by Paul Auster
Not long ago, I received a poetry magazine in the mail with a cover that read: USA OUT OF NYC. Not everyone would want to go that far, but in the past several weeks I’ve heard a number of my friends talk with great earnestness and enthusiasm about the possibility of New York seceding from the Union and establishing itself as an independent city-state. That will never happen, of course, but I do have one practical suggestion. Since President Bush has repeatedly told us how much he dislikes Washington, why doesn’t he come live in New York? We know that he has no great love for this place, but by moving to our city, he might learn something about the country he is trying to govern. He might learn, in spite of his reservations, that we are the true heartland.
July 31, 2002
Columbia: 1968
It was the year of years, the year of tumult and craziness, the year of fire, blood, and death. I had just turned twenty-one, and I was as crazy as everyone else.
There were half a million American soldiers in Vietnam, Martin Luther King Jr. had just been assassinated, cities were burning across America, and the world seemed headed for an apocalyptic breakdown.
Being crazy struck me as a perfectly sane response to the hand I had been dealt—the hand all young men had been dealt in 1968. The instant I graduated from college, I would be drafted to fight in a senseless war I was morally and politically opposed to, and because I had already made up my mind to refuse to fight in that war, I knew there were only two options in front of me: prison or exile.
I was not a violent person. Looking back on those days now, I see myself as a quiet, bookish young man, struggling to teach myself how to become a writer, immersed in my courses in literature and philosophy at Columbia. I had marched in demonstrations against the war, but I was not an active member of any political organization on campus. I felt sympathetic to the aims of SDS (one of several radical student groups, but by no means the most radical), and yet I never attended its meetings and not once had I handed out a broadside or leaflet. I wanted to read my books, write my poems, and drink with my friends at the West End Bar.
Forty years ago today, a protest rally was held on the Columbia campus. The issue had nothing to do with the war but, rather, with a gymnasium the university was about to build in Morningside Park. The park was public property, and because Columbia intended to create a separate entrance for the local residents (mostly black), the building plan was deemed to be both unjust and racist. I was in accord with this assessment, but I didn’t attend the rally because of the gym.
I went because I was crazy, crazy with the poison of Vietnam in my lungs, and the many hundreds of students who gathered around the sundial in the center of campus that afternoon were not there to protest the construction of the gym so much as to vent their craziness, to lash out at something, anything, and since we were all students at Columbia, why not throw bricks at Columbia, since it was engaged in lucrative research projects for military contractors and thus was contributing to the war effort in Vietnam?
Speech followed tempestuous speech, the enraged crowd roared with approval, and then someone suggested that we all go to the construction site and tear down the chain-link fence that had been erected to keep out trespassers. The crowd thought that was an excellent idea, and off it went, a throng of crazy, shouting students charging off the Columbia campus toward Morningside Park. Much to my astonishment, I was with them. What had happened to the gentle boy who planned to spend the rest of his life sitting alone in a room writing books? He was helping to tear down the fence. He tugged and pulled and pushed along with several dozen others and, truth be told, found much satisfaction in this crazy, destructive act.
After the outburst in the park, campus buildings were stormed, occupied, and held for a week. I wound up in Mathematics Hall and stayed for the duration of the sit-in. The students of Columbia were on strike. As we calmly held our meetings indoors, the campus was roiling with belligerent shouting matches and slugfests as those for and against the strike went at one another with abandon. By the night of April 30, the Columbia administration had had enough, and the police were called in. A bloody riot ensued. Along with more than seven hundred other people, I was arrested—pulled by my hair to the paddy wagon by one cop as another cop stomped on my hand with his boot. But no regrets. I was proud to have done my bit for the cause. Both crazy and proud.
What did we accomplish? Not much of anything. It’s true that the gymnasium project was scrapped, but the real issue was Vietnam, and the war dragged on for seven more horrible years. You can’t change government policy by attacking a private institution. When French students erupted in May of that year of years, they were directly confronting the national government—because their universities were public, under the control of the Ministry of Education—and what they did initiated changes in French life. We at Columbia were powerless, and our little revolution was no more than a symbolic gesture. But symbolic gestures are not empty gestures, and given the nature of those times, we did what we could.
I hesitate to draw any comparisons with the present—and therefore will not end this memory piece with the word Iraq. I am sixty-one now, but my thinking has not changed much since that year of fire and blood, and as I sit alone in this room with a pen in my hand, I realize that I am still crazy, perhaps crazier than ever.
