Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011)

by Paul Auster

  Your reference to “late style” reminded me that I still haven’t read Edward Said’s book. I will try to track it down in the coming days. Tolstoy is a good example, but what about Joyce? It seems to me that his early style is late (by your definition, or by Said’s definition) and that as he progressed from book to book he became more and more ornate, complex, baroque, culminating in a final book that is so complex that no one can read it (alas). But Joyce died at fifty-nine, and perhaps it could be argued that he didn’t live long enough to have entered his late period. In any case, his is the only name that jumps out at me to contradict this theory. No, perhaps Henry James as well, whose final, dictated books are filled with some of the most tortuous sentences in English literature. Other writers, perhaps most writers, strike me as fairly consistent from beginning to end—Fielding, Dickens, Nabokov, Conrad, Roth, Updike, fill in the blanks. Not Beckett, of course, and in parallel with the late Bach, think of the late Matisse and his spare and sinuous cutouts. More stripped down, less stripped down, the same. Those are the three possibilities—which is to say, each person follows his or her own path. Goya said: “There are no rules in painting.” Are there any rules in the life of an artist?

  Summer seems to be over. Brisk days now, a new bite in the air. Siri plunges on with her novel, and I am unemployed again.

  Warmest thoughts,

  Paul

  October 1, 2009

  Dear John,

  I forgot to mention Robert Lowell. I forgot Elizabeth Bishop. I forgot John Berryman. I forgot Sylvia Plath. I forgot Robert Duncan. I forgot James Wright. I forgot William Bronk. I forgot Larry Eigner. I forgot H. D. (d. 1961) and Mina Loy (d. 1966) and Marianne Moore (d. 1972) and Laura Riding (d. 1991) and Lorine Niedecker (d. 1970). Not to speak of Theodore Roethke, Muriel Rukeyser, Denise Levertov, James Schuyler, Richard Wilbur, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and James Merrill. No doubt I am forgetting others still.

  Yesterday, I bought Edward Said’s On Late Style. Have read the first essay (mostly about Beethoven and Adorno) and see that the argument is not quite as simple as I originally thought. I will push on and give you my comments later.

  Said, by the way, was the adviser for my M.A. thesis at Columbia in 1969–70—and we stayed in touch, off and on but warmly, until his death. The man who put the book together, Michael Wood, was another teacher of mine—and is still a friend. Just yesterday, Siri saw him at Princeton (where he now teaches) to talk to his class on the contemporary novel. I myself will be going to the same class in two weeks. I don’t know why I mention this—simply because, I suppose, so many memories came rushing back to me when I bought the book yesterday.

  All good thoughts—

  Paul

  October 9, 2009

  Paul,

  See below.

  What does one do?

  John

  “22 September 2009

  “J.M. Coetzee, c/o Vintage Books

  “Dear Mr. Coetzee,

  “I am disappointed and find it a shame that a writer enjoying such eminence as you do, should stoop to using anti-Semitic slurs, and these wholly gratuitously.

  “I refer to your book ‘Slow Man’ Chapter 22 pages 167 and 168. Your reference to ‘Jews’ made in this derogatory way in no way furthered the story, and in my opinion should not have been used.

  “For me an interesting book has been spoiled.

  “Yours sincerely,

  “[Name and address supplied]”

  October 10, 2009

  Dear John,

  What to do? Do nothing—or something. That is to say, ignore the stupid letter and think no more about it. Or else, if you find yourself so deeply irked that it is impossible to stop thinking about it, write to the woman in England and tell her that you have written a novel, not a tract on ethical conduct, and that disparaging remarks about Jews, not to speak of out-and-out anti-Semitism, are a part of the world we live in, and just because your character says what she says does not mean that you endorse her comments. Lesson one in How to Read a Novel. Do writers of murder stories endorse murder? Do you, as a committed vegetarian, expose yourself as a hypocrite if one of your characters eats a hamburger? The woman’s letter is absurd, idiotic. But the sad truth is that all novelists receive letters of this sort from time to time. My standard response is to crumple them up and toss them in the trash.

  I imagine you have received my last letter by now, along with the card listing the names of more poets (still more, many more, have since occurred to me). I would appreciate your thoughts on the Adorno/Said notion of late style which, I confess, eludes me somewhat.

  Hoping you are well.

  Affectionately,

  Paul

  October 14, 2009

  Dear Paul,

  Last week I sent you a copy of a letter I had received from a reader in England, with a rather despairing accompanying note: What is one to do about this?

  The letter points to a passage in my novel Slow Man in which Marijana , the Croatian inamorata of the hero, makes an anti-Semitic remark about a certain shopkeeper. The letter writer accuses me, as author of the book, of anti-Semitism.

  You wrote back pointing out, very sensibly, that there are indeed things one can “do” about such a letter. One can ignore it, for instance. Or one can write back explaining that characters in novels have a degree of independence from their authors, and—particularly in the case of secondary characters—do not unfailingly speak for them.

  You also point out that as a writer of a certain prominence I must expect to get all kinds of mail from readers, including mail that doesn’t necessarily reflect a sophisticated understanding of what fiction is or does.

