Talking to Strangers

by Paul Auster

  When I asked Jacques who this person was, he explained that Clastres had studied with Claude Lévi-Strauss, was still under forty, and was considered to be the most promising member of the new generation of anthropologists in France. He had done his fieldwork in the jungles of South America, living among the most primitive Stone Age tribes in Paraguay and Venezuela, and a book about those experiences was about to be published. When Chronique des Indiens Guayaki appeared a short time later, I went out and bought myself a copy.

  It is, I believe, nearly impossible not to love this book. The care and patience with which it is written, the incisiveness of its observations, its humor, its intellectual rigor, its compassion—all these qualities reinforce one another to make it an important, memorable work. The Chronicle is not some dry academic study of “life among the savages,” not some report from an alien world in which the reporter neglects to take his own presence into account. It is the true story of a man’s experiences, and it asks nothing but the most essential questions: how is information communicated to an anthropologist, what kinds of transactions take place between one culture and another, under what circumstances might secrets be kept? In delineating this unknown civilization for us, Clastres writes with the cunning of a good novelist. His attention to detail is scrupulous and exacting; his ability to synthesize his thoughts into bold, coherent statements is often breathtaking. He is that rare scholar who does not hesitate to write in the first person, and the result is not just a portrait of the people he is studying but a portrait of himself.

  I moved back to New York in the summer of 1974, and for several years after that I tried to earn my living as a translator. It was a difficult struggle, and most of the time I was barely able to keep my head above water. Because I had to take whatever I could get, I often found myself accepting assignments to work on books that had little or no value. I wanted to translate good books, to be involved in projects that felt worthy, that would do more than just put bread on the table. Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians was at the top of my list, and again and again I proposed it to the various American publishers I worked for. After countless rejections, I finally found someone who was interested. I can’t remember exactly when this was. Late 1975 or early 1976, I think, but I could be off by half a year or so. In any case, the publishing company was new, just getting off the ground, and all the preliminary indications looked good. Excellent editors, contracts for a number of outstanding books, a willingness to take risks. Not long before that, Clastres and I had begun exchanging letters, and when I wrote to tell him the news, he was just as thrilled as I was.

  Translating the Chronicle was a thoroughly enjoyable experience for me, and after my labors were done, my attachment to the book was just as ardent as ever. I turned in the manuscript to the publisher, the translation was approved, and then, just when everything seemed to have been brought to a successful conclusion, the troubles started.

  It seems that the publishing company was not as solvent as the world had been led to believe. Even worse, the publisher himself was a good deal less honest in his handling of money than he should have been. I know this for a fact because the money that was supposed to pay for my translation had been covered by a grant to the company by the CNRS (the French National Scientific Research Center), but when I asked for my money, the publisher hemmed and hawed and promised that I would have it in due course. The only explanation was that he had already spent the funds on something else.

  I was desperately poor in those days, and waiting to be paid simply wasn’t an option for me. It was the difference between eating and not eating, between paying the rent and not paying the rent. I called the publisher every day for the next several weeks, but he kept putting me off, kept coming up with different excuses. At last, unable to hold out any longer, I went to the office in person and demanded that he pay me on the spot. He started in with another excuse, but this time I held my ground and declared that I wouldn’t leave until he had written out a check to me for the full amount. I don’t think I went so far as to threaten him, but I might have. I was boiling with anger, and I can remember thinking that if all else failed, I was prepared to punch him in the face. It never came to that, but what I did do was back him into a corner, and at that moment I could see that he was beginning to grow scared. He finally understood that I meant business. And right then and there, he opened the drawer of his desk, pulled out his checkbook, and gave me my money.

  In retrospect, I consider this to be one of my lowest moments, a dismal chapter in my career as a human being, and I am not at all proud of how I acted. But I was broke, and I had done the work, and I deserved to be paid. To prove how hard up I was during those years, I will mention just one appalling fact. I never made a copy of the manuscript. I couldn’t afford to xerox the translation, and since I assumed it was in safe hands, the only copy in the world was the original typescript sitting in the publisher’s office. This fact, this stupid oversight, this poverty-stricken way of doing business would come back to haunt me. It was entirely my fault, and it turned a small misfortune into a full-blown disaster.

  For the time being, however, we seemed to be back on track. Once the unpleasantness about my fee was settled, the publisher behaved as if he had every intention of bringing out the book. The manuscript was sent to a typesetter, I corrected the proofs and returned them to the publisher—again neglecting to make a copy. It hardly seemed important, after all, since production was well under way by now. The book had been announced in the catalogue, and publication was set for the winter of 1977–1978.

  Then, just months before Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians was supposed to appear, news came that Pierre Clastres had been killed in a car accident. According to the story I was told, he had been driving somewhere in France when he lost control of the wheel and skidded over the edge of a mountain. We had never met. Given that he was only forty-three when he died, I had assumed there would be ample opportunities in the future. We had written a number of warm letters to each other, had become friends through our correspondence, and were looking forward to the time when we would at last be able to sit down together and talk. The strangeness and unpredictability of the world prevented that conversation from taking place. Even now, all these years later, I still feel it as a great loss.

