Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me: Journals and Stories, 1933-1941

New York and San Francisco: Pantheon Books, 1993. xi, 349 pages; 22 cm. Near fine. Tight, clean copy. Top right corners lightly bumped, age toning. Stated First Edition. Fine DJ. "M.F.K. Fisher worked diligently, and against time, in the months just before her death to assemble her never-before-published journals, short stories, and correspondence, weaving them into two volumes. Continuing where she left off in To Begin Again, this book presents a candid and revealing portrait of the artist during what may have been the most traumatic period of her life. Fisher and her first husband, Al, had returned from France to California by 1933, but the Depression had reduced their hopes and frustrated their artistic aspirations. After a short stay, they left California for Switzerland, accompanied by their friend Dillwyn Parrish. This is Fisher's most open account of their complicated triangle, and in it she reveals the details behind her decision to divorce her husband and marry Parrish. A short time after their marriage, Parrish developed Buerger's disease, and Fisher chronicles their heartbreaking battle with this terrible degenerative illness. As fascism swept across Europe, they returned to California, remaining through Parrish's decline and ultimate suicide. This was an excruciating time for Fisher, who was forced to watch helplessly as the disease ravaged the man she would call 'the love of my life,' just as the Nazis marched in to conquer her beloved France. 'When I write of hunger,' says Fisher, 'I am really writing about love and the hunger for it . . . [and] the warmth and the riches and the fine reality of hunger satisfied . . . and it is all one.' Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me documents, with arresting candor and emotion, the loves and longing that would shape the rest of Fisher's remarkable life and forever inform her work." - Publisher.. 1st. Hardcover. Very Good/Fine. 8vo.