by Paul Auster
John
August 24, 2009
Dear Paul,
I have been thinking about names, about their fittingness or unfittingness. I would guess that names interest you too, if only because of having to find good, “right” names for your imaginary persons. Neither of us seems to go in for calling characters A or B or Pim or Bom.
I was brought up within the linguistic orthodoxy that the signifier is arbitrary, though for mysterious reasons the signifiers of one language won’t work as signifiers in another language (Help me, I am dying of thirst! will get you nowhere in Mongolia). This is supposed to be doubly true of proper names: whether a street is named Marigold Street or Mandragora Street or indeed Fifty-fifth Street is supposed to make no difference (no practical difference).
In the realm of poetry (in the widest sense) the doctrine of the arbitrariness of the signifier has never won much credence. In poetry the connotations of words—the accumulations of cultural significance around them—matter. “Mandragora,” via Keats, calls up bliss and death. “Fifty-fifth Street,” which at first sight seems anonymous, turns out to connote anonymity.
Through a supreme act of poetic power, Franz Kafka has given a letter of the alphabet allusive (connotative) force. Roberto Calasso’s recent book is called simply K. We look at the jacket and we know what it will be about.
I once called a character K (Michael K) as a stroke to reclaim the letter of the alphabet that Kafka had annexed, but didn’t have much success.
Few of us write novels, but most of us, one way or another, end up producing offspring, and are then compelled by law to give our offspring names. There are parents who accept this duty with joy, and parents who accept it with misgiving. There are parents who feel free to make up a name as they choose, and parents constrained (by law, by custom, by anxiety) to choose a name from a list.
Parents with misgivings try to give the child a neutral name, a name without connotations, a name that will not embarrass it in later life. Thus: Enid.
But there is a catch. Name too many daughters Enid, and the name Enid comes to signify the kind of child whose parents reacted with misgiving to the duty of naming a child and thus gave their girl-child as anonymous a name as they could. So “Enid” becomes a kind of fatality awaiting the child as she grows up: diffidence, caution, reserve.
Or someone far away, someone you have never heard of, disgraces your name. You grow up in the Midwest of the United States, and everything is fine until one day someone asks you, “Are you by any chance related to Adolf Hitler?” and you have to change your name by deed poll to Hilter or Hiller or Smith.
Your name is your destiny. Oidipous, Swollen-foot. The only trouble is, your name speaks your destiny only in the way the Delphic Sibyl does: in the form of a riddle. Only as you lie on your deathbed do you realize what it meant to be “Tamerlane” or “John Smith” or “K.” A Borgesian revelation.
All the best,
John
August 29, 2009
Dear John,
First, allow me to pounce on Fifty-fifth Street—which “turns out to connote anonymity.” For the sake of argument, let us assume that the Fifty-fifth Street in question happens to be located in New York, the borough of Manhattan to be precise, east side or west side not indicated, but Midtown Manhattan for all that, and then anyone who lives in this city will be able to conjure up vivid mental pictures and a flood of personal memories about that street whose name is not a word but an anonymous number. You write “Fifty-fifth Street,” and I immediately think about the St. Regis Hotel and an erotic encounter I had there when I was young, about taking the French writer Edmond Jabès and his wife there for tea one afternoon and seeing Arthur Ashe enter the room in his tennis whites, about lunching there with Vanessa Redgrave and discussing the role she was about to play in my film, Lulu on the Bridge. The numbers tell stories, and behind the blank wall of their anonymity they are just as alive and evocative as the Elysian Fields of Paris. Mention to a New Yorker the following streets, and his mind will swarm with images: 4th Street (Greenwich Village), 14th Street (the cheapest stores in the city), 34th Street (Herald Square, Macy’s, illuminated Christmas decorations), 42nd Street (Times Square, “legitimate” theaters, Give my regards to Broadway), 59th Street (the Plaza Hotel and the grand entrance to Central Park), 125th Street (Harlem, the Apollo Theater, Duke Ellington’s song about the A train). Just two blocks up from 55th Street, on West 57th, there is the building in which my grandfather used to have his office (intense childhood memories of going in there and being allowed to play with the typewriters and adding machines), which happens to be the same building that for many years housed the New York Review of Books (intense memories from early adulthood of sitting with Bob Silvers as we discussed the pieces I had written for him)—so that the mere mention of 57th Street will summon forth for me an entire archeology of my past, memories layered on top of other memories, the primordial dig.
