It was Saturday afternoon, and my wife and I decided to go to the mall to pick up a pair of pants I’d bought there and had altered. We couldn’t find a parking space outside so we drove into one of those high-rise parking garages and wound around in circles until we eventually found a spot. Too many stairs, so we took the elevator down after making note of the floor we were on. We didn’t want to be looking for the car until we reported it stolen, then a week later have the police find the car where we’d parked it. We walked into the department store where I’d bought the pants, and we agreed to meet at the ground-floor escalator in half an hour. My wife could go to the cosmetics area to look for special offers and hit them up for samples, and I could get my pants and browse for a while on my own. We parted, and I headed for the men’s department. My wife had found the pants two weeks before on a sale table. Half price, camel colored, neutral, versatile, only the length needed to be altered. A salesman greeted me, and I got my claim ticket from my wallet and told him I’d come for the pants. He gave me a practiced smile, took the ticket, and said he’d be right back with them. I started to look around and I noticed that things had changed since I’d been there before. In the rear of the department, where the dressing rooms used to be, there was now a wide stairway going down. Wooden handrails, dark green carpet on the steps, the whole thing looking as if it had been there for years. I asked myself how they could have pulled off a construction project like this in less than two weeks with no sign of dust or rough edges. I went on browsing, looking at ties, and it began to worry me that the salesman had been in the back room for so long. Finally he appeared empty-handed and said he’d been unable to find my pants, but he was going to check on the other side of the sales floor. He kept the smile coming at me and hurried through a doorway. Again he was gone longer than I expected, and when he returned his smile was showing some wear. I’ll try on this side again, he said, and as he walked away I looked back at the stairway. I was thinking that if they could put those stairs through the wall and floor within two weeks they should be able to find my pants. The next time the salesman appeared he still didn’t have the pants and his focus seemed to have switched to the claim ticket. You know what, he said, I’ve just noticed that this ticket has the store number written on it for our location at the other mall. Could you have bought the pants there? I answered that I’d been to that mall recently but I’d never set foot in their other store. Let me give them a call, he said, and see if we can find your pants over there. I told him I didn’t see how that was possible, but I couldn’t fault him for trying to find my pants. So I stood at the service counter while he called. He apologized for taking so much of my time and said he couldn’t understand why the claim ticket would have the other store number on it. He shrugged at me as I fidgeted, but soon I could tell by the look on his face that someone had come on the line. Great, he said, let me tell the customer. They have your pants at our other store, sir, would you like them to be sent here or do you want to go pick them up? I asked him how they could have gotten there, but he had no explanation, and I said I’d drive over for them today. He told the person that I was coming by for the pants, hung up, again apologized, and then asked if I was sure I hadn’t been in their other store. I told him I didn’t even know they had a store in the other mall. He told me the name of the salesman to ask for and I shook his hand. When I met my wife at the escalator she noticed right away that I wasn’t carrying the pants. Did something go wrong? she asked, and I told her that my pants were at their other store. We’ve never been to the other store, she said. We then discussed how we’d been together when I bought the pants and wondered how they could have ended up at the other mall, pants couldn’t walk without a person in them. They must have taken
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By Jacqueline Feldman“My guarantor is coming!” Emma said.
The Daily
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The Art of Fiction No. 178
By Paul AusterIn 1985, after seventeen New York publishers had rejected City of Glass, the lead novella in The New York Trilogy, it was published by Sun and Moon Press in San Francisco. The other two novellas, Ghosts and The Locked Room, came out the next year. Paul Auster was thirty-eight. Although he wrote reviews and translations regularly and his prose poem White Spaceshad been published in 1980, the trilogy marked the true start of his literary career.
Auster has written about those prepublication years in Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure (1997). He studied at Columbia University in the late sixties, then worked for a few months on an oil tanker before moving to Paris where he eked out a living as a translator. He started a little magazine, Little Hand, and an independent publishing house of the same name with his first wife, the writer Lydia Davis. In 1972 his first book, a collection of translations titled A Little Anthology of Surrealist Poems, was published. He returned to New York City in 1974 and, among other ventures, tried to sell a baseball card game he had invented. In 1982, Auster published his first prose book, The Invention of Solitude, a memoir and meditation on fatherhood that he started writing shortly after his father’s death.
Auster has published a book almost annually since the trilogy: In 1987 the novel In the Country of Last Things appeared. His other novels include Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), Leviathan (1992), and The Book of Illusions (2002). Auster was made a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 1991 (he was elevated to an officer in 1997).
The range of Auster’s work is remarkable—novels, essays, translations, poems, plays, songs, and collaborations with artists (including Sophie Calle and Sam Messer). He has also written three screenplays: Smoke (1995), Blue in the Face (1995), and Lulu on the Bridge(1998), which he directed as well. Oracle Night, his ninth novel, will be published later this year.
