Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011)

by Paul Auster

  I realize that Franzen was trying to be funny—or ironic—or provocative in his opening paragraph. It’s simply that the joke fell flat for me. The contempt in America for anything related to artistic or intellectual pursuits is so widespread today, so deeply a part of right-wing, populist thinking, that it pained me to see F. rehashing those ugly platitudes—even in jest. This is the country, after all, where George W. Bush, the scion of wealth and privilege, can pretend to be a “regular guy”—and get away with it—whereas Obama, who grew up in difficult circumstances, is seen as an “elitist” because he has written a couple of books, did well at Columbia and Harvard, and used to be a law professor.

  •

  We are back from Norway now, which I would have to describe as the Land of No Torment. Landscapes of unearthly beauty—literally, not of this earth, as if we had landed on some other planet. Siri’s mother, who just six weeks ago appeared to be at death’s door, has made a complete recovery after a doctor’s misdiagnosis, and she was the queen of the family reunion (which included forty-nine people of all ages), the last living member of her generation, and therefore the matriarch, albeit a quiet, self-effacing one, basking in the affection of her children, her nieces and nephews, and the children of her children, nieces, and nephews. A wondrous thing to behold.

  •

  According to a note I received from Philip Roth the other day: “You should know that in the Italian press Debenedetti said that he plans to publish a book of his fabricated interviews with an introduction by me.”

  Apparently, the story goes on.

  With best thoughts,

  Paul

  July 29, 2010

  Dear Paul,

  This morning I finished reading Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost, and this evening I watched François Ozon’s film Le temps qui reste. A common motif: cancer. Exit Ghost stars a septuagenarian who, impotent after prostatectomy, falls head over heels in love with a young woman. The film is about a rather vain and selfish young man who finds that he has terminal cancer and in the course of his last days becomes what one can only call a better human being. So: the one a comedy of cancer, of the bitter Rothian variety, the other an elegy of a quite affecting kind.

  I don’t find Exit Ghost a particularly notable addition to the Roth canon. I know that Roth relishes the challenge of wringing something fresh out of stock situations, but there is only so much mileage one can get out of the aging male struggling against decay to prove his virility one last time.

  Otherwise with the Ozon film. Do you know his work? The film is perfect in its way, capturing the loneliness of the dying and the mix of compassion, indifference, and anxiety with which the rest of us treat them. It makes delicate use of a little inset story that in other hands might have come out grotesque: a waitress approaches the young man in a café, compliments him on his looks, and invites him to inseminate her, since her husband—who is complicit in the proposal—is sterile. She even offers to pay. The young man is at first offended, but in the end thinks better of it: it is a way of leaving something of himself behind.

  There is a Chekhovian feel to this inset story as Ozon handles it: sympathetic yet cool and clear-eyed. The couple’s rather anxious question to the young man, as they are saying good-bye: Can you reassure us that it is cancer you are suffering from (dying of) and not AIDS? He would clearly like to see them again; they have no such wish.

  I assume you have read Exit Ghost, so you know that it is a bit of a ragbag. It includes an entirely unmotivated diatribe on trends in so-called cultural journalism put in the mouth of Roth’s character Lonoff. In this diatribe there is no doubt much that I, as non–New Yorker, miss. But Lonoff (Roth too?) clearly feels nothing but contempt for the mixture of moralizing and biographical reductionism that passes for criticism in your cultural organs (ours too). (By biographical reductionism I mean treating fiction as a form of self-disguise practiced by writers: the task of the critic is to strip away the disguise and reveal the “truth” behind it.) The villain in Exit Ghost is one of these critics. He threatens to publish a reading of Lonoff’s fiction as a disguised history (or perhaps an occluded history—one doesn’t know) of incest with an elder sister.

  I have no trouble understanding why Roth, a very visible figure on the literary landscape, should have strong feelings about this brand of literary criticism, even while he is aware that the more he fulminates, the more the Klimans of the world (Kliman is the critic-villain) lick their lips (What is he trying to hide?). I am sure that you, who swim in the same pond as Roth and are only slightly less visible, must have views of your own on the subject, which I think I can guess at. As for me, I like to think that, living on the very fringes of the known universe, I will escape the attention of the Klimans; but I am probably deluded.

  Warmest wishes,

  John

  P.S.: I have no wish to extend the discussion of South African history unnecessarily, but if there had been no cold war the whole South African mess would have been settled much earlier. For decades the South African regime represented itself as a bastion against Russian penetration into minerals-rich sub-Saharan Africa, and one U.S. administration after another bought that story. It didn’t help that the African National Congress was enmeshed with the South African Communist Party.

  The old South African regime was only one of a rats’ nest of dictatorships and oligarchies worldwide that the U.S. supported during the cold war for strategic ends. It was no coincidence that F. W. de Klerk unbanned the ANC in the same year that the Soviet Union was dissolved and the Berlin Wall fell.

  July 29, 2010

  Dear John,

  Alas, I have not read Exit Ghost, nor have I seen Le temps qui reste. I have consumed several Roth novels over the years (no more than a fraction of his output) and have seen two or three Ozon films—one of which, Swimming Pool, made a strong impression on me.

