by Paul Auster
Max, words! There will be no other words in the world
But those our children speak.
For example:
What do we believe
To live with? Answer.
Not invent—just answer—all
That verse attempts.
For example:
The planet’s
Time.
Blood from a stone, life
From a stone dead dam. Mother
Nature! because we find the others
Deserted like ourselves and therefore brothers.
For example:
Impossible to doubt the world: it can be seen
And because it is irrevocable
It cannot be understood, and I believe that fact is lethal.
The most I can do right now is offer a few memories. It’s not that my friendship with George was an intimate one—but it was not a casual friendship either—and I saw him often enough and received enough letters from him to have formed some sense of who he was.
* * *
We began corresponding in 1973. I was still living in France then—deep in the country, working as the caretaker of an old farmhouse in the Var. As it turned out, this was the same region where George and Mary had once lived, and he made a point of mentioning it in his first letter. “Your address,” he wrote. “Var. To Publishers preceded the Objectivist Press: Mary and I, seeking a cheap printer and a place to live cheaply (1930) found the printer in Touloun, and the house in Le Beausset, Var.
“A house in the grape-fields, long unused except for the harvest, off the road entering Le Beausset from the West. We saw it still there (much restored and very pretty, though it always was, in 1963 (approx.)
“We printed Williams’ Novellette and other Prose, Pound’s How to Read, The Objectivist Anthology—
“(historical note)
“and loved, and will always love, Var. (and I landed with the 103rd division in Marseille, 1943)”
It was a good beginning somehow—a bond of place, as though I had stumbled into George’s life of forty years ago, and I think that meant something to him, meant something to both of us. Looking through his letters now, I see another reference to the Var—and what must have been some snapshots I sent to him after returning to New York in 1974. “Dear Paul,” it begins—“we’re happy with the photos—-the foot path thru the field put us back in Le Beausset---I thought I smelt the air of Le Beausset--”
We did not meet until the spring of 1976, and what stands out most from the encounter are small details—minuscule fragments. Why these things should seem important is a mystery to me, but they have stuck somewhere in my brain, and whenever I think of George, these are the memories that come back first. How, for example, when I walked into his house on Polk Street for the first time, he was standing in the kitchen washing dishes—decked out in a pair of pink rubber gloves and up to his elbows in suds. Hardly the posture of a venerable poet out to impress a young admirer, but George never played those games with anyone. Later that day (or perhaps it was another day soon afterward), we all went out for a walk, and as it was a raw, chilly afternoon and George did not have a proper coat, he grabbed the first one that came to hand—which happened to belong to his niece, Andy, a very lady-like coat with a fur collar and elaborate fur cuffs. George put it on without the slightest hesitation (to add to the absurdity, it was far too small for him) and then walked outside with the rest of us. The thing that impressed me most was that he didn’t say a word about it. Another man would have been embarrassed—and would have made some joke to cover up his embarrassment. But not only did George say nothing, he didn’t even seem to notice. A small incident, to be sure, but at the same time it reveals something essential about George: his lack of self-consciousness, his utter indifference to appearances. And when I speak of appearances, I am not just referring to clothes.
I was staying with a friend in Berkeley that spring, and not long after meeting George, I hurt my neck in a freak collision while playing softball. One morning, as I stood on the front porch of my friend’s house with my neck in a brace, George came sauntering down the street with a walking stick in his right hand. We exchanged somewhat astonished greetings, and then George explained that he was on his way to see a healer of some sort, a woman who had been recommended to Mary. (The memory problems had already begun, but this was only the first stage—and the symptoms were not yet severe.) Given the condition of my neck, George said, perhaps she could do something for me as well, and why didn’t I come along? So the two of us set off to look for the miracle woman together. We found the house without much trouble, but when George rang the doorbell, no one answered. We tried again, but nothing happened, and it soon became clear that no one was at home. Then, with a sudden look of doubt on his face, George asked me what day it was. “Wednesday,” I said. “That’s why she isn’t here,” he said. “My appointment was for Tuesday.”
This story has terrible implications for me now—but at the time, even George found it comical. I remember how he laughed at himself and then shrugged it off as something that could happen to anyone.
A year or two later, George and Mary came to New York for a short visit. They stayed in the apartment of a friend in Brooklyn Heights, and I went there for dinner one evening with my wife and baby son. James Weil (the publisher of Elizabeth Press) had spent the afternoon with them, and when we arrived, he was still there. Perhaps it was the presence of the baby, or perhaps it was merely the warmth of the greeting we were given by George and Mary—but for some reason, Jim got it into his head that we were related. It’s true that George and I bore a certain physical likeness (our dark coloring) and that Mary and my wife shared some features (their size, their blondness), but even after we tried to convince him that we were just friends, he refused to believe it. He thought we were pulling his leg and would not budge from his opinion. Again, this is something small, almost too small to be mentioned. But it moves me to think that the affection we had for each other was so obvious—that when seen through the eyes of another, it looked as though we belonged to the same family.
