Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011)

by Paul Auster

  The point being, I suppose, that by skirting past the traditional arts (literature, theater, music, painting), one could arrive at a better understanding of the aesthetic impulse in human beings, that the best argument for the importance of art lies precisely in its uselessness, that we are most deeply and powerfully human when we do things for the pure pleasure of doing them—even if it requires untold years of hard work and training (the young ballerinas) and even if the pleasure can entail frightening risk (the high wire). . . .

  All that said, I hope you enjoy the film if you haven’t already seen it.

  Concerning your letter: I don’t see any flaw at the heart of Giving Offense, which I consider to be an excellent book, and I doubt that the reason you are thick-skinned vis-à-vis your reviewers has anything to do with the fact that you earned your living as a teacher. You believe in your work, that’s all there is to it. You believe in it and know that it’s good.

  Some months ago, we were wondering why no new sports had been invented in recent decades. Having taken a couple of peeks at the Winter Olympics, I think we might have overstated our case. Ski cross! Snowboarding! Women tumbling head over heels in midair with skis attached to their feet!

  My heart was in my throat.

  All best,

  Paul

  P.S.: On the heels of the German publication of The Shaking Woman last month, Siri has now been invited to give the annual lecture at the Freud Foundation in Vienna. Imagine. How not to be proud of her?

  March 29, 2010

  Dear Paul,

  Thanks very much for the Philippe Petit DVD, with the welcome bonus of a filmed interview with you. I enjoyed the interview. There is the pleasure of having you visit our living room, of hearing the enviably considered, just, and well-formed sentences you speak. Also the admirable generosity of your view of Petit himself, who strikes me, I am afraid to say, as a rather conceited fellow. But then, perhaps one needs to be conceited, or at least to have no doubts about oneself, if one is to prosper in funambulism or any other métier that requires absorption of the mental self in the physical self, an absorption that is indistinguishable—as you point out in the interview—from concentrated thought.

  The film itself, I thought, was ill conceived. The moments that I bear away from it are still shots of Petit on the wire, taken from so far away that the wire vanishes and he seems to be standing in space. Too much of the rest of the movie consists of Petit promoting himself, telling us how “impossible” the feats are that he is about to perform, though we already know they were not impossible, since he performed them. All the tiresome recounting of how he and his friends evaded patrolling guards could also have been cut.

  I can conceive of a better story about a funambulist than the one Petit embodies, a story that might have been sketched by Kafka in his early years and then discarded. A young man ventures out on a high wire over an abyss. He does not fall, he comes back safely, but he never ventures on the wire again, never even talks about it, though his friends remember his feat and reminisce about it among themselves. The young man resumes his life, eventually marries, has children, and in every outward respect prospers. Yet he is never his old self again: his friends know it, and so does he. It is as if he had met someone or something out in space, in the brief time he was there: a look passed, a recognition, and everything was changed.

  What I want, I suppose, is not the actual Philippe Petit but a high-wire artist who is open to the metaphysical. But perhaps being open to the metaphysical is incompatible with having unquestioned faith that you are not going to fall.

  Which brings me to a comment you made in your last letter to the effect that, as a writer, I seem to have solid faith in what I am doing. (You were responding to my remark that, hard though it might be to credit, I don’t get upset when reviewers give me a going-over.)

  I think that for once you are wrong about me. I don’t have a great deal of faith in what I am doing. To be more precise, I have enough faith to get me through the writing itself—enough faith or perhaps enough hope, blind or blinkered hope, that if I give the project at hand enough time and attention it will “work,” will not be a palpable failure. But that is where my faith or hope runs out. I don’t have much faith that my work will endure. “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme”: that’s what true faith sounds like. I can’t echo it.

  On quite another subject, I have been looking back at some remarks I made to you a while ago about the so-called global financial crisis, to the effect that it did not look to me like a real crisis, but on the contrary like a textbook example of people sitting in Plato’s cave, staring at shadows (on their computer monitors), which they mistook for reality. I suggested that if we simply reset the numbers, the “crisis” would be over.

  This prescription of mine, it might be objected, is much like saying that if we scooped out the contents of everyone’s memories and replaced them with a new set of memories we would in effect be creating a new reality. What both prescriptions ignore, the objection might continue, is that memories are not just biochemical configurations in the brain (or configurations of bits in a computer) but the traces of things that really happened in a real past. Even the figures in the banks of monitors in the stock exchange have behind them a history from which they cannot be cut off—what we might call the historical memory of economics. In other words, the radical-idealist solution to the problem of how to make a better future (replace the past with a better past) is no more naive than the radical-idealist solution to the financial crisis: replace the bad figures with good ones.

