Paddington at the Seaside begins: “Today,” said Mr. Brown at breakfast one bright, summer morning, “feels like the kind of day for taking a young bear to the seaside. Hands up to all those who agree.” So, the Browns pack up the motorcar and...
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...
Brautigan’s “I’ll Affect you Slowly” from Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork is a bit of humor. It’s about a sly attempt at seduction that may or may not have been successful. I’ll affect you slowly as if you were having a picnic in a dream. There will be...
Steig’s juvenile novel Abel’s Island (1976) is a Robinsonade, the adventure of Abelard Hassam di Chirico Flint a mouse stranded for a year on an island in a river. Like Robinson Crusoe, Abel manages to live off the land and returns to his former life chastened but...
Fowles’s notion of wrecking pleasure is an aborted picnic on the River Cherwell. Daniel Martin and Jane Mallory, two Oxford undergraduates, set out for a pleasant outing. It’s intended as an innocent date because Daniel is dating Mallory’s sister...
Wunderlich’s surrealistic Das Frühstuck im Grünen [Luncheon on the Grass] is an adaptation of both Édouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass. Sensuality, sex, and pleasantries are absent. Distorted figures, resembling goats, sit in a barren landscape without the benefit...
Simon Boulderstone, a British lieutenant, serving during the North African campaign, is among the major characters of Manning’s The Battle Lost and Won. Cutting short a leave, Boulderstone wanders, trying to regain his unit and rejoin the fighting against Rommel at El...
Manhire’s “How to Take Your Clothes Off at a Picnic” (1977), Sheet Music: Poems 1967-1982 (1996) is a humorous riff on picnic adultery: It is hardly sensuous, but having Eaten all the cold meat and tomatoes You forget to remove your trousers And instead...
Grass’s picnic in The Flounder is among the worst. Not only does he mock the accepted idea of a picnic, but he turns it topsy-turvy. It’s an ugly episode in which Sybille, aka Billie, is a variation of the Greek oracle/prophetess Sybil. According to Grass’ version,...
Norma Jean Darden and Carole Darden’s sisters have written a family food memoir. Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine is a short biography of their father, Bud Darden, Walter T. Darden, MD, with a picnic menu attached. The sisters’ family picnic memories at...
What’s the fun of a picnic still life without picnickers? Featured Image: Patrick Caulfield. Picnic Set. Screenprint. 1978
Trillin’s “Fly Frills to Miami” makes a picnic in an airplane “normal.” When Trillin’s wife Alice complains about travel expenses, Calvin decides to go cheap by purchasing food from New York to Miami. Based on “Alice’s...
Charles Bukowski’s “Some Picnic” is mean-spirited –what a picnic ought not to be. I rank it among the most unpleasant and psychologically cruel. When Bukowski says he, his girlfriend Jane and his parents picnicked and “made a...
Schlöndorff does his best to remain faithful to Grass’s mordant picnic satire. Grass was pleased: “In Schlöndorff, I found a true interlocutor, someone who provoked me with his questions, who delved into the heart of the subject, and who, during our dialogue, forced...
Wilfred Toadflax’s surprise birthday is a picnic feast of cakes, pies, jellies, and fruits. It’s the kind of high-carb meal that makes your teeth hurt. Mr. Apple’s grace suggests that the food is local, but not as he suggests from “our green...
Davies’s picnic wit is a metaphor in is this advice about sexual mores to an assembly at his daughter’s school: “A girl who thinks love affairs are less trouble than a marriage is probably also the kind of girl who thinks that picnics are simpler than dinner parties....
Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is inspired by Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. Coppola adapted the action and characters to his conception of the “insane” war in Vietnam, and the beach party picnic is his addition to the narrative. Coppola ensures...
Williams’s A Clear Day for Creve Coeur (1979) is so anti-picnic that it ends the action before the picnic begins. The play’s title is a pun on the French creve coeur, which means heartbreak. In the middle or late 1930s, Creve Coeur was an active amusement...
Brooklyn’s Prospect Park is where Sophie Zawistowska is sometimes picnicked. Stingo, the narrator, associates Sophie’s park outings as one of Watteau and Fragonard a fête champêtres. He supposes that it was a “pleasant game” for Sophie to buy...
Colgate’s The Shooting Party is a snapshot of English gentry circa October 1913 when Sir Randolph and Minnie Nettleby, the lord and lady of the manor, host one of their traditional fall shooting parties. A halt accompanies it on the hunt or midday break for luncheon....
