Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory/1989
From The Art of Hunger. Reproduced with permission of Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory.
LARRY McCAFFERY: At one point in Moon Palace, Marco Fogg says that art’s purpose is “penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it.” Is that what writing does for you?
PAUL AUSTER: Sometimes. I often wonder why I write. It’s not simply to create beautiful objects or entertaining stories. It’s an activity I seem to need in order to stay alive. I feel terrible when I’m not doing it. It’s not that writing brings me a lot of pleasure—but not doing it is worse.
SINDA GREGORY: Your books have always relied more on chance and synchronicity to move their plots forward than the sorts of causality found in most fiction: this is even more apparent in your two new novels, Moon Palace and The Music of Chance. Is this foregrounding of chance a result of your own sense of how life operates (your “personal philosophy”)? Or does it have more to do with your sense that this approach has interesting aesthetic applications?
PA: From an aesthetic point of view, the introduction of chance elements in fiction probably creates as many problems as it solves. I’ve come in for a lot of abuse from critics because of it. In the strictest sense of the word, I consider myself a realist. Chance is a part of reality: we are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence, the unexpected occurs with almost numbing regularity in all our lives. And yet there’s a widely held notion that novels shouldn’t stretch the imagination too far. Anything that appears “implausible” is necessarily taken to be forced, artificial, “unrealistic.” I don’t know what reality these people have been living in, but it certainly isn’t my reality. In some perverse way, I believe they’ve spent too much time reading books. They’re so immersed in the conventions of so-called realistic fiction that their sense of reality has been distorted. Everything’s been smoothed out in these novels, robbed of its singularity, boxed into a predictable world of cause and effect. Anyone with the wit to get his nose out of his book and study what’s actually in front of him will understand that this realism is a complete sham. To put it another way: truth is stranger than fiction. What I am after, I suppose, is to write fiction as strange as the world I live in.
LM: I’d say your books don’t use coincidence in an effort to “smooth things over” or to create the usual realist’s manipulated illusion that everything can be explained. Your books seem more fundamentally “about” mystery and coincidence, so that these operate almost as governing principles that are constantly clashing with causality and rationality.
PA: Precisely. When I talk about coincidence, I’m not referring to a desire to manipulate. There’s a good deal of that in bad eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction: mechanical plot devices, the urge to tie everything up, the happy endings in which everyone turns out to be related to everyone else. No, what I’m talking about is the presence of the unpredictable, the utterly bewildering nature of human experience. From one moment to the next, anything can happen. Our lifelong certainties about the world can he demolished in a single second. In philosophical terms, I’m talking about the powers of contingency. Our lives don’t really belong to us, you see, they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding. We brush up against these mysteries all the time. The result can be truly terrifying—but it can also be comical.
SG: What sorts of things are you thinking of—a small thing, like someone getting a phone call to the wrong number (which sets the plot of City of Glass in motion)? Or something more outlandish, like meeting your long-lost father by accident in Moon Palace?
PA: I’m thinking of both small things and large things. Meeting three people named George on the same day. Or checking into a hotel and being given a room with the same number as your address at home. Seven or eight years ago, my wife and I were invited to a dinner party in New York, and there was an exceedingly charming man at the table—very urbane, full of intelligence and humor, a dazzling talker who had all the guests captivated with his stories. My wife had grown up in a small town in Minnesota, and at one point she actually said to herself: this is why I moved to New York, to meet people like this. Later on in the evening, we all started talking about our childhoods and where we had grown up. As it turned out, the man who had so enthralled her, the man who had struck her as the very embodiment of New York sophistication, came from the same little town in Minnesota that she did. The same town! It was astonishing—like something straight out of an O. Henry story.
These are coincidences, and it’s impossible to know what to make of them. You think of a long-lost friend, someone you haven’t seen in ten years, and two hours later you run into him on the street. Things like that happen to me all the time. Just two or three years ago, a woman who had been reading my books wrote to me to say that she was going to be in New York and would like to meet me. We had been corresponding for some time, and I welcomed the chance to talk to her in person. Unfortunately, there was a conflict. I already had an appointment with someone else for that day, and I couldn’t make it. I was supposed to meet my friend at three or four o’clock in a delicatessen in midtown Manhattan. So I went to the restaurant—which was rather empty at that hour, since it was neither lunchtime nor dinnertime—and not fifteen minutes after we sat down, a woman with an absolutely startled expression on her face walked up to me and asked if I was Paul Auster. It turned out to be the same woman from Iowa who had written me those letters, the same woman I hadn’t been able to meet with because I was going to this restaurant. And so I wound up meeting her anyway—in the very place where I hadn’t been able to meet her!
Chance? Destiny? Or simple mathematics, an example of probability theory at work? It doesn’t matter what you call it. Life is full of such events. And yet there are critics who would fault a writer for using that episode in a novel. Too bad for them. As a writer of novels, I feel morally obligated to incorporate such events into my books, to write about the world as I experience it, not as someone else tells me it’s supposed to be. The unknown is rushing in on top of us at every moment. As I see it, my job is to keep myself open to these collisions, to watch out for all these mysterious goings-on in the world.
LM: When you say that your job as a writer is to open yourself to these collisions that are really occurring around you, does this imply that your works are usually inspired in some fairly direct way from the mysteries you’ve actually experienced or is the autobiographical basis of your work less literal?
PA: Essentially, I’m a very intuitive writer, which makes it difficult for me to talk about my work in any coherent way. There’s no question that my books are full of references to my own life, but more often than not, I don’t become aware of these references until after the fact. Moon Palace is a good case in point. It sounds more like an autobiography than any of my other novels, but the truth is that it’s probably the least autobiographical novel I’ve ever written. Still, there are a number of private allusions buried in the story, but it was only after the book was finished that I began to see them.
The business about the boxes of books in the beginning, for example. Fogg receives these boxes from his Uncle Victor, and after his uncle dies, Fogg sells off the books to keep himself afloat. Well, it turns out that the image of those boxes must have been planted in my head way back in my early childhood. My mother’s sister is married to Allen Mandelbaum, who is widely known now as the translator of Virgil and Dante. When I was five or six, my aunt and uncle went off to live in Italy and wound up staying there for twelve years. My uncle had an enormous library, and since we lived in a large house, he left his books with us for all the years he was gone. At first, they were stored in boxes in the attic, but after a while (I must have been nine or ten at that point), my mother began to worry that the books might get damaged up there. So one fine day she and I carried the boxes downstairs, opened them up, and put the books on shelves in the living room. Until then, our household had been largely devoid of books. Neither of my parents had gone to college, and neither of them was particularly interested in reading. Now, quite suddenly, literally overnight, I had a magnificent library at my disposal: all the classics, all the great poets, all the major novels. It opened up a whole new world to me. When I think back on it now, I realize that these boxes of books probably changed my life. Without them, I doubt I ever would have dreamed of becoming a writer.
