Collected Prose: Autobiographical Writings, True Stories, Critical Essays, Prefaces, Collaborations With Artists, and Interviews (25 page)
Authors: Paul Auster
*
The Book of Memory. Later that evening.
Not long after writing the words, “this was the only thing she could remember,” A. stood up from his table and left his room. Walking along the street, feeling drained by his efforts that day, he decided to go on walking for a while. Darkness came. He stopped for supper, spread out a newspaper on the table before him, and then, after paying his bill, decided to spend the rest of the evening at the movies. It took him nearly an hour to walk to the theater. As he was about to buy his ticket, he changed his mind, put the money back in his pocket, and walked away. He retraced his steps, following the same route that had taken him there in reverse. At some point along the way he stopped to drink a glass of beer. Then he continued on his walk. It was nearly twelve when he opened the door of his room.
That night, for the first time in his life, he dreamed that he was dead. Twice he woke up during the dream, trembling with panic. Each time, he tried to calm himself down, told himself that by changing position in bed the dream would end, and each time, upon falling back to sleep, the dream started up again at precisely the spot it had left off.
It was not exactly that he was dead, but that he was going to die. This was certain, an absolute and immanent fact. He was lying in a hospital bed, suffering from a fatal disease. His hair had fallen out in patches, and his head was half bald. Two nurses dressed in white walked into the room and told him: “Today you are going to die. It’s too late to help you.” They were almost mechanical in their indifference to him. He cried and pleaded with them, “I’m too young to die, I don’t want to die now.” “It’s too late,” the nurses answered. “We have to shave your head now.” With tears pouring from his eyes, he allowed them to shave his head. Then they said: “The coffin is over there. Just go and lie down in it, close your eyes, and soon you’ll be dead.” He wanted to run away. But he knew that it was not permitted to disobey their orders. He went over to the coffin and climbed into it. The lid was closed over him, but once inside he kept his eyes open.
Then he woke up for the first time.
After he went back to sleep, he was climbing out of the coffin. He was dressed in a white patient’s gown and had no shoes on. He left the room, wandered for a long time through many corridors, and then walked out of the hospital. Soon afterwards, he was knocking on the door of his ex-wife’s house. “I have to die today,” he told her, “there’s nothing I can do about it.” She took this news calmly, acting much as the nurses had. But he was not there for her sympathy. He wanted to give her instructions about what to do with his manuscripts. He went through a long list of his writings and told her how and where to have each of them published. Then he said: “The Book of Memory isn’t finished yet. There’s nothing I can do about it. There won’t be time to finish. You finish it for me and then give it to Daniel. I trust you. You finish it for me.” She agreed to do this, but without much enthusiasm. And then he began to cry, just as he had before: “I’m too young to die. I don’t want to die now.” But she patiently explained to him that if it had to be, then he should accept it. Then he left her house and returned to the hospital. When he reached the parking lot, he woke up for the second time.
After he went back to sleep, he was inside the hospital again, in a basement room next to the morgue. The room was large, bare, and white, a kind of old-fashioned kitchen. A group of his childhood friends, now grownups, were sitting around a table eating a large and sumptuous meal. They all turned and stared at him when he entered the room. He explained to them: “Look, they’ve shaved my head. I have to die today, and I don’t want to die.” His friends were moved by this. They invited him to sit down and eat with them. “No,” he said, “I can’t eat with you. I have to go into the next room and die.” He pointed to a white swinging door with a circular window in it. His friends stood up from their chairs and joined him by the door. For a little while they all reminisced about their childhood together. It soothed him to talk to them, but at the same time he found it all the more difficult to summon the courage to walk through the door. Finally, he announced: “I have to go now. I have to die now.” One by one, with tears pouring down his cheeks, he embraced his friends, squeezing them with all his strength, and said good-bye.
Then he woke up for the last time.
*
Concluding sentences for The Book of Memory.
From a letter by Nadezhda Mandelstam to Osip Mandelstam, dated 10/22/38, and never sent.
