A LIFE IN WORDS

No one can say where a book comes from, least of all the person who writes it. Books are born out of ignorance, and if they go on living after they are written, it’s only to the degree that they cannot be understood. (36)

IBS: Leviathan is more explicitly political than your other books. It tells the story of Benjamin Sachs’s astonishing route to anarchism. His fall off a fire escape on the Fourth of July triggers what becomes a quest for moral integrity where the personal history and the history of America interconnect. It seems to me that there’s a new kind of realism here, a new take on ambiguity, which, I hope, we’ll talk about. But first, are there are any autobiographical elements in Leviathan?

PA: Yes, there are. One element is the fall from the fire escape. I wrote about it in The Red Notebook, story number twelve. My father fell off the roof of a building when I was a boy. His fall was broken by a clothesline, and he was saved. The image of my father tumbling through the air—in all likelihood falling to his death—haunted my childhood and has continued to stay with me in the years since. That’s one thing. Another thing is that a crucial aspect of the novel began as an idea for a film. Around 1989 or so, I was contacted by the British director Michael Radford, who said he would like to collaborate with me on a movie project. He told me about a friend of his, the French artist Sophie Calle—someone I had never heard of at that point—and a work she had made about a lost address book. I think you know the story: someone lost the book, she chanced upon it lying on a street in Paris and decided to talk to everyone listed in it in order to make a portrait of the owner—in absentia. Over the next month, she published daily interviews with the people she managed to track down in the newspaper Libération (along with photographs of them). The owner of the lost address book was abroad during most of that month, and when he returned to Paris and discovered what was going on, he was so furious that he threatened to sue her unless she published her own picture in the newspaper—naked. She did it, and that was the end of the story. An intriguing bit of business, I thought, which possibly could lead to something, and so I agreed to explore it with Michael. We came up with an outline for a film—something quite sexy and steamy, I’m afraid, which didn’t go down well with producers and was rejected everywhere—but by then the character I had invented for the film, Maria Turner, was so fully formed that I integrated her into the novel I had been dreaming about for the past year or so. I had met Sophie Calle by then, and when I asked her if I could appropriate some of her real works for my fictional character, she said yes. That explains the little note at the beginning of Leviathan: “The author extends special thanks to Sophie Calle for permission to mingle fact with fiction.”³⁸

PA: Yes, they’re my initials, and Iris is Siri spelled backward. Iris was the protagonist of Siri’s first novel, The Blindfold, which came out the same year as Leviathan. I imagined a kind of transfictional marriage between her character and mine. I wanted to use my initials because Siri had played with her own name for her character. They’d be married. It would sort of be us, and then, of course, it wouldn’t. It was a little homage to my wife.

PA: There are other autobiographical elements: I did see the celebration for the centenary of the Statue of Liberty from the window of someone’s house in Brooklyn. It was a big party similar to the one I describe in the book. There’s Columbia University, where Fanny and Aaron study, and Aaron was in France just the way I was. None of this is terribly significant. However, I did one thing with this novel I haven’t done with any of the others: I used the place where much of it was written (Vermont) directly in the story.³⁹ It’s probably of little interest to the reader, but I was fascinated by the idea of imagining my characters right there, in the same space where I was working. The house in Vermont in the story is the house where we were staying while I was writing the book. There I was, in that little shack,⁴⁰ writing at the green table, fictionalizing the real right in front of my eyes. Usually, I write from memory or imagination, but there the concrete world was turned into a phantom world. It had a strange, vibrating quality to it. Eerie.

IBS: Of course, in the book, you have the narrator, bearing your initials, move into this “real” house in Vermont, which, in the fiction, belongs to your central character. Peter Aaron here has an experience similar to the one you’ve just described:

[I]t barely crossed my mind that I was sitting in the same chair that Sachs used to sit in, that I was writing at the same table he used to write at, that I was breathing the same air he had once breathed. If anything, it was a source of pleasure to me. I enjoyed having my friend close to me again, and I sensed that if he had known I was occupying his old space, he would have been glad. (218–219)

IBS: As far as I can tell, there are a couple of echoes from the three novels that preceded Leviathan.

