The Death of Paul Auster

The cutting of a telegraph line

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When Paul Auster died on April 30, there were appreciations everywhere. I first encountered his work when I picked up a copy—by chance—of City of Glass at a used bookstore.  I had never heard of him (this was in 1988), but I spent a dollar on what would turn out to be a favorite novel and one that I’ve reread many times.  Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover.

Everything about City of Glass appealed to me: the puzzles, the self-reflexiveness, the imitation of hardboiled crime novels, the investigations into the nature of language, and the way the book teases its reader with gestures toward a grand unifying theory that it never delivers.  (It can’t—that’s a theme of the book.)  I read everything else by Auster I could find: the other two volumes of The New York Trilogy, The Invention of Solitude, In the Country of Last Things, and Moon Palace. These books were manna from Heaven for an English major who loved Nabokov and I was at the exactly-perfect age to encounter his work: I had been taught by two professors who were insistent on making me consider authorial decisions and care about artistic performance.  While theory had made inroads in taking all the pleasure out of reading and Auster became a European darling of the academy for the ways in which he deconstructed narrative, he was still an old-fashioned storyteller who wanted his readers to turn his pages.  In 1992, I wrote him a letter, care of his publisher, about how much I enjoyed his books and how they reminded me of the work of Jorge Luis Borges, another favorite.  Having no idea if he would actually receive it, I was shocked when he responded with a long letter in which he thanked me for writing to him and reading his books as enthusiastically as I did.  (He added that he didn’t really enjoy Borges, which surprised me.) 

During this time I was teaching high-school English and one of my best students, Shira, had also become a fan.  I brought the letter from him to school so she could see it; when I saw her in a packed hallway that morning, I handed it to her, saying, “Check this out!  A letter from Paul Auster!  Give it back to me later in class.”

When class began, Shira looked upset.  Was it something in the letter?  No—she had somehow lost the letter between the time I handed it to her and the beginning of the period. I wasn’t angry and told her it was okay.  I joked that I had already read it, and she shouldn’t be upset.

Two months later, I found a Federal Express package on my front doorstep.  This was a time when receiving a FedEx package was still exciting.  The sender’s address was somewhere in Brooklyn.  I didn't know anyone from Brooklyn.  Inside, I found a copy of The Art of Hunger, Auster’s just-published collection of essays and reviews.  Who was sending this to me?  And how did they know that I liked Paul Auster?

The sender was Auster himself, who had inscribed the book with this message:  

Those who rub elbows with the good and the great may be used to this kind of thing, but I wasn’t.  I reread that inscription a dozen times, thinking that Auster’s handwriting perfectly matched his sentences.  (I’ve since learned that, like Beckett, he wrote everything first by hand.)  The next day, I showed the book to Shira, who, I learned, had got my address from another teacher, contacted Auster, told her the story of the lost letter, and asked him if he would send me another one.  With how many of his individual readers did he maintain this kind of contact?  By now, his books were selling, he had made a name for himself, and was epitomizing the ultra-cool Brooklyn-based writer that can no longer really exist because even us squares know about them.  

Later, in graduate school, I composed a long explication of The Music of Chance, Auster’s masterpiece.  I held the reader’s hand and gave a tour of the novel, pointing out how every moment, and sometimes individual words, contributed to the whole.  I’ve done a lot of homework over the course of my life, but this is an assignment that I remember well. 

The book follows the adventures of Jim Nashe, one of literature’s many unfortunate travelers, who comes into money, becomes addicted to the freedom it brings, and cherishes life on the road: the book opens with, “For a whole year, he did nothing but drive, traveling back and forth across America as he waited for the money to run out.”  When the well runs dry, he takes up with a seedy but good-hearted gambler, Jack Pozzi, and agrees to stake him in a poker game against two eccentric millionaires. 

Things do not go well.  That’s all you should know.  If you haven’t read anything by Auster, begin with this one and don’t read anything about it until you finish. 

The title reflects Auster’s favorite theme: the moments where the universe seems to be speaking to us in code, whether or not it actually is.  Is there some kind of hidden music behind events that we cannot hear?  Why does the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon make us uneasy?  On impulse, I sent Auster another letter, care of his new publisher, about how I had just spent a few weeks rereading and thinking about The Music of Chance.  Again I stood dumbfounded when he responded:

His graciousness here—apologizing to me for his “sleepy publisher”—still impresses me.  I sent him the paper, assuming that would be the end of it, and forgot about it.  Five weeks later, I received this:

The cynic in me asks if Auster actually read the essay; there’s no way to know for sure.  Was he simply being polite?  But maybe Auster did find something “moving” about the earnestness of a graduate student poring over the pages of his novel.  And who could resist reading an appreciation of something he had created?  Don’t authors across Substack like to read comments on their pieces? I took him at his word; if this is what Kurt Vonnegut called a “foma,” a harmless untruth that makes us happy, so be it. 

Over the next few years, I wrote to Auster about books as he published them, sometimes at length about ones I particularly enjoyed, such as Mr. Vertigo and The Book of Illusions. He responded every time, having no reason to do so other than kindness.  He kept writing and I kept reading.  I saw Phillip Haas’s terrific adaptation of The Music of Chance in 1993 and when Wayne Wang’s Smoke, for which Auster wrote the screenplay, was released in 1995, I was there on opening weekend, enjoying Harvey Keitel, William Hurt, and Jerry Garcia’s upbeat cover of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”

More years passed.  I taught The Music of Chance and The New York Trilogy to undergraduates.  (Auster: “Let me know what they think of it.”)  In 2002, while walking in a hallway of an academic building at Rutgers,  I happened—again, by chance—to see a ragged flyer stapled to the bottom of a bulletin board announcing that Auster was going to speak next week at the library.  I hadn’t missed it!  

I had never seen him in person and was immediately struck by his height and what people today would call his vibe. Like his penmanship, his voice suited his work.  (I already knew what he looked like and thought he resembled a version of Montgomery Clift—again, everything fit.)  After reading from his latest (The Brooklyn Follies), he took questions from the audience; I asked him about his celebrations of coincidences that authors usually try to justify and he responded with examples of how he still gets excited when he meets two people named George in one day, or how he sometimes thinks of a person who then calls him at that exact moment.  After the talk, I walked up to the podium, introduced myself, and showed him the copy of The Art of Hunger he had sent me.  He fumbled with his glasses, saying, “Forgive me–I need these things,” read the inscription, shook my hand, and said, with complete sincerity, “It’s so good to meet you in person.”  When I glanced at the date of the inscription, I realized that we were speaking exactly ten years to the day that he had sent it.  “How about that!” he said.  I couldn’t resist responding, “Must be the music of chance.”  He laughed and shook my hand again. 

There was no reason for Auster to respond to my letters and certainly not to actually read some random grad student’s paper on one of his books.  That he did is a reminder that the connections we make with living authors are somehow different from those made with favorites from the past.  Since then, I have not read everything Auster published; we find ourselves interested in different things over time.  But I still liked knowing he was out there: an irrational feeling, to be sure, but nonetheless real.  The death of a living author whose work one admires is a sobering cutting of a telegraph line.  I know, I know–we’ll always have the books and the books are what’s important.  Most of the writers I admire were long gone before I was born: I’ve never had to genuinely respond to the death of Shakespeare, Johnson, or Flannery O’Connor.  To have a writer predecease his contemporary readers is a reminder that the number of his books we’ll get to read has been determined and is forever unchangeable, despite occasional discoveries of unpublished work. 

I haven’t yet read Auster’s last published novel.  But now I will, motivated by a sense of deference and gratitude.