A LIFE IN WORDS

IBS: The Invention of Solitude is a groundbreaking book that pushes straight through the boundaries of literary convention. You turn autobiographical material into two engaging narratives that explore ideas about memory, solitude, and ways of being in the world, which have been cornerstones in your work ever since. What prompted the writing of the first part, “Portrait of an Invisible Man”? Was it the death of your father?

PA: Yes, without question it was the death of my father, which, as you know, was unexpected and came as a shock to me. He was sixty-six or sixty-seven—I’ve never known exactly what year he was born—in any case, not an old man. He had been in good health all his life. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke. He played tennis every day. I always assumed he would live to be ninety and had given little or no thought to his potential death. Yet, there it was. It happened. And it caused a tremendous upheaval in my life. The frustration of having so much unfinished business with my father propelled me into wanting to write about him. Suddenly he was gone, suddenly I could no longer talk to him. All the questions I’d wanted to ask no longer could be asked. But you see, it’s important to note that if he had died the year before, I might not have written “Portrait of an Invisible Man.” At that time, I was still writing poetry, exclusively poetry, and had more or less given up the idea of writing prose. But then the poetry dried up, and I couldn’t write anything. It was a miserable time for me. Then, as I’ve described in Winter Journal,⁷ I went to that dance rehearsal, and something happened. A revelation, a liberation, a fundamental something. I immediately plunged into writing White Spaces,⁸ which I happened to finish the night my father died. I went to bed at two a.m., I remember, a Saturday night/Sunday morning, thinking how this piece, White Spaces, was the first step toward a new way of thinking about how to write. Then the phone rang early the next morning, just a few hours later. It was my uncle on the line telling me my father had died that night. That was the shock. Coinciding with the fact that I had returned to prose, that I felt it was possible for me to write in prose, finally, after so many years of struggling to write fiction, and then finally abandoning it.

PA: It freed me from the constraints that had been blocking me for the past year or two. I had, in a sense, retaught myself how to write. I’d unlearned all the lessons of my education—which had been more of a burden than a help, I’m afraid.

PA: I’m talking about my literary education. My studies at Columbia University and the intense scrutiny of texts you engage in as a student of literature. I’d come to such a point of self-consciousness that I somehow believed that every novel had to be completely worked out in advance, that every syllable had to give off some kind of philosophical or literary echo, that a novel was a great machine of thought and emotion that could be analyzed down to the phonemes in every sentence. It was too much. I hadn’t realized that the unconscious plays such a large part in the making of stories. I hadn’t yet grasped the importance of spontaneity and sudden inspirations. It took me a very long time to learn that a lack of understanding about what you are doing can be just as useful as knowing what you are doing. White Spaces, however good or bad the piece might be, was an important step for me. I was ready to let my writing take new forms, and, in a sense, my father’s death was the excuse to go ahead. “Portrait of an Invisible Man” was written feverishly. He died in mid-January 1979, and, I would say, by early February I had started writing the book. It’s not a long text, and it took me only two months to finish it. Later, stupidly, I decided to expand it and write it in a more traditional way, but then I scrapped that longer version and went back to the original. It was clearly prompted by a combination of emotional distress, the need to say something about my father, and a very literal feeling that, if I didn’t, he would vanish. At that moment, I was artistically ready to take it on. This is crucial.

PA: After I finished the first part, my life went through a number of other upheavals. My first marriage was essentially over by the end of 1978. Only six weeks later, my father died. Lydia⁹ was very kind to me about it. We pulled together to get through that difficult period but stuck to the plan to separate, and by the spring I had moved into my grim little room on Varick Street in Manhattan. So much had happened to me in the intervening months that I wanted to write a chronicle of those disruptions. This then developed into “The Book of Memory.”

IBS: “Portrait of an Invisible Man” and “The Book of Memory” are very different in terms of tone, style, structure, and perspective, but I think the contrasts only inform and enrich each of the texts. You told me earlier that originally you hadn’t intended for them to be published together. What happened?

PA: I gave the first part to a poet friend of mine who had a minuscule publishing house. The plan was to put it out as a small book of about seventy-five or eighty pages. The problem was that he didn’t have much money, and by the time he’d raised the funds to publish it, “The Book of Memory” was finished. Rather than produce two short books, it was financially sounder to do them both in a single volume. I then came up with the overall title, The Invention of Solitude. The book has a unity to it, even though it’s two separate works, and, in retrospect, I’m glad it worked out that way. The two parts bounce off each other and seem to be stronger in tandem than they would have been alone.

IBS: In “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” you describe your father as fundamentally detached from the people closest to him. Paradoxically, it’s precisely through this description that you bring into “presence” that which defined him most accurately, namely his absence.

