What Would Lynne Tillman Do? Read online

  Like her novels, her memoir is exceptional, not because she’s had a unique life, though she has probably, or at least a difficult one, but then who hasn’t. It’s how she chooses to represent it; how she manufactures meaning through style, with measure and intelligence. Her memoir is generative and evanescent. It speaks to the way life comes and goes, with its beauties and tragedies, through its balletic recording of transience and impermanence. Fox’s graceful writing and integrity give comfort in these darker days.

  The Coldest Winter

  Paula Fox’s The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe contests not just a book’s usual designations—major, minor, big, small—but also its genre, in this case, the memoir. Fox is a great American writer, the author of several brilliant novels—including Desperate Characters, The Widow’s Children and Poor George—and a recent autobiographical work, Borrowed Finery. Her arresting, unique style and her profound understanding of character and situation transform a putative memoir into an assemblage of philosophical tales. Fox writes of incomprehensible acts and alarming histories with an earned, uncanny, and special wisdom.

  Like other American writers, Fox sought out Europe as a testing ground for her fledgling writer’s life. It was “a time when I imagined that if I could only have found the right place, the difficulties of life would vanish.” But the year she leaves is 1946, she is 23 years old and life abroad is framed by the harrowing landscape of post-war Europe. World War II and the Holocaust pervade almost every meeting she holds and every place she goes.

  In London, when England was still on rationing, wealthy and celebrated English people and American expatriates befriend her. Their class and sumptuous houses provoke her wonder about those who imagine their property “reflected their praiseworthy character, not the ease with which they spent money.” Unlike many earlier Americans abroad, Fox must earn her living. She lands a job as a stringer for a left-wing newspaper owned by a peer, Sir Andrew, who hopes to present an alternative and challenge to Reuters’ dominance. He assigns Fox to Paris, to cover a peace conference at the Palais du Luxembourg. But Fox reflects primarily on the effects of the recently ended war, a changed, saddened Paris and human wreckage.

  Fox’s novelistic eye tracks the odd habits of a fellow female boarder in a Parisian pension, with whom she partners in bridge. Then she notices a “faded blue tattoo of a number” on the strange woman’s arm. A love affair ineluctably embraces the war, too; her lover is a Corsican politician whose wife suffered torture to protect him. The lovers’ desire collapses under the burden of their own ethical indictments, “her bravery never far from our minds.” One of the people she interviews drives her to his apartment for dinner with him and his wife, and Fox studies his shabby sheepskin jacket. Without being asked, the man explains that “the jacket had kept him warm” for three years in a concentration camp. The jacket, she writes, “seemed to me the brown carcass of an animal that had fought in vain for its life.” Her qualification “in vain” alerts the reader to a struggle of lifelong despair.

  In thoughts stunning as camera flashes, Fox knits her past together. She presents startling images and unforgettable stories. She compresses narrative time, moving fluidly from the young Fox to the older one, to measure first reactions and impressions against the insights of retrospection. She is honest, more severe with herself than anyone else. “I knew so little, and the little I did know, I didn’t understand. My ravenous interest in those days was aroused by anything.”

  Sir Andrew assigns her to Warsaw, where “to walk . . . was to feel the cold and desolation and silence of a city of the dead.” Here and elsewhere, Fox encounters people who pose great paradoxes and enigmas. There is troubling Mrs. Helen Grassner, a Jewish-American, middle-aged woman, who searches Poland for Jews and who grieves, because she didn’t lose any of her family in the camps. With her, some other journalists and three Czechs who’d been in camps, Fox tours the Polish countryside, courtesy of the Polish government. They visit “a former vacation estate of a Prussian aristocrat,” now a home for traumatized children “who had been born [or spent some time] in concentration camps . . . [though] their parents, without exception, had been murdered by the Nazis.” A 19-year-old man, formerly a member of a Young Fascists organization, follows her one night and, in shadow, whispers of his thrill at watching executions. She rushes away, feeling disgust, hatred, and also a little sympathy for his abject, ruined life. Much later, working as a tutor for institutionalized, orphaned teenagers in New York, she remembers the children born in camps, their “stunted little weeping figures.”

