known; a great book in which Cyril displays his amazing knowledge, understanding and appreciation of many of the greatest books in the English Language that have come across his critic’s mind. Of his own cleverness, he admits to it in the following way;
“I had an excellent memory, I could learn by heart easily, gut a book in an hour and a half of arguments, allusions and quotations, like a Danube fisherman removing caviar from the smoking sturgeon, and remember them for just long enough to get down in an examination paper."
The third time the mollusc made its appearance was when I started reading Bergson, which immense project I took up shortly after having begun to look into the Pre-Soviet world of the Russian Futurists and Formalists.
The only book of Bergson's I had read, and that was long ago, was a translation of Creative Evolution. I decided to re-read it, fifty years later. Although my brain is less muddled now than it was then, I was having a tough go of it with C.E., so after the first chapter I did some research and decided to let go of it for a while and go to his book The Creative Mind, which is more of an introduction to his philosophy. I'm about one third through it, [C.M.] now, on my kindle. I can see this was a good idea because his thinking is coming together for me. I also plan, during my next budgetary cycle, to read Gilles Deleuze's book Bergsonism; the unanimous decision by those who've read it seems to be that it will help me to better understand Henri.
Before I put aside Creative Evolution though; I had gotten through the first chapter which contains what I might call, if I was so inclined, a masterpiece of conchological explication. I should probably refrain from going that far. Anyway, it's about the; wait for this; ...'ta dah!' ..eye of the mollusc.
True, I had read, back in the sixties, the popular book, Stalking The Blue Eyed Scallop, by Euell Gibbons, later famous for his TV ads in which he said that Post's Grape-nuts "taste like wild hickory nuts", which we were to assume were just yummy, and they pretty much are, but I don't think I actually took that title to mean that scallops actually had eyes. I think I just thought it, the "eye", was some sort of adaptive camouflage.
But in fact scallops do have eyes! And Bergson proceeds, in that first chapter, [C.E.] to explain in great detail about mollusc's eyes and their evolution, using as his primary dynamic something like what we English speakers call the 'life force', which Bergson calls 'elan vital'. Throughout the twentieth century, thinkers who were dismissive of Bergson; philosophers, biologists, chemists and the like, took the aforementioned elan as the place to get off the Bergson train. People of various cognitive types are still having problems with elan vital today. So much so, indeed, that I thought I might just as well jump into the fray. Here's my version of how whatever it is or might be comes to be.
-There is, in what I can only hope is the bottom rung of the known universe, which I like to think of as infinite, a zone [ehrwon?] where a specific activity is going on; a wave is noticed by some subjective entity, which turns the wave into a photon, which is light. This is going on everywhere; to infinity. Subject, meet object; predicate comes in there too, somehow. (Subjectivity then, would be 'homogeneous' with the infinite universe.)
I refer you, for a better explanation, to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online; which will give you Bergson's understanding of terms such as duration, memory, unity, divergence, retrospective, multiplicity, actualize, tendency, and, very important, mechanism and finalism. All
through this discussion of the mollusc by the way, Bergson
differentiates himself from those fellow evolutionists who hold with mechanism and finalism, two isms that attempt to fly without the wings
of elan vital.
Post-Darwin, evolutionists worked at filling in the gaps in the Darwinian theory. The evolution of complex organs was full of gaps. For Mechanists and Finalists alike there was good reason to follow form with function, or function with form. The Mechanist found that in the course of changing, the organ stumbles upon a new function, as a coincidence. The Finalist would add that the organ is striving for a goal; which is to see. There is some inherent final goal. Bergson, thinking that function and organ development are two different things that have no reason to work together, decides to compare two eyes that developed separately; the vertebrate and the mollusc eye.
He picks the common scallop, aka Pecten. The scallop, he notes, separated from the common parent-stem long before the appearance of anything approaching an eye in the Pecten.
He proceeds, for the reader, to examine the eyes of the Pecten (scallop). Both invertebrate and Pecten eyes have similar parts and structure. Yet, "All are agreed that mollusks and vertebrates separated from their common parent-stem long before the appearance of an eye so complex as that of the Pecten”, as Bergson puts it.
