Fox: Well that’s the way I feel about it. I just suddenly thought of a bird and the way nestlings go up to the mother in the nest. We saw a nature film the other night about a bear in winter and the cubs being born and how they nuzzled her. Some people seem to feel that life is like that. With children and whatnot. That there’s a kind of selflessness, which I don’t think one thing or the other about. There’s no self there. It’s all expressed in terms of nestling.
Rumpus: Do you think finally love is not enough sometimes?
Fox: I don’t think it is ever. I think knowledge and thought are not enough either. I mean sometimes when you’ve eaten a good meal you feel full, there’s that moment. Or listening to music. Beethoven, the 5th Symphony. Mozart’s Piano Concerto—there are all kinds of pleasures. ‘Night and Day’ by Cole Porter. (Points to a painted manhole cover on her wall) The artist took a plaster cast of a manhole cover. Every time I look at it I feel a terrific sense of the possibilities of life. There are moments when we feel great after a little whiskey in the evening, or crème brulee, or the feeling for one’s child, the feeling for one’s friend and all those things make up a life for some people.
It’s very interesting to think about the big bang. What did it take place in? That’s what I’m always thinking about. The big bang.
Rumpus: Did you ever envision a day when people would be carrying around small electronic devices and sometimes staring at them with smiles and frowns on their faces?
Fox: I hear people going along the street and my first thought is they are crazy, they’re talking to themselves. It’s so automatic. My husband has a cell phone so he can call me. I heard a guy on the subway once say to another man who was sitting with a child on his lap, he said children today are much smarter than they used to be and I thought of Thomas Hardy and Charlemagne. I thought how being smart now means being electronically wired so that you understand all these things. But it’s the same human intelligence at work. It’s both remarkable and stupid at the same time. Look at the Kindle.
Rumpus: Have you tried it or seen it?
Fox: I remember seeing somebody reading on the subway.
Rumpus: Do you think all the technology is doing something to us a species?
Fox: Oh I think it always does. The first tablets, ten thousand years ago, they were found in Amarna in the Fertile Crescent and they were lists because there was no proper language as we know it. There were lists of what belonged to a temple. Seven casts of wine, fourteen goats and so forth. Just lists. I learned about them at Columbia from an archeologist. Language changed everybody. At the same time I read a book about the cave painters. Thirty-thousand years ago they knew about perspective and I read a quote from Picasso who said we haven’t learned anything in the last ten thousand years. They didn’t have self-consciousness because they painted stick figures except for sexual parts. They had perspective, the horses hooves seemed to come out—the bison and the mammoths. They were wonderfully detailed. There were caves in Spain and France and then they found underwater caves in the Mediterrean. The sea had risen in the last forty thousand years. They began to dive and explore the caves. They found these extraordinary paintings. But then these stick figures. There was no sense of the person, the individual. But they were wonderful painters. I wonder about it. They weren’t changed by their painting. But gradually a change came about. It has a lot to with religion I think. Religion came from someplace as an explanation I suppose. But then the wish for an explanation must have come from some place too. The self came gradually in bits and pieces.
Rumpus: You said you are working more on articles now.
Fox: Yes, I’ve got a piece coming out in the Yale Review. I did have this piece in the New York Review of Books in the December 2nd issue. I may go back to a book.
Rumpus: I read at one point you were writing a novella about the Cathar massacre in Béziers, France during the 1300’s.
Fox: Yes I started that. It interested me so. I read a lot about it. I was very struck by the inhumanity of each of us towards the others. The Bishop told passing crusaders to kill Cathars in the village of but there were only 20 Cathars within a population of 200. And the crusaders asked the Bishop, this is purported in the archives, they asked, what should we do with the others? And the Bishop said, “Kill them all, God will know his own.” And I thought that was a horrible statement. It’s just what the Jihadists state now. So we haven’t escaped, in some way, from the past. It’s still with us.
Rumpus: You might go back to it?
Fox: No, I don’t think so. It was one of those efforts one makes. It’s too much. I can’t absorb anymore. How did they comb their hair for example. I started it and I wrote about thirty pages. The literalness of life is such—unless you are Kafka, then you can write the way he did. Not that anybody else has ever.
Rumpus: Is there a work of yours you champion more than others?
Fox: I liked ‘Perlita’ in The Coldest Winter very much. That section. I feel I’ve written a lot of books and I have. I’ve written thirty-one books and published them all. Jonathan Lethem said once that I wrote too many children’s books. He meant that for me. That I’d be pegged as a kid’s book writer. Many of my children’s books like The Slave Dancer and the One-Eyed Cat were meant to be read as novels. They are only passed onto to children by people in this country, but in Europe they are looked at much differently. But still I don’t know that children’s book are a different category. When I think of Wind in the Willows and Robin Hood and his Merry Men and Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson—all of those books I read as a kid.
Rumpus: Huckleberry Finn.
Fox: Oh yes, I went to St. Louis and I looked down at the Mississippi from the airplane. And thought of that raft and Huck on it.
Rumpus: A long time ago.
Fox: Yes it was.
