Talking to Strangers

by Paul Auster

  On my visit that day, I brought along for him a copy of my first book of poems, Unearth, which had just been published. This evoked a story from Reznikoff that strikes me as significant, especially in the light of the terrible neglect his work suffered for so many years. His first book, he told me, had been published in 1918 by Samuel Roth (who would later become famous for pirating Ulysses and his role in the 1933 court case over Joyce’s book). The leading American poet of the day was Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Reznikoff had sent him a copy of the book, hoping for some sign of encouragement from the great man. One afternoon Reznikoff was visiting Roth in his bookstore, and Robinson walked in. Roth went over to greet him, and Reznikoff, standing in the back corner of the shop, witnessed the following scene. Roth proudly gestured to the copies of Reznikoff’s book that were on display and asked Robinson if he had read the work of this fine young poet. “Yeah, I read the book,” said Robinson in a gruff, hostile voice, “and I thought it was garbage.”

  “And so,” said Reznikoff to me in 1974, “I never got to meet Edwin Arlington Robinson.”

  It was not until I was putting on my coat and getting ready to leave that Reznikoff said anything about the piece I had sent him. It had been composed in an extremely dense and cryptic style, wrestling with issues that Reznikoff himself had probably never consciously thought about, and I had no idea what his reaction would be. His silence about it during our long conversation led me to suspect that he had not liked it.

  “About your article,” he said, almost offhandedly. “It reminds me of something that once happened to my mother. A stranger walked up to her on the street one day and very kindly and graciously complimented her on her beautiful hair. Now, you must understand that my mother had never prided herself on her hair and did not consider it to be one of her better features. But, on the strength of that stranger’s remark, she spent the rest of the day in front of her mirror, preening and primping and admiring her hair. That’s exactly what your article did to me. I stood in front of the mirror for the whole afternoon and admired myself.”

  * * *

  Several weeks later, I received a letter from Reznikoff about my book. It was filled with praise, and the numerous quotations from the poems convinced me that he was in earnest—that he had actually sat down and read the book. Nothing could have meant more to me.

  A few years after Reznikoff’s death, a letter came to me from La Jolla, written by a friend who works in the American Poetry Archive at the University of California library—where Reznikoff’s papers had recently been sold. In going through the material, my friend told me, he had come across Reznikoff’s copy of Unearth. Astonishingly, the book was filled with numerous small notations in the margins, as well as stress marks that Reznikoff had made throughout the poems in an effort to scan them correctly and understand their rhythms. Helpless to do or say anything, I thanked him from the other side of the grave.

  Wherever Edwin Arlington Robinson might be now, one can be sure that his accommodations aren’t half as good as Charles Reznikoff’s.

  1983

  The Bartlebooth Follies

  Georges Perec died in 1982 at the age of forty-six, leaving behind a dozen books and a brilliant reputation. In the words of Italo Calvino, he was “one of the most singular literary personalities in the world, a writer who resembled absolutely no one else.” It has taken a while for us to catch on, but now that his major work has at last appeared in English—Life: A User’s Manual (1978), expertly translated by David Bellos—it will be impossible for us to think of contemporary French writing in the same way again.

  Born into a Jewish family from Poland that emigrated to France in the 1920s, Perec lost his father in the German invasion of 1940 and his mother to the concentration camps in 1943. “I have no memories of childhood,” he would later write. His literary career began early, and by the age of nineteen he was already publishing critical notes in the NRF and Les Lettres Nouvelles. His first novel, Les Choses, was awarded the Prix Renadot for 1965, and from then until his death he published approximately one book a year.

  Given his tragic family history, it is perhaps surprising to learn that Perec was essentially a comic writer. For the last fifteen years of his life, in fact, he was an active member of Oulipo, a strange literary society founded by Raymond Queneau and the mathematician François le Lionnais. This Workshop for Potential Literature (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) proposes all kinds of madcap operations to writers: the S-7 method (rewriting famous poems by replacing each word with the seventh word that follows it in the dictionary), the Lipogram (eliminating the use of one or more letters in a text), acrostics, palindromes, permutations, anagrams, and numerous other “literary constraints.” As one of the leading lights of this group, Perec once wrote an entire novel of more than 200 pages without using the letter e; this novel was followed by another in which e is the only vowel that appears. Verbal gymnastics of this sort seemed to come naturally to him. In addition to his literary work, he produced a notoriously difficult weekly crossword puzzle for the news magazine Le Point.

  To read Georges Perec one must be ready to abandon oneself to a spirit of play. His books are studded with intellectual traps, allusions and secret systems, and if they are not necessarily profound (in the sense that Tolstoy and Mann are profound), they are prodigiously entertaining (in the sense that Lewis Carroll and Laurence Sterne are entertaining). In Chapter Two of Life, for example, Perec refers to “the score of a famous American melody, ‘Gertrude of Wyoming,’ by Arthur Stanley Jefferson.” By pure chance, I happened to know that Arthur Stanley Jefferson was the real name of the comedian Stan Laurel, but just because I caught this allusion does not mean there weren’t a thousand others that escaped me.

