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.
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)
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…
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