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Winter Journal

PAUL AUSTER in conversation with Paul Holdengräber

October 1, 2012

LIVE from the New York Public Library

www.nypl.org/live

Celeste Bartos Forum

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Good evening. Good evening. My name is

Paul Holdengräber, and I’m the Director of Public Programs here at the New

York Public Library, otherwise known as LIVE from the New York Public

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 1 Library. As you know, I’ve said this a hundred times, my goal here at the

Library is simply to make the lions roar, to make a heavy institution dance, and when I’m successful to make it levitate. It was a pleasure to show you

Patti Smith, to give you a sense. I think it was appropriate in so many different ways to show that video in particular, with New York, a bygone

New York, and to invite to the stage in a minute from now Paul Auster. I would like to also encourage you all after the event to have your book signed by Paul Auster, Winter Journal is a book that we will be discussing tonight among many other of Paul Auster’s works.

I also encourage you to become a member of the New York Public Library, to support it, to support our great collection and everything we do for you.

And to come to many of the many events that are coming up now.

Tomorrow I will be interviewing Cheryl Strayed, then we will be having

Steven Johnson and Sherry Turkle. After that Pete Townshend on Monday and Katie Roiphe on Wednesday and many, many more other events—you’ll have them all on your seat.

Now it is my great, great pleasure to invite to the stage Paul Auster, and as you know I’ve always asked or I’ve asked for the last four or five years the

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 2 various guests to give me a biography of themselves in seven words, a haiku of sorts or if you are extremely modern, a tweet. Usually I know these seven words in advance. When I asked Paul Auster for his seven words, he kept them close to himself, and he will let us know what the seven words are that define or don’t define him. Please welcome Paul Auster.

(applause)

PAUL AUSTER: It’s not usual that a writer is asked to introduce himself, but this is what Paul asked of me in only seven words, so this is what I came up with: “American. New Yorker. Wanderer. Husband. Father. Writer.

Troublemaker.”

(laughter)

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Which of those words do you feel is the least important?

PAUL AUSTER: They’re all important.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 3 PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Troublemaker?

PAUL AUSTER: Very important, yes.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: How so?

PAUL AUSTER: How so? Because—the idea, when I was a young person,

I mean, watching Patti Smith there, she’s a bit older than I am, but we’re certainly from the same generation. The idea of being artists when I was young, when she was young, was to break the mold, not to fit into conventions, not to do what people had done before you, and this has been a guiding light throughout my entire life as a writer, and politically I want to be a troublemaker, artistically I want to be a troublemaker. So it’s essential.

Wanderer is also essential; I’ve been all over the place. Even though this is the center for me, New York City, I’ve been all over the world, and somehow that has defined me as well. What am I going to eliminate?

Husband? No. Father? No. So everything is essential.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Is it harder to be a troublemaker now?

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 4 PAUL AUSTER: Not really, if you put your mind to it.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Wanderer. Harder to be a wanderer now that most places have been discovered?

PAUL AUSTER: No, you can still go anywhere you want. In fact, I think it’s probably easier to be a wanderer now than it used to be. I can’t imagine what my life would have been if I had just stayed here all my life. I think the adventures of living abroad, being in other cultures, have informed who I am and made me better and a more alert and more interested person about the world.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And in many ways—We’ll get to this in a moment—in many ways, this book, Winter Journal, is in effect the book of a wanderer. A wanderer as he takes on a journey his own body.

PAUL AUSTER: Well, wandering is part of the book but then there’s a lot of immobility as well, because I think what’s interested me always is the two: the man alone in a room, the thinking individual, the solitary soul, indifferent to surroundings, finding some kind of inner essence. At the same

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 5 time counterbalanced by a freedom to go wherever the body wants to take you and in some sense then the physical journeys become a mirror of the mental journeys that you conduct in absolute stasis and silence and solitude.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: First sentences. The first sentence of Winter

Journal is “You think it will never happen to you. That it cannot happen to you. That you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then one by one they all begin to happen to you in the same way they happen to everyone else.” I’d like you to talk about this first sentence, and also the very strong use of the word “you.”

PAUL AUSTER: The second person is a very unusual way to write a book.

I know of a number of novels that have been written that way. But not many.

Just a handful. I can’t think of a single autobiographical work that has been written in the second person. And I’ll tell you why I did it. It came instinctively and I didn’t question it. I started writing this way but then as I got into the project—because when you start a book, you don’t know if it’s going to become a book, you’re just feeling your way through. But once I understood that it was going to be something that I could finish, I stopped and examined what I was doing, and I thought, “well, the reason I’m writing

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 6 about myself which is not to tell the story of my life,” which is finally quite uninteresting, I think. It’s an attempt to try to communicate what it feels like to be alive in one’s own body, something we all share, something that is—

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Infinitely personal and universal.

PAUL AUSTER: And universal. So therefore the “I,” which is the typical person of an autobiographical work, I thought would have been too exclusionary. I didn’t want to just tell my own story. There is a possibility of a “he,” which I’ve used in a previous autobiographical work, the second half of The Invention of Solitude, which is also an option, and I know several autobiographical works that use the “he.”

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Most recently we had on this stage Salman

Rushdie, whose whole book is written—

PAUL AUSTER: That’s right, Salman’s new book. But then J. M.

Coetzee’s three autobiographical works are all in the third person as well, so there are many ways to do this, but I thought in this case the third person

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 7 would have been too distancing, therefore I’m left with the second person.

So what does the second person give me?

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You’re left with it.

PAUL AUSTER: Well, it’s the only other option. A kind of intimacy but at the same time a distance, as if addressing myself and therefore able to enter into a dialogue with myself.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: So it isn’t solipsistic.

PAUL AUSTER: Not at all. And the distance that—that displacement from the “I” to the “you” I hope allows the reader to enter the book in a very full way.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Well, you know, it is as if you are reenacting, using that “you,” the notion of the reader as being, the person who reads the book as being the reader of his own life in reading this book. It’s as if the scars you describe on your face, the urge you have at certain moments to go to a restroom, all these various moments you describe of bodily function and

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 8 of a body in pain, is something that a reader upon reading it can he or she feel themselves as if they were going to a mirror to look at what their face looked at that moment.

PAUL AUSTER: I would assume so. I mean, we’ve all been through these things. And much of what I write about in this book is what people don’t talk about, but I wanted to talk about the things that are not discussed openly. Because this is also what it means to be alive, and I’m very interested in trying to communicate this, bring it to life on the page. Just breathing in your own body, just walking down the street, feeling, you know, sleet lashing your face, whatever it might be that you’re going through. We’re always living in a completely physical environment. You know, modern life has protected us from many of these things, but not all by any means, and we’re still subject to bumps and bruises and knocks and accidents and the unexpected charging in on us at every moment, and therefore, again, accidents are part of this book as well and everything that is unpredictable.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I like the use of the word “bumps,” because in a way this book is about bumping.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 9 PAUL AUSTER: Probably you’re right. I mean, when American children were little in my day, when you crashed into something your mother would say, “Oh, you’ve got a bump,” right, “you’ve bumped,” “you have a bump on your head,” “you’ve bumped into something,” and we’re constantly bumping into things even as grownups.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Bumping into people, bumping, hurting ourselves.

PAUL AUSTER: Hurting ourselves.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You describe with a certain amount of intimacy and intricacy the various ways in which you nearly avoided disaster and sometimes didn’t avoid it at all. As, for instance, when you describe your face, which could be a moment in the book that is nearly like an autobiography of the face.

PAUL AUSTER: Well, I begin small in the book and then I get into bigger things. You know. I have had scars. I think everyone has scars of one kind or

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 10 another. You know, the one here and the one here and the one here and the one here and these are just normal incidents in the course of a life. Nobody gets through life unscathed physically and if we’re not banging into things, we’re not falling off of buildings and crashing our cars into other cars, then there can be internal illnesses, all kinds of things are happening to us and we’re always negotiating a way to try to stay on top of the things that could do us in or could at least diminish our lives, and we keep forging on.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You are kind of amazed at moments that we don’t hurt ourselves more often, that we don’t bump into more things. There are so many close calls.

