Paul Auster Memorials

 You can find my other writings on Paul Auster here. Better yet, go get one of his books.

The Guardian published ‘A literary voice for the ages’: Paul Auster remembered by Ian McEwan, Joyce Carol Oates and more.

From The Paris Review, Paul Auster, The Art of Fiction No. 178. The following pasages are what interested me most, you may find others which will suit you more.

INTERVIEWER

You also seem to have a fixation with nineteenth-century American writers. Their names turn up with surprising frequency in your novels: Poe, Melville, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne—Hawthorne most of all. Fanshawe, the name of one of the characters in The Locked Room, comes from Hawthorne; In the Country of Last Things begins with an epigraph from Hawthorne; in Ghosts, Hawthorne’s story “Wakefield” becomes part of the structure of the novel; and in The Book of Illusions another one of Hawthorne’s stories, “The Birthmark,” is the subject of an important conversation between Zimmer and Alma. To top it off, in May of this year, you published a long essay about Hawthorne—the introduction to Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny by Papa, which was brought out by New York Review Books. Can you say something about this abiding interest in Hawthorne?

AUSTER

Of all writers from the past, he’s the one I feel closest to, the one who talks most deeply to me. There’s something about his imagination that seems to resonate with mine, and I’m continually going back to him, continually learning from him. He’s a writer who isn’t afraid of ideas, and yet he’s also a master psychologist, a profound reader of the human soul. His fiction was utterly revolutionary, and nothing like it had been seen in America before. I know that Hemingway said that all American literature came out of Huck Finn, but I don’t agree. It began with The Scarlet Letter.

But there’s more to Hawthorne than just his stories and novels. I’m equally attached to his notebooks, which contain some of his strongest, most brilliant prose. That’s why I was so keen on having Twenty Days published as a separate volume. It’s been available in The American Notebooks for many years, but in a scholarly edition that costs something like ninety dollars and which few people bother to read. The diary he kept about taking care of his five-year-old son for three weeks in 1851 is a self-contained work. It can stand on its own, and it’s so charming, so funny in its deadpan way, that it gives us an entirely new picture of Hawthorne. He wasn’t the gloomy, tormented figure most people think he was. Or not only that. He was a loving father and husband, a man who liked a good cigar and a glass or two of whiskey, and he was playful, generous, and warmhearted. Exceedingly shy, yes, but someone who enjoyed the simple pleasures of the world.

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INTERVIEWER

You died as a poet, but eventually you were reborn as a novelist. How do you think this transformation came about?

AUSTER

I think it happened at the moment when I understood that I didn’t care anymore, when I stopped caring about making Literature. I know it sounds strange, but from that point on writing became a different kind of experience for me and when I finally got going again after wallowing in the doldrums for about a year, the words came out as prose. The only thing that mattered was saying the thing that needed to be said. Without regard to preestablished conventions, without worrying about what it sounded like. That was the late seventies and I’ve continued working in that spirit ever since.

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AUSTER

The “entertainment-industrial complex,” as the art critic Robert Hughes once put it. The media presents us with little else but celebrities, gossip, and scandal, and the way we depict ourselves on television and in the movies has become so distorted, so debased, that real life has been forgotten. What we’re given are violent shocks and dim-witted escapist fantasies, and the driving force behind it all is money. People are treated like morons. They’re not human beings anymore, they’re consumers, suckers to be manipulated into wanting things they don’t need. Call it capitalism triumphant. Call it the free market Economy. Whatever it is, there’s very little room in it for representations of actual American life.

 The Guardian also published ‘Getting a book idea feels like a buzz in the head’: Paul Auster – a life in quotes, and these are what stood out for me:

    Only a person who really felt compelled to do it would shut himself up in a room every day … When I think about the alternatives – how beautiful life can be, how interesting – I think it’s a crazy way to live your life.

    The excitement, the struggle, is emboldening and vivifying. I just feel more alive writing.

You can never achieve what you hope to achieve. You can come close sometimes and others may appreciate your work, but you, the author, will always feel you’ve failed. You know you’ve done your best, but your best isn’t good enough. Maybe that’s why you keep writing. So you can fail a little better the next time.

Once more The Guardian, ‘I remember Paul Auster’: a tribute by Jonathan Lethem to his friend 

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