by Paul Auster
All that, yes, but one remark from that afternoon at La Closerie des Lilas stands out from the others, and not only does it reveal much about Beckett the man, it speaks to the dilemma all writers must live with: eternal doubt, the inability to judge the worth of what one has created.
During the conversation, he told me that he had just finished translating Mercier and Camier, his first French novel, which had been written in the mid-forties. I had read the book in French and was unreserved in my enthusiasm for it. “A wonderful book,” I said. But Beckett shook his head and said, “Oh no, no, not very good. In fact, I’ve cut out about twenty-five percent of the original. The English version is going to be quite a bit shorter than the French.” And I said, “Why would you do such a thing? It’s a wonderful book. You shouldn’t have taken anything out.” Again, Beckett shook his head. “No, no, not very good, not very good.”
After that, we started talking about other things. Then, out of the blue, five or ten minutes later, he leaned across the table, looked me in the eye, and said, “You really liked it, huh? You really thought it was good?”
This was Samuel Beckett, remember, and not even he had any grasp of the value of his work. No writer ever knows, not even the best ones.
“Yes,” I said to him. “I really thought it was good.”
2005
By the Book
Exchange with The New York Times Book Review
What books are currently on your nightstand?
Just two—the Library of America editions of James Baldwin’s Collected Essays and Early Novels and Stories. Until recently, I hadn’t read any Baldwin since high school (a long time ago, given that I graduated in 1965), and because the novel I was working on was mostly set in the fifties and sixties, I dutifully plunged in to have another look. Duty quickly turned into pleasure, awe, and admiration. Baldwin is a remarkable writer on both fronts, fiction and nonfiction, and I would rank him among America’s twentieth-century greats. Not just for his boldness and courage, not just for his enormous emotional range (from boiling anger to the most exquisite tenderness), but for the quality of the writing itself, the chiseled grace of his sentences. Baldwin’s prose is what I would call “classical American,” in the same sense that Thoreau is classical, and at his best I believe Baldwin is fully equal to Thoreau at his best. Oddly enough, I finished reading the two books more than a year ago, but they’re still on my nightstand. I can’t say why—I just like having them there. They comfort me.
What’s the last great book you read?
Oreo, a novel by Fran Ross, which was first published by a small press in 1974, received little or no attention, and then fell off the face of the earth until it was reissued by New Directions in 2015. Sadly, it was the only novel Ross ever wrote, and even more sadly, Ross died at fifty back in 1985. But what a rollicking little masterpiece this book is, truly one of the most delightful, hilarious, intelligent novels I’ve stumbled across in recent years, a wholly original work written in a wonderful mashed-up language that mixes high academic prose, black slang, and Yiddish to great effect. I must have laughed out loud a hundred times, and it’s a short book, just over two hundred pages, which averages out to one booming gut-laugh every other page.
What’s the best classic novel you recently read for the first time?
To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf. I read a couple of books by Woolf when I was eighteen (The Waves and Orlando), didn’t much like them, and crossed her off my list for the next fifty-one years. What a mistake. To the Lighthouse is one of the most beautiful novels I have ever read. It pierced me and made me tremble and continually had me on the verge of tears. The music of its long, looping sentences, the understated depth of its feeling, the subtle rhythms of its structure were so moving to me that I read it as slowly as I could, going over paragraphs three and four times before pushing on to the next.
What’s your favorite book that no one else has heard of?
Weeds of the West, a 628-page, profusely illustrated handbook written by a team of forty weed specialists and published by the Western Society of Weed Science. The color photographs are splendid to look at, but what I love most about the book are the names of the wildflowers themselves. Bur chervil. Spreading dogbane. Skeletonleaf bursage. Nodding beggarsticks. Bristly hawskbeard. Tansy ragwort. Blessed milkthistle. Poverty sumpweed. Prostrate spurge. Everlasting peavine. Panicle willowweed. Ripgut brome. There are hundreds of them, and the pure pleasure of reading those words out loud to myself never fails to lift my mood. The poetry of the American earth.
Tell us about your favorite New York stories.
There are so many of them, so many dozens over so many years, but in light of the hatred poured out against immigrants by one of the candidates in the recent presidential campaign, I’ll give you this one because the featured player in it is an immigrant. My local stationery store in Brooklyn is owned by a man who was born in China. His assistant was born in Mexico, and the woman who handles the cash register was born in Jamaica. One chilly afternoon several months ago, as I was standing by the front counter getting ready to pay for my supplies, the Jamaican cashier noticed that my nose was running (because of the cold weather), but rather than ignore it or tell me to wipe my nose, she plucked out a fresh tissue from her box of Kleenex, leaned across the counter, and wiped it for me. Very gently, I might add, and without saying a word. Was it wrong of her to have touched me without my permission? No doubt some people would think so. But from my perspective, it was an act of unusual kindness, and I thanked her for helping me out. Another instance of life in the People’s Republic of Brooklyn.
