Talking to Strangers

by Paul Auster

  Reading a writer’s letters can often provoke a sense of discomfort. We feel we are intruding on a private realm, seeing things that were never meant for our eyes, and more often than not we are unable to find anything that helps to illuminate the writer’s work—the reason for seeking out the letters in the first place. With Kafka, however, the letters are fundamental. Occupying a middle ground between the inner battles of the diaries and the third-person accounts of biographers, they help us to understand his relations with the world and give us a context in which we can penetrate his character. One conclusion presents itself immediately: Kafka was a born writer, incapable of writing a bad sentence or expressing himself awkwardly. As early as 1902, at the age of nineteen, he wrote to a fellow student, Oskar Pollak, with the whimsy and imaginative flair that were to become his trademark:

  I sat at my fine desk. You don’t know it. How could you? You see, it’s a respectably minded desk which is meant to educate. Where the writer’s knees usually are, it has two horrible wooden spikes. And now pay attention. If you sit down quietly, cautiously at it, and write something respectable, all’s well. But if you become excited, look out—if your body quivers ever so little, you inescapably feel the spikes in your knees, and how that hurts. I could show you the black-and-blue marks. And what that means is simply: “Don’t write anything exciting and don’t let your body quiver while you write.”

  Two years later he wrote to the same Oskar Pollak:

  I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?… But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

  Max Brod was Kafka’s principal correspondent, and over the twenty years of their friendship Kafka poured out his soul to him. The letters to Brod are by far the most intimate in the book, dealing in great detail with personal and literary matters—all the myriad events of Kafka’s daily life—and containing superb descriptions of both the ambiance and the people at the various sanitoria Kafka went to during his last years. It is impossible to read these letters without marveling at the depth of the friendship between these two men, the bond of absolute trust that existed between them. This correspondence alone would have been enough to form a stunning book, but there is far more: Kafka’s numerous letters to Kurt Wolff, his publisher, written with such humility in regard to his own work that it almost seems that Kafka felt Wolff was doing him a favor by publishing his stories; Kafka’s long correspondence with Minze Eisner, a young girl with emotional troubles whom he befriended, encouraged, gave advice to, and helped through the difficult years of adolescence; a dazzling disquisition on the education of children to Brod’s sister; his constant efforts to promote the work of young friends to publishers and magazine editors; as well as assorted letters to Martin Buber, Robert Musil, Franz Werfel, and other prominent writers of the period. We see Kafka from so many different perspectives, encounter him in relation to so many different kinds of people, that we are finally able to witness the evolution of his personality, to come face-to-face with him as a man. The value of this book cannot be minimized. Because of it, our reading of Kafka’s work will never be quite the same again.

  The last eight pages are made up of “Conversation Slips,” the notes scribbled by Kafka on his deathbed to Dora Dymant and Robert Klopstock—the two friends who stayed with him until the end and whom he called his “little family.” Kafka was suffering from tuberculosis of the larynx and was not allowed to speak; eating had become so painful to him that as the disease was doing its final work he actually starved to death. These notes, in all their elliptical brevity, are among the most shattering things Kafka ever wrote. Here was Kafka, confined to his bed, surrounded by flowers, watched over by his two friends and (the irony is so cruel as to attain the force of a cosmic punishment) correcting proofs of “A Hunger Artist” as he waited to die.

  To think that I once could simply venture a large swallow of water … I’d especially like to take care of the peonies because they are so fragile … And move the lilacs into the sun … I’ll hold out another week, maybe, I hope; such are the nuances … Please be careful that I don’t cough in your face … How trying I am to all of you; it’s crazy … Fear again and again … If there were no main topic, there would be no subjects for conversation … The trouble is that I cannot drink a single glass of water, though the craving itself is some satisfaction … How wonderful that is, isn’t it? The lilac—dying, it drinks, goes on swilling … Put your hand on my forehead a moment to give me courage.

  And finally, after the doctor had been in to see him:

  So the help goes away again without helping.

  He was forty years old, on the brink of a new life, filled with hope for the future. Even now, more than fifty years later, the sense of loss still burns deep.

  1977

  Reznikoff × 2

  1. THE DECISIVE MOMENT

  Charles Reznikoff is a poet of the eye. To cross the threshold of his work is to penetrate the prehistory of matter, to find oneself exposed to a world in which language has not yet been invented. Seeing, in his poetry, always comes before speech. Each poetic utterance is an emanation of the eye, a transcription of the visible into the brute, undeciphered code of being. The act of writing, therefore, is not so much an ordering of the real as a discovery of it. It is a process by which one places oneself between things and the names of things, a way of standing watch in this interval of silence and allowing things to be seen—as if for the first time—and henceforth to be given their names. The poet, who is the first man to be born, is also the last. He is Adam, but he is also the end of all generations: the mute heir of the builders of Babel. For it is he who must learn to speak from his eye—and cure himself of seeing with his mouth.

