A LIFE IN WORDS

IBS: Oracle Night is not just the story about the marriage of an ailing writer, Sidney Orr, who is struggling to get back on his feet both physically and mentally. It’s also a book about the processes, the labor and the mystery of writing. Orr struggles to complete his haunting narrative of Nick Bowen, who, one day, for reasons that are not entirely clear, decides to divest himself of his former life and ends up trapped in an underground bomb shelter that serves, strangely, as a Holocaust archive. We’re not always sure whether we’re inside or outside Orr’s mind.

PA: Oracle Night developed very slowly. As far back as 1982, I started writing something about an enchanted notebook—a book you could enter and actually walk around in—a strange little poetic text that never amounted to anything and that I stopped working on after ten or fifteen pages. But the idea stayed with me and eventually transformed itself into the Portuguese notebooks in Oracle Night. I remember that I started the novel not long after finishing Timbuktu—in 1998—but after writing the first twenty pages or so, I stopped. I still didn’t understand what I was doing, so I put it aside and worked on other things—the screenplay of Martin Frost, then The Book of Illusions—and didn’t get back to it for another three years, when I started writing it in earnest. It took that long to figure it out—and even then, I still ran into problems.

PA: Yes, very difficult, especially toward the end. I had an ending in mind, but then I realized that I didn’t like it. I was stuck—in the same way Sidney gets stuck with his story. I didn’t know what to do. I must have written seven different endings until, finally, I found what I was looking for. What a strange business. Sometimes, a book is there for you: you know what you want to do, and you do it. Other times, you believe you know, but in fact you don’t, and you have to keep searching for the right solution. That’s why every book is a different experience.

PA: Yes, but he has nothing to do with me. He’s from a different generation, and he’s a different kind of writer with an altogether different biography from mine. And yet—how shall I put it?—I think of the writers in the book as representations of my younger and older novelist selves. But not in an autobiographical sense—in a spiritual sense. The protagonist, Sidney Orr, may be the same age as I was in 1982, the year I began thinking about this book—but he shares none of my history: I was never a schoolteacher, I never had a near-fatal illness, my books don’t resemble his. As for Trause, he fought in World War II, for God’s sake. I hadn’t been born then.

IBS: Then why give him a version of your name? It’s almost as if you are writing “Auster” into a book again.

PA: I know. I saw the anagram and I liked the name, but other than the fact that Trause is in his mid-fifties—as I was when I wrote the book—I don’t think we should make too much of this.

IBS: Oracle Night is very much a book about writing, especially about being stuck, as you just said. Sidney begins but never manages to complete the Nick Bowen story.

That morning, however, as I sat at my desk for the first time in almost nine months, staring at my newly acquired notebook and struggling to come up with an opening sentence that wouldn’t embarrass me or rob me of my courage, I decided to give the old Flitcraft episode a shot. (14)

PA: Another piece of old resurrected material. The Flitcraft episode goes back to 1990, when I was first contacted by the filmmaker Wim Wenders, who remains a close friend. Wim had been reading my books, and he proposed that we work on a film together. We talked about a number of possible ideas, then he suggested that we do something with the Flitcraft story in The Maltese Falcon. Not a straight adaptation of Hammett, just the premise: the story of a man who walks away from his life. “That’s interesting,” I said. “I like it.” So I mapped out the tale of Nick Bowen (which is nearly identical to the one in Oracle Night) and boiled it down to a fifteen- or twenty-page treatment—an outline of the film. Unfortunately, the financing never came through, and the project fell apart. For ten years, those pages sat in a drawer of my desk. I never knew what to do with them, but the idea continued to fascinate me—a man who abandons everything and winds up getting stuck in a room. Oracle Night gave me a chance to go back to the idea, and the pages came out of the drawer. In the original outline for the film, I was planning to get Bowen out of the room, but for the novel, no. It would have been absurd to release him. Sidney is not in good shape: he’s confused, he’s weak, and his writing is going nowhere. He’s not up to figuring out a way to get Bowen out of the room. Still, this attempt to begin writing again is itself a sign that Sidney is recovering. It’s a first step. Even if it fails, it’s nevertheless a step toward taking hold of his life again.

IBS: And so, the secondary narrative reflects the primary narrative, and this is why Sidney Orr’s story about Nick Bowen should not be finished?

