In The Wine Lover’s Daughter, Anne Fadiman Reacquaints the World With Her Once-Famous Father

“I am quite convinced,” writer Clifton Fadiman once observed, “that our culture makes it difficult, if not impossible, for children ever really to know their parents.”

If you’re not familiar (and if you’re anywhere close to my age, chances are you’re not), Fadiman was the Brooklyn-born son of immigrants who rose meteorically from humble origins to become, in the middle part of the 20th century, an essayist, critic, editor, public intellectual, radio personality, peerless wit, and something of a household name. At 28, he was the editor in chief of Simon & Schuster; at 29, the book critic of The New Yorker; at 34, the host of Information Please, an NBC radio quiz show that at its height drew 15 million listeners (at a time when that was roughly one in 10 Americans). Later he was a cofounder and longtime judge of the Book of the Month Club; a serial editor of anthologies; a prolific writer of forewords and afterwords, prefaces and introductions, essays and articles; author of a children’s book, a guide to world literature, and an encyclopedic tome for oenophiles. So devoted was he to the written word that his New York Times obituary—he died at 95 in 1999 from pancreatic cancer, after going effectively blind in his late 80s—charmingly dubbed him a “bookworm’s bookworm.”

He was also the father of three children, among them a daughter, Anne Fadiman, a bookworm and author in her own right, best known for The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, a journalistic account of the devastating clash between Western medical practice and Hmong spiritual belief as it played out in the unfortunate case of an epileptic toddler whose refugee family resettled in California’s Central Valley in the 1980s. The Spirit Catches You, published in 1997, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and became an unlikely cult favorite, a touchstone for a generation of social scientists, teachers, doctors, and journalists (including this one). Fadiman, who teaches writing at Yale, went on to pen two essay collections, 1998’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader and 2007’s At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays. And now, 10 years since her last book, 20 years since her first, she’s back with The Wine Lover’s Daughter, a lively, moving, beautifully written memoir of the author’s relationship with her father, told through the story of his unfettered passion for wine (“I know no other liquid,” he once wrote, “that, placed in the mouth, forces one to think”) and her own difficult-to-cop-to, lifelong apathy for it.

It’s a book about how much our tastes—and our freedom to indulge or express them—define who we are. It’s also a book about self-doubt. Fadiman senior spent his life honing his command of “the Western canon and the WASP social code,” but was never able to shake a niggling feeling that he’d snuck into a club to which he did not belong, a persistent insecurity rooted in angst over his less-than-patrician heritage (he was Russian Jewish, one generation removed from the shtetl); his stature (5 foot 8 1/2 to his older brother Ed’s 6 foot 1); and his failure, in an age of rampant anti-Semitism, to secure a teaching position in the English department of Columbia University, his alma mater. (The powers that be informed him they could take only one Jew, and his friend Lionel Trilling got the job.)

The Wine Lover’s Daughter is, as the title suggests, as much about the child as it is about the parent. “Keep on trying the wine,” the author’s father urged her on a teenage trip to France. “Suddenly it will seem right and habitual.” It never did, though Fadiman was in her 40s before she admitted defeat.

It also wasn’t until she was in her 40s that the author had the confidence to try her hand at her father’s brand of literary writing (prior she had mostly worked, like her mother, as a journalist; it probably didn’t help that dad, who was born in 1904, held the distressingly antique belief that, “as a general rule, women were more superficial thinkers than men”). The younger Fadiman has long been concerned with the matter of oaklings, her word for children who choose the same occupation as their ultra-successful parents (oaks), and often fail to thrive under the shade of the mighty parental canopy. The ur-example, as she once described in an essay for Lapham’s Quarterly, is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s long-suffering poet son Hartley, who died a penniless alcoholic, and who, despite having written some good sonnets and essays, is remembered “for two things and two things alone: He was the son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and he was a disappointment.”

