From Penguin Reading Guide for Mr. Vertigo. Reproduced with permission of Paul Auster
Applewhite: What drew you to the story of Mr. Vertigo?
Auster: That’s a great mystery to me. I don’t know where it came from. For years I’d been walking around with a tale of a master and a disciple in my head, never very clearly defined, and never much of a story, just a situation. When I sat down to write it, I thought it would be about twenty pages. Obviously, I was wrong.
Applewhite: You once told an interviewer that “very strong emotions, traumas even, generate [my] stories.” Was that the case with Mr. Vertigo?
Auster: Again, every book I’ve ever written has been a conundrum to me. I don’t know what I’m doing, or why I’m doing it. There is simply the compulsion to do it, the absolute necessity of getting that story down on paper. Sometimes, later, after a book is written, I have little glimmers of understanding about where it came from, little hints. With Mr. Vertigo, I think it has something to do with the idea of falling from high places. I say that in the way an anthropologist would say it, strictly based on observation and the evidence of my own eyes. I can think of several books I’ve written in which people fall. In the most important scene of In the Country of Last Things, Anna Blume jumps through a window on the top floor of a building in order to save herself; she’s not killed, but it changes the course of her life. In Moon Palace, Fogg’s obese father falls into an open grave and breaks his back. Everything in Leviathan revolves around a man falling off a fire escape. All this, I think (but how can I really know?) might be connected to something that happened to my father when I was a little boy. He was working on a roof in Jersey City and fell off, just like that. He slipped and started tumbling through the air. If not for a clothesline that broke his fall, he probably would have been killed. Though I didn’t see it happen, I walked around with that image in my head all through my childhood: my father flying through space. Maybe that’s the source, the thing at the bottom of my strange obsession.
Applewhite: One of my favorite things about the book is the combination of the spiritual and the utterly mundane. Both are certainly present in the character of Master Yehudi: sometimes he sounds like a Zen priest, sometimes like a carnival huckster.
Auster: He’s a very complex character. On the one hand he’s a con man, a charlatan, an operator trying to make a lot of money—just like everyone else in America. On the other hand, he has a very deep spiritual side. He’s interested in spiritual truths. Defying the laws of nature, as he proposes to do with Walt, puts him in a very precarious and interesting position with God, with the universe, with man. And Master Yehudi thinks about these things. He takes them seriously.
Applewhite: Where does he come by his spiritual leanings?
Auster: Hard to say. He was there, fully formed in my head before I started writing. Later on, I realized that his biography was quite similar to Houdini’s, who was also a Hungarian Jew who came from a family of rabbis. His real name was Erich Weiss. The contrast between what you might call the mythical and the everyday, how they combine and live side by side in the same world, is part of what this book is about. It’s what establishes its tone.
Applewhite: Walt uses a lot of religious language and imagery too. Where does it come from?
Auster: What interests me about American language, the language of the people, is that it’s very crude, very lively, very inventive. But at the same time, there’s a Biblical component to it, especially the Bible in the King James version, which is undoubtedly the most read book in American history, as well as the book that has been most listened to. For many people, especially people of earlier generations, it was the only literature they knew. So there’s an astonishing combination in the American vernacular of what you might call the high and the low. Walt’s speech is a perfect example of that.
Applewhite: Isn’t Walt searching for some sort of truth?
Auster: No more or less than anyone else. We’re all looking for the truth, aren’t we? Something to believe in, something solid to stand on. You can read this book in many different ways, and I don’t think that one reading is more valid than another. They all coexist. You can look at it as a parable of childhood, but you can also look at it as a piece of American history. You can look at it as a novel about the public and the private, about money, about show biz, about success and failure. I would be the last person to try to impose an interpretation on a reader.
Applewhite: Why did you write the story in the first person?
Auster: Another question I can’t answer. That’s just how it came to me, the old man looking back. You could say, though—assuming you’re a literary critic—that a first-person narration is less reliable than a story told in the third person. A third-person narrator is omniscient; you trust the voice, you accept it on faith. A first-person narration is more complex, because you have to take into account who’s saying what, and why. What if the narrator is lying on purpose? You can never ignore that as a possibility.
