What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (11 page)

All attitudes and positions—positive, negative, neutral, informed, uninformed—betray us. “My education,” Franz Kafka wrote, “has damaged me in ways I do not even know.” I agree, and here want to substitute the word “culture.” It, too, damages in ways we don’t know.

The mayor of Tijuana, Carlos Bustamante, tore down La Ocho, the city’s filthy, infamous jail, a holding pen for big and small criminals, including American college boys. They were arrested after a night of drugs, alcohol, or sex with a prostitute; they had to pay $2,000 to get out of jail. Mayor Bustamente defended La Ocho’s destruction: it represented “the darkest side of Tijuana’s history.” Speaking for that dark side, a well-known chef and restaurant owner, Javier Plascencia, countered, “It was ugly, but it was ours.”

Which brings me to the terrible loss of artist Mike Kelley in January. Kelley was from Detroit and witnessed the collapse of America’s Motor City. Early on, he was part of a group called
Destroy All Monsters, school of art, rock, performance. Kelley’s treasury included private obsessions, public frenzies, disgust, American bathos and sub-cultural storage units. Poignant, psychologically raw, stunning, his work did damage to what’s “obvious” and in “good” or “bad” taste. Kelley didn’t destroy all monsters, but he recognized many of them.

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.

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.