The Edison material has deep roots in my past as well. Our house wasn’t far from the Seton Hall University campus, and every two weeks I would go for a haircut at Rocco’s Barbershop, which did a brisk business with the college students and the boys from the town. This was the late fifties and everyone walked around in crewcuts then, which meant that you wound up going to the barbershop quite often. Anyway, it so happened that Rocco had been Thomas Edison’s barber for many years, and hanging on a wall of the shop was a large framed portrait of Edison, along with a handwritten message from the great man himself. “To my good friend Rocco,” it said. “Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. Thomas A. Edison.” I found it tremendously exciting that my barber was the same man who had once cut the hair of the inventor of the lightbulb. It was ennobling, somehow—to imagine that the hands touching my head had once touched the head of America’s greatest genius. I used to think that ideas from Edison’s brain had been transferred to Rocco’s fingers—which meant that those ideas were now going into my brain! Edison became the hero of childhood, and each time I went for a haircut, I’d stare at his portrait and feel as though I were worshipping at a shrine.
Some years later, this beautiful myth of my boyhood shattered to pieces. It turned out that my father had once worked as an assistant in Edison’s lab at Menlo Park. He had been hired straight out of high school in 1929, but just a few weeks after he started the job, Edison discovered that he was Jewish and fired him. My idol turned out to be a vicious anti-Semite, a scoundrel who had done my father a terrible injustice. None of this is mentioned in Moon Palace, of course, but the unflattering references to Edison no doubt come from the personal animosity I developed for him. I won’t bore you by citing other examples, but in some way the whole book is impregnated with subliminal connections of this sort. There’s nothing unusual about that. All writers draw on their own lives to write their books; to a greater or lesser degree, every novel is autobiographical. What is interesting, however, is how the work of the imagination intersects with reality.
SG: Do you mean that eerie sense that Borges kept writing about—the author who begins to find evidence of his writing somehow finding its way into the world? A big responsibility …
PA: It can become quite disturbing at times, utterly uncanny. The very day I finished writing The Music of Chance—which is a book about walls and slavery and freedom—the Berlin Wall came down. There’s no conclusion to be drawn from this, but every time I think of it, I start to shake.
Back in 1984, when I was in the middle of writing The Locked Room, I had to go to Boston for a few days. I already knew that the final scene in the book was going to take place in a house in Boston, at 9 Columbus Square, which happens to be a real address. The house is owned by good friends of mine, and I have slept there on many occasions over the past fifteen years or so. That’s where I was going to stay this time as well, and I remember thinking how odd it would be to visit this house again now that I had fictionalized it for myself, had appropriated it into the realm of the imagination. I took the train to Boston, and when I arrived at South Station, I climbed into a cab and asked the driver to take me to 9 Columbus Square. The moment I gave him the address, he started to laugh. It turned out that he had once lived there himself—back in the 1940s, at a time when the building had been used as a boarding house. Not only that, but he had lived in the very room where my friend now had his study. For the rest of the ride, he told me stories about the people who had lived there, the woman who had owned it, and all the mischief that had gone on in the rooms I knew so well. Prostitution, pornographic films, drugs, crimes of every sort. It was all so odd, so mysterious. Even today, it’s hard for me not to feel that I invented this cab driver myself, that he didn’t materialize out of the pages of my own book. It was as if I had met the spirit of the place I was writing about. The ghost of 9 Columbus Square!
LM: You told me once that in a certain way you felt all of your books were really “the same book.” What book is that?
PA: The story of my obsessions, I suppose. The saga of the things that haunt me. Like it or not, all my books seem to revolve around the same set of questions, the same human dilemmas. Writing is no longer an act of free will for me, it’s a matter of survival. An image surges up inside me, and after a time I begin to feel cornered by it, to feel that I have no choice but to embrace it. A book starts to take shape after a series of such encounters.
SG: Have you tried to figure out the specific source of these encounters?
PA: Frankly, I’m never really certain where any of it comes from. I’m sure there are deep psychological explanations for most of it, but I’m not terribly interested in trying to track down the source of my ideas. Writing, in some sense, is an activity that helps me to relieve some of the pressure caused by these buried secrets. Hidden memories, traumas, childhood scars—there’s no question that novels emerge from those inaccessible parts of ourselves.
Every once in a while, however, I’ll have a glimmer or a sudden intuition about where something came from. But, as I said before, it always happens after the fact, after the book is finished, at a moment when the book no longer belongs to me. Just recently, as I was going through the manuscript of The Music of Chance for typographical errors, I had a revelation about one of the scenes that takes place toward the end of the novel: the moment when Nashe opens the door of the trailer and discovers Pozzi lying on the ground. As I read that passage—which goes on to describe how Nashe bends over the body and examines Pozzi to see if he is alive or dead—I understood that I was writing about something that had happened to me many years before. It was one of the most terrible moments of my life, an episode that has stayed with me ever since, and yet I wasn’t aware of it at the time I composed that scene.
I was fourteen years old and had been sent to a summer camp in upstate New York. One day, a group of about twenty of us went for a hike in the woods, accompanied by one or two counselors. We trekked for several miles, I remember, all of us in good spirits, when it suddenly began to rain. A moment later, the sky opened up, and we found ourselves in the middle of a ferocious downpour, a summer lightning storm punctuated by tremendous claps of thunder. It wasn’t just some passing cloud. It was an out-and-out tempest, a monumental attack from the heavens. Lightning bolts were shooting down all around us, and there we were, stuck in the woods, with no shelter in sight. It became very terrifying, as though we had suddenly been caught in an aerial bombardment. One of the boys said that we would be safer if we got away from the trees, and so we began to scramble back toward a clearing we had passed a little while before. He was right, of course. In a lightning storm, you have to protect yourself by going to open ground. The problem in this case was that in order to enter the clearing, we had to crawl under a barbed wire fence. So, one by one, we crawled under the fence and made our way to what we thought would be safety. I was somewhere in the middle of the line, behind a boy named Ralph. Just as he was crawling under the fence, an enormous bolt of lightning struck the wire. I couldn’t have been more than two feet away from him. He stopped, apparently stunned by the lightning, and I remember that I crawled under the fence at that point, inching under the wire to Ralph’s left. Once I got through, I turned around and dragged him into the meadow to make room for the other boys. It didn’t occur to me that he was seriously hurt. I figured that he had received a shock and would soon recover from it. Once we were all in the clearing, the lightning attack continued; the bolts were dancing around us like spears. Several of the boys were hit, and they lay there weeping and moaning on the ground. It was an awful scene, truly awful. Another boy and I stayed with Ralph the whole time, rubbing his hands to keep him warm, holding his tongue to make sure he didn’t swallow it. His lips were turning blue, his skin was turning cold, but still, I kept thinking he would start coming around at any moment. He was dead, of course. He had been killed the instant the lightning hit the fence—electrocuted, with an eight-inch burn across his back. But I didn’t learn that until afterward, until after the storm had stopped.