Hartley Coleridge clearly haunts the author, but so does another prospect: that time marches forward, our attentions spans shrink ever shorter, and fame, particularly of the sort Clifton Fadiman once enjoyed, is ultimately ephemeral. Trilling, the author writes, “went on to become one of the great literary scholars of the 20th century; my father went on to become,” in the view of the critic Dwight Macdonald, “a middlebrow” who “polluted modern America with the ‘tepid ooze of Midcult.’” Nearly two decades after Fadiman’s death, all but one of his books are out of print. The fear of being known only as Clifton Fadiman’s writer daughter has been supplanted by the fear that no one gets the reference.

Hence this book, which brings his work—his “marvelous, witty, essayist’s voice,” as Fadiman put it when we spoke by phone—back to the page. Good wine and good words can serve as time capsules. At the risk of sounding trite, The Wine Lover’s Daughter functions, in part, as a decanter into which the author has poured a very fine vintage of (her father’s beloved) Premier Cru Bordeaux, a bottle laid down in the cellar for decades, forgotten even, then rediscovered, uncorked, savored. The literary charms of Clifton Fadiman, readers will discover, have aged very well.

More from my conversation with Anne Fadiman, below.

You quote a letter your dad once sent to Dorothy Van Doren, the widow of his Columbia professor Mark Van Doren, in which he wrote: “I am quite convinced that our culture makes it difficult, if not impossible, for children ever really to know their parents.” Did this book come from a place of wanting to know him better?

Yes! I love that letter. I read it many years ago and never forgot that phrase. He was very much a part of our home life, so it’s not so much that he had been a mystery that I needed to solve, but that since he wasn’t around to talk with anymore, the only way of spending time with him was to write about him, and also to try to understand him better through understanding what he loved. The two things he loved most were books and wine. Books we had in common. I’d written about his and my interactions with books, peripherally in many essays over the years. But I’d never written about him and wine. Although as you discovered, the book is not entirely about wine. It’s mostly a father-daughter memoir. But wine is an important theme.

I love drinking wine, but I generally find reading about it rather tedious. You manage to make it really lively. But were you concerned that a wine-centric book might be a turnoff for readers?

You and I are just the opposite, because I don’t like drinking wine, but I find it intensely interesting. I wasn’t thinking about it in those terms. Whether wine snobs will enjoy this book? It’s hard to say. Of course, its author isn’t one, but neither was my father. He hated wine snobs. His knowledge of wine wasn’t something he wished to lord over other people, though it was a symbol of the life of refinement that he had craved when he was growing up poor in Brooklyn. But when I write, I don’t think: What will readers want? I think: What can I write best?

You worked on this book for eight years. It’s been 10 years since your last book. Why did it take so long?

Well, I wasn’t working on it constantly for the eight years, because I teach both semesters. It started off as an essay, and then I realized I had too much to say. Knowing that it was a book also provided the incentive for me to write about aspects of my father’s life that he wouldn’t have wanted me to write about. So it starts with a little bit more levity. At the beginning you might not know that you are going to get into the somewhat painful topics that you reach later, like my father’s extremely deep-seated social insecurity; like the fact that he wished he weren’t Jewish; like his sexism and his infidelity to my mother. Had I written an essay, I don’t think I would have dug quite so deep into the uncomfortably dark corners.

I imagine it was hard to do that digging?

Well, some of it was a struggle. Those are some of my favorite parts. Once I decided to make it a book, the contract that I was making was to help the reader get to know my father as fully as possible. This wasn’t just a small glittering essay with a lot of names of French wines. This was going to be a book in which I truly tried to bring my father back to life, by making his temperament and presence vivid on the page. And without the dark stuff, that wouldn’t have been possible. I think people who write puff pieces about their parents, perhaps they’re doing it even after the parent dies as a way to please them unconsciously? But I don’t need to please my father. I need to please my own standards as a writer. I couldn’t have done that if, for example, I had not written the chapter called “Jew,” which seems to be the one that people are talking about. I’ve already gotten emails from readers about similar experiences that they or their parents had: trying not to seem Jewish; wishing they weren’t Jewish; raising their children not to seem Jewish. It seems to have unleashed a volley of responses from people with whom it unfortunately resonated.

Your father was a self-hating Jew who became a keen scholar of Waspiness. Your first book was an ethnography of another culture. Obviously you weren’t studying the Hmong for the purposes of passing as one, but do you feel you inherited that attention to detail and nuance from your dad? Is there a connection between who your dad was in the world and your interest in writing a book like The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down?

