The Redwood Coast
Review
Volume 10, Number 3
Summer 2008
A Publication of Friends of Coast Community Library in Cooperation with the Independent Coast Observer
memoir
Marvelous!
Jake Fuchs
M
y father was Daniel Fuchs, the
novelist turned movie writer. He
died in 1993, but his so-called
“Brooklyn novels” were republished
recently, as was a new collection of his
writings about Hollywood and the movies. He wrote the three novels, populated
by the common folks of his gritty native
borough, in the 1930s, before I was born.
They were largely ignored, and it took the
critics about twenty years to decide they
were praiseworthy examples of “proletarian fiction.” By that time we were living in
Beverly Hills and Pop had found another
vocation, writing film scripts.
Curiously, while the belated approval
for his earlier work, often associated with
disapproval for ceasing to do it, impressed
other movie people, it seemed to make
little difference to him. Lying on chaises
around somebody’s kidney-shaped pool,
his friends would ask what he thought
about this great realist and that. John Dos
Passos came up a lot. “Dos,” they said, as
if they knew him or thought he did. Pop’s
responses were terse, and I don’t remember them. Oh, I was there too, sometimes
swimming or begging some hapless adult
to play Ping-Pong, but most often I too
would be occupying a chaise. Sometimes
I listened to the conversation, half understanding, but usually I read. On the cover
of my paperback there might have been a
rocket rising on its fiery tail, a bug-eyed
alien, a space girl with a helmet and huge
breasts.
Starting when I was about 10, I became
addicted to science fiction. This distressed
my father. It might have been the covers.
When he came upon me reading the stuff,
he would seize my book or magazine,
consider it gravely and drop it back into
my hands without a word. Often he would
shake his head.
“What’s so bad about it?” I asked
once, when I must have been about 12. “I
enjoy it,” I said, waving the latest issue of
Astounding at him, “and it’s giving me a
great vocabulary.”
He exhaled smoke. He was always
smoking.
“Can’t he read something real?” he
asked plaintively. The question was addressed to my mother, sitting quietly by
us. He often spoke to me through her.
Her usual ploy was to change the subject.
But what Pop had said stuck with me.
I couldn’t help thinking about it. After all,
he had a point: science fiction wasn’t real.
It wasn’t about the real world; that was the
main attraction, that it took you someplace
else. However, you had to come back; it
was where you lived, and this was about
the time when I realized that I didn’t fit
there. I didn’t fit in school or anywhere
else outside of my house, and the science
fiction I carried around and read whenever
I had a spare moment probably didn’t
help.
I was a weirdo, and other kids mocked
me and made me angry and sad. So that’s
why I finally read Pop’s Brooklyn novels,
as anti–science fiction, to find out about
the real. Though it existed in Beverly
Hills, there it was somehow hidden from
me, if not from others, so that I kept
bumping into it and making a fool of myself. But I knew that my father was considered a minor master of realism, which
had to have something to do with the real,
See Marvelous page 9
Notes on the life and death
of Tillie Olsen
Let her be. So all that is in her will not
bloom—but in how many does it?
There is still enough left to live by.
—“I Stand Here Ironing”
Tillie Olsen in the 1940s
Realm of Possibility
Notes on the life & death of Tillie Olsen
Martha K. Davis
T
he first time I met Tillie Olsen, it was for a job interview.
She lived in a lower-income
community of apartment
houses in the center of San
Francisco. When she opened her door we
smiled, introduced ourselves, and I held
out my hand. She said, “Let me give you
a hug,” and she did. Tillie was slightly
shorter than I was—five-foot-three or
so—and had short, wavy white hair and
beautiful piercing blue eyes. When she
focused on me, I was both startled and
gratified to feel not merely looked at but
taken in. Of course I couldn’t help but like
her immediately.