LM: That’s the kind of experience you never leave behind completely.
PA: No, never. I can’t tell you how deeply it affected me. Not just the tragedy of a young boy losing his life like that—but the absolute suddenness of it, the fact that I could easily have been the one crawling under the fence when the lightning struck. Speaking about it now, I understand how crucial it was to me. In some sense, my entire attitude toward life was formed in those woods in upstate New York.
SG: In retrospect, is that why Moon Palace winds up having those two critical scenes involving lightning?
PA: There’s no question that those storms refer to the storm I lived through, I’m certain of it. And there are other traces of that event in Moon Palace. The passage when Effing watches over Byrne’s body in the Utah desert. Clearly I was reliving the experience of watching over the dead boy’s body in the woods …
What I am trying to say, I suppose, is that the material that haunts me, the material that I feel compelled to write about, is dredged up from the depths of my own memories. But even after that material is given to me, I can’t always be sure where it comes from.
LM: How do you balance this sense of feeling compelled to write about these things, your desire to leave yourself open, creatively, to these powerful resonances, versus your goal as an artist to control them, to shape them into an aesthetic arrangement?
PA: I don’t mean to imply that my books are nothing but an outpouring of my unconscious. There’s art involved as well, and effort, and a very precise sense of the kinds of feelings I am trying to convey. To say that “all my books are the same book” is probably too simple. What I mean is that all my books are connected by their common source, by the preoccupations they share. But each book belongs to its central character: Quinn, Blue, the narrator of The Locked Room, Anna Blume, Fogg, Nashe. Each one of these people thinks differently, speaks differently, writes differently from all the others. But each one is also a part of myself—which probably goes without saying. If all these books were put together in one volume, they would form the book of my life so far, a multifaceted picture of who I am. But there’s still more to come, I hope. If you think of the imagination as a continent, then each book would be an individual country. The map is still quite sketchy at this point, with many gaps and unexplored territories. But if I’m able to keep going long enough, perhaps all the blanks will eventually be filled in.
SG: On the other hand, you frequently seem to return to the same “terrain,” even if it’s located on different literary continents. For example, there’s a recurrent motif in several of your books (I’m thinking of City of Glass, Moon Palace, and The Music of Chance) of the windfall or inheritance that creates a suspension of the daily routine for the main character, followed by a gradual dissipation of the money until the character is left with nothing. This sounds almost like a starving artist’s fantasy, but since the process is described so vividly and convincingly, I wonder if it might have a basis in your autobiography …
PA: As a matter of fact, I did receive an inheritance after my father died eleven years ago. It wasn’t a tremendous amount of money as far as inheritances go, but it made a huge difference, it was enough to change my life entirely. I was pushing thirty-two at the time, and in the ten years since graduating from college I had been scraping along as best I could, often in very miserable circumstances. There were long stretches of time when I had nothing, when I was literally on the brink of catastrophe. The year before my father died was a particularly bad period. I had a small child, a crumbling marriage, and a minuscule income that amounted to no more than a fraction of what we needed. I became desperate, and for more than a year I wrote almost nothing. I couldn’t think about anything but money. Half-crazed by the pressure of it all, I began devising various get-rich-quick schemes. I invented a game (a card baseball game—which was actually quite good) and spent close to six months trying to sell it. When that failed, I sat down and wrote a pseudonymous detective novel in record time, about three months. It was eventually published, but it only brought in about two thousand dollars, which was hardly the kind of money I had been hoping for.
At another point, I made some inquiries about getting a job as a sports writer, but nothing came of that either. As a last resort, I even broke down and applied for a job as a teacher. A full load of freshman composition courses at Dutchess Community College for $8,000 a year. This was the worst thing I could imagine, but I swallowed my pride and took the plunge. I thought my credentials were decent. I had an M.A. from Columbia, I had published two or three books of poetry, I had translated quite a bit, had written articles for the New York Review of Books, Harpers, and so on. But it turned out that there were three hundred applicants for that miserable job, and without any prior experience, I didn’t have a chance. I was rejected on the spot. I don’t think I’ve ever been closer to feeling that I was at the end of my rope. Then, out of nowhere, with absolutely no warning at all, my father dropped dead of a heart attack and I inherited some money. That money changed everything for me; it set my life on an entirely different course.
LM: Your early published creative works were nearly all poems. Wasn’t it just after the death of your father that you first started writing prose—the materials that eventually became The Invention of Solitude?
PA: Not exactly. Although you might say that it was only then that I began to think of myself as a prose writer. But the fact is that I had always dreamed of writing novels. My first published works were poems, and for ten years or so I published only poems, but all along I spent nearly as much time writing prose. I wrote hundred and hundreds of pages, I filled up dozens of notebooks. It’s just that I wasn’t satisfied with it, and I never showed it to anyone. But the ideas for several of the novels I eventually published—at least in some kind of preliminary form—came to me back then, as far back as 1969 and 1970. I’m thinking particularly of In the Country of Last Things and Moon Palace, but also certain parts of City of Glass. The crazy speech about Don Quixote, the maps of Stillman’s footsteps, the crackpot theories about America and the Tower Of Babel—all that was cooked up when I was still in my early twenties.
SG: But at some point you fairly consciously decided to shift your focus away from prose to poetry. What was behind this decision?
PA: It was like someone trying to will himself to break a bad habit. By about the mid-seventies, I stopped writing fiction altogether. I felt that I was wasting my time, that I would never get anywhere with it, and so I decided to restrict myself exclusively to poetry.
LM: Was it really so exclusive, though? Wasn’t this about the time your first critical essays began appearing?
PA: Yes, I suppose I failed to break the habit. I continued writing prose anyway, quite a bit of it, in fact. Critical prose, articles, book reviews. Between 1974 and 1979, I must have written twenty-five or thirty pieces. It started right after I returned to New York. I had just spent four years living in France, and right before I left, an American friend of mine in Paris who knew Bob Silvers of the New York Review of Books suggested that I contact him once I returned. I eventually did, and when I proposed writing an article about Louis Wolfson’s book Le Schizo et les Langues, he said go ahead. He made no promises, of course, but I remember that he offered to pay me something even if they didn’t publish it, which I found very generous and uncalled-for. It turned out that he liked the article, and I wound up writing a number of others for him. They were mostly on poets—Laura Riding, Jabès, Ungaretti, and so on. Bob Silvers was an excellent editor—tough, respectful, very businesslike, and very enthusiastic—and I’m still grateful to him for having given me a chance.
