A LIFE IN WORDS

IBS: Moon Palace takes us on an epic journey through the inner and outer landscapes of young Marco Fogg. He nearly perishes in Central Park, he loses the woman he loves, he walks across America—and becomes a man. In the process, he discovers both his father and grandfather: Solomon Barber, the obese history professor who never recovered from his love for Marco’s mother, and the rambunctious old man in the wheelchair, Thomas Effing, whose turbulent life is told in the biography Marco is hired to write. It’s quite a tour de force combining elements from the bildungsroman, the American road novel, metafiction, and the frontier novel in one dense and complex book. It’s your first extended work of narrative fiction, isn’t it?

PA: The longest up to that point, in any case. I finished writing it in 1987, but the earliest versions of the book go back to 1968, with dozens of false starts and new beginnings over the next year or two. All the early versions must be in the library.³⁰ As I said earlier, Moon Palace and City of Glass were originally the same book. When I finally sat down and wrote City of Glass as it is now, I plundered material from the old manuscript. The same was true of the final version of Moon Palace.

PA: Each one evolved into its own narrative, and everything changed. Moon Palace is a circular book—three interconnecting stories about three generations of men.

IBS: Three generations making the same mistakes, as you’ve said somewhere. Three lonely men searching for a place to belong, mostly within themselves. They’ve all suffered losses, and they’re all orphaned. There’s a desire for origins here, isn’t there, a need to emerge from something that has formed you?

PA: I know the book sounds autobiographical, but it’s not. Almost nothing comes from my own life. Just a few incidental details, and even those are utterly transformed. The books Uncle Victor gives to Marco . . .

PA: That clearly refers to the books my uncle left behind in our house. You know that story. When he went to live in Italy, his library was stored in our attic and then, one day, my mother and I took the books downstairs and put them on shelves. Suddenly, I had a library! My parents didn’t read, but I did, by then I had become a passionate reader, and it was a tremendous resource to have those books in the house. Curiously, when I wrote about the books in Moon Palace, I wasn’t thinking about my uncle at all. It only occurred to me later that that in fact had been the inspiration for the episode. Another thing, a very small thing, comes from a friend of mine, a painter, someone I met on a ship going to Europe in 1965. As an opponent of the Vietnam War, he starved himself so he would flunk his draft physical. He lost tremendous amounts of weight. He told me later that when he went to the draft board, he was so skeletal that the doctor asked him, “Young man, have you had breakfast this morning?” My friend replied, “Doctor, do I look like someone who could go without breakfast?” [laughs]. I use that line in Moon Palace. It comes directly from my friend. After college, he went to live on the Navajo reservation that spreads across the Arizona-Utah border—in a town called Ojeto, which means “moon-over-the-water.” When I started writing Moon Palace, I wanted to go out West; I needed to explore, to feel the landscape. My friend went with me, and we spent about ten days wandering around that territory together. We visited Mr. and Mrs. Smith, who are described in the book. I just lifted them from life. She was Kit Carson’s granddaughter or great-granddaughter, and Smith was a fascinating character. He looked to me like the prototypical westerner and talked with a western accent—a little like an old Gary Cooper. It turned out he’d grown up in the same New Jersey town where I grew up and that we’d gone to the same high school. Later, he became a hoofer on Broadway. I was astonished. Imagine that, the old man of the West had been a Broadway dancer! He had completely reinvented his life. My friend and I also went to Lake Powell, rented a motorboat, and cruised around on the water. In the novel, of course, all of Effing’s paintings are submerged under that lake.

PA: Another autobiographical fact, which you probably remember from Hand to Mouth, concerns the novelist H. L. Humes, Doc Humes (one of the founders of Paris Review), who wound up staying at my apartment when I was a student. He was the mad writer who gave away money. That was the inspiration for what Effing does in the novel. I had actually witnessed Doc do this, handing out money to strangers in the street. You can imagine the astonishment! Especially the bums. Getting a fifty-dollar bill in 1969 would be like getting five hundred dollars today.

PA: He’d burst into a coffee shop, slap down fifty-dollar bills in front of everyone sitting at the counter, and shout, “Spread a little sunshine, spread a little sunshine!”