Another woman who also wanted to
work for Tillie had arrived before me
and was already in what used to be her
husband’s study, taking old books out of
cartons and categorizing them. The two
of us were in Tillie’s apartment because a
nonprofit writers organization had offered
to provide her with a personal and literary
assistant. The young writer she chose
would be paid by the organization to assist
her in making her daily life more manageable and her writing life more accessible.
In return, the assistant would receive the
mentorship of an older, established writer.
The year was 1990. Tillie was 78; I was 29.
That first afternoon she was visibly
tired. Instead of giving me a task to do,
she mostly talked to me in the hallway—
about a recent illness, about her family,
about all the projects she needed to start
or finish—while occasionally the other
woman came out of the study to ask which
category a particular book belonged to. I
could see that Tillie’s distractibility irritated her. I felt guilty that I wasn’t helping
too, and I asked her several times to put
me to work, but she seemed to want to
talk instead. The truth was, I was happy to
listen to her. She was Tillie Olsen the Author; reading her work had deeply affected
me as a writer and as a feminist. Besides,
I liked her and I wanted to get to know
her. She spoke of several losses she had
recently experienced; the most wrenching
had been the death of her husband, Jack. A
year later she was still surprised sometimes to wake up in the morning alone.
The war obsessed and
haunted her. She experienced rage and helplessness and hope and
a desire to educate
others with lessons
from the past, all with
a depth I couldn’t and
didn’t want to feel but
that was, I recognized,
what was remarkable
about Tillie and what
drained her, what distracted her from her
writing and what ultimately enriched it.
That first day set the pattern for our
future working relationship. She chose
me to be her assistant. The other woman,
whom I knew, resented Tillie’s decision
because Tillie had always been a champion of the working class, which she was
and I was not. But I think that day Tillie
felt sensitive and vulnerable, and when
she wanted to talk I was there to listen.
She knew she was not an easy person to
work for. Perhaps unconsciously she was
seeking someone more patient than efficient, more flexible than organized.
Tillie often used to say that she wasn’t
a very good mentor for me, because
we didn’t talk about writing itself: the
struggles and pleasures of crafting words
into stories. She never read my fiction,
and we never discussed her published
work in terms of structure or technique
or even inspiration. I had read everything
she had published in book form, what
precious little there was: the extraordinary stories in Tell Me a Riddle, the short
novel Yonnondio: From the Thirties,
the groundbreaking Silences, even the
daybook Mother to Daughter, Daughter to
Mother, more a compilation than a written
work. I knew each of these books had
taken years to complete, and the novel and
book of stories are very slim. Yet Tell Me
a Riddle (1961) and Silences (1978) alone
had made her a well-known and muchadmired author. Not only was her knotty,
evocative writing style unique; her subject
at that time was groundbreaking: the
stunted lives, particularly of women, that
the demands of family, work in the outside
world and societal expectations never allowed to come to full fruition.
Tillie spoke of these things—the lives
of women and the working class, the
circumstances that silenced writers, her
own slowed-to-a-trickle output—all the
time, but she rarely referred to her books;
these weren’t themes she had grappled
with and relegated to the past, but ongoing
passions she lived by. She didn’t presume
she had something important to teach me,
some secret knowledge or arduously acquired experience to impart. When I asked
her how she remembered so much, she
answered, “Why, I’ve lived longer than
you have!” That didn’t exactly answer my
question. I later learned that her schooling
had consisted of a great deal of memorization, as well as copying out passages from
books. After she left high school during
her senior year in order to work, she educated herself by reading as much as she
could. Her memory was phenomenal.
S
he may not have felt she was an adequate mentor, but I often felt I wasn’t
fulfilling my end of the bargain either. I
wanted to help her organize her life so
that she could go into her study—the
walls crowded with books, filing cabinets
stuffed with papers, photos and postcards propped up on the bookshelves,
her typewriter on the desk in front of the
window—close the door behind her, and
write. For a while I nursed a fantasy that I
would be the one to help restore her to her
rightful place in front of her typewriter,
where she would, with the weight of the
daily world lifted from her shoulders—by
me—allow the words that were stored
up inside her to pour forth onto the page.
