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Overview
Paul Auster's Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure is a fascinating and often funny memoir about his early years as a writer struggling to be published, and to make enough money to survive.
This is the story of a young man's struggle to stay afloat. By turns poignant and comic, Paul Auster's memoir is essentially an autobiographical essay about money--and what it means not to have it. From one odd job to the next, from one failed scheme to another, Auster investigates his own stubborn compulsion to make art and describes his ingenious, often far-fetched attempts to survive on next to nothing. From the streets of New York City and Paris to the rural roads of upstate New York, the author treats us to a series of remarkable adventures and unforgettable cast of characters while examining what it means to be a writer.
“Required, inspiring reading for Auster-holics and aspiring writers.” —Kirkus Reviews
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466817647 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Holt, Henry & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2003 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 164 |
| File size: | 148 KB |
About the Author
Hometown:
Brooklyn, New YorkDate of Birth:
February 3, 1947Place of Birth:
Newark, New JerseyEducation:
B.A., M.A., Columbia University, 1970Read an Excerpt
In my late twenties and early thirties, I went through a period of several years when everything I touched turned to failure. My marriage ended in divorce, my work as a writer foundered, and I was overwhelmed by money problems. I'm not just talking about an occasional shortfall or some periodic belt tightenings--but a constant, grinding, almost suffocating lack of money that poisoned my soul and kept me in a state of never-ending panic.
There was no one to blame but myself. My relationship to money had always been flawed, enigmatic, full of contradictory impulses, and now I was paying the price for refusing to take a clear-cut stand on the matter. All along, my only ambition had been to write. I had known that as early as sixteen or seventeen years old, and I had never deluded myself into thinking I could make a living at it. Becoming a writer is not a "career decision" like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days. Unless you turn out to be a favorite of the gods (and woe to the man who banks on that), your work will never bring in enough to support you, and if you mean to have a roof over your head and not starve to death, you must resign yourself to doing other work to pay the bills. I understood all that, I was prepared for it, I had no complaints. In that respect, I was immensely lucky. I didn't particularly want anything in the way of material goods, and the prospect of being poor didn't frighten me. All I wanted was a chance to do the work I felt I had it in me to do.
Most writers lead double lives. They earn good money at legitimate professions and carve out time for their writing as best they can: early in the morning, late at night, weekends, vacations. William Carlos Williams and Louis-Ferdinand Celine were doctors. Wallace Stevens worked for an insurance company. T. S. Eliot was a banker, then a publisher. Among my own acquaintances, the French poet Jacques Dupin is co-director of an art gallery in Paris. William Bronk, the American poet, managed his family's coal and lumber business in upstate New York for over forty years. Don DeLillo, Peter Carey, Salman Rushdie, and Elmore Leonard all worked for long stretches in advertising. Other writers teach. That is probably the most common solution today, and with every major university and Podunk college offering so-called creative writing courses, novelists and poets are continually scratching and scrambling to land themselves a spot. Who can blame them? The salaries might not be big, but the work is steady and the hours are good.
My problem was that I had no interest in leading a double life. It's not that I wasn't willing to work, but the idea of punching a clock at some nine-to-five job left me cold, utterly devoid of enthusiasm. I was in my early twenties, and I felt too young to settle down, too full of other plans to waste my time earning more money than I either wanted or needed. As far as finances went, I just wanted to get by. Life was cheap in those days, and with no responsibility for anyone but myself, I figured I could scrape along on an annual income of roughly three thousand dollars.
I tried graduate school for a year, but that was only because Columbia offered me a tuition-free fellowship with a two-thousand-dollar stipend--which meant that I was actually paid to study. Even under those ideal conditions, I quickly understood that I wanted no part of it. I had had enough of school, and the prospect of spending another five or six years as a student struck me as a fate worse than death. I didn't want to talk about books anymore, I wanted to write them. Just on principle, it felt wrong to me for a writer to hide out in a university, to surround himself with too many like-minded people, to get too comfortable. The risk was complacency, and once that happens to a writer, he's as good as lost.
