by Paul Auster
“And I agreed to that? I allowed myself to bargain with a six-year-old?”
“You were just humoring me. The possibility of losing the bet didn’t even occur to you. But lo and behold, when Mrs. Saperstein arrived at the Statue of Liberty with her two sons, the boys were dressed exactly as I had predicted. And just like that, I became the master of my own wardrobe. It was the first major victory of my life. I felt as if I’d struck a blow for democracy, as if I’d risen up in the name of oppressed peoples all over the world.”
“Now I know why you’re so partial to blue jeans,” Fanny said. “You discovered the principle of self-determination, and at that point you determined to be a bad dresser for the rest of your life.”
“Precisely,” Sachs said. “I won the right to be a slob, and I’ve been carrying the banner proudly ever since.”
“And then,” Mrs. Sachs continued, impatient to get on with the story, “we started to climb.”
“The spiral staircase,” her son added. “We found the steps and started to go up.”
“It wasn’t so bad at first,” Mrs. Sachs said. “Doris and I let the boys go on ahead, and we took the stairs nice and easy, holding onto the rail. We got as far as the crown, looked out at the harbor for a couple of minutes, and everything was more or less okay. I thought that was it, that we’d start back down then and go for an ice cream somewhere. But they still let you into the torch in those days, which meant climbing up another staircase—right through Miss Battle-Axe’s arm. The boys were crazy to go up there. They kept hollering and whining about how they wanted to see everything, and so Doris and I gave in to them. As it turned out, this staircase didn’t have a railing like the other one. It was the narrowest, twistingest little set of iron rungs you ever saw, a fire pole with bumps on it, and when you looked down through the arm, you felt like you were three hundred miles up in the air. It was pure nothingness all around, the great void of heaven. The boys scampered up into the torch by themselves, but by the time I was two-thirds of the way up, I realized I wasn’t going to make it. I’d always thought of myself as a pretty tough cookie. I wasn’t one of those hysterical women who screamed when she saw a mouse. I was a hefty, down-to-earth broad who’d been around the block a few times, but standing on those stairs that day, I got all weak inside, I had the cold sweats, I thought I was going to throw up. By then, Doris wasn’t in such good shape herself, and so we each sat down on one of the steps, hoping that might steady our nerves. It helped a little, but not much, and even with my backside planted on something solid, I still felt I was about to fall, that any second I’d find myself hurtling head-first to the bottom. It was the worst panic I ever felt in my life. I was completely rearranged. My heart was in my throat, my head was in my hands, my stomach was in my feet. I got so scared thinking about Benjamin that I started screaming for him to come down. It was hideous. My voice echoing through the Statue of Liberty like the howls of some tormented spirit. The boys finally left the torch, and then we all went down the stairs sitting, one step at a time. Doris and I tried to make a game out of it for the boys, pretending that this was the fun way to travel. But nothing was going to make me stand up on those stairs again. I’d have sooner jumped off than allow myself to do that. It must have taken us half an hour to get to the bottom again, and by then I was a wreck, a blob of flesh and bone. Benjy and I stayed with the Sapersteins on the Grand Concourse that night, and since then I’ve had a mortal fear of high places. I’d rather be dead than set foot in an airplane, and once I get above the third or fourth story of a building, I turn to jello inside. How do you like that? And it all started that day when Benjamin was a little boy, climbing into the torch of the Statue of Liberty.”
“It was my first lesson in political theory,” Sachs said, turning his eyes away from his mother to look at Fanny and me. “I learned that freedom can be dangerous. If you don’t watch out, it can kill you.”
I don’t want to make too much of this story, but at the same time I don’t think it should be entirely neglected. In itself, it was no more than a trivial episode, a bit of family folklore, and Mrs. Sachs told it with enough humor and self-mockery to sweep aside its rather terrifying implications. We all laughed when she was finished, and then the conversation moved on to something else. If not for Sachs’s novel (the same book he carried through the snow to our aborted reading in 1975), I might have forgotten all about it. But since that book is filled with references to the Statue of Liberty, it’s hard to ignore the possibility of a connection—as if the childhood experience of witnessing his mother’s panic somehow lay at the heart of what he wrote as a grown man twenty years later. I asked him about it as we were driving back to the city that night, but Sachs only laughed at my question. He hadn’t even remembered that part of the story, he said. Then, dismissing the subject once and for all, he launched into a comic diatribe against the pitfalls of psychoanalysis. In the end, none of that matters. Just because Sachs denied the connection doesn’t mean that it didn’t exist. No one can say where a book comes from, least of all the person who writes it. Books are born out of ignorance, and if they go on living after they are written, it’s only to the degree that they cannot be understood.