Who knows? Perhaps this was her fantasy
as well. One day, working with her files, I
read letters she had received from women
who were so moved by her work that
they wanted to wash her dishes, walk the
dog, do the laundry, anything to help her
find her way back to her writing. By then
I was beginning to realize, after several
weeks of working for her, that doing the
laundry—or finishing all the tasks she
wanted to put behind her—wasn’t going
to be enough.
See olsen page 10
Summer 2008
The Redwood Coast Review
Page 9
marvelous from page 1
and that his scene and time, Brooklyn and
the 1930s, was as real as real could get. I
read the books.
fter several years I did indeed become
reasonably comfortable in the life I
had to share with other people, but I’d
hesitate to say that Daniel Fuchs’s Summer in Williamsburg, Homage to Blenholt,
and Low Company should get any credit,
or any blame. When I reread the Brooklyn
novels now, in fact, I’m struck by how much
fantasy and charming dreaminess inhabit
them, along with the hard facts of life in
working-class immigrant neighborhoods.
But then that real, that kind of real, was all
I could see.
As a result, the three novels disturbed
me in a way I couldn’t have expected. If
overcrowded, sweaty Brooklyn was so real
and if real was so good, I asked myself, why
had Pop taken us to Beverly Hills, with its
broad, uncluttered streets, sprawling houses,
and rolling, emerald lawns? No wonder the
real eluded me here. It was so un-Brooklyn,
this town where no one sweated except for
the Japanese gardeners. But here we were,
and I knew there was something particularly
bad about that, but was for a time unsure of
what it was. One day it struck me. Instead of real books about real life, Pop was
writing, if you could even call what he did
writing, frothy, flickering concoctions for
the screen. For his sake and mine, I had to
speak my mind.
So I advised my father that we should return to Brooklyn, which I began to think of
as my spiritual home, although I had never
been there. I also confronted him about his
misspent life as a screenwriter. In fact, that
became the more important issue for me.
Movies were even phonier than Beverly
Hills. They were completely phony. I knew
that, and he had to know it, too. Pop’s
Academy Award, proudly displayed on the
top bookshelf in our den, was for a musical,
in which people kept jumping up and singing and dancing, as no one ever did in life.
He was wasting his talent, his gift, on the
movies. People often said that in print when
praising the proletarian fiction he used to
write. I suppose that’s why I started thinking
Thomas Fuchs
A
Susan, Daniel and Jake Fuchs in 1953
about it. He should start writing about real
life again, I told him. In a novel, of course,
preferably about Brooklyn. A real place.
Real writing.
Pop was often irritable, but he never got
angry when I pressed him on these points.
It only seemed to make him tired. Perhaps
he felt he had brought this punishment on
himself by sniffing at my science fiction,
which at this time I resolved to read no
more. Nor did he ever try to explain what
our family was doing here, in phony Beverly Hills, or why he ground out stories that
only boobs would think were about anything
real.
He could have explained, I think; there
were answers, really only one answer, and
he knew it, or he almost knew it. Possibly
it embarrassed him; but it’s more likely
that he sensed that I was sad and struggling
and had a powerful motive for craving
what I thought real and shunning what I
thought wasn’t, so that it was best for him
to say nothing. I might have understood
his answer, despite being so young, but it
wouldn’t have helped me.
What I believe now is that, no matter
what was in his mind when he urged my
mother to have me read something real, he
Formerly in New York City
Sometimes I look at a section of skyline
and attempt to digitally remove
all the buildings less than one hundred years old.
It never works, because the eye is not
a computer. The eye is stubbornly
retentive of reality. But now and then
it comes on me, this need to see
for myself how this place used to be.
Old photographs are fine — but they are
only so many versions of how things
were formerly in New York City.
