The New York Trilogy

by Paul Auster

  Further letters continue this trend, with various names mentioned, various jobs alluded to. I gather that the money Fanshawe earned on the ship lasted for about a year and that afterwards he scrambled as best he could. For a time it seems that he translated a series of art books; at another time there is evidence that he worked as an English tutor for several lycée students; still again, it seems that he worked the graveyard shift one summer at the New York Times Paris office as a switchboard operator (which, if nothing else, indicates that he had become fluent in French); and then there is a rather curious period during which he worked off and on for a movie producer— revising treatments, translating, preparing script synopses. Although there are few autobiographical allusions in any of Fanshawe’s works, I believe that certain incidents in Neverland can be traced back to this last experience (Montag’s house in chapter seven; Flood’s dream in chapter thirty). “The strange thing about this man,” Fanshawe writes (referring to the movie producer in one of his letters), “is that while his financial dealings with the rich border on the criminal (cutthroat tactics, outright lying), he is quite gentle with those down on their luck. People who owe him money are rarely sued or taken to court— but are given a chance to work off their debts by rendering him services. His chauffeur, for example, is a destitute marquis who drives around in a white Mercedes. There is an old baron who does nothing but xerox papers. Every time I visit the apartment to turn in my work, there is some new lackey standing in the corner, some decrepit nobleman hiding behind the curtains, some elegant financier who turns out to be the messenger boy. Nor does anything go to waste. When the ex-director who had been living in the maid’s room on the sixth floor committed suicide last month, I inherited his overcoat—and have been wearing it ever since. A long black affair that comes down almost to my ankles. It makes me look like a spy.”

  As for Fanshawe’s private life, there are only the vaguest hints. A dinner party is referred to, a painter’s studio is described, the name Anne sneaks out once or twice—but the nature of these connections is obscure. This was the kind of thing I needed, however. By doing the necessary legwork, by going out and asking enough questions, I figured I would eventually be able to track some of these people down.

  Besides a three-week trip to Ireland (Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Sligo), Fanshawe seems to have remained more or less fixed. The final draft of Blackouts was completed at some point during his second year in Paris; Miracles was written during the third, along with forty or fifty short poems. All this is rather easy to determine—since it was around this time that Fanshawe developed the habit of dating his work. Still unclear is the precise moment when he left Paris for the country, but I believe it falls somewhere between June and September of 1971. The letters become sparse just then, and even the notebooks give no more than a list of the books he was reading (Raleigh’s History of the World and The Journeys of Cabeza de Vaca). But once he is ensconced in the country house, he gives a fairly elaborate account of how he wound up there. The details are unimportant in themselves, but one crucial thing emerges: while living in France Fanshawe did not hide the fact that he was a writer. His friends knew about his work, and if there was ever any secret, it was only meant for his family. This is a definite slip on his part—the only time in any of the letters he gives himself away. “The Dedmons, an American couple I know in Paris,” he writes, “are unable to visit their country house for the next year (they’re going to Japan). Since the place has been broken into once or twice, they’re reluctant to leave it empty—and have offered me the job of caretaker. Not only do I get it rent-free, but I’m also given the use of a car and a small salary (enough to get by on if I’m very careful). This is a lucky break. They said they would much rather pay me to sit in the house and write for a year than rent it out to strangers.” A small point, perhaps, but when I came across it in the letter, I was heartened. Fanshawe had momentarily let down his guard—and if it happened once, there was no reason to assume it could not happen again.

  As examples of writing, the letters from the country surpass all the others. By now, Fanshawe’s eye has become incredibly sharp, and one senses a new availability of words inside him, as though the distance between seeing and writing had been narrowed, the two acts now almost identical, part of a single, unbroken gesture. Fanshawe is preoccupied by the landscape, and he keeps returning to it, endlessly watching it, endlessly recording its changes. His patience before these things is never less than remarkable, and there are passages of nature writing in both the letters and notebooks as luminous as any I have read. The stone house he lives in (walls two feet thick) was built during the Revolution: on one side is a small vineyard, on the other side is a meadow where sheep graze; there is a forest behind (magpies, rooks, wild boar), and in front, across the road, are the cliffs that lead up to the village (population forty). On these same cliffs, hidden in a tangle of bushes and trees, are the ruins of a chapel that once belonged to the Knights Templars. Broom, thyme, scrub oak, red soil, white clay, the Mistral— Fanshawe lives amidst these things for more than a year, and little by little they seem to alter him, to ground him more deeply in himself. I hesitate to talk about a religious or mystical experience (these terms mean nothing to me), but from all the evidence it seems that Fanshawe was alone for the whole time, barely seeing anyone, barely even opening his mouth. The stringency of this life disciplined him. Solitude became a passageway into the self, an instrument of discovery. Although he was still quite young at the time, I believe this period marked the beginning of his maturity as a writer. From now on, the work is no longer promising—it is fulfilled, accomplished, unmistakably his own. Starting with the long sequence of poems written in the country (Ground Work), and then on through the plays and Neverland (all written in New York), Fanshawe is in full flower. One looks for traces of madness, for signs of the thinking that eventually turned him against himself—but the work reveals nothing of the sort. Fanshawe is no doubt an unusual person, but to all appearances he is sane, and when he returns to America in the fall of 1972, he seems totally in command of himself.

