LT: In Desperate Characters, when Sophie and Otto go for a drive, she sees a poster of an Alabamian presidential candidate. You wrote: “His country, warned the poster—vote for him—pathology calling tenderly to pathology.”
PF: That was based on George Wallace. (laughter)
LT: Your fourth novel, The Widow’s Children, like Desperate Characters, takes place in a weekend. It’s a very disturbed family romance. Laura, the mother, Clara, her daughter, her brothers, all have terrible relationships. The family is supposed to be celebrating. Laura keeps it a secret that her mother has just died. It’s an intriguing withholding on her part, and strategy on your part as author.
PF: A lot of things went into that. I don’t think in advance about psychology, because then I’d be a psychologist. I think there is an impulse in Laura to keep it private. She was possessive about her mother’s death and her mother, in a very primitive way. There are lots of reasons. She wanted to punish her daughter and her brothers. But that was also very primitive—to punish them for everything, for being themselves, for not paying attention to their mother, for neglecting her, for their laughter, for their lives. And then there was a child’s secrecy. That is very significant for me: a child’s secrecy and horror, because Laura was frightened by the death of her mother. If she didn’t say it, then it didn’t happen.
LT: Like magical—
PF: Magical thinking, exactly. Her main reason can fit under the subtitle “mischief,” of a certain psychological bullying, viciousness, revenge. There are other reasons, but they’re less significant.
LT: The Widow’s Children is structured in sections: Corridor, Drinks, Restaurant, specific places or times in which we expect things to happen or not to happen.
PF: The corridors of our lives are very different. We pass through them on our way to different places, but they also exist in themselves as places where things happen. In the restaurant, Laura looks around; Clara, all of them, are at the table, and they’re moored in middle-class-life comfort. It’s the hour of drink, persuasion, assuagement and satisfaction, but not at Laura’s table.
LT: The discomfort . . .
PF: It’s very extreme, and Carlos, Laura’s brother, can’t wait to get away, to escape. They all want to escape, except for Laura’s longtime friend Peter, who begins to sense, who sees how bad his choices were, but how inevitable.
LT: In the last paragraph of the novel, after Laura’s mother’s funeral, Peter remembers his childhood.
PF: I remember the last line. He had “known the cat and dog had been let out because he saw their paw marks braiding the snow, and felt that that day, he only wanted to be good.” That’s a kind of hope. We all wish we were good.
LT: Your characters all want to be good.
PF: Yes, I think that’s true. Except for Laura.
LT: Each of your books is quite different from the others, though there are recurrent themes, like justice, injustice, people trying to see their own flaws, wanting to be good, honest. The Widow’s Children stands out as something unto itself.
PF: It’s so dense and compact a book. But I think in the last novel I wrote, The God of Nightmares [set in New Orleans], I kind of eased up on pounding away at my themes. That’s really my most hopeful novel.
LT: Do you know why?
PF: No, except that it has a kind of easing.
LT: I think it’s that, in the text itself, there’s forgiveness.
PF: I think that’s true. Oh, yes.
LT: There’s the protagonist Helen’s mother’s letter to her. Her mother’s dying, and she asks Helen to forgive her. She also forgives Helen.
PF: She says you have to forgive me for myself. Because we’re all helpless, the way we are, until we can strike a judgment, a point—that’s why judgment comes in . . . . I was just having a very complex thought. I don’t know how to speak about it.
LT: At the end, Helen discovers that Len, her husband, was in love with her best friend, Nina, years ago. She feels terribly betrayed.
PF: But after their fight, she passes her hands over his body while he’s asleep. Yes, it is forgiveness.
LT: Was your complex thought about forgiveness?
PF: We can’t forgive easily. We have to take into account what was done. Various people get treated so badly. People get mistreated all the time. Black people were treated as an entity in a terrible way. We’re such primitive creatures that we go by what we see, which is a different skin tone. Part of us is primitive.
LT: Helen leaves New Orleans, marries Len and the novel jumps into the future, when she thinks, “We were no more than motes of dust, drifting so briefly through a narrow ray of light that we could have no history.” All of your characters experience that.
PF: Yes, it’s a kind of profound life melancholy. But it’s offset by feelings of affection for other people and, in this case, particularly for people in the French Quarter, who took Helen in, so to speak. She had such a good time when they told their stories.
LT: The secondary characters are wild, vivid figures. It’s a war novel, like The Western Coast, but even more so. People go to war, come back, and don’t, which is felt in the entire city.
PF: Everything was made very precious by that sense of leave-taking. I just suddenly remembered the black man looking at the ship, and Helen and Nina saying, “What do you think he was thinking about?” Nina says, “Getting away.” I did see a black man looking at a ship, while living on the Mississippi. But I don’t know if he was longing to get away.
LT: Your fifth novel, A Servant’s Tale, begins with two words, “Ruina! Ruina!” It covers a lot of time and history. Luisa Sanchez is a character of great abjection. As a child, she comes to New York, America—El Norte—from San Pedro, where her mother was a maid, her father, the son of a plantation owner. When she grows up, Luisa decides to be a maid.
