From The Futurist Radio Hour, KUSF San Francisco. Reproduced with permission of Paul Auster.
CAPEN: I’d like to delve into the past as our departure point. You were, at one time, a merchant seaman, and I wonder how this came about.
AUSTER: It’s true, I did work for about six months on an Esso oil tanker. I got the job after I left college. I didn’t know what I wanted to do in life. I didn’t want to be an academic, which is probably what I was best suited for, but I just didn’t want to be in school anymore, and the idea of spending my life in a university was too horrible to contemplate. I had no real profession, no trade, I hadn’t really studied for anything. All I wanted to do was to write. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn’t need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children. It turned out that my stepfather, who was a person I was very close to, the person to whom I dedicated Moon Palace, Norman Schiff, earned his living as a labor lawyer and negotiator. One of his clients was the Esso Seamen’s Union, a company union. So I knew all about these ships, and when I was about to leave school I asked Norman if he could help me get a job on one of them, and he said, “I’ll take care of it for you.” It’s extremely difficult to get these jobs, because you can’t get a job on a ship unless you have seaman’s papers, and you can’t get seaman’s papers unless you have a job on a ship. There had to be a way to break through the circle, and he was the one who arranged it for me. So I shipped out. It’s quite amusing. I went through all the exams, I got my papers, and then I had to sit around and wait until a ship from the fleet came into the New York area with an opening, not knowing how long this wait was going to be. In the meantime—this is 1970—I took a job with the U.S. Census Bureau. In The Locked Room, the third volume of The New York Trilogy, there’s a sequence where the narrator talks about working for the census, and I took this straight from life. As in the book, I wound up inventing people. Kind of curious. Anyway, right around that time I had a problem with a wisdom tooth and I had to go to the dentist to have the thing pulled out, and it was while I was sitting in the chair in the dentist’s office—the dentist had just picked up a big pair of pliers and was about to yank out my tooth—when the telephone rang. It was my stepfather. “The ship is here,” he said. “You have to report in two hours.” So I jumped out of the dentist’s chair with the bib on and said, “Sorry, I have to leave,” and ran out and made my way to a tanker in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The tooth was taken out a week later in Baytown, Texas. The ship traveled around the Gulf of Mexico, and it was all new to me, I hadn’t been in the South, I hadn’t been in Texas, and I learned a lot during those months. Luckily, the work was well paid. I managed to save several thousand dollars, and it was with that money that I moved to Paris, where I spent the next three or four years.
CAPEN: This was key for you, this move. What was your experience of Paris? It almost seems like you learned the meaning of being a writer there.
AUSTER: Well, it was certainly a fundamental time. I had been writing before that. It was what I wanted to do with my life. But my student years came at a particularly crazy time in America. We’re talking about the late ’60s, and Columbia University, where I went to school, was a hotbed of activity. It was impossible not to get caught up in it. As a consequence, I didn’t do as much writing as I would have hoped. So after I graduated, leaving America for a while made sense. It wasn’t that I wanted to become an expatriate. I just needed some breathing room. I’d already been translating French poetry, I’d been to Paris twice before and had liked it very much, and so that was where I went. By the time I returned to New York, it was certain to me that this is what I was doing with my life, there was no turning back.
CAPEN: You entered into it in what may be the most obscure way, through French poetry, translations of Surrealist works. So the ’70s were that sort of period for you. Then in the ’80s you came into your own as a novelist, and from there it’s skyrocketed into this decade.
AUSTER: The funny thing is, as a young person I was trying to write prose, and I wrote a lot of it, but I was never satisfied with the results. Two of the novels I wound up finishing and publishing later I started very early on, in my early twenties, In the Country of Last Things and Moon Palace. I worked on both of those books for a long time but never quite got a grip on either one. I put them aside and at a certain point decided that I couldn’t write prose, that I would just stick to writing poetry. I was always interested in French poetry and began translating for the pure pleasure of it. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, to pay the rent and put bread on the table, but it was grinding and unpleasant work, I really didn’t like it. I wound up translating a lot of mediocre books, badly written books on subjects that had no interest to me, for pay that was disastrously low. At a certain point I realized I could probably earn more flipping hamburgers. I mean, it was that bad. By the late ’70s, I ran into a crisis—on every level: personal, artistic, and I was absolutely broke, I’d run out of money and … hope, I guess. I stopped writing for about a year. The only thing I actually did during that period was write a detective novel under another name, in about six weeks, just to make money, I was so desperately poor, but it took several years before it was actually published. When I started writing again in late ’78, it was prose, and the fact is I haven’t written a poem since then. I absolutely stopped, and absolutely started again, and the two parts of my life as a writer are very different.
CAPEN: Not many poets come out of Brooklyn, although Whitman certainly is a notable exception.
AUSTER: Actually, Brooklyn has a long literary history. Whitman most famously, but most of the Objectivists lived in Brooklyn—Louis Zukovsky, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, and probably one of the great twentieth-century poems, The Bridge, written by Hart Crane, was composed in Brooklyn. In fact, there are few places in America with a greater poetic tradition than Brooklyn.