  Nineteen seventy-eight came and went, and Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians did not appear. Another year slipped by, and then another year, and still there was no book.

  By 1981, the publishing company was on its last legs. The editor I had originally worked with was long gone, and it was difficult for me to find out any information. That year, or perhaps the year after that, or perhaps even the year after that (it all blurs in my mind now), the company finally went under. Someone called to tell me that the rights to the book had been sold to another publisher. I called the publisher, and they told me yes, they were planning to bring out the book. Another year went by, and nothing happened. I called again, and the person I had talked to the previous year no longer worked for the company. I talked to someone else, and that person told me that the company had no plans to publish Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians. I asked for the manuscript back, but no one could find it. No one had even heard of it. For all intents and purposes, it was as if the translation had never existed.

  For the next dozen years, that was where the matter stood. Pierre Clastres was dead, my translation had disappeared, and the entire project had collapsed into a black hole of oblivion. This past summer (1996), I finished writing a book entitled Hand to Mouth, an autobiographical essay about money. I was planning to include this story in the narrative (because of my failure to make a copy of the manuscript, because of the scene with the publisher in his office), but when the moment came to tell it, I lost heart and couldn’t bring myself to put the words down on paper. It was all too sad, I felt, and I couldn’t see any purpose in recounting such a bleak, miserable saga.

  Then, two or three months after I finished my book, something extraordinary happened. About a y
ear before, I had accepted an invitation to go to San Francisco to appear in the City Arts and Lectures Series at the Herbst Theatre. The event was scheduled for October 1996, and when the moment came, I climbed onto a plane and flew to San Francisco as promised. After my business onstage was finished, I was supposed to sit in the lobby and sign copies of my books. The Herbst is a large theater with many seats, and the line in the lobby was therefore quite long. Among all those people waiting for the dubious privilege of having me write my name in one of my novels, there was someone I recognized—a young man I had met once before, the friend of a friend. This young man happens to be a passionate collector of books, a bloodhound for first editions and rare, out-of-the-way items, the kind of bibliographic detective who will think nothing of spending an afternoon in a dusty cellar sifting through boxes of discarded books in the hope of finding one small treasure. He smiled, shook my hand, and then thrust a set of bound galleys at me. It had a red paper cover, and until that moment, I had never seen a copy of it. “What’s this?” he said. “I never heard of it.” And there it was, suddenly sitting in my hands: the uncorrected proofs of my long-lost translation. In the big scheme of things, this probably wasn’t such an astonishing event. For me, however, in my own little scheme of things, it was overwhelming. My hands started to tremble as I held the book. I was so stunned, so confused, that I was scarcely able to speak.

  The proofs had been found in a remainder bin at a secondhand bookstore, and the young man had paid five dollars for them. As I look at them now, I note with a certain grim fascination that the pub date announced on the cover is April 1981. For a translation completed in 1976 or 1977, it was, truly, an agonizingly slow ordeal.

  If Pierre Clastres were alive today, the discovery of this lost book would be a perfect happy ending. But he isn’t alive, and the brief surge of joy and incredulity I experienced in the atrium of the Herbst Theatre has by now dissipated into a deep, mournful ache. How rotten that the world should pull such tricks on us. How rotten that a person with so much to offer the world should die so young.

  Here, then, is my translation of Pierre Clastres’s book, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians. The author has vanished, the young translator who discovered the book twenty-five years ago is now older than the author at the time of his death, but Clastres’s book is still with us, and against all odds, this long-lost English version has survived.

  1997

  An Evening at Shea

  I remember him well. A stocky right-hander with a sidearm delivery who wore number 26. Not much speed, but a tricky combination of sliders and sinkers that kept the hitters off balance: “Give them a little air to mash at.” He started when called upon, pitched in long relief, worked as a setup man, intermittently served as a closer. When he was with the New York Mets, his teammates called him Jack. As in Jack-of-All-Trades. Whatever he was asked to do, he did. He might not have impressed you, but he rarely failed to get the job done.

  Terry Leach was never a star. He struggled in the minor leagues for many years before he was given a chance, and even when he performed well, his efforts went unnoticed. In a late-season start for the Mets in 1982, he pitched a one-hit, ten-inning shutout against the Phillies, but the following year he was back in the minors. As an undrafted player with an unorthodox style and less than overpowering natural skills, he had to work harder than everyone else to win a place for himself. He survived on guts, humor, and an irrational love of the game. He simply refused to take no for an answer, and in the end he built a solid career for himself. How many pitchers have had ten-game winning streaks and a season’s record of 11–1? How many pitchers have come into a World Series game to face the opposing team’s hottest hitter with two outs and the bases loaded and managed to strike that hitter out? Terry Leach did those things, and by the time you’ve read about them in this short but infinitely charming book, you will have already learned that this man is more than just an ex-pitcher. He is a born storyteller, and with Tom Clark’s help he has put together one of the most engaging baseball books I have read in years.

