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 years 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.