Conversations with Paul Auster

Interview with Paul Auster

5 Interview with Paul Auster Joseph Mallia/1987 Originally commissioned by, edited, and published in BOMB Magazine, from BOMB Magazine Issue 23, Spring 1988, pp. 24–27. Copyright Bomb Magazine, New Art Publications, and its Contributors. All rights reserved. The BOMB Digital Archive can be viewed at www .bombsite.com. MALLIA: In your book of essays The Art of Hunger you cite Samuel Beckett as saying, “There will be a new form:” Is your work an example of that new form? AUSTER: It seems that everything comes out a little strangely and my books don’t quite resemble other books, but whether they’re “new” in any sense, I really can’t say. It’s not my ambition to think about it. So I suppose the answer is yes and no. At this point I’m not even thinking about anything beyond doing the books themselves. They impose themselves on me, so it’s not my choice. The only thing that really matters, it seems to me, is saying the thing that has to be said. If it really has to be said, it will create its own form. MALLIA: All of your early work, from the 1970s, is poetry. What brought about this switch in genres, what made you want to write prose? AUSTER: Starting from a very early age, writing novels was always my ambition . When I was a student in college, in fact, I spent a great deal more time writing prose than poetry. But the projects and ideas that I took on were too large for me, too ambitious, and I could never get a grip on them. By concentrating on a smaller form, I felt that I was able to make more progress. Years went by, and writing poetry became such an obsession that I stopped thinking about anything else. I wrote very short, compact lyrical poems that usually took me months to complete. They were very dense, especially in the beginning—coiled in on themselves like fists—but over the years they gradually began to open up, until I finally felt that they were heading in the 6 CONVERSATIONS WITH PAUL AUSTER direction of narrative. I don’t think of myself as having made a break from poetry. All my work is of a piece, and the move into prose was the last step in a slow and natural evolution. MALLIA: As a younger writer, who were the modern writers you were interested in? AUSTER: Of prose writers, unquestionably Kafka and Beckett. They both had a tremendous hold over me. In some sense, the influence of Beckett was so strong that I couldn’t see my way beyond it. Among poets, I was very attracted to contemporary French poetry and the American Objectivists, particularly George Oppen, who became a close friend. And the German poet Paul Celan, who in my opinion is the finest postwar poet in any language. Of older writers, there were Hölderlin and Leopardi, the essays of Montaigne, and Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which has remained a great source for me. MALLIA: But in the ’70s you also wrote a great number of articles and essays about other writers. AUSTER: Yes, that’s true. There was a period in the middle ’70s in particular when I found myself eager to test my own ideas about writers in print. It’s one thing to read and admire somebody’s work, but it’s quite another to marshal your thoughts about that writer into something coherent. The people I wrote about—Laura Riding, Edmond Jabès, Louis Wolfson, Knut Hamsun, and others—were writers I felt a need to respond to. I never considered myself a reviewer, but simply one writer trying to talk about others. Having to write prose for publication disciplined me, I think, and convinced me that ultimately I was able to write prose. So in some sense those little pieces of literary journalism were the training ground for the novels. MALLIA: Your first prose book was The Invention of Solitude, which was an autobiographical book. AUSTER: I don’t think of it as an autobiography so much as a meditation about certain questions, using myself as the central character. The book is divided into two sections, which were written separately, with a gap of about a year between the two. The first, Portrait of an Invisible Man, was written in response to my father’s death. He simply dropped dead one day, unexpectedly , after being in perfect health...