  I saw Terry Leach pitch many times, but only once in person. It was a warm August night in 1985, and at the last minute my wife and I decided to go out to Shea Stadium to watch the Mets play against the Giants. We got there just before the game began, bought our tickets at the gate, and hustled up to our seats in the right-center-field mezzanine—just in time for the national anthem. Sid Fernandez was supposed to be pitching against Vida Blue that night, but Fernandez came down sick while warming up on the mound and had to be scratched. Terry Leach was sitting in the clubhouse at that moment, dressed in his underwear and working on a crossword puzzle. Five minutes later, he threw the first of the eighty-seven pitches he would throw that night. That averages out to fewer than ten pitches an inning over nine innings, a number that signifies absolute mastery over the other team. Since Terry Leach went the full nine innings, shutting out the Giants on just three hits, I would have to rank his performance as the greatest one I have had the pleasure to witness. The Giants couldn’t touch him. Late in the game, when he laid down a successful sacrifice bunt, Terry Leach was given the first standing ovation of his major-league career. My wife and I were standing with that crowd, both of us clapping, both of us shouting our heads off. Even now, fourteen and a half years later, we still thank the gods of baseball for what they gave us that night.

  December 18, 1999

  The National Story Project

  I never intended to do this. The National Story Project came about by accident, and if not for a remark my wife made at the dinner table sixteen months ago, most of the pieces in this book never would have been written. It was May 1999, perhaps June, and earlier that day I had been interviewed on National Public Radio about my most recent novel. After we finished our conversation, Daniel Zwerdling, the host of Weekend All Things Considered, had asked me if I would be interested in becoming a regular contributor to the program. I couldn’t even see his face when he asked the question. I was in the NPR studio on Second Avenue in New York, and he was in Washington, D.C., and for the past twenty or thirty minutes we had been talking to each other through microphones and headsets, aided by a technological marvel known as fiber optics. I asked him what he had in mind, and he said he wasn’t sure. Maybe I could come on the air every month or so and tell stories.

  I wasn’t interested. Doing my own work was difficult enough, and taking on a job that would force me to crank out stories on command was the last thing I needed. Just to be polite, however, I said that I would go home and think about it.

  It was my wife, Siri, who turned the proposition on its head. That night, when I told her about NPR’s curious offer, she immediately came up with a proposal that reversed the direction of my thoughts. In a matter of thirty seconds, no had become yes.

  You don’t have to write the stories yourself, she said. Get people to sit down and write their own stories. They could send them in to you, and then you could read the best ones on the radio. If enough people wrote in, it could turn into something extraordinary.

  That was how the National Story Project was born. It was Siri’s idea, and then I picked it up and started to run with it.

  * * *

  Sometime in late September, Zwerdling came to my house in Brooklyn with Rebecca Davis, one of the producers of Weekend All Things Considered, and we launched the idea of the project in the form of another interview. I told the listeners that I was looking for stories. The stories had to be true, and they had to be short, but there would be no restrictions as to subject matter or style. What interested me most, I said, were stories that defied our expectations about the world, anecdotes that revealed the mysterious and unknowable forces at work in our lives, in our family histories, in our minds and bodies, in our souls. In other words, true stories that sounded like fiction. I was talking about big things and small things, tragic things and comic things, any experience that felt important enough to set down on paper. They shouldn’t worry if they had never written a
story, I said. Everyone was bound to know some good ones, and if enough people answered the call to participate, we would inevitably begin to learn some surprising things about ourselves and each other. The spirit of the project was entirely democratic. All listeners were welcome to contribute, and I promised to read every story that came in. People would be exploring their own lives and experiences, but at the same time they would be part of a collective effort, something bigger than just themselves. With their help, I said, I was hoping to put together an archive of facts, a museum of American reality.

  The interview was broadcast on the first Saturday in October, exactly one year ago today. Since that time, I have received more than four thousand submissions. This number is many times greater than I had anticipated, and for the past twelve months I have been awash in manuscripts, floating madly in an ever-expanding sea of paper. Some of the stories are written by hand; others are typed; still others are printed out from e-mails. Every month, I have scrambled to choose five or six of the best ones and turn them into a twenty-minute segment to be aired on Weekend All Things Considered. It has been singularly rewarding work, one of the most inspiring tasks I have ever undertaken. But it has had its difficult moments as well. On several occasions, when I have been particularly swamped with material, I have read sixty or seventy stories at a single sitting, and each time I have done that, I have stood up from the chair feeling pulverized, absolutely drained of energy. So many emotions to contend with, so many strangers camped out in the living room, so many voices coming at me from so many different directions. On those evenings, for the space of two or three hours, I have felt that the entire population of America has walked into my house. I didn’t hear America singing. I heard it telling stories.