A LIFE IN WORDS

PA: Winter Journal and Report from the Interior are a pair, a diptych. After finishing Winter Journal, I realized there were other things I wanted to explore—but from another point of view. If Winter Journal is essentially a book about the physical self, this one is more about inner life, inner development, thought, morality, aesthetics, politics, religion. All the things that go into making a person. That was my object, I think. At the same time, I’m not a dualist, and it would be wrong to say one is the “body book” and the other is the “mind book.” The perspective shifts, that’s all. Report from the Interior is probably the strangest book I’ve ever written.

IBS: Thematically, Report from the Interior revolves around peak moments of realization, and, as I see it, it’s very much your own personal history of epistemology in words and images. You point out that this is

not because you find yourself a rare or exceptional object of study, but precisely because you don’t, because you think of yourself as anyone, as everyone. (4)

I thought it’s precisely on this point that your autobiographical writing differs most distinctly from the traditions of the genre: you seek to describe—not the extraordinary, not the exceptional—but rather that which is ordinary, or simply human. For me, this is the principal appeal of Winter Journal and Report from the Interior.

PA: As I said earlier, I hope they can serve as an invitation for readers to unlock their own memories.

IBS: In the opening paragraph you contemplate the difficulties of giving an accurate account of your mind “as you remember it from your childhood.”

PA: Yes, it was more difficult to write Report from the Interior than Winter Journal.

IBS: It must have been, and you did anticipate major difficulties, as I recall it.

PA: The first part is about a hundred pages long, and it goes up only to the age of twelve. The problem was that there was a lot of material that seemed important but which I’d mostly forgotten. I needed to concentrate on the things I remembered well in order to discuss them in enough detail. So many other things have vanished. I have no access to them. The first passages focus on the animistic thinking of early childhood. Oddly enough, I can still remember some of those thoughts. Hence, the opening words of the book:

In the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts, and even the clouds had names. Scissors could walk, telephones and teapots were first cousins, eyes and eyeglasses were brothers. The face of the clock was a human face, each pea in your bowl had a different personality, and the grille on the front of your parents’ car was a grinning mouth with many teeth. Pens were airships. Coins were flying saucers. The branches of trees were arms. Stones could think, and God was everywhere. (3)

Then there’s a leap into the next phase—of being six years old—when memories start to coalesce. Until then, I think we’re largely fragmentary beings, but a moment of self-awareness comes, self-consciousness, of being able to say to yourself: “I’m thinking the thought that I’m thinking.” This kind of reflection is very different from just thinking. Once you have the ability to look at yourself from the outside, memories become continuous and the narrative self begins. As time goes on, you lose much of it. Here, I try to bring up early school experiences of learning how to read and write. I found that some of my most vivid memories were of the foolish and ridiculous things I did, such as imitating the boy who didn’t separate his W’s. I don’t recall what it was like to do A and B and C and D, but I have a lucid memory of W. So I put it in the book. After this, I move into my first reading experiences and mention the books I liked. This is also the time in which moral development begins: analyzing moments of bad behavior—taking apart the radio, trying to chop down the tree. Then, there’s the sense of being an American, the discovery that I was Jewish, beginning to think for myself, saying, “Well, actually, if America is such a wonderful country, what about the Indians? What about the slaves?” Then, I’m moving toward the brink of adolescence. That awful time of being eleven and twelve, when you become obsessed with being part of the gang. We outgrow that, of course, or most of us do, but it’s a bad time. Then the exploration of hero worship, which is something fundamental to childhood, especially to boys. That was when the preoccupation with sports started for me. It was central to my whole existence back then. This was also the time when I became interested in films, and here I briefly discuss War of the Worlds. As I say, it was a kind of theological jolt because suddenly the all-powerful God was shown to have no power. That was a revelation, a mighty and enduring experience.

PA: Not really. As I say in the book, my parents were not religious, but they sent me to Hebrew school when I was nine because that was the thing to do. It was no fun being chained to another desk three times a week, but I don’t regret it. It was another formative experience.

