A LIFE IN WORDS

Winter solstice: the darkest time of the year. No sooner has he woken up in the morning than he feels the day beginning to slip away from him. There is no light to sink his teeth into, no sense of time unfolding. Rather, a feeling of doors being shut, of locks being turned. It is a hermetic season, a long moment of inwardness. The outer world, the tangible world of materials and bodies, has come to seem no more than an emanation of his mind. He feels himself sliding through events, hovering like a ghost around his own presence, as if he were living somewhere to the side of himself—not really here, but not anywhere else either. A feeling of having been locked up, and at the same time of being able to walk through walls. He notes somewhere in the margins of a thought: a darkness in the bones; make a note of this. (The Invention of Solitude, 78)

IBS: The first time I came to talk with you,¹⁴ you gave me a manuscript version of Winter Journal. I was very excited and sat in a bar half the night reading it. I didn’t have the confidence to say so at the time, but it kept reminding me of The Invention of Solitude. It has to do with tone and this slightly peculiar perspective on oneself. Am I completely off the mark here?

IBS: The first page of Winter Journal is very striking because of the many contrasts and shifts. You open with the second-person perspective and use the present tense throughout, whether you’re six years old, ten years old, or an adult. In the second paragraph there’s the cold floor, it’s winter, the trees are white. Then, in the next paragraph, you’re ten, it’s midsummer, it’s warm, you mention the trees in the backyard again, and you’re sweating . . .

Speak now before it’s too late, and then hope to go on speaking until there’s nothing more to be said. Time is running out, after all. Perhaps it is just as well to put aside your stories for now and try to examine what it has felt like to live inside this body from the first day you can remember being alive until this one. A catalogue of sensory data. What one might call a phenomenology of breathing. (1)

There are several things we should discuss here. One of them is the second-person perspective, or the choice to write in that way.

IBS: Yes, there’s quite a lot to say about that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an autobiographical work written in the second person.

IBS: That’s true, and you’ve used it in your own fiction: in part of Sunset Park Morris Heller writes his journal in the second person.

PA: In Invisible,¹⁵ too, there’s one part narrated in the second person. But in neither case a whole book. In Winter Journal, as in the sequel, Report from the Interior, we’re in the second person throughout.

IBS: Yes, the two are closely linked partly through this strangely angled autobiographical perspective, right?

PA: It’s important to stress that I don’t find my life to be exceptional in any way and that this is not an autobiography. It’s a book composed of autobiographical fragments shaped like a piece of music. It’s a poem rather than a narrative. One would normally write something like this from a first-person point of view. Had I done that, my own story would have been in central focus, and that’s not what I wanted to do. The third person was another option, but it seemed too distant for this particular book, which focuses on the body. Then there was the second person. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that its effect would be to open up a little space between myself and myself in which I could engage in a kind of intimate dialogue with myself. I wanted to look at myself from a distance—but only a small one, and the distance of the third person would have been too big. At the same time, I wanted to implicate the reader. In many ways, the book is an invitation to the reader to explore his or her own memories, to think about his or her own life. I hope it can serve as a sounding board for people to remember the kinds of things I’m remembering about myself in the book. We all have the memories of our bodies. We’ve all been sick, we’ve all hurt ourselves, we’ve all felt joy, we’ve all tasted food we like. Everyone recalls these experiences. It’s part of being human. Time is a strange factor here, and by using the same tense through all the chronological shifts, I tried to produce a kind of simultaneity for the experiences I write about: the six-year-old boy is the same person, finally, as the sixty-four-year-old man.

IBS: That makes sense, and it explains the seamlessness of the shifts. Even if there’s a time difference of sixty years, it’s just a split second.

PA: I wrote this book in a kind of trance, and it came to me in the order you see in the final version. I didn’t map it out. I made a little list of some of the things I wanted to examine, but the order never changed. It was there from the beginning. The music was in my head, and I just transcribed it, so to speak. I’ve rarely felt so integrated with what I was writing. I’ve rarely had to struggle less with my material. Sometimes you’re digging through rocks to get to where you have to go, other times it’s as if you’re swimming. There’s a little phrase from the American painter Philip Guston that has always meant a lot to me: “Years and years of struggle for a few moments of grace.” This book was like that for me. It was written in just three or four months.

IBS: In the paragraph you quoted a moment ago, there’s a pronounced urgency: “Speak now before it’s too late.” Why is that?

PA: Because I’m getting old, and I don’t know how much time I have left. If I’d put this off for a couple of years, maybe I wouldn’t have been around to do it. It’s very strange to become as old as I am now.