And yet, as you say, the signifier is arbitrary, and until or unless that signifier is filled up with personal associations, it will remain indistinguishable from any other signifier. Just the other day, when Siri and I returned from Nantucket (that is, before I had read your letter), the taxi driver from the airport took a shortcut through a Brooklyn neighborhood I was not familiar with, and as we rode down Ocean Parkway, we traversed twenty-six consecutive cross streets named after the letters of the alphabet, from Avenue A to Avenue Z, and I remember thinking that none of this meant anything to me, that unlike the Avenue A in Manhattan (the East Village), which I know and therefore have a personal connection to, the Avenue A in Brooklyn is a complete cipher. I found myself pondering how boring it would be to live on a street named Avenue E or Avenue L. On the other hand, I also thought: Avenue K wouldn’t be bad (for all the reasons you mention), and other interesting or tolerable letters would be O, X, and Z—the nothing, the unknown, and the end. Then I walked into the house, which is also on a street designated by a number, and read your fax about K and 55th Street. Perfect timing.
The first book published by George Oppen, the American poet I am so fond of, was called Discrete Series (circa 1930)—a mathematical term, as I’m sure you know, and the example Oppen always gave to describe a discrete series was this: 4, 14, 23, 34, 42, 59, 66, 72. . . . At first glance, a meaningless collection of numbers, but when you learn that those numbers are in fact the station stops along the IRT subway line in Manhattan, they take on the force of lived experience. Arbitrary, yes, but at the same time not meaningless.
Many years ago, when I wrote my little novel Ghosts, I gave all the characters the names of colors: Black, White, Green, Blue, Brown, etc. Yes, I wanted to give the story an abstract, fable-like quality, but at the same time I was also thinking about the irreducibility of colors, that the only way we can know and understand what colors are is to experience them, that to describe “blue” or “green” to a blind man is something beyond the power of language, and that just as colors are irreducible and indescribable, so too are people, and we can never know or understand anything about a person until we “experience” that person, in the same way we can be said to experience colors.
We grow into the names we are given, we test them out, we grapple with them until we come to accept that we are the names we bear. Can you remember practicing your signature as a young boy? Not long after we learn how to write in longhand, most children spend hours filling up pieces of paper with their names. It is not an empty pursuit. It is an attempt, I feel, to convince ourselves that we and our names are one, to take on an identity in the eyes of the world.
In some cultures, people are given new names after reaching puberty, at times even a third name after committing a great or ignominious deed in adulthood.
Some people, of course, are saddled with atrocious names, comical names, deeply unfortunate names. The most pathetic one I have ever run across belonged to a man who married a distant re
lative: Elmer Deutlebaum. Imagine walking through life as Elmer Deutlebaum.
My Canadian-born grandfather, the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants, out of some incomprehensible loyalty to the British crown, named my mother Queenie. It took her many years to grow into that one. When she was eight or nine, after years of teasing from her classmates, she decided to change it to Estelle. Not as bland as Enid, perhaps, but hardly an improvement. The experiment lasted for approximately six months.
Not to be forgotten in all this is our common ancestor, Adam. According to the Old Testament, God gave Adam the task of giving names to all things animate and inanimate. As interpreted by Milton in Paradise Lost, Adam—in his innocence, in the state of grace he lived in before he came to know good and evil and was expelled from the Garden—is able to reveal the essences of each thing or creature he names, to reveal the truth of the world through language. After the fall, words were severed from things, and language became a collection of arbitrary signs—no longer connected to God or a universal truth.