PA: It shouldn’t be finished. I’m sure a lot of readers were frustrated by that.

IBS: Absolutely! You abandon the poor man trapped in an old bomb shelter with no means of escape. It’s such a cliff-hanging moment: we desperately want to know whether Rosa Leightmann rescues him.

PA: It happens to writers all the time. You start on a project and run out of gas. Sidney runs out of gas. How else to show that except by stopping the story before it ends?

IBS: That makes sense. So, we have aborted writings and an aborted baby. Is there a connection between the two? I mean, one of the big questions in Oracle Night concerns the capacity of words to create and to kill, right?

PA: Okay, I want to tell you three things: first, the story about the French writer who stopped writing is a true story. Louis-René des Forêts. Do you know about it?

PA: The newspaper article is real. I rewrote it very slightly and changed the name of the author, but it was a real news story. I was horrified, I have to say. Third, the Warsaw phone book. It’s also real. I have it. My Polish publisher gave it to me because there was an Auster listed in it—perhaps a relative—and I wanted to include these fragments in the book as documentary evidence alongside my inventions. Have I told you the story about the journalist? Not long after Oracle Night was published, a Polish journalist came here to interview me. He was in a sweat, hyper-excited, about to jump out of his skin. He said, “You’ll never believe this, but the people in the phone book, the Orlovskys—they were my grandparents.” Now, that is strange! I’d picked them out at random.

IBS: That’s unbelievable! All this connects with the notion of the oracular, doesn’t it, when you place a writer between the present and the future, propelled by words whose impact he hasn’t quite understood.

The future was already inside me, and I was preparing myself for the disasters that were about to come. (223)

PA: Yes, that’s exactly right. Another interesting thing about the title is that I stole it from another book—and wasn’t even aware of it. A book of poems written in the late seventies or early eighties by someone named Michael Brownstein—an acquaintance of mine but not a close friend. A book with the title Oracle Night. Michael called me and said, “Do you remember my book?” I felt like an imbecile. No, I hadn’t remembered, and now that I did remember, I was mortified. “Don’t worry about it,” Michael said, “it doesn’t matter in the least”—a generous and gentlemanly response, but I still felt like an imbecile. It’s the only time I’ve ever done anything like that. But what a beautiful title—ideal for my purposes—and my unconscious mind reached out and stole it.

IBS: It seems fitting, then—almost “oracular” in fact—that you throw into doubt the origins of the title in the book:

I thought maybe I’d read a book by Sylvia Monroe as a boy and had since forgotten about it, only to dredge up an unconscious memory of her in the person of Sylvia Maxwell, the pretend author of the pretend Oracle Night. But it seemed I’d plucked Maxwell out of thin air and Oracle Night was an original story, with no connection to any novel other than itself. I probably should have felt relieved, but I didn’t. (184)

PA: So, there must have been something stirring inside that unconscious of mine.

IBS: I think Oracle Night is also a book about the impossibility of getting to the truth of things.

PA: Sidney keeps analyzing Grace’s behavior, again and again he tries to figure out what’s going on. He thinks he’s probably right that she had an affair with Trause, but she has never confessed. Which means that he can’t be one hundred percent certain.

IBS: Why is she so enigmatic? Why doesn’t she tell him what’s going on? She asks him to trust her . . .

PA: She can’t, she can’t. I’ve known many people like this, people who can’t talk, who can’t reveal things about themselves. She’s warm and loving, but she has secrets, and she can’t share them. That’s her personality, that’s who she is. One has a sense, I do anyway, that as life goes on she’ll evolve into something a bit different.

PA: By the end of the story, Sidney reaches a conclusion that makes sense to him—but then again, he may not be right. In an almost Kierkegaardian way, he makes a leap of faith and decides that it doesn’t matter whether he’s arrived at the truth or not. He can live with the uncertainty because he cares enough about Grace to feel that, whatever betrayals might have occurred, they are finally unimportant. He wants her too much. Those are the spiritual underpinnings of the book.