  Chekhov’s stories come to mind, his portrayals of ethical dilemmas, human ugliness and pathos, their unquestionable beauty and compassion. The Coldest Winter accounts for a year or so in Fox’s life, but even more it asks how and why her or anyone’s experience matters. Fox’s past lies between and within the lines of other lives, her history inseparable from the greater one, and nothing she reports is reduced to a truism or general statement. Now, as she looks back, the endurance of memories is a mystery, haphazard as life itself.

  In this and her novels, Fox chooses words so splendidly a reader must contend with how language can and cannot allow events and emotions to be rendered. Notably, Fox marks tragedy and “outrageous fortune” with a delicate hand. The enormity of the Holocaust is, in a grave sense, beyond words, so the fewer the better. By her discretion, this reader thought often of Primo Levi’s writings and teachings. The uncaptioned photographs that are interspersed sparely throughout the book add to an idea of memory’s elusiveness, and how very much more is forgotten. The pictures may be of a person or place Fox has just mentioned. Or, untitled, they may suggest that Paula Fox’s experiences, the people she met, places she visited, can also represent those lost to history, unsung and anonymous. Her “year over there,” she writes, “had shown me something other than myself.”

  F is for the Future

  1995

  You asked how I’m spending my time when I’m not watching the OJ trial. On the Internet at a friend’s house. Testing my limits in the screen/face of seeming limitlessness, testing the machinery before I buy into it totally or semi-totally. (Reminds me of an aristocratic English guy I knew who was asked, after he crashed his car into two police cars, why he’d done it, why he’d wantonly wrecked those cars, and he answered: I was testing my machinery. His machinery worked—his grandfather’s a lord, he wasn’t in Bow Street jail even an hour.) My digression, association, isn’t really wack; it’s part of what the thing’s about—relating, associating, digressing. As well as limits. Because while you seem to be homing in on or sensing the infinite, “accessing” an infinite variety, inundated with choices, threads and threads, you can feel powerless or powerful, depending upon how you navigate in a ocean/notion like, the infinite is in a machine on your desk. Some people might develop a cortisone-type high, imagining everything in the machine is them, they can master the course/ship; others will get lost at sea, devastated by how much they can’t do. I have both feelings. (You know I question the idea of access anyway.) Remember when I bought my computer years ago and fell in love with the delete key, wanted to delete everything. Sea metaphors—you “navigate” on the Internet. A new frontier, discoveries are expected, a journey, a narrative, and some new terms specific to it. I like seeing the way old words appear in new contexts as new clothes. Weirdly predictable material in a new world is expected. Remember how carrying a Porta-Pak was going to change everything? It’s important to believe you redo it all with new techie toys, I guess, so even if the Internet carries old problems, it adds possibility, promise and dimension, some new problems, has effects no one can absolutely predict. Obviously your own little world is instantly changed, how you spend your time, whom you meet and what happens to you in cyberspace. You might learn to have different expectations, when people talk the talk, cyberspeak, a telegraphic shorthand. But how will sociality change—did the telephone change how people relate to each other, do we know? How will people’s
minds change or be changed? Technology and science are already so embedded in our thinking and lives, maybe it’s impossible to recognize it. I keep remembering Wittgenstein’s horror of science, his fury at the growing dependence on it.

  Traveling into libraries, cool; I hated returning books (but library as physical space, as possible sanctum, will be missed; the idea will be missed). The ability to “access” knowledge replays the old Information v. Knowledge prizefight. What’s knowledge? I can see, so can you, the movies, mixing animation with live action, the cyber world entering the “real” world, boring. A TV sitcom with the nerd at the computer, all the trouble he—maybe she—gets into. You know. But what’s interesting is you can’t encompass it, you ride it, surf it (I skim it), you choose. (You have to pick Echo, Panix, Netcom, America Online, Compuserve, one of the delivery systems first, which reminded me of another great divide: IBM or Mac.) Immediately arresting and annoying, to me, overwhelming, the magnitude. What you decide to look into and lurk around, voyeuristically, is self-evidentiary. (Watching trials has changed me. I get worse all the time.)

