IBS: The Red Notebook is a collection of stories about strange real events that have happened either to you or to people you know. In which way is this little book of anecdotes an ars poetica?
PA: The style of these little stories is modeled on the joke—the simplest form of storytelling. Bare-bones sentences building up to a punch line. Very concise, very precise, not one word wasted, quick and efficient in the way a good joke is quick and efficient. At the same time, I was trying, in an indirect way, to use these stories to present my view of what we spoke about earlier: the “mechanics of reality.” There’s no theology involved in this. There’s not even much philosophy. It’s simply an observation of how strangely events intersect in the world. Such things don’t happen every minute, but they happen with astonishing frequency.
IBS: This penchant for magical occurrences would seem to be a red thread that runs through these anecdotes and indeed a few of your other writings, most notably The Music of Chance.
PA: Of course, I’m attuned to these things, and the more they happen, the more alert I become to them. At the same time, the book is the result of a basic impulse to share these fascinating little anecdotes with other people.
IBS: There’s a contrast embedded in the stories, isn’t there, between the content, which is extraordinary, and the narration, which is simple. As you say, there’s not a single word too many. Story number nine in the American edition is a good example:
This story turns on contradiction and your attentiveness to ambiguity. As often before in your work, it leaves everything “stranded in the middle” between two truths.
PA: Two truths that are equal and opposite, yes.
IBS: Your interest in the nature of memory is vividly captured in the story about how, as a young boy, you saved the little girl slipping on the ice in her mother’s high heels.
PA: After the book was published, I gave a reading at the University of Pennsylvania and a young man, a student, came up to me and said, “I’m the son of that woman. The girl you pulled out from under the car is my mother.” A beautiful moment—but I must admit that it made me feel old [laughs].
IBS: It tells us something about the “mechanisms of memory,” doesn’t it? You remember this as an act of heroism, whereas she has suppressed it completely. Or maybe, as you say, she wasn’t even aware that she was in danger.
PA: No, she wasn’t aware of it. We don’t remember most of the things that happen to us. Much of our life just vanishes.
IBS: So what is it that makes some memories stay with us and not others?
PA: Siri has done vast amounts of work on neuroscience and questions of memory. What she tells me, and what I’m convinced is true, is that emotion consolidates memory. If it’s just an ordinary occurrence in an everyday movement of your life, you’re not going to remember it. You don’t recall what you ate for dinner on April ninth thirty-six years ago. But if on that April ninth thirty-six years ago, your parents had a tremendous argument in front of you, or someone died, or you broke your arm, you might have a clear memory of what you ate that night. It’s possible. There must be something sufficiently powerful to make a deep impression on you. Then again, there are things I remember that seem entirely insignificant, and yet, there they are. Little scenes without much emotion to them that come back for no apparent reason. For example, a memory from about twenty years ago, when my good friends from Paris, Jacques Dupin, the poet, and his wife, Christine, were visiting New York. We spent a whole day together, and at one point we were in Chinatown standing on a street corner discussing where we wanted to go for dinner. I’m back at that corner frequently, just standing there with them, talking to my two friends. Why? I don’t know. I have no idea.
IBS: Our senses take us back to such moments.
PA: Smell, more than anything else for sure.
IBS: Sound, music, colors . . . they transport you straight into the past. Of course, it’s all connected to emotion, as you say.
PA: In The Red Notebook, I’m also interested in exploring things that don’t happen, that almost happened but didn’t. That’s why, in some sense, the most important story in the first sequence is the one about my father falling off a roof and not dying. In Sunset Park, Renzo, the novelist, tells Morris that he’s thinking of writing a book about “the things that don’t happen.” It’s a fascinating subject. For instance, how many times have two countries been on the verge of war and somehow managed not to go to war? In retrospect, historical events seem to be inevitable—but they’re not. It’s an endlessly debatable topic. Do individuals count in history, or is it some invisible social force that causes things to happen? These are fascinating questions. They apply both to the small lives of individuals and to large historical events.
IBS: This is relevant also to The Red Notebook, isn’t it: the individual, little story, the example, and then the general, big story.
PA: True enough. In the second sequence, “Why Write?,” which is all about children, there’s the story of that horrific experience I went through at the age of fourteen, when I was right next to a boy who was electrocuted by lightning and killed on the spot. It’s one of the most important things that has ever happened to me—perhaps the most important. It absolutely informs the way I think about the world. The arbitrary nature of things—one minute you’re alive, the next minute you’re dead. The pure randomness of it all. I never thought, in those early hours after it happened, “If it had been four seconds later, I would have been killed and he would be alive.” We were crawling under a barbed wire fence single file, and he was right in front of me. The bolt of lightning hit the fence and electrocuted him. I didn’t even know he was dead. I pulled him into the meadow after I had crawled through. I went on rubbing his hands for close to an hour as the rain poured down on us and the storm continued.