LM: Did you find any of the same kinds of pleasures writing those critical articles that you received from your creative work?
PA: I never thought of myself as a critic or literary journalist, even when I was doing a lot of critical pieces. Eventually, I started doing articles for other magazines as well. Harper’s, Saturday Review, Parnassus, the San Francisco Review of Books, I can’t remember all of them. I never accepted assignments or did pieces to order. I only wrote about writers who interested me, and in nearly every case I was the one who suggested the article to the editor, not the other way around. I looked on those pieces as an opportunity to articulate some of my ideas about writing and literature, to map out some kind of aesthetic position. In effect, I could have accomplished the same thing by keeping a journal, but I felt it was more interesting and challenging to throw my thoughts out into a public arena. I wasn’t able to cheat. Everything had to be stated with absolute clarity: there was no room for vague impressions. All in all, I feel it was a useful apprenticeship. I wasn’t writing fiction, but I was writing prose, and the experience of working on those articles proved to me that I was gradually learning how to express myself.
SG: How was your poetry evolving during this period?
PA: It was beginning to change, beginning to open up. I had started out by writing poems that resembled clenched fists; they were short and dense and obscure, as compact and hermetic as Delphic oracles. But by the mid-seventies I could feel them taking on a new direction. The breath became somewhat longer, the propositions became somewhat more discursive. At times, a certain prose tonality began to creep in. In 1976 and 1977, I wrote four one-act plays, wondering if this wouldn’t be the proper medium for these new urges that were growing inside me. One of them, to my everlasting regret, was even performed. There’s no point in talking about that now—except to say that the memory of that performance still pains me. But another of those plays eventually came to life again. Six years later, I went back to it and reworked it into a piece of prose fiction. That was where Ghosts came from, the second novel of The New York Trilogy.
LM: Was there any particular breakthrough moment for you in terms of your prose—something that made you realize you could work in this form? Or was it more a matter of one thing leading to another—the essays, the plays, and so on—until you felt comfortable with it?
PA: It was both, I think, if such a thing is possible. But first came all the emotional and financial hardships I mentioned before. I barely wrote anything for close to a year. My wife and I were grinding out translations to put food on the table, and the rest of the time I was pursuing my half-baked money schemes. There were moments when I thought I was finished, when I thought I would never write another word. Then, in December of 1978, I happened to go to an open rehearsal of a dance piece choreographed by the friend of a friend, and something happened to me. A revelation, an epiphany—I don’t know what to call it. Something happened, and a whole world of possibilities suddenly opened up to me. I think it was the absolute fluidity of what I was seeing, the continual motion of the dancers as they moved around the floor. It filled me with immense happiness. The simple fact of watching men and women moving through space filled me with something close to euphoria. The very next day, I sat down and started writing White Spaces, a little work of no identifiable genre which was an attempt on my part to translate the experience of that dance performance into words. It was a liberation for me, a tremendous letting go, and I look back on it now as the bridge between writing poetry and writing prose. That was the piece that convinced me I still had it in me to be a writer. But everything was going to be different now. A whole new period of my life was about to begin.
It’s very strange, but I remember finishing that piece on January 14. I went to sleep very late that night, around two or three in the morning. At eight o’clock the phone rang, and there was one of my uncles on the other end of the line, telling me that my father had died during the night. …
LM: And along with that news came the inheritance.
PA: Yes, then came the inheritance. The money gave me a cushion, and for the first time in my life I had the time to write, to take on long projects without worrying about how I was going to pay the rent. In some sense, all the novels I’ve written have come out of that money my father left me. It gave me two or three years, and that was enough to get me on my feet again. It’s impossible to sit down and write without thinking about it. It’s a terrible equation, finally. To think that my father’s death saved my life.
SG: The way you describe this movement from initially writing prose, to abandoning it in favor of poetry when you felt you had failed at prose, to returning to it almost triumphantly during this moment of conversion—it almost sounds as if all along you had strong personal and aesthetic preferences for prose forms. If that’s the case, how do you feel about the poetry you wrote during that period?
PA: What it boils down to, I think, is a question of scope. It was a gradual process, but at the same time there was also a leap, a last little jump right at the end.
I remain very attached to the poetry I wrote, I still stand by it. In the final analysis, it could even be the best work I’ve ever done. But there’s a fundamental difference between the two activities, at least in the way I’ve approached them. In some sense, poetry is like taking still photographs, whereas prose is like filming with a movie camera. Film is the medium for both those arts—but the results are totally different. In the same way, words are the medium for both poetry and prose, but they create entirely different experiences, both for the writer and the reader.
SG: In other words, prose is able to encompass a lot more for you.
PA: That’s essentially it. My poems were a quest for what I would call a univocal expression. They expressed what I felt at any given moment, as if I’d never felt anything before and would never feel anything again. They were concerned with essences, with bedrock beliefs, and their aim was always to achieve a purity and consistency of language. Prose, on the other hand, gives me a chance to articulate my conflicts and contradictions. Like everyone else, I am a multiple being, and I embody a whole range of attitudes and responses to the world. Depending on my mood, the same event can make me laugh or make me cry; it can inspire anger or compassion or indifference. Writing prose allows me to include all of these responses. I no longer have to choose among them.
LM: That sounds like Bakhtin’s notion of “the dialogic imagination,” with the novel arising out of this welter of conflicting but dynamic voices and opinions. Heteroglossia …
PA: Exactly. Of all the theories of the novel, Bakhtin’s strikes me as the most brilliant, the one that comes closest to understanding the complexity and the magic of the form.
It probably also explains why it’s so rare for a young person to write a good novel. You have to grow into yourself before you can take on the demands of fiction. I’ve been talking about it in theoretical and literary terms, but there’s also the simple fact of growing older, of acquiring a better sense of who you are.
SG: I know you had started other books before City of Glass, but one thing that struck me in reading that book was how fully formed this literary sensibility seemed to be for somebody just publishing his first novel. Were there some private, personal factors at work, beyond the death of your father, that helped you mature as a writer and as an individual, so that you were in fact ready to write that first novel?
PA: I’m certain that having children has had a lot to do with it. Becoming a parent connects you to a world beyond yourself, to the continuum of generations, to the inevitability of your own death. You understand that you exist in time, and after that you can no longer look at yourself in the same way. It’s impossible to take yourself as seriously as you once did. You begin to let go, and in that letting go—at least in my case—you find yourself wanting to tell stories.
When my son was born twelve years ago, Charlie Simic, who’s been a close friend for a long time, wrote me a letter of congratulations in which he said, “Children are wonderful. If I didn’t have kids, I’d walk around thinking I was Rimbaud all the time.” He put his finger right on the heart of the experience.