  For the mathematically inclined, there are magic squares and chess moves to be discovered in this novel, but the fact that I was unable to find them did not diminish my enjoyment of the book. Those who have read a great deal will no doubt recognize passages that quote directly or indirectly from other writers—Kafka, Agatha Christie, Melville, Freud, Rabelais, Nabokov, Jules Verne, and a host of others—but failure to recognize them should not be considered a handicap. Like Jorge Luis Borges, Georges Perec had a mind that was a storehouse of curious bits of knowledge and awesome erudition, and half the time the reader can’t be sure if he is being conned or enlightened. In the long run, it probably doesn’t matter. What draws one into this book is not Perec’s cleverness, but the deftness and clarity of his style, a flow of language that manages to sustain one’s interest through endless lists, catalogues, and descriptions. Perec had an uncanny gift for articulating the nuances of the material world, and in his hands even a worm-eaten table can become an object of fascination. “It was after he had done this that he thought of dissolving what was left of the original wood so as to disclose the fabulous aborescence within, this exact record of the worms’ life inside the wooden mass: a static, mineral accumulation of all the movements that had constituted their blind existence, their undeviating single-mindedness, their obstinate itineraries; the faithful materialisation of all they had eaten and digested as they forced from their dense surroundings the invisible elements needed for their survival, the explicit, visible, immeasurably disturbing image of the endless progressions that had reduced the hardest of woods to an impalpable network of crumbling galleries.”

  Life: A User’s Manual is constructed in the manner of a vast jigsaw puzzle. Perec takes a single apartment building in Paris, and in ninety-nine short chapters (along with a Preamble and an Epilogue) proceeds to give a meticulous description of each and every room as well as the life stories of all the inhabitants, both past and present. Ostensibly, we are watching the creation of a painting by Serge Valène, an old artist who has lived in the building for fifty-five years. “It was in the final months of his life that the artist Serge Valène conceived the idea of a painting that would reassemble his entire existence: everything his memory had recorded, all the sensations that had swept over him,
all his fantasies, his passions, his hates would be recorded on canvas, a compendium of minute parts of which the sum would be his life.”

  What emerges is a series of self-contained but interconnecting stories. They are all briskly told, and they run the gamut from the bizarre to the realistic. There are tales of murder and revenge, tales of intellectual obsessions, humorous tales of social satire, and (almost unexpectedly) a number of stories of great psychological penetration. For the most part, Perec’s microcosm is peopled with a motley assortment of oddballs, impassioned collectors, antiquarians, miniaturists, and half-baked scholars. If anyone can be called the central character in this shifting, kaleidoscopic work, it would have to be Percival Bartlebooth, an eccentric English millionaire whose insane and useless fifty-year project serves as an emblem for the book as a whole. Realizing as a young man that his wealth has doomed him to a life of boredom, he undertakes to study the art of watercolor from Serge Valène for a period of ten years. Although he has no aptitude whatsoever for painting, he eventually reaches a satisfactory level of competence. Then, in the company of a servant, he sets out on a twenty-year voyage around the world with the sole intention of painting watercolors of five hundred different harbors and seaports. As soon as one of these pictures is finished, he sends it to a man in Paris by the name of Gaspard Winckler, who also lives in the building. Winckler is an expert puzzle-maker whom Bartlebooth has hired to turn the watercolors into 750-piece jigsaw puzzles. One by one, the puzzles are made over the twenty-year period and stored in wooden boxes. Bartlebooth returns from his travels, settles back into his apartment, and methodically goes about putting the puzzles together in chronological order. By means of an elaborate chemical process that has been designed for the purpose at hand, the borders of the puzzle pieces are glued together in such a way that the seams are no longer visible, thus restoring the watercolor to its original integrity. The watercolor, good as new, is then removed from its wooden backing and sent back to the place where it was executed twenty years earlier. There, by prearrangement, it is dipped into a detergent solution that eliminates all traces of the painting, leaving Bartlebooth with a clean and unmarked sheet of paper. In other words, he is left with nothing, the same thing he started with. The project, however, does not quite go according to plan. Winckler has made the puzzles too difficult, and Bartlebooth does not live long enough to finish all five hundred of them. As Perec writes in the last paragraph of the ninety-ninth chapter: “It is the twenty-third of June nineteen hundred and seventy-five, and it is eight o’clock in the evening. Seated at his jigsaw puzzle, Bartlebooth has just died. On the tablecloth, somewhere in the crepuscular sky of the four hundred and thirty-ninth puzzle, the black hole of the sole piece not yet filled in has the almost perfect shape of an X. But the ironical thing, which could have been foreseen long ago, is that the piece the dead man holds between his fingers is shaped like a W.”

  Like many of the other stores in Life, Bartlebooth’s weird saga can be read as a parable (of sorts) about the efforts of the human mind to impose an arbitrary order on the world. Again and again, Perec’s characters are swindled, hoaxed, and thwarted in their schemes, and if there is a darker side to this book, it is perhaps to be found in this emphasis on the inevitability of failure. Even a self-annihilating project such as Bartlebooth’s cannot be completed, and when we learn in the Epilogue that Valène’s enormous painting (which for all intents and purposes is the book we have just been reading) has come no farther than a preliminary sketch, we realize that Perec does not exempt himself from the follies of his characters. It is this sense of self-mockery that turns a potentially daunting novel into a hospitable work, a book that for all its high jinks and japery finally wins us over with the warmth of its human understanding.