IBS: You also urge the addressee—“you”—to “put aside your stories for now and try to examine what it has felt like to live inside this body.” Is Winter Journal entirely autobiographical, or are there elements of autofiction? Is there anything invented, anything deliberately invented?

PA: No, not at all. In the five autobiographical works I’ve written so far, the effort in every case has been to be as accurate as possible, not to cheat. I think cheating would vitiate the whole project, make it meaningless. It’s as if you make a pact with the reader and say, “I’m telling you the truth as I remember it. I know there are probably inaccuracies in here, but they’re not intentional.” I couldn’t proceed in any other way. A long time ago,¹⁶ we were talking about memoirs and how it’s impossible to recall conversations from fifty years ago accurately. When people claim to remember exactly what was said, they’re merely using the conventions of popular fiction to embroider their lives. I find those works dishonest. It’s really a moral problem, isn’t it, if you lie and insist you’re telling the truth.

IBS: [Laughs] You provide several lists of detailed autobiographical information here in Winter Journal: your favorite foods, schools, places you’ve traveled to, the scars on your body, and roughly fifty pages on the twenty-one places where you’ve lived during your life. Interestingly, you combine the factual data with sensuous impressions in almost equal measure. Why give this rich information in the form of lists rather than weave it into the prose?

PA: I think there’s a kind of lyrical force to these lists that harmonizes with the tone I wanted to create with the prose. It’s essentially a book about the body, but not one hundred percent. This inventory of dwelling places is justified because those are the places that have sheltered my body from the elements. So there’s a reason to include it. The same goes for the sections about my mother, because it was in her body that my body began, and so, it seemed right and proper to talk about her. The passages about her are at the very center, right in the middle of the book.

IBS: Yes, The Invention of Solitude focused on your father, but here in Winter Journal you give us a vivid portrait of your mother:

There were three of her, three separate women who seemed unconnected to one another, and as you grew older and began to look at her differently, to see her as someone who was not just your mother, you never knew which mask she would be wearing on a given day. At one end, there was the diva . . . In the middle, which was far and away the largest space she occupied, there was a solid and responsible being . . . At the other end, the extreme end of who she was, there was the frightened and debilitated neurotic. (140–141)

PA: Earlier, we talked about spectrum in a personality. My mother had a wide spectrum, and it was unclear which part of her was going to manifest itself at any given moment. It took me a long time—nine years after her death—to be able to write about her. Interestingly, I wrote about my father immediately after he died. I think the difference is that I had a more complex and troubled relationship with my father. With my mother there were none of those problems. She adored me from the minute I was born, and she always wanted the best for me. She was kind and generous. Very generous. My mother’s life, in effect, turned out to be a sad life. She was someone, it seemed to me, in spite of her neuroses and problems, who was born to be happy. She was always optimistic, never depressed. Her life took some crazy turns, and she suffered because of them.

IBS: It makes perfect sense to write about your mother and indeed to list homes and other key elements to do with the history of your body, but there’s data here about things that would not seem to be of equal importance, for instance, your favorite foods. I was wondering, why give this particular information rather than other things to do with the body like, say, your favorite garments or dances, performances, beautiful poems that have affected your body? Are there any criteria for the selection of these facts?

PA: No, these are the things that occurred to me as I was working on the project, things that seemed significant. This book is about what it feels like to sit in a chair or walk on grass. That’s the kind of thing I wanted to talk about. Very basic things. This is what I remember. That’s all.

IBS: In The Invention of Solitude you say, “Memory: the space in which a thing happens for the second time” (83). Here, in Winter Journal, you use the present tense throughout the book as if all these things are indeed “happening for the second time”: happening as you write and again, I suppose, as we read.

PA: Yes, events recur—if only in the mind. But I never thought about The Invention of Solitude while I was writing this book. I don’t go back and read my own work.

IBS: We keep coming back to The Invention of Solitude. Somehow it echoes through many of your books, doesn’t it?

PA: Well, as we said earlier, I do feel that it’s a primary source, the foundation of much of my later work. Writing down memories seems to make the events happen again. It also triggers discoveries. There’s something about the act of holding a pen in your hand, or, I guess, putting your fingers on a keyboard, and getting into the zone of language, that generates more language, that generates thoughts, sensations, memories, and ideas that can only occur while you’re writing. Without the pen in my hand, I don’t have the same thoughts. Curious.

IBS: Winter Journal highlights the physical dimension of life and makes tangible things that we normally consider to be immaterial. For instance, the list of your twenty-one homes is not just a list of facts: for each place you knit factual data together with memory, and memory, here, is triggered almost exclusively either by emotion (love, failure, loss, frustration, anxiety, and a rare triumph) or by the senses (sight, touch, and pain).

