Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011)

by Paul Auster

  The first time I attended one of these Christmas dinners, I didn’t know what to think. It struck me as absurd that six intelligent people would engage in such childish rituals, but at the same time the happiness and solidarity among the six participants was impressive. No family in my experience had ever seemed more harmonious, more closely knit.

  As the years passed, the clan grew. Each sister married and had children, and by the time the family had attained its peak population (before the death of Siri’s father), there were nineteen people sitting around the table for Christmas dinner. The new generation has embraced the tradition with the same enthusiasm as the elders, and not one child has ever complained about having to eat the same food every year. The repetition of the menu seems to give everyone comfort, and with another Christmas looming up next week, I confess that I, the old skeptic of yore, am looking forward to it.

  •

  Thank you for the kind words you e-mailed to Siri about the Woodian attack on my work, my life, and whatever it is I seem to represent for him. I haven’t read it. I have stopped reading all reviews of my books, whether good or bad, but I heard enough from others about what he wrote to feel as if I had been mugged by a stranger. If you are punched, your impulse is to punch back. In this situation, that isn’t allowed—which is exceedingly frustrating—but the sting has lessened with the passing of time. Otherwise, according to my editor, Frances Coady, whom you met in Australia in ’08 (Peter Carey’s wife), response has been uniformly positive and they are about to reprint the book for the fourth time in six weeks. So I mustn’t complain, least of all about a man whose name suggests that one day he will be eaten by termites.

  With a hearty Ho Ho Ho,

  Paul

  January 7, 2010

  Dear Paul,

  The picture you evoke of meals in the Hustvedt household is most interesting.

  In the paradigmatic version of the family table there seem to be three stages. In the first you graduate from infanthood to a place at the table, where you spend some years cautiously observing how people older than yourself conduct themselves. In the second you begin to rebel against the order of the table, against “table manners,” which now seem to you to embody everything that is false and hypocritical about society and the family in particular. Your rebellion may proceed to the point where you take your plate of food to your bedroom and eat it there, or else sneak food from the refrigerator. Then in the third stage—the stage you describe—you rediscover the table as a site of integration, and even begin to assert the values of the table against rebellious younger participants.

  What interest me are the customs that have developed around the table. Thus, despite the fact that the table is precisely a place to which one brings one’s animal appetites in order to satisfy them, manners prescribe that appetite should be reined in and—at least formally—yield place to the appetites of others (“Please, after you!”). Furthermore, it is not “good manners” to sate one’s appetite in silence: the dinner table becomes a sort of conclave where family matters of the more superficial kind are aired. In these family conversations, the first rule is that the passions should not be let loose, however much they may rage under the surface. (This is of course what children approaching the age of rebellion find most insufferable about family meals: the playacting.)

  There is perhaps a fourth stage to the paradigm. The children have flown the nest, father and mother are left facing each other across the table. Will they speak (obeying, however, the rule that proscribes passionate speech) or will they lapse into a silence that will extend itself, and harden, year after year?

  I should mention that I too have been the object of the attentions of the critic you name. It’s a peculiar position one finds oneself in. Quite aside from the question of animus on the critic’s part, there may be errors of fact in the review, or elementary misreadings. Should one react? Should one write a letter to the editor, a rejoinder to the unfair review? It is not as if editors would not welcome such a response—there is nothing their readers relish more than a good literary spat in the correspondence columns.

  The sage writer will be cautious here. He will know that to betray irritation, to say nothing of outrage or (God forbid!) hurt feelings, will be fatal: it will turn him into a figure of fun. Knowing this, the critic is further emboldened. He becomes like the child lobbing pebbles at the gorilla in the zoo, knowing he is protected by the bars.

  All good wishes,

  John

  January 12, 2010

  Dear John,

  At Christmas dinner the other week, I asked the youngest members of the family (ages seven, ten, and fifteen) if they found it unpleasant to be forced to eat the same food every year—with no variations whatsoever—and they all said that they loved it, that the sameness was what made it so enjoyable, and that they looked forward to that dinner with great eagerness every year.

  The consolations of ritual. A ritual in which religion plays no part. The consolations of family ritual.

  Siri, who cooked the meal at our house, neglected to prepare one of the traditional offerings: boiled red cabbage—which, I would venture to say, no one in the Hustvedt clan eats except at Christmas. When the absence of the dish was finally noted, a general lamentation was heard around the table. Siri apologized for her forgetfulness and promised to be more attentive next year.

  It would seem that every detail counts.

  •

  Critics. You are right: it would be fatal for a novelist to respond publicly to a malicious attack. In recent years, however, I’ve heard of two such incidents—neither one consisting of an exchange of letters. The eighty-year-old Norman Mailer punching a critic in the stomach for giving him a bad review. And Richard Ford spitting in the face of a younger novelist who had written a vile, mean-spirited article about his latest book. My sympathies were with the puncher and the spitter—probably because I myself am too well mannered to punch or spit, much as I have sometimes wanted to.