The New Colossus was the one novel Sachs ever published. It was also the first piece of writing I read by him, and there’s no doubt that it played a significant role in getting our friendship off the ground. It was one thing to have liked Sachs in person, but when I learned that I could admire his work as well, I became that much more eager to know him, that much more willing to see him and talk to him again. That instantly set him apart from all the other people I had met since moving back to America. He was more than just a potential drinking companion, I discovered, more than just another acquaintance. An hour after cracking open Sachs’s book fifteen years ago, I understood that it would be possible for us to become friends.
I have just spent the morning scanning through it again (there are several copies here in the cabin), and am astonished by how little my feelings for it have changed. I don’t think I have to say much more than that. The book continues to exist, it’s available in bookstores and libraries, and anyone who cares to read it can do so without difficulty. It was issued in paperback a couple of months after Sachs and I first met, and since then it has stayed mostly in print, living a quiet but healthy life in the margins of recent literature, a crazy hodgepodge of a book that has kept its own small spot on the shelf. The first time I read it, however, I walked into it cold. After listening to Sachs in the bar, I assumed that he had written a conventional first novel, one of those thinly veiled attempts to fictionalize the story of his own life. I wasn’t planning to hold that against him, but he had talked so disparagingly about the book that I felt I had to brace myself for some kind of letdown. He autographed a copy for me that day in the bar, but the only thing I noticed at the time was that it was big, a book that ran to more than four hundred pages. I started reading it the next afternoon, sprawled out in bed after drinking six cups of coffee to kill the hangover from Saturday’s binge. As Sachs had warned me, it was a young man’s book—but not in any of the ways I was expecting it to be. The New Colossus had nothing to do with the sixties, nothing to do with Vietnam or the antiwar movement, nothing to do with the seventeen months he had served in prison. That I had been looking for all that stemmed from a failure of imagination on my part. The idea of prison was so terrible to me, I couldn’t imagine how anyone who had been there could not write about it.
As every reader knows, The New Colossus is a historical novel, a meticulously researched book set in America between 1876 and 1890, and based on documented, verifiable facts. Most of the characters are people who actually lived at the time, and even when the characters are imaginary, they are not inventions so much as borrowings, figures stolen from the pages of other novels. Otherwise, all the events are true—true in the sense that they follow the historical record—and in those places where the record is unclear, there is no tampering with the laws of
probability. Everything is made to seem plausible, matter-of-fact, even banal in the accuracy of its depiction. And yet Sachs continually throws the reader off guard, mixing so many genres and styles to tell his story that the book begins to resemble a pinball machine, a fabulous contraption with blinking lights and ninety-eight different sound effects. From chapter to chapter, he jumps from traditional third-person narrative to first-person diary entries and letters, from chronological charts to small anecdotes, from newspaper articles to essays to dramatic dialogues. It’s a whirlwind performance, a marathon sprint from the first line to the last, and whatever you might think of the book as a whole, it’s impossible not to respect the author’s energy, the sheer gutsiness of his ambitions.
Among the characters who appear in the novel are Emma Lazarus, Sitting Bull, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joseph Pulitzer, Buffalo Bill Cody, Auguste Bartholdi, Catherine Weldon, Rose Hawthorne (Nathaniel’s daughter), Ellery Channing, Walt Whitman, and William Tecumseh Sherman. But Raskalnikov is also there (straight from the epilogue of Crime and Punishment—released from prison and newly arrived as an immigrant in the United States, where his name is anglicized to Ruskin), as is Huckleberry Finn (a middle-aged drifter who befriends Ruskin), and Ishmael from Moby Dick (who has a brief walk-on role as a bartender in New York). The New Colossus begins in the year of America’s centennial and works its way through the major events of the next decade and a half: Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn, the building of the Statue of Liberty, the general strike of 1877, the exodus of Russian Jews to America in 1881, the invention of the telephone, the Haymarket riots in Chicago, the spread of the Ghost Dance religion among the Sioux, the massacre at Wounded Knee. But small events are also recorded, and these are finally what give the book its texture, what turn it into something more than a jigsaw puzzle of historical facts. The opening chapter is a good case in point. Emma Lazarus goes to Concord, Massachusetts, to stay as a guest in Emerson’s house. While there, she is introduced to Ellery Channing, who accompanies her on a visit to Walden Pond and talks about his friendship with Thoreau (dead now for fourteen years). The two are drawn to each other and become friends, another of those odd juxtapositions that Sachs was so fond of: the white-haired New Englander and the young Jewish poet from Millionaire’s Row in New York. At their last meeting, Channing hands her a gift, which he tells her not to open until she is on the train heading back home. When she unwraps the parcel, she finds a copy of Channing’s book on Thoreau, along with one of the relics the old man has been hoarding since his friend’s death: Thoreau’s pocket compass. It’s a beautiful moment, very sensitively handled by Sachs, and it plants an important image in the reader’s head that will recur in any number of guises throughout the book. Although it isn’t said in so many words, the message couldn’t be clearer. America has lost its way. Thoreau was the one man who could read the compass for us, and now that he is gone, we have no hope of finding ourselves again.
