PAUL AUSTER - ‘He was a monumental literary presence’

Paul Auster, dubbed the ‘patron saint of literary Brooklyn’, has died aged 77. 

Lisa Allardice kicks off our tributes to the author who wrote a book a year

2 May 2024 - G2 - The Guardian

By Ian McEwan, Joyce Carol Oates and Sinéad Gleeson

While camping, a boy next to him was struck by lightning. 

He used this twice in his writing

Like Saul Bellow and Chicago or Philip Roth and New Jersey, Paul Auster will always be synonymous with Brooklyn. He was “the patron saint of literary Brooklyn” according to the headline on The New York Times tribute following his death on Tuesday. Long before Brooklyn became a byword for aspiring young novelists, Auster made the borough his own with his breakout collection The New York Trilogy, first published in 1987. While Auster may have chafed against its enduring success, the trilogy is how he will be most immediately remembered. Anyone with bookish pretensions who came of age in the 1980s will have a battered copy somewhere on their shelves. City of Glass, the lead story, was rejected 17 times before it was published as a free-standing novel in 1985.

Famously prolific, Auster averaged a book a year, until his final novel Baumgartner, about an octogenarian author, was published last year. He was as versatile as he was prodigious – able to turn his hand as smartly to non-fiction, translation, poetry and screenplays. His memoirs include The Invention of Solitude, 1982, a meditation on fatherhood following his father’s death; Hand to Mouth, 1997, about being young and broke as a writer; and Winter Journal, 2012, about getting old. In the 1990s, he also wrote three films: Smoke, Blue in the Face and Lulu on the Bridge.

But it is as a short story writer and novelist that he earned his reputation as one of the most inventive American writers of his generation, with acclaimed works including Moon Palace, 1989, The Music of Chance, 1990, and The Book of Illusions, 2002. Considered something of a “rock star” in France, Auster was made a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 1991. At home he was part of an American literary elite – with close friends including Don DeLillo, Peter Carey and Salman Rushdie.

His first wife was the short story writer Lydia Davis, his second Siri Hustvedt, his first reader and editor since they married in 1982. “I can’t think of a single instance when I haven’t followed her advice,” he said in 2003. (With typical metaplayfulness, the narrator of Leviathan, Peter Aaron, shares Auster’s initials and his wife is called Iris – Siri spelled backwards.) “No one can say where a book comes from, least of all the person who writes it,” observes Aaron in Leviathan. “Books are born out of ignorance, and if they go on living after they are written, it’s only to the degree that they cannot be understood.”

As a young writer in the late 70s, it was only when Auster stopped trying to make literature that he found the style that would become inimitably his own. “I’ve always wanted to write what to me is beautiful, true and good,” he wrote in A Life in Words in 2017, “but I’m also interested in inventing new ways to tell stories. I wanted to turn everything inside out.” And that is exactly what he did: marrying tricksy European postmodernism with hard-boiled American noir, to create something dizzyingly inventive and new. Full of sly jokes, riddles and metafictional high jinks, his work also had the paciness of a thriller (in a rare note of disapproval, New Yorker critic James Wood accused his works of peddling a “B-movie atmosphere”).

From his short stories to the Booker prize-shortlisted tome 4321 – which tells four versions of the life of a Jewish boy born in Newark in 1947, just like Auster – he was always blurring the edges between fiction and reality.

His subjects were loss, grief and identity, with versions of himself (in various degrees of disguise) popping up, along with references to 19th-century American writers, notebooks and baseball (until he was 17, he only wanted to be a baseball player), all of which he loved.

He would always begin each novel in longhand – he favoured notebooks with quadrille lines (small squares). “Every book begins with the first sentence and then I push on until I’ve reached the last. Always in sequence, a paragraph at a time,” he told the Paris Review. Once he was satisfied with the paragraph, he would type it up.

