[In the following interview, Gray discusses the stylistic and thematic aspects of her novel October Blood.]

Francine du Plessix Gray's third novel, October Blood, takes place mainly in the ultra-urban, high-powered New York of High Fashion. Gray knows the territory well. Her mother, as Tatiana of Saks, was a designer of hats; her stepfather, Alexander Liberman, became editorial director of Condé Nast. Today Francine Gray lives a quiet life in rural Connecticut with her husband, painter Cleve Gray.

October Blood takes place, Gray says, “at the heart of a sexual-industrial complex which advised hundreds of thousands of women how to comb their hair, keep their men, feed their guests, what paintings to hang on the walls, what poets to name-drop at lunch and what novels, plays and beaches to discuss at dinners.”

Gray feels that although her new book's settings, characters and temper are significantly different, it completes a thematic trilogy with Lovers and Tyrants and World without End, her two previous novels. Two of the strongest linking elements are the self-searching and strong, if often antagonistic, family bonds of her protagonists. Gray's own relationships with her parents have fueled her writing—from her attempt to shut out memories of her natural father, who died in the French Resistance, to her rejection and later acceptance of her mother's values.

[Petroski:] How do you see October Blood fitting in with your two previous novels? Did you consciously think in terms of a certain readership as you wrote?

[Gray:] No, I never think of a specific audience—horrible thought! I can only think of the reader as some ideal angelic mind with whom I strive to communicate. I love my reader, and try to be kind.

October Blood does share the major themes of my other two novels but evolves them in more comical, fabulist ways. First and foremost, the search for community in our nomadic times. The protagonists of all my novels are solitary, fatherless persons who have been deracinated from their original tribal terrain by war or other circumstances and who seek for a family—either real or synthetic—in which to anchor. The family into which October Blood's protagonists assemble is very eccentric and bittersweet.

Another theme equally central to all three novels is women's need for adventure and solitary quest. Throughout history many of us have lusted for a Utopia of departure and abnegation, a fantasy of chucking it all, leaving all family duties and worldly goods behind. That's what the Brontës and Kate Chopin and Colette and Doris Lessing have written about—this is the female impulse most tabooed by society, and that's why it interests me so.

The women in October Blood are all the more burdened with the material dross of life because they purvey the arts of seduction, so their manner of flight is bound to be all the more dramatic. So here the theme of flight and severance is elaborated on an almost mythic level. I begin early in this century with the great-grandmother leaving her sumptuous Edwardian trappings for a life of abnegation in the African desert. This leave-taking is projected as fable in the memory of the protagonist, Paula, who will eventually take flight in her own exotic manner.

The third theme that binds October Blood to the earlier novels is the primacy of the mother-daughter bond. It's been the major preoccupation in women's writing in the past few years, and I caught the bug early on. But here, too, the mother-daughter theme is made more absolute by being sensed first in its mythic dimension—through the invisible but constantly remembered Edwardian grandmother.

Isn't it ironic that all these women you describe are so asexual, yet they deal in this loaded brand of femininity?

Isn't it? The women who teach and sell the business of seduction, who tell you how to trim your fanny and paint your face and keep your man in bed, who “dictate the fate of hems in the Western world,” as my heroine Paula puts it, are women who have little or no sex life … at least that's the way I've observed it over forty years of living with such women. It's a pragmatic, hard-dealing, often brutal world in which people seek each other out for the profit or gain they will get from each other, so that its glamour and glitter is admixed with great solitude. So—no sex, no easy friendships under all the sequins—these are pretty barren, solitary lives. And this isolation gives the book a pathos and tension which, I hope, balances out the antic black humor that pervades the rest of the work.

Four generations are so cleanly defined in October Blood, yet they work well together. Which were the characters that you mentioned were “given” to you in a space of a few weeks?

Paula came to me first, the protagonist. I had a close friend in college whose mother was a high priestess of fashion very similar to those in October Blood, who became schizophrenic in her senior year and had to be put away. It's not unlikely for daughters of fashion queens to go schizo, seeing the manic concentration on appearance, the hyped-up illusions on which we're brought up. My friend spent some eight years in the hospital, and when she came out she married, and had two children, and shortly thereafter died of cancer. I've been wanting to write about her for years. I suppose that a central impulse behind this book is my desire to resuscitate this beloved friend, give her the future she never had … much fiction, I think, is written out of a longing to bring the dead back to life.

