Talking to Strangers

by Paul Auster

  —Objects and Products (more than 130 entries), including driftwood lamps, pop beads, beanbag ashtrays, pearlized plastic toilet seats, jeweled bottle openers, “Ace” combs, roller skate keys, Aspergum, dented Ping-Pong balls, and miniature Bibles. “I remember the first ballpoint pens. They skipped, and deposited little balls of ink that would accumulate on the point.”

  —Sex (more than fifty entries), detailing early heterosexual fumblings in high school—“I remember the first time I got jerked off (never did discover it for myself). I didn’t know what she was trying to do and so I just laid there like a zombie not helping one bit”—later homosexual experiences and glimpses of gay life—“I remember not liking myself for not picking up boys I probably could pick up because of the possibility of being rejected”—and more general (often touching) remarks: “I remember early sexual experiences and rubbery knees. I’m sure sex is much better now but I do miss rubbery knees.”

  —Jokes and Common Expressions (more than forty entries), including sick jokes, Mary Anne jokes—“I remember ‘Mommy, Mommy, I don’t like my little brother.’ ‘Shut up, Mary Anne, and eat what I tell you to!’”—traveling salesman jokes, and phrases such as “to coin a phrase,” “See you later alligator,” “Because I say so, that’s why,” and “I remember, when babies fall down, ‘oopsy-daisy.’”

  —Friends and Acquaintances (more than ninety entries), which tend to take the form of small narratives and are generally longer than the other sections of the book. One example: “I remember my parents’ bridge teacher. She was very fat and very butch (cropped hair) and she was a chain smoker. She prided herself on the fact that she didn’t have to carry matches around. She lit each new cigarette from the old one. She lived in a little house behind a restaurant and lived to be very old.” Another example: “I remember Anne Kepler. She played the flute. I remember her straight shoulders. I remember her large eyes. Her slightly roman nose. And her full lips. I remember an oil painting I did of her playing the flute. Several years ago she died in a fire giving a flute concert at a children’s home in Brooklyn. All the children were saved. There was something about her like white marble.”

  —Autobiographical Fragments (twenty entries): a less insistent theme than the other subjects explored by Brainard, but fundamental to our understanding of his project, his life. We see him arriving in New York for the first time, learn of his stuttering and shyness, witness his initial encounter with the poet Frank O’Hara, are informed of his poverty and destitution during an early stay in Boston (“I remember collecting cigarette butts from the urns in front of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston”), are told about his short, unhappy stint as a scholarship student at the Dayton Art Institute (“I remember in Dayton, Ohio the art fair in the park where they made me take down all my naked self-portraits”), are given a full account of his draft board physical and his rejection by the army after he declared himself to be a homosexual (even though he was a virgin at the time), and are exposed to his self-doubts as an artist, which surely played a role in his decision to stop exhibiting his work during the last fifteen years of his life, as in this laconic but poignant entry: “I remember when I thought I was a great artist.”

  —Insights and Confessions (forty entries), most of them about Brainard’s inner life and character, his overpowering self-consciousness (“I remember that I never cried in front of other people”; “I remember being embarrassed to blow my nose in public”); his awkwardness in social situations (“I remember, at parties, after you’ve said all you can think of to say to a person—but there you both stand”); and, here and there, instances of almost blinding emotional clarity: “I remember that life was just as serious then as it is now,” which could be the most important sentence in the book, the reason why the fifteen hundred fragments of I Remember ultimately cohere to form a solid and integrated work.

  —Musings (more than thirty entries), which track the various stray thoughts that come flying in and out of consciousness, the bafflements and perplexities of someone trying to make sense of the world, the bizarre questions all people wind up asking themselves at one time or another. “I remember not understanding why people on the other side of the world didn’t fall off”; “I remember wondering if girls fart too”; “I remember wondering how turtles ‘do it’”; “I remember thinking once that flushing away pee might be a big waste. I remember thinking that pee is probably good for something and that if one could just discover what it was good for one could make a mint.”

  Such are the various themes and threads that comprise the totality of I Remember. Among its many virtues, it is a book that dwells with great focus on the sensuous details of somatic life (what it feels like to have your hair cut in a barbershop, what it feels like to “turn around and around real fast until you can’t stand up,” to hear water swishing around in your stomach for the first time and think you might have a tumor), that lovingly records the banal and trivial details of the American landscape of the forties, fifties, and sixties, and presents us with a portrait of a particular man—the modest, self-effacing young Joe Brainard—that is so precise and uninhibited in its telling that we as readers inevitably begin to see our own lives portrayed in his. The memories keep coming at us, relentlessly and without pause, one after the other with no strictures regarding chronology or place. One moment we are in New York, the next moment we are in Tulsa or Boston, a recollection from twenty years ago stands side by side with a memory from last week, and the farther we advance into the text, the more resonant each articulation becomes. As Brainard himself understood as he was writing I Remember, it is, truly, a book that belongs to everyone.

