Borrowed Finery, a memoir

Paula Fox’s autobiography is the larger narrative that overarches her most memorable novels, the moving, even searing, stories of displaced children. Think of How Many Miles to Babylon?, where ten-year-old James lives in a single room with three aunts. His father has disappeared. The aunts tell him that his mother is in hospital, but James believes she is really an African queen and he must run away to find her. The reader has to piece together and make coherent the contents of James’ thoughts and the actualities of his life, which threaten to overwhelm him. The clarity of the writing heightens the readers’ responses to the focused narrator. Every event is credible, but this is fiction.

The important part of the story is about a child who later says of herself, ‘I assumed responsibility for all that happened in my life, even for events over which I had not the slightest control. It was a hopeless wish that I would discover why my birth and my existence were so calamitous for my mother.’ Born in a Manhattan foundling home in 1923, Paula Fox was left there by her young parents until she was rescued by her grandmother. Her 19-year-old mother is reported as ‘panic stricken and ungovernable in her haste to have done with me’. When the grandmother returned to Cuba shortly afterwards, the child was passed from person to person until she was safe in the keeping of a Congregational minister who also cared for his invalid mother. This was the only stable period of Paula’s childhood. It had ‘blue American days full of buoyancy and promise’. She was loved, well treated, read to then taught to read. She sat with Uncle Elwood as he typed his sermons, and came to understand that ‘a word spoken as meant contained a mysterious energy that could awaken thought and feeling in both speaker and listener’. The security and adventure of this short childhood were the source of a growing sense of self every child should have.

Visits to or from her parents were always fraught with tension. The Fox couple, Elsie and Paul, were youthful, attractive and irresponsible. In their American milieu of the Twenties they were ‘bohemian’. Paul, a Hollywood scriptwriter, was a heavy drinker. On a rare, unexpected visit to his young daughter, he knew exactly how to make her feel that his long absence was her fault. His wife, Elsie, was glamorous, abusively cruel and pathologically disturbed. In their company both Paula and the reader feel the precariousness of her circumstances.

These incessant flittings, by car or train, became an Odyssey without any sense of homecoming or rootedness. Each interlude contributed to Paula’s knowledge of the world and to her increasing sense of its mutability. To round off her education she studied art, went, still young, to the Julliard School of music in New York and a finishing school in Montreal, all chosen by her father. A series of temporary partners accompanied other studies. No wonder that, after going from job to job, Paula made what she called ‘a disastrous marriage’, and had, outside it, a daughter whom she offered for adoption, changing her mind about it too late to reverse the decision. Years later, her daughter found her.

Where do the novels fit in, particularly those for young readers? There is no mention of them, in creation or existence, but in one sense they are there from the beginning, lying underneath the duplicity of the parents that their child finds so confusing. This is a memorable telling of a life developed in writing as a bulwark against disappearance, the struggle that many children resolve, at least partly, by learning to read.