The character of Nada, Paula's mother, was given me almost simultaneously. She's inspired by another dead friend, a woman of my mother's generation who was very close and very kind to me in my teenage years. Like Nada she was British, and like Paula's grandmother she had been a beauty fabled throughout Europe, with many recollections of her childhood in Edwardian England. I wrote a short story about her some fifteen years ago which didn't work as a narrative, but the germ of the character was there, and an entire world of high style to describe. Like my fictional Nada she splits for a kind of desert in her last years, leaving all that shit behind. All That Shit—that's what one of my closest friends and best readers wanted me to call the book.

Of course one of the few “names” the public recognizes from the fashion publishing world is that of Diana Vreeland. Do you think people will try to find her in October Blood?

Anyone who thinks that knows nothing about Vreeland. One has only to know the basic biographic facts of Vreeland's life, or read her book D. V., to know how totally unlike her my characters are. Diana had one long, loyal marriage and a super solid family life and was a loving, disciplined mother. Her sons have both had brilliant and focused careers, radically unlike a character like my Babs and her picaresque son Nicholas. I'll tell you a secret: The character of Babs might have been drawn from younger women of my generation who tried to imitate Diana Vreeland but who didn't begin to have her character and intelligence and imagination.

Yet much of the book satirizes the world of fashion, doesn't it?

Yes and no. Like my other books, October Blood is ultimately about vocation. The key line in the novel comes at the end, at Babs' graveside, when Julian, Paula's husband, says that the world of Best [the fashion magazine in the book] is as noble and as potentially redemptive as his own aspired-to career, the priesthood. As he puts it, it's actually more innocent and purer because it has to do with the mere illusion of power, with “dressing up dolly.” Whereas genuine evil exists in places where people have true power—doctors, lawyers, heads of state. I may satirize the fashion world in this book but I also redeem it—I think I show that its denizens are individuals capable of as much nobility and suffering and insecurity and spirituality as those who practice any other vocation.

You've said that in writing October Blood you discarded certain scenes from the real-life fashion world because they might be considered hyper-real. What sort of scene would you not use, and why?

Well, I had a scene in which a fashion editor takes a model and a photographer and three assistants to India because she's obsessed with the great idea of photographing Givenchy ball gowns in Calcutta with some sacred temple and lots of elephants in the background. They arrive and set up the camera, and the temple elephants have gone berserk and are chomping and foaming at the mouth, it's 10:00 a.m. and the model has already had three Benzedrines and two shots of whiskey.

And while the beggars start swarming around, the editor has the accessories from I. Magnin and Vuitton and Hermès unpacked and starts screaming at her assistants, “You only brought me seven shades of pink! How do you expect me to work with only seven shades of pink!” And the beggars are clawing at the fashion crew, the editor and the stoned model are throwing fits—all this in Calcutta—the elephant is defecating in front of the camera and the photographer has started in on his own load of Benzedrines. …

Well, this is a real-life story but it's too black and Monty Pythonesque for anything but a totally surreal text, and I'm still working in a fairly realistic frame. I had to discard it because it seemed out of measure with the credibility of my main narrative.

The dialogue in October Blood is remarkable, so witty and comic, so compact. Could you say a bit about how you brought it off?

One-liners of Babs' like “I could use a church service, kneeling is so good for the thighs,” made the comedy in the novel seem deceptively easy. I wrote the first draft much faster than I wrote the other novels precisely because I was brought up in that world, where people said things like “Western civilization is built on waste, glorious, endless waste.”

Going into the second draft I realized that I'd been working in the reverse of the proper novelistic process, in which you work from character towards dialogue and set scenes. I saw that my abundance of howlers created a very flat, two-dimensional surface, and I had to resculpt the next drafts into a third dimension to make my characters credible, like working and reworking a bas-relief into a sculpture-in-the-round. Most difficult.

Are you able to teach at the same time as you're working on a novel? How much time passed between those first inklings and the finished draft?

Oh, teaching has never really interrupted me. I lead such a solitary life here in New England, so isolated from both solid intellectual dialogue and the sound of everyday talk, that teaching is one of the most inspirational activities I have. The most disruptive interruptions are my ventures into political reporting, as in the almost book-length story I did on Klaus Barbie (“When Memory Goes: Vichy France and the Jews,” Vanity Fair, October and November, 1983). The analytic process that goes into historical writing of that sort is diametrically opposed to the subjective, Dionysiac turn of mind one has to nurture to let any lyrical or novelistic juices flow. All in all October Blood took three and a half years to write, with a block of some seven months really blown during my work on Barbie and the Holocaust in France.

