Talking to Strangers

by Paul Auster

  Yes, a number of rants and diatribes have been sent in by deranged people, but far fewer than I would have predicted. I have been exposed to groundbreaking revelations about the Kennedy assassination, subjected to several complex exegeses that link current events to verses from Scripture, and made privy to information pertaining to lawsuits against half a dozen corporations and government agencies. Some people have gone out of their way to provoke me and turn my stomach. Just last week, I received a submission from a man who signed his story “Cerberus” and gave his return address as “The Underworld 66666.” In the story, he told about his days in Vietnam as a marine, ending with an account of how he and the other men in his company had roasted a stolen Vietnamese baby and eaten it around a campfire. He made it sound as though he were proud of what he had done. For all I know, the story could be true. But that doesn’t mean I have any interest in presenting it on the radio.

  On the other hand, some of the pieces from disturbed people have contained startling and arresting passages. Last fall, when the project was just getting under way, one came in from another Vietnam vet, a man serving a life sentence for murder in a penitentiary somewhere in the Midwest. He enclosed a handwritten affidavit that recounted the muddled story of how he came to commit his crime, and the last sentence of the document read, “I have never been perfect, but I am real.” In some sense, that statement could stand as the credo of the National Story Project, the very principle behind this book. We have never been perfect, but we are real.

  * * *

  Of the four thousand stories I have read, most have been compelling enough to hold me until the last word. Most have been written with simple, straightforward conviction, and most have done honor to the people who sent them in. We all have inner lives. We all feel that we are part of the world and yet exiled from it. We all burn with the fires of our own existence. Words are needed to express what is in us, and again and again contributors have thanked me for giving them the chance to tell their stories, for “allowing the people to be heard.” What the people have said is often astonishing. More than ever, I have come to appreciate how deeply and passionately most of us live within ourselves. Our attachments are ferocious. Our loves overwhelm us, define us, obliterate the boundaries between ourselves and others. Fully a third of the stories I have read are about families: parents and children, children and parents, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, grandparents. For most of us, those are the people who fill up our world, and in story after story, both the dark ones and the humorous ones, I have been impressed by how clearly and forcefully these connections have been articulated.

  A few high-school students sent in stories about hitting home runs and winning medals at track meets, but it was the rare adult who took advantage of the occasion to brag about his accomplishments. Hilarious blunders, wrenching coincidences, brushes with death, miraculous encounters, improbable ironies, premonitions, sorrows, pains, dreams—these were the subjects the contributors chose to write about. I learned that I am not alone in my belief that the more we understand of the world, the more elusive and confounding the world becomes. As one early contributor so eloquently put it, “I am left without an adequate definition of reality.” If you aren’t certain about things, if your mind is still open enough to question what you are seeing, you tend to look at the world with great care, and out of that watchfulness comes the possibility of seeing something that no one else has seen before. You have to be willing to admit that you don’t have all the answers. If you think you do, you will never have anything important to say.

  Incredible plots, unlikely turns, events that refuse to obey the laws of common sense. More often than not, our lives resemble the stuff of eighteenth-century novels. Just today, another batch of e-mails from NPR arrived at my door, and among the new submissions was this story from a woman who lives in San Diego, California. I quote from it not because it is unusual, but simply because it is the freshest piece of evidence at hand:

  I was adopted from an orphanage at the age of eight months. Less than a year later, my adoptive father died suddenly. I was raised by my widowed mother with three older adopted brothers. When you are adopted, there is a natural curiosity to know your birth family. By the time I was married and in my late twenties, I decided to start looking.

  I had been raised in Iowa, and sure enough, after a two-year search, I located my birth mother in Des Moines. We met and went to dinner. I asked her who my birth father was, and she gave me his name. I asked where he lived, and she said “San Diego,” which was where I had been living for the last five years. I had moved to San Diego not knowing a soul—just knowing I wanted to be there.

  It ended up that I worked in the building next door to where my father worked. We often ate lunch at the same restaurant. We never told his wife of my existence, as I didn’t really want to disrupt his life. He had always been a bit of a gadabout, however, and he always had a girlfriend on the side. He and his last girlfriend were “together” for fifteen-plus years, and she remained the source of my information about him.

