M.F.K. Fisher's essay on the Gare de Lyon and its magnificent Train Bleu restaurant introduces Judith Clancy's 32 drawings and collages (accompanied by the artist's notes) of and related to that Paris railroad station.
"Taken together, prose and pictures accurately and movingly evoke what it was (and is) like to spend time, eating and awaiting a train, in this lovely old station," David Shaw wrote in his Los Angeles Times review of the book.
Pulitizer Prize-winning critic Allan Temko wrote in his San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle review: "The ornate restaurant of the Gare de Lyon, overlooking the great glassed-in train shed where the Mistral leaves for the Cote d'Azur, is one of the delicious places of Paris, from an architectural as well as a culinary point of view. Both the cuisine and the ambiance, hardly changed since the bel epoque, are evoked in Not a Station But a Place. It's a delightful collection of drawings, collages and written notes...The book provides an added treat in a memoir of this golden dining room by M.F.K. Fisher, as succulent as the souffle of shellfish and mushrooms she enjoyed there, together with a Grand Cru Chablis, and further seasoned by a remembrance of her friend Janet Flanner."
"I sat waiting, drinking a brandy and water, realizing suddenly that I was not in a station, but in a Place."
That sentence by M.F.K. Fisher, describing a 1937 realization, provided the title for this delightful book. The Gare de Lyon is very much a railway station but also, as Mrs. Fisher points out "It has, in an enormous way, something of the seduction of a full-blown but respectable lady, post-Renoir but pre-Picasso, waiting quietly in full sunlight for a pleasant chat with an old lover..."
She told "something of all this" to her friend Judith Clancy when the artist told the noted philosopher about food that "like me some years before, she would be alone in Paris for the first time in her lives there." Ms. Clancy says her friend insisted that she arrive for lunch two hours before train time "knowing full well I would return to draw." And draw she did, capturing both the vitality of the station and the "peculiarly lacy and golden quality of its second floor restaurant."
M.F.K. Fisher (1908-1992) was the much-admired author of more than 25 books and hundreds of magazine articles about the complex hungers and satisfactions of life. Her artist friend, Judith Clancy (1933-1990), is represented in museum and private art collections here and abroad. Her published work includes the drawings, the last she did, that graced Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence, and those selected after her death for Toujours Provence. Her Paris Alive: The Point of View of an American is available from Synergistic Press in the U.S. edition of her 1986 exhibition at the Musee Carnavalet, the only solo exhibition by an American at that prestigious Paris museum.
$7.95 Quality trade paperback, 72 pages
ISBN 0-912184-02-7
(Also available in hardcover, without dustjacket as published, at $9.95 and a few copies remain from a hardcover, slipcased edition of 250 numbered and signed by M.F.K. Fisher and Judith Clancy. The limited edition is a true collector's item and at $50 is a bargain for a signed Fisher first edition.)
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