The problem with canonizing Bourdain

Now comes a biography of Anthony Bourdain, the tall, formerly earring-wearing, forever tattoo-bearing, world-weary, cigarette-and-drug-infested chef, sometime novelist, prolific nonfiction chronicler of the kitchen, and persistently popular TV personality, whose cuisine-centric travelogues, including Travel Channel’s No Reservations and CNN’s Parts Unknown, developed a cult following as devoted as the queen’s queue. In the years since his suicide in 2018, his birthday, June 25, has been christened “Bourdain Day.”

“His fans are young and old, male and female, straight and queer,” wrote Bourdain’s book editor Karen Rinaldi in a passage quoted in journalist Charles Leerhsen’s Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain. “They are blue and red, east and west, black and white; they are hip and square, adventuresome and timid, paleo and vegan, armchair and inveterate travelers alike.”

Fair enough, but if Bourdain is modern society’s idea of a unifying, broadly appealing celebrity, poor old C.S. Lewis was more right than he could ever know: that Bourdain, with his hangdog countenance, dissipated manner, seen-it-all-tone, and rather gross mixture of shock value and sentimentality, acquired a constituency, rather than mere fans, is an indication that we no longer seek honorable public figures to admire — say, the queen or the pope — but messed-up dudes to relate to.

Leerhsen makes no attempt to skip past his subject’s excesses, indulgences, and severe limitations of character, but that hardly makes this book a revelation — after all, Bourdain himself traded on his bad-boy image. Whatever fresh sordid details are to be found here will just add to the legend; his devotees are either inured to his foibles or eager to learn more of them. There is a book to be written about the valorization of those who valorize their own vices, but this isn’t it.

Although he writes in a personal, digressive style that makes room for occasional sharp criticism of his subject, Leerhsen, when it comes down to it, shows signs of being as impressed as anyone with Bourdain. How else to describe a book that begins with the following line: “One day about twelve years before he started to smoke and drink, Anthony Bourdain was born.” If you doubt that Leerhsen is a true believer, consider the passage in which Bourdain is compared to Ernest Shackleton and Edmund Hillary because he “taught us about the limits of human endurance, the difference being his focus on the liver.” And if you doubt that Leerhsen fancies himself a hip, with-it writer — no boring, just the facts, ma’am, biography for him — just ponder the multiple references to the works of the ultimate hip nonfiction writer, Geoff Dyer.

But back to Bourdain: Like most would-be rebels, the cook-slash-gadabout comes across as a bit of an imposter eager to associate himself with genuine subversives; as a teenager, he created “R. Crumbish”-style comic books, and as an undergraduate at Vassar College, he placed at the foot of his bed a poster of the hero Alex from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. All of these painfully naive acts of self-creation help explain Bourdain’s self-image as a writer, raconteur, and voyager more than a mere chef, though he was employed at such relatively fancy establishments as Brasserie Les Halles in New York City. Yet how good was he as a wordsmith? Leerhsen freely admits that Bourdain’s early fiction “seldom broke the plane of mediocre” and isn’t afraid to grade the basic concept behind Bourdain’s book (not his show) A Cook’s Tour with a gentleman’s C. A magazine editor who worked with him says that he gagged up a “vomit draft” that needed much refinement.

Leerhsen recognizes all of this, and yet he can’t let go of Bourdain as a red-blooded, carnivorous nonconformist par excellence. Even here, though, the poseur in him comes through. “Who else on a plane ride to Mexico for a No Reservations shoot would reread Malcolm Lowry’s alcohol-drenched, Quauhnahuac-set novel Under the Volcano for whatever context and perspective it could provide?” writes Leerhsen, to whom we are tempted to reply: There are plenty of aspiring or aging hipsters who would indeed make a show of reading Under the Volcano for the benefit of whoever might be watching.

And how much of a renegade can Bourdain really be if, on an episode of Parts Unknown, he shares a meal in Vietnam with Barack Obama? (After Bourdain’s death, the former president even memorialized him in a mildly insufferable tweet: “Low plastic stool, cheap but delicious noodles, cold Hanoi beer — this is how I’ll remember Tony.”) Leerhsen can get awfully maudlin, in the manner of some of Bourdain’s monologues, as in his reflections on Bourdain’s decision to become the union shop steward at the Rainbow Room, where he worked for a spell: “If he couldn’t improve the dining experience, maybe he could help make the working conditions slightly more humane.” What a guy.

To be sure, Leerhsen catalogues Bourdain’s abundance of addictions — to illicit substances, to financial recklessness, even to prostitutes — but in the end, the most fatal was his devotion his own fame. “He had a Google Alert for ‘Anthony Bourdain’ set to ‘as-it-happens’ and configured as a push notification on his iPhone,” Leerhsen writes, and this addiction proved fatal to two marriages and seems to have contributed to his ill-advised infatuation with Italian actress Asia Argento, with whom he was attempting to prolong an intense, futile, on-again, off-again entanglement in the years before his death. The book’s account of that last sorry saga, including quotes from text messages lobbed back and forth between Argento and Bourdain, who comes across as pitiful, has garnered considerable attention. But the whole affair, read at the end of this long sordid tale, exhausts more than shocks.

Even Leerhsen concedes that Bourdain did himself in: “You need to have a lot of things go right in your life before you can become as miserable as Anthony Bourdain, by his late fifties, found himself.” “First-world problems,” the kids call it these days.

Let us pity him, let us feel free to take pleasure in some of his writings and shows, but to create a god out of him — nah.

Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.