Tribute to a Soldier

I write these words on Monday, February 3rd, as I listen to the soundtrack of The War, a seven-part series that Ken Burns produced long ago.  As I both read and hear the lyrics, I think of my daughter whose 51st birthday is this week.  Commissioned in the U.S. Army at Duke University in 1996, this soldier, wife, and mother… has served for 29 years and remains on active duty.

I have hit replay three times to hear “American Anthem.”  The words and music are by Gene Scheer and sung in The War by Nora Jones. Haunting… her voice and the lyrics, 80 years after the second World War.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc1tuPllezI

I sit here this winter’s day with a pad of yellow paper and a pen, looking out at bare trees against a gray sky.  What comes to mind is General Lloyd Austin, the four-star Secretary of Defense, now replaced by a former Fox News host. Could the contrast between the two men be any greater?  I also think of General Mark Milley whose photograph has been removed from the Pentagon. The price of being forthright and honest in America today.

Given I’ve listened to “American Album” several times, I now quote the three stanzas.

1.   All we’ve been given by those who came before/ The dream of a nation where freedom would endure/The work and prayers of centuries have brought us to this day/What shall be our legacy, what will our children say? /Let them say of me I was one who believed /in sharing the blessings I received/  Let me know in my heart when my days are through/ America, America, I gave my best to you.

2    Each generation from the plains to distant shores/ With the gifts they were given were determined to give more/ Battles fought together, acts of conscience fought alone/  These are the seeds from which America has grown./ Let them say of me I was one who believed/ In sharing the blessings that I received/ Let me know in my heart when my days are through/ America, America, I gave my best to you.

3.   For those who think they have nothing to share/ Who feel in their hearts there is no hero there/ Though each quiet act of dignity, is that which fortifies/ The soul of a nation, that will never die/ Let them say of me I was one who believed/ In sharing the blessings I received/ Let me know in my heart when my days are through/ America, America, I gave my best to you/  America I gave my best to you.

I honor my daughter, a soldier, whose acts of intelligence and dignity have fortified countless soldiers, female and male, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Germany & Poland & Romania with NATO, plus army installations throughout the United States. I also honor my husband who gave thirty years to the USAF, and to my son-in-law who retired from the U.S. Army after thirty years. And lastly I honor Lt. General William Earl Brown, who encouraged my daughter and was my hero for forty years until his death in June 2020.

The Kindness of Strangers

A third winter day with Paula Fox…and this time on Frightsday.

The famous Irish writer James Joyce renamed the days of the week. The one he gave to Friday is timely, given our chaotic times under a deranged monarch.  Paula Fox’s mother was deranged too, not related to politics but to motherhood.  Fox tells the reader that she never learns why ‘her birth and existence were so calamitous for her mother.”  After Paula was born, Elsie left her in an orphanage in Manhattan. Yet fate intervened for infant Paula in the personage of the Reverend Elwood Amos Corning, a Congregational Minister from Balmville.

On Paula’s 5th birthday, she received a card from her father Paul with two five dollar bills, enough for a white dotted-Swiss Easter dress, which Paula and Uncle Elwood (as she calls the Reverend) buy. Clothing becomes a strand woven into this memoir from beginning to the last chapter (California) before the six concluding pages about Fox’s mother and her daughter, also abandoned at birth. If you read the memoir, you’ll understand Paula’s action and her eventual reunion with Linda.

Borrowed Finery begins with two pages in the same time frame as California.  Paula works in a cheap clothing store in Los Angeles and has one thick blue tweed suit, “a couple of sizes too big and sewn of such grimly durable wool that the jacket and skirt could have stood upright on the floor.” I laughed when I read this, remembering a suit I inherited at age 10, which I hated for its scratchy wool and same stiffness.

