Artists of the Miniature

Handing out peanut butter sandwiches to revolutionaries

Laurie Colwin in 1978 (Darleen Rubin/Penske Media/REX/Shutterstock)

There are some artists who scintillate, whose interpretive dynamism is so acute that it comes at you in shining points that seem to poke holes in the veneer of everyday reality, allowing glimpses of the transcendent to show through. These artists are masters of the small detail. They tend to die young, as if such precise and passionate energy were really meant for a more rarified realm than this. Jacqueline du Pré comes to mind:

As does Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who I was privileged to hear live on several occasions, including her legendary performance of Bach’s Cantata BWV 82, “Ich habe genug,” at John Jay College in 2001, where she sang in a hospital gown, a dancer shadowing her with a bare light bulb on a long extension cord. A fistfight over her daring interpretation was narrowly averted in the balcony before it ended.

In literature, I would place Laurie Colwin, who died at the age of 48 in 1992, into this group. Her novels and short stories are enchanting, funny, and unspeakably sad all at once, shot through with a kind of delicacy and restraint that earned her comparisons to Jane Austen during her lifetime, and revel in descriptions of the physical world, the surfaces of things, and the everyday appurtenances of urban life. Colwin also wrote a food column for Gourmet, which, belying the magazine’s high-flown title, was mainly about plain food — how to turn out potato salad, brownies, a perfect roast chicken, and the ways that doing so could be an anthropological experience that enabled you to understand yourself and the world. Colwin’s Gourmet essays were published in two volumes, Home Cooking and More Home Cooking, which I first discovered at the Strand Book Store years ago. After watching the now-infamous video of a Columbia protester demanding food after the storming of Hamilton Hall, I pulled my tattered copy of Home Cooking off the shelf.

As Colwin relates in the book, one of her earliest experiences of cooking for a crowd was during the Columbia protests of 1968. In the essay “Feeding the Multitudes,” she explains:

In 1968, Students for a Democratic Society called a strike [at Columbia] and occupied a number of buildings. I was a part-time student, part-time office girl, and when the strike was called I found myself in my Miss Bergdorf dress and raincoat in the kitchen of an occupied building trying to figure out how to feed a large number of ravenous postadolescents. . .

As I began to make what felt like hundreds of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, my comrades streamed in — Columbia College boys younger than I, and starving.

“Hey! Can I have something to eat?”

“No. We have to save food for mealtimes.”

“Hey. I’m starving. Puh-lease?

“Okay. You can have tuna fish or peanut butter and jelly.”

“Tuna fish! Peanut butter and jelly! We had peanut butter and jelly for breakfast and I’m allergic to tuna fish.”

I learned to say: “Forget it! You’re supposed to be eating paving stones like your comrades in Paris.” This sent them skulking away.

About her stint as an SDS cook, Colwin reminisces:

Time has passed and it is fashionable to run down the sixties, but I am proud to have been in that kitchen. The issues were real issues of academic freedom and social justice, about which many students of the time had deep and passionate feelings.

Hamilton Hall during its occupation in the 1968 Columbia protests. Hanging from the windows are a picture of Stokely Carmichael and a Viet Cong flag.

Colwin wrote “Feeding the Multitudes” in the 1980s, at a time marked by student apathy and conformism. One can forgive her soft-pedaling of SDS as a bunch of hungry students passionate for social justice; she was young herself, and caught up in the events of the Columbia spring, which, if they were anything like the student protests of this spring, must have been filled with camaraderie, high spirits, and the sense, simultaneously solemn and ecstatic, that one was changing the course of history.

Columbia student protesters dancing (photo by Grace Li)

SDS would soon rename itself Weatherman and carry out a spate of bombings, including the accidental destruction of a Greenwich Village townhouse that left three of its members dead and scattered the rest underground, including Mark Rudd, the leader of the 1968 protests at Columbia.

