by Paul Auster
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Your insight into the Enlightenment’s mania for quantification and the development of organized sports is ingenious. I don’t know how familiar you are with baseball, but given the time you have spent in America, you must have at least a passing acquaintance with it. As you are probably aware, it is a sport dominated by numbers. Every play, every action within a play is immediately transformed into a statistic, and since those statistics are kept on file, every action that takes place in a game today is read in the context of the entire history of the sport. Few Americans can remember who the president was in 1927, but anyone who follows baseball will be able to tell you that 1927 was the year Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs. To give you a taste of this almost Talmudic obsession with numbers, I enclose a photocopy of a page from The Baseball Encyclopedia which, among other things, includes the career record of every player who has participated in even a single game since the sport was invented. Note that Paddy Mayes’s entire career consisted of just five games, all in 1911, whereas Willie Mays, the legendary Willie Mays (he of the absent pencil story), played from 1951 to 1973 and appeared in 2,992 games. Quantification indeed. To the uninitiated, these charts will look like utter nonsense.
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You mention that the rules of football were codified in the mid–nineteenth century. While researching my little piece on soccer/football more than ten years ago, I found out that standard rules were introduced as early as 1801—even closer to the mid–eighteenth century and the birth of the “quantificatory spirit,” thus making it possible for Napoleon to have been defeated “on the playing fields of Eton.” But you are right about the present-day rules of football, which were drawn up at Cambridge University in 1863.
As for bat-and-ball games, I stumbled across this theory about the origins of cricket: knocking down three-legged milkmaid stools with a thrown object (stone? ball?) and then, as time went on, to make the game more challenging, the introduction of a stick to prevent the object from hitting the stool. The three legs of the stool eventually became the wicket. Plausible? Perhaps.
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You refer to the interview I did with Kevin Rabalais for The Australian. To tell the truth, I have absolutely no memory of what I said to him. Nor can I remember anything I have ever said to any interviewer over the years. Hundreds of conversations of which not a single syllable remains. And yet, with so-called normal conversations, that is, with Siri, with you, with any of my friends or associates or relatives, I am usually able to recall most of what was said. Is an interview somehow a non-event, an abnormal event, a conversation that is not a conversation? Even during the course of an interview, I tend to forget what I have just said. The words leave my mouth and then vanish forever. Is it the pressure to answer the question now before me that makes me forget the previous one? Does the fear of saying something stupid inhibit my capacity to remember? Is it the tedium of talking about myself?
When you were here last summer, you mentioned that you have stopped giving interviews. But did something similar ever happen to you in the past—or am I the only one afflicted by this peculiar form of amnesia?
In any case, if I told Kevin Rabalais the story about the pencil, I must have been talking about my encounter with Willie Mays when I was eight years old. Did I go on to recount the postscript—something that happened less than three years ago? If not, let me know, and I will share it with you in my next letter, since it is a strange and moving story, one worth telling.
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On the subject of memory, something happened to us last night that has left us both rather stunned. About twenty-five years ago, Siri and I saw a film on the public television channel, an obscure 1933 Depression comedy-drama starring Claudette Colbert, Three-Cornered Moon. We both thought it was terrifically well done, and for the past quarter century we have referred to it as a lost treasure, one of the best movies of the period. Last week, I discovered that the film has been released on DVD and ordered a copy—which arrived yesterday. We eagerly put it on after dinner, and then, much to our disappointment, our separate and mutual disappointment, discovered that it is not a very good film at all, mediocre at best. How could we have been so mistaken in our judgment? Even more important, we had both misremembered essential aspects of the plot—but in different ways. Siri thought Claudette Colbert had three sisters, when in fact she has three brothers. I thought Claudette Colbert had saved the family from ruin by going out and getting herself a job, when in fact she loses her job after just two weeks.
What to make of this?
It strikes me that memory might be something we could investigate. Or, if that is too vast a subject, the deceptions of memory.
With warmest thoughts,
Paul
November 22, 2009
Dear John,
This, from the sports section of today’s Sunday Times, which might amuse you (on the heels of your last letter), especially the statement: “the future of the game is in the numbers.” The statistics they are talking about here go far beneath—or beyond—the charts I sent you the other day. We are coming closer and closer to a realm of pure theoretical physics.
On the other hand, even if everything they do can be translated into numbers, the players themselves are not robots. Witness the lovely 1946 photo of Ted Williams and Stan Musial—two of the all-time greats.
Thinking of you . . .
All best,
Paul
December 15, 2009
Dear Paul,
You ask whether I have had the experience of giving an interview and then being unable to remember what I had said. Not exactly. But I have often felt oppressive boredom as I listen to myself mouthing off to interviewers. To my way of thinking, real talk only occurs when there is some kind of current running between the interlocutors. And such a current rarely runs during interviews.
I’ll be glad to discuss memory with you at some time in the future, if we can remember to get back to it. At present the aspect of memory that concerns me most is absentmindedness. I watch myself with a hawk’s eye for the first sign, as the end of my seventieth decade on earth approaches, that my mind is going. No sign yet—at least, no sign that I will admit to be a sign.