PA: The strange thing about my father, as I say quite explicitly in the first half of the book, is that it was difficult for him to connect with the people he was most intimate with: his wife and his children. With other people it was different. For instance, if someone was stranded on a road in the middle of the night, that person would call my father because he knew he would come. He was also generous and sympathetic toward his poorer tenants and his nephew, my cousin, whom he took care of for many years. There was a lot of tenderness and a strong sense of responsibility in my father, even if it was difficult for him to express it to the people closest to him. Not so long ago, I received a letter from someone who had lived next door to him in the last years of his life. She wrote: “You have no idea how kind your father was to us when we moved in.” She had one or two small children, and he would buy presents for them—snowsuits. I was very moved by this.

PA: This was what I was trying to say in the book. The mystifying forces of contradiction: he was this, and he was that. You say one thing, and it’s true, but the opposite is true as well. Human beings are imponderable, they can rarely be captured in words. If you open yourself up to all the different aspects of a person, you are usually left in a state of befuddlement.

IBS: There’s a dynamic in this confusion, though, isn’t there? I mean, isn’t there an urge to try to piece the different aspects together?

PA: You make it sound as if I’d tried to create some kind of Frankenstein’s monster [laughs]. No, I think the only metaphor I’ve used to talk about the range of selves within a single self is the idea of a spectrum. I believe that every human being is a spectrum. We live most of our lives in the middle, but there are moments when we fluctuate to the extremes, and we run that gamut from one shade of a color to another at different moments, depending on mood, age, and circumstance.

IBS: Yes, and the notion of a spectrum makes sense. Is there anything that holds the self together, do you think? A substratum of some sort?

PA: Identity is what’s in my passport. No, I don’t even know what identity means in this context. I think a moment comes at around the age of about five or six when you have a thought and become capable of telling yourself, simultaneously, that you are thinking that thought. This doubling occurs when we begin to reflect on our own thinking. Once you can do that, you are able to tell the story of yourself to yourself. We all have a continuous, unbroken narrative within ourselves about who we are, and we go on telling it every day of our lives.

PA: It changes, the story shifts. Of course, we’re revising all the time. We tend, just as a matter of self-preservation, to leave out the worst. Oliver Sacks, the neurologist, worked with brain-damaged patients who had lost the ability to tell this story to themselves—Siri knows more about this than I do. The thread has been cut, and they don’t have personalities anymore. They’re no longer “selves” in the ordinary sense of the word. They’re utterly fragmented beings. I think what pulls human beings together is this inner narrative. It’s not “identity.” I keep reading about the search for identity in my characters, but I have no idea what that means.

IBS: If the self is formed as a narrative, I suppose there’s also an element of invention? We make up things to believe about ourselves.

PA: Some people are able to tell a more or less truthful story about themselves. Others are fantasists. Their sense of who they are is so at odds with what the rest of the world feels about them that they become pathetic. You see it again and again in life: the aging woman who thinks she’s still twenty years old and has no idea that she looks ridiculous in the eyes of others. Or the mediocre poet who thinks he’s brilliant. It’s painful to be with these people. Then, there’s the other extreme, the people who diminish themselves in their own minds. They’re often much greater people than they think they are, and, often, much admired by others. Still, they kill themselves inside. Almost by definition, the good are hard on themselves—and the less than good believe they’re the best [laughs].

IBS: Could it be a kind of insecurity about himself that determined your father’s reluctance to sign his name? It’s a very striking scene in “Portrait of an Invisible Man”:

He could not simply put the pen against the paper and write [his signature]. As if unconsciously delaying the moment of truth, he would always make a slight, preliminary flourish, a circular movement an inch or two off the page, like a fly buzzing in the air and zeroing in on its spot, before he could get down to business. (30)

To me this is an image of someone so utterly detached from himself that it’s disturbing even to commit to his own name.

PA: Actually, I find it rather humorous. There was a popular television show in America in the fifties called The Honeymooners, starring a comedian named Jackie Gleason and his sidekick, played by Art Carney, who would always loop his hand around in hilarious circles before he could write his signature. My father did something similar, though in a much more reduced way. I always found it endearing and strange.

IBS: I thought, perhaps, your description of this reluctance to commit his name to paper was another manifestation of the “invisibility” of the portraitee, you know, to link the title to the man, or vice versa, and—in more general terms—to provide a connection between name and character.

PA: Well, if there is such a connection, it’s not one I consciously construct. Curiously, almost all the characters in my novels come to life with their names already attached to them. I can think of only one instance when I’ve changed the name of a protagonist. Jim Nashe, the hero of The Music of Chance, originally went by the old New England name of Coffin. I wrote the whole novel with Nashe as Coffin, then realized, when I was done, that even though I didn’t intend it to be symbolic . . .

PA: It would be read that way, and so I decided to change it. That was the only time this happened. All my other characters have kept the names they were born with.

IBS: So, the connection between the characters’ names and the role they play in the story is only rarely constructed? You’re not flaunting the artificiality of the fiction and the fact that these characters are figments of your imagination?

IBS: Exactly. Many readers, I imagine, will be wondering why you chose one name rather than another, especially when some of them appear so obviously to carry meaning.

