12 May 2011 04:23:02
"I've always known a lot of very bad people, destructive, brutes of a certain kind. Then I've seen these lovely impulses and what not, and they've stayed with me and comforted me," she says during a recent interview in the living room of her Brooklyn town house, a cobblestone garden in back.
Known for the memoir "Borrowed Finery" and for such novels as "Desperate Characters" and the award-winning "The Slave Dancer," Fox has a poised and graceful presence, with a strong chin, a proud smile and gently parted gray-white hair. She has been a Brooklyn resident for decades and lives with her husband, the editor, critic and translator Martin Greenberg, and two middle-age cats, one of whom, Lucy, checks in periodically like a nervous publicist.
Fox is a recent inductee into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. She also has a new book, "News From the World," short pieces written over the past 45 years, from remembrances of family and neighbors to such fiction as the title story, in which an oil slick ruins a seaside village's peaceful isolation, a theme of violation and endangerment that appears in much of her work. The new book is dedicated to two writers she befriended as a young adult, Mary King and Pat O'Donnell. Their "goodness" and "sobriety" and "seriousness" were qualities she encountered too rarely as a girl.
Childhood taught her harsh lessons about the character of writers, and of parents. Her father, Paul Fox, was a screenwriter, and a drunk, given to "interminable, stumbling descriptions of the ways in which he and fellow writers tried to elude domesticity," she observes in her new book. Her mother, Elsie, was a "sociopath," the author says, who banished Paula from the house. The hero of her youth was an early caretaker, the Rev. Elwood Amos Corning, "Uncle Elwood," whom Fox can summon in perfect detail.
"I have a painter's memory," Fox says during the interview. "I can remember things from my childhood which were so powerfully imprinted on me, the whole scene comes back. I remember Mr. Corning, for example, Uncle Elwood, as I called him, imitating a horse he had in the living room of the house, and I remember him bursting with laughter as he galloped past me into the dining room."
Her father did make at least one important contribution: books, a box of them he delivered to Corning's house when Paula was 5. She read fairy tales and the funny papers, Mark Twain and "Treasure Island." She memorized Rudyard Kipling's "If" and could recite the American presidents in chronological order.