IBS: Report from the Interior revolves around these peak moments of realization and describes how you acquire knowledge about yourself and the world. In this process of exploring what you call “the internal geography of your boyhood,” you discover that

your parents had no idea what they were doing, that the fortress most couples try to build for their children was no more than a tumbledown shack, and therefore you felt exposed to the elements, unprotected, vulnerable—which meant that in order to survive it was essential that you toughen up and figure out a way to fend for yourself. (46)

That’s essential, too, isn’t it? You “felt unprotected, vulnerable” and had to rely on yourself.

PA: There was something deeply vacant about our family life—to a shocking degree, actually. There were exceptions, of course. Good moments. It wasn’t all bleak, but mostly it was. I had to find a life for myself outside the family—in school, with my friends. That was the road to survival. I couldn’t let myself be crushed by the miseries of home—no, I had to find another way.

IBS: You say that there was a need to retreat from all this unhappiness, and solitude became your home base as well as your starting point.

PA: It’s in those states of boredom and loneliness that you think about things. You lapse into dreamy, wistful speculations about the world, ideas come to you that wouldn’t come to you in any other way. Even though you’re feeling unhappy, these moments of emptiness can be very productive.

IBS: Revisiting such painful places can be difficult, and I was wondering whether writing this book brought a measure of clarity. Did it heal old wounds? Was there a therapeutic effect to the process?

PA: As I said earlier in connection with The Invention of Solitude, while you’re writing, it seems to have a cleansing effect. Once you finish, however, nothing has changed. These memories are not deeply painful. When my friend’s grandfather kicked me out of their house in anger, I was upset, but looking back on it now, I understand exactly what happened. I was shaken at the time, but it doesn’t disturb me now.

PA: No, and even the last passage in the first part, where I’m breaking down in front of my English teacher in the seventh grade when he falsely accuses me of lying . . .

PA: Horrible, yes, because we all have an idea about justice, and to tell the truth and not be believed is about the worst injustice there is.

IBS: Well, if he’s still alive, perhaps he’ll write back to you and apologize. Then, as with the story of Willie Mays in The Red Notebook, the circle will be completed.

PA: I can tell you another thing about this teacher: he was a great believer in the virtues of public speaking, so we were often assigned to write speeches and deliver them to the class. His evaluation of me was: “You have a terrible voice, never speak in public.”

PA: Yes. My voice was changing then, and I must have been a little squeaky. But you know, even now, every time I go on the radio I think about that teacher telling me, “You shouldn’t be doing this.” I also record all my own work for audiobooks. I enjoy reading aloud, really enjoy it. But every time I do one of those recordings I think about that teacher.

PA: Anyway, these seem to be fundamental stories. Stories we all have. Memory consolidated by emotion, as we said in connection with Winter Journal. That’s essentially the first part of Report from the Interior.

IBS: In part one, “Report from the Interior,” you briefly describe your first appearance as a writer when reading your own work out loud in primary school. After that, in “Two Blows to the Head,” you give massive attention to two films: The Incredible Shrinking Man, which you saw at the age of ten, and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, at fourteen. You devote twenty or thirty manuscript pages to each of these films. I realize that they truly gave you a “blow to the head,” but I’m thinking there must have been other things, books, for instance, that influenced your mind just as much.

PA: The thing is, I didn’t read many good books when I was young. Literature came later for me. When I was small, I read stupid sports novels, stories about baseball players and watered-down biographies of famous people. I didn’t read anything truly memorable until I was around fourteen. Films had a bigger impact on me than books at the time. They changed me. I was absolutely overwhelmed by The Incredible Shrinking Man when I was ten. And the fact is, I’ve always been terribly interested in movies.

PA: My appetite for films has been undiminished since childhood. I seriously thought about becoming a filmmaker when I was twenty. During my time as a student in Paris, I wrote a screenplay and was considering going to film school, shifting into film and not becoming a writer. As I said to you the other day, I was very shy then, and I couldn’t talk in front of people. How would I be able to direct a movie if I couldn’t speak? So I gave up the idea.

IBS: Part three, “Time Capsule,” opens a door to an interesting time when you were in your early twenties at the university, traveling, experimenting with your writing. It’s also the time in which you wrote hundreds of pages of fiction, some of which ultimately went into the three novels City of Glass, In the Country of Last Things, and Moon Palace.

PA: The early incarnations and rough drafts of things I later rewrote and published. All those manuscripts are sitting in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library now—at least the ones that weren’t lost.