PA: “No symbols where none intended,” as Beckett wrote in Watt. I’m afraid it mostly comes out of the unconscious, out of the guts. The theater director Peter Brook once made a statement that impressed me enormously: “What I’m trying to do in my work,” he said, “is to combine the closeness of the everyday with the distance of myth. Because, without the closeness, you can’t be moved, and without the distance you can’t be amazed.” This is such a beautiful formulation. It’s so succinct and to the point, and I suppose I respond to it because it expresses what I feel about art as well.

IBS: This duality plays very much into the relationship between the inner and outer dimensions of your portrait of the father, your father, in The Invention of Solitude, doesn’t it?

IBS: Toward the end of “Portrait of an Invisible Man” you say, “When I step into this silence, it will mean that my father has vanished forever” (65). Is this how it felt to you? I thought, perhaps, the purpose of writing about the dead was to keep them alive. Like memory, where, as you say, things happen for the second time. Is it that you can bring something back to life only in the process of writing about it? Then it vanishes?

PA: I didn’t know what would happen, but I imagined it would be something like that. While I was working on the book, my father was very vivid to me, and the act of writing seemed to alleviate some of the shock and pain of his death. Yet, when the book was finished, it was as if I’d never written it. Everything was the same as before. Putting together the portrait didn’t solve anything. Writing isn’t therapy.

PA: Yes, because even as I was writing it, I kept trying to present all sides of my father simultaneously, and I was always heartened by the positive things I discovered about him. He did have very good qualities, after all, and I feel that if he’d grown up in different circumstances, his life would have turned out quite differently. He was deeply shaped by his environment. I mean, the immigrant story, the crazy mother, the murder of his father when he was a small boy, the constant dislocations of the family—it taught him to hide himself. So, one does feel sorry for him. I certainly do.

IBS: It must have been hard to be the son of somebody who kept himself so separate.

PA: I wrote that book more than half my life ago, and the fact is that I still think about my father all the time. As I wrote in Winter Journal, I also dream about him quite often. I have conversations with him in those dreams, and even if I can never remember what we talk about, the conversations are always friendly ones. I wish he’d lived long enough to see how well I’ve managed to take care of myself—after such a rocky start.

IBS: What about your grandmother? You said she was crazy. She comes across as a very strong character with an iron grip on her four sons.

PA: She had four sons and a daughter. My aunt Esther, the oldest of the Auster children, was the mother of the nephew my father took under his wing. She had an unhappy life. Her mother, my grandmother, was a ferocious woman.

PA: Vividly. According to family legend, she used to beat her sons over the head with a broom when she was angry at them.

PA: Stanislaw, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Galicia, which now finds itself in the western part of Ukraine, near Poland. I think she came to America when she was fourteen. She was an orphan. After she married my grandfather, they returned to Europe a number of times. The reality of immigration is much more complex than the myth. My uncle, the one just older than my father, was born in London, for example. When she was young, I believe my grandmother worked on the Lower East Side in a millinery factory—making hats. I don’t know much about her family. Her name was Perlmutter, a common Jewish name. She was uneducated and never learned to speak English very well.

PA: Yes. A funny thing happened a few years ago—a family thing. Siri and I went to the funeral of one of my first cousins. Another cousin was there, the oldest of the nine grandchildren, a woman whom I’ve always liked a lot, Jane Auster . . .

PA: Yes, my cousin Jane. Anyway, we were in the cemetery where most of my father’s family is buried. We all walked over to our grandmother’s grave, and the outspoken, extremely humorous Jane looked down and said, “You know, I always hated you, Grandma. You were the worst person I’ve ever met. You were mean, and I was frightened of you. And on top of that, you were the worst cook in the world. You couldn’t make a decent meal if your life depended on it.” Everyone started laughing in a great rush of relief and amusement. No, she was ferocious, my grandmother. I was frightened of her, too. I didn’t feel any connection to her at all.

PA: One of my uncles was a witness. My aunt Esther must have been about eighteen at the time. Yes, they knew, they all knew. They just didn’t tell anybody. They held their collective breath and never divulged the secret. Until that fluky incident, which I describe in The Invention of Solitude, when my cousin (the one who died recently) happened to sit next to a man on an airplane who started talking about Kenosha, Wisconsin. That was how the story finally came out.

IBS: The portrait of your father is exceptionally vivid, I think, because you manage to make his “absence” so very “present,” as it were. Even so, the “I” speaker—you—insists on the necessity of recognizing “right from the start, that the essence of this project is failure” (20). Why failure?

PA: Because I don’t feel you can fully capture anyone. It’s something you try to do, but, as we said earlier, you can never crack the mystery of a human being. In a sense, all writing is failure. You know that Beckett phrase—to cite Beckett once more—“Fail again, fail better.” Fail better, yes, that’s what you do. You keep going—and try to “fail better.”

IBS: Can you explain that to me? Why is the success of a piece of writing conditional on failure?

