Foxy
I had been left in a Manhattan foundling home a few days after birth by my reluctant father, and by Elsie, my mother, panic-stricken and ungovernable in her haste to have done with me.
When she heard where I was, my grandmother went at once to the home and took me away. But what could she do with me?
What bothers me about a great many autobiographies is the author’s claim to recall every moment of their childhood in sequence and detail and, more annoying still, their dishonesty in trying to mould our opinion of them, and persuade us that they had an adult perspective on things when they were 5 years old. (Simone de Beauvoir is particularly annoying in this respect.)
Throughout her beautiful memoir, Borrowed Finery, Paula Fox admits that she can’t recall this or that detail, perhaps it was the next day… and we’re grateful.
Time deceives memory. My circumstances seemed to have changed overnight, but it must have happened over months, slowly.
She also resists the temptation of imposing the adult I on the little girl I (Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t let’s go to the dogs tonight also resists beautifully). More stunning still is how quiet it is, how poised the voice of today’s I, speaking of itself as a girl.
For years I assumed responsibility for all that happened in my life, even for events over which I had not the slightest control. It was not out of generosity of mind or spirit that I did so. It was a hopeless wish that I would discover why my birth and my existence were so calamitous for my mother.
Very briefly, Fox, who is a fine novelist and children’s book author, was dumped in an orphanage at birth and subsequently shuttled around various stranger’ and relatives’ homes, her parents allowing her brief visits that were usually cut short, sometimes by her truly vile mother threatening, ‘either she goes or I do.’
Her father is a charming, flaky drunk writer whose work included the screenplay for Last Train to Madrid, which Graham Greene called ‘the worst movie I ever saw.’ He calls her pal, gives her gifts that he takes back a day later and fills her head with marvellous tales.
After downing a few drinks, he would fall in love with his own voice, theatrically honeyed, filled with significant whispers and pauses. He was in thrall to his voice; his thoughts stumbled behind.
It’s a tale that would have been melodramatic in most hands, but with Fox it is simple and understated and renders mundane scenes from childhood with gorgeous clarity. There are lines that leave you gaping at their perfection and, pardon the oxymoron, laconic density.
That happened to me every Sunday after church. But it lasted no longer than it takes to describe it.
I finished the book at 2 am, cried like a baby for another half hour then fell into dreams of ships in the desert.
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