  Twenty years ago, I had my chance, but I couldn’t go through with it. A book critic from the Los Angeles Times (who had previously worked as a theater critic for the New York Times) wrote an extremely hostile review of Moon Palace. Not just a negative review, but an out-and-out assault. Roughly a year after that, the editor of the New York Times op-ed page commissioned me to write a Christmas story—my one and only commission, my one and only short story, which evolved into the film Smoke a few years later. It was the first work of fiction ever published in the Times (not counting the erroneous news stories they have printed, of course), and the editor was proud of himself for having thought of the idea, pleased with the results and the favorable comments from readers, and so he invited me out to lunch as a way of thanking me for my efforts. We went to a restaurant near the Times building, a place heavily frequented by Times employees, and when the lunch was over and we were about to leave, he spotted the reviewer from the L.A. Times, his former colleague in New York. “Look, there’s X,” he said. “Let’s go over and say hello.” I didn’t have time to tell him that X had written a nasty review of my novel and that I had no desire to meet him. When the op-ed page editor announced my name to X, the man’s face went white, and I saw fear in his eyes. He looked like someone who was expecting to be punched, and I confess that for a brief instant I felt tempted to oblige him. But only for an instant. It seemed far better to pretend that I had no idea who he was, had never heard of his name, had never read the review, and therefore I politely shook his hand and told him how happy I was to meet him. He looked both shocked and relieved—there would be no punch, after all—and for those few moments I felt a strange sense of power (never felt before, never felt since), knowing that I was in complete control of this man’s fate, that he was utterly in my hands. I had behaved beautifully, I thought, and I left the restaurant basking in my moral triumph.

  Now, I’m not so sure I did the right thing. Years passed, many y
ears, and eventually X returned to the New York Times as an occasional reviewer of books. As I mentioned in my last letter, I have stopped reading reviews of my work, but last year (fall 2008) I opened my morning copy of the Times to read over breakfast, and there, to my surprise, was a review of Man in the Dark by X. No one had told me the review would be running that day, and with the piece directly before my eyes, my resolve weakened, and I read the article in spite of myself. Another blistering assault from the man I probably should have punched twenty years ago. One sentence has stuck with me and will never be expunged from my mind: “Paul Auster does not believe in traditional fictional values.” What on earth does that mean? It sounds like something a right-wing politician might say during an election campaign.

  •

  Somewhere, somehow, I happened to learn that our birthdays fall during the same week. Mine is February third, and yours, I believe, is the ninth. If I am correct, then a significant milestone is looming in your immediate future, and I send you warmest good wishes from across the seas.

  I suspect that you are not someone who cares much about these things, but I wonder if Dorothy is pushing you into some kind of celebration, or if you will allow the day to go by without any fuss. This is not a personal question. I’m interested in why some of us actively embrace celebrations and rituals (i.e., Siri and Christmas), and others of us do not.

  We have been back from Spain and France for a few days now and have more or less readjusted to New York time. Very cold there, very cold here, and, it seems, very cold in parts of Australia as well. Already, I am longing for spring.

  Best thoughts,

  Paul

  February 19, 2010

  Dear Paul,

  I know you are not an habitué of literary salons, but you do live in a cultural metropolis and are therefore fated to cross paths now and then with the folk who review your books. I, on the other hand, run little risk of meeting the sort of person who makes a living by saying clever things at other people’s expense, and consequently, unlike you, I have never needed to restrain myself from punching one of them on the nose.

  For someone as thin-skinned as myself, at least in my everyday dealings, I have always found it puzzling that I don’t take bad reviews to heart. Puzzling, but not puzzling enough for me to want to find out why this is so, in case I should suddenly lose that useful carapace.

  An incapacity to get upset by what other people say about me, and its obverse, an incapacity to sympathize thoroughly with people who do get upset, is, I suspect, the weakness at the heart of a book I published in 1996 under the title Giving Offense. Why be offended by insults to your religion (or your country or your race or your moral standards), I ask there—why not simply shrug them off and get on with your life?

  The answer that many (most?) people would give is: Because I can’t. Because my sense of myself is under attack. Because failing to take offense would leave me feeling humiliated.

  I am sure that in rare cases there is a kernel of irreducible truth in a response like this. But my instinct, or my predilection, now and when I wrote Giving Offense, has been to treat such a response as a cover for a reactive impulse to which the offended party would be reluctant to confess: belligerence of spirit, an appetite for a good scrap.

  One reason why I should be, or can afford to be, thick-skinned vis-à-vis reviewers is that I have never had to depend on my books for a livelihood. Until I retired from teaching not long ago, I had a perfectly adequate academic salary to depend on. I could have been panned by every critic on earth, my book sales could have plummeted to zero, and I would not have starved. The uglier side of Grub Street—the animosities, the fawning and backbiting, and so forth—comes from a sometimes desperate need to scrounge a living.