  It is also interesting to consider what is not in Brainard’s book, all the things that most of us would probably feel inclined to put in if we were to sit down and write our own versions of I Remember. No memories of sibling conflict, no memories of cruelty or physical violence, no eruptions of anger, no impulse to settle scores, no bitterness. Aside from fleeting references to the Kennedy assassination, “Korea” (in quotation marks), and the “I Like Ike” slogan of the Eisenhower presidential campaigns, there are no memories of political, public, or national events. Mondrian, Picasso, and Van Gogh are all mentioned, but there is nothing about Brainard’s development as a visual artist, and except for telling us that he read all of Dostoyevsky’s novels in Boston, no memories of discovering the work of other writers, even though Brainard was a passionate reader of fiction. No grief, no rage, and very few tears. Only one entry (“I remember throwing my eye-glasses into the ocean off the Staten Island ferry one black night in a fit of drama and depression”) gives any hint of emotional suffering or deep inner turmoil. Brainard’s book was written at the precise moment when so-called confessional poetry was dominating the American literary scene. Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman (all suicides) were in vogue, and the private rant had become an acceptable, even lauded form of poetic discourse. Brainard confesses, but he does not rant, and he has no interest in mythologizing the story of his own life. He seduces us with his gentleness, his lack of pomposity, his imperturbable interest in everything the world offers up to him. He begins and ends small, but the cumulative force of so many small, exquisitely rendered observations turns his book into something great, something that will become, I believe, an enduring part of American literature.

  * * *

  Before I Remember, and after I Remember, and even during I Remember (which was composed in four separate stages between 1969 and 1973), there were, and are, the several hundred pages of Joe Brainard’s other writings. Spanning three decades (from the early sixties to the early nineties), this work falls more or less equally into two general categories: short texts (fiction, nonfiction, poems) and diaries or journals (Brainard used the terms interchangeably). The short pieces tend to be funny—often uproariously funny. The diaries are flatter and more introspective, but not without their bursts of funniness as well. Brainard is an unclassifiable writer, but there are moments when his antic in
ventions recall some of the zanier stunts performed by older American humorists, in particular Ring Lardner and S. J. Perelman. Different as they are in so many ways, all three share a love of nonsense, of parody and pastiche, of disjointed narrative, and alternately exploit both raucous and deadpan approaches to the comic. In Brainard’s case, one could also cite the influence of Dada and Surrealism, as filtered through the japeries and ironies of the New York School poets, as well as an occasional tip of the hat to Gertrude Stein, as in this delicious passage from an early “story” entitled “May Dye”: “we found breaking bird feathers quite easy and extremely enjoyable and we enjoyed enjoyable things in the most enjoyable way you can imagine enjoyable things being enjoyed.”

  From the exuberant high jinks of “Back in Tulsa Again” to the irreverent and inspiriting “People of the World: Relax!” (“Take it easy and smoke a lot / Make all the noise you want to on the toilet / Other people will hear you but it does not matter / People of the world: RELAX!”) to the inane brilliance of the one-sentence “No Story” (“I hope you have enjoyed not reading this story as much as I have enjoyed not writing it”), Brainard disarms us with the seemingly tossed-off, spontaneous nature of his writing and his stubborn refusal to accede to the pieties of self-importance. We must remember that he was very young when the wildest pieces in this collection were written—still in his twenties—and what these little works capture most fully, it seems to me, is precisely a sense of youth, the laughter of youth, the energy of youth, for in the end they are not really about anything so much as what it means to be young, that hopeful, anarchic time when all horizons are open to us and the future appears to be without limits.

  Little by little, however, the pieces begin to take on a more somber tone, even as Brainard continues to maintain the lightness of his touch. By the mid-seventies, following his enormous exhibition of 1,500 collages at the Fischbach Gallery, he seems to have entered a personal and artistic crisis, leading to such troubling statements as: “the person I always thought I was simply isn’t anymore: does not exist!” (in “Nothing to Write Home About”) and then, a few sentences later in the same piece: “the sky is no longer the limit … the temptation to wallow in one’s own muck—to simply surrender—to give up—is far too appealing. And far too realistic a possibility for comfort.”

  In 1978, in an interview with Anne Waldman, it is clear that Brainard is already preparing to jump ship:

  AW: Do you think one has a choice about being an artist?