April 2008
TALKING TO STRANGERS
Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature Acceptance Speech
I don’t know why I do what I do. If I did know, I probably wouldn’t feel the need to do it. All I can say, and I say it with utmost certainty, is that I have felt this need since my earliest adolescence. I’m talking about writing, in particular writing as a vehicle to tell stories, imaginary stories that have never taken place in what we call the real world. Surely it is an odd way to spend your life: sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist—except in your own head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.
This need to make, to create, to invent is no doubt a fundamental human impulse. But to what end? What purpose does art, in particular the art of fiction, serve in what we call the real world? None that I can think of—at least not in any practical sense. A book has never put food in the stomach of a hungry child. A book has never stopped a bullet from entering a murder victim’s body. A book has never prevented a bomb from falling on innocent civilians in the midst of war. Some like to think that a keen appreciation of art can actually make us better people—more just, more moral, more sensitive, more understanding. Perhaps that is true—in certain rare, isolated cases. But let us not forget that Hitler started out in life as an artist. Tyrants and dictators read novels. Killers in prison read novels. And who is to say they don’t derive the same enjoyment from books as everyone else?
In other words, art is useless—at least when compared, say, to the work of a plumber, or a doctor, or a railroad engineer. But is uselessness a bad thing? Does a lack of practical purpose mean that books and paintings and string quartets are simply a waste of our time? Many people think so. But I would argue that it is the very uselessness of art that gives it its value—and that the making of art is what distinguishes us from all other creatures who inhabit this planet, that it is, essentially, what defines us as human beings. To do something for the pure pleasure and beauty of doing it, with no other aim than to do it as well as you can. Think of the effort involved, the long hours of practice and discipline required to become an accomplished pianist or dancer. All the suffering and hard work, all the sacrifices in order to achieve something that is utterly and magnificently … useless.
Fiction, however, exists in a somewhat different realm from the other arts. Its medium is language, and language is something we share with others, that is common to us all. From the moment we learn to talk, we begin to deve
lop a hunger for stories. Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the Bedtime Story—when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semidark and read from a book of fairy tales. Those of us who are parents will have no trouble conjuring up the rapt attention in the eyes of our children when we read to them. Why this intense desire to listen? Fairy tales are often cruel and violent, featuring beheadings, cannibalism, grotesque transformations, and evil enchantments. One would think this material would be too frightening for a young child, but what these stories allow the child to experience is precisely an encounter with his own fears and inner torments—in a perfectly safe and protected environment. Such is the magic of stories: they might drag us down to the depths of hell, but in the end they are harmless.
We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story, and the next, and the next. For years, in every country of the Western world, article after article has been published bemoaning the fact that fewer and fewer people are reading books, that we have entered what some have called the “postliterate age.” That may well be true, but at the same time this has not diminished the universal craving for stories. Novels are not the only source, after all. Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories. They need them almost as desperately as they need food, and however the stories might be presented—whether on a printed page or on a television screen—it would be impossible to imagine life without them.
Still, when it comes to the state of the novel, to the future of the novel, I feel rather optimistic. Numbers don’t count where books are concerned—for there is only one reader, each and every time only one reader. That explains the particular power of the novel, and why, in my opinion, it will never die as a form. Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader, and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy. I have spent my life in conversations with people I have never seen, with people I will never know, and I hope to continue until the day I stop breathing.
It’s the only job I’ve ever wanted.
October 2006
Notes
The Art of Hunger
1 All quotations are from the Robert Bly translation (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1967).
2 From an interview with Tom Driver, “Beckett at the Madeleine,” in The Columbia University Forum, Summer 1961.
New York Babel
1 Published by Editions Gallimard in 1971; preface by Gilles Deleuze.
2 My translation.
Dada Bones
1 Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, edited by John Elderfield and translated by Ann Raimes (New York: Viking Press, 1975).
The Poetry of Exile
1 Celan makes reference to Van Gogh in several of his poems, and the kinship between the poet and painter is indeed quite strong: both began as artists in their late twenties after having lived through experiences that marked them deeply for the rest of their lives; both produced work prolifically, at a furious pace, as if depending on the work for their very survival; both underwent debilitating mental crises that led to confinement; both committed suicide, foreigners in France.
2 I am grateful to Katharine Washburn, a scrupulous reader and translator of Celan, for help in deciphering the German text of this poem and suggesting possible references.
Innocence and Memory
1 All quotations are translated by Allen Mandelbaum and appear in his Selected Poems of Giuseppe Ungaretti, published by Cornell University Press in 1975.
Book of the Dead
1 Le Livre de Yukel (1964), Le Retour au livre (1965), Yaël (1967), Elya (1969), Aély (1972), El, ou le dernier livre (1973), which are followed by three volumes of Le Livre des resemblances. Four books are available in English, all of them admirably translated by Rosmarie Waldrop: The Book of Questions, The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book (Wesleyan University Press), and Elya (Tree Books).
