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- - - - SAVE ME, ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER! Part 2 of an Interview with Paul Collins About
BY TOMMY THORNHILL - - - - Q: Lady Into Fox reminded me of two other novels from this time that share identity and transformation as central themes. The first is Kafka's Metamorphosis, written in 1915 but not translated into English until the late 1930s. Collins: Yeah, that was one of the first things I thought of when reading it. It is entirely possible that he read it. His mother was a translator, so the idea of having foreign literature lying about the house was probably not all that strange to him. But it is a fairly universal allegory. A story of your wife suddenly turning into a fox... there's a certain sense of absurdity to Lady Into Fox, a goofiness to his having to deal with cooking for a fox, playing cards with a fox, operating a stereoscope for a fox. Yet it also has a very dark core, a dilemma that I think everyone runs into sooner or later. I mean, one of the major themes of Lady Into Fox is having someone you are close to, a family member or a spouse, getting drastically altered in an instant. How do you deal with the aftermath? How do you maintain that familial bond after they have been utterly altered? At some point in most people's lives, some family member is changed by old age or an accident or something, and they have to grapple with this. In a weird way, that is what happened to Garnett himself. He watched a number of his Bloomsbury colleagues die around him, either committing suicide or declining into illness. He outlived them all. Q: Yet, when he wrote this he was only twenty-two. Collins: That is one of the strange things about the book. One thing that occurs to me is that the aftermath of World War I may have had something to do with it. He was a conscientious objector... Q: [John Maynard] Keynes got him out? Collins: Right. But a number of people around him were either not returning from the war or coming back terribly altered from who they had been. I'm quite sure that he witnessed many families experiencing this. How do you deal with this as a family? How do you go on from there? Q: The second novel I was thinking of is Virginia Woolf's Orlando, and it came out in 1928. Do you know if Lady Into Fox had any influence on that? Collins: That is kind of a provocative idea. She certainly did read Lady Into Fox and Man in the Zoo as well. To a certain extent they were all influencing one another. It was a relatively small circle and they were all reading one another's work and all responding to it in letters, if not actually publishing it in the case of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. So it is quite possible. You know, there's also a French novel from 1961 by Vercors called Sylva, which is his reworking of Lady Into Fox. It grasps that underlying allegory; in this case the transformation is into a heroin addict. Q: That is interesting in light of Garnett's pseudonymous first novel—I found it earlier on Advance Book Exchange for $18,500—which is called Dope Darling: A Story of Cocaine. The plot of Dope Darling is about a man who is torn between two loves, one of whom is addicted to cocaine. Collins: I hadn't even thought about that! He only glances over it in his autobiography as something he needed to knock out for some money. But in the context of that later French book, yeah, there's that shared idea of an ordinary person being taken over by some sort of animality. Q: Garnett is very thorough in describing the practical problems that you would encounter if someone turned into a fox. You can't have any dogs or birds about. Collins: I think that the matter-of-fact nature of the narrative is one of the things that make this book work. There are a few pages in the beginning where the narrator is wondering aloud how this sort of thing could happen. Basically, once it happens it happens. There is not any real attempt at explaining it. It is basically taken as a given: here is the situation; now Mr. Tebrick has to deal with it. Down to a real practical level: how do you play cribbage with a fox? Q: Didn't Garnett go by the nickname "Bunny"? Collins: I don't know if he referred to himself that way, but everyone else did. The letters Virginia Woolf sent him address him as Bunny. It doesn't seem that anyone called him David. Q: Interesting nickname in light of writing a novel about a fox that at one point tears apart a bunny. It further made me wonder if the novel is an allegory for a tortured romantic life: Does Silvia want to be with him? How can he love her? Can settling for unrequited love be satisfactory? Collins: Almost the story of one's ex. Q: Exactly. Silvia is trying to figure out how to interact with her ex-husband, whom she no longer loves but is still in love with her. And poor Mr. Tebrick doesn't realize that the object of his affection is not the person he thinks she is, even though she is telling him, "I am not the person you think I am. I am a vixen." Once Silvia is in a good spot, married with pups, she can have Tebrick back in her life in a different role. Collins: Right. [Laughs] "You can be uncle Tebrick now."
OTHER McSWEENEY'S FEATURES:
Save Me, Andrew Lloyd Webber! By Tommy Thornhill Laurienzo Peewee Hockey League Disclaimer By D. Byard Cox Thursday List Insanity: Politics Edition! An Excerpt from The Convalescent By Jessica Anthony Philip Colavito, Mob Accountant By Leonard Pierce |
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