PA: Because you can never achieve what you hope to achieve. You can come close sometimes and others may appreciate your work, but you, the author, will always feel you’ve failed. You know you’ve done your best, but your best isn’t good enough. Maybe that’s why you keep writing. So you can fail a little better the next time.

IBS: These reflections on the processes and mechanisms of writing you weave into the narrative are another reason why “Portrait of an Invisible Man” is so good, I think. The substratum of meta-commentary engages the reader in ways traditional autobiographical texts do not. For instance, here:

I have a sense of trying to go somewhere, as if I knew what I wanted to say, but the farther I go the more certain I am that the path toward my object does not exist. I have to invent the road with each step, and this means that I can never be sure of where I am. A feeling of moving around in circles, of perpetual back-tracking, of going off in many directions at once. And even if I do manage to make some progress, I am not at all convinced that it will take me to where I think I am going. Just because you wander in the desert, it does not mean there is a promised land. (32)

PA: With this book, I was finding my path as I went along. And this is reflected in the work itself. I’ve always been interested in exposing the inner workings of what I’m doing—or trying to do—because the process of thinking seems to me just as interesting as the results of that thinking.

IBS: Because conventionally, a work of art will present itself as a complete entity informed by its own beauty and truth, which is passed on to a more or less passive recipient.

IBS: Yes, because everybody pretends the story is real: author as well as reader.

PA: Well, I guess I’m interested in not pretending. But again, “postmodern” is a term I don’t understand.

PA: Yes, but you know, there’s an arrogance to all this labeling, a self-assurance that I find to be distasteful, if not dishonest. I try to be humble in the face of my own confusions, and I don’t want to elevate my doubts to some status they don’t deserve. I’m really stumbling. I’m really in the dark. I don’t know. And if that—what I would call honesty—qualifies as postmodern, then okay, but it’s not as if I ever wanted to write a book that sounded like John Barth or Robert Coover.

IBS: No, no, I’m not implying that at all. I understand what you are saying about honesty. It’s the backbone of your work, and it’s what makes it evocative and stimulating. There’s that wonderful line in the passage we have just read: “Just because you wander in the desert, it does not mean there is a promised land.” Is this a comment on the process of writing in general, or is it specific to the composition of this particular portrait?

PA: No, it’s a general statement. It doesn’t apply just to writing but to any kind of human endeavor. You grope toward something. Scientists, too—they “wander in the desert” looking for a solution to a scientific problem. It doesn’t mean they’re going to find it. You need to be a little lost sometimes.

IBS: A journey toward something, but you don’t know where it’s going to end?

IBS: Well, one doesn’t get the impression that you were “wandering in the desert” when you wrote The Invention of Solitude. It’s usually regarded as an innovative and elegant undermining of the conventions of biography and autobiography. Given what you have said about the motivation for the book, I don’t suppose you deliberately set out to renovate literary form and genre?

PA: No, well, how shall I put it . . . The Invention of Solitude was the product of the breakthroughs I’d made in my own thinking about how to make art, how to make writing. I understood that everything comes from within and moves out. It’s never the reverse. Form doesn’t precede content. The material itself will find its own form as you’re working through it. And so, I didn’t arrive at a solution before I started, I simply found it as I was writing. It seemed necessary to do it that way. It wasn’t a desire to be different so much as to find a way to tell what I had to tell. Then, if it came out sounding different from the conventions of the genre, so be it.

IBS: “Portrait of an Invisible Man” introduces the theme we have called “Abandoned Things” to signify the importance attached to the remains of a dead person, which is so prominent in many of your books:

Things are inert: they have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them . . . And yet they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself. (10–11)

In the Country of Last Things is literally set among abandoned things; in City of Glass, Stillman collects and renames broken items found in the gutter; there are husbands obsessively sorting through their deceased wives’ closets; a father playing with the toys of his dead sons . . .

PA: Disconnected, yes. Lost objects. Also in Sunset Park: Miles taking photographs of abandoned objects. Bing’s Hospital for Broken Things. It’s true. So this is something that keeps recurring. And?

IBS: And why this penchant for the vacated or masterless? Where does it come from?

PA: I’m not sure. I think it’s visceral. Certainly in Portrait it was about a direct emotional experience. My father came from the generation of men who wore neckties, and apparently he kept every tie he ever owned. When he died, there must have been a hundred of them in his closet. You are confronted by these ties, which are, in a sense, a miniature history of his life. What will you do with them? You have to throw them out or give them to charity, but who wants a tie that was made in 1943? It was so poignant. That was the only time I cried. I didn’t cry when I heard the news of my father’s death, and I didn’t cry at the funeral. Nothing. But I teared up when I was carrying the ties out to the truck to give them away. I was clutching his one hundred ties. They were all that was left of him. So, my interest in these abandoned things, as you call them, didn’t come out of thoughts or ideas about objects, it was simply the experience of these things in my own life. Maybe that’s the origin of the theory about objects in movies I developed later on in Man in the Dark. The great filmmakers are able to invest objects with human emotion and tell stories through them.

