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Saturday afternoon, rain falling, Mozart’s Prague #38 playing, and beside me, A Servant’s Tale, Paula Fox’s sixth and final novel.


I was surprised after writing blogs on Fox’s two memoirs, to realize I had this novel in my library.  I must have bought it from Daedalus Books after I read Borrowed Finery and The Coldest Winter, written after Fox stopped writing novels. She did, however, keep writing books for children; and A Servant’s Tale shows her keen understanding of them.

Luisa is a child when the novel begins in Malagita, on the Spanish-speaking island of San Pedro in the Caribbean. In Fox’s early and complicated life, she spent time in Cuba with her grandmother; and in part one of the novel, Fox’s evocative prose conveys tacit knowledge of this place where “The bats would begin to fly… vague, smoky shapes in the fading light.” The reader lives closely with Luisa and understands why at the end of part one, she dreams “of the day when I would return to San Pedro, now a bluish haze receding on the horizon.” Her father had made them leave because of his mother, “so rich she could settle the question of who belonged in this world and who didn’t.” The father’s story is a complicated one, woven throughout the novel, but his wife does not adjust to their new life, a common story of estrangement, not learning English, and yearning for home.


Part two takes place in a New York City barrio and frequent moves within it for father, mother, and Luisa.  For this inquisitive child to become a young woman who feels herself to be “a shapeless lump of obduracy” is unsettling, as is the question she asks: What if defeat is a large portion of your heritage?


You might be asking, “Why let yourself in for 321 pages of a novel that sounds dismal and dreary?” Because the writer is Paula Fox who communicates what’s worth understanding in a prose worth reading. One reviewer wrote, “Luisa Sanchez is as indelible and eternal as many in Dickens, Balzac, or George Eliot.”  Luisa is not without a memorable friend like Ellen, and she does marry and have a son, Charlie, though no happier ever after with her husband and a disheartening scenario with her son. 


Yet the core of this novel is Luisa’s work as a maid, and for a decade or longer, in the same three residences. There is the decent Mr. Erwin, an antique dealer, the neurotic and animal loving Mary Lou Jester, and the unforgettable Phoebe Burgess with her “glutinous violence of soul.”  You would need to read the novel to understand how something from the first chapter has resonance for Phoebe, whose innards are as rotten as the doll Luisa opens in Malagita.


I liked the Baltimore Sun reviewer who wrote, “A reader will not take anything away from this novel.  It is too rich for that. What the reader will take away, and will live with, is the entire work.”  I know I will not forget this novel and will read others by Paula Fox.


Next week: The popular and wildly praised James

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Gail Wilson Kenna

Updated: 7 days ago


I write these words on Monday, February 3rd, as I listen to the soundtrack of The War, a seven-part series that Ken Burns produced long ago.  As I both read and hear the lyrics, I think of my daughter whose 51st birthday is this week.  Commissioned in the U.S. Army at Duke University in 1996, this soldier, wife, and mother… has served for 29 years and remains on active duty.




I have hit replay three times to hear “American Anthem.”  The words and music are by Gene Scheer and sung in The War by Nora Jones. Haunting… her voice and the lyrics, 80 years after the second World War.



I sit here this winter’s day with a pad of yellow paper and a pen, looking out at bare trees against a gray sky.  What comes to mind is General Lloyd Austin, the four-star Secretary of Defense, now replaced by a former Fox News host. Could the contrast between the two men be any greater?  I also think of General Mark Milley whose photograph has been removed from the Pentagon. The price of being forthright and honest in America today.


Given I’ve listened to “American Album” several times, I now quote the three stanzas.


1.   All we’ve been given by those who came before/ The dream of a nation where freedom would endure/The work and prayers of centuries have brought us to this day/What shall be our legacy, what will our children say? /Let them say of me I was one who believed /in sharing the blessings I received/  Let me know in my heart when my days are through/ America, America, I gave my best to you.