PF: You know what one of the reviewers said about that? A black woman in the New York Times wrote, “Why didn’t she pull herself together, go to college, and get a degree?” It’s like a corporate person rearranging a book of taxes, when they say it should go here in this column rather than here.
LT: Women writers are meant to write women characters who uplift the sex, like black writers—women and men—are urged to uplift the race. By your having Luisa make that decision, it flies in the face of—
PF: The American Dream.
LT: Horatio Alger, middle-class values. The novel confronts claims and feelings—ideologies—that Americans hold dear. Luisa wants to be a servant.
PF: Americans hold family values dear, even as they’re killing their own children. I think that people in terrible situations lie to themselves about the situations they’re in. I feel that lying is the great human activity; being right is the great human passion. Because if you’re not right, you’re nothing.
LT: Luisa marries Tom, a public-relations manager; they met at a political meeting in Columbia University. You feel part of his interest in her is her ethnicity, her so-called authenticity, and his wanting to overcome his middle-class ways. Then he tries to change her. But Luisa will not be changed by anyone or anything.
PF Yes. This is what has happened to her: she wants her childhood back. She doesn’t give it up until the end of the book, when she’s able to think about something else. She wonders about Maura, one of the boarders in her parents’ apartment. Luisa is the victim of herself. She’s given everything over to reconstituting, discovering, her own terrible, lovely childhood and her grandmother. That’s what she wants. She goes back to San Pedro and discovers that it’s all changed, but the old witch is there. Gradually, in that last section, she recognizes it, without being able to name it, but the only way a reader knows that she’s recognized it is that she can think of something else, in a way that’s absolutely free of everything.
LT: Thinking about a person other than herself gives her the possibility of another future.
PF: I knew that she wasn’t going to act the same way afterward. Even though so many yea
rs had passed, and she hadn’t seen Ellen Dove, her black friend, I thought Luisa would contact her again and see about getting a law degree or something. (laughter) Then there was the last story in The Coldest Winter, “Frank.”
LT: One of the boys you were teaching.
PF: Yes. Narcissism is not a good thing to have in the sense that you fill in everything with yourself, and people suffer so. You don’t just have to be an indulged, rich child to be narcissistic. In fact, it’s the opposite. The poor children. The world’s filled up with questions of the self and the sense of the self. It’s a dreadful, agonizing torture. And that’s what happens to people, it seems to me, who have deprived, difficult, complex lives—when it’s very extreme, out of some kind of alarm, everything in one’s self—whatever it is—rushes to fill in all the spaces. So I used not the usual, sentimental relativism, that is, something larger than the self, but something other than the self.
LT: That’s a very important distinction. You wanted Frank to go to an observatory and look through the big telescope, to see the stars.
PF: I had taken a course with Professor Motz, Lord Motz, professor of astronomy at Columbia. This was in the 1950s. I had a year with him and I couldn’t go ahead, because I hadn’t been to high school. I had only been there for three months. I didn’t have the trigonometry I would have needed. I also couldn’t go on with geology, which I loved.
LT: You had only three months of high school?
PF: Yes, pretty much. But I went to Columbia for four years, and managed other courses outside of the science courses. I’ll tell you, my father was a terribly irresponsible man. He had a lot of charm, but he was an alcoholic.
LT: In your memoir Borrowed Finery, when you were going to meet the daughter that you had given up for adoption, you wrote, “In the face of great change, one has no conscious.” You were hoping the plane would crash.
PF: That’s right.
LT: When your characters have to face change, they’ll do or think anything. Again, you’re fearless; your characters don’t couch their thoughts. Most writers would avoid their characters thinking what yours do.
PF: My husband, Martin, thinks it’s because I didn’t go to college. (laughter)
LT: Your characters have prejudices. Again, white novelists mostly shy away from writing about race, which is obviously a major subject.
PF: Yes, it is. It seems so important to me. My friend Mason Roberson, who was a writer and part of the Harlem Renaissance, lived in Carmel for a while. We used to have very funny phone calls. He wrote continuity for Sam Spade, and one day he called me up when I was living in San Francisco. He said, “I have a question to ask you.” I said, “Shoot.” He said, “What’s ‘shortnin’ bread’?” (laughter)
LT: You also write about your mother in Borrowed Finery. You go to see her after 30-odd years, when she’s dying. She offers you a family photograph, but then she hides it under her bed covers.
PF: She was such a savage that she didn’t try to conceal anything about herself, though she concealed the picture very effectively. There was something remarkable about her that way; she would never pretend to be anything. I spent very little time with her, but once when she was in New York, with my father when they first came back from Europe, she was in a little brownstone on the East Side. I remember looking down a flight of stairs, and there was a brown, straw baby carriage with a hood. She looked down at it and said, “You know, the woman whose carriage that is killed her baby last week. Isn’t it interesting to look down and see that carriage?” She was a terror for me. Any creature can give birth and walk away, and I thought that’s what she’d done.
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.
What Would Lynne Tillman Do? Page 9