PA: No one does these things. There’s a good documentary about Doc Humes made by his daughter.³¹ I make an appearance in the film and talk about those excursions with Doc.

IBS: We get a very vivid impression of the 1960s in the novel: the moon landing, the Vietnam War, student life, glimpses of the city . . .

It functioned as a protective membrane, a second skin that shielded me from the blows of life. Looking back on it now, I realize what a curious figure I must have cut: gaunt, disheveled, intense, a young man clearly out of step with the rest of the world. But the fact was that I had no desire to fit in. (15)

PA: That’s another autobiographical thing [laughs]. When I went to Europe at eighteen, I bought myself a tweed suit in Dublin. It was the first time I’d bought a suit: a beautiful, thick Irish tweed, greenish with brown and dull-red flecks. I loved that suit so much that I wore it every day when I was a freshman at Columbia, and by the second year it had completely worn out. The seat of the pants had holes in it, the whole thing disintegrated. That’s the origin of the suit in the novel.

PA: It started with Kennedy’s speech. He announced that we were going to send a man to the moon. I was about to turn thirteen then, and so I grew up with the expectation that Americans would travel to outer space.

IBS: The moon symbolizes just about everything in the novel. In an interview you said:

The moon is many things all at once, a touchstone. It’s the moon as myth, as “radiant Diana, image of all that is dark within us”; the imagination, love, madness. At the same time, it’s the moon as object, as celestial body, as lifeless stone hovering in the sky. But it’s also the longing for what is not, the unattainable, the human desire for transcendence. And yet it’s history as well, particularly American history . . . But the moon is also repetition, the cyclical nature of human experience. (Collected Prose, 566)

PA: Yes, but you see, once you start thinking about something, you begin to make connections. I’ve described this associative mechanism as a kind of pinball machine, where one thing touches on another and then another and another, and soon you have an enormous system of interrelated references.

PA: I stayed in Chinatown for about two or three weeks in the late 1960s. What a strange place to live back then. Nobody spoke English. It was like being in another country. I tried to express that in the book as well. Also—and this is very interesting to me—the only man-made structure on earth that can be seen from space is the Great Wall of China. Or so I’ve read somewhere. I hope it’s true.

IBS: When Marco is delirious with hunger and loneliness, China, America, and the moon become intimately connected through his one view onto the outside world: the neon sign of the Chinese restaurant from which the novel takes its title:

I can’t be sure of any of it, but the fact was that the words Moon Palace began to haunt my mind with all the mystery and fascination of an oracle. Everything was mixed up in it at once: Uncle Victor and China, rocket ships and music, Marco Polo and the American West. (32)

IBS: Yes, there’s an interesting relationship between inner and outer worlds in Moon Palace. Marco’s room is very much the “site of inwardness” you describe in The Invention of Solitude and indeed the scene of radical divestment:

The room was a machine that measured my condition: how much of me remained, how much of me was no longer there. I was both perpetrator and witness, both actor and audience in a theatre of one. I could follow the progress of my own dismemberment. Piece by piece, I could watch myself disappear. (24)

PA: The inherited books stand in for Marco here, and they’re gradually sold off. That was an inspired piece of business, I must say, turning boxes of books into furniture.

Think of the satisfaction . . . of crawling into bed knowing that your dreams are about to take place on top of nineteenth-century American literature. Imagine the pleasure of sitting down to a meal with the entire Renaissance lurking below your food. (2)

IBS: [Laughs] It is. Why is Marco unable to leave that room? Why doesn’t he just go out and get himself a job? Why does he have to fall apart like this?

PA: Because it’s an experiment. He’s pushing himself beyond the limits of the rational. “I would turn my life into a work of art,” he explains,

sacrificing myself to such exquisite paradoxes that every breath I took would teach me how to savor my own doom. The signs pointed to total eclipse, and grope as I did for another reading, the image of that darkness gradually lured me in, seduced me with the simplicity of its design. (21)

Of course, there are many options open to him: scholarships, loans he could have taken to avoid disaster. He refuses to be helped. Marco is not a typical boy of the 1960s. He stands apart from everything—a complete eccentric. He’s not taking drugs, he’s not in the rock and roll world, he’s not plotting a revolution. He’s obsessively pursuing his own inner path, which is a strange and twisted one. He refuses. It’s an existential position, a categorical no to the world as it is.