  JB: Oh yes, I think one always has a choice.

  AW: When did you make that choice?

  JB: I don’t think I ever made it, but I think I have a choice. I think I could stop it now.

  AW: Isn’t it too late to stop?

  JB: No, I don’t really think so. I think I could stop tomorrow, I really do.

  Not long after that, he did stop. No more exhibitions of his work, no more writing for publication. For the next fifteen years—until his death from AIDS in 1994 at age fifty-two—he spent his time reading books and nurturing his friendships with the many people he loved, the many people who adored him. Why he withdrew from the art world remains a mystery. Some say that he was burned out, exhausted by the frenzied pace that had fueled such an abundant outpouring of work. Others say that he was disappointed in his progress as an artist, by his failure (self-perceived failure) to master oil painting to the degree he aspired to. Others, such as poet Ann Lauterbach (a good friend of Brainard’s during his last years), have reported that he felt he didn’t have enough ambition, or at least not “the right kind of ambition.” And then, too, there was the growing competitiveness and commercialization of the art world, which made Brainard feel increasingly uncomfortable and out of place, for, as Lauterbach puts it, “Joe had no taste for this new aggressive combat. Life and art were, for Joe Brainard, acts of devoted camaraderie and generative collaboration.”2

  All of these factors might have played a part in Brainard’s decision, but it is important to note that he was not anguished by this decision, and he walked away from his career without regrets. Ron Padgett (the editor of this volume), whose friendship with Brainard began in a first-grade classroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and continued until the last day of Brainard’s life in New York City, believes that Brainard’s evolution from artist to former artist was almost inevitable. As he writes in his book about Brainard: “In a 1973 letter … Joe referred to what he felt was his ‘basic lack of dedication to art.’ For him, art was simply ‘a way of life’ that enabled him to fulfill his need to give people ‘a present’ and perhaps be loved in return. Gradually … Joe’s need to make art diminished as his own life became his art.”3

  With that in mind, it strikes me as altogether fitting that Padgett should have chosen to begin and end the second part of this book with two previously unpublished pieces. “Self-Portrait on Christmas Night,” written in 1961, when Brainard was just nineteen years old, and a short, untitled paragraph from January 1978, almost half a lifetime later—a glimpse, as it were, of Joe Brainard before he became Joe Brainard, followed by a glimpse of Joe Brainard when he was beginning to distance himself from the Joe Brainard of old.

  “Self-Portrait on Christmas Night” is an extremely moving document, a passionate cry from the heart delivered by a very young man (still a boy, really) about his hopes and fears as an artist and as a human being. With uncanny prescience, it maps out the journey this young man is about to take, as if Brainard instinctively understood the doubts and potential stumbling blocks that lay ahead of him. Romantic and excessive, different in tone from all of his other writings, it is both a declaration of independence and the anatomy of a soul in conflict. “I’ll always know, yet will never really know. Will do great paintings, but will never do what I want. Will learn to understand and accept life, but will never know why. Will love and make love, but will know it could be greater. Will be smart, but will always know there’s so much more to learn. I’m damned, but can’t change.”

  A gush of adolescent angst, to be sure, a single paragraph that sprints along breathlessly for fourteen typewritten pages, but painfully honest and insightful, an essential key to our understanding of Brainard’s work, and then, sixteen years and one month later, when the adolescent fires were nearly extinguished, the painter who was also a writer sat down to compose a small scene in words. Working calmly and patiently, with no ambition other than to depict the visual and sensual this-ness of what it feels like to sit in a room and look out the window, he offers up his impressions as a gift, since all art for Brainard is a gift to an Other, to a real or imagined someone, and that sublime little paragraph ends with these words:

  Outside my window snow is falling down, against a translucent sky of deep lavender, with a touch of orange, zig-zagged along the bottom into a silhouette of black buildings. (The icebox clicks off, and shudders.) And it’s as simple as this, what I want to tell you about: if perhaps not much, everything. Painting the moment for you tonight.