  To me (to skip several steps in the argument) the question boils down to how seriously we should take Jorge Luis Borges. Borges posits the irruption into our history (that is, into the body of historical memory that we broadly share) of an encyclopedia that, when completed, will have the potential to supplant the old past with a new past and thus a new present—that will, potentially, remake us. Is Borges’s fable to be enjoyed as a philosophical jeu d’esprit but not taken seriously, or is he floating an idea with real philosophical depth? I would like to think the latter.

  Applied to the financial crisis, the Borgesian proposal seems to me at least feasible, in theory. Compared with the weight and density of human history, the numbers on the computer monitors don’t come trailing all that much historical freight behind them—not so much that we could not, if we truly wanted it, agree to dispense with them and start with a fresh set of numbers.

  It is the question of whether we truly want a new financial dispensation, whether we can agree on a new set of figures, that is the rub. The figures themselves offer no resistance: the resistance is in ourselves. So, looking around us today, we see just what we might expect: we, “the world,” would rather live through the misery of the reality we have created (the entirely artificial reality of the crisis) than put together a new, negotiated reality.

  All the best,

  John

  April 7, 2010

  Dear John,

  Just back from another brief journey . . . to find your new fax waiting for me.

  So glad you enjoyed the filmed interview (which was done in cramped circumstances in no time at all), and yes, even if the words we have used are different—my “arrogant” as opposed to your “conceited”—there is no question that Philippe is a handful. I suppose that goes without saying. And yet, his very lack of humility is, I think, what makes him so interesting to me.

  I understand your reservations about the film, but the images of that little man alone on the wire are unforgettable, and I was also much taken by the old footage from the early seventies of Philippe and his friends cavorting in the French countryside as he prepared for the big walk. A touching glimpse of the silliness and energy of youth—reminding me of outtakes from a Truffaut film that was never made. As for the interviews, the truth is that he is calmer and more charming in person.
I sensed that he was very wound up while talking to the camera, determined to provide the director with a “good performance.”

  Forgive me if you feel I’ve misjudged you. I imagine my comments were a reflection of my own unbounded faith in your work. Of course you live with doubts and insecurities and a belief that your books will not endure. So do I. So, I would think, does every writer who is not certifiably insane. It is an inner condition, which has nothing to do with the good or bad things reviewers might say about us—since they always seem to praise for the wrong reasons, just as they condemn for the wrong reasons, which disqualifies them from serious consideration as arbiters of literary merit. Every writer judges himself—most often harshly—which is probably why writers keep writing: in the vain hope they will do better next time. But just because you (J.C.) live in doubt about yourself doesn’t mean that I, as your reader of many years, need have any doubts about your work. As for one’s response to reviews, it might simply be a matter of temperament—the thick-skinned versus the thin-skinned. Perhaps you are thick-skinned—at least when it comes to the remarks of strangers. I would not describe myself as thin-skinned—but thin-skinned enough to be happy with my decision not to read reviews anymore.

  (News flash. I have just been on the phone with Paola Novarese of Einaudi and have two bits of information to pass on to you. First: it seems that both of us have been victims of a journalistic hoax. Over the past years, a certain Tommaso Debenedetti has been publishing fabricated interviews with writers in various newspapers—over twenty of them, apparently, perhaps even more—including one with you as far back as 2003 and one with me as recently as January of this year. A scandal in the works. I am not so much angry as confused. Why would someone go to so much trouble to fake encounters with writers—who, as we know, are the least important people in the world? Second: we will both be in Italy at the same time in June. Siri and I accepted to do a conversation together for a little Mondadori/Einaudi festival in Tuscany. One hour of discomfort for four days of vacation in the region afterward. According to Paola, you will be doing something in Genoa that same weekend [12–13]. It would be ludicrous not to make an effort to see each other during that time, even if it means spending an extra day or two in Italy before flying home. We would be more than willing to displace ourselves and strike out in your direction if a get-together is possible. Will Dorothy be with you? Let me know what you think. I’m sure that the people at Einaudi would be happy to help us with the arrangements.)

  Mulling over your comments about the economic crisis, Borges, and new paradigms, I was most struck by your final remark that “we . . . would rather live through the misery of the reality we have created . . . than put together a new, negotiated reality.” This applies not only to economics but to politics and nearly every social problem we are faced with. At random, let me set forth three examples from hundreds if not thousands of problems bedeviling the world.

  1. The Mideast conflict. Whether or not one subscribes to Zionism, whether or not one believes in the logic of a secular state founded by the members of a single religion, Israel is a fact, and the destruction of Israel would cause irreparable harm to nearly everyone on the planet. World War III, untold numbers of deaths, incalculable disaster. On the other hand, in spite of the historical connection of the Jewish people to the region, Israel’s Arab neighbors look upon the Jewish state as a cancer in their midst, and since 1948 they have been unrelenting in their determination to wipe it off the map. There was a time (before the assassination of Rabin, before the 9/11 attacks and the growth of militant Islam) when I felt some cautious optimism about the possibility of a two-state solution. Now that hope is gone, and when I consider that this conflict has endured for what amounts to my entire life, I believe the time is long past due to begin thinking about radical and hitherto unimagined solutions. I have come up with several quixotic ideas over the years, but I believe my latest plan is the best. Evacuate the entire Israeli population and give them the state of Wyoming. Wyoming is immense and sparsely populated, and in the interests of world peace, the American government could simply buy up the ranches and farms there and relocate the Wyoming population to other states in the region. Why not? The greatest threat to mankind would be eliminated, Dick Cheney would be homeless, and in no time at all the Israelis would have established a thriving country. A perfectly rational solution, it seems to me, and yet of course it will never happen. Why? Because, to use your words, “we would rather live through the misery we have created.”

