Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011)

by Paul Auster

  . . . which are always the same book, endlessly repeated, thousands of subtle variations on the same story, and nevertheless the public has an insatiable hunger for these novels. As if each one were the reenactment of a ritual.

  The narrative aspect, yes, which keeps us watching until the final play, the final tick of the clock, but all in all I tend to think of sports as a kind of performance art. You complain about the déjà vu quality of so many games and matches. But doesn’t the same thing happen when you go to a recital of your favorite Beethoven piano sonata? You already know the piece by heart, but you want to hear how this particular pianist will interpret it. There are pedestrian pianists and athletes, and then someone comes along who takes your breath away.

  I wonder if any two contests have ever been exactly alike, play for play. Perhaps. All snowflakes look the same, but common wisdom says that each one is unique. More than six billion people inhabit this planet, and supposedly everyone’s fingerprints are different from anyone else’s. Of the many hundreds of baseball games I have watched—perhaps even thousands—nearly every one has had some small detail or event I have never seen in any other game.

  There is pleasure in the new, but also pleasure in the known. The pleasure of eating food one likes, the pleasure of sex. No matter how exotic or complex one’s erotic life might be, an orgasm is an orgasm, and we anticipate them with pleasure because of the pleasure they have given us in the past.

  Still, one does feel rather stupid after spending an entire day in front of a television set watching young men hurl their bodies against one another. The books sit on the table unread. You don’t know where the hours have gone, and, even worse, your team has lost. So I say from Paris, knowing that when the New York football Giants play a crucial playoff game against a tough Philadelphia team tomorrow, I won’t be able to watch—and I am filled with regret.

  With a big salute across oceans and continents,

  Paul

  January 26, 2009

  Dear Paul,

  You seem to treat sport as a mainly aesthetic affair, and the pleasures of sports spectatorship as mainly aesthetic pleasures. I am dubious about this approach, and for a number of reasons. Why is football big business, while ballet—whose aesthetic attractions are surely superior—has to be subsidized? Why is a “sporting” contest between robots of no interest? Why are women less interested in sport than men?

  What the aesthetic approach ignores is the need for heroes that sports satisfy. This need is at its most passionate among boys young enough to have a flourishing fantasy life; I suspect that it is the residue of this juvenile fantasy that fuels adult attachment to sport.

  Insofar as I respond to the aesthetic in sport, it is moments of grace (grace: what a complex word!) that I respond to, moments or movements (another interesting word) that cannot be the issue of rational planning but seem to come down as a kind of blessing from on high upon the mortal players, moments when everything goes right, everything clicks into place, when the lookers-on don’t even want to applaud, just to give silent thanks that they were there as witnesses.

  Yet what athlete would want to be complimented for his grace on the field? Even women athletes would give you a hard look. Grace, gracefulness: effeminate terms.

  If I look into my own heart and ask why in the twilight of my days I am still—sometimes—prepared to spend hours watching cricket on television, I must report that, however absurdly, however wistfully, I continue to look out for moments of heroism, moments of nobility. In other words, the basis of my interest is ethical rather than aesthetic.

  Absurdly because modern professional sport has no interest in the ethical: it responds to our craving for the heroic only with the spectacle of the heroic. “We cried out for bread and you gave us stones.”

  The ubiquity of the postgame interview. The man who for an hour or two threatened to leave us behind, to ascend into that realm—only one step short of the divine—where heroes have their being is compelled to resume his mere earthly status, that is to say, is ritually humiliated. “Yeah,” he is compelled to say, “we worked hard for this, and it paid off. It was a team effort.”

  You don’t work to become a hero. That is to say, what you do in preparation for the heroic contest is not “work,” does not belong to the round of production and consumption. The Spartans at Thermopylae fought together and died together; they were heroes all of them, but they were not a “team” of heroes. A team of heroes is an oxymoron.

  All the best,

  John

  Brooklyn

  February 2, 2009

  Dear John,

  I don’t think we are at odds about this. My letter from Paris was mostly a response to your comments about watching sports on television (a narrow topic, no more than a small sub-issue in the very large conversation about sports in general) and why we, supposedly grown men, would choose to fritter away an entire Sunday afternoon following the essentially meaningless activities of young athletes on distant ball fields. A so-called guilty pleasure, but one that often leaves us feeling hollowed out and disgusted with ourselves after the game is over.

  Taking the broadest view possible, it strikes me that the subject of sports can be divided into two major categories: the active and the passive. On the one hand, the experience of participating in sports oneself. On the other hand, the experience of watching others play. Since we seem to have begun with a discussion of the latter, I will do my best to confine myself to that part of the question for now.

  The ethical component you refer to is especially vital to the very young. You worship your gods and want to emulate them; every contest is a matter of life and death. At my advanced age, however, these attachments have weakened considerably, and I tend to find myself watching games from a much farther remove, looking for “aesthetic pleasures” rather than seeking to validate my own existence through the actions of others. Not to belabor the point, let’s drop the old man’s perspective for now. Let’s go back to the beginning and try to remember what happened to us in the distant past.