PA: Well, not as well as some people. In my films, I’ve never figured out how to do it.

IBS: Think of the moment in The Book of Illusions where David Zimmer is sorting out the baseball cards . . .

IBS: That’s one of the most moving scenes in the book. You can almost see the boys playing on the floor, even if they’re hardly described at all. You have achieved precisely that effect: abandoned objects bring their absent owners to life, if only momentarily.

PA: Only to reinforce their absence. That’s why it becomes tragic or, if not tragic, poignant.

IBS: Photos are very important in this connection, aren’t they, because they evoke the absent person in two-dimensional visual flashes. This brings us to the trick photo in “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” which so effectively epitomizes the father’s lack of engagement with the world that one thinks it must have been invented to perfect the portrait: the uncanny dearth of presence, the lack of communication.

[I]t is as if he has come there only to invoke himself, to bring himself back from the dead, as if, by multiplying himself, he had inadvertently made himself disappear. There are five of him there, and yet the nature of the trick photography denies the possibility of eye contact among the various selves. Each one is condemned to go on staring into space, as if under the gaze of the others, but seeing nothing, never able to see anything. It is a picture of death, a portrait of an invisible man. (31)

PA: Let me show you. [He stands up and points to a photograph on the wall.] It’s fascinating how deeply indifferent we are to the family pictures of other people. They don’t tell us anything. We don’t care. But when it’s our own family, they’re bathed in significance, aren’t they? It’s very private for each person.

PA: Yes, and also the evidence they give of the fact that indeed, yes, your father actually once was a baby.

IBS: Of course, these mechanisms of retrieval through objects, whether in the form of words, photos, or memory, inform part two of The Invention of Solitude. In a sense, “The Book of Memory” is a collection of vignettes held together by the opening and the closing paragraphs—which are identical.

He lays out a piece of blank paper on the table before him and writes these words with his pen. It was. It will never be again.

He finds a fresh sheet of paper. He lays it out on the table before him and writes these words with his pen.It was. It will never be again. Remember.

IBS: Memory becomes the overriding principle here. The writer recollects as he paces up and down inside his solitary study. Could we say that, in a sense, he fills this bare room with his moving body, just as he fills the empty sheet with words: thought, emotion, images moving across the page? Just as in White Spaces, we are inside those square blank spaces that frame so much of your writing?

PA: I think that’s true of this book and some other things I wrote later. Again, it came out unconsciously. I didn’t have an overall plan for it. In fact, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I tried to create a structure for the book, a musical rhythm for the little blocks of prose that kept doubling back on one another. Repeat, and then move forward, so that the reader would never forget that we’re still in that moment. It was a difficult thing to do. I remember making a chart, which was later published somewhere.¹⁰ There was a square with a room inside and little lines branching off into a kind of honeycomb of thoughts and ideas—a map of the book. I was already fairly deep into the writing when I sketched it, so it was part of the process rather than a preliminary plan, but it gave me a sense of where I was and how much more I had to do in order to cover everything I wanted to cover. As you can see, I was groping my way toward some kind of understanding. In a lot of the writing I have done since, the same dynamic is at work: enclosure and then wandering. Language, solitude, and movement are constantly referred to in this book. Being outside and moving through space, or being confined to a closed-in space. At the same time, there’s a lot about sitting still inside a room and writing.

PA: Or painting. The writing or the painting takes the place of the movement through space. Then it becomes a mental journey.

IBS: So, you have inner movement, which is creative output, and outer movement, which is physical walking. In White Spaces, too, it’s precisely that: enclosure, the movement of words and the movement of the body. Why is journey so important?

PA: I’m not sure I can explain it. Obviously, the act of writing forces you to sit still, but if you’re spending every day of your life sitting in a room at a table with a piece of paper in front of you, it begins to affect you. You start to think about the environment and the machinery you use to explore the inner world and the outer world. It’s the way the imagination can flourish—particularly under these very austere conditions: table, chair, page, pen, and a man or a woman sitting at that table.

IBS: One of the most prominent recurring themes in your work is no doubt language itself and its connection with the body. Here in “The Book of Memory,” A. says:

For no word can be written without first having been seen, and before it finds its way to the page it must first have been part of the body, a physical presence that one lives with in the same way one lives with one’s heart, one’s stomach, and one’s brain. (138)

For me, these lines provide a link between White Spaces and Winter Journal . . .

PA: Let’s see, White Spaces was written in ’78, Winter Journal in 2011, so there’s a thirty-four-year gap between them. I’m writing about language and the body in both texts, even if the perspectives are different. And about winter. It’s a big loop, isn’t it? I never really thought about it. Then, toward the end of Winter Journal, I describe the origin of White Spaces. It’s interesting. Maybe I should just quit now [laughs] because everything has come full circle.