  2. The essential flaw of the United States Constitution. America purports to be a democracy (majority rule) but is in fact a country run by the few. I am not talking here about corporations, vested interests, and the economic elite, I am referring to the federal system itself, to the fact that each one of the fifty states has two senators, meaning that underpopulated Wyoming (approximately half a million people) has the same voice in the country’s affairs as mega-populated California (more than thirty million people). Unfair and undemocratic, which means that we have a government that fails to express the will of its citizens. There are historical reasons for this flaw (the compromise of the 1780s that brought the original thirteen states together as a single country), but it was never a good idea, and now, more than two centuries later, it is threatening to tear us apart. How to change the system? Only through a congressional vote, which would ask the senators from the small states to vote themselves out of power, to eradicate themselves. And when has a politician ever voted himself out of power? And therefore we go on living in the misery we have created.

  3. The crisis in American education. Everyone acknowledges the problem, everyone knows that the majority of our students are failing, everyone understands that an educated public is the only hope for the future of democracy (even if we are not, strictly speaking, a democracy), and yet every reform only seems to make the situation worse. My solution: better teachers. How to get better teachers? Pay them the same salaries as lawyers, doctors, and investment bankers, and suddenly the brightest students would begin opting for a career in teaching. It could easily be paid for by cutting X number of useless weapons projects, by reducing the military budget, but it will never happen, at least not in a world that resembles the one we live in today. And thus we go on wallowing in our misery.

  I don’t know how hard the economic crisis has hit Australia, but the effects have been devastating here. Not quite the out-and-out Great Depression we were girding ourselves against eighteen months ago, but horrible just the same, horrible for so many who have borne the brunt of it. Lost jobs, lost houses, the disintegration of whole towns and communities. As with every economic collapse in the past, every burst bubble since the beginning of capitalism, I think it was caused by historical blindness, an ignorant belief that what goes up need never come down, no matter how many times the up-down dynamic has played itself out in the past. In this case, the erroneous assumption that housing prices would go on rising forever. Therefore, sell houses to people who can’t afford them, since in the end even they will come out on top. Then, even worse, bundle up those fragile, unsustainable mortgages into securities (a great word: securities), since everyone is bound to profit in a world that is all up and no down. Supposedly learned men subscribed to this nonsense, and now look at us. The scary part of it—at least here—is that no one in the world of finance seems chastened.

  I have been reading Kleist lately, his stories and letters in particular. I remember being deeply impressed when I first read him in my early twenties, but now I am overwhelmed. His sentences are remarkable—great hatchet-blows of thought, an implacable narrative speed, a pulverizing sense of inevitability. No wonder Kafka liked him so much . . .

  Tell me what your plans are for Italy in June. Siri and I would rejoice at seeing you again.

  Best thoughts,

  Paul

  April 17, 2010

  Dear Paul,

  Thanks for your letter of April 7. I have been in
contact with the folks at Einaudi, and I hope to see you and Siri in Pietrasanta in June.

  Since you wrote, there have been further developments in the Debenedetti affair, as I am sure you must be aware. You and I turn out to be only two among a multitude of the man’s victims. My Italian isn’t up to much, but glancing at his made-up interview with me I infer that he uses me as a mouthpiece for certain views of his own about Africa and South Africa, in much the same way as he uses Philip Roth as a mouthpiece for his views on Barack Obama.

  I haven’t succeeded in locating the interview with you.

  If this is his modus operandi, then his overall aim would seem to be to gather together a host of literary celebrities to spruik the Debenedetti vision of the world.

  We live in an era in which it is really only the law of libel that holds back would-be writers like Debenedetti from turning us—and here us might include anyone whose name is more or less widely known—into characters in their fictions, making us mouth sentiments and perform actions that might amuse, upset, offend, repel, or even horrify us. If projects such as this flourish, then ultimately the pseudoselves that have been created for us, with their blessedly uncomplicated opinions, will come to reign in the public consciousness, while our “real” selves and our “true” (and tiresomely tangled) opinions will be known only to a few friends. The triumph of the simulacra.

  You broach the subject of Israel. I find Israel hard to talk about, but if you will bear with me I will try to bring order to my tangled thoughts.