Since hearing of the passing of Paul Auster last month I’ve been in a type of parted, limping, consciousness, with one that keeps trudging on while the other, stripped of twenty years and badly wounded, asks himself what it was all for? It had been that long since I had read his works. I attempted to go back to them, to search out what it was in them that had moved me so, but I realized I did not own a single one of his books. I even stopped by the Jefferson Library and they had none of his titles. This once so massive character had just withered away and died undramatically in his Brooklyn brownstone, while the city he once defined to me, held me in its loose grip of mundane intrigue, like if it was really just a grind, and I was just another bean.
Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within... By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere.
I read Auster in a dangerous time when my sense of self morphed with whatever art I consumed. Every film, book, and song, defined me in a new way. I came to Auster, a few days after having discovered Transtromer, who had written, in my rough translation, that:
the unanswered letters are gathered high above, like cirrostratus clouds foreboding a storm. They dampen the rays of the sun. One day I will answer them. One day when I'm dead and finally allowed to focus.
Or at least, when I'm so far away from here that I can find myself again. When I newly arrived walk 125th St, in the wind of dancing trash. I who love to stroll and disappear in the crowd, a letter T in the endless mass of text.
To disappear in a crowd. This was in the same breath of time as Wong Kar Wai released In The Mood For Love, where Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung kept moving painfully close to each other, to the rhythms of their Hong Kong block and the music of Astor Piazzolla, without ever quite colliding. The pull of City invaded me. I started to dream of abandoned blocks, because it wasn’t the center I desired but eerie industrial backwaters, with huffing sounds raising up behind desolate bridges. The Lovers on the Bridge, Stranger Than Paradise. It happened all so suddenly. Auster’s eyes on the book sleeve like bullet holes, his crossed arms, the burning cigarette. He became the emblem as much as the city became the frame. At that time, still held back by the provincial jail that was my hometown, with its neatly painted houses, the polite nods between neighbors, its perfectly tended lawns; I, for the first time, clenched a fist in the pocket of my trench coat and thought of steel and brick and pollution. The big city stepped out of my imagination as salvation and escape. The anonymity of it, that blur of culture and language, the faceless traffic, the subway trains full of strangers, the world minding it's own; I dreamt of it like the folding away of a curtain to unwrap my true self. I'd be allowed to - as Transtromer had written - finally focus, and do do the things I was set out to do. These ideas formed a branch so deep down on my trunk that from a certain angle, like from this angle upon hearing of Auster's passing, seem to make up my whole tree. The big city dweller, the silhouette in the dark window frame, the coat that flashes by on the street then is gone forever missing.
It could have been within a few weeks that I devoured them, one after the other, first reading City of Glass, then, at my friend's Martin’s house, a fellow fan, in his boys room, seeing the film Smoke with Harvey Keitel, finally, over a few hot summer days, I read my to that date favorite book, The Invention of Solitude. At the time Auster lay somewhere in the outskirts of the canon, out there beyond Kundera, for example, or any of the Nobels, known only by the chosen few. He was a writer my parents had never heard of. But most importantly, he was the writer of New York.
New York, at the time, I knew as the literary center of the world. The writers I admired - Jeffrey Eugenides, Donna Tartt, Brett Easton Ellis - all lived there. But on the same street in Brooklyn, the couples Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Kraus, and Siri Hulvsted and Paul Auster, all lived, forming the image of domestic literary bliss. Seeing pictures and films from those quintessential Brooklyn blocks that I had never visited, I imagined the insides filled floor to ceiling with books and stacks of paper. Out of these, Auster was my favorite, and also, by putting it in the title of his most famous work, the only one who had made New York his subject. So, at a time when all I wanted out of life was to learn how to write, it wasn't a creative writing program that sprung to mind, but New York. In Auster's books each mundane thing had a multitude of meaning. A phone that rang was an invitation to another story simultaneously going on down the road. The hidden would connect and light up a poetic, coincidental spectra of the world, something that I, where I was living, knew nothing about.
I still cannot pass The invention of Solitude on a book vendors table without picking it up and feeling its weight. Remembering it vaguely, mostly who I was when I read it, and the moment he smells something sour on the child's breath realizing the decay is already within him, or, City of Glass, wanting to recede against a lamppost and light up a cigarette, see the passing people like silhouettes, and Brooklyn like giant puzzle. To walk and walk and walk among the dim houses and stare up at the sole lit window, a block shimmering with mystery, tales. The massive forearms of Harvey Keitel in Smoke, walking like a boxer, his large hands on the delicate body of his camera. Yes, the works of Paul Auster only makes fragmentary appearances in my mind, feelings, phrases, images; probably because so much time, half a life, has passed since I read them, but partly also because it wasn't about the works, it was the idea of the man himself. The beauty of this man.