Aftermath of the explosion of a townhouse on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village, used by Weatherman as a bomb-making lab, 1970

But Laurie Colwin, part-time student and part-time office girl, was not really of this circle. Her cooking for it, though surely exciting, was more an act of big-sisterly charity than one of revolution. In fact, “Feeding the Multitudes” uses the 1968 Columbia protests as a springboard for a much longer meditation on Colwin’s volunteer work cooking for homeless women, and closes with a recipe for shepherd’s pie to serve 150 people that she made for her daughter’s school fair.

Though the actions of SDS at Columbia and thereafter were destructive, Colwin’s cooking in the midst of them was a gesture of humanity, a civilizing force in the face of chaos. And over the past few weeks, despite the Hamilton Hall occupiers’ plea to be fed, the tent encampments were inundated with “food [donations] from all over the world.”

But Venmo-ing pizza money, and exchanging your Miss Bergdorf dress for a sweatshirt with a nametag reading “Kitchen/Colwin,” are two different things. In the first scenario, an electronic donation pings on your phone from a stranger in some distant place, who’s totally abstracted the meaning of “Globalize the Intifada,” and believes (as you do) that your short-lived bacchanal is a deep interrogation of global morality. In the second, an ordinary person, in all her contradictions and complexity, who is not really part of your party and may be only dimly aware of your cause but who commits herself to you as a person, stands right in front of you and hands you a peanut butter sandwich. The first provision of food comes from self-righteousness; the second comes from love.

When I think of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson or Laurie Colwin, it occurs to me that the artists we love are those who seem to sing, write, or speak with our own imagined voice, the voice that we long to possess. They are ventriloquists of the soul, articulating the hidden truths of the human condition, and, even more astonishingly, of our own personal, inchoate graspings. As much, or as little, as their biographies might tell us, we must accept that as people they will always be deep mysteries to us: can we ever really know another person, including the people nearest us, let alone the strangers who offer us the generosity of their art or a peanut butter sandwich? One thing I feel certain of, though, is that these artists were deeply acquainted with grief.

How can we know this? We can comb through what biographical records exist — for instance, for Hunt Lieberson — and intuit in them profound heartbreak in her recounting of various relationships and her happy, late-in-life marriage to a man who nevertheless had to divorce his first wife to enter it. As for Colwin, the official records are even scanter, and we must look to her creative output, which, despite bearing titles like Family Happiness and Happy All the Time, and the fact that her protagonists are privileged people far from want or deprivation, pulse with a subtle undercurrent of sorrow. The happy families Colwin writes about strive to accommodate responsibility and delight with loss, betrayal, and adultery. She dwells on little details, as in this passage from Another Marvelous Thing:

Having a love affair, Francis reflected, was not unlike being the co-governor of a tiny, private kingdom in some remote country with only two inhabitants — you and the other co-governor. This kingdom had flora and fauna, a national bird, language, reference, conceit, a national anthem . . . The idea that one of the co-governers has a life outside the kingdom always brings pain. For example, the afternoon Francis’s eye fell on a thick air letter in an elderly hand. When pressed, Billy turned red and explained that for many years she had been having a correspondence with a retired schoolteacher in the town of Northleach whom she had met during one of her research periods in the Cotswolds. He sent her hand-knitted mittens of local wool. She sent him new mystery books. They wrote a letter each month . . . What richness! what privacy! what sadness!

The mystery of another person, his or her unknowability, the way that each individual is a sealed, impenetrable world, is the sorrow itself.

What makes artists like Colwin and Hunt Lieberson so unusual is that they are miniaturists whose loving magnification of details nevertheless has the impact of a room-sized mural. The profound quiet with which Hunt Lieberson sings the line “Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen” (sleep now, you tired eyes) in Canata BWV 82 (linked above) conveys a trust that goes beyond earthly life.

And Colwin wrote, describing a pair of lovers separating:

She nestled against him and he hoped ardently that they would part and rejoin over and over, into the future. After all, they had parted before. Surely it would not be final. They would find their way back to one another as swans are said to come back each year to the same still pool.

These artists of such precise and delicate sensibility without sentimentality, these artists who die too young, are those who both create the still pool, and whose return to it we deeply long for. In the meantime, we have their music and their words to console us.