What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (13 page)

LT:
Maybe the one thing you got from her of value was her honesty.

PF:
Exactly, that’s what was remarkable about her. She never tried to be any different than she was.

LT:
I want to ask you about friends, groups, if you saw or see yourself as part of a literary movement. So many literary histories make assumptions about writers in that way.

PF:
No, I don’t feel that I’m in any particular group or movement. It’s hard for me to feel that I belong to any group. That’s a limitation for me, in myself. It’s partly because I was always on the outskirts as a child—of my own life, in my family. As a writer, I feel like one voice among many. I hope that I don’t dishonor the art of
writing as I am passing through. It’s my hope that I don’t damage it in any way.

LT:
Was it a struggle for you, the response to your books when they came out, and your novels going out of print?

PF:
It was, but I’ve gone on. When
The Widow’s Children
was turned down by Harcourt Brace, by Bill Goodman, who had taken
Poor George
on, he said it was the best novel I had written so far, but that my track record was very poor. That was a terrible thing—the track record idea. Of course, what else is new? This is a country so nakedly based on money. Other places try to conceal it.

LT:
You said you didn’t want to dishonor writing. That would be impossible. Your writing is truly wonderful. You are a great writer.

PF:
Thank you. That’s lovely to hear. I don’t know what to say.

LT:
Are you going to write another novel?

PF:
I’m working on a short novel. It’s called
A Light in a Farmhouse Window
. It takes place in contemporary France. There’s a little part of it that goes back to 1321, when heretics occupied some small villages in the Pyrenees. They were the Cathars, and they were, like the Albigensians, completely wiped out by the Dominican priests. I’ll tell you one story that I use: A Dominican priest was describing a village late at night to some horsemen, a gang, and one of the Crusaders tells him there were only 20 heretics in the village. The
total population was 200. The Dominican priest said, “Kill them all. God will know his own.”

Borrowed Finery

After September 11, reckoning with Paula Fox’s memoir,
Borrowed Finery
, is intellectually consoling. Like most people, I’m roller-coasting: Nothing means anything, everything’s urgent, life’s precious or, obviously, expendable. Her memoir asks: What does another life tell us? How is the manner in which a life is written significant?

Fox’s life has had its fair—or unfair—share of painful incidents, alarming events, betrayals, bad parents. But thinking and writing against the current American grain, Fox doesn’t deliver cause and effect dicta; she doesn’t blame others or luxuriate in neglect, succumbing to the narcissism of victimhood. Instead, she shapes her memoir with a light hand, clearing an unusual path to her psychology and history. Connections she might have forged to establish the story, as she does in her novels—though there too she masters the art of underexplanation—are mostly absent or understood by indirection. The reader connects to and makes sense of, or doesn’t, her psyche and worldview.

I once was surprised to find out that Paula Fox writes children’s books. Not after reading the preface to this book. She launches her memoir with a parable, using a suit, clothing—
Borrowed Finery
—as a trope for fashioning and rendering a self. The opening prefigures a work about human mysteries rather
than revelations. It signals Fox’s exception to conventional wisdoms, reminding me of Paul Bowles’ elegant, enigmatic Moroccan stories.

“In that time I understood mouse money but not money,” she writes, whimsically characterizing her early poverty. In one sentence, Fox ensnares the adult, who is somehow forever a child, to suggest that no one is ever completely removed from childhood’s fantastical realm and claims. In her preface too she touches on materialism, capitalism, and proposes that the life she will construct in writing might be the sum of a subjective struggle between culture and politics.

Fox doles out the past in episodes spanning people and places. She leaves them and returns, leaves again. The book divides into sections: “Balmville,” “Hollywood,” “Long Island,” “Cuba,” “Florida,” “New Hampshire,” “New York City,” “Montréal,” “New York City,” “California,” and “Elise and Linda.” The reader hasn’t seen the name “Linda” before.