IBS: You say that, however much you tried, you were incapable of writing a novel when you were twenty. You were too young.

PA: There are exceptions, of course, but very few people can do it at that age. Since writing a novel is such a long process, you have to have grown into your own way of writing. You must have your own style, your own approach to things, and it takes a long time to acquire that. Many young people can write short stories. I wrote them when I was a teenager, but then I began thinking about longer forms. It was too soon, and I wasn’t ready.

IBS: The fragments or anecdotes, as you sometimes call them, in The Red Notebook, they’re not short stories?

IBS: Sure [laughs]. What’s the story behind the letters to your ex-wife, Lydia Davis?

PA: Not long after I started writing Report from the Interior, Lydia contacted me. She was planning to sell her papers to a library, and it turned out that she had saved most of the letters I had written to her. The letters themselves, the physical letters, belonged to her, but the words belonged to me. That’s the law. No one can publish anything from those letters without my permission, but she has the right to sell the physical objects. So, she wanted me to go through them and see if I wanted anything sealed off. Incredibly enough, there were five hundred pages.

PA: “Oh dear” is right. I read through my own letters and felt I was encountering a stranger, a boy I only vaguely knew and had completely lost sight of.

PA: It’s astonishing that she kept them. Anyway, I decided to use extracts from the letters written between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two in this book. Most of those early letters were dashed off very quickly, they tend to be rather sloppily written, in fact. Even so, there are some flashes of not altogether horrible writing.

PA: A portrait of a young man in a time of turmoil—and also of a young person trying to become a writer. Nearly all the personal stuff is left out. Who cares about the romantic dramas of my late boyhood? I don’t even care about them myself anymore. What matters is that it was the late 1960s, and every second it seemed as if the world was about to blow up.

IBS: There’s Columbia, too, and the student uprising. This is historical material. I was wondering why you decided to report it through fragments extracted from letters written to your girlfriend at the time rather than as an eyewitness account? I mean, this is important stuff.

IBS: In “Time Capsule” we also get a glimpse of the ideas that had a formative effect on you. You were interested in philosophy and you come back to this paradox: “The world is in my head. My body is in the world” (192).¹⁹ Here, you conclude that Merleau-Ponty influenced you more than any other philosopher with his “vision of the embodied self.” Why is that? It affected you then, but can you see the effects of it in your writing later on? Does it play into your notion of the interconnection of language and body?

PA: Merleau-Ponty was the one philosopher I read who seemed to integrate mind and body at the profoundest levels, the one philosopher who was not a dualist. So it felt truer to me, more valid and more connected to the way I thought about reality. We gravitate toward the things that seem right to us. I read a lot of philosophy: Kierkegaard, Sartre, Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Descartes, Pascal, Marx, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, and all the pre-Socratics. I was obsessed with Heraclitus. When I think about it now, it’s astonishing how much I read. I was eating books. Every day. I devoured them. I don’t read that much anymore. I can’t.

IBS: Surely, reading all that classical philosophy and existentialism and what came after must have influenced your thinking in some ways.

IBS: What about the paradox: “The world is in my head. My body is in the world”?

PA: I was just twenty years old when I wrote that—all the way back in 1967—but I think I explain it in Report from the Interior:

You still stand by that paradox, which was an attempt to capture the strange doubleness of being alive, the inexorable union of inner and outer that accompanies each beat of a person’s heart from birth until death. (192)

That’s it. We perceive the world. The world is our idea. We can only see the world to the extent that we can perceive it. In other words, the world is somehow a construction of our imagination, but at the same time, we’re concrete beings who occupy space. We have bodies, and we’re in the world that we perceive. So it’s a paradox. I think those two sentences capture the essence of what I’ve been trying to do all my life.

IBS: Part four, “Album,” is not just a pictorial accompaniment to your memories, is it? I mean, it opens to an alternative world where images from films, cartoons, and historical scenes were as real to you as people of flesh and blood. This is where cartoon figures like Farmer Gray and Felix the Cat truly exist. You describe the early realization that

The real is so defiantly at odds with the imagined, you can’t help feeling that a nasty trick has been played on you. (9)

In several of your novels, characters, narrators, even the author (whoever he is), cross effortlessly between different worlds, and I was wondering whether this disappointment might have prompted some of your shifts between the “real” and the “imagined” inside the fiction?