IBS: [Laughs] This identification of factual with sensory data, I think, is what makes Winter Journal such a wonderful book to read.

PA: As we know, place and memory are linked. Most memory systems use spatial representation. Cicero’s, Bruno’s, nearly all of them. I wasn’t interested in dredging up everything in Winter Journal, only the things that sprang to mind first because, somehow, as you say, the emotion is going to dominate.

IBS: How did you do it? Did you sit down, pen in hand, and say, “Okay, I want to project my mind into this flat where I used to live. Here is the room, this is the space, this is what it looked like, and then we’ll see what happens.”

PA: That’s right. “Then we’ll see what happens.” I never knew what I was going to find. That’s what made this such an interesting book to write. And also why I called it a journal—and not a chronicle or a history.

IBS: What makes it interesting, I think, is this marriage between place, emotion, and sensory data. As elsewhere in your writing, rooms offer protection and you place your body, often in motion, inside these spaces:

Your body in small rooms and large rooms, your body walking up and down stairs, your body swimming in ponds, lakes, rivers, and oceans, your body traipsing across muddy fields, your body lying in the tall grass of empty meadows, your body walking along city streets, your body laboring up hills and mountains . . .

Enclosures, habitations, the small rooms and large rooms that have sheltered your body from the open air. (224–225)

PA: That’s right. This is the body in motion. Then we come to rest inside the habitations, the enclosures. I’ve written very little while sitting outdoors. Some writers prefer that, sitting outside with their notebook or typewriter. Many people write in outdoor cafés or at the beach; on the porch of their house or in the garden. I’ve never done that. I sometimes jot things down on the subway or even walking down the street. Not often, but it does happen. In general, however, I’ve always done my writing indoors . . .

IBS: Have you thought about why that is? Do you need to have a roof over your head, four walls, to contain something?

PA: Probably, yes, I think so. It’s as if the room is a body, and the body inside the room is the brain. A curious kind of doubling effect.

IBS: The intimate connection between writing and physical movement is prominent in Winter Journal also:

In order to do what you do, you need to walk. Walking is what brings the words to you, what allows you to hear the rhythms of the words as you write them in your head. One foot forward, and then the other foot forward, the double drumbeat of your heart. Two eyes, two ears, two arms, two legs, two feet. This, and then that. That, and then this. Writing begins in the body, it is the music of the body, and even if the words have meaning, can sometimes have meaning, the music of the words is where the meanings begin. You sit at your desk in order to write down the words, but in your head you are still walking, and what you hear is the rhythm of your heart, the beating of your heart. (224–225)

PA: There is a rhythm in walking, a binary rhythm, as with so many things that pertain to the human body: two eyes, two hands, two legs, two feet, and the heartbeat, which is a kind of thump-thump, thump-thump. Walking seems to create a rhythm that is conducive to the production of language, especially, of course, poetry. In “Conversation about Dante,” Mandelstam argues that Dante’s poetry mimes the rhythms of the human gait and then he asks this beautiful question: “I wonder how many pairs of sandals Dante wore out while writing The Divine Comedy.” Only a poet could have come up with that question. So much is churning inside me while I write that I find it difficult to sit still for long. I get up and pace around the room a lot, and just that, the act of moving around, the act of walking, seems to generate the next gust of words. Writing is an intensely physical activity for me; not only am I holding the pen or typing on the typewriter, which are material objects, I’m also moving around, as if building up momentum for the next round with the pen or typewriter.

PA: When I first learned about them as a student, I thought, “This makes sense to me.” But then, the real words can only come from the act of pressing the pen against the page. It’s not as though I’m thinking of words when I walk around. I’m just thinking of what I’m doing, seeing pictures in my head.

PA: No, I’m dreaming with my eyes open. Somehow, as I move around the room, it’s easier for these things to come to me than when I’m sitting down. I don’t know why.

IBS: It makes sense. So that’s why you always say that “writing begins in the body.” It is the “music of the body” that produces meaning for you?

IBS: And then you sit down to write. This is precisely what you describe in White Spaces and The Invention of Solitude.

PA: It’s interesting how White Spaces keeps coming back in these conversations. Eight little pages. However minor or unimportant those pages are, they were a new beginning for me.

IBS: It’s a piece only a few people have read. Remember when I asked you to read it in Copenhagen in 2011? Most of the people in the audience didn’t know it, even if they were readers of your work. Now it has come back into focus in more ways than one.

¹⁶ In the conversation on The Invention of Solitude in November 2011. This conversation took place in May 2013.