PAUL AUSTER: But I think anyone who gets to be a certain age has been through X number of close calls. You cannot get through a human life untouched by life. It’s just impossible. This is I think maybe the final message of this book is that we’re all part of it.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: That’s the first sentence says that.

PAUL AUSTER: Yes, yes.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 11 PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s all porous in some way.

PAUL AUSTER: We’re all having the same experiences in different variations of that experience.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And so it’s nearly miraculous that we manage.

PAUL AUSTER: Yes and all those who don’t manage. Think of how many people we know who have died in accidents during the course of our lives, the unlucky ones, the ones who don’t get through the scrapes, who die in a car crash at seventeen and don’t make it to be sixty years old. We know many of these people. We all know them. It’s part of everyone’s past—is the disease and the accidents and the unforeseen that will rob us of the lives of people we care about.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I’d like you to read a passage about scars.

PAUL AUSTER: He’s picked this all, you know, we haven’t discussed what we’re going to do.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 12 PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Isn’t that so much better?

(laughter)

PAUL AUSTER: Give it to me and I’ll read it.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: From here to here.

PAUL AUSTER: All right. Okay. This is on page 5, so we’ve very early in the book.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: There will be later pages.

PAUL AUSTER: I see, I see that.

(laughter)

PAUL AUSTER: “The inventory of your scars, in particular the ones on your face, which are visible to you each morning when you look into the

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 13 bathroom mirror to shave or comb your hair. You seldom think about them, but whenever you do, you understand that they are marks of life, that the assorted jagged lines etched into the skin of your face are letters from the secret alphabet that tells the story of who you are, for each scar is the trace of a healed wound, and each wound was caused by an unexpected collision with the world—that is to say, an accident, or something that need not have happened, since by definition an accident is something that need not happen.

Contingent facts as opposed to necessary facts, and the realization as you look into the mirror this morning that all life is contingent, except for the one necessary fact that sooner or later it will come to an end.”

Then there’s a break, so this is the account of the first scar.

“You are three and a half, and your twenty-five-year-old pregnant mother has taken you along with her on a shopping expedition to a department store in downtown Newark. She is accompanied by a friend of hers, the mother of a boy who is three and a half as well. At some point, you and your little comrade break away from your mothers and begin running through the store.

It is an enormous open space, no doubt the largest room you have ever set foot in, and there is a palpable thrill in being able to run wild through this

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 14 gargantuan indoor arena. Eventually, you and the boy begin belly-flopping onto the floor and sliding along the smooth surface, sledding without sleds, as it were, and this game proves to be so enjoyable, so ecstatic in the pleasure it produces, that you become more and more reckless, more and more daring in what you are willing to attempt. You reach a part of the store where construction work or repair work is under way, and without bothering to take notice of what obstacles might lie ahead, you belly-flop onto the floor again and sail along the glasslike surface until you find yourself speeding straight toward a wooden carpenter’s bench. With a small twist of your small body, you think you can avoid crashing into the leg of the table that is looming before you, but what you do not realize in the split second you have to shift course is that a nail is jutting from the leg, a long nail low enough to be at the level of your face, and before you can stop yourself, your left cheek is pierced by the nail as you go flying past it. Half your face is torn apart. Sixty years later, you have no memories of the accident, you remember the running and the belly-flopping but nothing about the pain, nothing about the blood, and nothing about being rushed to the hospital, or the doctor who sewed up your cheek. ‘He did a brilliant job,’ your mother always said, and since the trauma of seeing her firstborn with half his face ripped off never left her, she said it often. Something to do with a subtle

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 15 double-stitching method that kept the damage to a minimum and prevented you from being disfigured for life. ‘You could have lost your eye,’ she would say to you, or, even more dramatically, ‘you could have been killed.’

No doubt she was right. The scar has grown fainter and fainter as the years have passed, but it is still there whenever you look for it and you will carry that emblem of good fortune: eye intact, not dead, until you go to your grave.”

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Thank you so much. So many questions, but one comment, is you really make us feel that moment, reenact that moment of a close call, the danger, and the nail going through your face. You set it up as if it was a plot that will hurt, a moment that will scar.

PAUL AUSTER: Well, we’re started with scars, so we’re already anticipating what the wound is going to be that will cause the scar, yes.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But also the memory.

PAUL AUSTER: It’s very dim, I have to say, but I do remember belly- flopping, I do remember that, unless I’m making it up, because we know that

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 16 memory is a very deceptive thing and that sometimes we think we remember things that we don’t really remember. Things that people have told us, and then we suddenly imagine and then incorporate into our bodies, really. But I do feel that I remember the belly-flopping, but I can’t be certain. And there’s no way that we can verify this one way or the other.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: We can verify the scar.

PAUL AUSTER: The scar is right here. It’s very, very faint now but through most of my childhood it was quite visible.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And it’s something you bring up also in The

Invention of Solitude, which in so many ways I think plays strongly as an echo chamber to this particular book, of not all the moments we do not remember. The early moments you spend with your son when he was two or three, this is a moment that I must say as I started to have children and even before that I were thinking about—so much of the time we spend that we are actively spending but the younger self, the younger child, has no memory of.

None at all.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 17 PAUL AUSTER: Obliterated completely. We don’t really have a continuous narrative memory until we’re about five. I think most of us have memories from late three, four, but they’re very isolated and they’re not part of any continuous story. But five, five and a half, I think we reach a moment when we can start telling ourselves the story of our own life, we feel that we’re living in an inner narrative. But before then the material is lost or very, very fragmentary and slight.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: The belly-flop you think you remember why?

PAUL AUSTER: I don’t know why. I’m sure it’s a physical sensation that is part of my motor-neuronal system and connected to my memory that’s still there, but again I’m not going to guarantee that this is an authentic memory. What I do have is my mother’s account of what happened. And I’m sure she was completely accurate about the events of that day.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I’d like us to look at—first of all I should say that your archives are here at the New York Public Library, and we’re privileged to have Isaac Gewirtz here, who is curator of the Berg Collection,

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 18 and who has made available to us some of the materials from this collection.

What does it feel like to be classified here?

PAUL AUSTER: It’s a very strange experience, I have to say. (laughter) I threw out a lot of material, and I started writing very early, I should say, You know, fifteen, sixteen, I was serious about writing, and felt that this was going to be my destiny. So we’re talking about almost fifty years. I’m sixty- five now, so close to fifty years I’ve been doing this. Well, as one writes one tears up pieces of paper, throws them away, but then there’s the other material one keeps and one becomes reluctant to throw out things and I for some reason kept a lot of youthful writings which never amounted to much in themselves but served as the basis for works that I later was able to finish, returned to and then completed. The Library has a lot of that material.

On the one hand, I think, “well, what’s the point?” The only thing that matters are the finished books. This is, you know, what people care about, what people read. On the other hand, we were here early and Isaac gave us a tour of the Berg Collection, bringing out some wonderful things and there was, you know, William Blake’s illuminated texts, and there was Nabokov marking up his copy of Bleak House no doubt to teach a class on it and also

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 19 marking up his copy of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” in a kind of outrage, retranslating the text.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Angry, angry.

PAUL AUSTER: So if you’re interested in Dickens or you’re interested in

Nabokov, this becomes very passionate stuff and I think these archives are very important to helping us understand the process of creating literature better. Whether I deserve to be here or not is another question but I feel very grateful that my papers are here.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But Paul, here you are.

PAUL AUSTER: Here I am. (laughter) And upstairs, too.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Here you are, and my question is perhaps slightly more pointed, which is what does it mean for you? I mean, what are some of the feelings you might have seeing your own work here and being able to rummage through it, have others rummage through it—

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 20 PAUL AUSTER: I’ll tell you one of the really big reasons why I did this, and I started giving papers here twenty years ago. It was because after I’d written and published a certain number of novels, there were academics who were writing about them, and I was getting letters all the time, all the time, and trying to answer people, and I really didn’t want to do this. A writer never wants to look back, you’re always looking to today and tomorrow, but yesterday is of no importance. So by giving my papers here all I had to do was say to people, “Go to the Berg Collection at the New York Public

Library.” (laughter) It just relieved me of a tremendous burden and so I’m very grateful, Isaac, thank you.