Later still, in 1980, I concocted a plan to interview George for the Paris Review. I was looking for an excuse to see him again, and it also struck me as a good way to give his poetry some attention in a different sphere—to introduce his work to a new group of readers. The Paris Review accepted the idea quite willingly, and when I wrote to George with the proposal, he answered as follows:
Dear Paul,
Very tempting—a pleasant prospect to see you again, and to talk. What worries me is the question of whether or not I can say anything that I have not already said—And my own condition at this moment which is something alas, very like senility—I am not being very brilliant these days, and I have not written anything since Primitive.
It is not that I fear being less than brilliant: I find that my only recourse is to admit, to myself and to others that on familiar streets I cannot find my way home. I am not attempting to deny this fact, but, ‘Alas; how the mighty mites have fallen.’
It would nevertheless be a great pleasure to me and Mary to talk.
I’ll do my best if you go ahead.
I did go ahead, and in February 1981 I flew out to San Francisco. George and Mary met me at the airport, and I spent the next few days at their house. The sequence of events is obscure to me now. I remember drinking champagne one night at dinner. I remember several walks—and sitting on a bench with George at one point as Mary accompanied their little dog to the end of the pier. There was also the morning we all went to the YMHA. The doctor had recommended exercise for George, and Mary enjoyed swimming in the pool. This was their routine, and there was no reason to disrupt it on my account. At the Y, Mary went off to the women’s locker room, and George and I headed for the men’s. Except for the sneakers he had put on for the occasion, he was wearing his normal clothes (a sweater with buttons, a shirt open at the collar, comfortable pants), and so I assumed he was planning to change into gym ge
ar of some kind or other. Why else would he have led me to the locker room? George came to a locker, stopped, and opened the door. Instead of the pile of equipment I was expecting to see inside, the locker was empty. George then removed his pipe from his pocket, placed it gently on the shelf, and closed the door. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.” That was the extent of it. The locker was for his pipe—for his pipe and nothing else.
It was a cheap corncob pipe, the kind of pipe that used to be displayed on the counter of every candy store and tobacco shop across America. The people’s pipe, which sold for a dollar or two—roughly fashioned, inelegant, but serviceable. George and his pipe always traveled together, except when he stored it in his locker to do his thrice-weekly exercises. Which were unnecessary, by the way, or at least useless, since George was in excellent physical condition, and even in his late sixties and early seventies he was lean and erect, strong, with the bearing of a young man. The mind that was going could not be saved by tossing around a medicine ball.
During that visit in 1980, however, he was much better than I thought he would be. There were times when he had to grope for his words, but there were also some moments of blazing wit, spontaneous remarks as precise and funny as anything I had ever heard him say. If the interview was not a success, George was not to blame for it. The problem was my own ineptitude. I had drawn up a list of questions in advance, but once the tape recorder started turning, I was gripped by a sense of how stupid these questions were. My voice trembled; I had trouble getting the words out of my mouth. The three of us sat around the kitchen table for a number of hours (three or four, I think, spaced out over several sessions), and George and Mary both did their best. But because I knew them and cared about them, because I was involved with them in ways that went beyond poetry, I could never strike the proper interviewer’s pose. You need detachment for that, and a certain hard-heartedness to pursue difficult questions, and I just didn’t have it in me. The results were therefore inadequate—a repetition of comments George had made to other interviewers in the past and descriptions of events that Mary had already covered in her autobiography. It pains me to think about it now. Not because I failed—but because it was a bad idea to begin with. The fact that this was the last time I saw George only makes it worse.
I listened to the tape only once—soon after returning to New York. I remember being startled by the sound of canaries chirping in the background. These were the birds that lived next to the window in George and Mary’s kitchen—and as we spoke that day, they had been singing behind us. On the tape, the noise was so loud that you would think we had been talking in the middle of a forest. This tape has been sitting in a drawer of my desk for the past three and a half years. I do not have a tape recorder, but even if I did, I doubt I would have the courage to listen to it again. On the bookshelf to the right of my desk, there is an etching Mary made around the time of my last visit—a tiny work, no more than 2½ inches by 2½ inches. It is a picture of four little birds, and I keep it there as a kind of charm. Whenever I look up at it, I hear the canaries again. I hear them in my drawer, and little by little the whole room fills with the sound of their singing.
THE STORY OF MY TYPEWRITER
(with paintings by Sam Messer)
Three and a half years later, I came home to America. It was July 1974, and when I unpacked my bags that first afternoon in New York, I discovered that my little Hermes typewriter had been destroyed. The cover was smashed in, the keys were mangled and twisted out of shape, and there was no hope of ever having it repaired.
I couldn’t afford to buy a new typewriter. I rarely had much money in those days, but at that particular moment I was dead broke.
A couple of nights later, an old college friend invited me to his apartment for dinner. At some point during our conversation, I mentioned what had happened to my typewriter, and he told me that he had one in the closet that he didn’t use anymore. It had been given to him as a graduation present from junior high school in 1962. If I wanted to buy it from him, he said, he would be glad to sell it to me.
We agreed on a price of forty dollars. It was an Olympia portable, manufactured in West Germany. That country no longer exists, but since that day in 1974, every word I have written has been typed out on that machine.