There are many kinds of surprise in
Borrowed Finery
, not the least Fox’s circumspection and reserve. Fox omits a lot—she never mentions becoming a writer, when she first published, any of that. We know, from how she reports listening to adult conversations when she was a child, that she loves words and ideas. We have a sense of the way she sees and pays attention: “Behind the door that closed off that uncanny space, I pictured Auntie, lying on her back in her bed, her eyes opened wide and unblinking, smoking cigarettes in the dark.” Those who know her human-suspense novel
Desperate Characters
will notice that Fox was once bitten by a cat. She makes profound use of a cat bite in the novel, not
unlike Shakespeare’s use of the handkerchief in
Othello
. But like Edith Wharton, who in “A Backward Glance” never mentions her divorce from Teddy Wharton, Fox is reticent, and what she withholds, she forces the reader to embellish, to fill out the suit she’s designed for us. In the end, Fox doesn’t tailor easy resolutions or cozy notions about redemption.

Looking through reviews of American novels, even a casual reader might be disgusted by how often the concept of “redemption” appears. Contemporary novels have become a repository for salvation; characters—and consequentially readers—are supposed to be saved at the end. Paula Fox avoids pious niceties. She claims a reality most American readers want to avoid—the possibility of failure, when good acts don’t replace bad ones in symmetries more appropriate to bad fiction. In Fox’s fiction, defeat and failure are normal.

Like her novels, her memoir is exceptional, not because she’s had a unique life, though she has probably, or at least a difficult one, but then who hasn’t. It’s how she chooses to represent it; how she manufactures meaning through style, with measure and intelligence. Her memoir is generative and evanescent. It speaks to the way life comes and goes, with its beauties and tragedies, through its balletic recording of transience and impermanence. Fox’s graceful writing and integrity give comfort in these darker days.

The Coldest Winter

Paula Fox’s
The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe
contests not just a book’s usual designations—major, minor, big, small—but also its genre, in this case, the memoir. Fox is a great American writer, the author of several brilliant novels—including
Desperate Characters, The Widow’s Children
and
Poor George
—and a recent autobiographical work,
Borrowed Finery
. Her arresting, unique style and her profound understanding of character and situation transform a putative memoir into an assemblage of philosophical tales. Fox writes of incomprehensible acts and alarming histories with an earned, uncanny, and special wisdom.

Like other American writers, Fox sought out Europe as a testing ground for her fledgling writer’s life. It was “a time when I imagined that if I could only have found the right place, the difficulties of life would vanish.” But the year she leaves is 1946, she is 23 years old and life abroad is framed by the harrowing landscape of post-war Europe. World War II and the Holocaust pervade almost every meeting she holds and every place she goes.

In London, when England was still on rationing, wealthy and celebrated English people and American expatriates befriend her. Their class and sumptuous houses provoke her wonder about those who imagine their property “reflected their praiseworthy character, not the ease with which they spent money.”
Unlike many earlier Americans abroad, Fox must earn her living. She lands a job as a stringer for a left-wing newspaper owned by a peer, Sir Andrew, who hopes to present an alternative and challenge to Reuters’ dominance. He assigns Fox to Paris, to cover a peace conference at the Palais du Luxembourg. But Fox reflects primarily on the effects of the recently ended war, a changed, saddened Paris and human wreckage.

Fox’s novelistic eye tracks the odd habits of a fellow female boarder in a Parisian pension, with whom she partners in bridge. Then she notices a “faded blue tattoo of a number” on the strange woman’s arm. A love affair ineluctably embraces the war, too; her lover is a Corsican politician whose wife suffered torture to protect him. The lovers’ desire collapses under the burden of their own ethical indictments, “her bravery never far from our minds.” One of the people she interviews drives her to his apartment for dinner with him and his wife, and Fox studies his shabby sheepskin jacket. Without being asked, the man explains that “the jacket had kept him warm” for three years in a concentration camp. The jacket, she writes, “seemed to me the brown carcass of an animal that had fought in vain for its life.” Her qualification “in vain” alerts the reader to a struggle of lifelong despair.

In thoughts stunning as camera flashes, Fox knits her past together. She presents startling images and unforgettable stories. She compresses narrative time, moving fluidly from the young Fox to the older one, to measure first reactions and impressions against the insights of retrospection. She is honest, more severe with herself than anyone else. “I knew so little, and the little I did know, I didn’t understand. My ravenous interest in those days was aroused by anything.”

