Ford’s jokey picnic episode is among the best. It plays counter to expectations because the picnic never happens. The situation is built around a conflict of rivals at an Army cavalry outpost in the 1870s. Miss Olivia Dandridge is flirting with Lt. Pennell and...
Toklas suggests that chopped roast beef and chopped chicken with mushrooms make the best picnic sandwiches. When these were not enough, Toklas and her partner Gertrude Stein stopped at restaurants where they might dine on Morvan Ham with Cream Sauce, three-minute veal...
When Auden was twenty-four and just starting as a poet, he placed himself on the lower slope of Mount Parnassus, sacred to Apollo and the Muses of the arts, where he might find his place at a “picnic on the lower slopes” with minor poets. Thirty-plus years later,...
Lewis’s food memoir includes happy memory of a Revival Sunday Dinner, aka “Second Sunday,” in her hometown of Freetown, Virginia, in the 1930s. Cooking was done by women, while the men attended church but returned home to pack the family and the food so that it would...
Forster’s “The Other Kingdom” is based on Ovid’s “Daphne and Apollo” in Metamorphosis. When Harcourt Worters gives his wife Evelyn Beaumont a grove of beech trees as a wedding present, she calls it her “picnic grove.” A...
Though billed as a comedy of errors, for all that happens in Bates’s “A Month by the Lake,” the lake might as well be Lake Coma. There is, however, a Bates a lovely picnic in the summer of 1937, enhancing the slow-paced relationship of the...
Brassaï’s Picnic on the Edge of the Marne is a snapshot of a group at leisure. It’s a typical picnic with mounds of food and six bottles of wine for five adults. Compare Brassaï with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Sunday on the Banks of the Marne [Dimanche sur les bords de...
Abell’s The Melody That Got Lost is a surrealistic drama with music that severely critiques modern conformity to middle-class values and the insipid qualities of middle-class imagination with a picnic filled with trash. The picnic scene begins when a typically...
McCulloch-Williams’s memories of her Mammy’s cooking are the basis of Dishes and Beverages of the Old South. The pig barbecue is probably the same vintage of the Wilkes’s Twelve Oaks picnic garden as Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. Her cookery...
Lubbock’s Portrait of Edith Wharton is definitive: “Edith settled, the strapped hampers (which she likes to think of as ‘corded bales’) set side by side, the rugs spread, the guests ‘star-scattered in their places: poetic allusion is never amiss at these symposia....