IBS: There’s also something inexplicable about Sidney’s presence-slash-absence in their apartment. There are several instances when Grace insists that Sidney was not in his study when, in fact, he was sitting right there at his desk completely absorbed in his writing: “[Y]ou weren’t there” (27), she insists. Sidney explains (as much to himself as to Grace and Trause) that

It’s not so unusual for a person to be so preoccupied as to appear absent—but the point was that I wasn’t absent. I was there, fully engaged in what was happening, and at the same time I wasn’t there—for there wasn’t an authentic there anymore. It was an illusory place that existed in my head, and that’s where I was as well. In both places at the same time. In the apartment and in the story. (29–30)

It’s as if Sidney has fallen “into his own story,” as one of your best critics suggests,⁵³ and I was wondering whether you are using the mysterious Portuguese notebook to illustrate the fact that the writer is lost to the world but fully present to himself only when absorbed in writing?

PA: It’s ambiguous. We can’t know. What matters is that Sidney himself believes it.

IBS: When I read Oracle Night, I have the feeling that there’s an obscure, almost arcane dimension to it: to the words, to the relationships between characters, to the notebook. You don’t often do that. There’s a magic element in Mr. Vertigo and Timbuktu, but this is different. I think it has to do with the notion that words hold the power to create reality here and now, directly.

PA: It is different. This is a very strange book, on the borderline of real madness. I thought of it as a dream book. I think it has to be read like that. There’s something so immediate about the way it’s written that it comes across as a realistic novel. It isn’t, of course, even though we could probably break it down and explain everything in terms of conventional realism if we were interested in doing that. I’m not. In Oracle Night, I write about states of mind and emotional reactions—and about the power of writing, the power of words, the power of stories.

IBS: And about being literally absorbed in writing, right? Sidney disappears . . .

PA: You do disappear when you’re writing. I feel that all the time. It’s uncanny how I can go into my little office at eight o’clock in the morning, get to work, then glance at my watch and realize that it’s one o’clock in the afternoon. It feels as if only ten minutes have gone by. I’ve been utterly immersed during those five hours: I’m not hungry, I don’t even know I’m there. I think this book is a reflection of that kind of “vanishing.”

The world would bounce and swim before my eyes, undulating like reflections in a wavy mirror, and whenever I tried to look at just one thing, to isolate a single object from the onrush of whirling colors—a blue scarf wrapped around a woman’s head, say, or the red taillight of a passing delivery truck—it would immediately begin to break apart and dissolve, disappearing like a drop of dye in a glass of water. Everything shimmied and wobbled, kept darting off in different directions, and for the first several weeks I had trouble telling where my body stopped and the rest of the world began. (2)

PA: Sidney has been damaged, but he’s slowly regaining his coherence and his strength, slowly but surely. Those sentences are from the beginning of the book, and they introduce what we would call a classically unreliable narrator. He’s being as honest as he can, but his perceptions are off.

IBS: That brings me to the footnotes. Sidney is trying to be as precise as he can, and footnotes, generally speaking, are intended to add precision to the text, right? This is the first time you use footnotes. But they’re not just ordinary footnotes: they’re part of the fiction and add quite considerably to the story, even if they’re physically subordinate to it.

PA: This is what I was thinking: the book takes place over a nine-day period, what I would call “the narrative present.” The footnotes are concerned with things from “the narrative past.” I didn’t want to interrupt the story with explanatory digressions and decided that footnotes would be the right place for them.

IBS: They start out as explanations, reasonably brief explanations of action, especially in connection with Grace, but then they become longer and longer and at some point threaten to take over. One of them goes on for four pages.

PA: The first long one is number three, which describes Sidney’s first meeting with Grace, his first encounter with the beloved.

Bodies count, of course—they count more than we’re willing to admit—but we don’t fall in love with bodies, we fall in love with each other, and if much of what we are is confined to flesh and bone, there is much that is not as well. We all know that, but the minute we go beyond the catalogue of surface qualities and appearances, words begin to fail us, to crumble apart in mystical confusions and cloudy, insubstantial metaphors. Some call it the flame of being. Others call it the internal spark or the inner light of selfhood. (19)

IBS: Why put that wonderful description in a footnote? It’s hugely relevant to the story.

PA: I know, but I wanted to have different levels of discourse in the book, the past and the present to begin with, but also different kinds of texts and typefaces: the news article, the footnotes, the illustrations—they’re all sitting next to one another on the page, each one distinct from the others and yet coexisting simultaneously.

