IBS: In your last novel, Sunset Park, one of your characters, Morris Heller, notes in his diary: “Writers should never talk to journalists. The interview is a debased literary form that serves no purpose except to simplify that which should never be simplified” (271). If you agree with Heller’s remarks—and there’s no reason to think that you don’t—why would you agree to enter into a conversation that will, at least to some extent, take the form of an interview?
PA: Heller was referring to the short, superficial interviews writers get roped into doing to accommodate their publishers—with newspapers and magazines, with radio, television, and the Internet: the so-called popular media. These talks are inevitably connected to commerce, to the promotion of books. Thankfully, you aren’t a journalist. You’re a serious reader, a professor of literature, and when you proposed doing this project together, which you described as a “biography of my work,” I was intrigued. Hesitant, too, of course, but intrigued.
IBS: Why hesitant?
PA: An inborn reticence, I suppose. Along with the fact that I don’t feel qualified to talk about my own work. I’m utterly incapable of discussing it with any critical intelligence. People ask Why, and I can never answer them. How can also be very problematical.
IBS: And yet here you are, starting to talk to me.
PA: Yes, because you agreed to confine the conversations to What, When, and Where. I hope it will be possible to address those kinds of questions. And, in trying to answer them, maybe some good things will happen, maybe I’ll discover some interesting things along the way.
IBS: You also said that you saw this project as an opportunity to “clear the air.”
PA: For a couple of reasons. First, because I’ve stumbled across some remarkable misunderstandings of my books, errors so egregious that I feel they should be corrected. I’m not talking about matters of taste or interpretation, but simple facts. A fair amount of scholarly work has been published about my writing, about forty books or so along with a wagonload of articles. Some of these books are sent to me. I don’t read them. I take a quick peek inside, then shut the book and put it on a shelf. Two or three years ago, however, I was taking my little peek at a book that had just arrived and fell upon the altogether baffling assertion that all my autobiographical works—The Invention of Solitude, The Red Notebook, and Hand to Mouth4—were in fact works of fiction, made-up books, pseudo novels. I was astonished to read this—and saddened as well. So much spiritual labor went into exploring those remembered experiences, I worked so hard to be honest in what I wrote, and to see all that turned into some kind of clever, postmodern game perplexed me. How could anyone be so wrong? So I want to go on record, once and for all, and declare that my novels are fiction and my autobiographical writings are nonfiction. Just for starters.
IBS: And the other reason?
PA: To disentangle the twisted notions about my supposed influence on Siri’s work.5 Various misconceptions have been circulating for a long time—both in print and on the Internet—that I introduced her to Freud and psychoanalysis, that I taught her everything she knows about Lacan, that I initiated her into the theories of Bakhtin, and so on. All of it is untrue. When Siri’s first novel came out, there was even one journalist who told her—to her face—that she couldn’t possibly have written the book and therefore it must have been written by me. It would be hard to come up with a nastier insult than that one. Did this man have such a prejudice against women that he simply couldn’t believe that a beautiful woman could also be an intelligent person and a gifted novelist? These are the facts: I’m eight years older than Siri, and when we started living together in 1981, she was only twenty-six, a poet and a graduate student hard at work on her PhD in English, and because she didn’t finish her degree until 1986, and because her first novel wasn’t published until 1992, I was already a known quantity when she arrived on the scene. It was too much for some people—two novelists in one household!—and so the rumor started that I was running some kind of literary factory in Brooklyn. Utter nonsense. Siri has one of the best minds I’ve ever encountered. She is the intellectual in the family, not me, and everything I know about Lacan and Bakhtin, for example, I learned directly from her. In fact, I’ve read only one short essay by Lacan, the “Purloined Letter” piece in the Yale French Studies issue on poststructuralism—all the way back in 1966. As for Freud and psychoanalysis, the whole thing makes me laugh. Siri has been reading Freud attentively since she was fifteen, and in May of this year6 she was invited to give the thirty-ninth annual Sigmund Freud Lecture at the Freud Foundation in Vienna. There has been only one person before her without a medical degree to be chosen, for goodness sake. Her book from 2009, The Shaking Woman, has made such a stir in the worlds of medicine, neuroscience, and psychiatry that the committee at the Freud Foundation was unanimous in wanting her for this year’s talk.
IBS: Yes, I’ve heard her address a theater full of academics from different fields. She is extremely well read and very impressive. Clearing the air, is there anything else you’d like to add?
PA: No, I don’t think so. I could go on, of course, but I’ve probably said enough.
IBS: Ready to start talking about your work?
PA: Yes, yes, fire away.
4 This conversation took place in autumn 2011 when Winter Journal was still in manuscript form. Report from the Interior was not started until 2012.
5 Siri Hustvedt, Auster’s wife.
6 2011.