To see the significance of the first two pages and what occurs in a bungalow at the end, required my second read of the memoir. How Paula ends up in Stella Adler’s Hollywood bungalow is too long to explain. Who was Adler?  I knew the name but only in the second read did I search the internet and read about Stella’s fame as an acting teacher. Adler believed that an actor not use a method but take the place of the character. Adler herself is described as “full of magic and mystery, a child of innocence and vulnerability.” And that evening, Adler, like an actress, moves inside Paula Fox. The following pages end the California chapter.

“I (Paula) was nearly fainting with self-consciousness in such company, and excited by it, sweating in my tweed suit and not only because of the weather.  Stella got up and went into another room. When she returned, she was holding a large photograph of a painting of a dark-haired child.

“My daughter, Ellen,” she said wistfully.  I loved Stella at that moment, and I thought to myself that Ellen was the most fortunate of children, the inheritor of every marvelous thing, especially the velvet dress she was wearing in her portrait.

Then she rose again. When she came back this time, she was carrying a blue covert-cloth suit in her arms as though it were an infant.

“May I give you this,” she asked me.

Everyone in the room had fallen silent. Odets (Clifford) hit a piano key softly, middle C.

“I think it’s the right size,” she said.

Harold Clurman (Adler’s husband) nodded his head and smiled at me. Allen said hurrah, for no apparent reason.  I took the suit.”

                                                        *

“I depend on the kindness of strangers.” This famous line is fitting. Do you know who said it? I love hearing from readers, so please let me know the character and the play!

Next time: Turns out Fox’s sixth novel A Servant’s Tale is in my library.  I’ll read it this week.

My Second Winter Afternoon with Paula Fox

From a NYTimes obit, I learned Fox died at 93 in early March of 2017. I disliked the obit’s title: “Paula Fox, Novelist Who Chronicled Dislocation.” The writer was Margalit Fox, no relation to Paula, I assume.  And limiting I thought, that this writer should identify Fox as a novelist.  She wrote six novels, yes. Yet she won awards for her 21 books for children and two extraordinary memoirs.

Paula Fox

Last week I expressed keen admiration for The Coldest Winter.  This week I spent a cold Friday afternoon under a quilt and read Fox’s memoir, Borrowed Finery. Then I understood her borrowed coat and garlic references. Both are in the earlier memoir, which covers her life to age 21. I had wondered, as I re-read The Coldest Winter, where Paula’s gutsy fortitude came from, given I knew nothing about her life before age 23 when she went to London.

Borrowed Finery gave me the answer. And yes, Fox had a dislocated life and structures her memoir by place: Balmville in New York, Hollywood, Long Island, Cuba, New York City, Florida, New Hampshire, New York City, Montreal, New York City, California.  Then an epilogue (as I think of it) titled “Elsie and Linda.”  Read the memoir and you’ll understand why Fox ends with this memory of her mother and daughter.

Dizzying, all of this movement in the memoir?  No, because I, the reader, was in the pen-held hand of a masterful writer.  To any of us, Fox wants us to know, anything can happen at any time; and this is the risk we take to be alive. And no given that we are alive, a claim I make to leap to a review of Borrowed Finery that annoyed me. This also from the NYTimes, a book review by Thomas Mallon, titled, “A Disposable Child.” I call this title misleading, given a reader reaches early adulthood in the memoir.  Mallon snidely calls Fox’s 21 books for children, “a kind of reverse compensation for the emotional neglect she suffered as a child.”  Odd claim since Fox does not “wallow in emotion, even as she succinctly reveals or expresses it.” (Rubin, L.A. Times) 

Thomas Mallon

Mallon calls the memoir “choppy and imagistic.” That’s memory, Mr. Mallon, and in your review, you express a preference for “the connective tissue of progressive experience and cultured context.”  Such inflated language, Thomas!  You note Fox’s “flatly portentous vignettes” and call her book “a flickering memoir,” and add that her novels “tend to be very dense.” (E.B. White says to avoid the use of very, and for good reason. (Elements of Style).

I have no idea the source for the following quote. I found it by happenchance in an old journal this morning. I think it fits Borrowed Finery. 

Here was something between body and memory. Dead pieces of paper which somehow were capable of giving off life.

To be continued next week…