Needless to say, I have spent my whole life exploring and meditating on my own name, and my great hope is to be reborn as an American Indian. Paul: Latin for small, little. Auster: Latin for South Wind. South Wind: an old American euphemism for a rectal toot. I therefore shall return to this world bearing the proud and altogether appropriate name of Little Fart.
Write again soon.
Yours ever,
Paul
September 13, 2009
Dear John,
Just back from Ireland (yesterday) and the immense relief to have the “Beckett Address” behind me. A dinner with Edward Beckett, the nephew and executor, born 1943, a professional flautist and former music teacher, ensconced in London for many years, a shy, pleasant man, unsophisticated in literary matters, well meaning, earnest, more attached to his uncle as uncle than as literary hero. He was happy with my talk, said so several times, and that, finally, was all I was hoping to achieve: not to fall on my face in front of him and the other 500 people in the room. Gripped the podium tightly, my knees locked out of tension during the 50-minute discourse, and by the time I left the stage, my legs were so stiff I could barely move and nearly did—literally—fall on my face.
They plan to do this every year. I suggested you for the next one, and the organizers were enthusiastic. Perhaps you will hear from them in the coming months. It’s your call, of course, whether to accept or not, but if you do accept, rest assured that you will be treated well.
While there, we learned that you are up for the Booker Prize. Fingers crossed on your behalf—and felicitations.
And then, this anguishing dilemma. We have been invited to a screening of Disgrace on the 17th—a film I am eager to see, in spite of your reservations—but it turns out that we have a conflict. A prior commitment, made many months ago, and when I suggested we break that date to attend the screening, Siri said she would never talk to me again, perhaps even kill me. I don’t doubt that she means it. In today’s New York Times, however, which lists all the new films of the upcoming season, I see that the movie will be opening on Friday. We will go next weekend, then. Would you like me to clip local reviews for you—or would you rather not know?
With big hugs to you and Dorothy,
Paul
September 26, 2009
Dear Paul,
You write about the associations that the name “55th Street” has for you, and mention in passing Avenues A through Z in Manhattan. At once my thoughts go to the long poem of Galway Kinnell’s on Avenue C. What a feat for a poet to have pulled off: a stranger from faraway Africa, hearing mention of avenues named after the letters of the alphabet, is at once transported (transpoeted, I nearly wrote) to the “God-forsaken avenue bearing the initial of Christ”!
I suppose that is one of the features that define a great city: with the passage of time, the names of its districts and quarters and streets and buildings become so woven into the tapestry of poems and stories that even readers who have never visited can find their way blindfolded: down 42nd Street as far as Baker Street, then make a left onto Nevsky Prospekt.
The 1950s and 1960s now look to me like a great age in American poetry, after which things have quietly gone downhill. Am I wrong? Is there something I am missing?
Rationalists are exasperated by the way in which words, even freshly minted ones, pick up connotations that blur their sharp denotative edges. One of the great projects of the Royal Society, founded in England in the late seventeenth century, was to establish a language free of associations, a language fit to be used by philosophers and scientists. The language that the scientific heirs of the Royal Society use today looks to us fairly pure, but only because it is based so heavily on Greek words, whose connotations are thoroughly lost to us (electricity from elektron, but who can say what this word, which denoted a precious-metal alloy, called up in the mind of Odysseus?).
(And what of my own response to electric, forever corrupted by the passage of “doom’s electric moccasin”—Emily Dickinson?)
Though Swift made fun of the Royal Society project, the ideal it reached for was not ignoble. I have never fully understood why Beckett dropped English, but I suspect that part of the reason was that he found the language too encumbered with literary associations. Conrad, as I recall, inveighed against the English word oak, which, he said, could not be employed without evoking a whole history of British navigation and British empire.
