Rogue 6 - Paul Auster (2024)

“I helped occupy one of the campus buildings, was roughed up by the cops and spent a night in jail, but mostly I was a bystander, a sympathetic fellow traveler. Much as I would have liked to join in, I found myself temperamentally unfit for group activities.”

-Paul Auster on the ‘68 Columbia protests from his memoir “Hand to Mouth”

Before last week I had no intention of doing a Rogue’s Gallery on Paul Auster. I’d never even read him. But two weeks ago, on the evening of May April 30th, two things happened: the NYPD cracked down on the Columbia students occupying Hamilton Hall, and Paul Auster died of lung cancer.

I’ve not seen any other mention of this timing, but considering he too was once a Columbia student arrested for occupying a university building (Mathematics Hall) in protest of a war (Vietnam), the synchronism of his death with another police raid on a Columbia hall 56 years later feels relevant. Feels rogue’s gallery-worthy. Sometimes I pick the rogues, sometimes the rogues pick me.

I’m not sure why I never read Paul Auster. I think it was my aversion to the whole Brooklyn writer thing, perhaps out of some weird shame as I too have lived in Brooklyn for chunks of my writing life. My prejudice may be rooted in all those Brooklyn Jonathans obnoxiously sucking up all the literary oxygen in New York: Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Ames, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Franzen (well, Franzen lived in Manhattan, but close enough).

Where were the Constantines? Screw all those Jonathans. Well, except Jonathan Ames, who briefly helped me out once in the production of a literary reality show:

I hadn’t read Auster but in 2018 I did once attend a reading from his then-latest work 4 3 2 1 at a Columbia alumni event (he was a class of ’69 alum and the keynote speaker). After the reading, I was walking with Auster and a few others up the path on the South Lawn1 and I asked him what he thought of self-publishing versus traditional. His response was unambiguous. By all means, he said in that silky tobacco-noir baritone of his, self-publish. He cited Thoreau and Whitman. But he added a qualifier: if you have the means.

I can’t say for sure what he meant by “the means.” I assume he meant money to cover the printing, binding, storing, and mailing of books. E-books didn’t factor into his calculus. Digital just wasn’t part of his vocabulary. In 2003, he even said that keyboards “intimidated” him. He wrote by hand, often with a fountain pen (“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.”) and then hammered out the handwritten manuscripts by typewriter. Even if he’d never smoked and managed to squeeze out another decade of life, you were never going to find Paul Auster on Substack.

Even by the technophobic standards of your average writer, that’s an exceptional degree of disconnection. This alone makes him a rogue in our time. The following was from a 2017 interview:

Well, I don’t have a cell phone or a mobile phone, however you want to describe these things. […] I didn’t want to be so reachable. I figured that if people wanted to get hold of me, they’d find a way. So, I’m free of that. I don’t do email. I don’t have a computer. I have just refused the digital revolution. I live as a dinosaur. But I do have ways of participating. I have a young woman who helps me out with various things and she fields emails for me, and I do have a fax machine, so when she gets them, she faxes them over.

Consider that last sentence (and try not to get distracted by the phrasing of “a young woman who helps me out with various things”). He has his emails faxed to him. That’s a whole new meta level of ludditry.

I can’t speak to his writing. Over the last week, I’ve been reading his memoir Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure, which came out in 1997, back before I’d embarked on early failure (by now, as I slog through Middle Failure, I’ve already one-upped Auster).

I confess the writing didn’t exactly light me up. I even encountered and winced over a few clichés: “laughing our heads off,” “happy as a clam,” “locked horns” “stuck to my guns,” “wore his heart on his sleeve.” But, having not read his more acclaimed works like The New York Trilogy or Moon Palace or The Book of Illusions, I’m in no position to judge an author by this book.

Occasional clichés aside, there are passages that shine:

…the entire country had been turned into a gigantic television commercial, an incessant harangue to buy more, make more, spend more, to dance around the dollar-tree until you dropped dead from the sheer frenzy of trying to keep up with everyone else. […] No, you didn’t have to swallow the dogma they were trying to sell you. You could resist them, poke fun at them, call their bluff. The wholesomeness and dreary rectitude of American life were no more than a sham, a halfhearted publicity stunt.

What comes across in Hand to Mouth is a fierce desire to write and be independent, and an early roguish itinerant worker impulse. The finest passages are his descriptions of the motley characters he encountered in his early years and jobs:

• The assistant repairman who lived on menthol cigarettes and “twelve to sixteen bottles of orange soda a day” and who got two hernias after trying to prevent himself from being crushed by a fridge (“his testicl*s had shot up out of his scrotum. First one ball, he said, and then the other. Pop… pop.”).

• The mad, electroshocked and acid-frazzled “legendary, forgotten novelist” H.L. Humes, founder of the Paris Review, who walked around New York handing out his inheritance of $15,000 in increments of 50-dollar bills as weapons to reveal the fiction of money and “unleash the greatest economic revolution in history.”

• His co-worker on an oil tanker, the “bovine Fundamentalist bachelor” Elmer, who ate prodigiously and to whom Auster devotes an entire page describing with the precision of an origami manual his ritual of folding his napkin up into a “long, rectilinear strip with all four edges exactly aligned” and subsequent “slow back-and-forth swiveling” mouth-wiping technique.

• The quarreling drunken couple staging a “bleak comedy” at a dive bar in which the woman dutifully obeyed the man’s order to get him another beer only to return and pour out the entire bottle over his head (“‘How do you like your beer, Charlie?’ she said. ‘How do you like your f*cking beer?’”).

• The cheerful, massive go-go dancer Barbara at “Big Mary’s Place,” a strip club in Tampa Florida where the theme was The Bigger, The Better, “a freak show of flesh, a cavalcade of bouncing white blubber... Each girl was a continent unto herself, a mass of quivering lard decked out in a string bikini…”

And let’s not leave out his Columbia peers in the 1968 anti-war movement like Weather Underground’s Mark Rudd (went in hiding for almost a hiding), Dave Gilbert (received a 75-prison sentence for involvement in a Brinks armored vehicle robbery) and Ted Gold (who blew himself up while building a bomb):

“In the summer of 1969, I walked into a post office in western Massachusetts with a friend who had to mail a letter. As she waited in line, I studied the posters of the FBI’s ten most wanted men pinned to the wall. It turned out that I knew seven of them.”

As a former occupier of a Columbia building and an influential New York Jew, how did Paul Auster feel about the 2024 Columbia protests and Hamilton Hall occupation? I can’t say. My guess is he would have stayed out of it. His only comments I could find on Israel / Palestine were some rueful but ultimately anodyne and innocuous statements about how both sides are to blame.

His silence may have also been due to a withdrawal from public life in recent years. Yes, there was the lung cancer. But tragedy preceded it. In November of 2021, his 10-month-old granddaughter died after ingesting heroine and fentanyl that her dad, passed out next to her, had been using. Six months later, the baby’s father—Paul Auster’s son—was charged in his baby’s death, and mere days after that, died of an overdose (as a father myself, and trying to put myself in his situation, I wonder whether a suicidal impulse was behind the overdose). Paul Auster’s own cancer diagnosis came later that year.

You’ll find few photos of Auster smiling. His works, from what I gather, are suffused with pain and loss. His 2002 novel The Book of Illusions, to take one, opens with a professor grappling with the sudden death of his wife and two young sons. It’s as if he were preparing himself through his novels for the calamity of his final years. As Oscar Wilde wrote, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”

Paul Auster. (1947-2024) 1968 Columbia occupier. 2017 Columbia keynote speaker. Brooklyn miner of loss.

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