There is the strange story of Catherine Weldon, the middle-class woman from Brooklyn who goes out west to become one of Sitting Bull’s wives. There is a farcical account of the Russian Grand Duke Alexis’s tour of the United States—hunting buffalo with Bill Cody, traveling down the Mississippi with General and Mrs. George Armstrong Custer. There is General Sherman, whose middle name gives homage to an Indian warrior, receiving an appointment in 1876 (just one month after Custer’s last stand) “to assume military control of all reservations in the Sioux country and to treat the Indians there as prisoners of war,” and then, one year later, receiving another appointment from the American Committee on the Statue of Liberty “to decide whether the statue should be located on Governor’s or Bedloe’s Island.” There is Emma Lazarus dying from cancer at age thirty-seven, attended by her friend Rose Hawthorne—who is so transformed by the experience that she converts to Catholicism, enters the order of St. Dominic as Sister Alphonsa, and devotes the last thirty years of her life to caring for the terminally ill. There are dozens of such episodes in the book. All of them are true, each is grounded in the real, and yet Sachs fits them together in such a way that they become steadily more fantastic, almost as if he were delineating a nightmare or a hallucination. As the book progresses, it takes on a more and more unstable character—filled with unpredictable associations and departures, marked by increasingly rapid shifts in tone—until you reach a point where you feel the whole thing begin to levitate, to rise ponderously off the ground like some gigantic weather balloon. By the last chapter, you’ve traveled so high up into the air, you realize that you can’t come down again without falling, without being crushed.
There are definite flaws, however. Although Sachs works hard to mask them, there are times when the novel feels too constructed, too mechanical in its orchestration of events, and only rarely do any of the characters come fully to life. Midway through my first reading of it, I remember telling myself that Sachs was more of a thinker than an artist, and his heavy-handedness often disturbed me—the way he kept hammering home his points, manipulating his characters to underscore his ideas rather than letting them create the action themselves. Still, in spite of the fact that he wasn’t writing about himself, I understood how deeply personal the book must have been for him. The dominant emotion was anger, a full-blown, lacerating anger that surged up on nearly every page: anger against America, anger against political hypocrisy, anger as a weapon to destroy national myths. But given that the war in Vietnam was still being fought then, and given that Sachs had gone to jail because of that war, it wasn’t hard to understand where his anger had come from. It gave the book a strident, polemical tone, but I also believe it was the secret of its power, the engine that pushed the book forward and made you want to go on reading it. Sachs was only twenty-three when he started The New Colossus, and he stuck with the project for five years, writing seven or eight drafts in the process. The published version came to four hundred and thirty-six pages, and I had read them all by the time I went to sleep on Tuesday night. Whatever reservations I might have had were dwarfed by my admiration for what he had accomplished. When I came home from work on Wednesday afternoon, I immediately sat down and wrote him a letter. I told him that he had written a great novel. Any time he wanted to share another bottle of bourbon with me, I would be honored to match him glass for glass.
