LT: Toward the end of The Western Coast, which takes place in LA during World War II, Annie drives cross-country with Mason White, a black soldier. She gives him a lift to Texas and sees the racism in America — they can’t go into many places.
PF: That happened to me. I picked up a black soldier, and we were thrown out of a dozen places in Texas, so many bar-cafés in these little one-store towns. These old men — everybody else had been drafted — they’d be rattling their bones at us. I said, “But he’s a soldier, how can you?” They said, “Well, we got our ways down here.” I remember the idiocy and limitation of what they said. I didn’t feel it at the time to be an idiotic limitation. I do now. I felt it then as a wall that wouldn’t give way. I just knew it would never give way with those people.
LT: You have a visual memory and write powerful visual images. In Poor George, you write of George’s distress and his troubled relationship with his wife, Emma: “There was a boiling sea of acid in his stomach — he longed for a pill. She dropped a cup and the handle broke.” You can see him agitated, their tension.
PF: I think that also there’s a certain thing that happens — that there is silence between actions. There’s so much silence in our lives, despite all of the terrible noise every day. There’s an awful silence in between things.
LT: You leave a lot of space between characters, and inside characters’ minds. It makes for a lot of anxiety.
PF: I know, in writing it too.
LT: In Desperate Characters, your second novel, and Poor George, the middle class isn’t allowed to enjoy its comforts.
PF: No! That’s why I’m not read!
LT: In Desperate Characters, Sophie Bentwood can’t enjoy eating in the garden of her Brooklyn house because of a wild cat. George Mecklin’s house is invaded by the delinquent teenager he sort of adopts. The Bentwoods’ summer house is vandalized, which goes back to your first ever story about robbers.
PF: But the Bentwoods don’t miraculously come alive; they’re not killed. I took a rather uneasy pleasure in writing about a family who were getting eaten, getting eaten to death, for being so opulent and luxurious. Summer people.
LT: The neighbors are enraged at them. George Mecklin’s also enraged. You write, “George felt as if his own personal army had just fixed bayonets.” He’s a teacher, supposedly civilized, a middle-class man. Much of your imagery about him, your metaphors, uses militaristic language and is violent.
PF: I think it’s what certain people in this country would use; I wouldn’t say, “with his cutlass drawn.” The militaristic imagery seems apropos to me. I have a certain sense of what suits and doesn’t suit in my range, inside of my range.
LT: Like Edith Wharton, you’re able to make inner worlds visible through external objects. The cup’s handle breaking, the image of a personal army in him. You internalize through what’s external, to create a psychological space. Did you read her?
PF: She and Henry James, whom I admire a great deal, didn’t have as much effect on me as Willa Cather and Thomas Hardy. I love two of Cather’s books so much, Death Comes for the Archbishop and The Shadows on the Rock. Of course, there’s George Eliot, whom I love. D.H. Lawrence was a great favorite of mine, I have read him over and over. His blood and sex ideology gets in the way of his finer observations and philosophical musings. I think ideologies are terrible for people — any kind. We have to be very careful to avoid them, and sometimes we can’t.
LT: Your characters give way to their ideology, to what they’re in, or fight it — feel oppressed by the middle class or against it, like Otto Bentwood’s partner, Charlie, in Desperate Characters. Otto tells him there’s no alternative. In your novels, there’s a sense that they’re living inside something. Some fight it, some don’t.
PF: That’s a very accurate description. I never thought of it exactly that way. But I don’t think about my books in a way that a very good reader would think about them.
LT: How do you think about them?
PF: I see things I like in some of my children’s books. I like the section about Paul Robeson in The Coldest Winter. It’s very hard for me to say. There’s something I think about age that makes you feel, there’s a certain sense, that you’ve done what you could do to ameliorate the condition of life, and it’s very limited. Unless you’re Madame Curie.
LT: In The Western Coast, you approach World War II and the Communist Party in America through Annie’s experience of them. She’s a drifter. One of her lovers, Myron Eagle, says to her, “You must make judgments. How can a person live without them?” That’s a central question in your work.
PF: I feel it in my own life. You can’t go around with your mouth open, because some buzzard will fly into it. Or some cobra will strike. I think you have to be able to give up judgments, when it’s time. But you have to make them too. Otherwise, everything is disorder and chaos.
LT: Max, for instance, in The Western Coast, is in the Party, but he steps back from its ideology and observes it. He’s an incredibly interesting character because of that.
PF: I think that you have to be attached and detached at the same time — who knows to what extent we can be detached? — but enough so that you can see what it is that you’re up to. I had an image once: a lynch mob, a victim, and a mediator. And I was all three. I didn’t exclude myself from any group. In some way, that sense of being absolutely susceptible to all of it, to human flaws, to virtues, to circumstances, to experiences — has helped me a lot. Because I tend — as we all do — to close in on myself; I have to keep it, especially when I write.
LT: You never let any of your characters off the hook. You don’t write stories of redemption, which, from my point of view, is an American disease.
PF: No, I know, it’s “Have a good day!” I wrote recently to the Royal Folio Society in England. I owed them 75 words about Proust. I said that I’d gone one day to Père-Lachaise cemetery and had seen the tomb of Gurdjieff, a spiritual healer. It was covered with flowers and candles, some lit the morning or afternoon I was there. I found Proust’s — black marble. And on it a little metal juice can that had contained frozen orange juice, and in it one small bramble rose. I wrote, Gurdjieff said we could reach a higher consciousness and be in control of our lives. Proust taught nothing, but he wrote the most extraordinary book of the 20th century, In Search of Lost Time. And he didn’t believe in ordinariness. But the childish ideas, that smiley face! It’s like naming the atom bomb the “peace bomb.” It’s a kind of perversity.