I'm not going to defend the choices I made. If they weren't practical, the truth was that I didn't want to be practical. What I wanted were new experiences. I wanted to go out into the world and test myself, to move from this to that, to explore as much as I could. As long as I kept my eyes open, I figured that whatever happened to me would be useful, would teach me things I had never known before. If this sounds like a rather old-fashioned approach, perhaps it was. Young writer bids farewell to family and friends and sets out for points unknown to discover what he's made of. For better or worse, I doubt that any other approach would have suited me. I had energy, a head crammed full of ideas, and itchy feet. Given how big the world was, the last thing I wanted was to play it safe.
It's not difficult for me to describe these things and to remember how I felt about them. The trouble begins only when I question why I did them and why I felt what I felt. All the other young poets and writers in my class were making sensible decisions about their futures. We weren't rich kids who could depend on handouts from our parents, and once we left college, we would be out on our own for good. We were all facing the same situation, we all knew the score, and yet they acted in one way and I acted in another. That's what I'm still at a loss to explain. Why did my friends act so prudently, and why was I so reckless?
I came from a middle-class family. My childhood was comfortable, and I never suffered from any of the wants and deprivations that plague most of the human beings who live on this earth. I never went hungry, I never was cold, I never felt in danger of losing any of the things I had. Security was a given, and yet for all the ease and good fortune in the household, money was a subject of continual conversation and worry. Both of my parents had lived through the Depression, and neither one had fully recovered from those hard times. Each had been marked by the experience of not having enough, and each bore the wound in a different way.
My father was tight; my mother was extravagant. She spent; he didn't. The memory of poverty had not loosened its hold on his spirit, and even though his circumstances had changed, he could never quite bring himself to believe it. She, on the other hand, took great pleasure in those altered circumstances. She enjoyed the rituals of consumerism, and like so many Americans before her and since, she cultivated shopping as a means of self-expression, at times raising it to the level of an art form. To enter a store was to engage in an alchemical process that imbued the cash register with magical, transformative properties. Inexpressible desires, intangible needs, and unarticulated longings all passed through the money box and came out as real things, palpable objects you could hold in your hand. My mother never tired of reenacting this miracle, and the bills that resulted became a bone of contention between her and my father. She felt that we could afford them; he didn't. Two styles, two worldviews, two moral philosophies were in eternal conflict with each other, and in the end it broke their marriage apart. Money was the fault line, and it became the single, overpowering source of dispute between them. The tragedy was that they were both good people--attentive, honest, hardworking--and aside from that one ferocious battleground, they seemed to get along rather well. For the life of me I could never understand how such a relatively unimportant issue could cause so much trouble between them. But money, of course, is never just money. It's always something else, and it's always something more, and it always has the last word.
As a small boy, I was caught in the middle of this ideological war. My mother would take me shopping for clothes, sweeping me up in the whirlwind of her enthusiasm and generosity, and again and again I would allow myself to be talked into wanting the things she offered me--always more than I was expecting, always more than I thought I needed. It was impossible to resist, impossible not to enjoy how the clerks doted on her and hopped to her commands, impossible not to be carried away by the power of her performance. My happiness was always mixed with a large dose of anxiety, however, since I knew exactly what my father was going to say when he got the bill. And the fact was that he always said it. The inevitable outburst would come, and almost inevitably the matter would be resolved with my father declaring that the next time I needed something, he was the one who would take me shopping. So the moment would roll around to buy me a new winter jacket, say, or a new pair of shoes, and one night after dinner my father and I would drive off to a discount store located on a highway somewhere in the New Jersey darkness. I remember the glare of fluorescent lights in those places, the cinder-block walls, the endless racks of cheap men's clothing. As the jingle on the radio put it: "Robert Hall this season / Will tell you the reason--/ Low overhead / Bum, bum, bum / Low overhead!" When all is said and done, that song is as much a part of my childhood as the Pledge of Allegiance or the Lord's Prayer.