You write non-fiction as well as fiction, but you always return to the novel.

While writing non-fiction you obviously don't learn as much about yourself as you do while writing novels. But paradoxically you also don't learn as much about the world. In fiction, precisely because you're working from the subconscious, inventing situations from the substratum of the communal psyche, you're in touch with a mythic reality which is more “real” than the common sense data of everydayness. I'm talking like a mystic, which I am.

Does it seem to you that many women writers now choose not to be married, not to have children, perhaps with the thought of protecting their time?

I can only speak for myself. I think some people need to have children in order to write, and I might be one of them. My sons are twenty-four and twenty-five now, and both brilliant at their vocations—one in finance, the other in art—and it's a luxury to have time to myself, but I miss them very much. Being a mother—and I was a very strong disciplinarian—is as much a part of my true nature as being a writer, and it's possible that I couldn't have done one without the other.

There's been so much obnoxious psychobabble written in the past decades about discarding the family to discover one's true “self,” et cetera. As far as I'm concerned, there's no self without community, the self is a myth. Community is the only basic reality. To the feminists who deride the sacrifices of parenting I answer with the words of Thomas Merton, one of my idols: “The idea that one can seriously cultivate his or her own personal freedom merely by discarding inhibitions and obligations, to live in self-centered spontaneity, results in the complete decay of the true self and of its capacity for freedom.”

Now one might see a contradiction between this communal ideal and my heroines' need for severance from traditional ties, but remember that they always return, in a new form, and ultimately my view is a feminist one which rejoins a quintessential spiritual quest—that the ultimate liberation is a liberation from the illusion of the senses.

You've been married to a painter for twenty-eight years. How has it helped your work, being married to someone involved in another of the arts?

Certainly it's worked better than living with another writer. I began as a painter, remember, and I think painters, when they do have a certain level of culture, are the most marvelous readers one can have. My husband reads some two novels a week—by other writers of course!—and occasionally publishes some splendid writing of his own on art, and is a particularly astute and accomplished editor. Whatever leaves my typewriter, I always give to my husband to read first, before sending it out to anyone.

I didn't learn English until I was twelve years old. French and Russian were my first languages, so Cleve Gray is my safeguard against all kinds of strange syntactical mistakes I still tend to make. And sometimes he rescues me by saying, “This is not ready to go out yet,” and I rework it. I hate to admit it, but in literary matters he's always right.

This studio is such an open, light place—do you do all of your work here?

Yes, I do, pacing and chewing sugar-free gum and drinking six varieties of herb teas from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. or so, with short breaks for exercising—tennis, swimming laps, yoga. But I leave the studio whenever I face a really tough problem and don't know how to proceed. Then I repair to my bedroom, which is dark green and very small and very claustrophobic and very womblike. I'm an early riser and I don't work in bed, I just like to lie on my bed to do my most difficult writing. Haven't a lot of women writers felt that need? Edith Wharton and Colette worked only while lying on their bed, I believe.

You've said that at times you're kept from your work by the sheer joy of living, the pleasures of family life.

I think that's partly because I've respected the kinds of inhibitions and obligations Merton speaks of. I've chosen to remain rooted in many traditions and in a rather conservative, religious world view, all while being a left-of-center political activist. The two get along extremely well in a Christian framework.

You know, I was born into relative poverty and a great aristocracy of manners, and I'm faithful to my heritage. Diana Vreeland once said: “Style! It helps you get down the stairs in the morning.” Well, I'll take that a step further: Style! It's what helped us to get down from the trees a million years ago.

Abiding to etiquette, answering mail, keeping orderly rooms, cooking and sharing fastidious meals are acts more than surface-deep. They're manifestations of a metaphysical and ethical order which bond us in more compassionate ways to other humans, civilizing forces without which we wouldn't have advanced beyond the Stone Age.

Too many of my colleagues—“left wing intellectuals,” if you will—have lost a sense of these civilities, and that's deplorable. Talent is never an excuse for rudeness. Manners are ethical and spiritual absolutes.

The standard hypothetical question: Is there a kind of novel you admire greatly and would love to write if you were given another incarnation as a novelist?

I envy works like Rushdie's Midnight's Children or Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting because they encompass a geopolitical, historical dimension, along with a marvelous lyric texture. I don't know of anyone outside of Bellow writing so inclusively in this country. Among “mentor novels” of an earlier generation, Mann's Dr. Faustus comes to mind, and Max Frisch's Homo Faber, and all of Kafka. I'm increasingly drawn to the German and Central European tradition.