PA: Exactly. He’s rebellious, but in an inward way, and to such a degree that he almost winds up killing himself. Then he’s rescued by the two people who love him most, Zimmer and Kitty. As you said the other day, love is the only thing that can catch you from falling, and once he’s been caught, he becomes more responsible. That’s the crucial next step in Marco’s development. The madness that initially took hold of him was a manifestation of grief. He’s entirely alone after Uncle Victor dies. Victor was his whole family.

IBS: For Marco, solitude is destructive. For Effing, however, seclusion is constitutive. He finds his true artistic perspective in a doubly isolated place: the hermit’s cage at the bottom of a blind canyon.

He had worked steadily for the past seven months at being alone, struggling to build his solitude into something substantial, an absolute stronghold to delimit the boundaries of his life, but now that someone had been with him in the cave, he understood how artificial his situation was. (176)

IBS: It’s interesting that we have grandson and grandfather both isolating themselves in order to either prove or achieve something. Effing produces the best paintings he has ever made. Of course, they are all lost under Lake Powell. No one will ever lay eyes on these fabulous works of art. Even so, he creates something new and wonderful in his solitary space. Marco, by contrast, disintegrates.

PA: Which means that their stories are actually different, doesn’t it? Then there’s Marco’s father. To me, the descriptions of Barber are among the most tender passages in the book. His unrequited love for Marco’s mother, Emily, the disgrace at the college, running off to Cleveland. We assume that Victor, who was working with the Cleveland Orchestra at the time, possibly saw Barber in that restaurant—devouring his food in a gluttonous frenzy to ease his pain.

IBS: Yes, that’s another stark contrast in the book: the son starves himself while the father tries to eat himself to death—more or less for the same reason.

His body was a dungeon, and he had been condemned to serve out the rest of his days in it, a forgotten prisoner with no recourse to appeals, no hope for a reduced sentence, no chance for a swift and merciful execution. (240)

So, we might say that all three generations are radically reclusive figures, each in his own way confined to a physical space: the son falls apart in his little airless room opposite the “Moon Palace”; the father is miserably alone trapped inside an obese body, the grandfather hides in the hermit’s cave. Then, Barber falls into an empty grave.

IBS: Over the years, you’ve placed several characters in graves and other types of underground seclusion: Walt in Mr. Vertigo, Owen Brick in Man in the Dark, Nick Bowen in Oracle Night.³²

PA: That’s true, and as we said the other day, there’s that moment in The Locked Room when the protagonist watches Fanshawe climb down into the open grave with the snow falling on top of him.

IBS: Moon Palace and Mr. Vertigo are sometimes referred to as your “frontier novels.”

IBS: If we stay with this metaphor, could we say that Marco probes the contours of his own inner territories, just as he discovers America on his trek across the country? Many frontiers are crossed in these processes: the West, space, manhood, fatherhood, love, sex.

IBS: The Western literary canon is also a discovery for Marco as he reads through Uncle Victor’s library:

It was almost like following the route of an explorer from long ago, duplicating his steps as he thrashed into virgin territory, moving westward with the sun, pursuing the light until it was finally extinguished. (22)

PA: Reading is certainly a discovery. Not least for Marco. In connection with Victor’s books, it also becomes a process of mourning:

As far as I was concerned, each book was equal to every other book, each sentence was composed of exactly the right number of words, and each word stood exactly where it had to be. That was how I chose to mourn my Uncle Victor. One by one, I would open every box, and one by one I would read every book. That was the task I set for myself, and I stuck with it to the bitter end. (21)

PA: No, he’s doing this as a kind of mad homage to his uncle. He wants to read the words his uncle read, every one of the words in every one of the books. It’s an emotional experience rather than an intellectual one. It’s a ritual he establishes for himself. It’s his form of secular prayer.

I could no longer see things for what they were: Objects became thoughts, and every thought was part of the drama being played out inside me. (54)

This is when the line between Marco’s inner and outer worlds is seriously destabilized. We’re not always sure which is more concrete.