“Or, as my grandmother once put it to my mother: ‘Your father would be a wonderful man, if only he were different.’”(82)

PA: It comes up again in Winter Journal, also in the script of Blue in the Face. I have Violet say to herself: “Auggie would be such a wonderful person, if only he were different” [laughs]. I think it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard about marriage: perfectly understandable—but ridiculous: “You’d be great if you weren’t yourself” [laughs]. I’d forgotten that I’d used it in Leviathan.

IBS: Is there an echo also of The Locked Room? I’m thinking of the way in which both narrators obsessively follow their best friend on what appears to be entirely aimless walks in the hope of detecting something—which, of course, they don’t.

Sachs wandered around the streets like a lost soul, roaming haphazardly between Times Square and Greenwich Village at the same slow and contemplative pace, never rushing, never seeming to care where he was. (125)

PA: Biography is something that interests me, and it comes up fairly often in my novels: one person writing the story of another. Leviathan is a good example of that. So is Moon Palace. So is The Locked Room. They’re all books about friendship fraught with emotion, love, and worry. Male pairs: one of our recurring themes. In Moon Palace, Marco Fogg, the biographer as it were, is the protagonist of the book. Here in Leviathan, it’s the opposite: the subject is a smaller character than the object. Aaron is less present and much less interesting than Sachs. Nick Carraway telling the story of Gatsby was a major source of inspiration here.

PA: Yes, Aaron is a flawed witness. There’s so much he doesn’t know or understand. Even though he’s trying his best to tell the whole story, there are many blanks he can’t fill in. He’s earnest and has good intentions, but, finally, he’s not up to the task.

IBS: Leviathan is firmly set in the political and cultural climate of America between 1950 and 1990, and this context is very important. Would it be fair to say that disillusionment with modern America is the principal determining factor in the shaping of the central character, Benjamin Sachs? You use Emerson’s “Every actual State is corrupt” as the epigraph of the book, and Sachs suggests in the novel he wrote that

America has lost its way. Thoreau was the one man who could read the compass for us, and now that he is gone, we have no hope of finding ourselves again. (38–39)

PA: It’s really a novel about my generation and what we went through during those years; the war in Vietnam being the central, burning issue. Every young man had to make a decision about where he stood because everyone was going to be drafted into the army. If you were against the war, as so many of us were, it was an impossible choice: prison or exile. Sachs is a highly principled person. He’s willing to put his ideas on the line, and so he goes to jail for a year and a half. That early experience determines who he becomes for the rest of his life. As things fall out, he begins writing his book in prison. It’s a kind of historical novel, but then he loses interest in fiction and becomes an essayist, writing about many different subjects—always with strong political opinions.

IBS: So, his political views were formed against this background. Was it similar to yours?

PA: It’s the background of our whole generation. Fortunately, I didn’t have to go to prison for my views. By the time I wrote Leviathan in 1990 and 1991, we’d had eight years of Reagan and were already two years into Bush One. Ten years of right-wing leadership. It was terrible—the dismantling of everything we had fought for in the sixties.

IBS: Leviathan begins on the Fourth of July 1990 and curls back to its key event on the same date four years earlier on the eve of the hundredth anniversary of the Statue of Liberty. Sachs is very much a product of this time, as you say, and his story is intimately linked to the grand American icon of freedom. I was wondering whether we can see him as an embodiment of contemporary America? He refers to himself as “America’s first Hiroshima baby” and his family background is truly a melting pot: his mother’s family came to America “because of Sir Walter Raleigh” (the Irish potato famine), and his father because of “the death of God” (Russian pogroms). This is a strange, roundabout sort of logic, which is also very funny.

IBS: At the same time, there’s that kind of American virtue about him: “he seemed to live in a state of perfect innocence” (50)—in a belated sort of Henry Jamesian way.

PA: Two things about Sachs: he’s an enthusiast, and he’s pure. He’s not competitive in the way the rest of the society is. He’s like a big child, he’s kind, funny, hardworking. He loves his wife and his friend. There’s nothing devious about him.

IBS: These qualities also characterize his writing, don’t they? Leviathan is named after Sachs’s unfinished novel. Aaron describes it in these terms:

Sachs was on to something remarkable. This was the book I always imagined he could write, and if it had taken a disaster to get him started, then perhaps it hadn’t been a disaster at all. (141)

I assume the title refers beyond Sachs’s abandoned manuscript to Hobbes’s notion of state absolutism and the tyranny and chaos associated with the biblical sea monster?