“So many strange things have happened to me in my life, so many unexpected and improbable events, I’m no longer certain that I know what reality is any more,” he said back in 2003 and his was certainly a life bookmarked by dramatic interventions. On a camping trip when was 14 the boy next to him was struck by lightning. Standing next to a boy “who was essentially murdered by the gods changed my whole view of the world”, he told the Guardian last year, in one of his last interviews. It also influenced how he wrote: he used the incident in both a short story and 4321.

For Auster, writing was an act of faith, right up until the end. “You make a pact with yourself to tell the truth,” he once said, “and you’d rather cut off your right arm than break that promise.”

‘Our supreme postmodernist, super-abundantly gifted’ Ian McEwan

The exquisite chapter of domestic accidents that opens Auster’s final novel, Baumgartner, leaves us with a microcosm of all that drew a worldwide discerning readership to this super-abundantly gifted, big-hearted novelist: a limpid present tense; a subtle awareness, comic as well as tragic, of what Virgil identified as “sunt lacrimae rerum” – there are tears in the nature of things – which, in Auster’s version, proposed pratfalls as well as death; a perfect expression of a hovering consciousness in the still moment; and finally, a honed prose that seemed to hint that just below its surface were instructions on how to read it and how it was written.

The adroit self-consciousness of his writing made him our supreme postmodernist. If his imagination seemed so spacious, it was because he was as much a European as an American writer. If he had Thoreau at his back, he also had Beckett.

It is possible to cross a Paul Auster Platz and walk down a rue Paul Auster. Not many novelists have been so honoured. As a presence he was ridiculously handsome, worldly, generous, funny and, unlike most great talkers, a highly attuned listener.

‘Like the flaring of a match, he would be off and running’

Joyce Carol Oates

Auster was an anomaly: a thoroughly warm, witty, sympathetic, laughter-loving individual, with insatiable intellectual curiosity and a gift for friendship. At the same time, he was a monumental literary presence, somewhat intimidating for the zeal with which he immersed himself in his writing, near-overwhelming in the abundance of his creative energies.

Within a few minutes, you might find yourself discussing a particular author’s inimitable prose, and then, like the flaring of a match, you were off and running. All other subjects faded away. Indeed, the last time we did an event together, just two of us on a panel at the fabled Brooklyn Book festival, whatever the subject was supposed to have been, Paul and I talked nonstop about Stephen Crane, happily quoting his sentences to one another.

Paul wrote many brilliant works but I feel that I must mention two. Firstly, Burning Boy, his biography of Stephen Crane, which looms large among the great literary biographies of the past decades – literally, at 800 pages, and luminous, a truly extraordinary portrait of a fellow writer by another, entirely different sort of writer.

Meanwhile, Auster’s poignant memoir of his father, The Invention of Solitude, is a beautifully poetic work, a meditation upon the very limits of language and our ability to know one another.

‘We spent two hours marvelling at his art and book collections’ Sinéad Gleeson

In the autumn of 2013, I was presenting a book show for RTÉ radio and my producer and I went to New York, armed with a dizzying schedule of people to record. Our last interview of the first day, as jetlag started to kick in, was Auster. We had been invited to the Brooklyn brownstone he shared with his wife, Siri Hustvedt.

Over the course of a couple of hours, we wandered around, marvelling at their book collection, meticulously organised by theme (“That’s contemporary American fiction right there”) and the art on the walls: two Gerhard Richter pieces that were gifted to Hustvedt after she wrote essays about the artist’s work, and a piece made by a neighbour, the writer Jonathan Safran Foer, which seemed to consist largely of an antique optometrist’s kit.

The inside of Auster’s house reflected the themes in his work – writing, art and ways of seeing. He believed in and played with ideas of coincidence, doubling and doppelgangers. Echoes and double exposure populate his narratives.

Although Auster was a New Jersey native, New York – its psychology and geography – are indelibly stamped on his novels and screenplays. In the interview, he spoke about making a pilgrimage to Dublin as a young man to follow in the footsteps of James Joyce. He spoke frankly about his writing process and showed us his beloved Olympia typewriter.

Its worn keys looked suspended, as if constantly awaiting the return of his hands.