Thanks for the pages of baseball statistics. They are all too reminiscent of the pages of the Cricketers’ Almanack, otherwise known as Wisden’s, which collects the world’s cricket statistics year by year.
I have been thinking about food—food and food taboos. I have been aware for a long time that Franz Kafka was a vegetarian. More recently I learned that this caused much dissension in the parental home—dissension that Kafka himself was perhaps not averse to fomenting. Now I have come across Ernst Pawel’s book on Kafka.* Pawel takes Kafka’s attitude to food seriously, as I suppose anyone must who has read “The Hunger Artist.” Kafka, says Pawel, drew unconsciously upon Jewish dietary law to create for himself a set of rituals of an ascetic, self-punishing, and finally destructive nature. One consequence of adhering to these rituals was that he gradually alienated himself from his family, to the point where he began to take his meals by himself.
It seems to me that there are two discourses of food going on around us, and they have surprisingly little contact with each other. The one is the discourse of dining and cuisine, which has expanded massively to the point where there are entire magazines devoted to it. The other is a discourse of eating pathology, covering psychophysical afflictions like anorexia and bulimia, and more generally the spread of obesity.
The question that pesters me is the following. Is it really so that there is a minority of the population (though perhaps in some countries a disturbingly large minority) who, to use the current euphemism, “have issues,” as Kafka did, with food, as opposed to a majority in whose lives food has no particularly deep meaning, to whom it is bodily nourishment and maybe a source of transitory pleasure, but nothing more? Might dividing people up into these two
crude classes not be akin to dividing people up into those who “have issues” with their parents and those who have none? Don’t we all “have issues” with our parents, only of different kinds and in different degrees? (I pose these questions with the spirit of Freud hovering at my elbow.) How many of us would get a clean bill of health from a Pawel-like investigator?
We like to think that there was a time—not too long ago—when food was so scarce that only a privileged few could afford to pick and choose, and therefore to “have issues.” To the hoi polloi, who presumably included your ancestors and mine, getting enough to eat was the only thing that mattered; if by good fortune you managed to put on a little weight, that was a cause of self-congratulation on your part and of envy on the part of your neighbors.
In this version of social history, it can only be recently—let us say in the past fifty or a hundred years—that troubled relations with the food we eat or don’t eat can have developed on a large scale.
But I wonder whether this version is true. I wonder whether, even in conditions of scarcity, it is not possible to have troubled relations with food. What, after all, is the phenomenon of the fast, enjoined by all religions, all about? (I mean, what is it about in terms other than the terms provided by the religions themselves, like purification of the spirit, mortification of the flesh, etc?) It is not as though the question of whether even the poor and illiterate have troubled relations with food is unanswerable: there are billions of people all around the world living in conditions of scarcity—we have merely to ask them. But is anyone exploring the deeper meanings of food in their lives? Not that I am aware of.
There is a passing remark of Freud’s that I find relevant here. What distinguishes the erotic life of the ancients from erotic life today, Freud said, is that in ancient times the focus of attention was on the erotic impulse, whereas today it is on the erotic object. Apply this to food writing. What would it mean to shift one’s attention from the comparative attractions of X and Y on the menu to the question of what it is in me that leads me to choose X over Y? Is it really true that gustatorial pleasure is unanalyzable, that it has no history, that it has no psychic dimension (no psychic dimension in the life of the individual subject)? Do we really accept that there should be a ban on such analysis (a spoilsport ban)?
One of the explanations for food taboos put forward by anthropologists is that the taboo defines an in-group as against an out-group, and is thus a kind of glue holding the in-group together. In this explanation, the content of the taboo is of secondary importance (marine animals that lack scales; cow’s milk). But this feels to me excessively abstract. A Westerner who sees an unfamiliar-looking carcass hanging in a Vietnamese roadside stall, and asks what it is, and is told it is a dog, feels a moment of authentic revulsion, I would guess, even nausea. To be told that his revulsion is culturally conditioned doesn’t mitigate it. The Vietnamese around him, smiling and joking about his reaction, don’t seem any the less—what is the word?—odious.
Go back to Franz Kafka at the table of Hermann Kafka. We have an idea, thanks to Pawel, of how Franz must have seemed to a sensible bourgeois like Hermann; but how did Hermann seem to Franz?
All the best,
John
December 18, 2009
Dear John,
I laughed out loud when I read about your willingness to discuss memory with me “some time in the future, if we can remember to get back to it.” In the next sentence of your letter, you refer to absentmindedness, and then, in the next sentence after that, you say that you are approaching the end of your seventieth decade on earth—which would mean that you are seven hundred years old! A slip, of course, the kind of thing we all do from time to time, even when we are young, even when we are not generally prone to absentmindedness, but somehow hilarious when the slip occurs during a discussion of absentmindedness.
For a man of your advanced years, I must say that you were looking remarkably fit the last time I saw you.
