The Western Coast Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Praise

  Half Title Page

  Other Books By

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Price You Pay

  PART ONE The Convention

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  PART TWO Meetings

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Copyright

  Praise for Paula Fox and her novels:

  “Paula Fox is so good a novelist that one wants to go out in the street to hustle up a big audience for her…Fox’s brilliance has a masochistic aspect: I will do this so well, she seems to say, that you will hardly be able to read it. And so she does, and so do I.”

  —Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek

  “Brilliant…Fox is one of the most attractive writers to come our way in a long, long time.”

  —The New Yorker

  “As a writer, Fox is all sensitive, staring eyeball. Her images break the flesh. They scratch the retina…Fox’s prose hurts.”

  —Walter Kirn, New York

  Desperate Characters:

  “A towering landmark of postwar realism…a sustained work of prose so lucid and fine that it seems less written than carved.”

  —David Foster Wallace

  “Absorbing, elegant…What gives this slice of life its timeless urgency is Fox’s spare yet penetrating prose, shifting imperceptibly from present to past, external to internal, revealing the hushed despair, absurdity, and latent violence that lie beneath the most humdrum words and routines.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Among the best things we have in contemporary literature—original, enduring, charged with intelligent, articulate life and with the tension of modern survival: brave, witty, alarming, and quite wonderful.”

  —Shirley Hazzard

  “A piercing portrait of a modern couple at bay…Relentlessly honest, brilliantly crafted, passionate.”

  —John Gabree, New York Newsday

  “A reserved and beautifully realized novel.”

  —Lionel Trilling

  “Desperate Characters takes its place in a major American tradition, the line of the short novel exemplified by Billy Budd, The Great Gatsby, Miss Lonelyhearts, and Seize the Day…Grueling and brilliant.”

  —Irving Howe, The New Republic

  “A brilliant performance, quite devastating in its mastery of the brutish New York scene.”

  —Alfred Kazin

  Poor George:

  “The best first novel I’ve read in quite a long time…A merciless uncovering of the exurban wastelands of the spirit.”

  —New York Review of Books

  “Compared by critics then and now to Chekhov and Melville and Muriel Spark and Nathanael West and Batman and Robin, really, and rightly. She’s good, she’s good, she’s more than good.”

  —Jonathan Lethem

  “Like a sealed bottle of pure mid Sixties…Poor George feels fresher after a third of a century than do most novels written yesterday.”

  —Jonathan Franzen

  The Widow’s Children:

  “Chekhovian…Every line of Fox’s story, every gesture of her characters, is alive and surprising.”

  —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times

  “Demonstrates once again Fox’s original unsettling talent…Astounding in its portrayal of the textures of emotional life, moment by agonizing moment…Fox releases conflicts and passions of great intensity, and sets them simmering, combining, and exploding like volatile liquid elements.”

  —Saturday Review

  “Compelling…It has in it, especially apparent in the wit, a worldliness which it could not do without, and which is that of someone who has lived long enough to have learned a great deal…Remarkable.”

  —New York Review of Books

  The Western Coast

  OTHER BOOKS BY PAULA FOX

  Poor George

  Desperate Characters

  The Widow’s Children

  A Servant’s Tale

  The God of Nightmares

  The Western Coast

  Paula Fox

  Introduction by Frederick Busch

  To the Memory of

  Amos Elwood Corning,

  and for Max Markowitz

  and Sara Chermayeff

  “…our existence is at every instant

  and primarily the consciousness of what

  is possible to us.”

  ORTEGA Y GASSET

  The Price You Pay

  Introduction by Frederick Busch

  Paula Fox’s third novel, The Western Coast, is about a place both mythic and actual: Hollywood, USA. It is the Sargasso Sea of the soul of the United States and has perhaps been considered the province of male authors. You might think of Tommy Wilhelm in Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day; to demonstrate that his protagonist is infected by dreaminess and a wish for instant success, Bellow has him forsake college to try to become an actor and, of course, fail. In Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, Tod Hacket is devoured by the dream. Monroe Stahr of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon dreams Fitzgerald’s dreams and chokes on his author’s rue. Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park manages to send the memories of Charley Eitel and their repository, Sergius O’Shaugnessy, off towards the “green light” of Fitzgerald’s American Dream. These are novels by men about men; even when they are among the supernatural beauty of Hollywood women—say Mailer’s Elena, whose glories prefigure Mailer’s obsession with Marilyn Monroe—their stories are male, men’s disappointments are expressed through women, and the women fail or betray the men who carry the narrative. But here comes Paula Fox, in 1972, with this large tale about the drift to the west in America. Her protagonist is not a man lured by a woman but a woman who, bruised and educated by the American Dream, expresses in her own way no man’s—but this brilliant author’s—sense of what Jean-Paul Sartre called nausée, a spiritual dismay, an abhorrence of oneself in the world.