The Mechanist, he says, would find any similarities coming from accidental variations. The Finalist would 'blame', or give credit to, external conditions leading to new organs. Mechanists, then, see the creeping forward in a similar direction which is the eye formation of vertebrate and mollusc as a series of coincidences. As Darwin said, species develop slowly by an accumulation of "insensible variations". Others counted on the spontaneous appearance of new properties, with new differences, which sometimes might theoretically, by chance, find some utility which favors their incorporation into the whole. With Hugo deVries it led to a theory involving mutations. What Darwin had was a good working theory with millions of not so tiny holes.
Bergson allows that there must be some truth to mechanism, finality and mutation but that it doesn't lead to enough. Something else is needed. Now, by this time you are probably thinking......."but what about genes?" In Bergson's time, the germ, or germ-plasm; that stuff inside the sperm and egg cells; filled in for what would eventually become the gene.*
*The New International Encyclopædia; Edition 1906; "Germ-Plasm: The kind of protoplasm supposed by some embryologists [to be] ..peculiar to the germinal part of the ovum and regarded as containing such chemical or molecular composition and properties as to determine the special character of the resulting organism. This singularity is supposed to be inherited and so continue from generation to generation."
Now back to the eye in question; Bergson puts the evolution of the mollusc eye on its own track, different from
that of vertebrates, as an example of the substantive creativity of the afore-mentioned 'elan vital'. Here-in lies what might be the biggest secret about Bergson which is that he included a metaphysical aspect to his science, though he inserted it without labeling it, and to a great extent he got away with it! This 'force' he says has a drive toward unity. [And in the sub-atomic scientific world of today it seems he was probably right!] And, inherent in this enduring unity this force holds a multiplicity of tendencies which can lead to division and diversion. (Here he uses the zygot and the embryo as examples.)
-In the previous discussion I relied heavily on The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is as far as I dare to go at this point in my study of Henri Bergson. As I said somewhere before, I am at the foot of Mt. Bergson. Am I too old to climb? We'll see. My plan next is to write a short blog post about how I plan to go about reading Bergson. But I'd like to leave you with the following from Eleanor Clark.
Eleanor Clark, The Oysters of Locmariaquer; HarperCollins e-books.
She has been talking about the business of Oystering in the part of Brittany that she also describes in the book. She goes on;
"An uncanny degree of judgement is involved too, something beyond just knowing the business. It goes in the family, father to son; you have to be raised in it, at least so they say in the region and they can't name a successful producer who didn't come to it that way. It is the one business, they say, that an outsider can't make good in. That might be partly because there is no more room; the concessions are all taken. but what they are talking about is the sense of a thousand subtleties, imponderables of the sea, which in conjunction with the end-less labor and patience go to make up the deep commitment associated with the word "metier."
"The outcome is a little luxury item, of rather large economic consequence but not great importance to the world's nourishment. It should be. The oyster is very high in nutrition value, at least as much so as milk, but that is scarcely relevant as things stand because not enough people can afford it. So the whole point is flavor, and sociologically speaking, how can you justify that? Is it worth all the pain and trouble? Should it even be allowed?
"You can't define it. Music or the color of the sea are easier to describe than the taste of these Armoicaines, which has been lifted, turned, rebedded, taught to close its mouth while traveling, culled, sorted, kept awhile in a rest home or "basin" between each change of domicile, raked, protected from its enemies and shifting sands etc. for four or five years before it gets into your mouth. It has no relation at all to the taste, if there is one, of the usual U.S. restaurant oyster, not to mention the canned or frozen one. (No Armoricaines are canned, or frozen; there is no such business.) Or rather yes, it has the relation of love to tedium, delight to the death of the soul, the best to the tolerable if tolerable, in anything. Or say of French bread, the kind anybody eats in France, to ... well, never mind. It is briny first of all, and not in the sense of brine in a barrel, for the preservation of something; there is a shock of freshness to it. Intimations of the ages of man, some piercing intuition of the sea and all its weeds and breezes shiver you a split second from that little stimulus on the palate. You are eating the sea, that's it, only the sensation of a gulp of sea water has been wafted out of it by some sorcery, and are on the verge of remembering you know what, mermaids or the sudden smell of kelp on the ebb tide or a poem you read once, something connected with the flavor of life itself...