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I’m sure you remember the Russian film we all liked so much at the festival last year, Wild Field. It still has no distributor in the U.S., and because that strikes me as an injustice, I recently called an acquaintance of mine, a curator in the film department at the Museum of Modern Art (one of the people responsible for selecting the lineup for the New Directors/New Films Festival held there every spring), and invited him to our house to watch the DVD. He responded enthusiastically and said he would do everything in his power to get the film shown. Excellent news. Then, the very next day, he called to tell me that one of his colleagues in the film department is currently in Georgia (the country, not the state) to organize a festival of Georgian cinema for the museum and that she, too, had just seen Wild Field and was similarly impressed and enthusiastic. More good news, yes, but then the other shoe dropped. It seems that the director—the same forty-nine-year-old man we met in Estoril who was so articulate and charming during the Q. and A. that followed the screening of his film—died less than a month ago. My friend couldn’t give me any details. So sad. The last thing in the world I was expecting to hear. I thought you and Dorothy should know. . . .
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In your last letter, you mentioned the interview I did with The Australian and the story about the pencil I couldn’t remember having told the journalist. I promised to give you the sequel if I hadn’t already done so. Since you didn’t mention it in your new letter, I assume I haven’t.
The first part is printed on pages 271–272 of my Collected Prose—section 5 of a sequence of true stories, Why Write? Once you have absorbed that moment of childhood misery, now this:
In January 2007, Siri and I escaped the cold of New York to attend a literary festival in Key West, Florida. One of the writers there was Amy Tan, whom I had met a couple of times back in the nineties through a mutual friend, film director Wayne Wang. Years earlier, Wayne had told me an interesting story about Amy, which I included in another sequence of true stories, Accident Report (page 273 of Collected Prose). Seeing Amy again, I realized that I had forgotten to send her a copy of the book in which the story had been published—so I bought one for her in Key West. She read the story about herself on the plane back home to San Francisco—as well as all the other stories in the book, including the one about Willie Mays. It turned out that the then seventy-six-year-old retired baseball player lived in a town near San Francisco and that two of Amy’s friends happened to be his next-door neighbors. Amy called them immediately after she walked into her house, told them to go out and buy a copy of my book, and then knock on Willie Mays’s door and read him the story I had written about our encounter in 1955. According to Amy’s friends, Willie’s eyes teared up as he listened to the story, and then for a minute or two afterward he just sat there shaking his head, repeating over and over again, “Fifty-two years, fifty-two years . . .”
Amy called Siri to tell her about this, but I was kept in the dark. The following week, which happened to be the week of my sixtieth birthday, kind Amy Tan came to New York, invited us to dinner, and presented me with a baseball autographed by Willie Mays. The old man finally got what the little boy had so desperately wanted. He no longer wanted it, of course, but that was beside the point. If nothing else, he was moved by the fact that Willie was moved.
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I hesitate to impose more of my old pieces on you, but if you do in fact have Collected Prose at hand, you might want to take a look at Pages for Kafka (page 303), The Art of Hunger (317), and New York Babel (325). These are ancient texts, all written when I was in my twenties, but they are directly linked to some of the questions you raise concerning Kafka and food.
I remember buying the Pawel book when it was first published (1984!—it doesn’t seem possible that so much time has passed) and thinking that it was by far the best work on Kafka I had read. I doubt that any subsequent biography has surpassed it. The passage you refer to is both chilling and insightful, a di
ssection of the same compulsion for self-sabotage I tried to evoke in my short, highly abstract young man’s piece. Kafka is an extreme example of food torment, but I agree with you that nearly all of us have “issues” with food, not necessarily the eating pathologies you refer to, but, let us say, “complicated relations” with what we put in our mouths. For the same reason you cite when referring to Freud: there is surely a psychological component that would explain why we are attracted to X on the menu and not Y. Does it all go back to buried memories from childhood? Probably.
I found all your points well taken, am not inclined to dispute any of them, but we might want to consider the social function of food, the rituals of feast days (the same dishes served every year at Christmas, Thanksgiving, Passover), the very concept of a meal itself. Why not simply eat when we are hungry, when our stomach tells us to eat? Who commanded that the day be divided into breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Reading about Kafka’s habit of eating alone, it struck me that most of us do not like to eat alone, that nearly everyone eats with others (couples, friends, families, children in school cafeterias) and that meals are generally an occasion for talk. Food goes into your mouth, words come out of it.
For the first half of my life, I had little truck with ceremonies of any kind. Birthday celebrations, national and religious holidays, anniversary parties—they all left me cold, and I shunned them as best I could. Then, twenty-nine years ago, I tiptoed my way into the Hustvedt clan and discovered the intricate protocols of Norwegian Christmas. Siri and her three sisters are all serious, free-thinking, secular people, and yet, under the guidance of their equally secular parents, the six of them demonstrated an absolute, unswerving faith in the importance of upholding this tradition. There is the tree, of course, and the giving of presents, but the heart of the tradition is the Christmas dinner—which never changes. Every item on the menu is exactly the same from year to year, ending with a dessert of rice pudding topped with raspberry sauce, one helping of which always contains a “magic” almond (put in there by Siri’s mother): the person with the almond in his or her bowl is given a prize, which turns out to be more food: a large tablet of chocolate.
