Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011)

by Paul Auster

  I tried the trick again, thinking first the one thought (the world without JMC), then the other (the world without me), and again it worked. The first was easy to think, the second impossible.

  The simple logical conclusion would seem to be that the equation “I = JMC” is false. And indeed one’s intuitions support this conclusion. I imagine that you find the equation “I = PA” equally false.

  But have you ever before seen the falsity of the equation demonstrated so neatly?

  Dorothy and I set out tomorrow morning for India, on our first visit there. Preparations for the visit have involved an unusual amount of shit—I mean literal shit. We had to have inoculations against diseases transmitted through shit (hepatitis, cholera), we have been warned from all quarters to wash our hands at frequent intervals and not put food in our mouths that has passed through the (shitty) hands of strangers, and now I read in the New York Review of Books blog that while men in India may shit in public without shame, being seen to relieve oneself during daylight hours is unacceptable for Indian women. Hence a wide range of diseases of the urinary tract and bowels among women.

  It always comes as a shock to find how elementary the basis is of taboos. For instance, wearing shoes in a mosque and sitting down in a mosque are both taboo. Why? Because the soles of one’s shoes have probably trodden in shit (obvious); and because the seat of one’s pants is probably soiled too (not so obvious).

  Thanks for your last letter (December 3), also featuring shit on shoes.

  All the best,

  John

  January 28, 2011

  Dear John,

  After months of work and a hundred pages written, I decided to abandon—or put aside—the novel I started in late spring. The book seemed to be spreading out in all directions rather than coming into focus, and I haven’t figured out a way to fix it. I have never dropped any project so deep into it—but, in spite of my disappointment, I am convinced I made the right decision. I wonder if anything similar has ever happened to you—and, if so, how you dealt with it.

  Tell me about India. A place I have never been to, and about which I know very little.

  Five feet of snow in New York this past month—one storm after another. It is turning into one of those winters.

  Fondest thoughts—and big hugs to you both,

  Paul

  March 3, 2011

  Dear Paul,

  I’ve been wanting to write to you about India, but then thought I ought to let enough time pass for my thoughts to settle and perhaps grow more mature, more interesting. Now I find that they aren’t growing at all, merely settling, so there is no reason for procrastinating any longer.

  I was invited to the Jaipur literary festival, which I thought I would use as an entrée to a tour, if not of India then at least of Rajasthan. If Rajasthan worked, I thought, I might at some future date explore another part of the country, perhaps Kerala, with a little more confidence.

  About the Jaipur festival I had mixed feelings. I had heard it was large and noisy, which didn’t recommend it to me. On the other hand, there would surely be sympathetic souls there, Indian and foreign, and I would have time to consult with them about good and bad, advisable and inadvisable, ways of seeing the country.

  I don’t think I distinguished myself at the festival. I was determined not to subject myself to the rounds of public questioning that have become a standard feature of festivals nowadays. Interrogation is not a medium I do well in. I am too brief in my responses, where brevity (clippedness) is all too easily misread as a sign of irritation or anger. So I announced that I was simply going to read a piece of fiction. This was what I did. The fiction wasn’t amusing (it was about life and death and the soul), so it was probably a bad choice for that kind of occasion. The audience response: respectful but puzzled.

  Anyway, after five days the festival was over and I had gathered no particular wisdom from sporadic conversations about how to approach India. Worse, I had picked up a low fever which left me feeling lethargic most of the time.

  So Dorothy and I set off on a one-week, fixed-price tour of Rajasthan in a car with a driver named Rakesh. Rakesh drove us from Jaipur to Pushkar to Jodhpur to Udaipur to Bundi and back to Jaipur, and when the tour was over put us on a plane out of the country.

  I suppose I could at this point list the sights along the way that made an impression on me. But I suspect you will want more from a letter than that. So I will limit myself to two observations on what I saw, and then perhaps reflect on the question of why I am such a poor reporter, not only on India but on all of life.

  My first observation was that this was the first country I had visited where human beings and animals seem to have worked out a decent modus vivendi. The range of animal species I actually observed was limited—cows, pigs, dogs, monkeys—but I have no reason to think that only these animals are accepted into the human sphere. I saw no sign of cruel treatment, no sign even of impatience, though the cows wander in among the very busy traffic and hold people up.

  It is commonplace that cows are worshipped in India. But worship seems to me the wrong word. Relations between people and animals are much more mundane than that: a simple tolerance and acceptance of an animal’s way of being, even when it intrudes among men.

  Behind this observation lies my experience in Africa, where animals are also omnipresent but where an unthinking cruelty toward them is common, an attitude of contempt toward them as a lower form of life.

