Conversations with Paul Auster

The Futurist Radio Hour: An Interview with Paul Auster

100 The Futurist Radio Hour: An Interview with Paul Auster Stephen Capen/1996 From The Futurist Radio Hour, KUSF San Francisco. Reproduced with permission of Paul Auster. CAPEN: I’d like to delve into the past as our departure point. You were, at one time, a merchant seaman, and I wonder how this came about. AUSTER: It’s true, I did work for about six months on an Esso oil tanker. I got the job after I left college. I didn’t know what I wanted to do in life. I didn’t want to be an academic, which is probably what I was best suited for, but I just didn’t want to be in school anymore, and the idea of spending my life in a university was too horrible to contemplate. I had no real profession, no trade, I hadn’t really studied for anything. All I wanted to do was to write. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn’t need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children. It turned out that my stepfather, who was a person I was very close to, the person to whom I dedicated Moon Palace, Norman Schiff, earned his living as a labor lawyer and negotiator. One of his clients was the Esso Seamen’s Union, a company union. So I knew all about these ships, and when I was about to leave school I asked Norman if he could help me get a job on one of them, and he said, “I’ll take care of it for you.” It’s extremely difficult to get these jobs, because you can’t get a job on a ship unless you have seaman’s papers, and you can’t get seaman’s papers unless you have a job on a ship. There had to be a way to break through the circle, and he was the one who arranged it for me. So I shipped out. It’s quite amusing. I went through all the exams, I got my papers, and then I had to sit around and wait until a ship from the fleet came into the New York area with an opening, not knowing how long this wait was going to be. In the meantime—this is 1970—I took a job with the U.S. Census Bureau. In The Locked Room, the STEPHEN CAPEN / 1996 101 third volume of The New York Trilogy, there’s a sequence where the narrator talks about working for the census, and I took this straight from life. As in the book, I wound up inventing people. Kind of curious. Anyway, right around that time I had a problem with a wisdom tooth and I had to go to the dentist to have the thing pulled out, and it was while I was sitting in the chair in the dentist’s office—the dentist had just picked up a big pair of pliers and was about to yank out my tooth—when the telephone rang. It was my stepfather. “The ship is here,” he said. “You have to report in two hours.” So I jumped out of the dentist’s chair with the bib on and said, “Sorry, I have to leave,” and ran out and made my way to a tanker in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The tooth was taken out a week later in Baytown, Texas. The ship traveled around the Gulf of Mexico, and it was all new to me, I hadn’t been in the South, I hadn’t been in Texas, and I learned a lot during those months. Luckily , the work was well paid. I managed to save several thousand dollars, and it was with that money that I moved to Paris, where I spent the next three or four years. CAPEN: This was key for you, this move. What was your experience of Paris? It almost seems like you learned the meaning of being a writer there. AUSTER: Well, it was certainly a fundamental time. I had been writing before that. It was what I wanted to do with my life. But my student years came at a particularly crazy time in America. We’re talking about the late ’60s, and Columbia University, where I went to school, was a hotbed of activity. It was impossible not to get caught up in it. As a consequence, I didn...