(laughter)

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Let me ask you one more time if I may, sorry.

For you to see these various manuscripts, have they been actually helpful in writing Winter Journal?

PAUL AUSTER: No, I wasn’t looking at these manuscripts.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 21 PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: At all. You remembered everything whether real or false on your own without.

PAUL AUSTER: Well, you see I never kept a diary or journey, so there’s no source of the material that’s in this book that is written anywhere. No, what’s in the library here are drafts of pieces.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: We’ll look at one, if we can look at image number 1.

PAUL AUSTER: I have a little screen here.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You might not be able—it’s just this passage, which is crossed off and ends up not being part of The Invention of Solitude.

It’s such an interesting passage and I looked in the original and indeed it isn’t there.

PAUL AUSTER: Well, you know, one is cutting things out all the time, and as I glance at this, and this is a late version of the book, because I don’t type until later, mostly I’m writing by hand in notebooks, so if I crossed this out,

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 22 I must have felt that it was redundant, that I had already said this elsewhere in a different way.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And you speak about typing and the tactility of typing as a way of rereading yourself with great care. But still, you didn’t feel it was totally redundant because you added a little—

PAUL AUSTER: When you see the handwritten material, it’s when I thought I was going to keep this, so I made a little change and then I realized finally, “cut the whole thing. So,” one is doing this all the time.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s an interesting passage.

PAUL AUSTER: Well, it’s about Jonah and the whale —there’s a long meditation on this in the book.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Do you mean reading those five lines that you cut out?

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 23 PAUL AUSTER: Oh, well, all right. You know, this is—we’re talking about something that was written in 1979, ’80. “For a man who is destined to speak, silence stands as an image of the solitude that precedes the act of speech. Even alone in the silence of his room.” See, this is the third person that we were talking about. “Even alone in the silence of his room and the four walls that enclose him on himself, he is only to speak to find the other lives inside him. At the moment he speaks he discovers he is two. That is to say, the one who speaks and the one who hears what is spoken. For even when there is no answer it cannot be said that the voice that speaks is heard by no one, even when no one else is there.” That’s kind of interesting. It’s about what happens when you’re writing.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Isn’t it? (laughter) I mean, I do—I mean, I’m not trying just to, you know, make you suffer. This is interesting. Why is it kind of interesting for you?

PAUL AUSTER: It’s interesting to me because it is about what happens when you’re writing. Because obviously when you’re writing, you’re reading what you write. And so the writer and the reader are somehow two parts of yourself. It’s not the same being that’s doing the writing and then

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 24 reading over what you’ve written, and this is an attempt to explain that. And probably I thought this is so subtle and unimportant to the general drift of what I was trying to say that I cut it out for that reason. Because, you see, in writing, the goal is not to write beautiful things. Not even elegant things. No, the goal is to say something meaningful, something that burns through literature, life, and everything, and gives you some feeling that you’re confronting something essential about what it means to be alive. I keep coming back to this, but this has been my whole motive as a writer for all these years, and therefore this was not doing the job, I was digressing. In a book full of digressions, it was one digression too many.

(laughter)

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Too many. I know that you fancy Rimbaud’s comment, “Je est un autre,” “the I is another,” and in reading this particular book, a Winter’s Journal, I felt that the inspiration was not just Rimbaud and the dissociation of the “you” to the other “you” writing or the “you” that is looking back at the former self, but one of the inspirations struck me as being Montaigne and the Montaigne of the essays, the Montaigne who says that when we read we are a reader of our own self.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 25 PAUL AUSTER: Well, Montaigne is an enormously important writer for me and I started reading him young when I was an undergraduate at

Columbia and I started in 1965. My first French teacher was Donald Frame, who was the translator and biographer of Montaigne, and no one has surpassed Frame’s translations of Montaigne, I must say, so by my sophomore year I was in the Montaigne seminar with Donald Frame, ten boys, one of them being Mark Rudd, if anyone knows who that was, the

SDS leader who led the revolution at Columbia in ’68. There we were, reading Montaigne in French, in the original, the Pléiade edition of

Montaigne. And it was an entire semester of immersion. I think in this very library there are two or three papers I wrote on Montaigne for that class. It had such an impact on me. Montaigne was the first person in Western history to write about himself as a fit subject.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: As a—

PAUL AUSTER: In a nonreligious sense. We had Saint Augustine doing his Confessions in around the year 400, but this is all in relation to religious belief. Montaigne, no, this is an entirely secular project. Thinking that

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 26 studying a man, himself, was a fit subject for men to study, and this was a revolutionary jump. Also, there’s a thing about Montaigne’s prose, which is about the most extraordinary prose one could ever read because it’s very energetic and unencumbered prose of propulsion, and he works with parataxis, which is stringing sentences along, just putting “and, and, and,” so that there is not this elaborate rhetoric that one would find in the sixteenth century but something much more immediate and I would daresay contemporary, something very compatible to the way we approach things, and this man was so far ahead of his time that whenever anyone talks about the essay and autobiographical writing, he is the prime reference, and I was not immune to the beauties and power of this writer and made an enormous impression on me.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And the essay quite literally is an attempt.

PAUL AUSTER: That’s the literal translation.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And it’s also an assay, which means simply to weigh but also in the act of essaying, in the act of trying out, it is not unlike I

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 27 think what you are doing in this most recent book, an attempt at self- discovery.

PAUL AUSTER: Well, if there is any literary antecedent for Winter

Journal, it would be Montaigne, for sure. He’s the first one who’s pointed this out, by the way.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s not a bad genealogy.

PAUL AUSTER: No, no, no. I’ve been reading him and reading him all my life.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But it is, you know, I mean it also quite seriously because you read the passage about he scar. The book is an attempt to put up a mirror.

PAUL AUSTER: A mirror to whom?

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: To yourself and surroundings, but to yourself, you’re looking at a six-year-old boy, you’re looking at a fifteen-year-old

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 28 boy, and you’re looking at that boy as he ages and as age transforms and changes him and as he arrived at a certain station in life, and you’re looking at him quite often with distance and sometimes the “you” becomes an accusation. Sometimes the “you” becomes an address to, and I think in that way there is—Montaigne is there.

PAUL AUSTER: I also think that distance of the “you” can also create a certain kind of humor and jocularity that I’ve striven for in this book, too.

It’s not a heavy book.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Really?

PAUL AUSTER: But it’s not a light book, either. It’s both. It’s about pleasure and pain. It’s about both.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: The pleasure of somersaults and the pain of the nail.

PAUL AUSTER: That’s right, that’s right.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 29 PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s about the difficulty of being in the backseat—I mean, that passage is fantastic.

PAUL AUSTER: When I have to pee when I’m five years old?

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Do you know where it is?

PAUL AUSTER: I’ll find it. it’s probably close to—

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: This is a passage—You see, we really hadn’t prepared this.

PAUL AUSTER: I opened right onto it—

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What is that phenomenon, by the way, of opening a book at a certain page—this happens to me quite often.

PAUL AUSTER: It’s called the Holdengräber Phenomenon. (laughter) So here’s page 17.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 30 “Again, it is 1952, and you are in the backseat of the family car, the blue

1950 De Soto your father brought home the day your sister was born. Your mother is driving, and you have been on the road for some time now, going from where to where you can no longer remember, but you are on your way back, no more than ten or fifteen minutes from home, and for the past little while you have had to pee, the pressure in your bladder has been building steadily, and by now you are writhing on the backseat, legs crossed, your hand clamped over your crotch, uncertain whether you can hold out much longer.” Now, this is funny to me. I’m sorry, this is not heavy stuff. “You tell your mother about your predicament, and she asks if you can hang in there for another ten minutes. No, you tell her, you don’t think so. In that case, she says, since there’s nowhere to stop between here and home, just go in your pants. (laughter) This is such a radical idea to you, such a betrayal of what you consider to be your hard-won, manly independence, that you can scarcely believe what she has said. Go in my pants? You say to her. Yes, go in your pants, she says. What difference does it make? We’ll throw your clothes in the wash the minute we get home. And so it happens, with your mother’s full and explicit approval, that you pee in your pants for the last time.”

