What Would Lynne Tillman Do?

by Lynne Tillman

  Writing also changes me. I don’t lie when I write. Something happens, and I must discover it. Writing forces one to go to the bitter end of what one thinks.

  There, Not There

  In Michael Almereyda’s beguiling film William Eggleston in the Real World (2005), Eggleston said of his own work: “I am at war with the obvious.” The photographer had been filmed, in 1976, answering a question at the opening of his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Eggleston takes shots at the obvious: a misbegotten window display; cheerless interior decoration; a shuttered house. He pictures forgotten spaces, in sidelong glances at American culture’s apparent failures or throwaways. He shelters so-called ordinary life, the unremarked-upon objects. Eggleston appears to be a romantic figure from the old school: courtly, handsome, alcoholic, not going quietly into that good night. He wanders in front of the camera, there, not there. Almereyda records Eggleston elusively, letting him hide in plain sight. There are few direct questions, while inter-titles mark the date, event and location. Scenes shift slowly, nothing’s rushed, Eggleston rarely says anything. His son, a photographer himself, assists him wordlessly or in code, present when needed, otherwise invisible.

  Almereyda’s portrait of an artist assembles through a wily accretion of images, with no dramatic “plot points” or “arcs.” The viewer creates his or her own narrative, senses what the story might be and, as in any compelling narrative, things don’t or can’t add up. Almereyda’s approach to Eggleston’s art and life is subtle, and though Eggleston has declared war on the “obvious,” his work is also. Eggleston’s images quietly dismiss received ideas of beauty and importance. In his eye, ugliness is no sin, beauty no virtue; they are just cultural and social attitudes that shape perception.

  In the film, Eggleston’s nights were very different from his days. Alcohol’s effects settled on him and his friends, and rattled any identifying cage I might set him in. The movie’s lack of comment clarifies the trouble with explanations: they can become heavy-handed guides or judgments. Instead, Almereyda allows encounters and moments to multiply or divide, one incident subtracts an assumption or augments another. An unexpected figure enters into the slippery sum: Eggleston’s wife of many years, mother of his children, doesn’t appear until close to the end of the movie. An elliptical interview with Eggleston by Almereyda occurs even closer to the end, reframing the artist’s image again.

  Stories about artists and writers, in novels and movies, usually rely on grating stereotypes, characteristics repeatedly exaggerated in representation. My favorite example comes from a movie Hollywood never released, a life of Franz Schubert. In it, friends beseech the composer more than once: “Why don’t you finish ‘The Unfinished’?” Hollywood is also the source for the term “the reveal.” On a certain page in a script, the heart of the story—usually transplanted during multiple rewrites—should manifest itself, enough so that even on the dullest of minds something can register.

  I once wrote a joke-poem to myself, and called it “Do the Obvious.” “Do the obvious / you won’t forget it / do the obvious / you won’t regret it.” (Refrain: “Don’t be afraid to be boring.”) Living holds few subtleties. There’s birth and death, obviously. And everything in between. Teachers of writing and art tell their students, whose hopes must not be crushed—at least not completely—“It’s not what it’s about, it’s how you do it.”

  It’s about expectations, everyone remarks, and desire. I heard a story about a guy from Texas, a Jimi Hendrix fanatic. He was with a friend looking at an art book. The Hendrix guy saw a picture of an Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup Can work and exclaimed: “God, that’s stupid.” His friend said: “What you expect to see there is just as stupid.”

  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 ye
ars 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 Wo
rld 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.

  LT: Max, for instance, in The Western Coast, is in the Party, but he steps back from its ideology and observes it. He’s an incredibly interesting character because of that.

  PF: I think that you have to be attached and detached at the same time—who knows to what extent we can be detached?—but enough so that you can see what it is that you’re up to. I had an image once: a lynch mob, a victim, and a mediator. And I was all three. I didn’t exclude myself from any group. In some way, that sense of being absolutely susceptible to all of it, to human flaws, to virtues, to circumstances, to experiences—has helped me a lot. Because I tend—as we all do—to close in on myself; I have to keep it, especially when I write.

  LT: You never let any of your characters off the hook. You don’t write stories of redemption, which, from my point of view, is an American disease.

  PF: No, I know, it’s “Have a good day!” I wrote recently to the Royal Folio Society in England. I owed them 75 words about Proust. I said that I’d gone one day to Père-Lachaise cemetery and had seen the tomb of Gurdjieff, a spiritual healer. It was covered with flowers and candles, some lit the morning or afternoon I was there. I found Proust’s—black marble. And on it a little metal juice can that had contained frozen orange juice, and in it one small bramble rose. I wrote, Gurdjieff said we could reach a higher consciousness and be in control of our lives. Proust taught nothing, but he wrote the most extraordinary book of the 20th century, In Search of Lost Time. And he didn’t believe in ordinariness. But the childish ideas, that smiley face! It’s like naming the atom bomb the “peace bomb.” It’s a kind of perversity.