The truth was that I enjoyed this bargain hunting with my father as much as I enjoyed the buying sprees orchestrated by my mother. My loyalties were equally divided between my two parents, and there was never any question of pitching my tent in one camp or the other. My mother's approach was more appealing, perhaps, at least in terms of the fun and excitement it generated, but there was something about my father's stubbornness that gripped me as well, a sense of hard-won experience and knowledge at the core of his beliefs, an integrity of purpose that made him someone who never backed down, not even at the risk of looking bad in the eyes of the world. I found that admirable, and much as I adored my beautiful, endlessly charming mother for dazzling the world as she did, I also adored my father for resisting that same world. It could be maddening to watch him in action--a man who never seemed to care what others thought of him--but it was also instructive, and in the long run I think I paid more attention to those lessons than I ever realized.
As a young boy I fell into the mold of your classic go-getter. At the first sign of snow, I would run out with my shovel and start ringing doorbells, asking people if they would hire me to clear their driveways and front walks. When the leaves fell in October, I would be out there with my rake, ringing those same doorbells and asking about the lawns. At other times, when there was nothing to remove from the ground, I would inquire about "odd jobs." Straightening up the garage, cleaning out the cellar, pruning the hedges--whatever needed to be done, I was the man to do it. In the summer, I sold lemonade for ten cents a glass on the sidewalk in front of my house. I gathered up empty bottles from the kitchen pantry, loaded them in my little red wagon, and lugged them to the store to turn in for cash. Two cents for the small ones; five cents for the big. I mostly used my earnings to buy baseball cards, sports magazines, and comic books, and whatever was left over I would diligently put in my piggy bank, which was built in the shape of a cash register. I was truly the child of my parents, and I never questioned the principles that animated their world. Money talked, and to the degree that you listened to it and followed its arguments, you would learn to speak the language of life.
Once, I remember, I was in possession of a fifty-cent piece. I can't recall how I came to have that coin--which was just as rare then as it is now--but whether it had been given to me or whether I had earned it myself, I have a keen sense of how much it meant to me and what a large sum it represented. For fifty cents in those days you could buy ten packs of baseball cards, five comic books, ten candy bars, fifty jawbreakers--or, if you preferred, various combinations of all of them. I put the half-dollar in my back pocket and marched off to the store, feverishly calculating how I was going to spend my little fortune. Somewhere along the way, however, for reasons that still confound me, the coin disappeared. I reached into my back pocket to check on it--knowing it was there, just wanting to make sure--and the money was gone. Was there a hole in my pocket? Had I accidentally slid the coin out of my pants the last time I'd touched it? I have no idea. I was six or seven years old, and I still remember how wretched I felt. I had tried to be so careful, and yet for all my precautions, I had wound up losing the money. How could I have allowed such a thing to happen? For want of any logical explanation, I decided that God had punished me. I didn't know why, but I was certain that the All-Powerful One had reached into my pocket and plucked out the coin Himself.
Little by little, I started turning my back on my parents. it's not that I began to love them less, but the world they came from no longer struck me as such an inviting place to live. I was ten, eleven, twelve years old, and already I was becoming an internal emigre, an exile in my own house. Many of these changes can be attributed to adolescence, to the simple fact that I was growing up and beginning to think for myself--but not all of them. Other forces were at work on me at the same time, and each one had a hand in pushing me onto the road I later followed. It wasn't just the pain of having to witness my parents' crumbling marriage, and it wasn't just the frustration of being trapped in a small suburban town, and it wasn't just the American climate of the late 1950s--but put them all together, and suddenly you had a powerful case against materialism, an indictment of the orthodox view that money was a good to be valued above all others. My parents valued money, and where had it gotten them? They had struggled so hard for it, had invested so much belief in it, and yet for every problem it had solved, another one had taken its place. American capitalism had created one of the most prosperous moments in human history. It had produced untold numbers of cars, frozen vegetables, and miracle shampoos, and yet Eisenhower was President, and 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.
