Paul Auster: Truth is Tough, but Beautiful

On the non-fiction

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

This month, I’m looking at writer Paul Auster from a few different angles. So far, we’ve looked at him in the news, introduced his fiction, and had a look at his intersections with critical theory. Next week, I’ll investigate some of his film work with you.

Today, I’m focusing on his non-fiction and, more specifically, his memoirs and autobiographical writing. Although the interesting thing about Auster’s memoirs is while at once intensely personal and detailed, they also stand for everyone.

And let’s throw Burning Boy into the mix, though it is not a memoir of course, he writes the biography (“The Life and Works…”) of Stephen Crane with some of the same stylistic and thematic features as he writes of his own life journey.

They also blend with his fiction. Although the fictional stories are imaginative, Auster plays with many of the same ideas there.

How much of fiction is real life? How would you write your memories for others to experience?

Death and childhood

Auster’s first full book of non-fiction was an early text following the death of his father. Portrait of An Invisible Man was first published in 1979, several years before City of Glass propelled him to literary fame. [Linked text is the one used for citation.] This shorter work — a 78 page essay — became the first part of a volume called The Invention of Solitude, published in 1982, that contains other essays, mainly on the act of writing.

Auster was not close to his father; he calls him the “invisible man” because although he did a lot of things with friends or family, he never really seemed present. It was as if he were drifting through life without ever leaving a mark. He was not even physically present at the birth of Auster, his first child; the author implicitly posits through the tale that maybe this experience or emotion was too far out of the range of his father’s capabilities.

The death of his father in his mid-sixties was a shock. Going through all the things in his house became a strange practice, causing Auster to reflect on his always-absence as well as his own finitude: “And then, suddenly, it happens there is death….We are left with nothing but death, the irreducible fact of our own mortality” (p. 3). The moving through objects and deciding what should be thrown away, sold, or given away…apparently nothing would be kept. Auster writes:

Things are inert: they have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. They are there and yet not there: tangible ghosts, condemned to survive in a world they no longer belong to. (p. 9)

Looking at the description of this process again now, I thought of the touching and subtle film Driveways (Andrew Ahn, 2019), where a woman cleans out her dead sister’s home. There are many parallels: the young son, the distance in the relationship, the existential questions. Essentially, both Auster’s memoir and Ahn’s film show the way we confront ourselves through the emptiness and abstract memories death leaves behind. The gaps and puzzles seem to lead us to changes in our relationship with others and the world we inhabit.

Despite the distance of Auster’s relationship with his father, he discusses the invisible man’s caring nature toward his sister who experienced severe mental illness and a trip his dad made to Paris when he was ill and poor, finally showing pride for what Auster was able to accomplish through a ghostwriting deal in Mexico.

But it is disappointing when the father pays little attention to his grandson, Daniel. It’s tragic to read the scenes where Auster describes loving his son in ways his father did not love him, knowing that Auster’s son and baby granddaughter have since died in such a terrible way and that he was estranged from his son for quite some time, although he does not discuss this in interviews. [I discuss this in the first issue of this series.]

The ending of the memoir now reads very differently:

Past two in the morning. An overflowing ashtray, an empty coffee cup, and the cold of early spring. An image of Daniel now, as he lies upstairs in his crib asleep. To end with this.

To wonder what he will make of these pages when he is old enough to read them.

And the image of his sweet and ferocious little body, as he lies upstairs in his crib asleep. to end with this. (p. 78)

Playing with pronouns

Auster writes about his experiences with death to a great extent. He includes reflection on learning that his grandmother had killed his grandfather (judged as self defense, but Auster isn’t sure) and also attempted suicide. Even though these tragedies happened before he was born, he considers them a part of his experience. Somehow this is not only from a historical or psychological view: it seems to be a part of his body.

Later, Winter Journal explores his own humanness and body following the death of his mother. Although published in 2012, a decade after her death, he discusses the way this death shocked him even more, giving him panic attacks:

“I didn’t see my father’s corpse, but I saw my mother’s corpse. It’s a horrible thing to see your parent dead, especially your mother, because your body began inside her body. You started in that person. It’s a very, very traumatic business.”