The following conversation started last fall with a live interview at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York City. The interview was completed one afternoon this summer at Auster’s home in Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt. A gracious host, he apologized for the workers who were installing central air conditioning in their nineteenth-century brownstone, then gave a brief tour: The living room is decorated with paintings by his friends Sam Messer and David Reed. In their front hall, there is a collection of family photographs. Bookshelves line the walls of his office on the ground floor. And, of course, on his desk the famous typewriter.
INTERVIEWER
Let’s start by talking about the way you work. About how you write.
PAUL AUSTER
I’ve always written by hand. Mostly with a fountain pen, but sometimes with a pencil—especially for corrections. If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page. Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.
INTERVIEWER
And you write in notebooks. Not legal pads or loose sheets of paper.
AUSTER
Yes, always in notebooks. And I have a particular fetish for notebooks with quadrille lines—the little squares.
INTERVIEWER
But what about the famous Olympia typewriter? We know quite a bit about that machine—last year you published a wonderful book with the painter Sam Messer, The Story of My Typewriter.
AUSTER
I’ve owned that typewriter since 1974—more than half my life now. I bought it second-hand from a college friend and at this point it must be about forty years old. It’s a relic from another age, but it’s still in good condition. It’s never broken down. All I have to do is change ribbons every once in a while. But I’m living in fear that a day will come when there won’t be any ribbons left to buy—and I’ll have to go digital and join the twenty-first century.
INTERVIEWER
A great Paul Auster story. The day when you go out to buy that last ribbon.
AUSTER
I’ve made some preparations. I’ve stocked up. I think I have about sixty or seventy ribbons in my room. I’ll probably stick with that typewriter till the end, although I’ve been sorely tempted to give it up at times. It’s cumbersome and inconvenient, but it also protects me against laziness.
INTERVIEWER
How so?
AUSTER
Because the typewriter forces me to start all over again once I’m finished. With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can’t get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It’s an incredibly tedious process. You’ve finished your book, and now you have to spend several weeks engaged in the purely mechanical job of transcribing what you’ve already written. It’s bad for your neck, bad for your back, and even if you can type twenty or thirty pages a day, the finished pages pile up with excruciating slowness. That’s the moment when I always wish I’d switched to a computer, and yet every time I push myself through this final stage of a book, I wind up discovering how essential it is. Typing allows me to experience the book in a new way, to plunge into the flow of the narrative and feel how it functions as a whole. I call it “reading with my fingers,” and it’s amazing how many errors your fingers will find that your eyes never noticed. Repetitions, awkward constructions, choppy rhythms. It never fails. I think I’m finished with the book and then I begin to type it up and I realize there’s more work to be done.
INTERVIEWER
Let’s go back to the notebooks for a minute. Quinn, in City of Glass, records his observations in a red notebook. Anna Blume, the narrator of In the Country of Last Things, composes her letter in a blue notebook. In Mr. Vertigo, Walt writes his autobiography in thirteen hardbound school composition books. And Willy G. Christmas, the demented hero of Timbuktu, has lugged his entire life’s work to Baltimore to give to his high-school English teacher before he dies: seventy-four notebooks of “poems, stories, essays, diary entries, epigrams, autobiographical musings, and the first eighteen-hundred lines of an epic-in-progress, Vagabond Days.” Notebooks also figure in your most recent novels, The Book of Illusions and Oracle Night. To say nothing of your collection of true stories, The Red Notebook. What are we to make of this?
AUSTER
I suppose I think of the notebook as a house for words, as a secret place for thought and self-examination. I’m not just interested in the results of writing, but in the process, the act of putting words on a page. Don’t ask me why. It might have something to do with an early confusion on my part, an ignorance about the nature of fiction. As a young person, I would always ask myself, Where are the words coming from? Who’s saying this? The third-person narrative voice in the traditional novel is a strange device. We’re used to it now, we accept it, we don’t question it anymore. But when you stop and think about it, there’s an eerie, disembodied quality to that voice. It seems to come from nowhere and I found that disturbing. I was always drawn to books that doubled back on themselves, that brought you into the world of the book, even as the book was taking you into the world. The manuscript as hero, so to speak. Wuthering Heights is that kind of novel. The Scarlet Letter is another. The frames are fictitious, of course, but they give a groundedness and credibility to the stories that other novels didn’t have for me. They posit the work as an illusion—which more traditional forms of narrative don’t—and once you accept the “unreality” of the enterprise, it paradoxically enhances the truth of the story. The words aren’t written in stone by an invisible author-god. They represent the efforts of a flesh-and-blood human being and this is very compelling. The reader becomes a participant in the unfolding of the story—not just a detached observer.
From the Archive, Issue 167
Interview
Season 4 Trailer
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