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.