Of course, he was also much closer with his mother, raised mainly by her. The memoir includes details of his own life and childhood as well as his relationship with his mother, but it does so in the assumption that these things also “happen to everyone else” (p. 377 or p. 1 in original). That is, all people age (if they are lucky enough to keep living); all people have families, childhoods…all people experience seasons and bodily functions. He is talking simply about being alive, about the “phenomenology of breathing” (ibid).

And this is why he writes in the second person; it is a story for everyone. Auster often plays with pronouns and names in his books as well, including using forms of his own name as protagonists, complicating the first/second/third person experience. He explains this to Columbia Magazine (the university he also taught at for years):

“Writing in the first person would have been too exclusionary,” says Auster, who speaks in a velvety baritone with a slight nap, perhaps from the Dutch Schimmelpenninck cigarillos that he chain-smokes throughout the day. “I see that my experiences are so similar to everyone else’s, because we all have bodies, after all. Something always goes wrong with our bodies. Or right with our bodies. First person would have been pushing people away. Third would have been too distant. So second seemed just right, where I could address myself as an intimate stranger or an intimate other. But then the ‘you’ has this rebound effect on the reader, who gets sucked in, and is experiencing it in a different way than a first- or third-person text.”

He describes feeling unique as a child, thinking his imagination was something special, such as the “two secret letters [of the alphabet] that were known only to you” (p. 577). I really love the way he talks about boredom:

Boredom must not be overlooked as a source of contemplation and reverie, the hundreds of hours of your early childhood when you found yourself alone, uninspired, at loose ends, too listless or distracted to want to play with your little trucks or cars…. Dreaded boredom, long and lonely hours of blankness and silence, entire mornings and afternoons when the world stopped spinning around you, and yet that barren ground proved to be more important than most of the gardens you played in, for that was where you taught yourself how to be alone, and only when a person is alone can his mind be free. (pp. 592-3)

These ideas remind me of the many hours I spent looking out car windows as we drove from Massachusetts to visit relatives in Minnesota and Virginia. I still love to go for a drive or look out a train window for hours and let my mind drift. I still love to be alone.

At the end of the follow up Report from the Interior, there is a beautiful story of a reading challenge set by a teacher. Auster read well more than the other children and the teacher thought he was cheating, keeping him after class to berate him. Of course, Auster had simply been a voracious reader and the teacher eventually understood, handing him a handkerchief:

…and every time you think of about what happened to you that morning more than half a century ago, you are holding that handkerchief again and pressing it into your face. You were twelve years old. It was the last time you broke down and cried in front of an adult.

The passage highlights the intimacy of writing, for we - the readers - all witness Auster’s tears through these stories. And then in some way, we allow our own to exist more peacefully.

I do think the use of second person here allows us to superimpose our own memories more easily and also consider Auster as an ‘everyman’ despite his fame. Narrative perspective — including person and tense as well as the level of narrative omniscience — changes the way we understand a text.

Often, when I’m drafting a book, I play with different types of voice. It makes things a bit more difficult in the editing process! But it allows me to play with the ideas differently. In the first drafting sessions — the sketches — I allow whatever perspective that comes to mind to exist. Sometimes, we can also include other perspectives as frame / dialogue / epilogue / etc.. Writers: what do you do?

Non-linear journeys

These books read like memories feel: they are all over the place, often random. They play with the idea of fate and life’s journeys: Did x cause z? Am I remembering this episode correctly? What does the before have to do with the now?

We move quickly to different times in these books. The fictional tome 4 3 2 1 allows four different possibilities, parallel universes, dependent on different factors the protagonist experiences in childhood. Auster moves through writing with this awareness that life has possibilities and that we may be subtly moved to a different line of journey by outside factors. And then, by suggesting they coexist, he suggests we have a choice in how we react to the things that affect us in childhood. It seems this is why he keeps going back to that time in his autobiographical writing.

However, the tale of Stephen Crane that he gives us is mainly linear (in terms of time) for the nearly 800 pages that it graces. I guess when one is dealing with artifacts rather than memories, one may be taking unacceptable liberty if one is to play with the possibilities. And also: Crane is dead. His life has a linear outcome. Auster is still making sense of what his life means, as we all are.

Still, there is similarity in the way Auster includes many details of Crane’s life, finding as many small things to share as possible to help us get a well rounded picture of the author, whom he hopes is not “forgotten” as he has been over the years. His “disappearance” parallels the invisibleness of Auster’s father. Perhaps he considers that there may have been an inner being in his father that Auster had neglected to know. Perhaps this being can be shared through writing.