  Yet my question still stands: What is one to do about this? For—the world being as it is, and the twentieth century in particular being what it was—an accusation of anti-Semitism, like an accusation of racism, throws one onto the defensive. “But I’m not one of them!” one wants to exclaim, displaying one’s hands, showing that one’s hands are clean.

  The real question, however, is not whose hands are clean and whose are not. The real question arises out of the moment of being thrown onto the defensive, and out of the sinking feeling that comes next, the feeling that the goodwill between reader and writer has evaporated, the goodwill without which reading loses its joy and writing begins to feel like an unwanted, burdensome exercise. What does one do after that? Why go on, when one’s words are being picked over for covert slights and heresies? It’s like being back among the Puritans.

  Enough of that. You ask what I make of Edward Said, your old teacher, on the subject of late style. I confess I don’t remember much of what he has to say, except that I found myself adhering stubbornly to the old-fashioned understanding of late style that he was engaged in attacking. In the case of literature, late style, to me, starts with an ideal of a simple, subdued, unornamented language and a concentration on questions of real import, even questions of life and death. Of course once you get beyond that starting point the writing itself takes over and leads you where it will. What you end up with may be anything but simple, anything but subdued.

  In your last letter you go through a roll call of postwar American poets, poets who made their mark after 1945, and really it is a very distinguished list. Do we see their like today? I suppose I should be cautious about coming out with too quick a reply: the old are notoriously blind to the virtues of the young. But I will say that among today’s readers I see very few who take their lead in life from what the poets of our day are saying. Whereas I do believe that in the 1960s and, up to a point, the 1970s a lot of young people—indeed, many of the best young people—took poetry as the truest guide to living there was. I am referring here to young people in the United States, but the same held for Europe—in fact, most strongly of all for Eastern Europe. Who today has the power to shape young souls that Brodsky or Herbert o
r Enzensberger or (in a more dubious way) Allen Ginsberg had?

  Something happened, it seems to me, in the late 1970s or early 1980s as a result of which the arts yielded up their leading role in our inner life. I am quite prepared to give heed to diagnoses of what happened between then and now that have a political or economic or even world-historical character; but I do nevertheless feel that there was a general failure among writers and artists to resist the challenge to their leading role, and that we are poorer today for that failure.

  All the best,

  John

  October 23, 2009

  Dear John,

  Just to cheer you up for a moment (if cheer is the proper word to use in this context). The other night, I participated in a PEN-sponsored event called “Reckoning with Torture,” which documented the abuses of the U.S. government under Bush (cover page of the program is enclosed), and in his opening remarks, Anthony Appiah, the new president of American PEN, cited a passage from Diary of a Bad Year—the one about Sibelius and Guantánamo, about pride in humanity and shame in humanity—and it made me glad (if glad is the proper word to use in this context) to know that you were among us that night and to be given proof that people exist out there who are fully engaged in your work—as opposed, say, to the English woman whose letter so deeply and justifiably upset you.

  •

  Forgive me for being so slow in answering your last fax—dated nine days ago. The truth is that I have been struggling to say something pertinent in response to your remark about the arts playing a diminished role in our inner life since the late seventies or early eighties. I have filled several pages with my rants and opinions, but they don’t satisfy me. I find them shallow and boring, and I hesitate to inflict them on you. Also: the more I have pondered the question, the more depressed I have become—overwhelmed by a feeling that I have been writing an obituary of my own time, my own life.

  Some of the approaches I have attempted are: 1) an analysis of capitalism triumphant; 2) the victory of pop culture over “high” culture; 3) the collapse of Communism, and with it the collapse of revolutionary idealism, the notion that society can be reinvented; 4) the death of modernism.

  Answers might be found in exploring these subjects, but all I have found is sadness.

  But you are right. Something is gone now that used to be there. I don’t know if artists themselves are to be blamed for this loss. There are probably too many factors involved to blame anyone in particular. One thing is certain, however: stupidity has increased on all fronts. If one reads the letters of soldiers from the American Civil War, many of them turn out to be more literate, more articulate, more sensitive to the nuances of language than the writing of most English professors today. Bad schools? Bad governments that allow bad schools to exist? Or simply too many distractions, too many neon lights, too many computer screens, too much noise?

  My only consolation is that art forges on, in spite of everything. It is an unquenchable human need, and even in these grim times, there are countless numbers of good writers and artists, even great writers and artists, and even if the audience for their work has grown smaller, there are still enough people who care about art and literature to make the pursuit worthwhile.

  I’m sorry to have given you so little today. I am in a funk. I will do better next time, I promise.

  With great affection,

  Paul

  November 2, 2009

  Dear Paul,

  May I return briefly to our discussion of sport?

  I’ve been reading a book about the history of quantification, Trust in Numbers by Theodore M. Porter (1995). Porter is concerned to show that our passion for the figures in “facts and figures” is of fairly recent origin: he dates the stirrings of the quantificatory spirit to the mid–eighteenth century

  It occurs to me that the rise of mass sports and the cult of numbers may be not unconnected; in other words, that there may be a reason why sports are delivered to us nowadays in numerical packaging.