This past summer, something funny happened to me that threw this whole question of children and writing into very sharp focus. We rented a house in Vermont for two months, an old fallen-down place in the middle of nowhere, a wonderful refuge. I was still writing The Music of Chance then, and every morning I’d walk over to a little outbuilding on the property to work on the book. It was about twenty or thirty yards from the house, and the kids and their friends would often play in the area between the two buildings. Right at the end of the summer, I was coming to the end of the first draft. As it happened, I finished on the day before we were supposed to head back to New York. I wrote the last sentence at about twelve or twelve-thirty in the afternoon, and I remember standing up from the table and saying to myself: “You’ve finally done it, old man. For once in your life, you’ve written something halfway decent.” I felt good, really very good—which is something that almost never happens to me when I think about my work. I lit a cigar and opened the door to step out into the sun, wanting to savor the triumph for a few minutes before I returned to the house. So there I was, standing on the steps of my little shack, telling myself what a genius I was, when all of sudden I looked up and saw my two-year old daughter in front of the house. She was stark naked (she scarcely wore any clothes all summer) and at that moment she was squatting over some stones and taking a shit. She saw me looking at her and began shouting very happily: “Look at me, Daddy! Look at what I’m doing!” So, rather than being able to bask in my own brilliance, I had to clean up my daughter’s mess. That was the first thing I did after finishing my book [Laughs]. Thirty seconds of glory, and then right back to earth. I can’t be sure if Sophie was offering me a not-so-subtle form of literary criticism, or if she was simply making a philosophical statement about the equality of all creative acts. One way or the other, she knocked me off my cloud, and I was very grateful to her for it.
LM: You mentioned earlier that all of your books are finally about yourself, that they are all exploring parts of your inner terrain. City of Glass supplies a lot of hints that it is in fact very much a book about you: not only do “you” literally appear by name in the book, but everyone Quinn meets—all these doubles and mirrors of his lost wife and family—seems to reflect back to us Quinn’s psychic dilemmas. And presumably yours. Had the experience of writing about yourself so prismatically in The Invention of Solitude helped prepare you, in a sense, for writing about yourself in the way you did in your novel?
PA: I think so. Yes, most definitely. In some sense, City of Glass was a direct response to The Invention of Solitude, particularly the second part, the section called “The Book of Memory.” But, in spite of the evidence, I wouldn’t actually say that I was “writing about myself” in either book. The Invention of Solitude is autobiographical, of course, but I don’t feel that I was telling the story of my life so much as using myself to explore certain questions that are common to us all: how we think, how we remember, how we carry our pasts around with us at every moment. I was looking at myself in the same way a scientist studies a laboratory animal. I was no more than a little gray rat, a guinea pig stuck in the cage of my own consciousness. The book wasn’t written as a form of therapy; it was an attempt to turn myself inside out and examine what I was made of. Myself, yes—but myself as anyone, myself as everyone. Even the first part, which is ostensibly about my father, is finally concerned with something larger than one man’s life. It’s about the question of biography, about whether it’s in fact possible for one person to talk about another person. The Locked Room picks up this problem again and approaches it from a somewhat different angle.
SG: Given what you’ve just said, I would have assumed you would have tried to prevent your audience from reading City of Glass as a disguised autobiography. Instead you introduce this possibility, and play with it in various ways. Why?
PA: I think it stemmed from a desire to implicate myself in the machinery of the book. I don’t mean my autobiographical self, I mean my author self, that mysterious other who lives inside me and puts my name on the covers of books. What I was hoping to do, in effect, was to take my name off the cover and put it inside the story. I wanted to open up the process, to break down walls, to expose the plumbing. There’s a strange kind of trickery involved in the writing and reading of novels, after all. You see Leo Tolstoy’s name on the cover of War and Peace, but once you open the book, Leo Tolstoy disappears. It’s as though no one has really written the words you’re reading. I find this “no one” terribly fascinating—for there’s finally a profound truth to it. On the one hand, it’s an illusion; on the other hand, it has everything to do with how stories are written. For the author of a novel can never be sure where any of it comes from. The self that exists in the world—the self whose name appears on the covers of books—is finally not the same self who writes the book.
SG: And of course it turns out that the “Paul Auster” whom Quinn visits in the novel isn’t the author of the book we’ve been reading—which literalizes this idea.
PA: Right. Paul Auster appears as a character in City of Glass, but in the end the reader learns that he is not the author. It’s someone else, an anonymous narrator who comes in on the last page and walks off with Quinn’s red notebook. So the Auster on the cover and the Auster in the story are not the same person. They’re the same and yet not the same. Just as the author of War and Peace is both Tolstoy and not Tolstoy.
LM: Was there a specific incident or impulse that started City of Glass?
PA: About a year after my first marriage broke up, I moved to an apartment in Brooklyn. It was early 1980, and I was working on “The Book of Memory” then—and also editing an anthology of twentieth-century French poetry for Random House. One day, a couple of months after I moved in, the telephone rang, and the person on the other end asked if he had reached the Pinkerton Agency. I said no, you’ve got the wrong number, and hung up. I probably would have forgotten all about it, but the very next day another person called and asked the same question. “Is this the Pinkerton Agency?” Again I said no, told him he’d dialed the wrong number, and hung up. But the instant after I hung up, I began to wonder what would have happened if I had said yes. Would it have been possible for me to pose as a Pinkerton agent? And if so, how far could I have taken it? The book grew out of those telephone calls, but more than a year went by before I actually began to write it. The wrong numbers were the starting point, but there’s no question that they influenced some of the other elements of the book as well—the private detective element, for example, and the idea of involving myself in the action of the story.
LM: There’s a scene in City of Glass where Quinn says that writing his Max Work mystery novels under the pen name of William Wilson made him feel he was writing these books at one step removed, so that “Wilson served as a kind of ventriloquist. Quinn himself was the dummy, and Work was the animated voice that gave purpose to the enterprise.” Since I know that you also wrote a detective novel under a pseudonym, I was wondering if you shared some of Quinn’s feelings about this process.
PA: It was exactly the same. All through the months I worked on that book, I felt as though I were writing with a mask on my face. It was an odd experience, but I can’t say that it was unenjoyable. Posing as someone else was quite a bit of fun, in fact—but at the same time disturbing and provocative. If I hadn’t gone through that experience of pseudonymity myself, I never would have been able to develop Quinn in the way I did.
SG: You must have had mixed feelings about finding yourself labeled so often (at least initially) as a “detective writer.”
PA: Yes, I must say I’ve found it rather galling at times. Not that I have anything against detective fiction—it’s just that my work has very little to do with it. I refer to it in the three novels of the Trilogy, of course, but only as a means to an end, as a way to get somewhere else entirely. If a true follower of detective fiction ever tried to read one of those books, I’m sure he would be bitterly disappointed. Mystery novels always give answers; my work is about asking questions.
