The Theoretical Foot (26 page)

What would have ruffled the feathers of the Lucy Pendletons of the world is that neither Sue Harper nor Sara Porter is made to suffer. Neither becomes pregnant and is then cast off, neither drinks arsenic or succumbs to alcoholism or, alone and abandoned, goes mad and throws herself beneath the wheels of a train.

And Lucy Pendleton is portrayed as the very embodiment of those who judge others on grounds of impropriety, snidely condemning her hostess while going ahead to enjoy the wonderful food
served at her hosts' table. Lucy will not deign to pick up the tiny game bird served at dinner using her fingers, as the others all do, as she's deemed this unmannerly, behavior she is righteously superior to. She then sneaks into the kitchen to secretly gorge on bread dipped in mayonnaise.

This is the book Dillwyn Parrish's sister read in manuscript directly after Fisher's having finished it. If her sister-in-law strenuously objected to her own portrayal in the famous literary personnage of Ann Garton Temple, she was even more offended on behalf of her friend Mary, who'd been a guest at Le Paquis, and who appears as the Lucy Pendleton character. Anne Parrish called the book hurtful, writing in a letter to Fisher dated 3 February 1940, she wished she hadn't read it, saying: “I feel as though I had overheard confidences not meant for me, eavesdropping unwillingly on you and Dillwyn talking together.” And Fisher had, in fact, done little to cover her traces in that she'd named the brother and sister in her story “Tim” and “Ann,” then had Lucy go on and on about the incestuous valence of their relationship.

Anne Parrish stressed that in her view the book simply shouldn't be brought out, but added, “[The] time may come when you feel that you do want to publish something with so much force and so much beauty, after so much work. If [so], I think you should use still another pseudonym. Not for my sake, not even for Mary's . . . but to spare yourself and Dillwyn embarrassment.”

Fisher's friends, Lawrence Clark Powell and his wife Fay Powell, had been given the book in manuscript at the same time. Each was enormously pleased by it, liking it almost without reservation, their letters and that of Anne Parrish's arriving at Bareacres almost concurrently. Having received their words of praise, Fisher wrote saying these “were as manna to me, since only the day before they came I learned that it will be impossible to publish the thing and furthermore that I had wrought irrevocable damage to one of the few friendships that I care about. I was shocked and terribly surprised. But Tim has always said that I am basically naïve and I suppose that was proof that he's correct. Anyway . . . it did me good
to learn that you both thought the book had its good points. I'll put it away and start soon on another one.”

Indeed, a year or so after Dillwyn's death, Fisher, needing money, did submit the book to her publisher Duell, Sloan and Pearce. It was rejected for reasons unknown but may well have had to do with its full-frontal attitude toward women's sexuality. And though another writer might have thought to rewrite the book in order to deal with her sister-in-law's objections, Fisher didn't do so.

Though there's no indication she ever became anxious to see this book in print, neither did Fisher suppress it. Having put the manuscript away, she seemingly cleared it from conscious memory as she struggled to recover from the numbingly painful events of those years, its pages lying somewhere untouched until late in the 1970s. Henry Volkening, her longtime agent, had died and she was now represented by Robert Lescher who was newly energetic on her behalf. Fisher obliged Lescher's enthusiasm by sending him everything she had, including the typescript of this book.

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher simply didn't consider herself a novelist. When urged by her third husband Donald Friede to write the novel that became
Not Now but Now,
Fisher told him: “But I am not a novelist. I've been reading novels all my life, and I don't want to write one.” It seems to have slipped her mind that once—and not so very long before—she
had
written one, a love story as tragic as it is beautiful, capturing the historic and incandescent moment she'd spent with the one person she ever completely adored, the man she'd marry and would then almost immediately lose. Lost, too, would be their almost implausibly idyllic life in what now seems not just another country, but another world, the one time and place, as Fisher would later say, she was ever entirely happy.

She'd typed the title page to read:

The Theoretical Foot

A Novel by M.F.K. Parrish