It wasn't long before I discovered that I wasn't the only person who felt this way. At ten, I stumbled across an issue of Mad magazine in a candy store in Irvington, New Jersey, and I remember the intense, almost stupefying pleasure I felt at reading those pages. They taught me that I had kindred spirits in this world, that others had already unlocked the doors I was trying to open myself. Fire hoses were being turned on black people in the American South, the Russians had launched the first Sputnik, and I was starting to pay attention. 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. The moment you began to study the facts, contradictions bubbled to the surface, rampant hypocrisies were exposed, a whole new way of looking at things suddenly became possible. We had been taught to believe in "liberty and justice for all," but the fact was that liberty and justice were often at odds with one another. The pursuit of money had nothing to do with fairness; its driving engine was the social principle of "every man for himself." As if to prove the essential inhumanity of the marketplace, nearly all of its metaphors had been taken from the animal kingdom: dog eat dog, bulls and bears, the rat race, survival of the fittest. Money divided the world into winners and losers, haves and have-nots. That was an excellent arrangement for the winners, but what about the people who lost? Based on the evidence available to me, I gathered that they were to be cast aside and forgotten. Too bad, of course, but those were the breaks. If you construct a world so primitive as to make Darwin your leading philosopher and Aesop your leading poet, what else can you expect? It's a jungle out there, isn't it? Just look at that Dreyfus lion strolling down the middle of Wall Street. Could the message be any clearer? Either eat or be eaten. That's the law of the jungle, my friend, and if you don't have the stomach for it, then get out while you still can.
I was out before I was ever in. By the time I entered my teens, I had already concluded that the world of business would have to get along without me. I was probably at my worst then, my most insufferable, my most confused. I burned with the ardor of a newfound idealism, and the stringencies of the perfection I sought for myself turned me into a pint-sized puritan-in-training. I was repulsed by the outward trappings of wealth, and every sign of ostentation my parents brought into the house I treated with scorn. Life was unfair. I had finally figured this out, and because it was my own discovery, it hit me with all the force of a revelation. As the months went by, I found it increasingly difficult to reconcile my good luck with the bad luck of so many others. What had I done to deserve the comforts and advantages that had been showered on me? My father could afford them--that was all--and whether or not he and my mother fought over money was a small point in comparison to the fact that they had money to fight over in the first place. I squirmed every time I had to get into the family car--so bright and new and expensive, so clearly an invitation to the world to admire how well off we were. All my sympathies were for the downtrodden, the dispossessed, the underdogs of the social order, and a car like that filled me with shame--not just for myself, but for living in a world that allowed such things to be in it.
My first jobs don't count. My parents were still supporting me, and I was under no obligation to fend for myself or contribute to the family budget. The pressure was therefore off, and without any pressure, nothing important can ever be at stake. I was glad to have the money I earned, but I never had to use it on nuts-and-bolts necessities, I never had to worry about putting food on the table or not falling behind with the rent. Those problems would come later. For now I was just a high school kid looking for a pair of wings to carry me away from where I was.
At sixteen, I spent two months working as a waiter at a summer camp in upstate New York. The next summer, I worked at my uncle Moe's appliance store in Westfield, New Jersey. The jobs were similar in that most of the tasks were physical and didn't require much thought. If carrying trays and scraping dishes was somewhat less interesting than installing air conditioners and unloading refrigerators from forty-foot trailer trucks, I wouldn't want to make too big a point of it. This isn't a question of apples and oranges--but of two kinds of apples, both the same shade of green. Dull as the work might have been, however, I found both jobs immensely satisfying. There were too many colorful characters around, too many surprises, too many new thoughts to absorb for me to resent the drudgery, and I never felt that I was wasting my time just to earn a paycheck. The money was an important part of it, but the work wasn't just about money. It was about learning who I was and how I fit into the world.