  My first answers came from the people Fanshawe had known at Harvard. The word biography seemed to open doors for me, and I had no trouble getting appointments to see most of them. I saw his freshman roommate; I saw several of his friends; I saw two or three of the Radcliffe girls he had dated. Nothing much came of it, however. Of all the people I met, only one said anything of interest. This was Paul Schiff, whose father had made the arrangements for Fanshawe’s job on the oil tanker. Schiff was now a pediatrician in Westchester County, and we spoke in his office one evening until quite late. There was an earnestness about him that I liked (a small, intense man, his hair already thinning, with steady eyes and a soft, resonant voice), and he talked openly, without any prodding. Fanshawe had been an important person in his life, and he remembered their friendship well. “I was a diligent boy,” Schiff said. “Hard-working, obedient, without much imagination. Fanshawe wasn’t intimidated by Harvard the way the rest of us were, and I think I was in awe of that. He had read more than anyone else—more poets, more philosophers, more novelists—but the business of school seemed to bore him. He didn’t care about grades, cut class a lot, just seemed to go his own way. In freshman year, we lived down the hall from each other, and for some reason he picked me out to be his friend. After that, I sort of tagged along after him. Fanshawe had so many ideas about everything, I think I learned more from him than from any of my classes. It was a bad case of hero-worship, I suppose—but Fanshawe helped me, and I haven’t forgotten it. He was the one who taught me to think for myself, to make my own choices. If it hadn’t been for him, I never would have become a doctor. I switched to premed because he convinced me to do what I wanted to do, and I’m still grateful to him for it.

  “Midway through our second year, Fanshawe told me that he was going to quit school. It didn’t really surprise me. Cambridge wasn’t the right place for Fanshawe, and I knew that he was restless, itching to get awa
y. I talked to my father, who represented the seamen’s union, and he worked out that job for Fanshawe on the ship. It was arranged very neatly. Fanshawe was whisked through all the paperwork, and a few weeks later he was off. I heard from him several times—postcards from here and there. Hi, how are you, that kind of thing. It didn’t bother me though, and I was glad that I’d been able to do something for him. But then, all those good feelings eventually blew up in my face. I was in the city one day about four years ago, walking along Fifth Avenue, and I ran into Fanshawe, right there on the street. I was delighted to see him, really surprised and happy, but he hardly even talked to me. It was as though he’d forgotten who I was. Very stiff, almost rude. I had to force my address and phone number into his hand. He promised to call, but of course he never did. It hurt a lot, I can tell you. The son-of-a-bitch, I thought to myself, who does he think he is? He wouldn’t even tell me what he was doing—just evaded my questions and sauntered off. So much for college days, I thought. So much for friendship. It left an ugly taste in my mouth. Last year, my wife bought one of his books and gave it to me as a birthday present. I know it’s childish, but I haven’t had the heart to open it. It just sits there on the shelf collecting dust. It’s very strange, isn’t it? Everyone says it’s a masterpiece, but I don’t think I can ever bring myself to read it.”

  This was the most lucid commentary I got from anyone. Some of the oil tanker shipmates had things to say, but nothing that really served my purpose. Otis Smart, for example, remembered the love letters Fanshawe had written for him. When I reached him by telephone in Baton Rouge, he went on about them at great length, even quoting some of the phrases Fanshawe had made up (“my darling twinkle-toes,” “my pumpkin squash woman,” “my wallowdream wickedness,” and so on), laughing as he spoke. The damndest thing was, he said, that the whole time he was sending those letters to Sue-Ann, she was fooling around with someone else, and the day he got home she announced to him that she was getting married. “It’s just as well,” Smart added. “I ran into Sue-Ann back home last year, and she’s up to about three hundred pounds now. She looks like a cartoon fat lady—strutting down the street in orange stretch pants with a mess of brats bawling around her. It made me laugh, it did—remembering the letters. That Fanshawe really cracked me up. He’d get going with some of those lines of his, and I’d start rolling on the floor like a monkey. It’s too bad about what happened. You hate to hear about a guy punching his ticket so young.”