  Five years ago, my birth mother was dying of cancer in Iowa. Simultaneously, I received a call from my father’s paramour that he had died of heart complications. I called my biological mother in the hospital in Iowa and told her of his death. She died that night. I received word that both of their funerals were held on the following Saturday at exactly the same hour—his at 11 A.M. in California and hers at 1 P.M. in Iowa.

  After three or four months, I sensed that a book was going to be necessary to do justice to the project. Too many good stories were coming in, and it wasn’t possible for me to present more than a fraction of the worthy submissions on the radio. Many of them were too long for the format we had established, and the ephemeral nature of the broadcasts (a lone, disembodied voice floating across the American airwaves for eighteen or twenty minutes every month) made me want to collect the most memorable ones and preserve them in written form. Radio is a powerful tool, and NPR reaches into almost every corner of the country, but you can’t hold the words in your hands. A book is tangible, and once you put it down, you can return to the place where you left it and pick it up again.

  This anthology contains 179 pieces—what I consider to be the best of the approximately four thousand works that have come in during the past year. But it is also a representative selection, a miniaturized version of the National Story Project as a whole. For every story about a dream or an animal or a missing object to be found in these pages, there were dozens of others that were submitted, dozens of others that could have been chosen. The book begins with a six-sentence tale about a chicken (the first story I read on the air last November) and ends with a wistful meditation on the role that radio plays in our lives. The author of that last piece, Ameni Rozsa, was moved to write her story while listening to one of the National Story Project broadcasts. I had been hoping to capture bits and fragments of American reality, but it had never occurred to me that the project itself could become a part of that reality, too.

  This book has been written by people of all ages and from all walks of life. Among them are a postman, a merchant seaman, a trolley-bus driver, a gas-and-electric-meter reader, a restorer of player pianos, a crime-scene cleaner, a musician, a businessman, two priests, an inmate at a state correctional facility, several doctors, and assorted housewives, farmers, and ex-servicemen. The youngest contributor is barely twenty; the oldest is pushing ninety. Half of the writers are women; half are men. They live in cities, suburbs, and in rural areas, and they come from forty-two different states. In making my choices, I never once gave a thought to demographic balance. I selected the stories solely on the basis of merit: for their humanity, for their truth, for their charm. The numbers just fell out that way, and the results were determined by blind chance.

  In an attempt to make some order out of this chaos of voices and contrasting styles, I have broken the stories into ten different categories. The section titles speak for themselves, but except for the four
th section, “Slapstick,” which is made up entirely of comic stories, there is a wide range of material within each of the categories. Their contents run the gamut from farce to tragic drama, and for every act of cruelty and violence that one encounters in them, there is a countervailing act of kindness or generosity or love. The stories go back and forth, up and down, in and out, and after a while your head starts to spin. Turn the page from one contributor to the next and you are confronted by an entirely different person, an entirely different set of circumstances, an entirely different worldview. But difference is what this book is all about. There is some elegant and sophisticated writing in it, but there is also much that is crude and awkward. Only a small portion of it resembles anything that could qualify as “literature.” It is something else, something raw and close to the bone, and whatever skills these authors might lack, most of their stories are unforgettable. It is difficult for me to imagine that anyone could read through this book from beginning to end without once shedding a tear, without once laughing out loud.

  If I had to define what these stories were, I would call them dispatches, reports from the front lines of personal experience. They are about the private worlds of individual Americans, yet again and again one sees the inescapable marks of history on them, the intricate ways in which individual destinies are shaped by society at large. Some of the older contributors, looking back on events from their childhood and youth, are necessarily writing about the Depression and World War II. Other contributors, born in the middle of the century, continue to be haunted by the effects of the war in Vietnam. That conflict ended twenty-five years ago, and yet it lives on in us as a recurrent nightmare, a great wound in the national soul. Still other contributors, from several different generations, have written stories about the disease of American racism. This scourge has been with us for more than 350 years, and no matter how hard we struggle to eradicate it from our midst, a cure has yet to be found.