In the long run, it probably doesn’t matter. People can say whatever they want; they’re entitled to misread books in any way they choose. It takes time for the dust to settle, and every writer has to be prepared to listen to a lot of stupidities when his work is discussed. The reviewing situation is particularly bad here, after all. Not only do we have the worst infant mortality rate in the Western world, but we probably have the lowest standard of literary journalism anywhere. Some of the people who review books strike me as quasi-illiterate, out-and-out morons. And theirs are the opinions that circulate, at least at the beginning of a book’s life.
SG: And yet, there are certain aspects about detective writing that are enormously attractive and compelling—things you point to in City of Glass about nothing being wasted in a good mystery novel, that “the center of the book shifts with each event that propels it forward,” its potential for having everything come to life, seething with possibilities.
PA: Of course. At its best, detective fiction can be one of the purest and most engaging forms of story-telling. The idea that every sentence counts, that every word can make a difference—it creates a tremendous narrative propulsion. It’s on that level that the form has been most interesting to me.
In the end, though, I would say that the greatest influence on my work has been fairy tales, the oral tradition of story telling. The Brothers Grimm, the Thousand and One Nights—the kinds of stories you read out loud to children. These are bare-bones narratives, narratives largely devoid of details, yet enormous amounts of information are communicated in a very short space, with very few words. What fairy tales prove, I think, is that it’s the reader—or the listener—who actually tells the story to himself. The text is no more than a springboard for the imagination. “Once upon a time there was a girl who lived with her mother in a house at the edge of a large wood.” You don’t know what the girl looks like, you don’t know what color the house is, you don’t know if the mother is tall or short, fat or thin, you know next to nothing. But the mind won’t allow these things to remain blank; it fills in the details itself, it creates images based on its own memories and experiences—which is why these stories resonate so deeply inside us. The listener becomes an active participant in the story.
LM: A lot of the contemporary writers who have also acknowledged a fascination with fairy tales (I’m thinking of people like Barth, Coover, Calvino, Borges) seem to share the sense that the fairy tale offers a method of communicating with readers that the novel basically ignores because it wants to provide all the details, the background, the explanation.
PA: I’d certainly agree that novel-writing has strayed very far from these open-ended structures—and from oral traditions as well. The typical novel of the past two hundred years has been crammed full of details, descriptive passages, local color—things that might be excellent in themselves, but which often have little to do with the heart of the story being told, that can actually block the reader’s access to that story. I want my books to be all heart, all center, to say what they have to say in as few words as possible. This ambition seems so contrary to what most novelists are trying to accomplish that I often have trouble thinking of myself as a novelist at all.
SG: In “The Book of Memory” you described your reaction to the breakup of your first marriage and your separation from your son by saying, “Each day would drag a little more of the pain out into the open.” Was writing City of Glass one way for you to work through or (or at least get at) that pain?
PA: That was the emotional source of the book, yes. My first wife and I split up in late 1978, and for a year-and-a-half after that I lived in a kind of limbo—first on Varick Street in Manhattan, then in that apartment in Brooklyn. But once the arrangements were worked out, my son was with me half the time. He was just three back then, and we lived together like a couple of old bachelors. It was a strange existence, I suppose, but not without its pleasures, and I assumed that life would go on like that for a long time. Then, early in 1981 (February 23, to be exact, it’s impossible for me to forget the date) I met Siri Hustvedt, the person I’m married to now. We took each other by storm, and nothing has ever been the same since. For the past nine years, she’s meant everything to me, absolutely everything …
So, by the time I started writing City of Glass, my life had undergone a dramatic improvement. I was in love with an extraordinary woman; we were living together in a new apartment; my inner world had been utterly transformed. In many ways, I think of City of Glass as an homage to Siri, as a love letter in the form of a novel. I tried to imagine what would have happened to me if I hadn’t met her, and what I came up with was Quinn. Perhaps my life would have been something like his. …
SG: Let’s talk a bit about the question of “solitude.” It’s a word that comes up often in your works—and of course it appears in the title of your first book of prose, The Invention of Solitude. It’s a concept that seems to contain a lot of different resonances for you, both personal and aesthetic.
PA: Yes, I suppose there’s no getting rid of it. But solitude is a rather complex term for me; it’s not just a synonym for loneliness or isolation. Most people tend to think of solitude as a rather gloomy idea, but I don’t attach any negative connotations to it. It’s simply a fact, one of the conditions of being human, and even if we’re surrounded by others, we essentially live our lives alone: real life takes place inside us. We’re not dogs, after all. We’re not driven solely by instincts and habits; we can think, and because we think, we’re always in two places at the same time. Even in the throes of physical passion, thoughts come pouring through our head. At the very height of sexual arousal, a person can be thinking about an unanswered letter on the dining room table or about standing on a street in a foreign city twenty years ago—or anything, anything at all …
What it boils down to is the old mind-body problem. Descartes. Solipsism. Self and other, all the old philosophical questions. In the end, we know who we are because we can think about who we are. Our sense of self is formed by the pulse of consciousness within us—the endless monologue, the lifelong conversation we have with our selves. And this takes place in absolute solitude. It’s impossible to know what someone else is thinking. We can only see the surfaces: the eyes, the face, the body. But we can’t see another person’s thoughts, can we? We can’t hear them or touch them; they’re utterly walled off from us.
Oliver Sacks, the neurologist, has made some astute observations about such things. Every whole person, he says, every person with a coherent identity, is in effect narrating the story of his life to himself at every moment—following the thread of his own story. For brain-damaged people, however, this thread has been snapped. And once that happens, it’s no longer possible to hold yourself together.
But there’s more to it than that. We live alone, yes, but at the same time everything we are comes from the fact that we have been made by others. I’m not just referring to biology—mothers and fathers, uterine birth, and so on. I’m thinking about psychology and the formation of the human personality. The infant feeding at the mother’s breast looks up into the mother’s eyes and sees her looking at him, and from that experience of being seen, the baby begins to learn that he is separate from his mother, that he is a person in his own right. We literally acquire a self from this process. Lacan calls it the “mirror-stage,” which strikes me as a beautiful way of putting it. Self-consciousness in adulthood is merely an extension of those early experiences. It’s no longer the mother who’s looking at us then—we’re looking at ourselves. But we can only see ourselves because someone else has seen us first. In other words, we learn our solitude from others. In the same way that we learn language from others.