  Jeffrey Brown, now a chef in a Houston restaurant, had been the assistant cook on the ship. He remembered Fanshawe as the one white crew member who had been friendly to him. “It wasn’t easy,” Brown said. “The crew was mostly a bunch of rednecks, and they’d just as soon spit at me as say hello. But Fanshawe stuck by me, didn’t care what anyone thought. When we got into Baytown and places like that, we’d go ashore together for drinks, for girls, whatever. I knew those towns better than Fanshawe did, and I told him that if he wanted to stick with me, we couldn’t go into the regular sailors’ bars. I knew what my ass would be worth in places like that, and I didn’t want trouble. No problem, Fanshawe said, and off we’d go to the black sections, no problem at all. Most of the time, things were pretty calm on the ship—nothing I couldn’t handle. But then this rough customer came on for a few weeks. A guy named Cutbirth, if you can believe it, Roy Cutbirth. He was a stupid honky oiler who finally got thrown off the ship when the Chief Engineer figured out he didn’t know squat about engines. He’d cheated on his oiler’s test to get the job—just the man to have down there if you want to blow up the ship. This Cutbirth was dumb, mean and dumb. He had those tattoos on his knuckles— a letter on each finger: L-O-V-E on the right hand, H-A-T-E on the left. When you see that kind of crazy shit, you just want to keep away. This guy once bragged to Fanshawe about how he used to spend his Saturday nights back home in Alabama— sitting on a hill over the interstate and shooting at cars. A charming fellow, no matter how you put it. And then there was this sick eye he had, all bloodshot and messed up. But he liked to brag about that, too. Seems he got it one day when a piece of glass flew into it. That was in Selma, he said, throwing bottles at Martin Luther King. I don’t have to tell you that this Cutbirth wasn’t my bosom buddy. He used to give me a lot of stares, muttering under his breath and nodding to himself, but I paid no attention. Things went on like that for a while. Then he tried it with Fanshawe around, and the way it came out, it was just a little too loud for Fanshawe to ignore. He stops, turns to Cutbirth, and says, ‘What did you say?’ And Cutbirth, all tough and cocky, says something like ‘I was just wondering when you and the jungle bunny are getting married, sweetheart.’ Well, Fanshawe was always peaceable and friendly, a real gentleman, if you know what I mean, and so I wasn’t expecting what happened. It was like watching that hulk on the t.v., the man who turns into a beast. All of a sudden he got angry, I mean raging, damned near beside himself with anger. He grabbed Cutbirth by the shirt and just threw him against the wall, just pinned him there and held on, breathing right into his face. ‘Don’t ever say that again,’ Fanshawe says, his eyes all on fire. ‘Don’t ever say that again, or I’ll kill you.’ And damned if you didn’t believe him when he said it. The guy was ready to kill, and Cutbirth knew it. ‘Just joking,’ he says. ‘Just making a little joke.’ And that was the end of it—real fast. The whole thing didn’t take more than half a blink. About two days later, Cutbirth got fired. A lucky thing, too. If he’d stayed around any longer, there’s no telling what might have happened.”

  I got dozens of statements like this one—from letters, from phone conversations, from interviews. It went on for months, and each day the material expanded, grew in geometric surges, accumulating more and more associations, a chain of contacts that eventually took on a life of its own. It was an infinitely hungry organism, and in the end I saw that there was nothing to prevent it from becoming as large as the world itself. A life touches one life, which in turn touches another life, and very quickly the links are innumerable, beyond calculation. I knew about a fat woman in a small Louisiana town; I knew about a demented racist with tattoos on his fingers and a name that defied understanding. I knew about dozens of people I had never heard of before, and each one had been a part of Fanshawe’s life. All well and good, perhaps, and one might say that this surplus of knowledge was the very thing that proved I was getting somewhere. I was a detective, after all, and my job was to hunt for clues. Faced with a million bits of random information, led down a million paths of false inquiry, I had to find the one path that would take me where I wanted to go. So far, the essential fact was that I hadn’t found it. None of these people had seen or heard from Fanshawe in years, and short of doubting everything they told me, short of beginning an investigation into each one of them, I had to assume they were telling the truth.

  What it boiled down to, I think, was a question of method. In some sense, I already knew everything there was to know about Fanshawe. The things I learned did not teach me anything important, did not go against any of the things I already knew. Or, to put it another way: the Fanshawe I had known was not the same Fanshawe I was looking for. There had been a break somewhere, a sudden, incomprehensible break—and the things I was told by the various people I questioned did not account for it. In the end, their statements only confirmend that what happened could not possibly have happened. That Fanshawe was kind, that Fanshawe was cruel—this was an old story, and I already knew it by heart. What I was looking for was something different, something I could not even imagine: a purely irrational act, a thing totally out of character, a contradiction of everything Fanshawe had been up to the moment he vanished. I kept trying to leap into the unknown, but each time I landed, I found myself on home ground, surrounded by what was most familiar to me.

  The farther I went, the more the possibilities narrowed. Perhaps that was a good thing, I don’t know. If nothing else, I knew that each time I failed, there would be one less place to look. Months went by, more months than I wou
ld like to admit. In February and March I spent most of my time looking for Quinn, the private detective who had worked for Sophie. Strangely enough, I couldn’t find a trace of him. It seemed that he was no longer in business—not in New York, not anywhere. For a while I investigated reports of unclaimed bodies, questioned people who worked at the city morgue, tried to track down his family—but nothing came of it. As a last resort, I considered hiring another private detective to look for him, but then decided not to. One missing man was enough, I felt, and then, little by little, I used up the possibilities that were left. By mid-April, I was down to the last one. I held out for a few more days, hoping I would get lucky, but nothing developed. On the morning of the twenty-first, I finally walked into a travel agency and booked a flight to Paris.