I have never had, nor felt the need of having, a hobby. When I was a kid, friends of mine collected stamps or miniature cars or made model airplanes. I did none of these things. When I was 11 or 12, a shop moved into our neighborhood called Hobby Models, catering to hobbyists of all sorts. I found nothing of the least interest there. I didn’t disdain or put down friends with hobbies. In fact, I rather envied them. I myself seemed to have neither the temperament nor the skill to be a hobbyist.
Something there is about a hobby that suggests handsome margins of leisure in one’s life—that and interests beyond the humdrum of merely making a living. That a man or woman grows roses or keeps orchids, does woodworking, searches out coins from antiquity, seeks out first editions, or collects 19th-century cookbooks gives that man or woman’s life added dimension.
None of these hobbies, or any other I have been able to discover, has attracted me. Perhaps a writer, being too dreamy, doesn’t require a hobby. A year or so ago, my dentist having retired, I signed on with the man who had taken over his practice and who asked me to fill out a medical-history form for him. Toward the bottom of the form, on its second page, was the simple question, “Hobbies?” Not wishing to leave a blank, I wrote in “Grievance collecting.”
At one time hobbies seemed pandemic. So much so that in the early 1950s, trousers called “hobby jeans” went on the market. Hobbyless though I was, I nevertheless had a pair of these jeans, which were of lightweight cotton, baby blue, with ample pockets, and a comfortable elastic band round the waist. When the chapter devoted to jeans in the history of the decline and fall of the West comes to be written, I hope hobby jeans will at least get a footnote.
The danger in a hobby is that it can elide into an obsession. One can easily turn from a hobbyist into a collector, from a collector into a connoisseur. (The distinction between a collector and a connoisseur is that the former wants everything in whatever he is collecting, the latter wants only the very best.) I recently read The Wine Lover’s Daughter, Anne Fadiman’s memoir of the obsession of her father, the literary critic Clifton Fadiman, with wine. As it happens, I worked with Kip (as we called him) Fadiman on the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the 1960s and liked him, though I was often amused by his pretensions. At the age of 63, he told a friend of mine, “What do I have left to live for? Certain wines, a few cheeses.” He once wrote a rubric for that portion of the encyclopaedia that was devoted to the movies: “The curious conflation of a new technology and a rising ethnic group.” I recall passing a note to a friend at the conference table at which this was discussed that read: “I believe he means the Jews got there first.”
The interest for me in Anne Fadiman’s memoir is in how, in her father’s case, a hobby, acquiring knowledge about wine, turned into a continuing act that gave meaning—or so at least he believed—to the life of this highly intelligent man. Born in Brooklyn, the son of immigrant Jewish parents, Kip Fadiman had been exposed to anti-Semitism early in life. He once told me that he had been denied entry into graduate school at Columbia because the English department there had already chosen its one Jewish student, Lionel Trilling. These experiences caused him to attempt to shed his Jewishness, and he sought to do so in part through indulgence in expensive wine. For Kip, in his daughter’s words, wine was one “of the indices of civilization.” Through wine he would escape his origins. Hobbyism spun utterly out of control. Sad stuff, really.
Kip Fadiman’s story is a stern reminder that a hobby should stay in bounds—remain a hobby merely. Which brings to mind the one joke about hobbies I know. Two old friends in New York meet after a hiatus of some years. Both are now retired. One asks the other what he does to fill his time.
“I have a hobby,” he says. “I raise bees.”
“Really,” says the other, “here in New York?”
“Yes, in my apartment.”
“But don’t you still live in that studio apartment on West 79th Street?”
“I do.”
“So where do you keep the bees?”
“In a suitcase in my closet.”
“A suitcase in your closet! How can the bees breathe? They’ll die.”
“So if they die, they die,” the man replies. “It’s only a hobby.”
Only a hobby—the old boy got it right, absolutely nailed it.