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 31 (laughter/applause)

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s a fantastic—it is very funny.

PAUL AUSTER: It is funny, yes.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s funny, and what your language manages to do there is to embody, to embody the body.

PAUL AUSTER: Embody the body. Well, let’s hope so.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Do you remember that moment clearly?

PAUL AUSTER: I was five, I remember that well. Listen, we’ve all been there, we’ve all been in tight squeezes. But nobody every writes about this, so I thought—

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: “Goddamnit, I will.” You know, this brings back to mind another writer who—Montaigne on the one hand and then a

French writer who I much admire named Georges Perec who like you writes

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 32 extraordinary lists and writes extraordinary pages about where he is in the world, and he called this phenomenon l'Infra-ordinaire, what is beneath the ordinary, what is so important and goes unnoticed.

PAUL AUSTER: Perec, I don’t know—most Americans don’t know who

Perec was.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And Species of Spaces is fantastic.

PAUL AUSTER: He’s a great writer. He’s a contemporary writer, he was born in 1936—I think it was ’36.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: That’s right.

PAUL AUSTER: And he died in ’82. He was only forty-six when he died, it was a life cut off way too soon. But he was truly brilliant. He wrote novels, he wrote essays, he wrote journalism, all kinds of things. He worked for the radio. One of my favorite little pieces by Perec is one year he decided to catalog everything he ate and drank. It’s a three-page essay. You know,

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 33 “forty-two hamburgers,” you know, “sixty-seven glasses of cognac,” and it’s just the whole year.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But you do something very similar. You ask yourself in the book, “How many times have I swallowed such and such a drink?”

PAUL AUSTER: But I haven’t counted them. He counted them. I ask myself how many.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: He’s more obsessive.

PAUL AUSTER: Much more obsessive. Look, the list goes all the way back. Rabelais was doing lists and it’s part of literature. James Joyce was a great list maker as well. Beckett. Swift. Many writers have done lists.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You know one of my—I mean, two of my favorite Perec stories are Perec sitting at the Café de la Maire in Paris on the

Place Saint-Sulpice, and he’s sitting there and he’s going to sit there for a few hours and write down everything he sees. And it’s called Tentative

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 34 d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien, “the attempt to exhaust a French space,” and a pigeon poos and a tram passes and a person loses his hat, and the book is phenomenally interesting and atrociously boring in some ways.

PAUL AUSTER: He did something similar, maybe it’s the same project, as a radio broadcast, too. He was sitting there and he’s just describing everything he can see.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You know, one other project which I don’t know if you know about, which to my mind seems very Paul Auster-ish is for—he was going to do it for twelve years, but I think he only did it for five or six, which was he was going to write the story of his street, and he was going to catalog everything on a certain day in the street once a year.

Everything that was happening in the street and then—and he stops. I wonder if it might be one of the pages—

PAUL AUSTER: Now that you’re mentioning this—

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What he does, what he wants to see, and he’ll put it in a sealed envelope, and he will look at how he describes the street,

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 35 the strength of his memory, and how the city of Paris is changing, so it’s an attempt at seeing what happens to language through time. What are you looking for?

PAUL AUSTER: I’m looking in my Collected Prose, a little piece I wrote in 2001, and I was asked by Perec’s widow to do this, and the Bibliothèque nationale, another great library, the French national library, has Perec’s papers and they were doing a bulletin about him, and they were asking for pieces, and his widow asked me to do this, and so I’m going to read this.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Please!

PAUL AUSTER: It’s a little appreciation of Perec, and it’s titled “Postcards for Georges Perec.”

1. “Whenever I think about Georges Perec, the first word that comes to mind is pleasure. I know of no other contemporary writer whose work so fully captures the sense of amazement and happiness that washes over us the first time we read a book that changes the world for us, that exposes us to the infinite possibilities of what a book can be. Every passionate reader has had

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 36 that experience. It usually occurs when we are quite young, and once we have lived through that moment, we understand that books are a world unto themselves—and that that world is better and richer than any one we have traveled in before. That is why we become readers. That is why we turn away from the vanities of the material world and begin to love books above all other things.

2. “What I admire most about Perec is the rare combination in his work of innocence and plenitude. These qualities are almost never found together in the same writer. Cervantes had them; Swift and Poe had them; one sees flashes of them in Dickens and Kafka, perhaps in certain pages of

Hawthorne and Borges. By innocence I mean absolute purity of purpose. By plenitude I mean absolute faith in the imagination. It is a literature characterized by effervescence, demonic laughter, joy. This is not the only experience we can have with books, but it is the fundamental experience, the one that makes all the others possible.

3. “All critics mention the dazzling ingeniousness of Perec’s writing, his cleverness. Much as I am awed by that cleverness, by the exuberant complexities of his brilliant mind, that is not what draws me to his work.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 37 What I am attached to is his engagement with the world, his need to tell stories, his tenderness. Underneath every trick and Oulipian puzzle”—now

Perec is the man who wrote a whole novel of three hundred pages without using the letter “e,” all right, just to give you an idea of what he could do when he was challenged—“so underneath every trick and Oulipian puzzle to be found in Perec’s books there is a reservoir of human feeling, a swell of compassion, a wink of humor, an unspoken conviction that, in spite of everything, we are lucky to be alive. Restraint should never be confused with a lack of feeling. The agonizing meticulousness of W ou le souvenir d’enfance (or the memory of childhood), for example, is the expression of a soul so wounded, a heart so shattered, that anything beyond a dry recitation of the facts would have been morally impossible. And yet, for all that, I consider it to be one of the most intimate and moving books I have read in the past twenty years.” Well, this was written for a French publication.

Everyone knows that Perec’s parents died during World War II. He was a

Polish Jew who grew up in France.

4. This is the end. “In David Bellos’s biography Georges Perec: A Life in

Words, an excellent book in its own right, there are several extended passages that describe Perec’s life at Moulin d’Andé, an artists’ retreat to the

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 38 north of Paris. In one of them, Bellos mentions the fact that the last scene of

Truffaut’s film Jules et Jim was shot there. ‘If one looks closely at the house in the background as the car plunges into the water,’ he writes, ‘you can see the window of the room that Georges Perec would come to live and write in for most of his weekends throughout the second half of the 1960s.’ I was astounded to learn this. Truffaut and Perec were almost exact contemporaries. The filmmaker, born in 1932, died in 1984 at the age of fifty-two, Perec, born in 1936, died in 1982 at the age of forty-six. Between them they managed to live only as long as one old man. Of all French storytellers from that generation, the generation of men and women who were children during the war, they’re the two who have meant the most to me, the ones whose work I’ve continued to go back to and from whom I will never stop learning. It moves me to know that they intersected in that singular and altogether improbable way. Six years before Perec entered that room, in which he wrote a book without once using the letter ‘e,’ Truffaut captured it on film. Wherever they are now I can only hope that they are talking about it.”

So. Perec. A wonderful writer.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 39 PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And what you—gravitate towards him—it’s a very moving passage, I must say. It’s a humor.

PAUL AUSTER: I’ve interrupted you, I’m sorry.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s the humor, it’s the humor I love when

Perec says, you know, “I want to write this text with a lot of footnotes, not that I have anything to say in footnotes, but I just, I love footnotes.”