PA: Well, words are physical and then, of course, they’re not. Physical just in the sense that you’re writing them. That’s a physical activity. You’re scratching a sign onto a piece of paper, and there’s the word. It’s a physical object. Also, when we speak and articulate words with our voices, well, that’s a physical activity, too. In this way, words have substance, even if they’re abstractions. Signs.

IBS: Yes, of course you’re right, there are different dimensions of language: abstract and concrete, meaning and form. Ideally, they should hang together or complement one another.

PA: Ideally, yes. But sometimes they’re like the trick photo of my father: different aspects with no communication between them.

IBS: I was wondering whether your thoughts about different aspects of the self also played into the narrative perspective of The Invention of Solitude?

PA: I started “The Book of Memory” in the first person as a natural outcome of “Portrait of an Invisible Man.” Then, after a while, I became dissatisfied with what I was doing. It felt wrong, and it took me a while to understand why. At some point in the middle of these confusions, I went to San Francisco to give a reading and stayed at a friend’s house—Michael Palmer, the poet, the very, very good poet. I was down in the guest room of his house, tormenting myself: “What’s wrong with my book? Why don’t I feel I’m doing it in the right way?” That’s when it suddenly came to me—I had to write about myself in the third person. Once I did that, I was able to go full bore into the project. It was an extremely complex book to write.

IBS: It’s also a complex book to read. Especially the composition of thirteen vignettes evoking famous writers and artists who were themselves working in solitary rooms, confined by choice or by force: Anne Frank, Kierkegaard, Pascal, Hölderlin, Descartes, Leibniz, even St. Augustine. How do they fit together?

PA: This is a book about a man alone in a room, namely myself. What happens when you’re alone is that you understand that you are populated by others. You are inhabited by other people, and you exist as an individual only because of your connection to others. I don’t just mean your family and friends. I also mean the people whose work you have read. They are part of who you are. At a certain point, I realized that this book about solitude had to be, in some sense, a collective work. That’s why I quote so freely from other writers, because they’re part of the inner conversations that are taking place in the autobiographical figure of A. I’m talking to them, and they’re talking to me.

PA: It’s a dialogue with other writers. They’re all writers who’ve meant a great deal to me. The ones I’ve thought about, thought with, and argued with for many, many years.

imagines an immense Babel inside him. There is a text, and it translates itself into an infinite number of languages. Sentences spill out of him at the speed of thought, and each word comes from a different language, a thousand tongues that clamor inside him at once, the din of it echoing through a maze of rooms, corridors, and stairways, hundreds of stories high. He repeats. In the space of memory, everything is both itself and something else. (136)

Is this a kind of exchange in and with “a thousand tongues” resounding through “a maze of rooms and stairways”? The ongoing narration of reality—and of our selves, which we talked about before? Processed through language, reiterated through memory?

PA: This is one of the essential passages in the book. When I say “immense Babel inside him,” I mean a place in which every language exists: a “clamor” of languages. According to the biblical story, we have different languages because God created a confusion of tongues when man tried to usurp God by building the Tower of Babel. What I’m proposing in “The Book of Memory” is that we are intersubjective beings and that even the notion of solitude, the fact that I can tell myself that I am alone, means that I have learned language and can therefore think about my state of being alone. But I have acquired language through other people. No one learns to speak by himself. It’s a group activity, and every child learns through verbal exchanges with other people. Therefore, even when you’re alone, you’re not alone. No one can be alone. The people who are locked up in closets, feral children who never have contact with human beings, do not develop. They become something less than human.

IBS: Is this because they have no contact with other people or because they have no language?

IBS: This means you can develop a sense of self without language, as long as you have social interaction.

PA: Yes, definitely. You just can’t think. I believe a dog has a sense of his own being. He can’t tell himself, “I have a sense of my own being,” but he feels alive in his own skin as a being separate from all other beings.

PA: I don’t think we would have the world without it. We wouldn’t be able to distinguish between things. We wouldn’t have tables and chairs, we would have a blur of objects.

PA: It’s interesting to look at people playing sports, a game of baseball, for example. A man picks up a ball and throws it, somebody swings, everyone starts running around, the crowd stands up and cheers. Until you learn the rules, the words of the rules, what you’re looking at is chaos. Once you acquire the vocabulary to articulate what you’re seeing, you begin to understand what’s going on. The events are the same, but without language you can’t understand them.

IBS: You often probe the arbitrary relationship between language and the individual’s reality, and I was wondering whether, in your view, it’s the writer, more than anyone else, who places himself in the blank space in between the word and the world and, from that vantage point, provides a perspective or a connection that carries meaning between the two. At the very beginning of “The Book of Memory,” you write:

Even as he stood in the present, he felt himself to be looking at it from the future, and this past-as-present was so antiquated that even the horrors of the day, which ordinarily would have filled him with outrage, seemed remote to him, as if the voice in the radio were reading from a chronicle of some lost civilization. Later, in a time of greater clarity, he would refer to this sensation as “nostalgia for the present.” (76)

If we follow this and then read White Spaces again, I was wondering if this little chart might make sense:

You place your writing “I” in the middle, between the world and the word, as a kind of mediator or translator between the two. The “I” is here, right now, in his room writing, his body quietly seated before the page or pacing the floor. In terms of time, the “I” is located in the present, at times remembering a past that he is about to put into words, at times looking into the future with the hindsight of the past. You are saying something very much to this effect in White Spaces about the body situated in the present, mediating between the room and the page.