We started seeing each other regularly after that. Sachs had no job, and that made him more available than most of the people I knew, more flexible in his routines. Social life in New York tends to be quite rigid. A simple dinner can take weeks of advance planning, and the best of friends can sometimes go months without any contact at all. With Sachs, however, impromptu meetings were the norm. He worked when the spirit moved him (most often late at night), and the rest of the time he roamed free, prowling the streets of the city like some nineteenth-century flâneur, following his nose wherever it happened to take him. He walked, he went to museums and art galleries, he saw movies in the middle of the day, he read books on park benches. He wasn’t beholden to the clock in the way other people are, and as a consequence he never felt as if he were wasting his time. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t productive, but the wall between work and idleness had crumbled to such a degree for him that he scarcely noticed it was there. This helped him as a writer, I think, since his best ideas always seemed to come to him when he was away from his desk. In that sense, then, everything fell into the category of work for him. Eating was work, watching basketball games was work, sitting with a friend in a bar at midnight was work. In spite of appearances, there was hardly a moment when he wasn’t on the job.
My days weren’t nearly as open as his were. I had returned from Paris the previous summer with nine dollars in my pocket, and rather than ask my father for a loan (which he probably wouldn’t have given me anyway), I had snatched at the first job I was offered. By the time I met Sachs, I was working for a rare-book dealer on the Upper East Side, mostly sitting in the back room of the shop writing catalogues and answering letters. I went in every morni
ng at nine and left at one. In the afternoons, I translated at home, working on a history of modern China by a French journalist who had once been stationed in Peking—a slapdash, poorly written book that demanded more effort than it deserved. My hope was to quit the job with the book dealer and start earning my living as a translator, but it still wasn’t clear that my plan would work. In the meantime, I was also writing stories and doing occasional book reviews, and what with one thing and another, I wasn’t getting a lot of sleep. Still, I saw Sachs more often than seems possible now, considering the circumstances. One advantage was that we had turned out to live in the same neighborhood, and our apartments were within easy walking distance of each other. This led to quite a few late-night meetings in bars along Broadway, and then, after we discovered a mutual passion for sports, weekend afternoons as well, since the ballgames were always on in those places and neither one of us owned a television set. Almost at once, I began seeing Sachs on the average of twice a week, far more than I saw anyone else.
Not long after these get-togethers began, he introduced me to his wife. Fanny was a graduate student in the art history department at Columbia then, teaching courses at General Studies and finishing up her dissertation on nineteenth-century American landscape painting. She and Sachs had met at the University of Wisconsin ten years before, literally bumping into each other at a peace rally that had been organized on campus. By the time Sachs was arrested in the spring of 1967, they had already been married for close to a year. They lived at Ben’s parents’ house in New Canaan during the period of the trial, and once the sentence was handed down and Ben went off to prison (early in 1968), Fanny moved back to her own parents’ apartment in Brooklyn. At some point during all this, she applied to the graduate program at Columbia and was accepted with a faculty fellowship—which included free tuition, a living stipend of several thousand dollars, and responsibility for teaching a couple of courses. She spent the rest of that summer working as an office temp in Manhattan, found a small apartment on West 112th Street in late August, and then started classes in September, all the while commuting up to Danbury every Sunday on the train to visit Ben. I mention these things now because I happened to see her a number of times during that year—without having the slightest idea who she was. I was still an undergraduate at Columbia then, and my apartment was only five blocks away from hers, on West 107th Street. As chance would have it, two of my closest friends lived in her building, and on several of my visits I actually ran into her in the elevator or the downstairs lobby. Beyond that, there were the times when I saw her walking along Broadway, the times when I found her standing ahead of me at the counter of the discount cigarette store, the times when I caught a glimpse of her entering a building on campus. In the spring, we were even in a class together, a large lecture course on the history of aesthetics given by a professor in the philosophy department. I noticed her in all these places because I found her attractive, but I could never quite muster the courage to talk to her. There was something intimidating about her elegance, a walled-off quality that seemed to discourage strangers from approaching her. The wedding ring on her left hand was partly responsible, I suppose, but even if she hadn’t been married, I’m not sure it would have made any difference. Still, I made a conscious effort to sit behind her in that philosophy class, just so I could spend an hour every week watching her out of the corner of my eye. We smiled at each other once or twice as we were leaving the lecture hall, but I was too timid to push it any farther than that. When Sachs finally introduced me to her in 1975, we recognized each other immediately. It was an unsettling experience, and it took me several minutes to regain my composure. A mystery from the past had suddenly been solved. Sachs was the missing husband of the woman I had watched so attentively six or seven years before. If I had stayed in the neighborhood, it’s almost certain that I would have seen him after he was released from prison. But I graduated from college in June, and Sachs didn’t come to New York until August. By then, I had already moved out of my apartment and was on my way to Europe.
