LIDIA VIANU

Poets' New York

RUTH FAINLIGHT

Interviews with Ruth Fainlight
Published in LIDIA VIANU, Desperado Essay-Interviews, Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti, 2006

© Lidia Vianu
 

LIDIA VIANU: Were you born in New York? When? What was it like when you were a child?

RUTH FAINLIGHT: I was born in New York – more precisely, in a nursing home on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, in May 1931. At that time, so I have been told, it was a pleasant neighborhood of wide streets and newly built apartment buildings for aspiring young lower-middle class families, many of whom were Jewish. But my family moved to England when I was five years old, so my memories are few. I clearly remember being taken to see my mother in the same nursing home, when my brother was born more than three and a half years later, and vivid images like snapshots of playing in the park, boating on the lake with my father, watching the sun come through the window blind in my bedroom while I had my afternoon nap, and sitting on the floor of my aunt’s porch (my mother’s only sister, Ann, who lived nearby, and with whom I spent much time, especially after my brother’s birth), drawing or playing with small sample books of cloth, choosing which colours and textures I liked best to dress my dolls.


LV. Is childhood in New York any different from childhood in a smaller town or in the country?

RF. In England, we lived in London, in a middle-class suburb in the northern part of the city, a few streets away from my father’s sister and her family. I imagine my childhood was much the same there as it would have been in New York City.


LV. Could you feel as a child that New York was a multicultural city? Did you fit in easily or did you feel an outsider?

RF. I was very aware as a child in America that I lived in a multi-cultural city.

My mother had arrived in the city with her family when she was about six years old, among the tens of thousands of immigrants who went to the USA in the first years of the 20th century. The town where she was born was then in the Austro-Hungarian empire, then became Romanian, Polish, and is now in the Ukraine. Sometimes the people who visited my family then, in the 1930s, were refugees from Germany or Austria. My aunt’s neighbor and best friend was an Italian woman, and I was often in her kitchen while they talked and laughed together. So I was used to being with people from many different backgrounds. New York has always been a city of immigrants.


LV. As a teenager in New York, what was your cultural life? TV? Theatres? Movies?

As a student and later, what magazines did you like to read? When did you become interested in New York’s literary life and what places did you go to, what New York reviews did you read?

RF. My mother, brother and myself returned to New York in June 1941 as ‘British refugees’, while our father remained in England. At first we lived in a small apartment in Manhattan. My brother and I attended summer classes at the local school, and she worked as a secretary. But it was too difficult for her to work and look after us, and we were sent to a boarding school on Long Island. While we were there, she was injured in a road accident. Our aunt Ann, who was now living outside Washington DC where her husband worked, came to collect my mother from the convalescent home, and the two of us from the school, to live with her in Arlington, Virginia. My cultural life then consisted of attending art classes for schoolchildren every Saturday morning at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, after which I would go home and listen to the opera matinee broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York with my aunt, who was a great lover of opera. She was a cultivated woman, and had many books on her shelves which I am sure had a strong influence on me. But I had always read a lot, and can still remember writing poems when I was ten and eleven years old – in fact, while we were still in New York, I read some of them on a children’s radio program, and had a few published in some sort of magazine (but their titles, and what the magazine was called, etc, is all lost in the mists of time). By the age of twelve I was already quite sure that I was an ‘artist’ – but whether that would manifest in painting or in writing was still uncertain!


LV. Why did you leave New York? Was it an easy decision? If you were to decide to come and live in London again, would you still do it?

RF. I left America because my parents decided it. My father had been in the war and after he was demobilised in England, he decided to stay there. (He was English; but had gone to America as a young man, met my mother, married, etc etc.)


LV. What was the impact of London on you? How old were you when you came to London?

RF. Coming to England at the age of 15 was an enormous shock – I was a real American teenager, used to an entirely different style of life: accommodation, school, food, etc. etc. It was not long after the end of the war, and a much poorer and harder life than I had come from.


LV. Who were your literary friends in New York and who are now your literary friends in London?

RF. Although I have not lived in America since then – apart from two semesters as poet-in-residence at Vanderbilt University, in 1985 & 1990 – I continue to think of myself as more American than English, and have kept my American passport. Many of my literary friends are Americans who either live in England or often visit the country. And in fact most of my friends, literary or otherwise, are not English, but ‘foreigners’ living in London – with whom I seem to feel more at ease than with ‘real’ English people.


LV. Where do you feel more at home, London or New York?

RF. Because my circle is made up of others like myself – English people who grew up in other countries, people who came to England as refugees or for personal reasons such as marriage, and of course, those Americans who adore England! – I feel very much at home in London. But in New York I feel entirely at home, like a fish in water. It is my place, finally. (Although I doubt if I shall live there again.)


LV. Does your poetry have traces of New York imagery? What is the emblematic feature of New York in your soul?

RF. I believe there are many traces of New York, or American, imagery in my poetry. When I first met Adrienne Rich in the early 1970s, I was intrigued, and gratified (because it seemed to confirm such an important aspect of my identity), when she told me how surprised she had been to see me referred to as an English poet, because to her ear, my poems sounded so American.


June 2005