  December 2010

  A Life in Art

  I want to make this as personal as I can, so I will not apologize for what might sound hopelessly nostalgic in this world of no more record shops, fewer and fewer bookstores, and the possible extinction of publishing houses as we have known them for the past two hundred years, but for the people of my generation, those of us born in the late forties and early fifties and who came of age in the sixties, the literary boys and girls who were planning to devote themselves to a life in art, publishers were the ones who helped guide us toward the discoveries we would have to make in order to discover who we were and what we were hoping to become, and from our point of view there were only two American publishers worthy of our absolute trust, New Directions, with its essential list of modernist poets both from this country and abroad, and the younger, more energetic Grove Press, directed by a battling renegade named Barney Rosset, whose mission was to stir things up and challenge the status quo in any way he could, and the times were ripe for such a challenge, the
world was waking up again after the dark years of economic depression and the long nightmare of global war, new ideas were suddenly in the air again, new artists were emerging, and Barney Rosset instinctively seemed to understand who the best of those new artists were, and as I worked my way through this lovely, enlivening scrapbook of letters, documents, and memories, I was astonished to discover the names of many people I have known, people who have been of immense importance to me throughout what has now been a long life in art, beginning with Joan Mitchell, Barney Rosset’s fellow Chicagoan, schoolmate, and first wife, the brilliant, generous, indelible Joan, who became my friend when I moved to Paris in 1971 as a twenty-four-year-old beginner, who did the cover art for the first issue of a magazine called Living Hand that I helped launch with a couple of friends, and who was responsible for my meeting Samuel Beckett, and Joan’s companion at the time, the French-Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, who also became my friend and once lent me his house for a month-long stay in the Laurentian Mountains and wound up illustrating the first book I ever published in France (even now, the five lithographs are hanging on a wall in my living room, as is the lithograph Joan made for the magazine), and Jean Genet, whom I met while I was still an undergraduate at Columbia when he visited the campus to deliver a speech in defense of the Black Panthers (such were the times, and such was the lure of Columbia after our mini-revolution in the spring of 1968), and because it was known that I could make my way around in French, I was enlisted to translate the speech and serve as his interpreter during the time he stayed with us, memorable hours spent in the company of one of Grove Press’s most memorable authors, the beatifically smiling Jean Genet, who walked around with a small flower tucked behind his ear, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, whom I met in Hamburg in 1988, the two of us among the seven different writers from seven different cities who had been invited to celebrate Hamburg’s eight hundredth anniversary, Alain being the representative from Paris, I being the one from New York, and after three days spent in Germany together we remained friends to the last, and Harold Pinter, not just a Grove Press author but a Faber & Faber author in the UK, as am I, which led to an encounter at a Faber dinner in London and an unforgettable conversation about the relative merits of cricket and baseball, and Richard Avedon, the photographer, who did a portrait of me sometime in the mid-nineties and later apologized for having done such a bad job of it, and Richard Seaver, the former Grove editor whom I met after my return from Paris in the mid-seventies and who graciously cheered on my work over the ensuing decades, and the long friendships formed with some of the poets in Donald Allen’s history-making anthology from 1960, in particular John Ashbery and Robert Creeley, who sat side by side in a class at Harvard the year I was born, and Susan Sontag, who appears in this book because of the production of Waiting for Godot she directed in Sarajevo during the siege, the intense and opinionated Susan who sometimes rubbed people the wrong way but never me—we were friends, we admired each other, we got along—and how not to remember the last time I saw her, the two of us sitting on a sofa together backstage at Cooper Union before participating in a human rights event for American PEN, sitting together holding hands and talking about the importance of friendship, and because she kept me in the dark about the return of the cancer that would eventually kill her, I didn’t understand that she was in fact saying good-bye to me, and Edward Albee, who just last year sat with me in a stuffy room on the top floor of the Strand discussing the work of Samuel Beckett in a conversation moderated by Jeannette Seaver, Dick Seaver’s widow, and then, of course, Samuel Beckett himself, whom I met in the early seventies because of Joan Mitchell, and how remarkable it is to think that the literary hero of my youth was sixty-seven years old then, which is precisely my age now, the great Samuel Beckett, who kept up a correspondence with me for many years after that initial meeting, a lifeline that helped sustain me through rough stretches of doubt and early despair, and decades later, when the one hundredth anniversary of Samuel Beckett’s birth was approaching, I tried to pay back the debt I felt I owed him by putting together the four-volume centenary edition of his work, which was published by Grove Press in 2006, a project warmly encouraged by Edward Beckett, Samuel Beckett’s nephew and literary executor, to whom I also owe a debt of gratitude, and then last of all, but really first of all, Barney Rosset, whose guts and wisdom made it possible for me to read Beckett and all the other writers published by Grove, the one-in-a-million Barney Rosset, whom I finally met during the last years of his life, late but not too late, for even old Barney was young, the youngest old man in all of America, and now America’s bravest publisher is dead, Samuel Beckett is dead, Joan Mitchell is dead, Jean-Paul Riopelle is dead, Genet and Pinter and Sontag and Robbe-Grillet and Seaver and Avedon and Creeley are dead, but even if they are ghosts now, not a day goes by when I don’t open the door of my room and invite them in.