Even at the camp, where my coworkers were all sixteen- and seventeen-year-old high school boys, the kitchen help came from a starkly different universe. Down-and-outs, Bowery bums, men with dubious histories, they had been rounded up from the New York streets by the owner of the camp and talked into accepting their low-paying jobs--which included two months of fresh air and free room and board. Most of them didn't last long. One day they would just disappear, wandering back to the city without bothering to say good-bye. A day or two later, the missing man would be replaced by a similar lost soul, who rarely lasted very long himself. One of the dishwashers, I remember, was named Frank, a grim, surly guy with a serious drinking problem. Somehow or other, we managed to become friends, and in the evening after work was done we would sometimes sit on the steps behind the kitchen and talk. Frank turned out to be a highly intelligent, well-read man. He had worked as an insurance agent in Springfield, Massachusetts, and until the bottle got the better of him, he had lived the life of a productive, tax-paying citizen. I distinctly remember not daring to ask him what had happened, but one evening he told me anyway, turning what must have been a complicated story into a short, dry account of the events that had done him in. In the space of sixteen months, he said, every person who had ever meant anything to him died. He sounded philosophical about it, almost as if he were talking about someone else, and yet there was an undertow of bitterness in his voice. First his parents, he said, then his wife, and then his two children. Diseases, accidents, and burials, and by the time they were all gone, it was as if his insides had shattered. "I just gave up," he said. "I didn't care what happened to me anymore, so I became a bum."
The following year, in Westfield, I made the acquaintance of several more indelible figures. Carmen, for example, the voluminously padded, wisecracking bookkeeper, who to this day is still the only woman I've known with a beard (she actually had to shave), and Joe Mansfield, the assistant repairman with two hernias and a ravaged Chrysler that had wiped out the odometer three times and was now up to 360,000 miles. Joe was sending two daughters through college, and in addition to his day job at the appliance store, he worked eight hours every night as a foreman in a commercial bakery, reading comic books beside the huge vats of dough so as not to fall asleep. He was the single most exhausted man I have ever met--and also one of the most energetic. He kept himself going by smoking menthol cigarettes and downing twelve to sixteen bottles of orange soda a day, but not once did I ever see him put a morsel of food in his mouth. If he ate lunch, he said, it would make him too tired and he would collapse. The hernias had come a few years earlier, when he and two other men were carrying a jumbo refrigerator up a narrow flight of stairs. The other men had lost their grip, leaving Joe to bear the entire weight of the thing himself, and it was exactly then, as he struggled not to be crushed by the several hundred pounds he was holding, that his testicles had shot up out of his scrotum. First one ball, he said, and then the other. Pop ... pop. He wasn't supposed to lift heavy objects anymore, but every time there was an especially large appliance to deliver, he would come along and help us--just to make sure we didn't kill ourselves.
The us included a nineteen-year-old redhead named Mike, a tense, wiry shrimp with a missing index finger and one of the fastest tongues I had yet encountered. Mike and I were the air conditioner installation team, and we spent a lot of time together in the store van, driving to and from jobs. I never tired of listening to the onslaught of loopy, unexpected metaphors and outrageous opinions that came pouring out of him whenever he opened his mouth. If he found one of the customers too snotty, for example, he wouldn't say "that person's an asshole" (as most would) or "that person's stuck-up" (as some would), but "that person acts as if his shit doesn't smell." Young Mike had a special gift, and on several occasions that summer I was able to see how well it served him. Again and again we would enter a house to install an air conditioner, and again and again, just as we were in the middle of the job (screwing in the screws, measuring strips of caulking to seal up the window), a girl would walk into the room. It never seemed to fail. She was always seventeen, always pretty, always bored, always "just hanging around the house." The instant she appeared, Mike would turn on the charm. It was as if he knew she was going to come in, as if he had already rehearsed his lines and was fully prepared. I, on the other hand, was always caught with my guard down, and as Mike launched into his song and dance (a combination of bullshit, razzle-dazzle, and raw nerve), I would dumbly plod on with the work. Mike would talk, and the girl would smile. Mike would talk a little more, and the girl would laugh. Within two minutes they were old friends, and by the time I'd put the finishing touches on the job, they were swapping phone numbers and arranging where to meet on Saturday night. It was preposterous; it was sublime; it made my jaw drop. If it had happened only once or twice, I would have dismissed it as a fluke, but this scene was played out repeatedly, no less than five or six times over the course of the summer. In the end, I grudgingly had to admit that Mike was more than just lucky. He was someone who created his own luck.