I remain in the room in which I am writing this. I put one foot in front of the other. I put one word in front of the other, and for each step I take I add another word, as if for each word to be spoken there were another space to be crossed, a distance to be filled by my body as it moves through this space. (Collected Poems, 158)

IBS: Well, if we follow your line of thinking, A. must situate himself in both the room and in language before he can achieve a sense of being in the world. He’s right there, mind and body, between the concrete physical world and the abstract verbal realm of his reality. And he has set himself the task of mediating between the two, or to translate one into the other.

PA: I think you’re right about this. In Winter Journal I actually say something quite similar:

[B]ack and forth it went for the next hour, the dancers taking turns with the choreographer. Bodies in motion followed by words, beauty followed by meaningless noise, joy followed by boredom, and at a certain point something began to open up inside you. You found yourself falling through the rift between world and word. (33)

[T]he chasm that divides human life from our capacity to understand or express the truth of human life, and for reasons that still confound you, this sudden fall through empty, unbounded air filled you with a sensation of freedom and happiness, and by the time the performance was over, you were no longer blocked, no longer burdened by the doubts that had been weighing down on you for the past year. (Winter Journal, 223–224)

IBS: Well, I think there really does seem to be a consistent notion of this arbitrary relationship between the word, the world, and the writer from your very first piece of prose to your very latest.¹¹

IBS: In Winter Journal, you inscribe a fall through the “rift between world and word.” The rift is a kind of “white space,” isn’t it?

PA: Yes, and it was a happy fall. A feeling of exaltation. I’ve given a number of readings from Winter Journal now, and I’ve read the passage about the dance rehearsal several times. It was this woman, you see, the choreographer, unable to explain the beautiful performance she had created and which had so moved and excited me. She was not inarticulate. Far from it. It’s just that her words had little bearing on what was happening on stage with the dancers. There it is: the enormous sense of relief I experienced when I finally understood that there’s a rift between world and word. The word is approximate: it can’t capture the world, but it’s still the only tool we have. We’re always going to fall short. Up to that point, as a poet and a writer, I thought I could achieve some kind of perfection. I put such pressure on myself, and the burden of it was so enormous that eventually it crushed me. I couldn’t write for a while.

PA: I believed in le mot juste with all its burdens and philosophical ramifications. I think what freed me was the knowledge that I was always going to fail. There was a kind of release in that revelation. I was freer, I was freer. Of course, you do the best you can. You keep trying. Again: “Fail better.” I think that was the visceral experience that allowed me to continue to write, indeed, to write all the prose books that have followed. Until then, I was blocked by the pressure I had put on myself.

Never before have I been so aware of the rift between thinking and writing. For the past few days, in fact, I have begun to feel that the story I am trying to tell is somehow incompatible with language, that the degree to which it resists language is an exact measure of how closely I have come to saying something important, and that when the moment arrives for me to say the one truly important thing (assuming it exists), I will not be able to say it. (32)

PA: Here I’m talking about the sheer complexity of writing, the near-impossibility of expressing in words exactly the thought you have, the feeling you have. It really is difficult. Most human beings are not capable of doing it, few writers have the talent and skill to do it well. The understanding of failure, which we talked about earlier, and the struggle to achieve sufficient accuracy is part of it. The more challenging it is, the more important it becomes. The more difficult to express, the more essential it is to find the right words. It’s easy to say, “I had a sandwich for lunch today.” But to try to express something complex like “who was my father”—you can barely do it. When the stakes are low, nothing matters. When they’re high, everything matters. And there’s every chance you’ll fall into the abyss.

IBS: That’s a “white space,” isn’t it? “Wordlessness.” You say somewhere: “his mind flails in a wordless panic” (77).

To be reduced to saying nothing. Or else, to say to himself: this is what haunts me. And then to realize, almost in the same breath, that this is what he haunts. (81)

IBS: Is there a double bind here? Seeking to fill the blank spaces: the naked room, the empty mind, the white page, and at the same time needing the “nothingness” that defines them? Is the hunger for fulfillment the underlying premise of writing?

IBS: Do you find these “white spaces” in language itself: things that can’t be expressed in words? I’m thinking of the incompatibility of thoughts and emotions with language you mentioned earlier. It’s not just one’s own inability to express these things, it’s also language itself that fails, isn’t it?

