Paul Auster interview

By Helena de Bertodano

Writers should never talk to journalists,’ says a character in Paul Auster’s latest novel, Sunset Park. This is discouraging – I am reading this on my way to interview Auster. ‘The interview,’ continues the character, ‘is a debased literary form that serves no purpose except to simplify that which should never be simplified.’ This is going to be fun.

Paul Auster with his wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt, and daughter Sophie As I walk towards his house, a large brownstone on a quiet tree-lined street in Brooklyn, New York, I am disconcerted to see Auster watching me from the window, stone-faced, like one of the lugubrious characters in his novels or films (he co-directed Smoke and Blue in the Face).

But first impressions are misleading: Auster could not be more welcoming as I arrive with my luggage, having not had time to stop at the hotel first.

‘You look like you’ve come to stay,’ he says, coming out to help me. ‘You’re most welcome to stay if you like.’

Auster, 63, settles into a khaki-coloured velvet chair in the living room, which is full of gleaming woodwork, tasteful modern art on the walls, books and magazines laid out artfully here and there, vases of flowers arranged just so.

He lives here with his second wife, the novelist Siri Hustvedt – daughter Sophie, a 23-year-old actress and singer, lives nearby in Manhattan. As Auster lights the first of many Petit cigarillos, I ask him why he bothers with interviews at all.

‘Listen,’ he says intently, ‘I have a certain loyalty to my publishers and I don’t want to be a stinker. I want to be a good sport so occasionally I’ll do something. But I feel that art is always irreducible in some way. It can be analysed and discussed, but I don’t know if it’s for the artist to do that.’

Depending on who you listen to, Auster is either the greatest novelist of his generation or so experimental and obscure that he is unreadable. ‘We all take our knocks,’ he sighs. ‘Over the years I’ve been slammed in ways that are appalling. I’ve had the most vicious attacks and the most extravagant praise, rarely anything in the middle.’

For years I was put off reading his ‘difficult’ books and was surprised to find they really are not. Sunset Park, his just-published 16th novel, is set in Brooklyn, the turf he knows best.

It follows a relatively conventional story arc about a young man haunted by his conscience who flees his family and reinvents himself by cleaning out repossessed homes. Of course, this is Auster, so nothing turns out quite as you expect, but it’s a compelling tale.

I ask if he minds when people say his books are incomprehensible. ‘No, it doesn’t bother me,’ he says. ‘The funny thing is I think they’re absolutely easy to understand. My books are about the real world, I’m not writing escapist fantasies. Listen,’ he says, a word he uses repeatedly, giving what he says a sense of urgency, ‘what I strive for is lucidity in every sentence.’

Dressed in a royal blue dress shirt, black suit trousers and polished leather shoes, Auster looks like a rather distinguished statesman, and is unfailingly polite. ‘That’s a great question,’ he often says encouragingly.

Why did he become a writer? ‘That is perhaps the question,’ Auster says. ‘Listen: I think writing comes out of a certain sense of loneliness, a sense of isolation.’ But doesn’t writing just exacerbate that sense? ‘No, I never found it lonely, I always felt exuberant when I was doing it. I started writing truly dreadful poems when I was about nine or 10 and graduated to short stories at about 11 or 12.’

He grew up in South Orange, New Jersey, the son of two mismatched Jewish immigrants from Poland, Samuel and Queenie, who eventually divorced. His father was a furniture salesman, then a property speculator and Auster’s first book, The Invention of Solitude, charts their difficult relationship.

There were few books in the house until his uncle, a translator, left his library with the Austers when he went overseas. ‘When I was 13 I was knocked out by Catcher in the Rye – there’s never been anything quite like that voice.’ But the real ‘thunderbolt’ came when he read Crime and Punishment. ‘That book undid me. I remember thinking: “If that’s what a novel is, that’s what I want to do” – I was just reading it in a sweat.’

He went to Columbia University, then started work on an oil tanker. ‘I wanted to have an adventure. I had a BA and an MA, and I wanted to do something different.’

At the age of 23, he moved to France to make his living as a writer. ‘It was a hand-to-mouth existence,’ Auster says. ‘When I got back from Paris, I was 27 and I had just $9: I’d published one book of poetry, maybe one or two books of translation. I stayed with my father until I could find a place to live. He was befuddled, he didn’t know what to make of me and I sympathise with him, because I was crazy.

‘Very reasonably, he said: “I just don’t understand you, you’re going to die if you don’t do something, this is unacceptable.” For once his argument got through to me. I thought about becoming a professor but in the end I just continued writing.’

His father died before Auster became famous. ‘Now that I’ve been able to earn a living from all this and to actually live much better than I ever imagined that I could or would, he would be very happy.’ And his mother? ‘She proudly put my books on her bookshelf, but I don’t think she ever read them. She was always interested in the movies that I made, those she could connect to – but not the books.’

His breakthrough novels were The New York Trilogy, three loosely connected detective stories in which he explores identity and language. Subsequent novels established him as an unconventional voice and he became especially popular in Europe, winning the Prix France Culture de Littérature Etrangère and the Principe de Asturias Award in Spain.