  A showbiz gossip group—“Keanu Reeves’ publicist, Robert Garlock, has just issued a release stating that Keanu has never met David Geffen and Keanu is not gay. . . . Any comments, folks?”

  A group around dry cleaning—“All of my suits have cleaning labels that say ‘Professionally dry clean only.’ Has anyone ever heard of an amateur dry cleaner?” “Actually, yes: there used to be, and perhaps still are, coin-operated dry-cleaning machines.”

  “The Extropians”—“The Extropy Institute now has an official home page and a gopher site as well. Extropian interests include transhumanism, futurist philosophy, personality uploading, critical analysis of environmentalism. . . .”

  (I love the use of the word gopher; the hiddenness of cyber-places realized by a furry, furtive animal is futurist anthropomorphism.)

  “Alt.Baldspot”—“Oh, my shiney head, my achin’ baldspot. I’m writing to ask all of you what is the best baldspot shining method. . . .”

  See, one Alt.Baldspot member imagines he can reach “all of us.”

  People join groups just for flaming, flaming’s a raging element of apparent endlessness. The term’s telling. Compare it with “Sticks and stones will break your bones, but names will never harm you.” Flaming’s more abstract, even if you think about fire, maybe a play on “reaching out,” which involves the idea of touching but also implies a larger, nonphysical embrace. (NYPD Blue uses it too much lately.) A galaxy of sex discussions/groups—”alt. sex.bestiality.hamster.duct tape” is my fave. Haven’t mentioned the serious conferences, haven’t gotten serious, yet. I did go into a house, “a virtual community,” LambdaMOO, and moved from room to room, trying to talk to somebody, but everyone was asleep, virtually.

  So, I’ll go on it, get E-mail, and become involved in a few conferences. Maybe you’re already doing it, like sex, or you’re not, because what is it, anyway, or you’re apathetic. I don’t know. I’m curious, not driven or obsessed, yet. It further marks and divides an already divided world, haves v. have-nots, and being literate or not is evidence of access, obviously, and disposition and more. A thing that seems limitless is all and nothing, what you make of it, like everything else. Massiveness, its volume, if not depth, is attractive and repulsive. I’m living approach/avoid anyway.

  Alt.yours.

  The Regulation of Pleasure

  Thinking about F.T. Marinetti, I’m reminded of an incident in London. Some years ago a play based on Kafka’s diaries was performed there by a fringe theater group. Their space was on the 8th floor of an office building. The elevator operator, noting the floor I wanted, complained, “Everybody talks about Kafka but no one does anything about him.” What does one do with Marinetti? An anarchist, a poet, an innovator, a fascist, an antifeminist, a super patriot, a drum major for war, a “master” of the manifesto, as he was called, the progenitor of the Futurists is no easy figure or influence to gloss in a few words or in many words.

  With the first Futurist manifesto, published in 1909 on the front page of Le Monde, Marinetti gave voice to a movement that understood the impact of the machine, that ecstatically embraced technology, war and the idea of progress, a movement that saw itself as the new incarnate. The Futurists cried “Burn the museums.” Marinetti demanded “parole in liberta,” free verse, free words, words freed from syntax. The sculptor Boccioni was “nauseated by old walls and palaces, old motives, reminiscences.” Marinetti claimed the automobile over Samothrace. But in their uncritical belief in progress, the Futurists took off with some 19th-century baggage, brashly landing at the doorstep of a new century, ours.

  It’s this aspect of Futurism that may be carrying undue weight for its position at the start of the 20th century when modernity was burdened with trying to become modern. To “make it new,” as Ezra Pound exhorted. In the 30s movie, The Twentieth Century, the train conductor—the name of the train is also the 20th century—keeps repeating, when there’s any problem, “But we’re on the 20th century,” and passengers insist, “But this is the 20th century,” The movie asks ironically, What makes one modern (or for that matter, postmodern)?