* * *
In the beginning, I didn’t think about it much. A year went by, ten years went by, and not once did I consider it odd or even vaguely unusual to be working with a manual typewriter. The only alternative was an electric typewriter, but I didn’t like the noise those contraptions made: the constant hum of the motor, the buzzing and rattling of loose parts, the jitterbug pulse of alternating current vibrating in my fingers. I preferred the stillness of my Olympia. It was comfortable to the touch, it worked smoothly, it was dependable. And when I wasn’t pounding on the keyboard, it was silent.
Best of all, it seemed to be indestructible. Except for changing ribbons and occasionally having to brush out the ink buildup from the keys, I was absolved of all maintenance duties. Since 1974, I have changed the roller twice, perhaps three times. I have taken it into the shop for cleaning no more often than I have voted in presidential elections. I have never had to replace any parts. The only serious trauma it has suffered occurred in 1979 when my two-year-old son snapped off the carriage return arm. But that wasn’t the typewriter’s fault. I was in despair for the rest of the day, but the next morning I carried it to a shop on Court Street and had the arm soldered back in place. There is a small scar on that spot now, but the operation was a success, and the arm has held ever since.
* * *
There is no point in talking about computers and word processors. Early on, I was tempted to buy one of those marvels for myself, but too many friends told me horror stories about pushing the wrong button and wiping out a day’s work—or a month’s work—and I heard one too many warnings about sudden power failures that could erase an entire manuscript in less than half a second. I have never been good with machines, and I knew that if there was a wrong button to be pushed, I would eventually push it.
So I held on to my old typewriter, and the 1980s became the 1990s. One by one, all my friends switched over to Macs and IBMs. I began to look like an enemy of progress, the last pagan holdout in a world of digital converts. My friends made fun of me for resisting the new ways. When they weren’t calling me a curmudgeon, they called me a reactionary and a stubborn old goat. I didn’t care. What was good for them wasn’t necessarily good for me, I said. Why should I change when I was perfectly happy as I was?
Until then, I hadn’t felt particularly attached to my typewriter. It was simply a tool that allowed me to do my work, but now that it had become an endangered species, one of the last surviving artifacts of twentieth-century homo scriptorus, I began to develop a certain affection for it. Like it or not, I realized, we had the same past. As time went on, I came to understand that we also had the same future.
Two or three years ago, sensing that the end was near, I went to Leon, my local stationer in Brooklyn, and asked him to order fifty typewriter ribbons for me. He had to call around for several days to scare up an order of that size. Some of them, he later told me, were shipped in from as far away as Kansas City.
I use these ribbons as cautiously as I can, typing on them until the ink is all but invisible on the page. When the supply is gone, I have little hope that there will be any ribbons left.
* * *
It was never my intention to turn my typewriter into a heroic figure. That is the work of Sam Messer, a man who stepped into my house one day and fell in love with a machine. There is no accounting for the passions of artists. The affair has lasted for several years now, and right from the beginning, I suspect that the feelings have been mutual.
Messer seldom goes anywhere without a sketchbook. He draws constantly, stabbing at the page with furious, rapid strokes, looking up from his pad every other second to squint at the person or object before him, and whenever you sit down to a meal with him
, you do so with the understanding that you are also posing for your portrait. We have been through this routine so many times in the past seven or eight years that I no longer think about it.
I remember pointing out the typewriter to him the first time he visited, but I can’t remember what he said. A day or two after that, he came back to the house. I wasn’t around that afternoon, but he asked my wife if he could go downstairs to my work room and have another look at the typewriter. God knows what he did down there, but I have never doubted that the typewriter spoke to him. In due course, I believe he even managed to persuade it to bare its soul.
* * *
He has been back several times since, and each visit has produced a fresh wave of paintings, drawings, and photographs. Sam has taken possession of my typewriter, and little by little he has turned an inanimate object into a being with a personality and a presence in the world. The typewriter has moods and desires now, it expresses dark angers and exuberant joys, and trapped within its gray, metallic body, you would almost swear that you could hear the beating of a heart.
I have to admit that I find all this unsettling. The paintings are brilliantly done, and I am proud of my typewriter for proving itself to be such a worthy subject, but at the same time Messer has forced me to look at my old companion in a new way. I am still in the process of adjustment, but whenever I look at one of these paintings now (there are two of them hanging on my living room wall), I have trouble thinking of my typewriter as an it. Slowly but surely, the it has turned into a him.
* * *
We have been together for more than a quarter of a century now. Everywhere I have gone, the typewriter has gone with me. We have lived in Manhattan, in upstate New York, and in Brooklyn. We have traveled together to California and to Maine, to Minnesota and to Massachusetts, to Vermont and to France. In that time, I have written with hundreds of pencils and pens. I have owned several cars, several refrigerators, and have occupied several apartments and houses. I have worn out dozens of pairs of shoes, have given up on scores of sweaters and jackets, have lost or abandoned watches, alarm clocks, and umbrellas. Everything breaks, everything wears out, everything loses its purpose in the end, but the typewriter is still with me. It is the only object I own today that I owned twenty-six years ago. In another few months, it will have been with me for exactly half my life.