  My other observation concerns poverty, and again the contrast with Africa was at the back of my mind. “The poor” in India do indeed seem to be living perilously close to subsistence level, to be scraping a bare existence from day to day. But the more I saw of this bare existence, the more I was impressed by the reservoir of practical skills people were drawing on, as well as by their sheer industriousness. Whether one was looking at men chipping building blocks out of quarried sandstone or at vendors preparing food at the roadside, these were dextrous people with what I can only call intelligent hands who, in another kind of economic setup, could be prosperous artisans. In other words, there seemed to me to be vast human resources that are only very partially tapped at present.

  And now we come to the observer himself, the man who emerges from a two-week immersion in a foreign culture (and a foreign civilization) with nothing to show for it save a handful of trite and rather abstract observations. Why am I incapable of travel writing in all its splendor—of the vivid evocation of strange sights and sounds? I know you will say, “But surely you are in good company. Where are the vivid evocations of strange sights and sounds in Kafka? Where are they in Beckett?” But is it good enough to rely on that kind of consolation? Isn’t it plain old inadequacy that one is exhibiting—an inadequate response to the beauty and generosity of the world? What is praiseworthy in trying to turn a native poverty into a virtue?

  Questions, questions.

  Yours ever,

  John

  March 7, 2011

  Dear Paul,

  I have heard from the organizers of events in Canada that they have got as far as making hotel reservations for us. Excellent. I’m looking forward very much to spending some time with you. A pity Siri can’t be there.

  Dorothy will be coming along—she will be presenting a paper at an academic conference at Queen’s University at more or less the same time.

  I’m sorry to hear you found yourself (in January) having to abandon a project into which you had obviously put a lot of work. But these investments are never wholly lost, are they? A page or two, an idea here and there, can surely be rescued, and (to drift into horticultural metaphor) may perhaps in time put down roots of its own.

  I have abandoned projects in the past, though my native tendency is to push on too long, perhaps, and too doggedly with a no-hoper.

  What interests me at the present juncture is the question of ho
w and when failing power will announce itself. One can’t go on writing forever; and one doesn’t want to sign off with an embarrassingly bad product of one’s dotage. How does one detect that one just doesn’t have it in one anymore to do justice to a subject?

  All good wishes,

  John

  March 8, 2011

  Dear John,

  Happy to receive your latest—your two latest—and to know that you are back in one piece.

  The fact is, travel writing tends to bore me, and even films about exotic places—which theoretically should grab you by the seat of your pants—have always left me cold. I remember the travelogues they used to show between the cartoons and the feature when I was a boy—works of unspeakable dullness that would send me rushing out to the concession stand within two minutes.

  Not that I haven’t taken pleasure in certain classics of the genre—Herodotus, Marco Polo, Sir John Mandeville, Saint Brendan, Columbus, Cabeza de Vaca—so many of them filled with lies and outlandish inventions—along with some nineteenth-century books of real literary merit: Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, Parkman’s The Oregon Trail, and Powell’s Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons—but the travel-writing boom of the eighties never said much of anything to me, and when you get right down to it, I much prefer the imaginary anthropologies of Calvino’s Invisible Cities or Henri Michaux’s prose poem “I am writing to you from a far-off country” or even Cyrano de Bergerac’s seventeenth-century account of his trip to the moon—works of pure fantasy that seem to say more about human life than any book or article of down-to-earth reportage.

  You lament the poverty of your skills as an observer of “strange sights and sounds,” but you are not a reporter—neither by training nor temperament—and the kind of attentiveness you bring to your experiences is of a different order from that of a journalist. The newspaperman and travel writer concentrate on the surfaces of things. Their job is to create word pictures for their readers, to look closely at each visual fact that presents itself to them and turn it into a captivating phrase or sentence, but you are looking at several things at once, at everything at once, and trying to make sense of what you see—that is, trying to synthesize the disparate facts into an observation that will encompass more than just the surfaces of things, that will pierce through to the inner depths. I was therefore grateful to you for your comments about the relations between human beings and animals in India (which I have never heard from anyone else) and the industry of what you call “intelligent hands.” Much better to read those things than to be told the color of the cups poor people drink from.

  March 10

  Fractured, busy days—which prevented me from continuing on the eighth . . .

  A word about Canada in September. I know how uncomfortable you feel about “public interrogation,” but that seems to be precisely what they want us to do together. The two of us alone on stage with no intermediary, first to give short readings from our work, and then to have some kind of conversation. We should probably figure out beforehand what we want to talk about (in the most general terms, a few major points) and then wing it from there. Some of our remarks will necessarily take the form of questions—each to the other—but not the kind of grilling one associates with traditional interviews. We should be all right, I guess, and if your statements are clipped, what difference does that make? I tend to be rather clipped myself.

