At 20, Paul Auster set out to discover if he had what it took to be a writer and, more important, to find himself. Twenty-five years later, he is one of the great novelists of his generation - but the quest for his true identity goes on. Then again, that's the whole point, isn't it?
A funny thing happened the day I went to interview Paul Auster in New York. Well, I say funny, but that's perhaps too strong a word. And yet later, looking back, it did take on a kind of humour - an Austerian humour. Something, anyway, that I think would make Auster laugh. It was a beautiful day and, since I had a few hours to kill before making my way over to his home in Brooklyn, I walked downtown to Union Square and into the five-storey Barnes and Noble bookshop, a bibliophiles' heaven. I wasn't looking for anything in particular, certainly not for books by Auster.
Still, as I browsed, some impulse made me go up to the fourth floor, to where works of fiction are alphabetically housed, and inch my way along the shelves to the letter A. There, between Austen and Balzac, between Atwood and Ballard - at the point, in other words, where you would expect to find Auster . . . Not a thing. A gap. For a moment, I have to say, this shook me. But then, as I pondered the meaning of this absence, it began to take on the aspect of some fantastic joke. Of course, it was right - that the man who has made his literary identity out of the search for his own identity, the man who has turned the problematic question "Who am I?" into the solution "I am the man who is asking that question" - that he would not be in the place where you would expect to find him. What could be more apt? It was then that I saw the sign. A small card, and on it these enigmatic words: "If you are looking for Paul Auster, ask downstairs." This was even better. A trail. Because wasn't this the whole purpose of my trip to New York, to seek and to find Auster? Wasn't I, in some small measure, playing the detective, the seeker after truth, not unlike Auster's own metaphysical detective Quinn in his wonderful The New York Trilogy. I ran, almost jumped, down the four escalators.
"I am looking for Paul Auster," I shouted at the girl behind the counter. "Which one?" she asked. I was ready for this. "The real one," I replied. She pointed behind her. There, arrayed on a long shelf, were all of Auster's books, and next to them the books of Dashiell Hammett, and next to those the books of William Burroughs. "People steal them," she said. So here, then, was the all-too plausible solution to my little mystery. Money. No mystery at all, in fact. Just a neatly constructed plot of cause and effect. In the confrontation between fiction and reality, reality had once again won hands down.
I exchanged my dollars for Auster's The Music of Chance, stepped out into the rag-and-bone shop that is Manhattan on an everyday afternoon, and began to read: "For one whole year he did nothing but drive . . . he hadn't expected it to go on that long, but one thing kept leading to another . . . " One thing will keep leading to another, right up to the end, the last word. That's reality. In the meantime, there was the man himself to meet. I wasn't going to give up that easily.
You will find Paul Auster, most days, in his large brownstone house situated in a leafy residential street in Brooklyn. The door will be opened by his tall, elegant wife, Siri Hustvedt, also a writer, and as Auster descends the stairs you will remark how exactly he resembles the photos that front a number of his books: beautiful, yes, with a long, lean face, two vertical creases in his cheeks, exquisitely arched brows, darkly gentle eyes that stare guardedly out from hooded lids. If you have read his two autobiographical books, The Invention of Solitude and Hand to Mouth, you will also know that it is from his mother, still alive, that he gets his adventurousness, his generosity, his tenderness.
A tenderness that can lead him to write in his Prayer for Salman Rushdie: "I pray for him every morning, but deep down I know that I am also praying for myself." A tenderness for experience because it is human.
From his father comes his suspicion, his inwardness, his pride, his dogged adherence to the task in hand, his capacity for ant-like labour. And his respect for craft. Sam Auster, now dead more than 20 years, was a gifted radio engineer who, in the 1920s, was hired to work at Thomas Edison's laboratory at Menlo Park in New Jersey. There is a family story that Edison sacked the 18-year-old Sam after just one day, "for being a Jew". That was in 1929, the year of the Wall Street Crash. Sam was not crushed. He went on to open a radio shop, in Newark, which, in turn, became a furniture shop. By the time Paul was born in 1947, the family was not yet affluent - that came later with his father's property speculation - but it was not struggling. Still, his father maintained his lifelong habit - the reluctance to spend money, embarrassing his small son by haggling with shopkeepers and promising presents that were never delivered. Always some excuse, some little drama, some new withholding.
