I am reading The Coldest Winter by Paula Fox. I just asked Alexa when Fox died and was told in New York. I heard March but not the year and asked for clarification. I was given a weather report for right now. Reception is poor this darkening afternoon, snow expected, and I’ve not enough space to give Paula’s remarkable memoir the credit it deserves.
I was three when Fox left New York for London with little more than names of some contacts. In my first read in 2006 of The Coldest Winter, I did not see the importance of the fur-lined tweed coat Fox is loaned, “a piece of borrowed finery,” that saved her life but not her friend Kay’s.
A British Lord, Sir Andrew, hires Fox¸ age 23, as a stringer for the news service he has begun in opposition to Reuters. Then Fox is off to Paris and Mont-Saint Michel. A reader might ask, What’s it all mean, these recounted vignettes? Then Fox is back in London, has lunch with Sir Andrew, who warns her about the cold in Poland. And in subtle ways we learn how post-war London feels.
In Warsaw, Fox meets Jan and his second wife, “caught midway between raging laughter and lamentation.” Just a few pages… but 25 in the following chapter, set in Prague. “Here and there, like a flame of banked fires, light shone from out of mountains of rubble and revealed the black ruins snow had not covered.”
Fox takes to wearing sheets of newspaper under her coat. She describes a large open field as “hanging from the sky, tied to it by dark threadlike branches of pine trees.” This long chapter, “After the Snow,” is about a larger than life Mrs. Grassner, and how the young Paula is forced to look deeply in order to render this experience through scene and dialog. The next chapter is “Marie” and Paula’s “flame from an old fire” and her sense of life and its injustice, when she “judged an action for its own sake with no thought of its outcome.”
It is dark now… this cold Sunday afternoon, forty pages from the end of this memoir, and Fox is in the Tatra Mountains of Poland on the Polish-Czechoslovakia border with young children born in concentration camps. A reader then learns that Fox worked for Sir Andrew as a stringer until 1947. Then with little money, she went to Barcelona to visit her great-uncle Antonio. When she boarded a train in Paris for Spain, she was “too young and dumb to worry about entering a fascist country.”
Fox’s time with Tio Antonio stayed with me vividly from reading her memoir years ago. She tells the story of Perlita, little Pearl, who had the look of a “circus dog in an old engraving.” This dog and its story is bound to bitter politics for Tio Antonio. This chapter also reveals a powerful conjunction for Fox as a child. She looks at Perlita with a sense of comradeship and notes, “Garlic(soup) had saved her. In a way it had saved me, too, confirming my position as an outsider and preventing me from absorbing easily an unquestioning assumption of national superiority, so prevalent, so grotesque a phenomenon in our country, made up as it were and is, in large part, of transportees, captives, and immigrants.”
Telling words for Inauguration Day, one too cold to be held outside in Washington, D.C.
Next week: More on Paula Fox, her life & death, and her earlier memoir, Borrowed Finery.