  The poem, then, not as a telling, but as a taking hold. The world can never be assumed to exist. It comes into being only in the act of moving toward it. Esse est percipii: no American poet has ever adhered so faithfully to the Berkeleyan formula as Reznikoff. It is more than just the guiding principle of his work—it is embedded in the work, and it contains all the force of a moral dogma. To read Reznikoff is to understand that nothing can be taken for granted: we do not find ourselves in the midst of an already established world, we do not, as if by preordained birthright, automatically take possession of our surroundings. Each moment, each thing, must be earned, wrested away from the confusion of inert matter by a steadiness of gaze, a purity of perception so intense that the effort, in itself, takes on the value of a religious act. The slate has been wiped clean. It is up to the poet to write his own book.

  Tiny poems, many of them barely a sentence long, make up the core of Reznikoff’s work. Although his total output includes fiction, biography, drama, long narrative poems, historical meditations, and book-length documentary poems, these short lyrics are the Ur-texts of Reznikoff’s imagination: everything else follows from them. Notable for their precision and simplicity, they also run counter to normal assumptions about what a poem should aspire to be. Consider these three examples:

  April

  The stiff lines of the twigs

  blurred by buds.

  Moonlit Night

  The trees’ shadows lie in black pools in the lawns.

  The Bridge

  In a cloud bones of steel.

  The point is that there is no point. At least not in any traditional sense. These poems are not trying to drum home universal truths, to impress the reader with the skill of their making, or to invoke the ambiguities of human experience. Their aim, quite simply, is clarity. Of seeing and of speaking. And yet, the unsettling modesty of these poems should not blind us to the boldness of their ambition. For even in these tiniest of poems, the gist of Reznikoff’s poetics is there. It i
s as much an ethics of the poetic moment as it is a theory of writing, and its message never varies in any of Reznikoff’s work: the poem is always more than just a construction of words. Art, then, for the sake of something—which means that art is almost an incidental by-product of the effort to make it. The poem, in all instances, must be an effort to perceive, must be a moving outward. It is less a mode of expressing the world than it is a way of being in the world. Merleau-Ponty’s account of contemplation in The Phenomenology of Perception is a nearly exact description of the process that takes place in a Reznikoff poem:

  … when I contemplate an object with the sole intention of watching it exist and unfold its riches before my eyes, then it ceases to be an allusion to a general type, and I become aware that each perception, and not merely that of sights which I am discovering for the first time, re-enacts on its own account the birth of intelligence and has some element of creative genius about it: in order that I may recognize the tree as a tree, it is necessary that, beneath this familiar meaning, the momentary arrangement of the visible scene should begin all over again, as on the very first day of the vegetable kingdom, to outline the individual idea of this tree.

  Imagism, yes. But only as a source, not as a method. There is no desire on Reznikoff’s part to use the image as a medium for transcendence, to make it quiver ineffably in some ethereal realm of the spirit. The progress from symbolism to imagism to objectivism is more a series of short-circuits than a direct lineage. What Reznikoff learned from the Imagists was the value—the force—of the image in itself, unadorned by the claims of the ego. The poem, in Reznikoff’s hands, is an act of image-ing rather than of imagining. Its impulse is away from metaphor and into the tangible, a desire to take hold of what is rather than what is merely possible. A poem fit to the measure of the perceived world, neither larger than this world nor smaller than it. “I see something,” Reznikoff stated in a 1968 interview with L. S. Dembo, “and I put it down as I see it. In the treatment of it, I abstain from comment. Now, if I’ve done something that moves me—if I’ve portrayed the object well—somebody will come along and also be moved, and somebody else will come along and say, ‘What the devil is this?’ And maybe they’re both right.”

  If the poet’s primary obligation is to see, there is a similar though less obvious injunction upon the poet—the duty of not being seen. The Reznikoff equation, which weds seeing to invisibility, cannot be made except by renunciation. In order to see, the poet must make himself invisible. He must disappear, efface himself in anonymity.

  I like the sound of the street—

  but I, apart and alone,

  beside an open window

  and behind a closed door.

  *

  I am alone—

  and glad to be alone;

  I do not like people who walk about

  so late; who walk slowly after midnight

  through the leaves fallen on the sidewalks.

  I do not like

  my own face

  in the little mirrors of the slot-machines

  before the closed stores.