  Through The Futurist Cookbook, published first in 1932 and just now translated into English, Marinetti and others propose recipes for modernity, manifestoes for the table. They polemicize against traditions of all sorts, particularly those of the bourgeoisie, offering Futurist maps to the entrance of the new. There’s a recipe for “The Excited Pig, formula by Futurist Aeropainter Fillia,” which calls for “a whole salami, skinned, served upright on a dish containing some very hot black coffee mixed with a good deal of eau de Cologne.” And one for “Words-In-Liberty, formula by the Futurist Aeropeot Escadame,” which needs “three sea dates, a half-moon of red watermelon, a thicket of radicchio, a little cube of Parmesan, a little sphere of gorgonzola, 8 tiny balls of caviare, 2 figs, 5 amaretti di Saronno biscuits: all arranged neatly on a large bed of mozzarella, to be eaten, eyes closed letting one’s hands wander here and there, while the great painter and word-in-liberty poet Dopero recited his famous song ‘Jacopson.’” Or there’s “The Steel Chicken”—the flavor of steel is an important ingredient in any machine lover’s diet—“the body of the chicken mechanized by aluminum-colored bonbons.” And my favorite, by Marinetti, “RAW MEAT TORN BY TRUMPET BLASTS; cut a perfect cube of beef. Pass an electric current through it, then marinate it for 24 hours in a mixture of rum, cognac and white vermouth. Remove it from the mixture and serve on a bed of red pepper, black pepper and snow. Each mouthful is to be chewed carefully for one minute, and each mouthful is divided from the next by vehement blasts on the trumpet blown by the eater himself . . . The soldiers are served plates of ripe persimmons, pomegranates and blood oranges. While these disappear into their mouths, some very sweet perfumes . . . will be sprayed around the room, the nostalgic and decadent sweetness of which will be roughly ejected by the soldiers who rush like lightning to put their gas masks on.”

  Trumpet blasts, soldiers and ripe persimmons, gas masks and perfumes of nostalgia characterize the Futurist menu of the 1930s, a tempting mix of militarism, sensuality, art and nature. The Cookbook aims for a “culinary revolution . . . changing radically the eating habits of our race.” As in the earlier—or first wave—Futurism, speed, motion, light and liberty are part of any dinner, constant companions. Futurist cooking will be “tuned to high speeds like the motor of a hydroplane.” Marinetti promises eating that is art, “the art of self-nourishment, which “like all arts . . . eschews plagiarism and demands creative originality.” These are prime ingredients of Modernism, taking into the equation, or recipe, that an “art of self-nourishment” is by any other name reflexivity.

  “Since everything in modern civilization tends toward the elimination of weight and increased speed, the cooking of the future must conform to the ends of evolution.” Pasta is banned. Pastasciutta, “however agreeable to the palate, is a passeist food because it makes peop
le heavy, brutish . . . sceptical, slow, pessimistic. Besides which patriotically it is preferable to substitute rice.” The Futurists are for risotto, or “totalrice.” Rice is light, good for speed and action, and, it’s noted, there’s the Italian rice industry to consider as well.

  Marinetti deploys food to construct “the modern man,” the new subject, to build him from the inside out, where food is what one ingests as metaphor and fuel. Futurist Marco Ramperti asserts: “The allegorical Italian has always got his avid mouth wide open over a plate of tagliatelle when he isn’t dangling dripping strands of vermicelli down his greedy gullet. And it’s an offensive image: derisory, grotesque, ugly . . . Our pasta is like our rhetoric, only good for filling up our mouths.” Since Marinetti’s the poet who advanced the idea of “words-in-liberty,” it makes sense that food might be seen as rhetoric, freed from its traditional position as just food, or that using certain words and dropping others, like dropping pasta and adding rice, might signify departures and surprises, changes in thinking, changes in being.

  In the new diet, taste alone certainly isn’t enough. Like art, food must strive to interact with its environment, and the environment itself, like the cuisine, must be shaped to serve higher ends, the evolution of society Marinetti calls for. At a Futurist dinner all the senses must be engaged and taught to renounce the habits that dull pleasure. Between bites one might be squirted with perfume while an airplane motor roars, the music of machines. Under a Futurist regime, where knives and forks are passe, eaters could be asked to touch continuously the leg of the eater next to them or, when having “Fillia’s Aerofood . . . composed of different fruits and vegetables,” to eat “with the right hand . . . while the left hand caresses a tactile surface made of sandpaper, velvet and silk. Meanwhile the orchestra plays a noisy, wild Jazz . . .”