CAPEN: Kurt Vonnegut feels that once he’s finished a book, the work is out of his hands, it’s out in the world, and it takes on a life of its own. You share this view?
AUSTER: Yes, I agree with that completely. The book is your book. You have been responsible for every single thing on every page, every comma, every syllable is your work. Then you let go of it, you give it to the world and what the world makes of what you’ve done is unpredictable, out of your control. One of my novels, City Of Glass, was turned into a comic book. The project was initiated by my friend Art Spiegelman (Maus). I knew that if Art was involved in this project it would be of high quality, so I let it happen. I think it’s terrific, by the way. I’m very impressed by how well the artist-writer team of [David] Mazzucchelli and [Paul] Karasik managed to render this book in images. Another novel, The Music of Chance, was turned into a film, but someone also made it into a ballet a couple of years ago. Most moving to me, and this is the best kind of thing that can happen to a writer, another one of my novels, In the Country of Last Things, fell into the hands of a theater director from Sarajevo about three years ago—during the siege. He read it under horrible circumstances, no electricity, no heat, in the dead of winter in the middle of a war, but once he started reading it, he told me, he couldn’t stop and pushed on to the end in one night with a candle by his bed. For him, the book was a blow-by-blow account of the situation in Sarajevo. He became so impassioned that he decided to mount a stage adaptation with his theater group—and they performed it, in the worst days of the siege. The book, of course, was written many years before the Bosnian apocalypse, and yet the work of one man’s imagination, in this case mine, somehow connected with what another man was living through at that moment, years later, and something new happened with it. Books constantly change, even though the words are the same. The world changes, people change, people find a book at the right moment, and it answers something, some need or desire. Why would I want to block something like that? I think you’d be foolish to assume that you know what the fate of your work is going to be.
CAPEN: Let’s get metaphysical for a moment. Do you feel as an author that you open yourself to some sort of channel and the story is out there waiting for you?
AUSTER: Well, yes, I suppose so. You just don’t know how complex and mysterious the world can be. It’s no accident that he should have felt that way, because I was consciously writing a book about events that had taken place earlier in the twentieth century. And so here in the late twentieth century, yet another horror takes place, and the book strikes a chord. You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it’s always just one person encountering the book. It’s not an audience, it’s one to one. It’s me the writer and you the reader, and we’re together on that page, and I think it’s probably about the most intimate place where two human beings can meet. That’s why books are never going to die. It’s impossible. It’s the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn’t only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and the two of you make the book together.
CAPEN: The titles of your books, In the Country of Last Things, City of Glass, The Music of Chance, Smoke … they sound like kernels of ideas as opposed to being derived later from an overview in the long run. Is this the case?
AUSTER: I find it impossible to start a project without the title in mind. I can sometimes spend years thinking of the title to go with the thing that’s forming in my head. A title defines the project, and if you keep finding the ramifications of the title in the work, it becomes better, I’m convinced of this. So, yes, I think about titles a lot. Sometimes I walk around making up titles for things that don’t exist, that will never exist.
CAPEN: Back to the work, once finished, being out of your control. Philip Haas, the director, took The Music of Chance and did, to my way of thinking, a brilliant job with this, but it was completely different than the book.
AUSTER: When The Music of Chance was published, several people called about turning it into a film. Philip Haas had no money and he had never made a feature film before, but I felt he understood the book and was going to do an honorable job with it. Some things were altered a bit, but I don’t feel the movie betrayed the novel.
CAPEN: John Irving says his favorite novel is Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and he’s read it perhaps a dozen times. Is there a book like that for you?
AUSTER: There are several of them, but if I had to say just one, one book that I keep going back to and keep thinking about, it’s Don Quixote. That’s the one, for me. It seems to present every problem every novelist has ever had to face, and to do it in the most brilliant and human way imaginable.
CAPEN: Are you about to unveil another novel?
AUSTER: I’ve finished a book, but it’s not a novel, it’s a nonfiction work. It’s hard to describe. I would call it an autobiographical essay about money. Mostly about not having money. It’s called Hand to Mouth. And since finishing that, I’m creeping my way back into a novel I had started before.
CAPEN: One last thought. Lou Reed, in Blue in the Face, says he’s been trying to get out of New York for thirty-five years, but he can’t seem to leave. Is this your desire? Or have you become fabulously well-to-do, with houses scattered all over?
AUSTER: No, I don’t have houses scattered all over, but I do have one house, and I live in it all the time. Lou says in the film, every New Yorker considers leaving New York at one time or another. I used to think about it every now and then, but at a certain point a few years ago, I realized that I had to stay. It’s better for me to be there. So … I’m staying. Maybe later, maybe somewhere down the road, I’ll change my mind. But for now, and for the foreseeable future, I’m not going anywhere.