When the artist Peter Blegvad was twenty, he developed an obsession with milk—with what he calls the liquid’s “numinousness.” He had just read an interview with Alfred Hitchcock about the scene in “Suspicion” in which Cary Grant’s character, a suspected murderer, carries a glass of milk to his wife’s bedside. The drink—possibly poisoned—seems to glow. In fact, it did glow; Hitchcock had placed a light in the glass. “It was just something about that image of the glass of milk glowing which seemed to reverse the image that I’d been raised on of milk as healthy, beneficial, bone-building,” Blegvad said the other day, from his house in London. The drink seemed to him a “summons to the unconscious to find out more.” He said, “The sense was that milk harbored secrets. Like it was a message for me that had to be deciphered.”
What secrets does a glass of milk contain? For more than fifty years, Blegvad, a slim, playfully erudite man in his seventies, has been collecting quotations about the stuff to find out. His latest book, “Milk: Through a Glass Darkly,” is a chronicle of his reading on the subject, a brief but nutrient-dense volume of musings. The quotations—three hundred and forty-two of them—are numbered and arranged by theme. (No. 97: “It is like a glass of milk. We need the glass. And we need the milk.” —John Cage.) The result is an eclectic portrait of milk, and an intimate diary of Blegvad’s reading life, what one reviewer called, not insincerely, “an autobiography . . . mediated through milk.”
This kind of vertical inquiry—narrow and deep—goes against Blegvad’s natural inclination as a dabbler. Born in New York City, he attended school and university in England before dropping out and moving back to New York in the nineteen-seventies. He wrote music for the avant-pop band Slapp Happy and drew backgrounds for spinoffs of the “Peanuts” cartoon. He returned to London, where he settled with his wife, the painter Chloë Fremantle, in the late eighties, and wrote a series of radio plays for the BBC. “As I’m working, I always think I can’t wait to be done with this and get back to that,” he said. His paintings have been exhibited at the Royal Academy, and his own comic strip, “Leviathan,” which ran in “The Independent,” is a cult classic. In 2011, he became the president of the London Institute of Pataphysics, a quasi-serious branch of philosophy with a Surrealist bent.
In his crammed study, Blegvad, who wore glasses and a fuzzy sweater, pointed out two file boxes filled with “Milk” memorabilia. He was surrounded by stacks of books and oddities—glass bottles, a puppet, a propeller, a model skull. “It is my belief that you could select almost anything and go into it deeply and it would be interesting,” he said. “That’s the way the world’s constructed.” He quoted the poet Charles Olson on the virtues of a “saturation job”—the quest to learn everything possible about one subject—no matter how long it takes. He admires the work of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who wrote a psychoanalysis of fire, water, air, and earth. “Milk’s not quite up there with the four elements, but it bloody nearly is,” he said.
In New York, Blegvad lived in a mostly abandoned office building, near Wall Street, where he would ride the elevator to explore the deserted floors. (“A magic time.”) He visited obscure collections to research milk. “I remember one near Chinatown that specialized in dairies,” he said. That yielded mere facts, so he switched tactics, collecting only snippets he came across by chance: a “serendipity filter.” Friends and family members would send him findings as well. “I wanted the sort of things that poets would say about milk,” he said. “They hallucinated milk, and that was what I was after.”
What do poets have to say about milk? A lot, as it turns out. No. 215: “I very likely could become a milk-producing mammary gland with appropriate hormonal stimulation.” —Philip Roth. No. 235: “Perhaps Looking-glass milk isn’t good to drink.” —Lewis Carroll. No. 193: “Her milk is my shit.” —Kurt Cobain. Blegvad saw his job as primarily curatorial, “to organize the quotes so they kind of rhyme with each other,” he said. “They semaphore each other.” There’s a recipe for cooked cow udder from the “National Bavarian Cookbook,” and Clifton Fadiman’s observation “Cheese: Milk’s great leap for immortality.”
Over the decades, Blegvad’s preoccupation has leaked into his other work. He once wrote a song that mentions drinking from a nipple on the moon. What does he make of it? “Maybe that you can discover everything, and also a bit of nothing—quite a bit of nothing—in anything,” he said. Would he attempt another saturation job? “Stone would be the likeliest thing,” he said. In Blegvad’s cosmology, stone is the opposite of milk. He has been collecting quotes on it for more than thirty years. “It would almost be a partner to the milk book. The stone book. Don’t hold your breath!” ♦