  Your use of the word “heroic” is fitting and no doubt crucial for understanding the nature of the obsession, which inevitably begins at the dawn of conscious life. But what does it mean to talk about the heroic in connection to early childhood? With young boys, I think, it largely has to do with an idea of the masculine, of sexual identification, of preparing oneself to become a man . . . and not a woman.

  Having raised two children—a boy and a girl—I was deeply fascinated (and often highly amused) to watch their sexual identities emerge at around the age of three. In both cases, it began through excess, through intensely exaggerated simulations of what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman. With the boy, it was all about Superman, the Incredible Hulk, and incorporating imaginary beings who were endowed with magical, all-crushing strength. With the girl (who at two asked if and when she would begin to grow a penis), it manifested itself in party shoes, miniature high heels, tutus, plastic tiaras, and a preoccupation with ballerinas and fairy princesses. Classic stuff, of course, but because it takes a while for boys and girls to understand that they are boys and girls, their first steps toward sexual identification are necessarily extreme, marked by a fixation on the symbols and outer trappings of their sex. Once the issue is settled (around age five?), the girl who previously insisted on wearing dresses at all times could happily put on a pair of pants without fear of turning into a boy.

  As an American child in the early 1950s, I began my simulations of masculine life as a cowboy. Again, it was all about the outer trappings—the boots, the hat, the six-shooters snug in their holsters. Because no self-respecting cowboy could possibly go by the name of Paul, whenever I was decked out in my Wild West costume I insisted that my mother call me John—and refused to answer her whenever she forgot. (You were never an American cowboy by any chance, were you, John?)

  But then—at wh
at moment I can no longer remember, though surely when I was somewhere between four and five—a new passion took hold of me, a new set of symbols, a new realm in which to assert my masculinity. Football (in its American incarnation). I had never played a game, I barely understood the rules, but somewhere, somehow (through photos in newspapers? through games broadcast on TV?), I got it into my head that football players were the true heroes of modern civilization. Once again, it was all about the outer trappings. I didn’t want to play football so much as to dress up as a football player, to own a football uniform, and my ever-indulgent mother granted my wish by buying me one. Helmet, shoulder pads and two-color jersey, the special pants that came down to the knee, along with a leather football—which allowed me to look at myself in the mirror and pretend that I was a football player. There are even photographs that document the imaginary exploits of that little boy in his pristine uniform which never once touched an actual football field, which was never once worn outside the domain of the small garden apartment he lived in with his parents.

  Eventually, of course, I did begin to play football—and baseball as well. With fanatical devotion, I might add, and the more interested I became in doing these things, the more interested I became in following the performances of the great ones, the professionals. In Portugal, I told you about the audacious, semi-insane letter I wrote to Otto Graham (the finest quarterback of the period, the star of the champion Cleveland Browns) inviting him to my eighth birthday party—and the gracious response I received from him, explaining why he could not attend. Ever since I mentioned this story to you, I have continued to ponder it, searching for more details, trying to come to a deeper understanding of my motives at the time. I remember now a distinct fantasy of Otto Graham coming to my house and the two of us going into the backyard and playing catch with a football. That was the birthday party. There were no other guests present—no other children, not even my parents—no one but my soon to be eight-year-old self and the immortal O.G.

  I see now, I know now with utmost conviction, that this fantasy represented a wish to create a substitute father. In the America of my young mind, fathers were supposed to play catch with their sons, but my father rarely did that with me, was seldom available in any of the ways I imagined fathers were supposed to be available to their sons, and so I invited a football hero to my house in the vain hope that he could give me whatever it was my own father had failed to give me. Are all heroes substitute fathers? Is that why boys seem to have a greater need for heroes than girls? Is all this youthful fixation on sports no more than another example of the Oedipal struggle gone underground? I’m not sure. But the maniacal intensity of sports fans—not all, but vast numbers nevertheless—has to come from somewhere very deep in the soul. There is more at stake here than momentary diversion or mere entertainment.

  I don’t mean to suggest that Freud is the only one with anything to say on the matter, but there is no doubt that he has something to add to the conversation.

  I realize that I often respond to your remarks with stories about myself. Understand: I am not interested in myself. I am giving you case studies, stories about anyone.

  With warmest thoughts,

  Paul

  March 15, 2009

  Dear Paul,

  You write of the young male child’s fixation on sporting heroes, and go on to distinguish this from a mature attitude that seeks the aesthetic in the sporting spectacle.

  Like you, I think that watching sport on television is mostly a waste of time. But there are moments that are not a waste of time, as would for example crop up now and again in the glory days of Roger Federer. In the light of what you say, I scrutinize such moments, revisiting them in memory—Federer playing a cross-court backhand volley, for instance. Is it truly, or only, the aesthetic, I ask myself, that brings such moments alive for me?

  It seems to me that two thoughts go through my mind as I watch: (1) If only I had spent my adolescence practicing my backhand instead of . . . then I too could have played shots like that and made people all over the world gasp with wonder; followed by: (2) Even if I had spent the whole of my adolescence practicing my backhand, I would not be able to play that shot, not in the stress of competition, not at will. And therefore: (3) I have just seen something that is at the same time both human and more than human; I have just seen something like the human ideal made visible.

  What I would want to note in this set of responses is the way in which envy first raises its head and is then extinguished. One starts by envying Federer, one moves from there to admiring him, and one ends up neither envying nor admiring him but exalted at the revelation of what a human being—a being like oneself—can do.

  Which, I find, is very much like my response to masterworks of art on which I have spent a lot of time (reflection, analysis), to the point where I have a good idea of what went into their making: I can see how it was done, but I could never have done it myself, it is beyond me; yet it was done by a man (now and again a woman) like me; what an honor to belong to the species that he (occasionally she) exemplifies!

  And at that point I can no longer distinguish the ethical from the aesthetic.

  As a footnote to my comments on the present banking crisis, may I quote a comment by George Soros that I came across? “The salient feature of the current financial crisis is that it was not caused by some external shock. . . . The crisis was generated by the system itself.” Dimly Soros recognizes that nothing has really happened—the only things that have changed are the numbers.

  All good wishes,

  John

  Brooklyn

  March 16, 2009

  Dear John,

  In light of your quotation from George Soros, these sentences from the galleys of a book I received the other day, written by a professor friend, Mark C. Taylor, to be published by Columbia University Press: “Since the late 1970s a new form of capitalism has emerged—finance capitalism. In previous forms of capitalism (i.e., industrial and consumer capitalism), people made money by buying and selling labor or material objects. In finance capitalism, by contrast, wealth is created by circulating signs, backed by nothing but other signs, in a regression that for practical purposes is limitless. Financial markets have become a sophisticated confidence game, and the people at the helm are latter-day versions of Melville’s wily Confidence Man. . . .”

  •

  A new twist in the Beckett Chronicle that might amuse you. A couple of weeks ago I received an invitation to attend a new literary festival to be held just outside Dublin in September and to give—imagine this—the first annual Samuel Beckett Address. I tortured myself about it for several days and then finally agreed to accept the invitation. I hope I haven’t made a terrible mistake. I wish, somehow, that we could do it in tandem.

  On the subject, I bought a copy of the first volume of Beckett’s letters last week and have been poking around in it with a kind of gloomy fascination. Never have I seen a book of correspondence with such a heavy, cumbersome apparatus. I now understand your doubts and confusions when you were asked to review it. The distinction between “work” and “life” has created a volume in which too much is missing, and I feel frustrated by it and at times (I confess) rather bored. I’m looking forward to reading your piece.

  •

  We can leave sports behind if you wish, although I was planning to go on at great length about the second part of the question (participating in sports rather than watching others play them): the pleasures of competition, the intense focus required that at times enables you to transcend the strictures of your own consciousness, the concept of belonging to a team, the necessity of coping with failure, and numerous other topics. At some later point, perhaps, I will sit down and try to write that letter, even if we are in the midst of something else. It’s a subject that still interests me a great deal.

  As for the exaltation you talk about when watching Federer in his glor
y days, I am in total accord with you. Awe at the fact that a fellow human being is accomplishing such things, that we (as a species) are not only the worms we often appear to be but are also capable of achieving miraculous things—in tennis, in music, in poetry, in science—and that envy and admiration dissolve into a feeling of overwhelming joy. Yes, I agree with you entirely. And that is where the aesthetic and the ethical merge. I have no counter-argument, for I have often felt exactly the same way myself.

  With fondest good thoughts,

  Paul

  April 6, 2009

  Dear Paul,

  Before you tell me what you think of the pleasures of competition, I have a preemptive comment to make.

  In my early twenties I was deeply involved in chess. For years I had been spending my working days writing machine code for computers, getting so deeply sucked into the process that I sometimes felt I was descending into a madness in which the brain is taken over by mechanical logic.

  I had the good sense to abandon computers, and then made my way to the United States to do a graduate degree. Onboard ship crossing the Atlantic (yes, in those days one could travel by sea if one didn’t have much money—the crossing took five days) I entered a chess competition and made it through to the final round, where my opponent was to be an engineering student from Germany named Robert.

  Our match commenced at midnight. At dawn we were still hunched over the chessboard. Robert was one piece up, but I felt I had the tactical advantage. The last few spectators around the board drifted away: they wanted to get a sight of the Statue of Liberty. Robert and I were alone.

  “I’ll give you a draw,” Robert offered. “OK,” I said. We stood up, shook hands, put away the chess set.