  Anyway, bravo to you for your forbearance, and boo to the critic in question for failing to be ennobled by your example.

  Yes, I am seventy now—thank you for your good wishes. I’ll look in the mirror, when I have a moment, to check whether I have entered upon the sixth or, horribile dictu, the seventh of the Shakespearean ages. I pray it is only the sixth, the age of the lean and slippered pantaloon with shrunken shanks and quavering voice, and not the last, the return to childishness, sans teeth etcetera.

  Yours ever,

  John

  February 23, 2010

  Dear John,

  For reasons I can’t quite grasp (possibly because you are so far away and our meetings are so infrequent), I often find myself wanting to give you things. The package of books last month, for example, and now the enclosed DVD of the Italian edition of Man on Wire. The film is about the same man, Philippe Petit, whose book I translated years ago and included in that package. I was interviewed for the DVD in a hotel lobby in Milan last year, and now I have been sent ten copies. With nine to spare, off one goes to you.

  I don’t know if you have already seen the film, which was released in 2008 and made something of a splash (Academy Award for best documentary), but if you haven’t seen it, it’s quite possible that you have no idea who Philippe Petit is. Most famously, he is the man who walked on a wire between the towers of the World Trade Center in 1974.

  If you look at the interview I did for the DVD, you will learn of my connection to Philippe—so no need to rehash that here. There is also the essay I wrote in 1982 (“On the High Wire,” in Collected Prose), which was supposed to serve as the introduction to the book I translated but—for highly strange and amusing reasons—never appeared in the volume.

  The essay mentions the name of Cyrus Vance, who served as secretary of state under Jimmy Carter and who was present at one of Philippe’s performances that I attended. I included Vance as a rhetorical point—to prove that high-wire walking is an entirely democratic art, able to excite the interest of all people, from young children to former secretaries of state. When I showed my piece to Philippe, however, he said—first—Who is Cyrus Vance?—and when I told him, he said—second—that he didn’t want the name of a politician in his book. I was dumbfounded. Don’t you understand? I said. I included him to make a point about what you do. No, no, Philippe replied, you have to cut out his name, I won’t stand for it. Exasperated and incensed, I told him that he was an idiot, refused to delete the name, and withdrew my introduction.

  A small but maddening example of Philippe’s arrogance, self-importance, and single-minded, all-consuming vanity. Then again, without that personality, it is unimaginable that he ever would have tried to do what he did. Fortunately, the quarrel didn’t last. We remained friends, and some years later, when I found him a French publisher for the same book, he was all too happy to have my introduction included.

  All that is secondary, not the reason for this letter today. I am far more interested in what Philippe does—particularly the three walks documented in the film: Nôtre Dame in Paris, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the World Trade Center. I don’t know how you will respond to these feats (or have responded to them), but for me they are among the most extraordinarily beautiful and thrilling accomplishments I have ever witnessed, acts of such stupefying grandeur that I tremble whenever I think about them.

  In one of your earlier letters, you talked about watching Federer play tennis: “I have just seen something that is at the same time human and more than human; I have just seen something like the human ideal made visible.” Then, a couple of paragraphs down, referring to masterworks of art: “Yet it was done by a man . . . like me; what an honor to belong to the species that he exemplifies!”

  Philippe’s exploits have inspired a similar kind of awe in me—and a similar pride in belonging to the human race.

  The question I want to ask is why.

  What he does is not, strictly speaking, art, is it? Nor does it fall within the domain of sports. From one point of view, I suppose it could be classified as an act of madness. After all, why risk your life for something that is at bottom utterly useless—a mean
ingless gesture? And yet, as I explain in the DVD interview, when I saw the footage of the Nôtre Dame walk, my eyes filled with tears when Philippe started juggling the wooden pins as he stood on the wire. It was so implausible, so terribly crazy, so beyond anything we can normally expect from a human being, that something inside me cracked.

  For years, I have walked around with an idea for a documentary film (something I know I will never do) called The Art of the Useless. It would begin with a master cabinetmaker at work on the construction of an elaborate cupboard (utilitarian craft) interspersed with images of young girls in a ballet class straining to perfect their art (the quest for beauty, which is essentially useless, since it serves no practical purpose) and then move on to interviews and performances by various practitioners of neglected and under-appreciated “artistic” pursuits: Philippe and the high wire; Ricky Jay, the sleight-of-hand artist and “up-close” magician; and Art Spiegelman, the cartoonist who turned the comic book into serious literature—in other words, arts generally associated with children and carnivals, and yet in the case of these three men, pursued with such rigor, intelligence, and originality that these popular forms are lifted to great heights of sophistication. I have known each of them for many years, and they have many traits in common: monomania, ferocious discipline, a sense of historical perspective (each one is an obsessive collector of material concerning his art), and the ability to write well. (I would signal Ricky’s history of magic, Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women, as an impressive example.)