I guess I always felt that my first book was more following in my mother’s footsteps. She was a reporter. She was the only woman war correspondent in China during World War II. And then my second two books, which were essay collections, were following in my father’s footsteps, because that was his favored genre. But I think there may be something to that. My father, as the son of immigrants, came from a cultural milieu that put a huge premium on assimilation. He and his two brothers both spoke impeccable English and didn’t sound anything like their parents, who spoke accented, not very grammatical English. Their parents applauded that. They wanted their children to be as American as possible. Whereas the Hmong, when they came here, didn’t want to be here, didn’t want to assimilate, and were looking back at Laos constantly, wishing to create little pockets of Hmong culture wherever they lived, where the old traditions could be preserved. How interesting: both of them coming to a new place—my father wasn’t an immigrant, but his parents had come to the United States not so long before he was born—with absolute opposite attitudes.

Before we got on the phone, I read an old profile published in The Guardian that described you as “‘a little bit tired’ of being Clifton Fadiman’s daughter.” Here you write that to head off comparisons, you once considered going by your mother’s maiden name. But now you’ve written a book that indelibly links you with your dad. Why the reversal?

I think the continued downward arch of my father’s fame. Not that the angle has been precipitous, but the 10 years that passed between then and now made my father pass a point of obscurity, beyond which I was much less likely to be known as Clifton Fadiman’s daughter. Many of the reviews so far have focused in ways that are sad but fascinating to me on the current lack of my father’s fame. The one in The Wall Street Journal is headlined: “Who Is Clifton Fadiman?”

Most people have no idea who he is these days, unless they’re 80 years old. I no longer felt I was in the shadow of his fame. In fact, one of the main reasons I wrote it was to try to revive his fame. All of his books but one are now out of print. I quote from many of his essays and his letters. He just had a marvelously witty essayist’s voice. Through my book, now people will be able to hear that voice.

There’s a chapter called “Oakling” in which I talk about the advantages and disadvantages of being the child of a famous person, especially a writer who decides to go into her father’s occupation. I wish my father’s fame had continued to burn bright. But one rather melancholy advantage of the fact that it didn’t is that I was liberated from oakling status.

It’s funny that even though your father was hugely prolific and wrote many essays and articles, and collected them into books, he never wrote what he might have regarded as a real book: 300 pages on a single topic.

Yes. Even though he was the least procrastinating person I’ve ever met, and one of the hardest workers, and he was just completely at home at his desk, happier there than anywhere else in the world, he never completed any of the noncollected full-length books that he planned. There were quite a few of them over the years. The one that really hung over our family like a shadow when I was growing up was to be this epic critical history of children’s literature. He once said as an old man that the piece he was proudest of was the entry on children’s literature that he wrote for the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Getting back to wine: It made me laugh to read about your father’s utter and complete disdain for rosé. What would he make of our pink wine–obsessed moment?

I think he would have rolled his eyes because he thought that rosé was both sissyish and vulgar, a sort of ladies luncheon wine. As you know, he was a pretty sexist guy, not politically—he was for the Equal Rights Amendment and so on—but kind of on a visceral level. He was very condescending toward women, one of his most major flaws. I think he thought of rosé as for people too namby-pamby to appreciate the nuance and intensity of a great Bordeaux. However, I don’t know that for certain, because as I explain in the book, he became much more open-minded about pretty much everything as he aged, about literature and also about wine. And he was becoming more open-minded emotionally, less secretive, wanting us to understand him, to return to the Dorothy Van Doren letter. And so he might have made space for rosé.

Any final takeaways we haven’t touched on?

My father was really funny. He was one of the wittiest men I’ve ever met, a master at wordplay. People who look down on puns definitely wouldn’t have looked down on them if they’d ever met my father. It’s a type of wit that might not be particularly fashionable today—perhaps the opposite of coarse humor. I tried to channel some of it in the book. I don’t want people to think this is a kind of elegy with violinists playing in the background: Oh, my dead father, oh, how I miss him. I do miss him, but one of the reasons I miss him is that he was so goddamn funny.

This interview has been condensed and edited.