PA: It’s a direct reference to Hobbes’s notion of the state, and combined with the explicit references to Emerson in the text, it’s clear from the beginning that this book will be commenting on the political climate of the day.

PA: No doubt. The book talks directly about a series of real political events and ideas—anarchism for one, and environmental activism for another.

PA: I should mention another autobiographical element. When I was six years old, my mother and I went to the Statue of Liberty, accompanied by one of her friends and that woman’s two sons. As Sachs’s mother does in the novel, my mother insisted that I dress up for the occasion—which made me feel foolish and uncomfortable—whereas the two other boys had been allowed to wear blue jeans and T-shirts. More significantly, my mother did indeed have a panic attack or a vertigo attack or some kind of crisis inside the statue, and she tried to cover it up by making a game of going down the stairs sitting instead of standing. She suffered from vertigo after that. The experience of seeing my mother nearly go crazy inside the Statue of Liberty had an important impact on my thinking about the statue. I couldn’t separate the two things, couldn’t think about one without thinking about the other, and I’ve never been back since that day. But, of course, the Statue of Liberty has a political significance here as well:

It represents hope rather than reality, faith rather than facts, and one would be hard-pressed to find a single person willing to denounce the things it stands for: democracy, freedom, equality under the law. It’s the best of what America has to offer the world, and however pained one might be by America’s failure to live up to those ideals, the ideals themselves are not in question. (216)

IBS: Early in the story, Sachs’s mother says, “It’s the symbol of our country, and we have to show it the proper respect” (33). Paradoxically, Sachs ends up systematically destroying replicas of this icon.

PA: In actual fact, there are not many replicas of the Statue of Liberty around the United States. I made that up. But yes, it’s the political and moral statement that matters.

Unlike the typical terrorist pronouncement, with its inflated rhetoric and belligerent demands, the Phantom’s statements did not ask for the impossible. He simply wanted America to look after itself and mend its ways. (217)

He doesn’t want to hurt anyone. He’s not a terrorist in the sense that he wants to kill people. It’s a symbolic act verging on performance art—political performance art. I remember that right after Leviathan came out, the Unabomber was caught, and several publications asked me to write articles about him. I didn’t do it because my man was driven by completely different motives and had nothing in common with the Unabomber. Sachs and the Unabomber don’t even live on the same planet.

IBS: Like Quinn and Nashe before him, Sachs divests himself of the life he has established with Fanny and sets out on the journey that will eventually destroy him.

I want to end the life I’ve been living up to now. I want everything to change. If I don’t manage to do that, I’m going to be in deep trouble. My whole life has been a waste, a stupid little joke, a dismal string of petty failures. (122)

Some of your other protagonists are tormented by a similar feeling of inadequacy. In connection with Hand to Mouth and The Invention of Solitude, we talked about failing in terms, in fact, of actually succeeding.

PA: Yes, but Sachs is talking about failure only. I don’t think there’s any double meaning to this. It’s a depressed man who’s talking here. He feels that he hasn’t justified himself to himself, that he hasn’t produced the work he wanted to do or become the man he wanted to be. We all feel that way sometimes, right?

IBS: Right. Solitude plays directly into this highly subjective perception of failure and success. Could we see it also as a precondition for development and achievement? In Leviathan, Sachs begins to write in prison and produces his best work up there alone in the studio in Vermont. Is his situation in any way similar to Effing’s when he takes refuge in the hermit’s cave in the canyon and produces his best paintings ever?

[T]he two times I’ve sat down and written a novel, I’ve been cut off from the rest of the world. First in jail when I was a kid, and now up here in Vermont, living like a hermit in the woods. I wonder what the hell it means. (141)

PA: In some of my books people isolate themselves, hole themselves up somewhere in order to write or paint or reflect.

IBS: Is there something about seclusion that enhances the creative impulse? Sachs is imprisoned, Effing confines himself in the hermit’s cave, and Fanshawe locks himself away in a room in order to write his book. In fact, they all produce brilliant work in these confined spaces; work that we never get to see or read.

PA: True, but each time it’s a little different. I write about this in my new book:

You wanted to isolate yourself as thoroughly as possible because you had started writing a novel, and it was your juvenile belief (or romantic belief, or misconstrued belief) that novels should be written in isolation. (Report from the Interior, 193)⁴¹

I had the mistaken idea as a young person that you had to lock yourself away from the world in order to do any kind of important work.