IBS: The balance is restored later, isn’t it, after the Central Park experience when he nearly perishes but is “rescued by love.”

PA: This is when he begins to form a more solid self. I always thought of this book as a coming of age story—David Copperfield in twentieth-century clothing. Where the book ends is the beginning of his adult life. Now, he’s ready to be in the world. I don’t think anyone can fully grow up until he’s experienced the loss of a person he loves. You can’t really become human until your heart has been broken. And Marco’s heart is broken, but he’s building himself up again—partly by way of his journey across the West to California, where he finds meaning in the mere fact of walking.

IBS: Could we say that the rough experience of traversing one’s country on foot is instrumental in the forming of the individual self here? I think we realize this when Marco, completely absorbed in Blakelock’s painting, Moonlight, understands that “you cannot live without establishing an equilibrium between the inner and outer” (58).

PA: The Blakelock painting is central to the book. Again, it brings together all these themes: the Indians, the West, the moon, madness, the search for understanding—all of it. In the end, the book is an echo chamber.

IBS: Perhaps that’s why our discussion today keeps flying off in several directions at once [laughs]. More than with any of the other books.

PA: With all my books, I start with an idea about the story, often a vague idea, and then I inch my way forward—guided by intuition and gut feeling. This book, however, needed a plan. It was all in my head—never written down—but I knew what the progression was going to be. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. The crucial thing for any narrative is to present the information in the right order. Here all the elements are linked, and so it became imperative to think about sequence. I wanted to tell the entire story in the first paragraph and then have the rest of the book unpack those opening lines:

Little by little, I saw my money dwindle to zero; I lost my apartment; I wound up living in the streets. If not for a girl named Kitty Wu, I probably would have starved to death . . . From then on, strange things happened to me. I took the job with the old man in the wheelchair. I found out who my father was. I walked across the desert from Utah to California. That was a long time ago, of course, but I remember those days well, I remember them as the beginning of my life. (1)

IBS: As you said earlier, the story is mostly about Marco’s development. There are these wonderful instructive moments, for instance, when wheeling Effing around in the streets becomes

a process of training myself how to look at the world as if I were discovering it for the first time. What do you see? And if you see, how do you put it into words? The world enters us through our eyes, but we cannot make sense of it until it descends into our mouths. (122)

IBS: Yes, and again here, we see the intimate connection between walking and naming objects. Somehow, Marco’s steps pace his translation of the world into words for the allegedly blind man to “see.”

PA: In one of my earliest poems, the last line reads, “The song is in the step.”³³ It means that the rhythm of walking creates the rhythm of language. I go back to it in Winter Journal.

IBS: I think you return to this idea a few times: White Spaces, “The Book of Memory,” City of Glass . . .

PA: Always from a slightly different angle. My feeling is that the rhythm in the language of a book also creates meaning.

IBS: You’re saying that the rhythm in the sentences is not just aesthetic and meaning-making, it’s also physical?

PA: But it can’t be articulated. It’s part of the experience of reading, which is a physical experience as well as a mental and an emotional one. I would argue that the reader responds physically to what’s on the page: You hear the words in your mind, meanings are produced, images are formed. They’re generated by the words that go into your head. Then, something starts happening to you.

IBS: What, then, about silences and gaps? Both Effing and Marco learn to embrace blanks, each in his own way and with very different outcomes. Marco discovers that

the more air I left around a thing, the happier the results, for that allowed Effing to do the crucial work on his own: to construct an image on the basis of a few hints, to feel his own mind traveling toward the thing I was describing for him. (123)

This is important, isn’t it, because it allows the reader to become actively involved in the process of creation.

PA: It’s something I discovered myself. The more I wrote, the more I understood that what you leave out is just as important as what you put in. In my experience as a reader, I’ve always found it most pleasurable when the author writes in such a way that I become fully engaged. In other words, not everything should be told. There must be room for the reader to fill in the blanks. It’s more stimulating. In this way, the book is a collaboration between the writer and the reader, and, in a sense, every book is a different book for every person who reads it. You bring your own past, your own character, your own story to whatever text you read. There are writers who overwhelm you with too many words. There’s not enough space. They don’t let you in.

