F is for Fox
A Conversation with Paula Fox
Paula Fox was rediscovered in the mid-1990s, when Jonathan Franzen found her second novel, Desperate Characters, at the artists’ colony Yaddo. Franzen, enthralled, wanted to teach the book, but there were few copies around. He contacted Fox and wrote about it and her for Harper’s. An editor, Tom Bissell, read Franzen’s essay and contacted Fox. The rest, we like to say, is history. But history, in all cases, is made by many hands.
Fox’s novels have been reprinted, and she is having a writer’s second birth and life. Fox and I were paired to read at the National Arts Club in 1999 by the series curator, Fran Gordon. That night, Fox read from The Widow’s Children, her third novel. I listened, ecstatic. Why had I never heard of her? I bought Desperate Characters, The Widow’s Children, and Poor George, her first novel. I hoped to interview her. Now, this interview in BOMB’s 25th-anniversary issue.
This provenance exists to register how strangely books live and die, and travel, how idiosyncratic their routes, how capricious a writer’s career, how haphazard a reader’s chances to find her books. Great literature disappears all the time. After his death, Chaucer disappeared for over 200 years. Every writer a reader loves, with few exceptions, or who is touted now, will be buried forever or a while. Writers sometimes make it their job to unearth other writers. It’s not just altruism.
Fox is the author of six brilliant novels, two breathtaking memoirs and 22 children’s or young-adult books. To me, it is indubitable that Fox is one of America’s greatest living novelists. Her exquisite choices of her narratives, her exquisite choice of language and imagery, her formidable intelligence, her acute observations, her honesty about the trouble with existence here, or anywhere, makes reading Fox a genuine experience. If you let it, her writing will ravish you, even devastate you.
Lynne Tillman: You’re a profoundly psychological writer, and also socially and politically engaged. In your first novel, Poor George, George Mecklin thinks, “We live on the edge of disaster and imagine we are in a kitchen.” Absolute Fox! How did George come to you? How did you decide to write a male protagonist?
Paula Fox: To answer the last part first: I didn’t even think about it. It would be false naïveté to say that I didn’t realize what I was doing. I did remember hearing, on NPR, in a time of extreme feminism in the late 1960s, a woman being interviewed who said, “Imagine! A man writing about a woman!” I thought of Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust. I thought, Of course, this kind of extremism accompanies everything that has to do with human affairs, as we see in contemporary life. What engaged me most in writing Poor George was a story I was told in about three sentences by someone I knew casually. He said, “I heard this story about a man who took a boy into his house. ” I thought of things that might happen. I didn’t actually think; a story grows, with me, in a series of images. I have acute memories of the past. I can remember the wrinkles in my father’s jacket, when he was lighting a cigarette, 65 years ago. I can see the wrinkles, the cigarette. I have a very visual memory. I started visualizing a place where George lived, and, from there, I invented a whole life for him. But one always writes about one’s self in a certain way. There’s no way you can write about anything that you know as well as yourself. In a certain sense, whatever is imagined is always based on an inner sense of self. Now, I don’t know what that means, particularly after reading in the Times today about all the discoveries about the brain. I don’t know where the invention of stories comes from. With the violin, you have to begin with some kind of musical ability; you can’t sing without an ability to sing. Then you need training. I think you need training for everything.
LT: Before you wrote Poor George, had you been writing short stories?
PF: Yes. I’ve been writing since I was seven. I wrote my first story ever, when I was seven, about a robber who comes into a house and kills everybody, but miraculously they all come alive. Actually, I sent out a lot of stories in between working for a living. I kept getting them back, except for two, which the Negro Digest—which is what it was called then — published. I was in my twenties, and they tried to find out if I were black.
LT: Was it because you write black characters?
PF: Yes, that’s what I was writing about: black. I didn’t feel any constraint about writing about anything, except kind of ordinary constraints of life. It seemed to me that the tracks hadn’t been made yet, in certain areas — by me. So, I made my own tracks, not that there weren’t lots of tracks around.
LT: There’s a fearlessness in your work. As you just said, you didn’t feel those constraints. Most white writers do.
PF: I think it’s not fearlessness as much as a kind of innocence. I think it was fixed in my mind when I was very little. There’s a scene in Borrowed Finery that occurred in my brief time with my parents in Hollywood. I had locked myself out one night, my parents were at a party, and I stayed with neighbors. When I came back the next morning, my father had brought home a different woman from my mother. I said, “Daddy, daddy,” coming up the stairs to his room. He rose up in the blankets — you know what a man looks like with blankets falling off of him — and in a rage. He grabbed me up and rushed downstairs with me, into the kitchen. There was a black maid ironing. He raised his hand to spank me, and she said, “Mr. Fox, that isn’t fair.” She rescued me. It must have taken so much courage for her to do that in 1929. I was very struck by that. I think what it did was, it instantly opened a kind of corridor, so that I went down it. Not because I was fearless, but because it was there. It just presented itself.
LT: All of your novels are about justice and injustice.
PF: I feel very strongly about that.
LT: In The Western Coast, your third novel, Annie’s friend Cletus, who’s black, is beaten up. It’s a horrible scene. Annie’s relationship with him changes, because he can’t continue to have the same feelings he had about white people after that.
PF: Cletus is based on a dear friend of mine who is dead now. He had a white mother and a black father. He didn’t get beaten up. The ease between Annie and Cletus is based on my relationship with him. You take certain things from life, then you enlarge or diminish them. You ornament them or leave them plain. You strain out the truth. Years ago, when I was looking at a manuscript of mine that was on the floor, turning the pages, suddenly this brain bulb went off. I thought, I have to try to tell the truth, even when it’s and and the. This was around the time that Mary McCarthy had claimed even Lillian Hellman’s ands and thes were lies. My own thought is that we can’t know the truth, but we can struggle for it, swim toward it, fight for it.