(laughter)

PAUL AUSTER: He was a remarkable writer, and I recommend him to everybody. Especially the big masterpiece, Life: A User’s Manual.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Life: A User’s Manual. But also he has a fantastic, since we’re in a library, he has a fantastic essay called “On the

Manner and Art of Classifying One’s Books,” which ends up being completely ludicrous. Because anybody who’s tried to classify his books knows that it’s a very hard art indeed. And he goes through so many different permutations.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 40 PAUL AUSTER: Yes, whether by size, by color, by subject.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Exactly. French literature has mattered to you so much and in France you matter so much to the French. You’ve had some encounters with French literature in various ways. One of them is translation, and on this very stage I had the pleasure of speaking once with

W. S. Merwin and Merwin said that Pound had told him that the first thing he should do before doing anything else is translate, and I’m wondering what you learned from translation?

PAUL AUSTER: I started doing this very early. There were two influences on me early. It was the Donald Frame class, I took it with freshman at

Columbia, it was with nineteenth-century French poetry and in order to understand the poems better, I started translating bits just so I could penetrate them, and then there’s the other more personal factor, which is that my uncle, not a blood uncle, but the man who was married to my mother’s sister for years who just died one year ago exactly, Allen Mandelbaum, was one of the most important translators we had in America. He translated

Virgil, Dante, Homer, Ovid, and many contemporary Italian poets and I

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 41 mean, his Dante is the best, it’s the one people read, and so Allen, Allen’s example when I was a teenager was what set me on the course of translating poetry, not just reading it but translating it. And so I became very immersed in this activity, and I think throughout my late teens and early twenties I did it avidly, I worked on it as hard as I worked on my own work, and I think it was a tremendous help, because, you see, as a young writer, in many cases, unless you’re Keats or Rimbaud, and I was neither one of those, you don’t really know what you’re doing yet, and it can be very helpful to take the pressure off of having to compose, having to come up with something new, and just lend yourself to a writer who is necessarily better than you are and try to figure out how he’s doing it.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: The craft.

PAUL AUSTER: The craft of it, just the tactility of the words, manipulating language to effect. Finding the cleanest, purest, more beautiful way of expressing something. This you can do as a translator. So I think it’s a wonderful thing for all young writers to do. Pound of course didn’t just advise Merwin to do this, he publicly said all young poets should translate,

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 42 and I took Pound’s words to heart as well and no regrets whatsoever, I have to say.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: To say before we go back to a few archives, to stay a little bit on the subject of some other French, not just Perec, who I think matters greatly to us both, but someone I was moved to read about, because he matters to me greatly as well, is your encounter, your most surprising encounter, with Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jean-Louis Trintignant, who said to you—

PAUL AUSTER: Does everyone know who this is? The actor

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Jean-Louis Trintignant is one of the great

French actors who plays in one of my favorite movies of Eric Rohmer, Ma nuit chez Maud. And you met him on a set?

PAUL AUSTER: No, I wasn’t on a set. I was giving a reading.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You were giving a reading and he was going to read the French, which the French love doing.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 43 PAUL AUSTER: A bilingual reading and he was the French reader.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And you didn’t know each other. You looked at each other a little bit, spoke a tiny bit to each other. And then he asks you

—

PAUL AUSTER: It’s in the book Winter Journal.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: How old you are.

PAUL AUSTER: He said, “How old are you?” And at the time I was fifty- seven and I said, “I’m fifty-seven,” and I said to him, “How old are you?”

He said, “seventy-four,” he’s very shy he doesn’t say much. We went back to rehearsing and then we went into the green room of the theater where we were going to give the reading. And there were a number of people around, my publisher was there and friends and people I didn’t know, and I wasn’t saying anything, I was just sitting in a chair thinking about what I was about to do, and I saw Trintignant on the other side of the room just looking down at the floor, cogitating about something. And then he looked up at me, he

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 44 caught my eye, and he said, “Paul, there’s just one thing I want to tell you.

When I was fifty-seven I felt old, but now at seventy-four I feel much younger.” (laughter) Well, I didn’t know what he was talking about.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Do you now?

PAUL AUSTER: I still don’t know, (laughter) but I’ve pondered it. I describe this incident in the book. The only thing I can come up with was simply that perhaps at fifty-seven a man is more afraid of dying than at seventy-four, but I’m not so sure that that’s the answer, I don’t really know, but it was so interesting and obviously meant so much to him, and he delivered it with such seriousness and he really wanted to tell me something and so I’ve been pondering it ever since, the last eight years I’ve been thinking about this.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: So was I. I mean, I read that and I’m not yet fifty-seven, and it’ll come soon enough, and I’m just wondering, “What does that mean?” Because it means something.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 45 PAUL AUSTER: Yes, it does, it does. (laughter) But I think it means perhaps that you get through the worst of your battles and maybe you’re on the other side of something and by the time you’re seventy-four you’re liberated, and God knows this man has suffered, and has had all kinds of terrible things happen to him, so it’s not as though he doesn’t have painful memories to deal with, but somehow he seemed lighter, lighter than most people at that age, so he had worked through whatever hell he had gone through, he was out on the other end already.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And your Winter Journal is also in a way a trip through some of the great grave difficulties, some of the hells you’ve experienced, some of the things that have been particularly—That’s why I thought that story was in a way symbolic and more than just, well I think that actually any anecdote you tell—

PAUL AUSTER: That’s why I put it in the book.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: —has some meaning.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 46 PAUL AUSTER: I just want to say, you see, this book is not an autobiography. It’s a book of autobiographical fragments—

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Sketches.

PAUL AUSTER: Just fragments, and I think of it as a piece of music, a literary work shaped like a piece of music. So it does not have a continuous narrative, it’s jumping around in time, and it’s not the whole story of my life, it’s certain parts of my life which I hope will create the effect of a piece of music of one sort or another so—next question.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Next image. If we could look at images 2 and

3. Just leave that for a moment. This is cover page of—

PAUL AUSTER: This is while I was in college then. It’s when I had very rough crazy handwriting, because I’m looking at the next page here and it was written very quickly.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Next page, I just want you to read number 33, which I find—

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 47 PAUL AUSTER: Number 33. Hard to read, but I can read it. “Feeling estranged from language is like feeing estranged from your body.” So this is the nineteen- or twenty-year-old me saying this.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What do you think you meant?

PAUL AUSTER: Meaning that, you know, language is the way we experience the world, understand the world, and so it’s as central a part of our existence as it is to have a body. I think that’s what I’m trying to say here, but I wouldn’t hold myself to this, either. I mean, this is written so many years ago, but I think that’s what I was trying to talk about.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: In Winter Journal you say, “No doubt you are flawed, and a wounded person. A man who has carried a wound in him from the very beginning. Why else would you have spent the whole of your adult life bleeding words onto a page?”

PAUL AUSTER: Why indeed?

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 48 PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Why?

PAUL AUSTER: There are no writers who spend a lifetime doing this kind of work who aren’t in some way damaged. I don’t think there’s a single artist who isn’t damaged in some way, needs to do this in order to find some way of binding up all these disparate parts of oneself. Other people are really content to live in the world. They enjoy the world. They want to be part of a group, they want to have jobs in which they’re actively working with other people and life in itself is sufficient and I think all writers and artists of all kinds are people who don’t fit in and have to try to invent things in order to create some kind of foundation for themselves on which to stand and live.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Just before you launched on a fifty-year career of writing, so far, you found great, great pleasure in sports, and you found great, great pleasure in sports, and you found great, great pleasure in baseball in particular.

PAUL AUSTER: I still do, I still do.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You still play?

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 49 PAUL AUSTER: I don’t play anymore but I certainly follow it very closely.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You talk about it in the book about watching baseball whenever you can, but there is an urgency, a bodily urgency, which you describe in the book and, for myself who knows, strictly speaking, nothing about this sport, I found those passages very moving and I’d like you to read one very short one on page 35, it is marked there. “Never a dull moment.”