I wanted to be Paul Auster. I wanted his voice, his eyes, his dramatic air. Of course, I wanted to be him as he was then living in a huge brownstone in Park Slope with his cool intellectual world famous genius of a wife. But that dream seemed, even to me at that time, as far fetched. So I hung on to the the idea of Paul Auster as young, unsuccessful and poor, the way he described himself in The Red Notebook, living with the hilarious and probably even more brilliant writer Lydia Davis, in a borrowed house in the south of France. Exiled and beautiful, in an isolated and cold stone house next to a great forest, working in their respective wing on their respective dream, meeting sometime in the yard to talk. I believe the recount takes up three pages of the opening of The Red Notebook, by a writer who wrote two memoirs, and still it is what stands out when I try to imagine who Auster was. Him and Davis are living a hand to mouth existence, with a small allowance the owners of the house offer them for the care of their two labradors. Their only other income comes from translations (Davis would go on to become Americas foremost translator of Proust) and the occasional boarding of the American photographer James Sugar, who when on assignment in the region would pay them fifty francs per night and take them out for dinner. Auster (now dead from complications of lung cancer) describes the panic of nicotine withdrawal brilliantly, turning the sofa inside out searching for old butts. In a particularly difficult time they are down to an expired package of pie dough and a sack of onions which they, after having cooked lightly and tasted, decide to cook a little bit longer. At this time, after putting it back in the oven, they are so hungry they have to escape the fumes with a stroll, and accidentally they burn the pie.
The story seems funny now, but at the time it was anything but funny. We had fallen into a dark hole, and neither one of us could think of a way to get out. In all my years of struggling to be a man, I doubt there has ever been a moment when I felt less inclined to laugh or crack jokes. This was really the end, and it was a terrible and frightening place to be.
This was at four o'clock in the afternoon. Less than an hour later, the errant Mr Sugar suddenly appeared, driving up to the house in a cloud of dust, gravel, and dirt crunching all around him. If I think of it hard enough, I can still see the naive and goofy smile on his face as he bounced out of the car and said hello.
Mr Sugar treats them for dinner in town.
We ate copiously and well, we emptied many bottles of wine, we laughed our heads off. And yet, delicious as the food must have been, I can't remember a thing about it. But I have never forgotten the taste of that onion pie.
So again, it is not the romantic svelte dark eyed Auster, in a stone house, with a poor poet girl friend, so enwrapped in conversation walking through the forest that they burn their last food, that I desire, but that same Auster, decades later, looking back at himself from on top of all the success and recognition, adoring his own young romanticism. This is the Auster I wanted to be.
According to Saint Augustine the divine is the whole, and we are a reflection of the divine the same way as the movement of the fragmented earthly time is a reflection of eternity. And so now when I look back at myself through the idea of Auster, I see I have made some progress: who I am compared to who I was when I found him, has reached for it. There is a room full of books facing a quiet back yard in a Brooklyn brownstone. It isn’t a massive library or a mahogany desk, it isn't the majestic Park Slope, but on a smaller scale, a slightly decrepit top floor, with piles of fingered softcovers, in Greenpoint. It isn’t the composed genius of Auster, the ability to close a door and work for hours just stimulated by the workings of the mind, but it is the ability to smoke cigarettes and go for aimless walks through industrial wastelands in the nearby Newtown Creek. It’s the keepings of a beautiful, mysterious wife.
The only real contact with him I ever had was second hand. My friend Anton once worked at Shawn Fine Wine and Spirit down the street from Auster, who was one of their best clients, something he used to point out when he called in his orders. He usually ordered a case of white burgundy from a lesser known producer that Shawn Fine Wine and Spirit sadly one week ran out of. That time Auster came down himself to come up with a substitute, and let Anton guide him south down the Saône river to Mâconnais. In their conversation it became clear that what Auster really wanted was Sancerre, but that he found it too expensive. The week after his visit he called down to Anton and ordered another case, saying happily that it was not only better than his last house wine, it was also cheaper.
Since his passing I've taken a habit of picking up bottles of Sancerre on my wine runs (always with the same feeling of being ripped off) and it is a delicious wine. The aromas of gooseberry, grass, and needle, with its sharp stony minerality makes it very hard to substitute. Well, Anton might be able to do it. But with the feeling of Sancerre it is like smoking (one of Auster’s real great passions) it’s an addiction that is easy to fulfill. For me the Sancerre is the ability that for once, and only for a minute, feel superior to Auster. And really, when it boils down to it, wasn’t this all I set out to be? Anyway, for a very decisive moment when I decided upon New York City as my city, Paul Auster was my Northen star. I wouldn't have been the same without him. And now, for better or for worse, I’m left to figure out myself where to go next. And why I should go there. I curse how little I actually remember of what Auster wrote. How much I all along was just thinking of myself. Well, I guess I can always just go back to read them - that is, if the library ever restocks - but reading them again would it start it all over? I don’t think I’m ready for that. Instead I keep moving slowly, letting that sentimental, damaged part of myself, catch up.
Beautiful