Paul Auster: From Poetry to Novels With a Side Trip Out to Sea

Paul Auster was 15 years old when he found the book that made him decide to become a writer.

"I was a sophomore in high school," said Auster (born in Newark, New Jersey, and living now in Brooklyn), "when I read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. And I was so overwhelmed by the book, I said to myself: 'If this is what a novel can be -- then I want to do it, too.'"

Auster, neither of whose parents was a big reader, fell in love with books as a child, starting with stories about baseball, then moving on to the tales of such authors as Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Allan Poe. "All the usual suspects," he explained.

Auster was writing "little poems" from the age of nine or ten. Then, he said, at 15, he discovered Dostoevsky's masterpiece.

"That," Auster noted, "was a major experience in my life."

Such fate-shaping biblio-events figure often in Paul Auster's novels, including his latest work, the January/February Book Sense 76 Top Ten pick Oracle Night, (Holt) in which novelist Sidney Orr buys a blue notebook that, as he writes stories in it, seems to affect events in his own life.

And one of Orr's projects is a tale inspired by a parable in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, in which a man named Flitcraft has his world turned upside down by a falling beam that nearly kills him: "He felt," as Hammett wrote, "like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works."

Once Dostoevsky raised that lid for a teenaged Auster, though, the would-be fiction-writer took a roundabout route to his eventual identity as a novelist -- a journey as full of literary labor and exotic travel as trips taken by some of the characters in his own books.

While attending Columbia University in the late 1960s, Auster said, "I was writing and publishing poems. I was translating poems and prose books to make money. And doing quite a bit of literary journalism: reviews and articles about writers and poets (for) the New York Review of Books, Harper's, Commentary, Saturday Review -- a whole number of places."

Then, after getting his master's degree, he went to sea. "I got a job, through a connection, as a merchant seaman on an oil tanker, and spent about six months traveling around the Gulf of Mexico, building up a little stockpile of money; and with that money I moved to France," Auster said. "I thought I'd stay for a year, and I wound up staying for four years. By the time I got back to New York, I was already 27. Still writing poems, still translating, still eking out my meager living."

Throughout these years, Auster tried to write novels. But, he explained, "I was never satisfied with the results, never showed anything to anybody, and assumed that it just simply wasn't my path, and that I was just going to go on writing poetry." Then, in the late 1970s, he said, "I hit a wall; I couldn't write at all, for about a year. And when I was able to write again, it was prose. Very strange: I just gave up one life as a writer and started another. And I guess the seminal event was when my father died, and I began writing The Invention of Solitude, my first prose work.... After that, it's been novels."

The lid had lifted once again. But the 11 novels Auster has since written (including the three in The New York Trilogy, and the bestsellers The Book of Illusions and Timbuktu) all display the well-crafted sentences and careful rhythms of a practiced poet.

"I try to write language that is very clear," Auster said, "almost transparent. I think the ideal is -- it's impossible, but this is what one aims for -- to write a book in which the language is so transparent that the reader at some point will forget that words are the medium of communication; that you're just inside whatever it is that's happening."

Auster believes that sentence rhythm plays a big part in all this. "I think we read with our bodies, as much as with our minds," he said. "And if a reader is attentive enough, and can start to feel the music, or the cadences, inside the prose -- other kinds of meanings begin to emerge, that are beyond the grasp of words. You can't articulate what it is, but it gives a sort of deeper and more satisfying experience for the reader, if he can get inside the music, of the prose."

Auster's prose is put to the service of stories filled with strange and mysterious events, oblique connections, bizarre coincidences, and apparently chance acts that reveal fateful patterns.

In real life, a chance suggestion a few years ago led, in such "Auster-like" fashion, to a nonfiction book that put the author unexpectedly on the bestseller lists -- as an editor.

"I was on NPR's All Things Considered," Auster recalled, "talking about a novel I'd just published; I think it was Timbuktu, back in 1999. After the interview was over, the host said, 'You know, we like the sound of your voice on the radio, and we like the way you read. Maybe you'd like to become part of the show.' And I thought, That's a terrible idea; I really don't want to do this. But just to be polite, I said, 'All right, I'll go home and think about it.' I mentioned it to my wife at dinner, and she was the one who came up with the idea of asking the listeners to send in true stories about their lives. I thought this was an utterly brilliant idea."

That idea led to NPR's National Story Project.

Auster said, "In one year, I read 4,000 stories," some of which were read on the radio. "And some of them were just absolutely remarkable." Several of these, Auster collected in the popular anthology I Thought My Father Was God.

The project proved especially meaningful and fulfilling to him, Auster explained. "I think I learned a lot about what life in the U.S. is like, what people have experienced, and also -- most interestingly -- how strange reality is. I think one of the reasons I did it was, I wanted to confirm for myself, almost as a philosophical experiment, if other people had had the same kinds of bizarre, inexplicable, unexpected experiences that I've had. And it turned out: Yes! Yes!"

It all brought home to him, in a different way, what Auster first learned as a boy in New Jersey: the crucial importance of stories to humanity.

"Starting at the age of two," he said, "children are hungry for stories. They need them as much as they need food. Because stories are a way of organizing your own thoughts about the world, and feeling a connection with humanity."

We continue to need stories -- real and imagined -- all our lives, Auster explained, "to understand things about ourselves, and things about other human beings. I think by living vicariously the lives of other people, we understand about ourselves and humanity in general."

Books -- from a biography of Ty Cobb to a novel by Franz Kafka -- are thus unique. "It's the only place in the world where two strangers can meet, on very intimate terms," Auster said. "In the end, the reader and the writer make the book, together. And I think that's why they're irreplaceable." --Tom Nolan