PAUL AUSTER: Okay, this is talking about playing baseball as a young kid. “Never a dull moment, in spite of what critics of the game might think: poised in a state of constant anticipation, ever at the ready, your mind churning with possibilities, and then the sudden explosion, the ball speeding toward you and the urgent need to do what must be done, the quick reflexes required to perform the job, and the exquisite sensation of scooping up a ground ball hit to your left or right and making a hard, accurate throw to first. But no pleasure greater than that of hitting the ball, settling into your stance, watching the pitcher go into his windup, and to hit a ball squarely, to

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 50 feel the ball making contact with the meat of the bat, the very sound of it as you followed through with your swing and saw the ball flying deep into the outfield—no, there was no feeling like it, nothing ever came close to the exaltation of that moment, and because you became better and better at this as time went on, there were many such moments, and you lived for them in a way you lived for nothing else, all wrapped up in this meaningless boy’s game, but that was the apex of happiness for you back then, the very best thing your body was able to do.”

Yeah, we’re talking about nine, ten, eleven, twelve in those years.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And one of the greatest memories you have of that moment is your mother and baseball.

PAUL AUSTER: Yes, yes.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Your mother playing baseball.

PAUL AUSTER: Well, there is a long passage in this book about my mother, her death, her life, and there was a moment when I was eight years

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 51 old, and my mother was already then working, she was out of the house most of the time. I didn’t see her so much after age six, but she had enough time to become a den mother in the Cub Scout thing that I joined that year.

The only year I was ever a Scout, my friends and I all wanted to be Cub

Scouts for some reason, I don’t think a single one of us lasted beyond the one year, and so she was one of the rotating den mothers, and she being the youngest, and prettiest, and most congenial of all the mothers, the boys really liked her a lot, and it was towards the end of the year and we no longer wanted to do Scout things. And she said, “Well, what do you want to do today?” We all said, “Well, let’s play baseball.” And we didn’t have enough for two regulation teams, we were only about twelve boys or so, so she decided to play in the game and I had never seen my mother playing baseball, and it was also so ridiculous, because for these den meetings, she would wear the blue den mother’s uniform, which I found hilarious, you know, seeing my mother dressed up in this costume. So there she was in her blue den mother’s costume and she came up to the plate for the first time in the game and she whacked a home run over the left-fielder’s head

(laughter) and ran around the bases and it was quite extraordinary. I think the boys were so astonished.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 52 PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You felt proud.

PAUL AUSTER: I felt very proud of her, yes, yes, and as I say in the book, of all the memories of that time—

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: That’s one of the strongest. And when you were fifteen or sixteen— excuse me for not remembering quite rightly—you thought you, you had the impression, or the delusion maybe that you could become a major league player, or minor league player, I can’t remember which category but it was—

PAUL AUSTER: I was good. I was good. There was a possibility that if I had really pursued it I could have been a good player but by the time I was about fifteen or sixteen, I began to lose interest. I discovered, well, girls, literature, cigarettes, alcohol. These things became much more interesting.

(laughter)

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: More predominant. But you also discovered ways of entertaining yourself through writing and combining writing and

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 53 baseball. And I’d like us to look if we could at Image 4 from our archives, thanks to Isaac Gewirtz. I don’t know what that is.

PAUL AUSTER: I’ll tell you what it is.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Please, and tell me in some detail, because I looked at them and they looked at me. And I had no idea what I was looking.

PAUL AUSTER: I’ll tell you.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Can you tell me?

PAUL AUSTER: This is all in my book Hand to Mouth, another autobiographical book from about fifteen, sixteen years ago. During my dark days of impoverishment, I’m talking about my late twenties, well, throughout my twenties into my early thirties. I had so little money. I had some schemes to make some cash. One of them was inventing a card baseball game, and you see these cards here.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Action baseball.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 54 PAUL AUSTER: These are all made—these are hand-done by me, I guess I gave them to the Library, they’re here.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Yeah.

PAUL AUSTER: When I was a little boy, I invented a card game using a regular deck of cards. But then when I was thirty, I remembered this game. I thought, “Maybe I can perfect it, make it more subtle and sophisticated, and make my fortune,” you see. That was the whole idea. So for a couple of months I worked out the rules and I made a game that was two decks of cards, you turn over the cards, and things are happening, there’s strategy and it really worked out well, because statistically the games—and I played hundreds of games—would go from one to nothing to about twelve to ten, all within the range of real baseball games.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And did you play with someone?

PAUL AUSTER: I played by myself or with a friend, just to test it out, I kept perfecting this thing.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 55 PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What does it mean?

PAUL AUSTER: So, I mean, does anyone really care that I go into this?

(laughter) It’s elaborate.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Just a little bit. Just for—at least for my benefit.

PAUL AUSTER: There are three kinds of cards, you see the red diamond in the center and the green and the black. All right. If you’re the pitcher and you’re turning over the cards, a red card would be a strike, a green card is a ball. Okay, it’s possible to get three strikes and an out, four balls and a walk.

If you turn over a black card, that means it’s a swing, and so the other play turns over his card and then you find out what’s happening, so then you go to the second level of information. You see that card, 6, red, pop out to shortstop, that would be the result, but if you turn over the third card, a single, so you’d get a man to first base. Not only that, if you have somebody on already, with that particular single, the runners advance two bases rather than one, I don’t think we should go into this any more, (laughter) but it

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 56 worked out, it worked out. (applause) But as I recounting the book I never managed to sell the game. It was just when computer games were coming in.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I must say I saw some of the letters you both wrote to various prospective clients and the letters you received in return. So this was not the way to make—

PAUL AUSTER: It didn’t work.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: No, and interestingly enough, again thanks to the Berg collection, we have some other baseball cards that I’d like us to see.

We were looking at them, I’m not sure anybody knows about them, it’s image 5. That’s really interesting, those are cards that—

PAUL AUSTER: There’s another writer who had a much more elaborate fantasy life than I did about baseball. Jack Kerouac spent years of his life inventing leagues and players and writing about them. And this is his

Philadelphia Pontiacs and the Boston Fords. In the Boston Fords we have

Pancho Villa and Red White and Phil Drayton in the outfield, it’s fascinating.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 57 PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And you saw some of the—we don’t have that image here, actually, he went through an incredible fantasy life of imagining their scores. I had the misfortune of asking you if you knew what this meant, and you said, “of course.”

PAUL AUSTER: Yes, of course. I think Kerouac did this for his own pleasure, I made up that game to make some money because I needed it, so different impulse altogether.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And image from earlier years. Image 6 if we could look at that. What year is that?

PAUL AUSTER: I don’t know, it’s probably in the eighties. I think that was a picture taken at Books & Company, the bookstore that used to be on

Madison Avenue. 79th Street, maybe, no, 77th, right by the Whitney

Museum, and there was a very nice guy that worked in the store, Peter

Philbrook, and the picture is the two of us with cigars in our mouth like that, we were just horsing around.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 58 PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But also there’s you smoking.

PAUL AUSTER: Well, I’ve always smoked.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Well, you could smoke, and there’s a passage in the book which is highly evocative where you say, “ah, the good days,” and you say you don’t miss the good old days.

PAUL AUSTER: No, there were no good old days, people delude themselves into thinking things were better then they are now.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Do they?

PAUL AUSTER: Yeah, yeah.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But there is something from the good old days that you truly miss.

PAUL AUSTER: There are things I miss, of course.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 59 PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And one of them is smoking anywhere.

PAUL AUSTER: You know, you used to be able to smoke in doctors’ offices. (laughter) I mean, doctors used to smoke while they were examining you. (laughter) I mean this is part of my life. It’s all gone now, obliterated. And you could smoke in elevators in New York City until maybe fifteen years ago.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And you say quite comically that possibly it was better for our health, but a lot is lost in the process.

PAUL AUSTER: I feel that a lot has been lost. We’ve become so worried, so puritanical about everything. You know, we need pleasure, too, in life, and a society that’s stomping on pleasure is not a very happy one, I think.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: A passage—we’re slowly winding down, but a passage from page 58 I’d like you to read. You were mentioning before— when we were speaking about Montaigne you were mentioning also

Rabelais and there’s one aspect of the book that I think is incredibly important which is catalogs, and even more than catalogs, lists, and in

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 60 particular in terms of lists, lists of places where you have lived. There are twenty-one different places, actually twenty-one a and b. There are twenty- one different places where you have lived and you go through them meticulously, as if you are looking in some way for your body in various positions in various spaces.