Table of Contents
| HAND TO MOUTH | 1 |
| Appendix 1: Three Plays | 131 |
| Laurel and Hardy Go to Heaven | 133 |
| Blackouts | 172 |
| Hide and Seek | 195 |
| Appendix 2: Action Baseball | 215 |
| Appendix 3: Squeeze Play, by "Paul Benjamin" | 237 |
Interviews
On September 19th, barnesandnoble.com welcomed Paul Auster, author of HAND TO MOUTH.
Moderator: barnesandnoble.com is proud to include Paul Auster in our series of live author events. Mr. Auster joins us via phone tonight to address inquiries into his remarkable career, as documented in his latest work HAND TO MOUTH: A CHRONICLE OF EARLY FAILURE. Thanks for joining us tonight, Mr. Auster. Is this your first online chat?
Paul Auster: Yes, it is the very first time I've participated in something like this.
Karen Barefield from Baltimore, MD: What is life like for you now that you have achieved the literary success/status after which you longed for so many years? I read THE NEW YORK TRILOGY a while ago and was engrossed, and am eager now to read HAND TO MOUTH.
Paul Auster: My life is essentially the same. The world of a writer is the world of the inner self, and no matter what your outward circumstances, that remains the same.
Fullmargin from Stuyvesant Town: As an aspiring author, struggling to achieve recognition, and the contacts this recognition, at least ideally, can bring, what did you do, or what do you recommend doing, in this city to find and form friendships that helped you to sustain and reinforce your literary interests?
Paul Auster: Well, this is a hard question to answer. I don't know how long you've lived here, or how many friends you have or might have. Generally speaking, though, it seems that young writers tend to gravitate towards one another in college, and that was certainly true in my own case. As a student at Columbia in the '60s, I was surrounded by many talented aspiring poets and novelists. Somehow or other, one thing seems to lead to another. One acquaintance will introduce you to someone else, who in turn will introduce you to someone else, and so on. If you feel isolated, it might not be a bad idea to enroll in a writing class, or find out about writers' groups that exist around the city.
Mary from NY: Your memoir is a chronicle of your early years as a writer. Do you feel your life since then is something you'd want to write about later on?
Paul Auster: Again. Well, the fact is I had wanted to write this book for many years. And I don't think of it as an autobiography so much as an autobiographical essay about money. What comes next is hard to say.
Anne Darden from Columbus, OH: How do you feel about the reclusive tendencies of some authors? What's your opinion on this inclination and do you try at remaining aloof? If so, why?
Paul Auster: This is a good question. There are no rules about this kind of thing. Every writer has to do what he or she feels comfortable with. Most of us who write tend to be reclusive by nature, and it is often difficult to get up in public and talk about our work. I myself find it rather uncomfortable, but I participate in these things every now and again because I feel I have an obligation to show good faith to my publisher, who has made, after all, a serious commitment to my work.
TOM G from Illinois: I'm glad for the publication of the pieces in the HAND TO MOUTH appendix -- it's like access to the master's notebooks. Do you have more that you refrained from publishing?
Paul Auster: There are many writings of mine from the past that I wouldn't dream of showing to anyone. The works in the appendices of HAND TO MOUTH, however, seem to have survived the ravages of time, at least to some extent. And I felt comfortable about publishing them in this book. I doubt that there is anything else from the past that is going to surface in the near future. [Laughs.]
Paul from New Orleans: I loved THE NEW YORK TRILOGY and THE ART OF HUNGER and I just ordered a copy of your memoir, but I'd like to know which book, of all that you've written, means the most to you? Which was the toughest to write?
Paul Auster: Interesting. This is a true answer to a question I've thought about often myself: I feel equally attached to all the books I've written. They are like my children. And while some of them might be stronger, or better, or more interesting than others, each one represents a long period of effort, struggle, and imagination. The book that seemed to be the most difficult to write was LEVIATHAN. Don't ask me why...but that book seemed to take more out of me than any other.
Georgette from a very pleasant Maine cabin: Journalists and critics alike are very prone to saying that you weave events from your own life and family history into your prose -- I can agree with that. However, I have also read of your level-headedness and relative peace. How do you separate the two, level "wounds open" by writing about them, and still live your life happily? Is it catharsis?