  It seems no accident that most Reznikoff poems are rooted in the city. For only in the modern city can the one who sees remain unseen, take his stand in space and yet remain transparent. Even as he becomes a part of the landscape he has entered, he continues to be an outsider. Therefore, objectivist. That is to say—to create a world around oneself by seeing as a stranger would. What counts is the thing itself, and the thing that is seen can come to life only when the one who sees it has disappeared. There can never be any movement toward possession. Seeing is the effort to create presence: to possess a thing would be to make it vanish.

  And yet, it is as if each act of seeing were an attempt to establish a link between the one who sees and the thing that is seen. As if the eye were the means by which the stranger could find his place in the world he has been exiled to. For the building of a world is above all the building and recognition of relations. To discover a thing and isolate it in its singularity is only a beginning, a first step. The world is not merely an accumulation, it is a process—and each time the eye enters this world, it partakes in the life of all the disparate things that pass before it. While objectivity is the premise, subjectivity is the tacit organizer. As soon as there is more than one thing, there is memory, and because of memory, there is language: what is born in the eye, and nevertheless beyond it. In which, and out of which, the poem.

  In his 1968 interview with Dembo, Reznikoff went on to say: “The world is very large, I think, and I certainly can’t testify to the whole of it. I can only testify to my own feelings; I can only say what I saw and heard, and I try to say it as well as I can. And if your conclusion is that what I saw and heard makes you feel the way I did, then the poem is successful.”

  New York was Reznikoff’s home. It was a city he knew as intimately as a woodcutter knows his forest, and in his prime he would walk between ten and twenty miles a day, from Brooklyn to Riverdale and back. Few poets have ever had such a deep feeling for city life, and in dozens of brief poems Reznikoff captures the strange and transitory beauties of the urban landscape.

  This smoky winter morning—

  do not despise the green jewel among the twigs

  because it is a traffic light.

  *

  Feast, you who cross the bridge

  this cold twilight

  on these honeycombs of light, the buildings of Manhattan.

  *

  Rails in the subway,

  what did you know of happiness

  when you were ore in the earth;

  now the electric lights shine upon you.

  But Reznikoff’s attention is focused on more than just the objects to be found in the city. He is equally interested in the people who fill its streets, and no encounter, however brief, is too slight to escape his notice, too banal to become a source of epiphany. These two examples, from among many possibilities:

  I was walking along Forty-Second Street as night was falling.

  On the other side of the street was Bryant Park.

  Walking behind me were two men

  and I could hear some of their conversation:

  “What you must do,” one of them was saying to his companion,

  “is to decide on what you want to do

  and then stick to it. Stick to it!

  And you are sure to succeed finally.”

  I turned to look at the speaker giving such good advice

  and was not surprised to see that he was old.

  But his companion

  to whom the advice was given so earnestly,

  was just as old;

  and just then the great clock on top of a building across the park

  began to shine.

  *

  The tramp with torn shoes

  and clothing dirty and wrinkled—

  dirty hands and face—

  takes a comb out of his pocket

  and carefully combs his hair.

  The feeling that emerges from these glimpses of city life is roughly equivalent to what one feels when looking at a photograph. Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” is perhaps the crucial idea to remember in this context. The important thing is readiness: you cannot walk out into the street with the expectation of writing a poem or taking a picture, and yet you must be prepared to do so whenever the opportunity presents itself. Because the “work” can come into being only when it has been given to you by the world, you must be constantly looking at the world, constantly doing the work that will lead to a poem, even if no poem comes of it. Reznikoff walks through the city—not, as most poets do, with “his head in the clouds,” but with his eyes open, his mind open, his energies concentrated on entering the life around him. Entering it precisely because he is apart from it. And therefore this paradox, lodged in the heart of the poem: to posit the reality of this world, and then to cross into it, even as you find yourself barred at all its gates. The poet as solitary wander
er, as man in the crowd, as faceless scribe. Poetry as an art of loneliness.

  It is more than just loneliness, however. It is exile, and a way of coming to terms with exile that somehow, for better or worse, manages to leave the condition of exile intact. Reznikoff was not only an outsider by temperament, nurturing those aspects of himself that would tend to maintain his sense of isolation, he was also born into a state of otherness, and as a Jew, as the son of immigrant Jews in America, whatever idea of community he had was always ethnic rather than national (his dream as a poet was to go across the country on foot, stopping at synagogues along the way to give readings of his work in exchange for food and lodging). If his poems about the city—his American poems, so to speak—dwell on the surfaces of things, on the skin of everyday life, it is in his poems about Jewish identity that he allows himself a certain measure of lyrical freedom, allows himself to become a singer of songs.