  Do I swim in the same pond as Roth? I’m not sure. We have crossed paths a few times, have twice had threesome dinners with Don DeLillo (a close friend of mine for many years), and have exchanged a handful of letters. In other words, he is an acquaintance, not a comrade. The thing that most interests him about me, I think, is the fact that we were both born in Newark. As for New York, however, I am not “slightly less visible” than he is—I am vastly less visible, perhaps infinitely less visible. Roth is a god whose work has been universally praised since his first book, whereas I am a mere struggling mortal whose work has been kicked around far more than I wish to remember. On top of that, I tend to steer clear of crowds, parties, and public pronouncements, preferring to tend my own little garden in Brooklyn. Roth, on the other hand, has been an enormous literary presence for more than fifty years—an exceptionally long run for any writer, no doubt the longest run of any American in history. One proof of his fame: he is the only living novelist whose work has been published by the Library of America.

  Not having read Exit Ghost, I can’t comment specifically on Lonoff’s rant against contemporary cultural journalism, but from your description of it, I would say that it is spot-on. Americans seem to have lost contact with the essence of fiction—which is to say, have lost the ability to understand the imagination—and therefore they find it difficult to believe that a novelist can “make things up.” Every novel is turned into a hidden autobiography, a roman à clef. No need to elaborate on how impoverished this view is—nor how ugly it can become in the hands of a malicious journalist.

  Your fax arrived last night while I was in the midst of watching my hapless baseball team (the New York Mets) suffer through yet another painful, extra-innings loss, and since we have written so much about sports lately, and since your letter discusses both a book and a film, I was fascinated to find the enclosed two articles in this morning’s New York Times.

  To begin with “E-Books Fly Beyond Mere Text.” Everyone has an opinion about e-books, of course. It is the burning topic in publishing tod
ay, and there is no doubt that we are witnessing a revolution, one that seems to be gaining strength with each passing minute. Even though I fall into the category of technophobe, I feel no threat from or hostility to Kindles, Nooks, or iPads. Anything that encourages reading should be considered a good thing, and these devices are unquestionably a great boon to the literary traveler. Rather than lug around a suitcase with thirty books in it, you can now load those thirty books into a lightweight digital contraption and move from place to place unencumbered.

  On the other hand, I do have certain fears. (Fears, by the way, already borne out by the destruction of the music business. How I miss browsing in record shops!) Amazon, which has so far cornered the market here, is selling books at too low a price, is in fact taking a loss with each book it sells in order to woo the public into buying the machines. One can foresee dire consequences in the long term: the collapse of publishing houses, the death of bookstores, a future in which every writer is his own publisher. As Jason Epstein pointed out in an article in the New York Review some months ago, it is absolutely essential that we continue to publish traditional paper books, that our libraries be maintained, since they are the bedrock of civilization. If everything went digital, think of the possible mischief that could ensue. Erased texts, vanished texts, or, just as frightening, altered texts.

  Okay. Such is my opinion. What concerns me now is the article in this morning’s paper and why I am of two minds about what I have read. The split seems to fall neatly between the terms “fiction” and “nonfiction.” For months now, I have been doing research for the novel I have finally just begun, part of which will concern itself with America in the early fifties. Consequently, I have read book after book about the Korean War, the Red Scare, the polio epidemic, the H-bomb, and so forth, but have also been watching documentary films, which can be very helpful. When, in today’s article, I came across the description of the “enhanced” Nixonland, I was intrigued. What an excellent idea, I thought, to combine written text and film in a history book. Such an excellent idea, in fact, that I can find no fault with it.

  With the novels, however, I found myself resisting. The books mentioned are mass-market pop thrillers, but they are works of fiction for all that, and the notion of adding clips from a television series based on one of those books irks me. The question is why. Does it have something to do with the loss of belief in the imagination that I mentioned earlier? As if books are somehow too hard to absorb, and the story cannot be fully experienced until it is seen by the naked eye? But isn’t reading the art of seeing things for yourself, of conjuring up images in your own head? And isn’t the beauty of reading all about the silence that surrounds you as you plunge into the story, the sound of the author’s voice resonating inside you to the exclusion of all other sounds?

  Perhaps I have turned into a stodgy old man. There are critical editions of classic novels that include excised passages, alternative endings, and even photographs. Why not film as well? I don’t know, but something in me is repelled by the notion of reading Disgrace, for example, and being able to click onto the film adaptation in midsentence on the second page of chapter 4. I am curious to know if you share this reaction or not.