And then Crane also has parallels with Auster himself. The passages of a young writer trying to make his living echo those Auster writes of his life in Paris:

The four young men who shared the fourteen-dollar-a-month room had one double bed and a coal box to sleep in and on, three in the bed and one on the box, tucked in fully clothed because of the chill in the room…

When his father arrived at his tiny room in which Auster was suffering with the flu, he was appalled and sprang into action to help him. It seems that implicitly, Auster suggests he has been lucky: he, too, could have died very young like Crane. Instead at 76, he is still writing.

Writing about writing

Auster is known for his use of metafiction in his novels and he often writes about being a writer through his memories and even in the research he does of other writers. He is interested in what it means to be a writer, as an identity and philosophy.

Auster was in a funk with his writing before his father’s death, no longer sure about poetry and translations. A reawakening in prose coincided with the death of his father. Perhaps the experience of losing someone so close and yet so distant at the same time sparked him to dig deeper in his writing in the years that followed. He links the two experiences together.

It was attendance at a modern dance performance that initially got Auster to write prose. As discussed in Winter Journal and this interview, he was suddenly able to write again:

Then, as I’ve described in Winter Journal, I went to that dance rehearsal, and something happened. A revelation, a liberation, a fundamental something. I immediately plunged into writing White Spaces, which I happened to finish the night my father died. I went to bed at two a.m., I remember, a Saturday night/Sunday morning, thinking how this piece, White Spaces, was the first step toward a new way of thinking about how to write. Then the phone rang early the next morning, just a few hours later. It was my uncle on the line telling me my father had died that night. That was the shock. Coinciding with the fact that I had returned to prose, that I felt it was possible for me to write in prose, finally, after so many years of struggling to write fiction, and then finally abandoning it.

Here are a few other examples —

From The Book of Memory (p. 187):

Written language absolves one of the need to remember much of the world, for the memories are stored in the words. The child, however, standing in a place before the advent of the written word, remembers in the same way Cicero would recommend, in the same way devised by any number of classical writers on the same subject: image wed to place.

From “Reznikoff x2” (p. 373 of Collected Prose, 2003):

Charles Reznikoff is a poet of the eye. To cross the threshold of his work is to penetrate the prehistory of matter, to find oneself exposed to a world in which language has not yet been invented. Seeing, in his poetry, always comes before speech.

From “Hand to Mouth” (pp. 175-6 of Collected Prose, 2003), after a discussion of writing several plays and novels that were abandoned then seeing some of his articles published in the Columbia Daily Spectator:

When I look back at those days now, I see myself in fragments. Numerous battles were being fought at the same time, and parts of myself were scattered over a broad field, each one wrestling with a different angel, a different impulse, a different idea of who I was.

In the above embedded video where Auster talks about writing Winter Journal, he also discusses the act of writing as a strange sort of enjoyment. At once “hard work” and “exhausting”…it give him a kind of “pleasure” all the same.

I would posit that writing is living for Auster. He has said many times in different interviews or in writing that it is a thing he cannot control, that he must write in order to live. This short response to a question from Yale Daily News seems to sum it up:

Q: Let’s start with writing on writing. Some of your characters are writers who try to find meaning in their lives through writing. Do you see them as reflections of yourself?

A: Those characters are writing in different areas and in different ways. In any case, they are a way to think about how to be alive, I suppose. I think that’s the function they serve. It’s not that I follow their literary careers or anything like that. Their writing reflects a state of inwardness and self-questioning.

If you are a writer, does writing feel like at least a part of your life force? Or does it haunt you? Is it a compulsion, a desire? Is it rational or does it move to imaginary worlds?

I often think writing is this kind of life force for me. Less about publication or profession, the act of writing in itself helps me get in touch with my authenticity, helps me let go of external forces that do not serve me, and helps me to find the beauty in the world. I wrote a lot before I understood why I was doing it.

I also think writing can be something I can dive too far into — too much writing depletes me rather than energizes. It is a classic example of a pharmakon — a poison or a remedy. Auster speaks of it in this way, almost as a curse, and often dissuading young writers to go into the profession unless they must. But at the same time, his joy can be clearly witnessed in his interviews (including the above, in which he talks about this strange kind of joy). Perhaps we need the lows with the highs to make it meaningful.