It is not uncommon for writers, as they age, to get impatient with the so-called poetry of language and go for a more stripped-down style (“late style”). The most notorious instance, I suppose, is Tolstoy, who in later life expressed a moralistic disapproval of the seductive powers of art and confined himself to stories that would not be out of place in an elementary classroom. A loftier example is provided by Bach, who at the time of his death was working on his Art of Fugue, pure music in the sense that it is not tied to any particular instrument.
One can think of a life in art, schematically, in two or perhaps three stages. In the first you find, or pose for yourself, a great question. In the second you labor away at answering it. And then, if you live long enough, you come to the third stage, when the aforesaid great question begins to bore you, and you need to look elsewhere.
All the best,
John
Brooklyn
September 29, 2009
Dear John,
We walked into the film with such low expectations (not only because of your remarks but because translating novels into movies is such a precarious business) and walked out pleasantly surprised, feeling the result wasn’t half bad at all. Yes, John M. was miscast, but his performance was more subtle and less mannered than most of the things I’ve seen him in over the past few years—good enough, in any case, not to destroy the mood of the story. We thought the daughter was excellent—much thinner and more attractive than the character in the book, of course, but this is the movies, and what can you do, since attractive women are what the movies are all about. Direction, photography, production design, locations—admirably done. The New York reviews that I saw were largely favorable. The audience sitting in the theater with us was engrossed, and given how poor most films are these days, it was refreshing to see something with some spine and intelligence to it. No, it doesn’t have the force of the book, but it tries to do justice to the book, and if I were in your shoes, I would feel reasonably satisfied, not the least bit betrayed. To add to your collection of UNIMPORTANT OBJECTS, I enclose our ticket stubs from the Quad Theater on 13th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues—just in case you want to show them off to your friends.
You talk about a golden age of American poetry in the fifties and sixties and then a quiet falling off. My first response was to say “nonsense,” but now that I’ve given the matter some thought, I sadly have to admit that I agree with you. Most of the great modernists were still breathing then (Stevens
died in 1954, but Pound, Eliot, and Williams all lived on into the sixties, Williams in particular doing some of his best work then), the so-called Objectivists were still thriving (the next generation, including Zukofsky, Oppen, and Reznikoff), Charles Olson was in full flower (how I loved Olson when I was young), and the generation after that (poets born in the 1920s) was emerging: Kinnell, whom you mention, but also Creeley, Ashbery, O’Hara, Merwin, Spicer, Ginsberg, and numerous others. Kinnell, Ashbery, and Merwin are still with us, but they are old men now, and what has happened after them? There are several poets born in the late thirties and early forties whose work I greatly admire and follow avidly—Michael Palmer (published by New Directions), Charles Simic (Harcourt), Ron Padgett (Coffee House Press) among them—not to speak of the somewhat younger Paul Muldoon (born in Northern Ireland, now an American citizen)—but they are all friends of mine, I have watched their work evolve over decades, and perhaps this personal connection clouds my judgment. I would be curious to know what you think of them, any one of them. There is also Susan Howe (New Directions), much admired, much debated, but oddly enough, the book I consider to be her best is a work of prose, My Emily Dickinson, an astonishingly brilliant and original text—in the spirit of Olson’s Call Me Ishmael or Williams’s In the American Grain: the poet as critic, criticism as a form of poetry, wonderful stuff. But no, none of these writers is as strong as the giants from the recent past. We live in an age of endless writing workshops, graduate writing programs (imagine getting a degree in writing), there are more poets per square inch than ever before, more poetry magazines, more books of poetry (99% of them published by microscopic small presses), poetry slams, performance poets, cowboy poets—and yet, for all this activity, little of note is being written. The burning ideas that fueled the innovations of the early modernists seem to have been extinguished. No one believes that poetry (or art) can change the world anymore. No one is on a holy mission. Poets are everywhere now, but they talk only to each other.