  The difficulty of understanding current events in distant parts of the world. Except for what is happening in front of my nose here in America, everything I know is filtered through the media (mostly the New York Times and the New York Review of Books, but also some TV and radio), and the farther away I am from the events in question, the less certain I am about what I know. I can grasp the tawdry farce of the recent Italian scandals (European politics are not alien to me), but when it comes to what is happening in the Middle East, I feel on less solid ground. What we are told in the American press is that spontaneous revolutions have occurred in Tunisia and Egypt, that protest movements have sprung up in several other countries throughout the region, and that the conflict in Libya is quickly devolving into a bloody civil war. To concentrate on Egypt for the moment: it seems that the peaceful uprising was secular in nature, for the most part led by young people in their twenties and thirties—educated young people who are largely unemployed or underemployed because of the malfunctioning society created by years of corruption and dictatorship—and supported by women, civil servants, impoverished workers, and even the military. Everyone praised the extraordinary fervor and dedication of the rebels, and yet now, just weeks later, cracks seem to be forming again, violent confrontations have been growing (most recently between Christians and Muslims), and all in all the situation seems perilously unstable to me. Decades of no true political life, no organized political parties, and no possibility of coherent political opposition have led to a kind of mass hunger for social change, but with no political tools to implement it—which has left the army in control of the country, at least for now. I sense there is a vacuum of power, and when I think about revolutions of the past, that sort of vacuum tends to produce a Napoleon or a Lenin, the brilliant opportunist who steps into the breach and takes control by force. Those are my fears—but what do I really know about what is going on, and what do I really know about the people involved? Next to nothing. Meanwhile, America debates whether we should start dropping bombs on Libya. One shudders to think . . .

  With warmest greetings,

  Paul

  March 14, 2011

  Dear Paul,

  You don’t use e-mail and (I am pretty sure) you don’t carry a mobile phone. I presume that these are principled decisions on your part. I am not at all interested in what they say at a personal level. What intrigues me is what it will mean to be a twenty-first-century person writing fiction from which twenty-first-century tools of communication like the mobile phone are absent.

  Before I say any more, be assured that my sympathies are very much on your side. I too have, willy-nilly, become a twenty-first-century person, yet I write books in which people write (and mail) paper letters, books in which the most up-to-date means of communication employed is (now and again) the telephone, which happens to be a nineteenth-century invention.

  The presence/absence of mobile phones in one’s fictional world is going to be, I suspect, no trivial matter. Why? Because so much of the mechanics of novel writing, past and present, is taken up with making information available to characters or keeping it from them, with getting people together in the same room or holding them apart. If, all of a sudden, everyone has access to more or less everyone else—electronic access, that is—what becomes of all that plotting? In the movies, one is already used to seeing all kinds of little plot routines being invoked to explain why character A can not speak to character B (phone left behind in taxi; phone reception blocked by mountains). The default situation has become that, save in extraordinary circumstances, B is always contactable by A.

  Is it going to become the norm of the fiction of tomorrow (indeed, of today) that everyone always has access to everyone else, with the corollary that if in a specific fictional world everyone does not have access to everyone else then that fictional world belongs to the past?

  One used to be able to get pages and pages out of the nonexistence of the telegraph/telephone (yet to be invented) and the consequent need for messages to be borne by hand or even memorized at one end and recited at the other (example: the man who had to race from Marathon to Athens). Are many of the stories that you and I and people like us write doomed to be seen as fictions premised on the nonexistence of the mobile phone, and therefore as quaint?

  Think further of what the mobile phone has done to the practice of adultery (the adaptations that adulterers have had to make), and to the practice of deception in general. A contemporary novel of adultery (or a novel of contemporary adultery) would have a quite diff
erent mechanics.

  Without making a mountain out of a molehill, let me also point to the growing lists of goods and services unavailable to people without mobiles (not nearly as large as the list of goods and services unavailable to people without access to the Internet, but nevertheless . . .). The pressure is definitely on us to have a mobile each—pressure, in effect, to have a number, a code, at which we can be located at all hours of the day and night. When every citizen has such a number, what need will there any longer be for a physical identity document?

  Already there are fictions in which mobile phones are used as tracking devices. Some unlucky guy in a turban switches on his mobile, and an instant later is hit by a missile fired from a drone.

  March 22, 2011

  With memories of your praise of William Wyler at the back of my mind, I have been watching what films of his I can lay my hands on—in the last couple of weeks, Mrs. Miniver, The Desperate Hours, The Children’s Hour, and a film based on a Somerset Maugham story, starring Bette Davis, whose title escapes me.

  Wyler does everything so efficiently and unobtrusively that one barely notices the authorial hand. I’d like to talk to you about him one day, and hear what, as someone in the business, you admire.

  Your comments on the current situation in Egypt seem exactly right. One watches those intelligent, fresh-faced, enthusiastic youngsters on the streets of Cairo telling the television cameras how great it feels to be free, how much they are looking forward to a new Egypt, and one wonders how they will be talking in two or three years, when a new ruling elite will have settled into power.

  I keep thinking that it is only in those all too brief interregnums, when one power has been overthrown and the next has yet to install itself, that people have a true taste of liberty—Europe between the eclipse of the Nazis and the arrival of the New Austerity, for example. How rare it is, a chance for the masses to dance in the streets! And how quaint that term, the masses!