  Concerning “How Do You Pack a Stadium?” I feel equally confused. There is no question that one can now “see” a game better on television than in the stadium where the game is played. But, as the sixty-three-year-old fan says about going in person, “I just want the ambience, to watch the players and feel the crowd. I would much rather have the feel of the game brought into the home, not the other way around.” The thirty-two-year-old fan disagrees (not without justification), but I’m not sure that turning an actual experience into a video experience is the answer. Especially at such a cost. How not to be stunned by an expenditure of $100 million on “stadium technology,” not to speak of “personal seat licenses” going for as high as $20,000—just for the right to buy a ticket? It’s not that I’m nostalgic for the old days, but I distinctly remember going to Yankee Stadium with a couple of my friends in 1961 (we were fourteen) to see the Giants versus the Browns and paying fifty cents for a seat in the bleachers. As we have been saying all along, sport is big business now, a mega-industry, a leviathan, and most of the world seems more than happy to be swallowed by the whale.

  As for South Africa and its role in the cold war, you are of course 100% right. Not that you need to hear that from me.

  New York continues to broil—the hottest July on record. When I wrote to you the other week and announced that the temperature was 98, I was wrong. It was 106.

  With fondest good thoughts,

  Paul

  August 18, 2010

  Dear Paul,

  I recently received an alumnus magazine from a university in South Africa. It included an article celebrating the opening of the new university library, with computer stations and study cubicles and seminar rooms and work spaces too many to count. I read the article, reread it to make sure. I was right. The word book did not occur once.

  In designing the library the architects had no doubt called on the advice of librarians, librarians of the new generation who look down on books as old-fashioned, whose dream is of a paperless library.

  What do such people have against books? Why don’t they share my vision of the library as acre upon acre of dimly lit stacks holding row upon row of tightly packed books stretching to infinity in every direction?

  The argument against the Borgesian library is almost too tedious to rehearse—too tedious and too clinching, in an age in which economics has been elevated to queen of the sciences. It is that books take up too much space. There is no way of justifying the preservation of a physical object that occupies 20 cm by 15 cm by 3 cm of costly space, and may sit on a shelf for decades and centuries untouched, unread. If we drop our deceased loved ones into holes in the earth, or consign them to the flames, why should it be sacrilege to get rid of dead books?

  Get rid of books, replace them with images of books, electronic images. Get rid of the dead, replace them with photographs.

  I am dismayed at the prospect of the library of the future. I am sure that feeling is shared by many. But, aside from sentiment, what can justify such dismay? A hunger for the real in a world of shadows? Books are not real, not in any important sense. The very letters on the page are signs, images of sounds, which are images of ideas. The fact that what we call a book can be picked up in one’s hands, has a smell and a feel of its own, is an accident of its production with no relevance to what the book conveys.

  When I was sixteen, having some money to spend, I bought ten or so books that were going to constitute the foundation of a personal library. They included War and Peace in the translation by Aylmer Maude, published by Oxford University Press, a bulky little book printed on thin India paper. (I bought War and Peace because Time magazine said it was the greatest novel ever written.)

  Aylmer Maude’s War and Peace, in its original maroon and cream wrapper, has accompanied me through half a century’s moves from continent to continent. I have a sentimental relation with it—not with Tolstoy’s War and Peace, that vast construct of words and ideas, but with the object that emerged from the printing house of Richard Clay and Sons in 1952 and was shipped from the warehouse of Oxford University Press somewhere in London to the press’s distribution agent in Cape Town and thence to Juta’s bookshop and to me.

  This kind of relationship with an author—extremely tenuous and highly indirect, conducted through perhaps a dozen intermediaries—will be less and less possible in the future. Whether such relationships have any value seems to me an open question, as is the question of whether it is better to own a physical copy of a book than to have the power to download an image of its text.

  The doubt and dismay I express here is not unrelated to the doubt and dismay you express in your most recent letter about the ways in which sport is being reshaped (repackaged) for television. There
still happens to be a confluence of interest between what the media want from the game and what the fans who actually attend games want—the fans want what they are so naive as to call the real thing, not a moving image of it, while the media abhor empty stadiums because an empty stadium spells death for the spectacle—but that doesn’t mean the business interests that own sports really care about fans except as consumers. If they can find a way of filling seats with holographic images, my guess is they will do so.

  Your dismay and my dismay: the shared dismay of two aging gents at the way the world is going. How does one escape the entirely risible fate of turning into Gramps, the old codger who, when he embarks on one of his “Back in my time” discourses, makes the children roll their eyes in silent despair? The world is going to hell in a handbasket, said my father, and his father before him, and so on back to Adam. If the world has really been going to hell all these years, shouldn’t it have arrived there by now? When I look around, what I see doesn’t seem like hell to me.

  But what is the alternative to griping? Clamping one’s lips shut and bearing the affronts?

  Yours ever,

  John

  Nantucket

  August 21, 2010

  Dear Gramps,

  I have always wondered how the world, which is very large, can fit into something as small as a handbasket. To deepen my confusion, I’m not even sure I know what a handbasket is. Aren’t all baskets in fact handbaskets, and if they are, isn’t the prefix hand wholly unnecessary? We should probably say: “The world is going to hell in a basket,” although that sounds even worse, doesn’t it? What should contain the world as we watch it descend into hell? A locomotive? An automobile? A cardboard envelope? Or perhaps something so small that it can’t even be seen. A single atom?