  Other stories touch on AIDS, alcoholism, drug abuse, pornography, and guns. Social forces are forever impinging on the lives of these people, but not one of their stories sets out to document society per se. We know that Janet Zupan’s father died in a prison camp in Vietnam in 1967, but that is not what her story is about. With a remarkable eye for visual detail, she tracks a single afternoon in the Mojave Desert as her father chases after his stubborn and recalcitrant horse, and knowing what we do about what will happen to her father just two years later, we read her account as a kind of memorial to him. Not a word about the war, and yet by indirection and an almost painterly focus on the moment before her, we sense that an entire era of American history is passing in front of our eyes.

  Stan Benkoski’s father’s laugh. The slap to Carol Sherman-Jones’s face. Little Mary Grace Dembeck dragging a Christmas tree through the streets of Brooklyn. John Keith’s mother’s missing wedding ring. John Flannelly’s fingers stuck in the holes of a stainless-steel heating grate. Mel Singer wrestled to the floor by his own coat. Anna Thorson at the barn dance. Edith Riemer’s bicycle. Marie Johnson watching a movie shot in the house where she lived as a girl. Ludlow Perry’s encounter with the legless man. Catherine Austin Alexander looking out her window on West Seventy-fourth Street. Juliana C. Nash’s walk through the snow. Dede Ryan’s philosophical martini. Carolyn Brasher’s regrets. Mary McCallum’s father’s dream. Earl Roberts’s collar button. One by one, these stories leave a lasting impression on the mind. Even after you have read through all fifteen dozen of them, they continue to stay with you, and you find yourself remembering them in the same way that you remember a trenchant parable or a good joke. The images are clear, dense, and yet somehow weightless. And each one is small enough to fit inside your pocket. Like the snapshots we carry around of our own families.

  October 3, 2000

  A Little Anthology of Surrealist Poems

  1968. I was twenty-one, a junior at Columbia, and these poems were among my first attempts at translation. Remember the times: the war in Vietnam, the clamor of politics on College Walk, a year of unending protests, the strike that shut down the university, sit-ins, riots, the arrest of seven hundred students (myself among them). In the light of that tumult (that questioning), the Surrealists were a crucial discovery for me: poets fighting against the conventions of poetry, poets dreaming of revolution, of how to change the world. Translation, then, was more than just a literary exercise. It was a first step toward breaking free of the shackles of myself, of overcoming my own ignorance. You must change your life. Perhaps. Back then, it was more a question of searching for a life, of trying to invent a life I could believe in …

  January 22, 2002

  The Art of Worry

  Art Spiegelman is a one-of-a-kind quadruple threat. He is an artist who draws and paints; a chameleon who can mimic and embellish upon any visual style he chooses; a writer who expresses himself in vivid, sharply turned sentences; and a provocateur with a flair for humor in its most savage and piercing incarnations. Mix those talents together, then put them in the service of a deep political conscience, and a man can make a considerable mark on the world. Which is precisely what Art Spiegelman has done for the past ten years at The New Yorker.

  We know him best as the author of Maus, the brilliant two-volume narrative of his father’s nightmare journey through the camps in the Second World War. Spiegelman showed himself to be an expert storyteller in that work, and no doubt that is how history will remember him: as the man who proved that comic books are not necessarily for children, that a complex tale can be told in a series of small rectangles filled with words and pictures—and attain the full emotional and intellectual power of great literature.

  But there is another side to Spiegelman as well, one which has increasingly come to dominate his energies in the post-Maus years: the artist as social gadfly and critic, as commentator on current events. As Spiegelman’s friend and admirer, I have always found it odd that he should have found a home for that aspect of his work at The New Yorker. The magazine was born in the Jazz Age and has been a fixture on the American scene for more than seventy-five years, rolling off the presses every week as the country has lived through wars, depressions, and violent upheavals, steadfastly maintaining a tone that is at once cool, sophisticated, and complacent. The New Yorker has published some excellent journalism over the years, but incisive and disturbing as many of those reports have been, the pages on which they appear have always been flanked by advertisements for luxury goods and Caribbean vacations, adorned with blithely amusing cartoons about the foibles of middle-class life. That is The New Yorker style. The world might be going to hell, but once we open the pages of our favorite weekly, we understand that hell is for other people. Nothing has changed for us—and nothing ever will. We are suave, tranquil, and urbane. Not to worry.