IBS: The notion of falling is a recurring theme in your work. We discussed it in connection with City of Glass and will no doubt come back to it again later. Here, in Leviathan, the fall is absolutely pivotal.

His body mended, but he was never the same after that. In those few seconds before he hit the ground, it was as if Sachs lost everything. His entire life flew apart in midair, and from that moment until his death four years later, he never put it back together again. (107)

The fall unleashes Sachs’s self-disgust, which matches his revulsion against America’s failure to live up to its own moral and political ideals. The consequences are stupendous.

PA: Yes, but it’s not just a symbolic fall. It’s a physical fall as well. It’s an accident, inspired, as I said earlier, by what happened to my father. It’s several things at once.

IBS: Can we associate it also with your interest in the properties of prelapsarian language? Sachs says, “It was as if uttering the word fall had precipitated a real fall” (109). This suggestion of a causal connection between word and object is present especially in your later books: saying the thing makes it happen.

PA: Sometimes, yes, that’s true. It’s one of those weird synapses—even if it means nothing, it feels as if it does. I don’t want to emphasize the symbolism of it too much. You can do it, but I won’t. I know you read biblical fable into this story, and you’re making an argument for that reading now, but I wasn’t conscious of it while writing the story.

IBS: Leviathan, of course, is also the name of the ante-mundane figure of violence and chaos in Genesis. Here, in your Leviathan, we have a hero who is profoundly angry and distressed by the violence and lack of moral integrity of his country. “[T]here was something almost Biblical about his exhortations,” you write, “and after a while he began to sound less like a political revolutionary than some anguished, soft-spoken prophet” (217). He suffers a dramatic fall at the very height of the celebrations of a national icon. It instantly and irrevocably changes Sachs’s life: he shaves his head to exhibit his scars, then sets off on an unknown route into the backwaters of America. Aaron, his best friend, fails to keep up with him. Then, think of the biblical story of the golden calf and how Moses’s brother, Aaron, brands the ram’s head and sends it into the wilderness to atone for the sins of Israel.

When Aaron has finished making expiation for the sanctuary . . . he shall bring forward the live goat. He shall lay both his hands on its head and confess over it all the iniquities of the Israelites and all their acts of rebellion, that is all their sins; he shall lay them on the head of the goat and send it away into the wilderness. (Lev. 16:20–23; my italics)

But Sachs was driven to do penance, to take on his guilt as the guilt of the world and to bear its marks in his own flesh. (132)

As I read it, Sachs is Aaron’s scapegoat, doing penance for America with the scars of guilt laid bare on his head. His fall is intimately associated with the grand icon of liberty, central to American self-understanding and celebrated almost to the point of worship. There is indeed an element of idolatry here, because it’s merely an image, a symbol of freedom—not the real thing. And just like the biblical Aaron’s brother, Moses, at first a “soft-spoken prophet,” Sachs destroys the idol.

PA: I wasn’t thinking about my story in those terms, but now that we’ve talked about these connections, I see them. This is the odd thing about writing novels: sometimes there’s something going on underneath, and the writer is unaware of it. We keep coming back to this unconscious awareness in our discussions. As a writer, you’re fixed on trying to tell the story, on trying to do it well, on trying to put the things you’ve been imagining on the page. Then this undercurrent of deeper meanings—it’s there! You can feel it percolating underneath, but you don’t always know exactly what it is. It’s for the reader to explore. A number of years ago, Siri and I were invited to do an event in a theater in New York. She had agreed to interview me about Oracle Night and was asked not to discuss it with me in advance. Once we were on stage, she made a very strong case for her claim that the book is indebted to Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. I was completely taken by surprise and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I had never thought about it. Of course, I had read Kierkegaard’s book many years earlier, and no doubt it had seeped into my unconscious and inspired elements in Oracle Night. It’s the same with these biblical stories. I read them when I was a child and know them well, but I wasn’t thinking about them consciously.

IBS: I think it makes sense when you read the book: the worshipping of an icon and the marked scapegoat doing penance for a whole nation.

Maria was the embodiment of his catastrophe, the central figure in the drama that had precipitated his fall, and therefore no one could have been as important to him. (126)

IBS: It seems to me that she is doing with her camera what some of your characters do with words.