IBS: One of the pivots in the book is the intimate and somewhat enigmatic bond between Orr and Trause.

PA: They have a warm relationship, but at the same time there’s a certain edginess to it. There’s also something competitive between them, which could suggest that Trause did in fact have an affair with Grace. And yet, Trause genuinely likes Sidney. He thinks he’s a good writer and a dependable person (why else would he ask Sidney to visit his son?). But he’s not above making an occasional nasty dig—as with poor Sidney’s “menstruating schnoz.” So many tangles. Another example of what you call “the male bond.”

IBS: Yes, and partly because of the asymmetry between the younger and the older man with regard to the nature of their writing and to the woman they both love.

PA: Their love for Grace is a connection here, of course, but as two artists from different generations, they do have something of a “master-apprentice” relationship. Sidney admires Trause’s work. He feels both awe and gratitude that Trause has accepted him as a friend, and the friendship is exceedingly important to him. Then, of course, he loses Trause’s manuscript—which, by the way, is the manuscript about the imaginary country that pops up later in Travels in the Scriptorium. Just so we don’t forget . . .

IBS: There’s also an important connection between Sidney and Trause’s son, principally because of the violence it triggers, which results in Grace’s miscarriage.

PA: Yes, violence again. Chang is an incomprehensible person, a figure from a hallucination.

IBS: The beating he gives Sidney is truly vicious. That moment seemed to me to be the exotic element in the novel: the violent clash with the “Other” culture, the culture we don’t understand.

PA: Yes, but it’s also relevant, as Sidney speculates, that Chang might have been a member of the Red Guard as a teenager, someone who learned violence from an early age. The incident from the Cultural Revolution discussed in the novel was drawn from real events, by the way. Bits of twentieth-century history keep slipping into the book in peculiar, unexpected ways. Not just the Cultural Revolution in China but World War I (Flagg and his ability to predict the future), World War II (Ed Victory and Dachau), the Kennedy assassination (Sidney’s film version of The Time Machine), and Duvalier in Haiti (the “African Princess”). Real events, as it were, embedded in a fictional world.

IBS: That’s also true of your commemoration of Holocaust victims through Ed Victory’s collection of telephone books. As you mentioned earlier, you have the real one from Warsaw and picked random names for your characters from it. Storing away an arbitrary selection of phone books underground is indeed a strange way of commemorating the horrors of the death camps.

PA: Because they contain the names of people, the living and the dead, the roster of the human race. He wants to collect all of humanity in his underground archive. It’s mad, I know, but Ed’s passion for this makes sense to me. It comes directly out of his war experiences.

IBS: Ed is quite a character. Of course, he’s invented by Sidney Orr, and Orr has very intimate relationships with his protagonists:

As for Bowen, however, I expressly made him someone I was not, an inversion of myself . . . I didn’t model him on anyone I knew (not consciously, at any rate), but once I had finished putting him together in my mind, he became astonishingly vivid to me—almost as if I could see him, almost as if he had entered the room and were standing next to me, looking down at the desk with his hand on my shoulder and reading the words I was writing . . . watching me bring him to life with my pen. (17–18)

PA: They generally do. I don’t know if this is a sign of mental immaturity, some kind of magical thinking, or just an effect of the time and emotion you invest in people who are not real. I wrote about this in Travels in the Scriptorium. They live inside you so vividly that they become people, even though they’re not. When we read, they are real people: characters who feed our imaginations and help us understand the world.

IBS: Even if, in fact, they belong between the covers of the book or inside someone’s skull. Just like your many characters trapped in confined spaces, locked away in bare rooms, immobilized in graves. It’s a very strong image.

PA: I think this is something that’s been driving me ever since I started writing. If you look at some of my early poems—that’s what they’re about. The title of my first little collection (which was never published) was Captives. Then there’s Wall Writing,⁵⁴ a title that refers to the fact that you can be on either side of a wall: included or excluded, as we said in connection with The Music of Chance. I was mostly thinking about walls surrounding a person as a metaphor for consciousness, the way thoughts trap us inside ourselves. I’m interested in trying to represent that—physically, in images. Or, to say it again: “The world is in my head. My body is in the world.”

⁵³ Mark Brown, Paul Auster (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 95.