PA: In the case of the cartoons, I imagined the world as one thing, but then I saw that it was something else. I couldn’t absorb it. It was an infinitely receding reality. TV, I knew, was not real. It was just images of something familiar and real. For me cartoons were the same. I just couldn’t understand that cartoons were images of images rather than images of things. You saw a human being on TV, and you knew there was a human being in the studio. Ergo, if you saw a cartoon, the cartoon character had to be in the studio as well.

IBS: You weave your considerations about writing into the book itself and lay bare these thoughts about how to begin to revisit the terrain of your childhood mind:

Dig up the old stories, scratch around for whatever you can find, then hold up the shards to the light and have a look at them. Do that. Try to do that. (5)

PA: I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into, and I felt that this debate with myself about what I was proposing to do was a natural part of the book.

IBS: Here it means, of course, that you have, side by side, the perspective of the mature author, the adult mind of Paul Auster, accompanying that of the very young boy. There’s a lot of humor in that relation.

Until you were five or six, perhaps even seven, you thought the words human being were pronounced human bean. You found it mystifying that humanity should be represented by such a small, common vegetable, but somehow, twisting around your thoughts to accommodate this misunderstanding, you decided that the very smallness of the bean was what made it significant, that we all start out in our mother’s womb no larger than a bean, and therefore the bean was the truest, most powerful symbol of life itself. (11–12)

[Laughs] You twist around the things you don’t understand in order to make sense of them. Errors compounding errors.

Once I thought that art should be . . . divorced from society . . . Once I wished to live with my back turned to the world. I see now that this is impossible. Society, too, must be faced—not in the purity of contemplation, but with the intention of acting. But action, when generated from an ethic, often frightens people . . . because it does not seem to have a one-to-one correspondence to its intention. (250)

PA: I was struggling to resolve the conflict between politics and art, trying to figure out how to justify being an artist at a moment when it seemed imperative to act. There were two examples on my horizon: socialist realism in the Soviet Union, which was bankrupt, and the Surrealists in France, who had tried to combine avant-garde literature with political activism. Clearly, I was interested in the Surrealists. In fact, the first book I ever published was A Little Anthology of Surrealist Poems, translations of Breton, Éluard, Artaud, and half a dozen other poets.

The social revolution must be accompanied by a metaphysical revolution. Men’s minds must be liberated along with their physical existences—if not, any freedom obtained will be false & fleeting. Weapons for achieving & maintaining freedom must be created. This means a courageous stare into the unknown—the transformation of life . . . ART MUST POUND SAVAGELY ON THE DOORS OF ETERNITY . . . (250)

PA: Yes, because I was so emphatic, so emphatic that I wrote it in capital letters. I kept it in, but I don’t understand it.

IBS: “This means a courageous stare into the unknown—the transformation of life.” This is big stuff.

God was the commander of the celestial mind police, the unseen, all-powerful one who could invade your head and listen to your thoughts, who could hear you talking to yourself and translate the silence into words. (12)

PA: I didn’t explore this business as fully as I might have. I just didn’t want to. It made me weary just to think about it. But you’re right, after being thrust into Hebrew school and having gone through my bar mitzvah, I did start to take an interest in Judaism around the time I was thirteen. I wasn’t sure if I believed in God. I wasn’t even sure whether religion was important. I was filled with all the questions young people ask. I actually continued after my bar mitzvah for about a year and even switched synagogues because I wanted something more serious. The rabbi there was a terrific man, Theodore Friedman. We had one-on-one conversations every week for about eight months. He would give me things to read and we discussed them. I was so lucky to have such an intelligent man to listen to me and talk things out with. I was probably about fourteen when I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t for me. I couldn’t believe in God, I didn’t want to practice any religion. Friedman was a good enough person to wish me well—and to let me go without an argument.