  But Spiegelman wants to worry. That is his job. He has embraced worry as his life’s calling, and he frets over every injustice he perceives in the world, froths diligently at the follies and stupidities of men in power, refuses to take things in his stride. Not without wit, of course, and not without his trademark comic touch—but still, the last thing anyone could call this man is complacent. Good for The New Yorker, then, for having had the wisdom to put him on its payroll. And good for Spiegelman for having reinvigorated the spirit of that stodgy bastion of good taste.

  Contributing both to the inside and the outside of the magazine, he has produced approximately seventy works for The New Yorker, toiling under the reigns of two chief editors, Tina Brown and David Remnick. These works include single-page drawings and paintings (among them a bitter send-up of Life Is Beautiful, a film that Spiegelman abhorred), extended articles on a variety of subjects presented in comic-book form (neo-Nazi hooliganism in Rostock, Germany; homages to Harvey Kurtzman, Maurice Sendak, and Charles Schulz; an attack on George W. Bush and the bogus elections of 2000; observations on pop culture as reflected in the behavior of his own children), and close to forty covers. The outside of a magazine is its most visible fe
ature, the signature mark of its philosophy and editorial content, the dress it wears when it goes out in public. Until Spiegelman came along, The New Yorker had been famous—even hilariously famous—for the blandness of its cover art. Smug and subdued, confident in the loyalty of its wide readership, issue after issue would turn up on the newsstands sporting sedate autumn scenes, snowy winter landscapes, suburban lawns, and depopulated city streets—imagery so trite and insipid as to induce drowsiness in the eye of the beholder. Then, on February 15, 1993, for an issue that fortuitously coincided with Valentine’s Day, Spiegelman’s first cover appeared, and The New Yorker exploded into a new New Yorker, a magazine that suddenly found itself part of the contemporary world.

  It was a bad time for the city. Crown Heights, an impoverished neighborhood in Brooklyn inhabited by African-Americans and Orthodox Jews, was on the brink of a racial war. A black child had been run over by a Jew, a Jew had been murdered in retaliation by an angry mob of blacks, and for many days running a fierce agitation dominated the streets, with threats of further violence from both camps. The mayor at the time, David Dinkins, was a decent man, but he was also a cautious man, and he lacked the political skill needed to step in quickly and defuse the crisis. (That failure probably cost him victory in the next election—which led to the harsh regime of Rudolph Giuliani, who served as mayor for the next eight years.) New York, for all its ethnic diversity, is a surprisingly tolerant city, and most people make an effort most of the time to get along with one another. But racial tensions exist, often smoldering in silence, occasionally erupting in isolated acts of brutality—but here was an entire neighborhood up in arms, and it was an ugly thing to witness, a stain on the democratic spirit of New York. That was when Spiegelman was heard from, the precise moment when he walked into the battle and offered his solution to the problem. Kiss and make up. His statement was that simple, that shocking, that powerful. An Orthodox Jew had his arms around a black woman, the black woman had her arms around the Orthodox Jew, their eyes were closed, and they were kissing. To round out the Valentine’s Day theme, the background of the picture was solid red, and three little hearts floated within the squiggly border that framed the image. Spiegelman wasn’t taking sides. As a Jew, he wasn’t proposing to defend the Jewish community of Crown Heights; as a practitioner of no religion, he wasn’t voicing his support of the African-American community that shared that same miserable patch of ground. He was speaking as a citizen of New York, a citizen of the world, and he was addressing both groups at the same time—which is to say, he was addressing all of us. No more hate, he said, no more intolerance, no more demonizing of the other. In pictorial form, the cover’s message was identical to an idea expressed by W. H. Auden on the first day of World War II: We must love one another or die.