Memories of Impermanence

A quarter of the way through Borrowed Finery, novelist Paula Fox’s new memoir, the author’s father makes a fitting observation. “People who’ve been parceled out and knocked around,” he says, “are always returning to the past, retracing their steps.” At 78, with six novels and 21 children’s works behind her, Fox is finally lending credence to the statement, offering an elegant, if fragmentary, portrait of her first 20 years.

To say that Fox was parceled out and knocked around is hardly doing her perilous and nomadic childhood justice. Left at a Manhattan foundling home by a mother “panic-stricken and ungovernable in her haste to have done” with her newborn baby, and a father seemingly incapacitated by love and alcohol, Paula eventually found her way into the care of Reverend Elwood Corning, a loving and heroic Congregationalist minister in upstate New York. At the age of six, Paula’s parents resurfaced, sending for her from Hollywood, where her father, Paul Fox, was a small-time screenwriter and big-time partier. After only a few days, Paula was again uprooted and sent to live with a near stranger, Mrs. Cummings, after her mother, Elsie, issued an ultimatum: “Either she goes or I do.”

Stints in a tiny New York City apartment with her Spanish grandmother and wildly unstable uncles bookended 16 months on an extravagant and expansive sugarcane plantation in Cuba, where her grandmother worked as a companion to a wealthy relative, and where, Fox says, “no one said my name for hours at a time.” Fox’s parents repeatedly sent for her through the years, from Martha’s Vineyard, Florida and ultimately California, providing her with a few glamorous days only to pass her off on yet another friend or relative.

As is to be expected, Fox grew up fast, most certainly prematurely. Her teens were spotted with spells at a finishing school in Montreal and the Julliard School in New York, and by age 21 she had endured a failed marriage, given up a child for adoption and worked at a string of odd jobs, some days making shrimp cocktails and others painting Mexican scenes on pottery.

Such a chronological description of Fox’s early years, however, belies the content and structure of her memoir. Borrowed Finery is not a work of autobiography, and those looking for a comprehensive account of Fox’s upbringing will be disappointed. Rather than a coherent and patterned narrative, Borrowed Finery is a smattering of Fox’s memories and experiences, a collection of impressions—of places, of people, of kindnesses and betrayals. Geographical locations replace dates as the signalers of time, with each section of the book bearing simply the name of the place in which the events transpired.

Fox’s writing is sparse and measured, careful not to reveal too much, yet somehow seeming to reveal all. She acknowledges the limitations of her own memory, even while writing so confidently from it. “The room is always sunny in memory, though it must have rained and snowed some days,” she says of the Canadian finishing school where she was sent for a year. Her characteristic eye for detail is in full effect, and her snapshot portraits of people are often brilliantly perceptive. Of the actress Stella Adler, with whom Fox spent only a single evening, she writes, “She was refined and at the same time raffish, and her voice was full of depths and fluting melodies.”

Other characters loom large throughout the book, not in their own right, but as anchors in Fox’s sea of impermanence, however unfit for the job they may have been. Fox’s mother is portrayed as unrelentingly cruel and unstable, a woman who hurled a glass of water at her young daughter’s back and begrudged her grown daughter a previous gift of a picture of her grandfather. “How could it be that Elsie was enough of an organic being to have carried me in her belly for a term?” Fox wonders. Her father, though playful and charismatic with his daughter, was also unreliable and capricious, “part ally, part betrayer.”

Amazingly, there is no bitterness or blame in Borrowed Finery. The quote that serves as a preface to the book—“After so long grief, such nativity!” from Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors—is a fitting testament to both Fox’s past and her present. Borrowed Finery comes at a time when Fox’s adult fiction is enjoying a rather remarkable resurgence, spurred in large part by the newly prominent author Jonathan Franzen, who discovered Fox’s 1970 novel Desperate Characters in the library at Yaddo, the writers’ colony in upstate New York. Franzen pushed for its reissue, calling it “obviously superior to any novel by Fox’s contemporaries John Updike, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow.” Professionally, she is a Newbery Award-winning children’s author who is finally receiving accolades for her more mature works. Personally, she has been happily married for 40 years and triumphantly reunited with the daughter she reluctantly gave up for adoption so long ago. After reading Borrowed Finery, it would be hard to begrudge Paula Fox any of her current nativity.

BORROWED FINERY: A MEMOIR

by Paula Fox

Henry Holt

210 pp., $23