PAUL AUSTER: Well, you see, if this book is the story of my body then it seemed to me perfectly legitimate to write about the places that have protected my body from the elements, my domiciles, for the same reason that it seemed legitimate to write about my mother in this book, because it was in her body that my body began. So there is a certain logic to everything that’s here even if it’s not readily apparent.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Page fifty-eight to there. It’s a fairly long passage but a good one that will get a sense of the rhythm.

PAUL AUSTER: “Your body in small rooms and large rooms, your body walking up and down stairs, your body swimming in ponds, lakes, rivers, and oceans, your body traipsing across muddy fields, your body lying in the tall grass of empty meadows, your body walking along city streets, your

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 61 body laboring up hills and mountains, your body sitting down in chairs, lying down on beds, stretching out on beaches, cycling down country roads, walking through forests, pastures, and deserts, running on cinder tracks, jumping up and down on hardwood floors, standing in showers, stepping into warm baths, sitting on toilets, waiting in airports and train stations, riding up and down in elevators, squirming in the seats of cars and buses, walking through rainstorms without an umbrella, sitting in classrooms, browsing in bookstores and record shops (R.I.P), sitting in auditoriums, movie theaters, and concert halls, dancing with girls in school gymnasiums, paddling canoes in rivers, rowing boats across lakes, eating at kitchen tables, eating at dining room tables, eating in restaurants, shopping in department stores, appliance stores, furniture stores, shoe stores, hardware stores, grocery stores, and clothing stores, standing in line for passports and driver’s licenses, leaning back in chairs with your legs propped up on desks and tables as you write in notebooks, hunched over typewriters, walking through snowstorms without a hat, entering synagogues and churches, dressing and undressing in bedrooms, hotel rooms, and locker rooms, standing on escalators, lying in hospital beds, sitting on doctors’ examination tables, sitting in barbers’ chairs and dentists’ chairs, doing somersaults on the grass, standing on your head in the grass, jumping into swimming pools, walking

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 62 slowly through museums, dribbling basketballs in playgrounds, throwing baseballs and footballs in public parks, feeling the different sensations of walking on wooden floors, cement floors, tile floors, and stone floors, the different sensations of putting your feet on sand, dirt, and grass, but most of all the sensation of sidewalks, for that is how you see yourself whenever you stop think about who you are: a man who walks, a man who has spent his life walking through the streets of cities.”

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What strikes me so much in this as in the book as a whole is language as tactile. Language as touching you at a distance.

PAUL AUSTER: For me it’s physical. Writing is physical. Writing is very connected to music. I mentioned music before, but I think the meanings in a work of art as opposed to a newspaper article are in the rhythms and therefore the meanings and the words convey a lot but it’s the rhythms of the sentences and the syllables that really carry the ultimate power of any literary work. And so it is tactile. It’s part of the body. Look, I’m talking, it’s coming out of my mouth. My mouth is part of my body. My lungs are engaged, my throat is engaged. It’s physical even though words are abstract things.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 63 PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And the voice is utterly particular.

PAUL AUSTER: Everyone’s voice is different. Everyone’s voice is—it’s like a thumbprint, whether on the page or in the air. Proceed.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Two last elements. There are many more images to show, I’d love to show them all, but I won’t, you’ll have to come to the archives to see them. There’s a line from The Invention of Solitude which I think could stand in well for Winter Journal. It’s a line by a poet I didn’t know at all named George Oppen, who you knew well.

PAUL AUSTER: Very well, yes.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And it’s a line on aging.

PAUL AUSTER: It’s a line of conversation, it’s not in a poem, it’s something he said to me.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 64 PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s also included in The Invention of Solitude, and it strikes me as something that this book tries to reenact in some way, which is, “What a strange thing to happen to a little boy.”

PAUL AUSTER: That’s what George said to me when he was about seventy-four or five, just how remarkable it was to be old and because old people don’t feel old because you have this connection with this six-year-old self that never goes away, that internal narrative that begins at that moment in your childhood is the continuous story of who you are and so even though we forget much, so much is obliterated from our memories, this sense of being the same person from six to seventy-five I think is pretty universal unless there’s brain damage or some physical thing that happens, but in healthy people you are connected to your childhood self even in old age.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You are connected and yet you are forgetful, so it’s a mixture of memory and—

PAUL AUSTER: But even young people are forgetful. You can’t—listen, I can’t even remember what we said at the beginning of this conversation,

(laughter) and this is another thing I want to say about memoirs, this great

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 65 genre that America keeps producing. This is not a memoir, this is a book of autobiographical fragments.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Sketches.

PAUL AUSTER: Because what astonishes me is that people write about their lives and they’re recapitulating conversations they had or overheard when they were six years old, and you have three pages of dialogue. Now, it’s not possible. These memoirs are fictions, they’re making it up, and I find it so dishonest and it annoys me so much that I want to scream when I read some of this stuff. Nobody can remember conversations—a few words from really the central conversations in the course of your life, but nobody can do it.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You’re saying this with a certain amount of— because it angers you.

PAUL AUSTER: It really irritates me. As I said, I can’t remember what I said to you thirty minutes ago. How am I going to remember what I said to

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 66 somebody thirty years ago? It’s not possible. So, just remember those books are novels, they’re not really autobiographies.

(laughter)

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: There is a moment in your book at the very end, on page 220, where you speak about a dance saving your life. I’d like you—and Nina W., I’d like you to recount that moment and then read from a very early piece of yours, which I think you describe as the beginning of your writing life.

PAUL AUSTER: Actually, I wanted to read this thing from the book.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You can, you can do both. Do page 220, do both.

PAUL AUSTER: It’s so much better in the book than what I could possibly say.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 67 PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Do both. It begins with “the dancers saved you.”

PAUL AUSTER: So here we are, we’re ten pages from the end of the book.

“The dancers saved you. They are the ones who brought you back to life that evening in December 1978, who made it possible for you to experience the scalding epiphanic moment of clarity that pushed you through a crack in the universe and allowed you to begin again. Bodies in motion, bodies in space, bodies leaping and twisting through empty, unimpeded air, eight dancers in a high school gym in Manhattan, four men and four women, all of them young, eight dancers in their early twenties, and you sitting in the bleachers with a dozen or so acquaintances of the choreographer’s to watch an open rehearsal of her new piece. You had been invited by David Reed, a painter you met on the student ship that took you to Europe in 1965, now your oldest friend in New York, who had asked you to come because he was romantically involved with the choreographer, Nina W., a woman you did not know well and whose affair with David did not last long, but, if you are not distorting the facts, you believe she had started out as a dancer in Merce

Cunningham’s troupe, and now that she had turned her energies to

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 68 choreography, her work bore some resemblance to Cunningham’s: muscular, spontaneous, unpredictable. It was the darkest moment of your life. You were thirty-one years old, your first marriage had just cracked apart, you had an eighteen-month-old son and no regular job, no money to speak of, grinding out your meager, inadequate living as a freelance translator, author of three small books of poetry with at most one hundred readers in the world, padding your pittance of an income by writing critical pieces for

Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, and other magazines, and apart from a pseudonymous detective novel you had written the previous summer in an effort to generate some cash (which still had no publisher), your work had staggered to a halt, you were stuck and confused, you had not written a poem in more than a year, and you were slowly coming to the realization that you would never be able to write again. Such was the spot you were in that winter evening more than thirty-two years ago”—it’s almost thirty-four years ago now—“when you walked into the high school gym to watch the open rehearsal of Nina W.’s work in progress. You knew nothing about dance, still know nothing about dance, but you have always responded to it with a soaring inner happiness whenever you see it done well, and as you took your seat next to David, you had no idea what to expect, since at that point Nina W.’s work was unknown to you. She stood on the gym floor and