  Annie Gianfala, seventeen years old and forsaken by her father, is penniless and alone. She goes west, as America did, but she journeys in the years before World War II. She drifts on the currents of the Depression, of enthusiasm for the Communist Party and Russia, and of distaste for the Party and its birthplace. She meets, and is educated by, in the senses as much as in the mind, louts, layabouts, jaded intellectuals, lovers of various stripes—including Walter Vogel, the merchant marine sailor whom she marries—as well as varieties of Party functionaries, black men, gay men, and every kind of failed and failing writer. Annie is both a waif and a woman of power. Men bring her their bodies as if bearing a gift, and she tends to accept them. Sad news for men: their bodies do not matter much. This novel, which so splendidly inhabits the senses, transcends them. And so does Annie. Early on, in fact, a kind of physical revulsion in her is clear; soon enough it becomes spiritual. Then we realize that we are in a territory shared with Paula Fox by James Purdy—in the fauvist, piano-playing boy of the book’s beginning and end; in Annie herself, an innocent with whom men beg to entrap themselves—as Ms. Fox writes victims who are pitched up upon demanding, even dangerous, people and learn from them, willy-nilly, life’s cruel lessons.

  First readers of The Western Coast will find a narrative intelligence so strong, an analysis so piercing, th
at they will be unsurprised to find that a number of intellectuals of the 1970s averted their eyes. They found themselves in this novel—as (among others) the Party Pasionaria, Fern, unshakably, stupidly loyal to her dogma; seeking to skewer others, she skewers herself while condemning “the soft-brained New York swimming-pool Jews with their hysterical, vicious anti-Bolshevik attacks on Comrade Stalin’s tactics.” A generation of blind political enthusiasts is drowned in that condemnation. But Ms. Fox’s eye is not only cruel: it is accurate, it can be gentle, and it is always just—as we find in this description: “Fern’s father had been a bookbinder and, once out of work, moved through the little rooms of the house like an exiled prince, remarking acidly on the fine and dependable qualities of leather.” That description evokes a lifetime’s imprisoned conclusion, and its sorrow is palpable.

  Annie, for all that she is an innocent abroad in the United States at one of its great moments of change—the waning days of the Depression, the acceleration into World War II, the accompanying end to so many certainties—is, despite her lack of schooling, no fool. She sees herself, she sees her context, and she learns about one in terms of the other. “‘Everybody teaches me,’ she said ironically, ‘as if I were the world’s village idiot.’ ” She observes herself with Walter, and what she sees is crucial: that, making love to her, he “invaded her…” and that “she fled him even as she lay there so passively.” Such moments are essential Paula Fox: the disgust with others, but also with oneself, and the sense—despite a need to merge, physically or psychically, with others—that one does so at a great expense. She writes, of course, about the price one pays for giving oneself, for tempting others to believe that one is accessible to them: the cost of being lonely, needful, generous—human.

  Wary as she is, Annie, because she is like us, is available to the dream that flourishes on the West Coast. During a period of her life that would seem familiar to Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, to Bellow’s Dangling Man, to Ellison’s Invisible Man, Annie, while waiting for her life’s next event to overtake her, lies low and essentially does nothing but go to the movies: “It was the movie music that hypnotized her—those swollen pulsating chords, the pudding texture of beaten pianos and whipped violins as the lovers kissed, as the mist covered the mansion, as the ship’s prow rose and sank upon orderly oceans…she wept…because of that music, a smothering syrup that drowned her brains, yet released in her a flood of melancholy that through some alchemy became a kind of exaltation.” This is as good an analysis of sentimentality as we could ask for. It says what one can about the confected dreams of Hollywood. Ms. Fox’s dark humor, her sense of the absurd, is richly conveyed in those beaten pianos and whipped violins. Furthermore, this passage accompanies two important sets of events in the story of Annie’s becoming a self she might wish to be. First, she becomes a model and, on the fringes of Hollywood’s body cult, is openly and commercially adored by men; Hollywood’s commodification of sexuality, and actors’ and models’ commodification of themselves, is confronted. More important, Annie’s sexual activity—at the time when her soul is most enmired—increases: “She discovered, or, rather, recognized at last, that men wanted to do this thing to her they wanted to do to anyone. Her body, the object, was of no value to her. Yet somewhere, like a hidden depravity, she felt love for it, pitied it like the lost animals she sometimes saw slinking into the doorways of closed shops late at night.” The character’s insight into herself, as she grows intellectually, is large and frightening: while an odalisque, she is also an analyst; you covet her body, you look up it to her face, and she is staring into you, understanding both you and herself all too well. The disgust here is ferocious. Young women, beginning to write in 2001, can learn much from this woman who, in 1972, was speaking on their behalf.