Applewhite: It’s pretty dramatic to make poor Walt choose between his testicles and stardom. How come you shaped the story that way?
Auster: I couldn’t think of a more dramatic conflict.
Applewhite: Explaining why Mrs. Witherspoon won’t be joining them on tour, Master Yehudi says, “If you just stand there and wait, there’s a chance the thing you’re hoping for will come right to you.” Do you think his fix on romantic love is as off-base as Walt does?
Auster: For many of the things one most ardently wants, patience is a great virtue. Sometimes things do come to you, including love. But Master Yehudi makes one mistake after another where Mrs. Witherspoon is concerned. He doesn’t play his cards right.
Applewhite: Mrs. Witherspoon’s a lusty lady. Do you think sex is important to men and women in the same way?
Auster: I don’t think she has a different approach to her sexuality than either Walt or Master Yehudi. Mrs. Witherspoon is my kind of woman, and I would venture to say that her view of sex is a lot less unusual than people might think. To give you some idea of how my books get written, I have to confess that when I started the novel there was no Mrs. Witherspoon. She just emerged. She started making appearances as I was writing, and became more and more important as the book continued. Actually, and this is occurring to me for the first time, if there’s any book that Mr. Vertigo is connected to, it’s Pinocchio, a book that I’ve thought about long and hard over the years. In some odd way you could say that Walt is Pinocchio, Master Yehudi is Master Geppeto, and Mrs. Witherspoon is the Blue Fairy.
Applewhite: Walt the Wonder Boy says, “You have to keep testing yourself, pushing your talent as hard as you can. … People begin to sense that you’re out there taking risks for them.” Is this true of writing?
Auster: As a writer, I don’t think about the audience in the way an actual performer does. When I wrote that passage, I was thinking about real entertainers, people who stand up in public and do their work in front of a crowd of strangers.
Applewhite: In your opinion, who are the great storytellers?
Auster: The anonymous men and women who invented the fairy tales we still tell each other today, the authors of the 1001 Nights, the European folk tales, the whole oral tradition that started the moment men learned how to talk. They’re an unending source of inspiration to me.
Applewhite: Are those the sorts of books you like to read? What’s on your bedside table?
Auster: It’s very cluttered right now, which probably means it’s a good cross-section of the kinds of things that interest me. My wife and I just bought two books for our daughter, who is almost eight, but I claimed them first: a collection of Yiddish folk tales and another one of French folk tales. I was recently sent the enormous, unabridged first English translation of The Man without Qualities, by Robert Musil, and that’s there too. Then there’s a book about intelligence in dogs, because I’m trying to write about a dog. Low Life by Luc Sante, and A Void by Georges Perec, a novelist I admire very much. Also … let me think … a book of poems by Charles Simic … and one or two others.
Applewhite: Talking about writing in the New York Times Magazine, you say, “You suffer a lot. You feel inadequate. The sense of failure is enormous.” Do you still feel that way in the light of your growing reputation?
Auster: Oh yes. The longer you go on writing, the harder writing becomes. You set higher and higher standards for yourself, and the risks you take become bigger, more dangerous, more disturbing. Just because you’ve written one book doesn’t mean you’ll be able to write a second, and just because you’ve written a second doesn’t mean you’ll be able to write a third. The struggles go on right to the end. When I read nice things about myself or my work, it’s as though they’re talking about someone else. People also say a lot of nasty things, and if you’ve made up your mind not to let that get you down, the only honest way to deal with praise is to ignore it, too.
Applewhite: In the same interview you describe writing as “certainly a stupid way to live your life, isolating yourself every day, making something nobody really needs or wants.” Do you really believe that?
Auster: Much of the time, yes. Some of the time, no. But, for better or worse, writing is what I do, it’s what I do best. I’m not good for anything else.