LM: “Solitude,” then, is the essential condition of being locked inside one’s own head—but also something that only comes into our awareness because of other people. This sounds like a paradox …
PA: It does, but I don’t know how else to express it. What is so startling to me, finally, is that you don’t begin to understand your connection to others until you are alone. And the more intensely you are alone, the more deeply you plunge into a state of solitude, the more deeply you feel that connection. It isn’t possible for a person to isolate himself from other people. No matter how apart you might find yourself in a physical sense—whether you’ve been marooned on a desert island or locked up in solitary confinement—you discover that you are inhabited by others. Your language, your memories, even your sense of isolation—every thought in your head has been born from your connection with others. This is what I was trying to explore in “The Book of Memory,” to examine both sides of the word “solitude.” I felt as though I were looking down to the bottom of myself, and what I found there was more than just myself—I found the world. That’s why that book is filled with so many references and quotations, in order to pay homage to all the others inside me. On the one hand, it’s a work about being alone; on the other hand, it’s about community. That book has dozens of authors, and I wanted them all to speak through me. In the final analysis, “The Book of Memory” is a collective work.
SG: Earlier, when we were talking about your pseudonymous mystery novel, you said you felt like you were “wearing a mask” while writing that book. Could you talk a bit about the different relationships you have with your characters when you’re writing a book from the first-person, as opposed to a third-person perspective? For example, do you feel less that you’re wearing this mask when you’re writing in the first person? Or do you feel a more abstract relationship to all your characters?
PA: This is a fundamental question for me. Some of my books have been written in the first person, others have been written in the third, and in each case the entire story has developed out of the particular narrative voice I’ve chosen. Yes, obviously a novel written in the first person is going to sound more intimate than one written in the third person. But there’s a vast range within those two categories, and it’s possible to bring the boundaries of first person and third person so close to each other that they touch, even overlap.
SG: How does this overlap work in your own books? Do you mean by confusing the distinction between who the reader thinks the narrator is and who finally is revealed to actually be telling the story, as you did in City of Glass?
PA: That’s probably where the overlap is most obvious, because in City of Glass you have a book written in the third person throughout, and then, right at the end, the narrator appears and announces himself in the first person which colors the book in retrospect somehow, turning the whole story into a kind of oblique, first-person narrative. But I’ve been interested in pursuing different ranges of effects that can be produced with this sort of thing in most of my books. Even in Ghosts, which reads something like a fable, you feel the presence of the narrator lurking behind each sentence. The storyteller is a part of the story, even though he never uses the word “I.” In the few places where he breaks in, he always refers to himself in the plural—as if addressing the reader directly, including him in what is finally a very personal “we.” The Locked Room is written in the first person, but so much of it is about trying to understand someone else that certain sections of it are actually written in the third person. The same holds true for In the Country of Last Things. The little phrases that appear a few times at the beginning—“she wrote” or “her letter continued”—put the whole book in a third-person perspective. Someone has read Anna Blume’s notebook; somehow or other, her letter has arrived. Moon Palace functions a bit like The Locked Room in that it’s an intimate, first-person narrative that veers off into the third person. There are long passages in that book where Fogg literally disappears. When it comes right down to it, The Music of Chance is the only one of my novels that doesn’t combine first- and third-person narration. It’s written strictly in the third person.
LM: Your handling of the narrative perspective in The Music of Chance reminded me of what we find in several of Kafka’s best works—your narrator is “outside” the character but somehow manages to convey very directly Nashe’s intensely subjective, emotionally charged “inner” life. It’s a delicate balance: the seemingly objective representation of an emotionally charged, psychological landscape.
PA: Yes, that third person is so close to the first person, is so deeply imagined from Nashe’s point of view, that there’s hardly any difference at all. It was a very wrenching experience to write that book—utterly grueling and exhausting. For weeks after I finished it, I felt like a dead man.
LM: You chose to present the two sections of The Invention of Solitude through two different narrative perspectives, with “Portrait of an Invisible Man” being written in the first person, while “The Book of Memory” is in the third person. What was involved in that choice?
PA: The opening part was written very naturally in the first person. I didn’t question it; it just came to me that way, and I went with it. When I started the next section, I assumed it would be written in the first person as well. I worked on it for six or eight months in that form, but something about it disturbed me, something wasn’t right. Eventually, after groping in the dark with it for a long time, I understood that the book could only be written in the third person. Rimbaud: “Je est un autre.” It opened a door for me, and after that I worked in a kind of fever, as though my brain had caught fire.
What it came down to was creating a distance between myself and myself. If you’re too close to the thing you’re trying to write about, the perspective vanishes, and you begin to smother. I had to objectify myself in order to explore my own subjectivity—which gets us back to what we were talking about before: the multiplicity of the singular. The moment I think about the fact that I’m saying “I,” I’m actually saying “he.” It’s the mirror of self-consciousness, a way of watching yourself think.
SG: Were there any particular difficulties in writing from a woman’s perspective, as you did with Anna in In the Country of Last Things?
PA: Not really. But something in me resisted it for a long time. In many ways, writing that book was like taking dictation. I heard her voice speaking to me—and that voice was utterly distinct from my own. In that sense, there was almost no difficulty at all.
But when you consider that I first heard that voice in 1970 and didn’t finish the book until 1985, it’s safe to conclude that it was a very difficult book to write. I didn’t want to do it. I felt it was presumptuous to write from the viewpoint of a woman, and so every time I started working on it again, I’d stop. I’d cross my fingers and hope that the voice had talked itself out, that at last I’d he free of it. A year or two would go by, and then I’d start hearing her again. I’d write for a while, then stop again. This went on for years and years. Finally, some time in the early eighties, right when I was in the middle of The New York Trilogy (I think I was between the second and third books), she came back to me in full force, and I wrote the first thirty or forty pages as they stand now. Still not sure of myself, I showed them to Siri and asked her what she thought. She said those pages were the best work I had ever done and that I had to finish the book. I had to finish the book as a present to her. “It’s my book,” she said, and she’s continued to refer to it in that way ever since.
Still, there was a pause after writing those initial pages. I wanted to finish the Trilogy first, so more time went by before I returned to it. But in that interval, I published what I had already written in the Paris Review. It’s the only time I’ve ever published a piece of a novel, but in this case it seemed to make sense. I did it as a kind of promise to myself, as a guarantee that I would actually finish it.
LM: There’s an obvious way that In the Country of Last Things is grounded in the dystopian or post-holocaust tradition of science fiction. But I was mostly struck with how palpably real this urban nightmare scene is. It seems not too different, in fact, from what you can find right here in New York.
PA: As far as I’m concerned, the book has nothing to do with science fiction. It’s quite fantastical at times, of course, but that doesn’t mean it’s not firmly anchored in historical realities. It’s a novel about the present and the immediate past, not about the future. “Anna Blume walks through the twentieth century.” That’s the phrase I carried around in my head while I was working on the book.
LM: What sorts of historical realities do you mean—the massive devastations caused in the two world wars?