IBS: It must have been a shock to realize he was dead.
PA: I had never seen a dead person. His lips were turning blue, he was utterly still, but it never occurred to me that he wasn’t alive.
IBS: How did you react when you finally realized that he was gone?
PA: It wasn’t until a couple of hours later that we were all told that Ralph was dead. We were stunned. We were all stunned. I think this is important because I’ve had a very lucky life in so many ways. I haven’t gone hungry. No matter how impoverished I’ve been at times, I’ve always had a roof over my head. But more significantly, I’ve never lived through a war or an occupation by a foreign army. I’ve never been thrust into the kind of daily violence that corrupts your soul and destroys the very fabric of your being. But this day, it was like being in a war. It was just as if a comrade in the trenches had been shot.
IBS: So you’ve had a taste of disaster.
PA: I’ve had a taste of it. That’s right. There were, of course, some near-death experiences, I suppose, that could be mentioned in this connection. Most particularly the car crash in 2002, which I describe at great length in Winter Journal. I think that’s probably the closest I’ve come to dying, except for the lightning storm in 1961.
IBS: It puts things into perspective.
PA: Well, I don’t know if it puts things into perspective. It creates a new perspective. I’m interested in this question of accidents. That’s why the third section in The Red Notebook is called “Accident Report.” We have the word “accident,” which means “an unexpected thing that happens, usually with harmful results.” In another context, a philosophical context, “the accidental” refers to that which is not necessary. So every accident is something that doesn’t necessarily have to happen. It happens because of a confluence of circumstances. The slightest lapse of attention, the smallest distraction, and your life can be changed forever. An English friend of mine pulled into a gas station. He got out of the car, slipped on a puddle of oil, and broke his leg in several places. He’s going to suffer from that broken leg for the rest of his life. Just because he stepped on that bit of oil. Accidents can irrevocably affect your health, your well-being, even your sanity. One random movement, one split second—it can kill you. This interests me a great deal.
IBS: I was wondering about the chapter headings in The Red Notebook. “Accident Report,” I suppose, is self-explanatory, but what about “Why Write?” Why use a question as your title when you make no apparent attempt to provide an answer?
PA: It’s a bit of a joke. The last story, if you remember, is the one about Willie Mays. You won’t have any idea who he is, but Willie Mays was the single greatest baseball player of my lifetime, probably the greatest player who has ever lived. He was in the early days of his career when I was a little boy—and obsessed with baseball. He became an exalted, heroic figure for me, and the tragedy of not having a pencil when I met him and asked for his autograph had an effect on my young life. The whimsical conclusion is this:
After that night, I started carrying a pencil with me wherever I went. It became a habit of mine never to leave the house without making sure I had a pencil in my pocket. It’s not that I had any particular plans for that pencil, but I didn’t want to be unprepared. I had been caught empty-handed once, and I wasn’t about to let it happen again.
If nothing else, the years have taught me this: if there’s a pencil in your pocket, there’s a good chance that one day you’ll be tempted to start using it.
As I like to tell my children, that’s how I became a writer. (78)
[Laughs.]
IBS: Ah yes, of course [laughs].
PA: There’s a coda to the Willie Mays story. Initiated by the American writer Amy Tan, who happens to be (how strange!) the subject of the first story in “Accident Report.” I met her in the nineties through our mutual friend, Wayne Wang. I don’t know her well, but a number of years ago, in January 2007, Siri and I went to a writers festival in Key West, Florida. Amy was there. I hadn’t seen her in years, and I realized that I had never given her the book that contains the story about her. All our books were for sale at the auditorium where we were doing our talks and readings, so I bought a copy of The Red Notebook and gave it to her. She read it on the plane ride home, and she was very touched that I had put her in the book. She also read the Willie Mays story, and, as it turns out, Amy has some good friends who live next door to Willie Mays in the Bay Area, in a town outside San Francisco. As soon as she got home, she called her friends and said, “Go and buy Paul’s book. Then knock on Willie’s door and go in and read him the story.”
IBS: And they did?
PA: They did. And Willie just sat there.
IBS: That’s incredible.
PA: Yes. He had tears in his eyes and kept shaking his head, again and again, shaking his head and saying, “Fifty-two years, fifty-two years, fifty-two years.” Then he took out a baseball and signed it for me. On my sixtieth birthday, Amy presented me with this ball. On my sixtieth birthday I got the signature I had wanted fifty-two years earlier. Of course, it was no longer important to me, but I was moved by the gesture. The story finally had an ending. Strange. So very strange.
IBS: In the story of the impostor who wrote letters in your name you conclude:
That’s a fairly accurate summary of this little book, isn’t it?
PA: Yes, because there are no conclusions to be drawn. Things happen, and we don’t know why they happen. They don’t seem to make any sense. Hence the title of the last section, “It Don’t Mean a Thing.”