‘In France they feel I am on their side: it helps that I speak French. I’m not the American enemy.’

In the United States, Auster is less revered. ‘All my stories are about America, they’re impregnated with American history, American literature. But… people care little about books, there’s no book culture here.’

Nevertheless, he is heartened by the canonisation of Jonathan Franzen, whose latest novel landed him on the cover of Time. ‘This is a sensation,’ Auster says enthusiastically. ‘I haven’t seen anything like this in decades. I’m happy that somebody who is halfway serious is getting this attention.’

I ask if he is jealous, would he like to be on the cover of Time? He laughs: ‘I think the possibility of that happening is zero. I don’t think about it. What I’m doing is too marginal for American taste. I never say to myself: “I want to write a book about the economic crisis in America or about the institution of marriage.”

‘I don’t even know what I do, I just write what I write. There is this tremendous drive to communicate: you want to get inside the reader’s skin and mind and heart, and challenge that person, move that person, open their eyes to things they maybe hadn’t thought about before.’

He claims never to read reviews of his own work. ‘Either it was going to depress me or puff me up in ways that are useless. Once I was reading the paper at breakfast and I happened to see a review and I was just too curious.

It said: “Paul Auster does not believe in traditional fictional values”, it sounded like a political attack, if you substituted the word family for fictional. It expressed a lot of what American critics think about my work.’

Like many writers, he is deeply frustrated by America. ‘There may be a moment I am so disgusted that I have to leave,’ he says, only half joking. ‘I feel tremendous compassion for Obama… I don’t think I have ever seen such conflict in the government. The Republicans actively want Obama to fail: they’d be very happy if he died and I think he has shown remarkable forbearance just in holding his own.’

Auster knows about forbearance: he was once introduced to a reviewer who had lambasted his books. This was in the days when Auster still read reviews. ‘When the reviewer heard my name, he turned white with fear, he was expecting me to punch him and I was tempted because I was so irritated with what he had written.

‘And then I said to myself: “The best way to deal with this is to pretend I don’t know who he is.” So I just said: “It’s very nice to meet you”, and I saw a great sigh of relief exit his lungs.’ He chuckles: ‘He’s still after me, so now I feel I should have punched him.’

The protagonists of Auster’s novels have often experienced huge loss before the story begins. ‘I’m interested in starting stories at the moment of some crisis to see how the character deals with it.’ Has he experienced such loss in his own life? ‘A lot of people have died on me very suddenly – I’m not unfamiliar with what it feels like.’

More than anything else, Auster’s novels are characterised by chance and coincidence. When he was 14, Auster saw a boy killed by lightning while on a hike at summer camp. ‘It was an experience that probably formed my view of the world more than anything else that ever happened to me,’ he says.

Recounting the story, it is as though he has returned to the horror of the moment. ‘We were lost in the woods and a very extreme electric storm broke out above us with lightning spears jumping into the ground – it was like being under a bombardment.

'One boy said it would be better to go into a clearing and we went single file under a barbed wire fence. The boy in front of me was directly under the fence when lightning struck it. He was killed instantly but we didn’t know it.

‘We pulled him through and were lying in the field with him as the storm raged – I remember holding his tongue so he wouldn’t swallow it and watching his skin turn blue. If you see that when you are 14 years old, you begin to sense that the world is a lot less stable than you thought it was.

‘Life is not neatly boxed. You go into work one day, and a plane flies into the building and you’re incinerated.’

Does his constant awareness of such mutability make life hard to live? ‘Listen, it’s not as if I walk around looking for these things – like everyone else, I have dreams and goals, and I get disappointed when they don’t work out. It’s just that so much is beyond our control. Meeting Siri was a fluke, just an accident and now we’ve been living together for 30 years.’

They met at a poetry reading in New York. Auster had previously been married to Lydia Davis, a short story writer, and had a son, Daniel. Siri recently described the meeting: ‘I stepped into the lobby and saw this beautiful man – we were introduced and I fell for him in about 10 seconds flat.’

‘If one of us hadn’t shown up,’ Auster says, ‘we would never have met – we had that one chance.’ As if by coincidence, the front door opens and a tall blonde woman appears, all smiles. ‘Here is Siri,’ he says, sounding surprised himself.

Auster writes his novels from a nearby apartment. ‘I toddle off to this very spartan place: there’s nothing to do but work. I write in a notebook, sometimes I tear it all up. If I can write one page I feel it’s a worthwhile day, then I type it up on my Olympia.’

He does not have an email address or a computer. ‘It’s not a philosophical position, I just feel a lot freer and clearer in my head not having to be bogged down by all this.’

Recently he has started work on a new novel but says that in the past few years he has found it harder to come up with ideas.

‘I used to have a backlog of stories, but a few years ago I found the drawers were empty. I guess I’m getting to the point where I tell myself if I can’t write another book it’s not a tragedy. Does it matter if I publish 16 or 17 novels? Unless it’s absolutely urgent, there’s no point in writing.’ The Telegraph

16 November 2010