PA: Among other things, yes. There are specific references to the Warsaw ghetto and the siege of Leningrad, but also to events taking place in the Third World today—not to speak of New York, which is rapidly turning into a Third World city before our eyes. The garbage system, which I describe at such great length in the novel, is loosely based on the present-day garbage system in Cairo. All in all, there’s very little invented material in the book. The characters, yes, but not the circumstances. Even the pivotal event in the story—when Anna, hoping to buy a pair of shoes, is lured into a human slaughterhouse—even that scene is based on historical fact. Precisely that kind of thing happened in Leningrad in World War II. The city was surrounded by the Germans for two and a half years, and in that time 500,000 people lost their lives. 500,000 people in one city. Just stop for a moment and try to imagine what it must have been like. Once you begin to think about such things, it’s difficult to think about anything else.
I realize that many people found this book depressing, but there’s nothing I can do about that. In the end, I find it the most hopeful book I’ve ever written. Anna Blume survives, at least to the extent that her words survive. Even in the midst of the most brutal realities, the most terrible social conditions, she struggles to remain a human being, to keep her humanity intact. I can’t imagine anything more noble and courageous than that. It’s a struggle that millions of people have had to face in our time, and not many of them have been as tenacious as she is. I think of Anna Blume as a true heroine.
SG: Earlier in the interview you referred to yourself as basically an “intuitive writer” in terms of the way your writing process operates. Maybe we could have you discuss the relationship between your conscious intentionality versus your intuition by having you discuss the way a specific image in your work develops. For instance, the moon image in Moon Palace appears in dozens of different contexts that occasionally dovetail or coalesce into groupings—Barber’s legends of the Indians (with their origins on the moon), the way the Utah desert is described as a lunar landscape, the fortune cookie that says, “The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future” (and which turns out to be a quote from Tesla), the restaurant named “Moon Palace,” and so on. Is the unfolding of these connections and resonances the product of conscious design or happy accident?
PA: If you think about any one thing long enough or hard enough, it’s going to begin to reverberate for you. Once that happens, waves are emitted, and those waves travel through space and bounce off other things, which in turn emit their own waves. It’s an associative process, and if you stick with it conscientiously enough, large portions of the world will eventually be touched by your thoughts. It’s not really a question of accident or design. This is the way the mind works. It just happens, but you have to be watching attentively for it to go on happening. Pick any object in front of you—a coffee cup, or a box of cigars, or a telephone—and try to think about where it comes from. Within ten minutes, you’re onto any number of other things—geology, history, labor problems, biology, God knows what—a whole range of subjects. “To see the world in a grain of sand.” If you’re capable of doing that, imagine how much can be seen in the moon!
LM: There’s also a certain sense in which those elaborate connections and metaphorical associations being developed grow naturally out of the kind of sensibility you project for Fogg.
PA: Precisely. Fogg is a bookish young man, an intellectual, and he has a penchant for this kind of thing. It’s something he inherits from his Uncle Victor, a man who is constantly searching the world for hidden connections. The moon imagery comes from Fogg—I wasn’t trying to impose it on him. At the same time, remember, he’s telling the story of his youth from the distance of middle age, and he often pokes fun at himself. He’s looking back on the way he used to think, the way he used to interpret the world. It’s one of the many follies of his adolescence, a symptom of the madness of those times. But Fogg is a unique case. Other characters I’ve written about have none of these tendencies; they don’t indulge in such elaborate mental gymnastics. Nashe, for example, the hero of The Music of Chance, has nothing in common with Fogg. He’s a much more straightforward kind of person, and consequently the book he appears in is a much simpler story.
LM: Let’s go back for a second to your comment about seeing the world in a grain of sand. What made it seem so much a part of what you were doing in the novel? And how did this fit in with the “follies” of Fogg’s adolescence?
PA: 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. First there’s Columbus, then there was the discovery of the West, then finally there is outer space: the moon as the last frontier. But Columbus had no idea that he’d discovered America. He thought he had sailed to India, to China. In some sense, Moon Palace is the embodiment of that misconception, an attempt to think of America as China. But the moon is also repetition, the cyclical nature of human experience. There are three stories in the book, after all, and each one is finally the same. Each generation repeats the mistakes of the previous generation. So it’s also a critique of the notion of progress. And if America is the land of progress, what are we to make of ourselves then? And so on and so on and so on. Fogg wends his way among all these ideas, this pinball machine of associations, struggling to find a place for himself. By the end of the book I think he manages to get somewhere. But he only reaches the beginning, the brink of his adult life. And that’s where we leave him—getting ready to begin.
SG: You’ve described how emotionally exhausting it was for you to write your latest novel, The Music of Chance. Did you realize when you started it that it was going to be such a wrenching book to write?
PA: It’s never possible to predict what it’s going to be like. With my other books, I’ve usually known the general shape of the story before beginning to write it, but in this case a number of crucial elements were altered as I went along. I began with a different ending in mind, but at a certain point I realized that I had been wrong, that the book was heading for a much darker conclusion than I had originally planned. This revelation came as a shock to me, it stopped me cold in my tracks. But there was no getting around it, and after thinking it over for several days, I understood that I had no choice.
SG: Do you recall what the origins of the book were?
PA: At the end of Moon Palace, Fogg is driving out west in a car. The car is stolen, and he winds up continuing the journey on foot. I realized that I wanted to get back inside that car, to give myself a chance to go on driving around America. So there was that very immediate and visceral impulse, which is how The Music of Chance begins—with Nashe sitting behind the wheel of a car.
At the same time, I wanted to explore the implications of the windfall I had received after my father’s death—which is something we discussed before. This led me to start thinking about the question of freedom, which is ultimately the true subject of the book.
As for the wall—those stones had been standing inside me for years. The play that I mentioned earlier, the one that was performed in the seventies, was about two men building a wall. The whole play consists of them lugging stones around the stage, and by the end they’re completely blocked off from the audience. I was never satisfied with it, but at the same time I couldn’t get rid of the idea. It plagued me and haunted me for all those years. So this was my attempt to improve on what I had done with it the first time. Those are three elements of the novel that I was able to think about before I wrote it. The conscious material, so to speak. Everything else is shrouded in obscurity.
When I was about two-thirds of the way through the first draft, it occurred to me that the story had the same structure as a fairy tale. Up until then, I had only thought about the book in concrete terms, the reality of the action. But if you reduce the book to its skeleton, then you wind up with something that resembles a typical story by the Brothers Grimm, don’t you? A wanderer stumbles onto an opportunity to make his fortune; he travels to the ogre’s castle to test his luck, is tricked into staying there, and can win his freedom only by performing a series of absurd tasks that the ogre invents for him. I don’t know if I want to make too much out of this, but it was an interesting discovery anyway. Another example of how elusive the whole activity of writing is. Yet another testimony to my own ignorance.