  1987

  POE’S BONES & OPPEN’S PIPE

  Two Lost Pieces from the ’80s

  I

  In 2013, the curator of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, Isaac Gewirtz, unearthed from my papers a rough manuscript of notes pertaining to a talk I delivered at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, in what was probably the spring of 1982. The finished typescript has been lost. What follows are some extracts from those preliminary notes. I have substituted Henry Weinfield’s excellent translation of the Mallarmé sonnet for the one I used that night.

  * * *

  I am very happy to be here tonight. First, for the chance to share some thoughts about poetry with you, but also because this visit represents something of a homecoming for me. I grew up in this town, and when I was a boy I lived only 4 or 5 blocks from the Seton Hall campus. Seton Hall was just a small college then, with none of the new, sparkling buildings that have sprung up since those ancient days in the 1950s, and I remember how often I used to come here and play with my friends, darting around the grounds and ball fields and gawking at the college students—all of them giants, decked out in their letter sweaters, plaid skirts, and saddle shoes …

  I went to the public schools in town, and one evening in late 1961 or early 1962, our ninth-grade basketball team played a game against Seton Hall Prep’s ninth-grade team—right here on the Seton Hall court—as a fund-raiser for the local Police Benevolent Association. It was one of the thrilling experiences of my young life—to play on the same court that Walter Dukes and Nick Werkman had played on—and I remember that the stands were packed. I also remember that we lost by a score of 30 to 29—because at one point the best player on our team stole the ball from an opposing player, got turned around in the ensuing chaos, and drove the length of the court for an uncontested layup—into the wrong basket, thus giving Seton Hall Prep two unearned points—and the victory.

  Every player who participated in the game was given a present—a pen from the Police Benevolent Association—emblazoned with the letters PBA—which happened to be my initials—Paul Benjamin Auster—and so I kept the pen as a particularly cherished object: my own personalized writing instrument! This also happened to be the time in my life when literature was beginning to acquire a new significance for me—14, 15 years old—and it was with that PBA pen that I wrote my first adolescent poems and stories—wretched works, to be sure, but composed with great earnestness and enthusiasm—and therefore it would be safe to say that Seton Hall—for better or for worse—played an essential role in who and what I am today.

  When I sat down to prepare my talk for tonight, it was hard to keep these thoughts out of my mind—thoughts about the past, about the idea of coming home—and even though my subject was supposed to be modern French poetry, I kept thinking about it in terms of home—home being America in this case—and little by little the name of Edgar Allan Poe began to resonate within me—Poe, the first American poet to have made an impact in France—all the while remembering that in the last months of his life Poe went back to his hometown of Richmond, Virginia, to deliver a lecture, not unlike what I am doing now in my hometown. One thing kept leading to another, and eventually I decided that my topic would be the question of literary influences between France and America—back and forth across the Atlantic over the years—and the curious way in which poetic works in one language are absorbed by works in another language.

  When I started thinking about Poe, the first image that came to mind was the unveiling of his tomb in Baltimore in 1875. Poe had died in 1849, of course—26 years earlier—and, as everyone knows, the circumstances of that death were rather shocking and mysterious: the sad final year of his life, which included the death of his wife, the completion of his masterpiece, Eureka, and then the frantic, pathetic search for a new wife—numerous proposals to women up and down the East Coast, all of which were rebuffed—and then the trip to Richmond to deliver his lecture, which was well received, and which inspired him to begin thinking about settling in his hometown, and finally, the strange and unaccountable binge in Baltimore, where he died in the gutter at the age of forty. All those facts are known, but less well known is what happened afterward. The grave in which P
oe was buried remained unmarked for several years. Eventually, one of Poe’s cousins, Neilson Poe, came up with the money to order a headstone—but then, in one of those gruesome twists that might have been invented by Poe himself, the nearly finished stone was smashed to pieces when a derailed train fell into the marble yard where the work was being done. Neilson couldn’t afford to pay for another stone, and so poor Poe languished in his anonymous hole for another two decades. Midway through that purgatory, efforts were begun by a group of Baltimore schoolteachers to raise money for a second memorial stone, and after ten long years, the stone was finally built. To mark the occasion—following Poe’s exhumation and the reburial of his remains in another plot—a ceremony was held at Baltimore’s Western Female High School. All the leading American poets of the day were invited, but one by one they all declined: Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, and others whose names have now passed into oblivion. In the end, only one poet deigned to grace the Western Female High School with his presence—the greatest of America’s poets, as it turned out, a man whose reputation was perhaps no less “dangerous” than Poe’s—New Jersey’s own Walt Whitman.

  Five years later, in 1880, Whitman wrote a short piece on Poe for a book that would eventually be published as Specimen Days. The chapter, entitled “Edgar Poe’s Significance,” includes an excerpt from an article published in the Washington Star about Whitman’s attendance at the Poe ceremony in November 1875: