Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011)

by Paul Auster

  He was a piece up, but I had the advantage: a draw was a fair compromise, not so?

  We docked. I was in the legendary city of New York. But the mood of the contest would not leave me, a mood of cerebral excitement, feverish and slightly sick, like a real inflammation of the brain. I had no interest in my surroundings. Something kept humming inside me.

  My wife and I got through Customs and found our way to the bus station. We were to catch different buses: she would go to Georgia to stay with friends while I went to Austin to find a place for us to live. I said good-bye to her abstractedly. All I wanted was to be alone, so that I could replay the chess game on paper and settle the doubt that nagged me. All the way to Texas in the Greyhound bus (two days? three days?) I pored over my notations, following a hunch that I should never have accepted a draw, that in three or four or five moves Robert the German would have been forced to capitulate.

  I should have been drinking in my first sights of the New World. I should have been making plans for the new life that was opening up before me. But no, I was in the grip of a fever. In a quiet way, I was raving mad. I was the madman in the last row of the bus.

  That episode is what comes to mind when you write about the pleasures of competition. What I associate with competition is not pleasure at all but a state of possession in which the mind is focused on a single absurd goal: to defeat some stranger in whom one has no interest, whom one has never seen before and will never see again.

  The memory of undergoing that fit of nasty exultation, nearly half a century ago, has fortified me forever against wanting to be the winner at all costs, to defeat some or other opponent and come out on top. I have never played chess since then. I have played sports (tennis, cricket), I have done a lot of cycling, but in all of this my aspiration has simply been to do as well as I can. Winning or losing–who cares? How I judge whether or not I have done well is a private matter, between myself and what I suppose I would call my conscience.

  I don’t like forms of sport that model themselves too closely on warfare, in which all that matters is winning and winning becomes a matter of life and death—sports that lack grace, as war lacks grace. At the back of my mind is some ideal—and perhaps concocted—vision of Japan in which one refrains from inflicting defeat on an opponent because there is something shameful in defeat and therefore something shameful in imposing defeat.

  All the best,

  John

  April 8, 2009

  Dear John,

  I have been living in a state of gloom and sorrow these past months. It has been a season of death, a time of funerals, memorial services, and condolence letters, and even as the headlines announce the disintegration of our flawed and ragged world, these private losses have touched me far more deeply than the mayhem burning in the universe-at-large.

  On Christmas day, the suicide of the twenty-three-year-old daughter of one of my oldest friends. In February, the death of a beloved woman friend I had known since I was seventeen. And last month, the absurd death of a forty-five-year-old friend after what appeared to be a harmless fall. All women, all gone before they could live out the time allotted to most of us. I tell myself that I should know better than to feel surprised, that such is the way of the world, that we are all mortal beings and our end can come at any time, but the long view offers not the smallest shred of consolation. The heart aches. There is simply no cure for it.

  Your chess story—which is also a kind of horror story—has made me rethink what I mean by the word “competition.”

  (I haven’t played chess in years, by the way, but there was a time in my early twenties when I became immersed in it, too. It is without question the most obsessive, most mentally damaging game invented by man. After a while, I found myself dreaming about chess moves in my sleep—and decided that I had to stop playing or else go mad.)

  When I used the phrase “the pleasures of competition,” I think I was referring to the sense of release that comes from giving yourself wholly to a game, the beneficial effect on both body and mind caused by absolute concentration on a particular task at a particular moment, the sense of being “outside yourself,” temporarily relieved of the burden of self-consciousness. Winning and losing are necessary but secondary factors, the excuse one needs in order to make a maximum effort to play well—for without maximum effort, there can be no real pleasure.

  Exercise for the sake of exercise has always bored me. Sit-ups and push-ups, jogging around the track “to stay in shape,” lifting weights, tossing around a medicine ball do not have the same salutary effect produced by competition. By trying to win the game you are playing, you forget that you are running and jumping, forget that you are actually getting a healthy dose of exercise. You have lost yourself in what you are doing, and for reasons I don’t fully understand, this seems to bring intense happiness. There are other transcendent human activities, of course—sex being one of them, making art another, experiencing art yet another, but the fact is that the mind sometimes wanders during sex—which is not always transcendent!—making art (think: writing novels) is filled with doubts, pauses, and erasures, and we are not always able to give our full attention to the Shakespeare sonnet we are reading or the Bach oratorio we are listening to. If you are not fully in the game you are playing, however, you are not truly playing it.

  We mustn’t overlook the question of fatigue. If your body tires in the middle of a game, you lose your concentration and your desire to win (that is, the ability to make a maximum effort). That is why tough and demanding competitive sports are played by young people, why most professional athletes are finished by the time they reach their midthirties. But there is a definite pleasure in trying to push yourself beyond your perceived limits, of continuing to make a maximum effort even though your resources are spent.

  I vividly remember my last stab at sporting glory. Twenty-plus years ago, I played in the New York Publishers Softball League once a week in Central Park as a member of the Viking-Penguin team (your American publisher, formerly mine). The squads were coed, the games were loose, sloppy affairs, but even though I was pushing forty or already past it, I enjoyed reactivating my old baseball muscles and (by force of habit and temperament) always played hard. One evening, as I stood at my position in the field (third base), the batter lofted a foul ball far, far to my right. When I saw the trajectory of the ball, I understood that I had no chance of catching it, but (again, by force of habit and temperament) I went after it anyway. Urging my no longer young legs to move as quickly as they could, I ran for what felt like ten minutes, realized that yes, perhaps I did have a chance, and at the last moment, just as the ball was about to hit the ground, lunged at full extension, snagged the ball in the utmost tip of my glove, and belly-flopped onto the grass. Remember, this was a game of no account, a friendly contest between joking book editors, secretaries, receptionists, and mailroom clerks, and yet I willed myself to go after that ball from a simple desire to push myself, to see if I had it in me to catch it. I was out of breath, of course, my knees and elbows were smarting, but I felt happy, terribly and stupidly happy.

  Which is to say, I am with you. The idea is not to win but to do well, to do the best you can. Your chess match with the stranger on the ship brought you face-to-face with some demonic part of yourself, and when you saw what you had become, you recoiled in disgust. I have never had a similar revelation. I don’t think, in fact, that I have ever been as hungry to win a match of any kind as you were with that German fellow in 1965. Does it have something to do with the difference between team sports and individual sports? All through my boyhood and adolescence I played on teams (primarily baseball and basketball) but rarely competed in one-on-one activities (running, boxing, tennis). Of all the hundreds of games I participated in, I would guess my teams won and lost in roughly equal measure. Winning was always more enjoyable than losing, of course, but I can’t remember ever feeling devastated by a loss—except for the f
ew times when I bungled a crucial play and felt responsible for letting down my teammates.

  In individual sports, however, I imagine the ego must be far more significantly engaged—and far more at risk. Hence your compulsive replaying of the chess match on that gruesome bus ride to Texas. You felt you were the better player, then proved you were, and cursed yourself for having accepted a draw. But what happens when the opposite is true, when you know you are not the better player?

  I am thinking of tennis, a sport I never spent much time with and am not very good at (awful backhand)—but which I nevertheless like to play. My father, who lived and breathed tennis, whose very existence was defined by his love of tennis (for many years, he would wake at six in the morning in order to play for a couple of hours before going to work), could still beat me most of the time when he was in his sixties and I was in my twenties. Even though I knew I probably couldn’t win, I always gave maximum effort when we played and measured my successes by how long I could keep volleys going, by how much I felt my game was improving, etc. Losses never stung. On the other hand, I have found that some victories are empty, even distasteful. About fifteen or eighteen years ago, I once played tennis with a writer friend, who turned out to be so bad at it, so tragically inept, that he didn’t manage to win a single point against me. I felt no pleasure in winning. I merely felt sorry for my poor, brave opponent, who had jumped into the deep end of the pool without knowing how to swim.

  The pleasure of competition, therefore, is most keen when the opponents are evenly matched.

  With best thoughts,

  Paul

  April 24, 2009

  Dear Paul,

  Thank you for sending me Invisible, which I read in two long sessions—two gulps, as it were.

  You told me last November that there would be incest in your next book, but I didn’t appreciate—given the added complication you introduce, namely the question Where does the act of incest take place, in the bed or in the mind or in the writing?—how close to the heart of the book incest would be.

  It’s an interesting subject, incest, one to which I have not given much conscious thought until now (how would one dare to deny, post Freud, that one has not given it unconscious thought?). It strikes me as curious that, even in the popular tongue, we use the same denomination for sex between brother and sister as for sex between father and daughter or mother and son (let’s put aside the various homosexual combinations for the moment). It’s hard to experience the same frisson of repugnance about the first as about the latter two. I don’t have a sister, but I find it all too easy to imagine how alluring sex games might be to a brother and a sister of more or less the same age—sex games proceeding to more than sex games, as in your book. Whereas sex with one’s own offspring must seem quite a step to take. I would have thought we would have developed different terms for two very different moral acts.

  There was a case last year in rural South Australia in which a father-daughter couple who had been living for decades as man and wife in fairly isolated circumstances were prosecuted. I don’t remember all the details, but the court ordered that they be separated, the father/husband being enjoined not to come anywhere near his daughter/wife under threat of a jail term. It seemed to me a cruel punishment, given that the complaint had come not from either of the partners but from neighbors.

  Having sex with one’s parents or children must be just about the last sexual taboo that survives in our society. (I confidently predict that Invisible will not be greeted with howls of outrage, confirming my sense that brother-sister sex is OK, at least to talk about and write about.) We have come a long way from societies divided into castes within which sexual relations had to be confined. I suppose that the arrival of easy contraception marked the demise of sexual taboos: the bugaboo that the woman might give birth to a monster lost its force.

  Not enough attention has been given, I think, to the role that the lore of animal husbandry played in the creation of sexual and racial taboos—lore dictating what species might be allowed to mate with what other species, or within a bloodline how many degrees of separation there had to be, evolved in the course of hundreds of generations of stock raising.