Twentieth-Century French Poetry
1 Among them are the following: Pierre Albert-Birot, Jean Cocteau, Raymond Roussel, Jean Arp, Francis Picabia, Arthur Cravan, Michel Leiris, Georges Bataille, Léopold Senghor, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Jacques Audiberti, Jean Tardieu, Georges Schéhadé, Pierre Emmanuel, Joyce Mansour, Patrice de la Tour du Pin, René Guy Cadou, Henri Pichette, Christian Dotremont, Olivier Larronde, Henri Thomas, Jean Grosjean, Jean Tortel, Jean Laude, Pierre Torreilles, Jean-Claude Renard, Jean Joubert, Jacques Réda, Armen Lubin, Jean Pérol, Jude Stéfan, Marc Alyn, Jacqueline Risset, Michel Butor, Jean Pierre Faye, Alain Jouffroy, George Perros, Armand Robin, Boris Vian, Jean Mambrino, Lorand Gaspar, Georges Badin, Pierre Oster, Bernard Nöel, Claude Vigée, Joseph Gugliemi, Daniel Blanchard, Michel Couturier, Claude Esteban, Alain Sueid, Mathieu Bénézet.
Joe Brainard
1 New York: Henry Holt, 2010.
2 Preface to The Nancy Book, by Joe Brainard, published posthumously in 2008 by Siglio Press, Los Angeles.
3 Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004).
Acknowledgments
THE ART OF HUNGER
The Art of Hunger: First chapter of MA thesis in Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, Spring 1970; published in American Letters and Commentary, 1988.
New York Babel: The New York Review of Books, 1975.
Dada Bones: Mulch, 1975.
Ideas and Things: An earlier version first appeared in Harper’s, November 1975.
Truth, Beauty, Silence; The New York Review of Books, 1975.
From Cakes to Stones: Commentary, 1975.
The Poetry of Exile: Commentary, 1976.
Innocence and Memory: The New York Review of Books, 1976.
Book of the Dead: The New York Review of Books, 1976.
Kafka’s Letters: The San Francisco Review of Books, 1977.
Reznikoff x 2: 1. Parnassus, 1979. 2. In Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1984.
The Bartlebooth Follies: The New York Times Book Review, 1987.
POE’S BONES & OPPEN’S PIPE
I: Introductory catalogue essay for Poe exhibition at Morgan Library & Museum (October 4, 2013 to January 26, 2014), Edgar Allan Poe: Terror of the Soul, curated by Isaac Gewirtz, published by The New York Public Library, 2013.
II: In The Oppens Remembered: Poetry, Politics, and Friendship, edited by Rachel Blau de Plessis (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015). Note: Through the industry and perseverance of the late Richard Swigg (editor of Speaking with George Oppen: Interviews with the Poet and Mary Oppen, 1968–1987), the 1981 interview mentioned in “Oppen’s Pipe” was published in Jacket 2, May 2016.
THE STORY OF MY TYPEWRITER
New York: D.A.P, 2002.
ODD JOBS
Answer to a Question from New York Magazine: New York, December 25, 1995. In response to the question: What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the words New York?
Twenty-Five Sentences Containing the Words Charles Bernstein: Introduction to a poetry reading at Princeton University, March 14, 1990.
Gotham Handbook: In Double Game, by Sophie Calle. London: Violette, 1999.
Postcards for Georges Perec: Portrait(s) de Georges Perec. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2001.
Remembering Beckett: In Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett: A Centenery Celebration, edited by James and Elizabeth Knowlson. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2006.
By the Book: The New York Times Book Review, January 12, 2017.
PREFACES
Twentieth-Century French Poetry: The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, edited by Paul Auster. New York: Random House, 1982.
Mallarmé’s Son: A Tomb for Anatole, by Stéphane Mall
armé, translated by Paul Auster. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983. Revised edition: New York: New Directions, 2005.
On the High Wire: Traité de funambulisme, by Philippe Petit. Arles, France: Actes Sud, 1997. Original publication: On the High Wire, by Philippe Petit, translated by Paul Auster. New York: Random House, 1985.
Translator’s Note: Chronicle of the Guyaki Indians, by Pierre Clastres, translated by Paul Auster. New York: Zone Books, 1998.
An Evening at Shea: Things Happen for a Reason: The True Story of an Itinerant Life in Baseball, by Terry Leach, with Tom Clark. Berkeley: Frog Ltd., 2000.
The National Story Project: I Thought My Father Was God and Other True Tales from NPR’s National Story Project, edited by Paul Auster. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.
