From The Rumpus.net 16 Nov. 2009. Reproduced with permission of Juliet Linderman
Rumpus: What were you doing before we met today? What is a typical day in the life of Paul Auster?
Paul Auster: There are two kinds of typical days. There’s the typical day when I’m writing a novel, and there’s the typical day when I’m not. I just finished something new, so I’m unemployed again, which means that I had a pretty lackadaisical day. When I’m writing a novel, I stick to a rigid routine. I get up between seven and eight, I have orange juice and tea, read the paper, and then go off to a little apartment I have in the neighborhood where I work. I stay there until five or six. It’s a very spartan environment. I don’t even own a computer. I write by hand and then I type it up on an old manual typewriter. But I cross out a lot—I’m not writing on stone tablets, it’s just ink on paper. I don’t feel comfortable without a pen or a pencil in my hand. I can’t think with my fingers on a keyboard. Words are generated for me by gripping the pen, and pressing the point onto the paper.
Rumpus: You’re a very prolific writer. You’ve published works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translation, critical essays and screenplays. When and how did you decide that you wanted to be a writer, and what do you recall as your earliest formative reading experience?
Auster: For one reason or another, I became a passionate reader when I was very little. By the age of nine or so, I was writing little poems—don’t ask me why, they were wretched, wretched, awful little things—but I enjoyed doing it, and eventually I graduated to writing short stories. When I was twelve years old, in the sixth grade, I wrote a long short story, and the teacher let me read it out loud to the other students at the end of school each day. My public debut as a writer! If I’m not mistaken, it was a story about someone hiding stolen pearls in a typewriter. I don’t know where I came up with the idea, I probably stole it. I remember doing drawings of all the faces of the characters too … ridiculous. But as I got older and entered my adolescence, I got more serious about all this. The turning point for me was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever at fifteen. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are, then I want to be a novelist.
Rumpus: You’ve got a new novel out, Invisible. In part two of Invisible, one character says to another, “Fear is a good thing. Fear is what drives us to take risks and extend ourselves beyond our normal limits. Any writer who feels he is standing on safe ground is unlikely to produce anything of value.” What kinds of risks do you take as a writer, and when is the last time you truly felt you were not standing on solid ground?
Auster: I never feel I’m standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear. As a poet or a novelist or a painter, you are pushing yourself all the time, always looking for a new way to approach things, challenging yourself and never, never trying to write the same book twice. You challenge yourself aesthetically, morally, psychologically. You go into terrain that can be very uncomfortable, and you have to do it with a certain boldness. You can’t shrink from the task, but that’s what makes it all so interesting. Otherwise, better to do another job. With Invisible, the structure is very strange, it’s very risky, as was Man in the Dark. That one loops in on itself, then takes a sudden right-turn about two-thirds through. As does this new one; it breaks into pieces by the end. There are two male narrators, and a female narrator in the last chapter as well. The story seemed to demand to be written that way. Then there’s the business that takes place in part 2 … which was utterly new territory for me, and it was difficult to write. I wanted to do it in a very open and honest way, which was demanding emotionally. I don’t even know where it came from—but there it was, and I went with it.
Rumpus: Do you have a particular process, or do you find that you invent a new process with each new book you write?
Auster: It’s new, it’s always new. I’m scared at the beginning of each book, because I’ve never written it before. I feel I have to teach myself how to do it. The tone of every book is slightly different; there’s a music in each that is distinct from all the others, and even the new book that I’ve just finished [Sunset Park]—is shaped differently from anything I’ve tried before. It contains some very long sentences, sentences that are three pages long, but there was some sort of inner cadence I was trying to create, and I felt that by using long, rolling, run-on sentences, the book had more propulsion.
Rumpus: You seem to have a fascination with writers, and they tend to play very central roles in your novels. Sometimes it seems that you explore the act of writing as a form of therapy, as if writing about something somehow makes it more real, gives it more meaning. But you also write about writing as a compulsion, as a tool that can unlock dark, difficult parts of the unconscious that you might not even know exist. Aside from a career, what role does writing play in your life? In short, why write?
Auster: I don’t know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn’t have to do it. But it is a compulsion. You don’t choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. When young people tell me they want to write, I say: Think very carefully about it. There will be few rewards, you probably won’t make any money, you probably won’t become famous, and you will spend your whole life locked up in a room by yourself worrying about how to survive. You have to have a tremendous taste for solitude. I think all writers are a bit crazy. Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else. On the other hand, when I’m writing, even though it’s hard and often a struggle, I’m happier than when I’m not writing. I feel alive. Whereas when I’m not writing, I’m nothing more than your common everyday neurotic. I feel that the act of writing, in and of itself, is a tool for probing the world in ways that wouldn’t be possible without a pen in your hand. It’s a strange, almost neurological phenomenon, and the words seem to generate more words—but only when you’re writing. You can’t do it in your head. It’s only in the heat of composition that these things occur to you.
Rumpus: So solitude is healthy for you?
Auster: Up to a point. I wouldn’t want to live alone. How grim things would be if I didn’t have Siri to talk to and share things with. But our days are spent apart, each one alone in a room.
Rumpus: You’ve worked as a translator, and you are obviously very sensitive to language, and you do often write about words themselves as being particularly important in and of themselves. Are words simply a vehicle for expression, or can they be the inspiration?
Auster: It can be both, and it shifts. I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist is to write a novel in which the language is so transparent that the reader will forget that language is the medium of communication. To see right through the words into the story itself. At other times, the materiality of the words themselves is the essence of the story. In Timbuktu, for example. It’s all about the language, the careening mayhem of free association. So it depends on what book we’re talking about.
Rumpus: I’ve read in several places that you are heavily influenced by Herman Melville. In Moby-Dick, the narrator Ishmael is decidedly unreliable. As readers, we don’t know who he is, or where he came from, and are given nearly no history of him at all. Similarly, in Invisible, and in some of your earlier work, your narrators are unreliable as well, playing with the notion of what truth is, and whether or not it can be qualified. When you craft your characters, do you endow them with histories? Do you always know exactly what forces drive them? Do you have emotional relationships with them, and why are some of them so opaque?
Auster: I find my characters as I’m writing. It’s quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them. Even after a book is finished, they seem to live on, as if they were as real as I am or you are. About a year ago, I was in Denmark, out by the water in Elsinore, and I was very moved to see that the name of one of the ferry boats was Hamlet. An imaginary character becomes so important to people that we name a ship after him. The imaginary lives on in the real. Invisible is the most complex book of mine in terms of narration. But as August Brill says at one point in Man in the Dark, “the real and the imagined are one. Thoughts are real, even thoughts of unreal things.”
Rumpus: What now, what’s next?
Auster: I’m not sure. For now, I’m still ruminating on the novel I just finished, Sunset Park. I’m still under the spell of it. I wrote the last pages at the end of August, but then there was the typing and correcting to do, and I didn’t let go of it until a couple of weeks ago. I seem to have a new rhythm now. Up until The Brooklyn Follies, I always knew what I wanted to write next—I had a backlog of books in my head. But after that, the drawer was empty. It is as if these last four books have been plucked out of thin air, with long gaps after writing, five, six, seven months. But after something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and finish a novel in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years or longer. When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have the last sentence in mind. But no book I’ve written has ever ended the way I thought it would when I started. Characters disappear, others come forward. Once you start writing, everything changes.