Paul Auster: Well, the fact is, there is no great separation between my life and my work. If I didn't do the work I do, I would probably explode. It is something I need in order to live. As far as my personal life goes -- without going into any detail -- I've had my ups and my downs, just like everyone else.
Molly from Indiana: Do you have a favored tendency toward any one genre? It seems as though you've worked with them all: screenplay, fiction, memoir, plays...
Paul Auster: Essentially, I think of myself as a storyteller. Most of my work has been narrative, i.e., novels. But I am also very interested in dramatic writing, which is, finally, an entirely different approach to telling stories. By not confining myself to any one form of writing, I feel I am able to renew myself and find more freedom in the work I am trying to do. The worst thing is to stand still. I want to keep pushing myself in different directions.
Marcus from 75th: Paul, I really enjoyed "Smoke." Did it really take three days, or am I misreading? And were you psyched when "Blue in the Face" sort of developed itself?
Paul Auster: Well, no. "Smoke" was shot in 45 days. It was a fully scripted film, and the actors, to my immense satisfaction, didn't deviate from the script. "Blue in the Face," which grew out of our rehearsals for "Smoke," was mostly improvised. BUT -- it did not take three days to shoot, but six. Three days in July, and then after a pause, to digest what we had done, three days in October. And then, ten months in the editing room.
Amanda Moser from Columbia.edu: In light of your theme of financial disparity, it seems appropriate to ask if the publication of your memoir was spurred by the rising trend in the genre -- was this merely a coincidence or a financially informed decision?
Paul Auster: Merely a coincidence. As you might or might not know, my first prose book, THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE, was also a "memoir" written between 1979 and 1981. And since then, I've published a number of autobiographical stories: THE RED NOTEBOOK and WHY WRITE?
Flo from Washington, DC: What writers influenced your writing? Who are some of your favorite authors?
Paul Auster: Well, let's begin with Americans. Poe, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville are all extremely important to me. Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes, Kafka, Beckett, Shakespeare, and Montaigne are some authors from abroad.
Cydney from Penngrove: In the first section of HAND TO MOUTH you talk about how much reading you did when you were an aspiring writer. Do you read as much these days, and what are you currently reading?
Paul Auster: I tend to read less now than I used to as a younger person. Probably because I spend so much more time working. I seem to read fewer novels now than before. Among the books on my bedside table right now are, let's see: a book by Tarkovsky, the Russian filmmaker, a book by Christopher Hitchins, a journalist, Don DeLillo's new novel, Orhan Pamuk's new novel, and a book of stories by Knute Hamsun.
Greg Harris from Miami, Florida: Mr. Auster, I've admired and recommended your work for several years now and just recently finished the wonderful HAND TO MOUTH. What do you hope your readers will come away with after finishing one of your novels? Is there any one idea, theme, or feeling in your writing you hope to impart?
Paul Auster: No one idea or theme. The total experience. To share these thoughts and emotions with other people, and for them to take on these thoughts and emotions as their own.
Carl Meholtz from Minneapolis: What came first -- your inclination to write about your early lack of money, or the desire to publish the pieces in the appendix?
Paul Auster: The essay came first. And the other pieces are put in as evidence.
Matthew Thomas from Brooklyn: How did your impoverished experiences related in HAND TO MOUTH influence your writing and your understanding of humanity -- can you see it evidenced in any particular characters?
Paul Auster: Seems to me that several of the characters in my books go through difficult times financially. As the old phrase goes, "You write what you know about." As for my understanding of humanity, I think it gave me a great and everlasting compassion for the underdog.
Gary O. from NYC: Where do you draw the line between selling out and becoming a successful writer? Is it possible to determine the taste of American culture to the extent that you can actually feed them what they want without exerting any personal artistry?
Paul Auster: Well in answer to the last part: certainly. We see it happening every day. In my own case, I've only been interested in trying to express the things I need to express. But I have no understanding of the so-called "marketplace," and the sales of my books would seem to indicate that there is a large gap separating me from the mainstream book-buyer in America.
Ben Mohammed from Toronto: Paul, I enjoyed your film "Smoke." How did you feel about a) writing about your neighborhood, and b) for the screen? Thank you.