IBS: This is the valuable lesson of representation Marco learns as he struggles to describe everyday things to Effing, isn’t it? One of your best critics argues that Marco “learns to exult in gaps” and that it’s precisely in the spaces between word and object that we have “chances of innovation.”³⁴ Could it be that what you leave out is in fact the principal source of significance, because it activates the reader’s imagination and spawns meaningful images?

PA: I would say that the blanks and the words are equally important in this process. You need one to offset the other. They interact. The most important question in writing is: “What comes next?” I write one sentence; what will the next one be? How big a leap can I make? If you go too far, the text becomes incomprehensible. Flaubert does this extremely well, particularly in his late work, for example, Bouvard et Pécuchet. There are massive spaces between the sentences. It’s exciting because as a reader you must learn to jump—you’re leaping when you read Flaubert. As a writer, it’s thrilling to do something like this: “Gita put down her pen and stared at the table. Five years later, when she was in Vienna . . .” [Laughs] It’s a jolt, isn’t it? You mustn’t overdo it. Then it becomes a gimmick, and it’s tedious. But if you find the right way to pull it off, it can be electrifying.

IBS: So, the reader is invited to leap with you across these blanks, and meaning is produced in mid-air?

PA: There’s no question about it. As a writer, I want to efface myself and become invisible. As I’ve said in the past, my ideal would be to write a book so transparent that the reader would forget that the medium is language and take in the narrative as pure experience.

The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle to enter the thick of things. (170)

PA: Sometimes I have characters say the opposite of what I believe, but this passage corresponds to how I feel. It was the lesson I myself finally learned. When I was young, I wanted to make beautiful objects. That was the aspiration, but in the end I found it to be a self-defeating one. It must be the thing you’re attempting to paint or the object you’re trying to describe that takes precedence over anything else. It’s the material you want to capture on canvas or on a page of writing. The form will find itself. If there’s beauty in it, it’s not because you’re straining to create something beautiful. It’s because you’re straining to enter into the thing you’re doing. That would imply that the process is more important than the result, and yet as an artist you have to be concerned with results. So, you’re writing out of your guts, you’re writing out of your unconscious, but at the same time it’s not pure savagery. It’s not all impulse. There’s a lot of art and craft involved in trying to do it right. This is why writers spend so much time polishing their sentences and their paragraphs. Writing is essentially rewriting.

PA: I think you teach yourself. No one can teach it to you. You learn through experience, but it doesn’t get easier. I’ve written all these books, and each time I think about a new one, I’m starting from scratch. I’m always at the beginning. I don’t know anything. My past experience doesn’t help.

IBS: Surely, you can draw on your knowledge of how to make sentences that work, building structures, forming characters, making leaps?

PA: I wonder. In any case, each time I start a new book, I’ve never written that book before. I’m going to have to teach myself how to do it as I go along. I have no formula to fall back on. The only change I’ve noticed over the years is that, when I was younger, if I came to a spot where I was blocked or confused or uncertain, I’d feel that the whole project was foundering. Now, I take it more calmly. If I’m stuck, it’s for a reason. Usually, it means that I have to rethink something or find a new way to push on. That’s a valuable lesson. Every book is different. Some books almost write themselves; for other books you have to grind out every sentence. The struggle doesn’t show on the page. The reader will never be able to tell. That’s the funny thing about it.

IBS: I see what you mean. Even if the reader is invited to participate, he or she is engaging with the result of your work, not the grinding process that preceded it.

PA: The effort all goes into making it look as though it didn’t require any effort at all: making it seem inevitable and having everything fall into the right place. You don’t want the reader to feel any hint of the labor you’ve put into the thing you’ve written. Even when I comment on this struggle inside my narratives, what you read is the result, not the work that went into achieving it. Moon Palace was a very long haul.

³⁰ The Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library.

³¹ Immy Humes’s documentary, Doc, won the International Literary Film Festival award in 2011 for a documentary film about literature.

³⁴ Steven Weisenburger, “Inside Moon Palace,” in Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster, ed. Dennis Barone (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995) 141.