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 69 explained to the tiny audience that the rehearsal would be divided into two alternating parts: demonstrations of the principal movements of the piece by the dancers and verbal commentary from her. Then she stepped aside, and the dancers began to move around the floor. The first thing that struck you was that there was no musical accompaniment. The possibility had never occurred to you—dancing to silence rather than to music—for music had always seemed essential to dance, inseparable from dance, not only because it sets the rhythm and speed of the performance but because it establishes an emotional tone for the spectator, giving a narrative coherence to that which otherwise would be entirely abstract, but in this case the dancers’ bodies were responsible for establishing the rhythm and tone of the piece, and once you began to settle into it, you found the absence of music wholly invigorating, since the dancers were hearing the music in their heads, the rhythms in their heads, hearing what could not be heard, and because these eight young people were good dancers, in fact excellent dancers, it wasn’t long before you began to hear those rhythms in your head as well. No sounds, then, except the sounds of bare feet thumping against the wooden floor of the gym. You can’t remember the details of their movements, but in your mind you see jumping and spinning, falling and sliding, arms waving and arms dropping to the floor, legs kicking out and running forward, bodies

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 70 touching and then not touching, and you were impressed by the grace and athleticism of the dancers, the mere sight of their bodies in motion seemed to be carrying you to some unexplored place within yourself, and little by little you felt something lift inside you, felt joy rising through your body and up into your head, a physical joy that was also of the mind, a mounting joy that spread and continued to spread through every part of you. Then, after six or seven minutes, the dancers stopped. Nina W. stepped forward to explain to the audience what they had just witnessed, and the more she talked, the more earnestly and passionately she tried to articulate the movements and patterns of the dance, the less you understood what she was saying. It wasn’t because she was using technical terms that were unfamiliar to you, it was the more fundamental fact that her words were utterly useless, inadequate to the task of describing the wordless performance you had just seen, for no words could convey the fullness and brute physicality of what the dancers had done. Then she stepped aside, and the dancers began to move again, immediately filling you with the same joy you had felt before they’d stopped. Five or six minutes later, they stopped again, and once more Nina

W. came forward to speak, again failing to capture a hundredth part of the beauty you had just seen, and back and forth it went for the next hour, the dancers taking turns with the choreographer, bodies in motion followed by

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 71 words, beauty followed by meaningless noise, joy followed by boredom, and at a certain point something began to open inside you, you found yourself falling through the rift between world and word, the chasm that divides human life from our capacity to understand or express the truth of human life, and for reasons that still confound you, this sudden fall through the empty, unbounded air filled you with a sensation of freedom and happiness, and by the time the performance was over, you were no longer blocked, no longer burdened by the doubts that had been weighing down on you for the past year. You returned to your house in Dutchess County, to the downstairs workroom where you had been sleeping since the end of your marriage, and the next day you began to write, for three weeks you worked on a text of no definable genre, neither a poem nor a prose narrative, attempting to describe what you had seen and felt as you’d watched the dancers dance and the choreographer talk in that high school gym in Manhattan, writing many pages to begin with and then boiling them down to eight pages, the first work of your second incarnation as a writer, the bridge to everything you have written in the years since then, and you remember finishing during a snowstorm late one Saturday night, two o’clock in the morning, the only person awake in the silent house, and the terrible thing about that night, the thing that continues to haunt you, is that just as you were finishing your

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 72 piece, which you eventually called “White Spaces,” your father was dying in the arms of his girlfriend. The ghoulish trigonometry of fate. Just as you were coming back to life, your father’s life was coming to an end.

(applause)

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: A space, what you were trying to work out there in some way or another, the space that exists between what we experience and what we express and yet in some way the necessity to find words that fail us.

PAUL AUSTER: The words failed. The words failed so miserably that for some reason, and I say—it still confounds me—it opened up room for me to breathe in again, room in which to start writing again and I suppose until that moment I had always thought words could do it and then I realized that night that words can’t do it.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: At this hour, I’m wondering if we should read this whole eight pages.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 73 PAUL AUSTER: We can’t, it’s too late.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But maybe I could read the first few lines and you could read the very last ones.

PAUL AUSTER: All right.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Something happens—this is indeed from

“White Spaces,” written in 1979. “Something happens and from the moment it begins to happen, nothing can ever be the same again. Something happens or else something does not happen. A body moves or else it does not move.

And it moves something begins to happen and even if it does not move something begins to happen. It comes from my voice but that does not mean that these words will ever be what happens. It comes and goes. If I happen to be speaking at this moment it is only I hope to find a way of going along, of running parallel to everything else that is going along, and to begin to find a way of filling the silence without breaking it.”

And then I’d love you to read from there to the very end.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 74 PAUL AUSTER: All right, okay, this is the piece is written at end of ’78 into the early days of January ’79.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Which got you to writing.

PAUL AUSTER: Well, here we go, and then we’ll end the evening with this. So this is towards the end of “White Spaces.” “In the beginning I wanted to speak of arms and legs, of jumping up and down, of bodies tumbling and spinning, of enormous journeys through space, of cities, of deserts, of mountain ranges stretching farther than the eye can see. Little by little, however, as these words began to impose themselves on me, the things

I wanted to do seemed finally to be of no importance. Reluctantly, I abandoned all my witty stories, all my adventures of faraway places, and began slowly and painfully to empty my mind. Now, emptiness is all that remains, a space no matter how small in which whatever’s happening can be allowed to happen. And no matter how small, each and every possibility remains, even a motion reduced to an apparent absence of motion, a motion for example as minimal as breathing itself, the motion the body makes when inhaling and exhaling air.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 75 “In a book I once read by Peter Freuchen, the famous Arctic explorer, described being trapped by a blizzard in Northern Greenland, alone, his supplies dwindling, he decided to build an igloo and wait out the storm.

Many days passed. Afraid above all that he would be attacked by wolves, for he heard them prowling hungrily on the roof of his igloo, he would periodically step outside and sing at the top of his lungs in order to frighten them away, but the wind was blowing fiercely and no matter how hard he sang, the only thing he could hear was the wind. If this was a serious problem, however, the problem of the igloo was itself much greater, for

Freuchen began to notice that the walls of his little shelter were gradually closing in on him. Because of the particular weather conditions outside, his breath was literally freezing to the walls, and with each breath the walls became that much thicker, the igloo became that much smaller, until eventually there was almost no room left for his body. It is surely a frightening thing, to imagine breathing yourself into a coffin of ice, and to my mind considerably more compelling than, say, “The Pit and the

Pendulum” by Poe, for in this case it is the man himself who is the agent of his own destruction and further the instrument of that destruction is the very thing he needs to keep himself alive, for surely a man cannot live if he does not breathe, but at the same time he will not live if he does breathe.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 76 Curiously, I do not remember how Freuchen managed to escape his predicament, but needless to say he did escape. The title of the book if I recall is Arctic Adventure. It has been out of print for many years.

“Nothing happens and still it is not nothing. To invoke things that have never happened is noble but how much sweeter to remain in the realm of the naked eye. It comes down to this, that everything should count, that everything should be part of it, even the things I do not or cannot understand. The desire for example to destroy everything I have written so far. Not from any revulsion at the inadequacy of these words, although that remains a distinct possibility, but rather from the need to remind myself at each moment that things do not have to happen this way, that there is always another way, neither better nor worse, in which things might take shape. I realize in the end that I am probably powerless to affect the outcome of even the least thing that happens, but nevertheless and in spite of myself as if in an act of blind faith I want to assume full responsibility and therefore this desire, this overwhelming need to take these papers and scatter them across the room or else to go on or else to begin again or else to go on as if each moment were the beginning, as if each word were the beginning of another silence, another word more silent than the last.

LIVEAuster_10.1Transcript 77 “A few scraps of paper, a last cigarette before turning in, the snow falling endlessly in the winter night, to remain in the realm of the naked eye, as happy as I am at this moment, and if this is too much to ask, than to be granted the memory of it, a way of returning to it in the darkness of the night that will surely engulf me again. Never to be anywhere but here in the immense journey through space that continues everywhere as if each place were here and the snow falling endlessly in the winter night.”

(applause)

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Thank you very much.

PAUL AUSTER: Thank you, Paul.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Thank you, that was wonderful.

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