PA: The thing is that reality is too complex, and language is always just an approximation of the real. Language is categories. This is the incompatibility Stillman (in City of Glass) obsesses about. This wooden artifact before us we call “a table,” right? This is a unique table. It was custom made, it’s red, no one else has this table. And so, to be absolutely accurate, you would have to name it: “red-table-number-one-that-exists-only-in-Brooklyn-New-York-in-the-house-of-Siri-and-Paul.” That would be the word for this object. Just to say “table” doesn’t do it. Even “red table” doesn’t do it. So, extrapolate and think of all reality being like this. Everything is equally complex: “Red-table-number-one-that-exists-only-in-Brooklyn . . .” Once you get away from the general categories that help break down reality and allow us, in effect, to perceive it, you destroy language. Stillman’s project would ultimately make words useless, meaningless—because every object would have to have its own impossibly complex name. You couldn’t say “book.” You would have to say “book-written-by-Paul-Auster-copy-number-7221-by-Faber-and-Faber-English-edition-bought-by-Gita-owned-only-by-her-creased-here-underlined-there . . .” That would be the word for this book, and it would be four pages long.

IBS: This is also a classical Jewish idea that the universe is precisely that one, infinite name for God.

PA: The infinite nothing, yes, but as far as language goes, saying that reality is incompatible with language means language as we know it. At the same time, every person is unique. To call my father a man, to call myself a man . . .

PA: No, it’s not enough. It’s becoming more and more specific, but then the problem is—I have often thought about this—if you wanted to write a phenomenological novel about what it feels like to be sitting in this room right now talking with you, it would take a thousand pages even to tell the first second.

IBS: Yes, that’s impossible. What is it, then, that you do when you capture something, as indeed you do, and make it come vividly to life on the page? Isn’t it that you’ve found the right words to conjure up an image in the reader’s mind?

PA: Yes, it’s that. To capture something about the truth of the thing. I guess you come at it fitfully and sometimes at an oblique angle.

IBS: Many of your characters crave meaning, and I was wondering whether, in your view, meaning is to be found in between rather than in the things themselves?

Like everyone else, he craves a meaning. Like everyone else, his life is so fragmented that each time he sees a connection between two fragments he is tempted to look for meaning in that connection. The connection exists. But to give it a meaning, to look beyond the bare fact of its existence, would be to build an imaginary world inside the real world, and he knows it would not stand. (147)

PA: People have often thought of me as obsessed with chance, but also with a kind of destiny or fate. What I am proposing is exactly the opposite. Look here:

At his bravest moments, he embraces meaninglessness as the first principle, and then he understands that his obligation is to see what is in front of him (even though it is also inside him) and to say what he sees. He is in his room on Varick Street. His life has no meaning. The book he is writing has no meaning. There is the world, and the things one encounters in the world, and to speak of them is to be in the world. A key breaks off in a lock, and something has happened. That is to say, a key has broken off in a lock. The same piano seems to exist in two different places. A young man, twenty years later, winds up living in the same room where his father faced the horror of solitude. A man encounters his old love on a street in a foreign city. It means only what it is. Nothing more, nothing less. Then he writes: to enter this room is to vanish in a place where past and present meet. And then he writes: as in the phrase: “he wrote The Book of Memory in this room.” (147–148)

What we’re talking about here is ambiguity. I guess what I’m trying to say is that sometimes life looks as though it were a novel, “an extension of the imaginary.” Coincidences happen so unpredictably, they seem to be screaming in our face so loudly that we feel they must have a significance. Things occur in such strange ways that we want to assign some metaphysical meaning to them. Well, tempted as I am to want to believe this, what I’m saying in this passage is that I don’t. How strange it is that reality should resemble fiction, but you can’t interpret the two in the same way. You’d collapse into craziness if you started reading reality as if it were a novel. Later, as I continued to think about this, I came to call it “the mechanics of reality.” Chance will create patterns. And those patterns will seem to have meaning, but they’re arbitrary.

IBS: This notion of ambiguity is pivotal in a lot of your work. In fact, several of the themes we’ve discussed here in connection with The Invention of Solitude are really essential to the entire body of your writing, aren’t they? From beginning to end.

PA: I’ve often felt that much of my work comes out of The Invention of Solitude. Or, at least that here I’m articulating the things I care about most; things I’ve gone on to embellish or change or develop in later works.

IBS: I sometimes think of The Invention of Solitude as a kind of toolbox or gene pool for your writing in general.

PA: Not all of it, but some things. Some of the essential things. You see, The Invention of Solitude was the condensation of many years of thinking about writing, the writing in my poems and in the prose I never published. It was all funneled into this book. It’s my first prose book, even if it’s not the first work of prose I wrote. Fortunately, as time has gone on, I’ve acquired new interests, found different things to think about. Otherwise, I would be running in place.

⁷ This conversation took place in November 2011. Winter Journal came out in October 2012.

¹⁰ Paul Auster and Michel Contat, “The Manuscript in the Book: Conversation,” Yale French Studies 89 (1996): 160–187.

¹¹ Auster had just completed Winter Journal when this conversation took place. It was published almost a year later.