What do you read when you’re working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid when writing?
No fiction while working on a novel—only after I’m done and before I’ve started something new—but poetry, history, and biographies are acceptable, along with books to help me research various things related to the book I’m writing. The truth is that I read far less than I did when I was younger, and because the struggle to write my own books can be so exhausting (both physically and mentally), I often collapse onto the sofa after dinner, turn on the television, and watch the Mets (during the baseball season) or old films on TCM with Siri (who is just as exhausted from her work as I am from mine). In my humble opinion, the two greatest improvements in American life over the past twenty years are the invention of TCM (a quality cinémathèque in everyone’s living room!) and the self-sticking postage stamp.
What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?
English As She Is Spoke: A New Guide to the Conversation in Portuguese and English, by Pedro Carolino, first published in America in 1883, with an introduction by Mark Twain. As Twain puts it, “nobody can add to the absurdity of this book,” and indeed it is ridiculous—a guide to English written by someone who had not the slightest grasp of the language. More than a hundred pages filled with such sentences as: “You have there a library too many considerable, it is a proof your love for the learnings” or “Nothing is more easy than to swim; it do not what don’t to be afraid of.” The book is pure Dada, and, as Twain writes, “its immortality is secure.”
What was the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?
The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel, which was given to me on my seventeenth birthday. It opened a door in my mind, and behind that door I found the room where I wanted to spend the rest of my life.
Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain?
Don Quixote and Raskolnikov.
What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?
I have vivid memories of Peter Rabbit, a book my mother must have read to me scores of times. And also a three-volume set of stories by Hans Christian Andersen. When I was nine or ten, my grandmother gave me a six-volume collection of books by Robert Louis Stevenson, which inspired me to start writing stories that began with scintillating sentences like this one: �
��In the year of our Lord, 1751, I found myself staggering around blindly in a raging snowstorm, trying to make my way back to my ancestral home.” First book bought with my own money: The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (a Modern Library Giant) at age ten or eleven. First grand literary passion: Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Biggest youthful blunder: my second book purchase. Boris Pasternak had just won the Nobel Prize, and suddenly he was the most talked about writer in the world. Wanting to learn what all the fuss was about, I bought a copy of Doctor Zhivago. I was roughly eleven and a half years old. One page into the novel, I realized that I couldn’t make head or tail of it. It was so far beyond my capacities at the time that I had to give up. To this day, I still haven’t read Doctor Zhivago. Countless poems by Pasternak in the years since then, but not once have I gone back to the novel.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Hawthorne.
Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t?
It’s not that I don’t like Huckleberry Finn. In fact, I would say the first third of the novel is among the best things I’ve ever read by an American writer, and because of that brilliant first third, nearly everyone else shares my opinion. But after getting off to such a rousing start, Twain put down the manuscript and didn’t return to it for years. The second third of the book is still good, often excellent (the famous scenes of Huck and Jim out on the river with all those colorful characters), but it doesn’t have the depth and originality of the first third. Then there’s the last third, and once Tom Sawyer enters the story, the book falls apart. It’s so juvenile in tone, in spirit, and the cruel prank they play on Jim seems to contradict everything that’s come before.
January 12, 2017
PREFACES
Twentieth-Century French Poetry
I
French and English constitute a single language.
—WALLACE STEVENS
This much is certain: If not for the arrival of William and his armies on English soil in 1066, the English language as we know it would never have come into being. For the next three hundred years French was the language spoken at the English court, and it was not until the end of the Hundred Years’ War that it became clear, once and for all, that France and England were not to become a single country. Even John Gower, one of the first to write in the English vernacular, composed a large portion of his work in French, and Chaucer, the greatest of the early English poets, devoted much of his creative energy to a translation of Le Roman de la rose and found his first models in the work of the Frenchman Guillaume de Machaut. It is not simply that French must be considered an “influence” on the development of English language and literature; French is a part of English, an irreducible element of its genetic makeup.
Early English literature is replete with evidence of this symbiosis, and it would not be difficult to compile a lengthy catalogue of borrowings, homages, and thefts. William Caxton, for instance, who introduced the printing press in England in 1477, was an amateur translator of medieval French works, and many of the first books printed in Britain were English versions of French romances and tales of chivalry. For the printers who worked under Caxton, translation was a normal and accepted part of their duties, and even the most popular English work to be published by Caxton, Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, was itself a ransacking of Arthurian legends from French sources: Malory warns the reader no less than fifty-six times during the course of his narrative that the “French book” is his guide.