  Annie’s voyage of discovery takes her from New York to California to New York and then to Europe. On her way, she twice experiences something like an unfettered innocence of experience. Each takes place in the American West. Each is a retreat, from society and from cruel consciousness, to the pastoral. Once, in Yosemite, she is with Walter Vogel, the returned husband whom she will divorce. The second time, she is with Myron Eagle, a physician who saved her life and now is her lover. With Eagle, it is the “last real time she spent in California,” it is “timeless, mindless pleasure” in an absolutely rustic setting. Such moments of the pastoral are, traditionally, the place away from civilized complications where nature—including human sexuality—may hold sway. But the lovers, taking a walk, come upon “the remains of an old movie set,” looking “like a small frontier village.” And soon thereafter, Eagle tells Annie that “‘You can’t ask people not to have a viewpoint—to simply look, the way you do. One of these days, you’ll have to come to some conclusions…like the rest of us.’” For a disengaged innocence is no entitlement, Ms. Fox seems to be alerting her protagonist: even an Edenic landscape may be as artificial as a movie set; we pollute what we inhabit, we are cursed with consciousness, and absolute innocence is not, finally, available to the thinking human animal. We have an obligation to evaluate. We are condemned to do so.

  Annie’s journey must be into that contention, and it must involve a confrontation with her own disgust. She seems to consider herself, by the end of this disquieting, brilliantly observed novel, more free than fettered. She says, so perfectly, “‘I was taken to California…After a while, I escaped.’”

  PART ONE

  The Convention

  Chapter 1

  Even on the most bitter afternoons of the winter of 1939, a man wearing neither coat nor hat marched up the rise to the Claremont Inn, paused there for the instant it took him to draw himself upright and salute the old building, then strode on toward Grant’s Tomb. Often, the wind blew hard across the Hudson River and lifted the loose grains of snow from a graying crust that shrank and hardened day by day as though it ate the ground it lay upon. In the winter clarity of the air the man, his loose shirt billowing about his waist and meager breastbone, seemed to send forth a livid light of his own.

  To most of the students of the International Hostel across the street, the man was an incidental object in that gelid landscape. The older residents rarely took notice of him as they grazed among the periodicals in the reading and visitors’ room, the windows of which fronted on Riverside Drive. New students or their guests, having heard about the eccentric, nearly naked marcher, or else catching a glimpse of him as they hurried indoors to the foyer, paused at the windows, speculating on his circumstances, his painful and bizarre appearance.

  What could he be saying to himself? His lips never ceased to move in silent speech. At intervals, he held his arms straight out and turned in slow circles, then listed like a slackening top, and at last straightened up and stood facing the dark Palisades across the river.

  If anyone laughed at the man, it was usually a Swiss back from his classes in hotel management at Columbia University a few blocks south of the hostel. “Don’t laugh!” a Spanish student would say sternly, at once adding an ironic comment of his own about the man’s arcane ritual.

  The day after Christmas, a Japanese opened the door to the reading room and, noting a chess game in progress between two Chinese in a corner, abruptly withdrew. Someone laughed. Mehta, one of the Indians from New Delhi, who had been standing at the windows observing the man salute the Claremont Inn, turned and explained to the room at large, “It was phosgene gas, without doubt. I have read about your war…extensively.”

  Walter Vogel, an unemployed actor since the Federal Theater Project had ended a few months earlier, hated the Indian, who had once said to him, smiling, “Walter, you are like a snake who eats the tiny eggs of birds,” a reference to Walter’s girl-hunting in the hostel cafeteria.

  “Ah, India…” said Walter, opening his Daily Worker in Mehta’s face. He disliked all Indians, with their borrowed voices and their women who would look, he imagined, the same lying down as they did standing up.

  “Phosgene or chlorine,�
� Mehta continued, now speaking to an Indian friend. “They used it at Ypres, the German people. But the Allies, as they were called”—the friend smiled—“found the gas mask to be somewhat effective, and, naturally, used gas themselves. The French employed gas shells. Interesting, don’t you think?”

  “The West is very inventive,” Mehta’s friend said. “In India, of course, we are not so advanced.”

  “How superior of you,” said Hannibal Salazar. “Don’t you think India superior, Walter?”

  Walter sat down without replying and continued to read his paper. Hannibal looked toward the window where the girl Walter had brought with him stood, still peering out of it. He went to her.

  “A thing thrown away,” said Hannibal softly. “That man…”

  “How can he bear it?” the girl asked, her face nearly touching the pane. “The cold…it’s even cold in this room.”

  “The wind is always so bad up here,” said Hannibal. “But perhaps in his madness he doesn’t feel it. I suffer so from this horrible weather.” He looked down at his own plump, short body. “This climate may account for the number of brutes you have in this country.”