Paul Auster: I thought of "Smoke" as a small homage to the place where I live, which I feel very attached to. The experience of writing a film and then participating deeply in the making of the film was a terrific experience, one that completely surprised me.
Franklin Boland from Greenwich, CT: Mr. Auster, good evening. Tell me, how deeply do you believe in the necessity of toiling in relative obscurity -- being what is called a "starving artist" -- in order for one's work to truly mature, to be as good as it can be? Do you have to start at the bottom, writing or painting by a single bare bulb?
Paul Auster: Again, there are no rules about any of this. Dickens was a success from his early 20's until he died. A great writer, who deserved all the acclaim he got. Other writers tend to run into tougher luck. [Laughs.] In general, I think it usually helps an artist to pay his dues. It gives him a better understanding of why he is doing what he is doing. If success comes late, it usually doesn't disrupt one's life as terribly as sudden success does.
Jackson from New York: Did it surprise you to see that Don DeLillo allowed his picture to grace the Art Section pages of The New York Times this past week?
Paul Auster: No. Don's picture has appeared in the Times many times.
Mark from NYC: Poetic influences? Is asking that even a fair question, for where does poetry come from but your own psyche? Still, I must ask.
Paul Auster: No poet can write poetry in a vacuum. You have to learn from the ones that came before you. My own favorites would probably include Shakespeare, Keats, John Donne, Emily Dickinson, Holderlin, Leopardi, and Baudelaire. And many others, too many to count, from the 20th century.
Elliott Nevins from Williamsburg: Paul, how do you feel about the "Brooklyn Renaissance" now rumored to be occurring?
Paul Auster: I've never heard about it. But if it's happening, I'm all for it!
T. Mohammed from Los Angeles, CA: Paul, people are calling your new book, among other things, occasionally comic. How do you feel about that? I've never heard the term used in regard to you before. Wry, but not comic.
Paul Auster: I think there is comedy in nearly every book I have written. And just remember, I'm the crazy person responsible for "Blue in the Face." Yes, there are very droll moments in HAND TO MOUTH, and I put them there intentionally.
Kathleen from New York: I picked up copy of HAND TO MOUTH and couldn't put it down. I've had people read over my shoulder and ask about the book. Have you ever been on a subway or in a park, and seen someone reading your book?
Paul Auster: Yes. A few times. If you ever happen to read an earlier novel of mine, CITY OF GLASS, I describe just such a situation. When the writer turns to the young woman reading his book, and asks her what she thinks of it (she has no idea that he is the author of the book), she shrugs, and says, "It's OK," or something like that. He is devastated. [Laughs.] Another comic moment: Just last night, I was sitting in an outdoor restaurant in NY, and a young man walked by carrying one of my books. And he came up to me and asked me to sign it, which I did, very happily.
Ned S. from New York: Paul, PORTRAIT OF AN INVISIBLE MAN is a remarkable story. Do you wish your father could read it, somehow? Or is it erected solely as a memoir in his absence?
Paul Auster: Well, I think about my father every day. And very much wish he were still alive. And if he were, I of course never would have written the book. I would gladly exchange the book to have him around.
G. Grantz from Bellrose Park: A tabletop baseball game? I didn't peg you as a baseball fan.
Paul Auster: I've loved baseball since my earliest childhood. Both as a player, and as a fan. Even now, I am deeply immersed in the pennant races in both leagues, and just wish the Mets hadn't made that terrible trade a month ago, just when it seemed they were about to contend seriously for a playoff spot.
Esme from Boston: What is it about Paris that is so attractive to artists? Is it the history, the spirit contained there? Something else? It seems that all the great ponderers of life pass through Paris for the conversation and the inspiration. Thank you.
Paul Auster: Paris is a city unlike any other I've lived in. It is the one place where you are allowed to be exactly who you are.
Moderator: Thanks for joining us tonight, Mr. Auster. Congratulations on your success, and we hope you'll visit us again in the barnesandnoble.com Live Event Auditorium. Goodnight!
Paul Auster: Thank you all for inviting me on. Goodnight.