Jennet Conant, A Covert Affair
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Conant has carved out a delicious niche reporting on cultural figures during wartime
Foodies will surely be intrigued by A Covert Affair, which details Julia and Paul Child’s time with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). As readers of Julia Child’s My Life in France know, it was during the couple’s postwar courtship that she honed her famous kitchen skills. Stationed in Kunming, China, where the ratio of men to women was roughly 40:1, Paul Child had a taste for fearless, intellectual women, and had a hard time seeing past a warm friendship with Julia McWilliams, 10 years his junior and a relative naif. The war had given the wayward Smith graduate direction, and she flourished in an administrative role. “A good many of the men here are extremely attractive, competent, experienced, and interesting, as you can imagine they would be in such a place at such a time,” Paul observed, in one of many letters to his twin brother, Charles. “Even the snaggle-toothed, the neurotic, the treacherous, and the dim-witted among women are hovered over by men, as jars of jam are hovered over by wasps.” Paul and Julia fell in love after finishing their respective overseas appointments. After years of trying, she eventually won him over, impressing him with challenging reading (Tropic of Cancer, which she didn’t like) and sophisticated meals.
While Paul and Julia’s story alone could sell the book, journalist Jennet Conant broadens the canvas to a group of agents stationed in China and Indonesia in the mid-’40s. (Founded after WWII, the OSS preceded the CIA.) She focuses on Jane Foster, a mercurial woman of great beauty, intellect and social pedigree who briefly supported Communist causes in the late ’30s. At the height of Senator McCarthy’s witch-hunts Foster was accused, along with her husband, George Zlatovski, of engaging in Soviet activities while working for the U.S. government.
Conant has carved out a delicious niche reporting on cultural figures during wartime (her last book, The Irregulars, detailed Roald Dahl’s brief career as a British spy). Jan Maxwell’s tempered narration helps unravel a fascinating story that we thought we knew.