It was an archeology of the present, so to speak, an attempt to reconstitute the essence of something from only the barest fragments: a ticket stub, a torn stocking, a blood stain on the collar of a shirt. (63)

Every time Sachs posed for a picture, he was forced to impersonate himself, to play the game of pretending to be who he was. After a while, it must have had an effect on him. By repeating the process so often, he must have come to the point where he started seeing himself through Maria’s eyes, where the whole thing doubled back on him and he was able to encounter himself again. (130)

PA: Some primitive peoples think pictures rob a person of his soul. Here, it’s the opposite.

IBS: Maria assists Sachs in this process of restoration, but he never fully recovers, does he? Something is irrevocably broken, inherently fractured.

PA: He’s never quite well again. Then, of course, he has the protracted affair with Lillian, which is wrenching. She’s a terribly complex character.

IBS: You have no fewer than three central female characters in Leviathan: Fanny, Lillian, and Maria. They all jump off the page. These wonderful women: strong, nuanced, unpredictable. Fanny really surprises, and she’s so vivid in the reader’s mind. Lillian, too, for different reasons—and Maria, obviously, with all her idiosyncrasies.

PA: Again, they’re complete inventions, except for Maria’s artworks. Other than that, there’s little resemblance between my character and the real-life artist.

IBS: I was thinking of the way in which all three women are center stage in Leviathan and come across as nuanced and round. Since Anna Blume, I don’t think you’ve given as much attention to any female character.

PA: This book represents a kind of shift for me. It’s the first time I tried to write what you might call a realistic novel. Realistic in the sense that it’s about people doing the ordinary things that people living in a society do together—something I had never addressed in any of my previous work. Until Leviathan, my books were almost exclusively about solitary figures.

IBS: We’ve often talked about recurrences in your work, but they are never repetitions: there’s novelty to every one of them. Could we say that a new kind of “realism” plays into your take on ambiguity in Leviathan? Aaron, your narrator, repeatedly runs into a wall of indeterminacy and contradiction: “all my certainties about the world had collapsed” (84). His exchange with Sachs about the near-fatal fall illustrates this:

“You told me you fell because you were too afraid to touch Maria’s leg. Now you change your story and tell me that you fell on purpose. You can’t have it both ways. It’s got to be one or the other.”

“It’s both. The one thing led to the other, and they can’t be separated. I’m not saying I understand it, I’m just telling you how it was, what I know to be true.” (121)

PA: That’s right, but this is also about misinterpretation. Aaron is not a reliable witness, as we said earlier. A good example would be when he’s at Fanny and Ben’s apartment for dinner and doesn’t know they’ve been trying to have a child for years and that, finally, they’ve been told she can’t conceive. Sachs says, “Who wants children?” Aaron doesn’t understand that he’s doing this out of love for Fanny. We often misread other people because we aren’t aware of their hidden motives. This kind of thing happens often in the book. Another example would be the uncertainty as to whether Fanny actually does have a love affair with Aaron in order to cure him.

They had presented me with two versions of the truth, two separate and distinct realities, and no amount of pushing and shoving could ever bring them together. (98)

I think in Leviathan ambiguity becomes more concrete than in the earlier books. However perplexing it may be, it’s quite clear now that there are many truths, and they can be equally accurate.

In other words, there was no universal truth. Not for them, not for anyone else. There was no one to blame or to defend, and the only justifiable response was compassion. I had looked up to them both for too many years not to feel disappointed by what I had learned, but I wasn’t disappointed only in them. I was disappointed in myself. I was disappointed in the world. Even the strongest were weak, I told myself; even the bravest lacked courage; even the wisest were ignorant. (98)

IBS: It really is a terrific passage. In a sense, it rounds up the process of “learning to live with ambiguity” that we talked about in connection with The New York Trilogy. It’s as if here it falls into place for you. Could that be true?

PA: Of all my books, Leviathan was probably the biggest struggle for me. The work progressed very slowly, and I never felt happy writing it. I kept thinking I was doing it wrong. Artistically, it was an enormous challenge and extremely painful to do. I’m not sure why.

³⁸ Sophie Calle then responded by thanking Auster for permission to mingle fiction with fact in her adaptation of Maria in her book, Double Game (Violette Limited, 1999; 2007).

³⁹ Here, Auster uses the place where he lives; in Sunset Park he uses the time in which he lives. See opening of discussion of Sunset Park.

⁴¹ This conversation took place in March 2012, eight months before the publication of Report from the Interior.