In the next century, when English came fully into its own as a language and a literature, both Wyatt and Surrey—two of the most brilliant pioneers of English verse—found inspiration in the work of Clément Marot, and Spenser, the major poet of the next generation, not only took the title of his Shepheardes Calender from Marot, but two sections of the work are direct imitations of that same poet. More important, Spenser’s attempt at the age of seventeen to translate Joachim du Bellay (The Visions of Bellay) is the first sonnet sequence to be produced in English. His later revision of that work and translation of another du Bellay sequence, Ruines of Rome, were published in 1591 and stand among the great works of the period. Spenser, however, is not alone in showing the mark of the French. Nearly all the Elizabethan sonnet writers took sustenance from the Pléiade poets, and some of them—Daniel, Lodge, Chapman—went so far as to pass off translations of French poets as their own work. Outside the realm of poetry, the impact of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s essays on Shakespeare has been well documented, and a good case could be made for establishing the link between Rabelais and Thomas Nashe, whose 1594 prose narrative, The Unfortunate Traveler, is generally considered to be the first novel written in the English language.
On the more familiar terrain of modern literature, French has continued to exert a powerful influence on English. In spite of the wonderfully ludicrous remark by Southey that poetry is as impossible in French as it is in Chinese, English and American poetry of the past hundred years would be inconceivable without the French. Beginning with Swinburne’s 1862 article in The Spectator on Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal and the first translations of Baudelaire’s poetry into English in 1869 and 1870, modern British and American poets have continued to look to France for new ideas. Saintsbury’s article in an 1875 issue of the Fortnightly Review is exemplary. “It was not merely admiration of Baudelaire which was to be persuaded to English readers,” he wrote, “but also imitation of him which, at least with equal earnestness, was to be urged on English writers.”
Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, largely inspired by Théodore de Banville, many English poets began experimenting with French verse forms (ballades, lays, virelays and rondeaux), and the “art for art’s sake” ideas propounded by Gautier were an important source for the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England. By the 1890s, with the advent of The Yellow Book and the Decadents, the influence of the French Symbolists became widespread. In 1893, for example, Mallarmé was invited to lecture at Oxford, a sign of the esteem he commanded in English eyes.
It is also true that little of substance was produced in English as a result of French influences during this period, but the way was prepared for the discoveries of two young American poets, Pound and Eliot, in the first decade of the new century. Each came upon the French independently, and each was inspired to write a kind of poetry that had not been seen before in English. Eliot would later write that “… the kind of poetry I needed, to teach me the use of my own voice, did not exist in England at all, and was only to be found in France.” As for Pound, he stated flatly that “practically the whole development of the English verse-art has been achieved by steals from the French.”
The English and American poets who formed the Imagist group in the years just prior to World War I were the first to engage in a critical reading of French poetry, with the aim not so much of imitating the French as of rejuvenating poetry in English. More or less neglected poets in France, such as Corbière and Laforgue, were accorded major status. F. S. Flint’s 1912 article in the Poetry Review (London) and Ezra Pound’s 1913 article in Poetry (Chicago) did much to promote this new reading of the French. Independent of the Imagists, Wilfred Owen spent several years in France before the war and was in close contact with Laurent Tailhade, a poet admired by Pound and his circle. Eliot’s reading of the French poets began as early as 1908, while he was still a student at Harvard. Just two years later he was in Paris, reading Claudel and Gide and attending Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France.
By the time of the Armory show in 1913, the most radical tendencies in French art and writing had made their way to New York, finding a home with Alfred Stieglitz and his gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue. Many of the names associated with American and European modernism became part of this Paris–New York connection: Joseph Stella, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth, William Carlos Williams, Man Ray,
Alfred Kreymborg, Marius de Zayas, Walter C. Arensberg, Mina Loy, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp. Under the influence of Cubism and Dada, of Apollinaire and the Futurism of Marinetti, numerous magazines carried the message of modernism to American readers: 291, The Blind Man, Rongwrong, Broom, New York Dada, and The Little Review, which was born in Chicago in 1914, lived in New York from 1917 to 1927, and died in Paris in 1929. To read the list of The Little Review’s contributors is to understand the degree to which French poetry had permeated the American scene. In addition to work by Pound, Eliot, Yeats, and Ford Madox Ford, as well as its most celebrated contribution, James Joyce’s Ulysses, the magazine published Breton, Éluard, Tzara, Péret, Reverdy, Crevel, Aragon, and Soupault.