A lot has changed in one hundred years —
some things inarguably, like architecture
and public sanitation, and some more open
to debate, like belief in god or people’s
fetishistic treatment of their dogs.
I don’t think dogs used to wear coats and boots —
but who knows? Maybe if I could just remove
those towers of glass and lower my eyes
ever so slowly toward the ground, I’d glimpse
the pooches of 1902 mincing along
the slate sidewalks in top hats and spats.
The eye is a pragmatic organ — it’s designed
to look at what’s ahead, not to peer at what’s
behind as if hoping to apply some lost
anodyne — but the brain can be wayward
and fanciful. For example, this business
of time travel — what good is that?
Understanding where we’re at is much
more to the point, because skyscrapers
almost never disappear and going
back in time like some crusading ghost
wouldn’t really change what’s here.
delighted both in Beverly Hills and writing
movies because they were, in large part,
anyway, something other than real. Movie
people, so free of the sense of limits that
had informed his old life in Brooklyn, particularly fascinated him for the same reason,
except when they wanted to know what he
thought about John Dos Passos.
I finally figured this out years later,
when I was about 30 and Pop had retired
from screenwriting. Or it may be that he
just couldn’t get a job; the business had
changed. My wife and I, still living then
in Southern California, would occasionally
come to the house in Beverly Hills for dinner, and after dinner he always told stories.
I disliked hearing them because I had
worked so hard to become a normal person,
and most of the stories were about movie
people whose moods were so volatile and
antics so peculiar that I often wanted to ask
my mother, “Can’t you get him to talk about
something real?”
H
ere’s Pop telling a story about a director and two actors. When he says
the director’s name, he glances at me as if
expecting me to recognize it, and I think I
do. Possibly I played Ping-Pong with the
man a few times by somebody’s pool. But
I don’t change my expression, which is as
blank as I can make it. Call him, the man,
Lowenstein.
The two actors, in a movie this moderately famous director is shooting, telephone
him and pretend to be emergency room
docs. Star X and Star Y, they themselves,
have been in a terrible car accident. Lowenstein panics.
Listening to this, my pretty, blond wife
smiles. Her moods are hard to read. She
Pop’s Academy Award,
proudly displayed on
the top bookshelf in our
den, was for a musical,
in which people kept
jumping up and singing
and dancing, as no one
ever did in life. He was
wasting his talent, his
gift, on the movies.
may or may not be genuinely amused by the
story. I can’t tell, but Pop thinks he’s making a big hit. Stubbing out his cigarette and
leaping to his feet, he enacts the role of the
horrified Lowenstein.
“What! What! Hugh St. Thomas is
dead, you say? Oh, just terribly disfigured.
Well, that’s bad, too. I’m coming, tell the
dear boys I’m coming!”
And on and on. Eventually the actors start giggling, and Lowenstein gets
wise. Somewhat out of breath by now, Pop
concludes his routine by miming the slamming down of a phone. He collapses on the
couch, lights up another smoke.
“Oh, he was marvelous,” Pop wheezes,
meaning Lowenstein, but not just Lowenstein. Everything. The life down there.
“Marvelous!” A science fiction word. At
that time I despised him for saying it.
Freya and I moved to Northern California. I got a college teaching job. We started
a family. The kids grew up. Pop’s in the
bookstores again.
“Marvelous.” That’s the word that comes
to me when I think of Beverly Hills, where
I grew up, and the movies in those days
and movie people. And I understand now
that those marvelous stories Pop told us
after dinner, told with such vigor that he exhausted himself, were the germs of movies
he lacked the energy to write.
Marvelous. It’s not the opposite of real.
It’s something in itself, but whatever it is,
it’s gone from the movies now, long gone.
I think that’s why he quit writing them. I’d
guess that it’s mostly gone from everything,
no matter how many video games they sell.
It’s certainly slipped away from me, the
marvelous, and I miss it. I miss him.
Jake Fuchs lives in Berkeley. His fiction has
appeared in the RCR and elsewhere.
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