2    Each generation from the plains to distant shores/ With the gifts they were given were determined to give more/ Battles fought together, acts of conscience fought alone/  These are the seeds from which America has grown./ Let them say of me I was one who believed/ In sharing the blessings that I received/ Let me know in my heart when my days are through/ America, America, I gave my best to you.


3.   For those who think they have nothing to share/ Who feel in their hearts there is no hero there/ Though each quiet act of dignity, is that which fortifies/ The soul of a nation, that will never die/ Let them say of me I was one who believed/ In sharing the blessings I received/ Let me know in my heart when my days are through/ America, America, I gave my best to you/  America I gave my best to you.

 

I honor my daughter, a soldier, whose acts of intelligence and dignity have fortified countless soldiers, female and male, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Germany & Poland & Romania with NATO, plus army installations throughout the United States. I also honor my husband who gave thirty years to the USAF, and to my son-in-law who retired from the U.S. Army after thirty years. And lastly I honor Lt. General William Earl Brown, who encouraged my daughter and was my hero for forty years until his death in June 2020.




 

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Gail Wilson Kenna

A third winter day with Paula Fox…and this time on Frightsday.


The famous Irish writer James Joyce renamed the days of the week. The one he gave to Friday is timely, given our chaotic times under a deranged monarch.  Paula Fox’s mother was deranged too, not related to politics but to motherhood.  Fox tells the reader that she never learns why ‘her birth and existence were so calamitous for her mother.”  After Paula was born, Elsie left her in an orphanage in Manhattan. Yet fate intervened for infant Paula in the personage of the Reverend Elwood Amos Corning, a Congregational Minister from Balmville.


On Paula’s 5th birthday, she received a card from her father Paul with two five dollar bills, enough for a white dotted-Swiss Easter dress, which Paula and Uncle Elwood (as she calls the Reverend) buy. Clothing becomes a strand woven into this memoir from beginning to the last chapter (California) before the six concluding pages about Fox’s mother and her daughter, also abandoned at birth. If you read the memoir, you’ll understand Paula’s action and her eventual reunion with Linda.


Borrowed Finery begins with two pages in the same time frame as California.  Paula works in a cheap clothing store in Los Angeles and has one thick blue tweed suit, “a couple of sizes too big and sewn of such grimly durable wool that the jacket and skirt could have stood upright on the floor.” I laughed when I read this, remembering a suit I inherited at age 10, which I hated for its scratchy wool and same stiffness.






To see the significance of the first two pages and what occurs in a bungalow at the end, required my second read of the memoir. How Paula ends up in Stella Adler’s Hollywood bungalow is too long to explain. Who was Adler?  I knew the name but only in the second read did I search the internet and read about Stella’s fame as an acting teacher. Adler believed that an actor not use a method but take the place of the character. Adler herself is described as “full of magic and mystery, a child of innocence and vulnerability.” And that evening, Adler, like an actress, moves inside Paula Fox. The following pages end the California chapter.


“I (Paula) was nearly fainting with self-consciousness in such company, and excited by it, sweating in my tweed suit and not only because of the weather.  Stella got up and went into another room. When she returned, she was holding a large photograph of a painting of a dark-haired child.

“My daughter, Ellen,” she said wistfully.  I loved Stella at that moment, and I thought to myself that Ellen was the most fortunate of children, the inheritor of every marvelous thing, especially the velvet dress she was wearing in her portrait.

Then she rose again. When she came back this time, she was carrying a blue covert-cloth suit in her arms as though it were an infant.

“May I give you this,” she asked me.

Everyone in the room had fallen silent. Odets (Clifford) hit a piano key softly, middle C.

“I think it’s the right size,” she said.

Harold Clurman (Adler’s husband) nodded his head and smiled at me. Allen said hurrah, for no apparent reason.  I took the suit.”

                                                        *


“I depend on the kindness of strangers.” This famous line is fitting. Do you know who said it? I love hearing from readers, so please let me know the character and the play!

Next time: Turns out Fox’s sixth novel A Servant’s Tale is in my library.  I’ll read it this week.

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