Sir Andrew assigns her to Warsaw, where “to walk . . . was to feel the cold and desolation and silence of a city of the dead.” Here and elsewhere, Fox encounters people who pose great paradoxes and enigmas. There is troubling Mrs. Helen Grassner, a Jewish-American, middle-aged woman, who searches Poland for Jews and who grieves, because she didn’t lose any of her family in the camps. With her, some other journalists and three Czechs who’d been in camps, Fox tours the Polish countryside, courtesy of the Polish government. They visit “a former vacation estate of a Prussian aristocrat,” now a home for traumatized children “who had been born [or spent some time] in concentration camps . . . [though] their parents, without exception, had been murdered by the Nazis.” A 19-year-old man, formerly a member of a Young Fascists organization, follows her one night and, in shadow, whispers of his thrill at watching executions. She rushes away, feeling disgust, hatred, and also a little sympathy for his abject, ruined life. Much later, working as a tutor for institutionalized, orphaned teenagers in New York, she remembers the children born in camps, their “stunted little weeping figures.”

Chekhov’s stories come to mind, his portrayals of ethical dilemmas, human ugliness and pathos, their unquestionable beauty and compassion.
The Coldest Winter
accounts for a year or so in Fox’s life, but even more it asks how and why her or anyone’s experience matters. Fox’s past lies between and within the lines of other lives, her history inseparable from the greater one, and nothing she reports is reduced to a truism or general statement. Now, as she looks back, the endurance of memories is a mystery, haphazard as life itself.

In this and her novels, Fox chooses words so splendidly a reader must contend with how language can and cannot allow events and emotions to be rendered. Notably, Fox marks tragedy and “outrageous fortune” with a delicate hand. The enormity of the Holocaust is, in a grave sense, beyond words, so the fewer the better. By her discretion, this reader thought often of Primo Levi’s writings and teachings. The uncaptioned photographs that are interspersed sparely throughout the book add to an idea of memory’s elusiveness, and how very much more is forgotten. The pictures may be of a person or place Fox has just mentioned. Or, untitled, they may suggest that Paula Fox’s experiences, the people she met, places she visited, can also represent those lost to history, unsung and anonymous. Her “year over there,” she writes, “had shown me something other than myself.”

F is for the Future

1995

You asked how I’m spending my time when I’m not watching the OJ trial. On the Internet at a friend’s house. Testing my limits in the screen/face of seeming limitlessness, testing the machinery before I buy into it totally or semi-totally. (Reminds me of an aristocratic English guy I knew who was asked, after he crashed his car into two police cars, why he’d done it, why he’d wantonly wrecked those cars, and he answered: I was testing my machinery. His machinery worked—his grandfather’s a lord, he wasn’t in Bow Street jail even an hour.) My digression, association, isn’t really wack; it’s part of what the thing’s about—relating, associating, digressing. As well as limits. Because while you seem to be homing in on or sensing the infinite, “accessing” an infinite variety, inundated with choices, threads and threads, you can feel powerless or powerful, depending upon how you navigate in a ocean/notion like, the infinite is in a machine on your desk. Some people might develop a cortisone-type high, imagining everything in the machine is them, they can master the course/ship; others will get lost at sea, devastated by how much they can’t do. I have both feelings. (You know I question the idea of access anyway.) Remember when I bought my computer years ago and fell in love with the delete key, wanted to delete everything. Sea metaphors—you “navigate” on the Internet. A new frontier, discoveries are expected,
a journey, a narrative, and some new terms specific to it. I like seeing the way old words appear in new contexts as new clothes. Weirdly predictable material in a new world is expected. Remember how carrying a Porta-Pak was going to change everything? It’s important to believe you redo it all with new techie toys, I guess, so even if the Internet carries old problems, it adds possibility, promise and dimension, some new problems, has effects no one can absolutely predict. Obviously your own little world is instantly changed, how you spend your time, whom you meet and what happens to you in cyberspace. You might learn to have different expectations, when people talk the talk, cyberspeak, a telegraphic shorthand. But how will sociality change—did the telephone change how people relate to each other, do we know? How will people’s minds change or be changed? Technology and science are already so embedded in our thinking and lives, maybe it’s impossible to recognize it. I keep remembering Wittgenstein’s horror of science, his fury at the growing dependence on it.