  Anyway, today pretty much everything seems to go. The righteous fury that used to be able to play over a whole range of tabooed sex acts (including adultery!) has been focused on a single act, namely grown men having sex with children, which is, I suppose, our way of extending the coverage of the father-child taboo.

  Interesting that when in benighted corners of the world (most notably benighted corners of the Muslim world) adulterous couples are punished, we criticize the law that punishes them for ignoring their human rights. What kind of world are we living in in which it is our right to break a taboo? What is the point of having a taboo (your Byronic Adam Walker might ask) if it is OK to violate it?

  All the best,

  John

  April 25, 2009

  Dear John,

  So happy that Invisible reached you and that you have consumed it so quickly.

  No, I haven’t given much conscious thought to the subject of incest either—at least not until I wrote the novel. Unlike you, I do have a sister, but she is nearly four years younger than I am, and the thought of going down that road with her never once crossed my mind. On the other hand, when I was eighteen or nineteen, I dreamed one night that I was making love to my mother. The dream baffled me then and continues to baffle me today, since it seems to demolish the classic Freudian equation: sublimation of desires through cryptic symbols and often oblique imagery, each thing standing in for something else. His theory has no place for what I experienced. As I recall, I was not disturbed by what was happening inside the dream, but after I woke up I was shocked and revolted.

  Shocked because at bottom I suppose I accept the taboo as inviolate. Not just incest between parents and children but between brother and sister as well. Whether what happens in my book with Walker and Gwyn really happens is open to question, but I had to write those passages from a position of absolute belief, and I confess that it was difficult for me—as if I had cut through the barbed-wire fence that stands between sanity and the darkness of transgression. And yet I fully agree with you that the book will not be met with howls of outrage (at least not on that count!). In fact, I think I already have proof of that. Earlier this week, Siri and I did a joint reading at Brown University in Providence at the invitation of Robert Coover (an old friend whom we hadn’t seen in a while). I read some pages from the second part (which included the “grand experiment” but not the full-bore incest of 1967), and although Siri reported that some students tittered nervously behind her, after the reading was over not a single person mentioned those paragraphs. “Nice reading,” they said, or “Very interesting, can’t wait to read the book,” but nothing about the content of what they had heard.

  Bouncing off your remarks about animal husbandry, I was reminded of a book I translated many years ago by the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres—Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians—an excellent, beautifully written study of a small, primitive tribe living in the jungles of South America. There is one homosexual in the group, Krembegi, and this is the astonishing account of what person(s) he can sleep with—and why:

  The ultimate bases of Atchei (Guayaki) social life are the alliances between family groups, relations that take form and are fulfilled in marriage exchanges, in the continual exchange of women. A woman exists in order to circulate, to become the wife of a man who is not her father, her brother, or her son. It is in this manner that one makes Picha, allies. But can a man, even one who exists as a woman, “circulate?” How could the gift of Krembegi, for example, be paid back? This was not even imaginable, since he was not a woman, but a homosexual. The chief law of all societies is the prohibition against incest. Because he was kyrypy-meno—(literally, an anus-lovemaker)—Krembegi was outside this social order. In his case, the logic of
the social system—or, what amounts to the same thing, the logic of its reversal—was worked out to its very end: Krembegi’s partners were his own brothers. ‘Picha kybai (meaning kyrypy-meno) menoia.’ “A kyrypy-meno man does not make love with his allies.” This injunction is the exact opposite of the rules governing the relations between men and women. Homosexuality can only be “incestuous”; the brother sodomizes his brother, and in this metaphor of incest the certainty that there can never be any real incest (between a man and a woman) without destroying the social body is confirmed and reinforced.

  Extraordinary, no? Encouraging incest in order to discourage it. The head spins . . .

  On another note, I want to congratulate you on your piece for the New York Review on Beckett’s letters. Thorough, compassionate, and just. Siri was especially pleased by the space you devoted to Bion. In the wake of your article and in anticipation of the talk I have agreed to deliver in Ireland this coming September, I dutifully plowed through the book, and now that I have come to the end, I want to revise my earlier comments to you. It is not boring. Far from it, and what moved me most was to watch his slow and painful evolution from an arrogant, know-it-all prick into a grounded human being. A note to one of the last letters (the book is not in front of me, so my wording might be off) quotes a letter from Maria Jolas to her husband in which she says something like: Beckett is better now—implying, I think, that they never cared for him personally and were now beginning to change their opinion.

  And yes, the notes represent an extraordinary undertaking. But do we really have to be told that Harpo Marx’s real name was Arthur?

  Best thoughts,

  Paul

  May 11, 2009

  Dear Paul,

  One further remark on sport: most of the major sports—those that draw masses of spectators and arouse mass passions—seem to have been selected and codified in a spurt around the end of the nineteenth century, in England. What strikes me is how difficult it is to invent and launch a thoroughly new sport (not just a variant of an old one), or perhaps I should say launch a new game (sports being selected out of the repertoire of games). Human beings are ingenious creatures, yet it is as though only a few of the many possible games (physical games, not games in the head) turn out to be viable.