IBS: Here, I thought, perhaps we also find part of the reason why you often downplay the fact that, actually, you do have a kind of Jewish background. Your parents, you say,

were simply Americans who happened to be Jews, thoroughly assimilated after the struggles of their own immigrant parents, and therefore in your mind the notion of Judaism was above all associated with foreignness. (68)

We see this Jewish “foreignness” reflected, for instance, in Timbuktu, don’t we? You continue,

Jews were invisible, they had no part to play in American life, and they never appeared as heroes in books or films or television shows. (70)

[T]o be a Jew was to be different from everyone else, to stand apart, to be looked upon as an outsider. And you, who until then had seen yourself as thoroughly American, as American as any Mayflower blue blood, now understood that there were those who felt you didn’t belong, that even in the place you called home, you were not fully at home. (72)

PA: When I was young, anti-Semitism was still rampant in America. Less so today, but it’s still with us. It will always be with us.

IBS: You also say that being Jewish had little to do with religion and came to signify

a history of struggle and exclusion that culminated in the disasters of World War II, and that history was all that concerned you. (73–74)

PA: Yes, pretty much. I feel connected to the history but also to many of the ideas. Let’s not sell it short, after all. Much of Jewish thought is thoroughly revolutionary. The idea of the Sabbath, for example. The Sabbath was for slaves as well as for free people, the first instance in human history when the high and the low were looked upon as equals. And if there was such a thing as justice, it had to be justice for all people. Think of the Book of Jonah, the only prophetic book written in the third person, that little comic tale, which is read on the darkest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur. Why this particular book? It’s because the message of Jonah is that you can’t have justice for just one people and not for all. It’s an overwhelming idea. In Christianity, it seems to me, if you’re going to be a good and serious Christian, you have to turn yourself into a saint. The golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Do you know how hard it is to live like that? The Jewish idea is the opposite: don’t do unto others what you don’t want them to do unto you. This strikes me as a much more plausible way to negotiate your way through the world than demanding near perfection.

IBS: In Report from the Interior, you talk about watching these “clusters of old Jews huddling in the darkness around ‘Old Country’ singers,” and it “filled you with dumb despair.” You say it was like

stepping among corpses, dead things, which I had known only from hearsay, now confronted for the first time. (258)

Yesterday, you told me it was the first time you saw those Ashkenazis. I was wondering why you associated them with something of the past only, an ominous past of “corpses” and “dead things”? It’s because of World War II, isn’t it?

PA: That and the oppression of the Jews, yes. I had grown up in a different kind of Jewish world, a suburban Jewish world, and I had never encountered these people. So it was a bit surprising. All this came back to me when I reread those old letters—written by a young man I can barely recognize anymore.

IBS: There is a line in a letter you wrote while in Paris in August 1967 that I think is pivotal in your work even today:

I have been writing. It makes me feel human. (207)

Becoming human is your gloss on Pinocchio, isn’t it? It’s a recurring notion in your work, and you’ve talked about becoming or remaining human in different contexts a few times in the course of these conversations, for instance, in connection with In the Country of Last Things you said that “the essence of the book is about how to remain human.”

PA: But that’s what all writing is about: how to find your own humanity and your connection to other human beings. I realize I’ve been writing seriously for fifty years now. It’s been a long journey. I’m much happier and feel more integrated when I’m working, when I’m writing, when I’m involved in a project. It’s not that writing is easy; it can be agonizingly difficult, but even the struggle is good. I sometimes ask myself, “Why do I do this? What’s the point of writing books, of spending my life in this way?” The only justification I’ve ever been able to come up with, the only thing that makes some sense to me, is that in order to write you have to give everything you have. It’s a total effort, and you have to expose yourself completely, you have to give and give and give. And you must put in a maximum effort every day. I think there are very few jobs in the world that ask so much of you. You can slide through in just about any other profession. You can rely on habits, you can be lazy, you can have days when you don’t need to make a maximum effort, whether you’re a lawyer or a doctor or a garbageman or a plumber. So, when I get up from my desk at the end of a day of work, even if I’ve accomplished nothing, even if I’ve crossed out every line I’ve written, I can at least get up and say, “I gave it everything I had. I’m exhausted, and I did the best I could.” Somehow, living at that level of intensity makes you feel human in a way that most other jobs don’t allow for.

¹⁸ This conversation took place in May 2013 on the basis of a manuscript version that did not include the “Album” of pictures. The book was published six months later.

¹⁹ “Report from the Interior” (unpublished manuscript), 154. It first appears in “Notes from a Composition Book” (1967) in Collected Poems, 203.