  Take the various football codes as an example. As far as I know, the progenitor of football, in Europe, was an annual tussle between the young men of neighboring villages to secure a nominated trophy and bring it home. The form of the trophy didn’t really matter. It may once have been a head, human or animal, but usually it was a bladder or ball. There were very few rules (“teams” were of any size, the field was the whole countryside, the competition was in running and/or blocking and/or wrestling, probably in eye-gouging too), and the game ended when, in effect, the first goal was scored.

  It was only in the mid–nineteenth century that rules of such contests were codified to make it a proper game. It was with this codification that the game began to take on its present numerical cast: number of players, size and marking of field, length of game, criteria for goal scoring, definition of victory, etc.

  Or consider bat-and-ball games. I take these to have their origin in a form of play in which one man hurls stones at another man, who defends himself with a shield or stick. This play becomes less dangerous when the target is redefined (in cricket) as an object which the man with the stick defends, and further redefined (in baseball) as an abstract torso-sized target more or less behind the man with the stick. What the reformers do with the resulting game is to add a heavy numerical overlay—distance between the two men, size and composition of “ball” (stone), size of “bat” (stick), etc.—and then to superadd a whole new system of abstract numerical rewards for hitting the ball (runs) and penalties for quitting your “at bat” post, etc.

  It is only once the primitive contests have been thus reconceived as rule-governed recreations, and victory has been given an abstract, numerical definition, that they are welcomed into modern life.

  Boxing is an interesting case. It remains the closest in spirit to the primitive contest. Though the quantifiers have done their best to modernize it (awarding points for blows, for example, at least in the amateur code), it remains only partly tamed, and thus hovers somewhat on the fringes of polite sport.

  It further occurs to me that a certain kind of male child is drawn to sports like baseball and cricket because they combine the hero worship common to all sport (“I wish my father were like X!” with the variant “The man who calls himself my father is not my real father; my real father is X”) with the socially sanctioned systems of quantification that allow quick but immature minds to evade difficult questions like, “Are the men who call themselves Team A better than the men who call themselves Team B?” or “Is there a way in which the communal virtue of Team A may exceed the sum of the virtues of its individual members?”

  These reflections were sparked by reading the interview you recently gave Kevin Rabalais (it appeared in last weekend’s Australian newspaper), which included a cautionary tale of what can happen to a boy who doesn’t take care to have his pencil ready at all times.

  Thanks for your letter of October 23. I can offer no better an answer than you to the question of why artists were important to our lives fifty years ago but are no longer so.

  As regards your sense that you are and perhaps have for a while been writing an obituary of your own times and your own life, let me mention that I recently heard about a burgeoning field in terminal care: the dying person is assisted by a professionally trained counselor to record their reflections on their own life—achievements, regrets, reminiscences, the works—which are then tastefully packaged (CD, bound printout) and passed on to the surviving family. It has been shown, said the promoter of the concept, that having a chance to tell their story in this way enables patients to die more peacefully.

  All the best,

  John

  November 13, 2009

  Dear John,

  The day after sending off my last letter to you, I received the manuscript of the English-language translation of a novel written by a friend of mine—a great mountain of a book, three or four
times longer than anything either one of us has ever written. The translator is someone new to him (his previous translator has retired), and because my friend considers this to be his most important book (it is), and because his grasp of English is shaky, I offered some months ago to read the translation and give comments to his American editor. I finished the job yesterday—a slow, painstaking slog through thousands and thousands of sentences, puzzled from beginning to end by the translator’s numerous errors, slowly coming to the conclusion (not yet confirmed) that English is not her first language. The mistakes are mostly small ones—“like” for “as if,” “me and him” for “he and I,” split infinitives, adjectives used as adverbs, and a maddening confusion between transitive and intransitive verbs—but the cumulative effect is jarring, making the book unpublishable as it stands now. Corrections will be made, of course, everything will come out right in the end, but all through my labors I kept thinking back to our discussion several months ago about the notion of a “mother tongue” and how truly complex a business it is to master a language, how many rules and principles and exceptions to rules and principles must be absorbed into one’s bloodstream to be able to “own” a particular idiom. The slightest misstep reveals a failure to understand how the system works. A single flub, and alarm bells start ringing. Not unlike what happened to me the other day when I called our local car service for a ride into Manhattan. I gave the female dispatcher the address, which she must have looked up on a computer map, and then she asked me if it was between such-and-such street and Houston Street (pronouncing it Hewston, like the city in Texas). Everyone who lives in New York knows that it is pronounced Howston—and I immediately said to her: “You’re not from New York, are you?” and she said no, she had in fact just moved here. It reminded me of certain scenes in war movies, spy movies, in which a German posing as an American or an American posing as a German gives himself away with a small slip like that—saying Hewston instead of Howston and thus exposing himself as an impostor. The firing squad comes next. A whole battalion is slaughtered. The war is lost. How intricate the knowledge of a mother tongue, how subtle its workings!