Impossible for a child to comprehend an adult's ambiguous relationship to money - the desire to make it, the refusal to enjoy it. Impossible, too, for an adult not to know the imperative of money - that a man can die for lack of it. A man who has come from abject poverty - as Auster's father had, out of eastern Europe and a city named Stanislav - can develop an undue reverence for money. For, as Auster says, money is always more recognisable by its absence than by its presence. "When I had no money, I used to have to think about it more." As love is more recognisable by its absence. "There was never any feeling of malevolence about my father. It's not that he was unfriendly, it's just that he was sealed off. There was a kind of distractedness there." Clearing away the detritus of his father's life after he had died, Auster came across a letter to him from a former tenant, a Mrs J.B. Nash, who had left her apartment in 1964 owing $40 in rent. In the letter, written in 1976, she enclosed $40 with the words, "You was never forgotten by me." Reading it, Auster broke down and wept - for his father's "many little kindnesses", kindnesses he knew nothing of.
It is kindness that interests him now. "And the older I get, the more interested in it I become. Goodness makes me cry, not evil. Evil you steel yourself against. But when someone does something good that they don't have to do: that gets to me." His parents' marriage was not a good one, "a mismatch". "It was not long before my mother realised her mistake". They divorced when Paul was 15 and his sister, a fragile child, not even 12. This could lead you to conclude that, as the sensitive child of a loveless union, he would later invest a great deal in his own marriage. And this would be right. It's not so much the way that he talks to Siri as the way he listens to her, the way his eyes follow her around when she is in the room.
BUT this is not all. Catastrophe is in the blood. His first marriage ended badly, not long after his son, Daniel, was born. "It was a mistake. People make mistakes, you can marry the wrong person." Mistake is a harsh word. "Yes. But if a marriage ends because you are both unhappy, you can say you made a mistake." Some refusal here, but of what? To say what cannot be said? That love does not endure. That a beloved child can be conceived without love. He himself is a devoted father to Daniel, now 21, and Sophie, 12, his daughter with Siri.
All his childhood, he was well-liked by his peers and a good sportsman. "Sport was my life from age five to 15." He went to Columbia University. His life seemed mapped, a pattern imposed. And then, aged 20, he just left. Took himself out of the pattern. He left university and went to work on an oil tanker, as a skivvy.
Between 1967 and 1971, he travelled back and forth between New York and Paris. And then, in 1971, he left New York to go and live in Paris. He stayed there three years. "I think I needed to get away. It was the time of the war here, there was so much noise. I couldn't think straight. I wanted to find out if I could be a writer. I didn't think I could find that out here." So, he placed himself in exile. He says he has always been physically strong, but this shift must have taken all the stamina, mental and physical, that he had. He took himself out of the world of cosy acquiescence and went to Paris with nothing. An ideal is all he had. An ideal to let writing take over his world - that was 25 years ago.
He repeats a quotation: "Anyone who becomes a poet is always, in some relationship to his world, an exile." And: "In this most Christian of worlds all poets are Jews." In other words, an outsider. To write, he says, you have to be out of the world. "Anyone who is making art of any kind is out of the world. You can't be in it in order to do it." This idea is at the centre of all of his work - an attempt to identify the world as part of literature, and not literature as part of the world. To undermine confidence in the idea that there is such a thing as straightforward reality. To reveal how only fiction can explore the mysterious levels of life hidden in our rational mind. So many of his novels resemble the telling of a dream conveyed with all its inconsistencies, its aimlessness - uncanny tales, balanced somewhere between the unspeakable and that which must be told.
And it is a compulsion, he says. Writing is a strange machine, one that he is not in control of. "I've never had an idea for a story in which I set out to prove something. I have never wanted to write a story about anything - the isolation of modern man, for instance. What happens is that something that wasn't there the day before is here today. "I have lots of ideas, and most of the time I spend pushing them away, looking for an excuse how not to do something. Then, sometimes, the idea is so compelling it won't go away. Simply, one gets gripped and you enter an imaginary world." In the very process of writing, you become someone else. Maybe it is this, finally, that makes him so elusive. It is not his intention. "I am not very good at this," he says, "as you see. But I am trying hard." It's as if every attempt to get at the man draws you only closer into his imaginary world.
So now I sit in this pretty house surrounded by the attributes of money. Not ostentatious, but comfortable. A house, Auster says, "probably once owned by a banker. Yes, I think a banker lived in this house." And he laughs. You can see why he would find this funny. A house once kept up by a man whose life's work was the making of money is now kept up by a man whose life's work is the moulding of words. For Auster, money is always reality - as the self is always a fiction. When these two fuse, as they finally have in Auster's life, what does he do? He writes about it.