“I have no words, my darling, to write this letter … I am writing it into empty space. Perhaps you will come back and not find me here. Then this will be all you have left to remember me by…. Life can last so long. How hard and long for each of us to die alone. Can this fate be for us who are inseparable? Puppies and children, did we deserve this? Did you deserve this, my angel? Everything goes on as before. I know nothing. Yet I know everything—each day and hour of your life are plain and clear to me as in a delirium—In my last dream I was buying food for you in a filthy hotel restaurant. The people with me were total strangers. When I had bought it, I realized I did not know where to take it, because I do not know where you are…. When I woke up, I said to Shura: ‘Osia is dead.’ I do not know whether you are still alive, but from the time of that dream, I have lost track of you. I do not know where you are. Will you hear me? Do you know how much I love you? I could never tell you how much I love you. I cannot tell you even now. I speak to you, only to you. You are with me always, and I who was such a wild and angry one and never learned to weep simple tears—now I weep and weep and weep … It’s me: Nadia. Where are you?”
* * *
He lays out a piece of blank paper on the table before him and writes these words with his pen.
The sky is blue and black and gray and yellow. The sky is not there, and it is red. All this was yesterday. All this was a hundred years ago. The sky is white. It smells of the earth, and it is not there. The sky is white like the earth, and it smells of yesterday. All this was tomorrow. All this was a hundred years from now. The sky is lemon and rose and lavender. The sky is the earth. The sky is white, and it is not there.
He wakes up. He walks back and forth between the table and the window. He sits down. He stands up. He walks back and forth between the bed and the chair. He lies down. He stares at the ceiling. He closes his eyes. He opens his eyes. He walks back and forth between the table and the window.
*
He finds a fresh sheet of paper. He lays it out on the table before him and writes these words with his pen.
It was. It will never be again. Remember.
1980–1981
REFERENCES
(Sources of quotations not mentioned in text)
| page 68 | “Israel Lichtenstein’s Last Testament.” In A Holocaust Reader , edited by Lucy S. Dawidowicz. Behrman House. New York, 1976. |
| page 71 | Flaubert. The Letters of Gustave Flaubert , selected, edited, and translated by Francis Steegmuller. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, 1979. |
| page 78 | Marina Tsvetayeva. Quotations of translations by Elaine Feinstein. In Marina Tsvetayeva: Selected Poems . Oxford University Press, 1971. |
| page 78 | Gregory I. Altschuller, M.D. Marina Tsvetayeva: A Physician’s Memoir . In SUN. Volume IV, Number 3: Winter, 1980. New York. |
| page 80 | Christopher Wright. In Rembrandt and His Art . Galahad Books. New York, 1975. |
| page 81 | Hölderlin. Prose quotations translated by Michael Hamburger. In Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments . University of Michigan Press. Ann Arbor, 1966. |
| page 82 | Hölderlin. To Zimmer . Translated by John Riley and Tim Longville. In What I Own: Versions of Hölderlin . Grosseteste Review Press, 1973. |
| page 108 | B. = André du Bouchet. In Hölderlin Aujourd’hui , a lecture delivered in Stuttgart, 1970. |
| page 110 | Collodi. The Adventures of Pinocchio . Translated by Carol Della Chiesa. Macmillan. New York, 1925. All further quotations from this edition. Translations sometimes slightly adapted. |
| page 119 | Edward A. Snow. A Study of Vermeer . University of California Press. Berkeley, 1979. |
| page 121 | Van Gogh. The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh . Edited by Mark Roskill. Atheneum. New York, 1972. |
| page 125 | Tolstoy. Ann Dunnigan’s translation of War and Peace . New American Library. New York, 1968. |
| page 126 | Freud. “The ‘Uncanny.” In On Creativity and the Unconscious . Harper and Row. New York, 1958. |
| page 127 | The Thousand and One Nights . All quotations from The Portable Arabian Nights . Translated by John Payne. Edited by Joseph Campbell. Viking. New York, 1952. |
| page 132 | Dostoyevsky. The Brothers Karamazov . Translated by David Magarshack. Penguin. Baltimore, 1958. |
| page 132 | Jim Harrison. Quoted in “The End of Cambodia?” by William Shawcross. The New York Review of Books . January 24, 1980. |
| page 134 | Anne Frank. The Diary of a Young Girl. Doubleday. New York, 1952. |
| page 135 | Quotations of commentaries on the Book of Jonah from “Jonah, or the Unfulfilled Prophecy” in Four Strange Books of the Bible , by Elias Bickerman. Schocken. New York, 1967. |
| page 137 | Leibniz. In Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays . Translated by Paul Schrecker and Anne Martin Schrecker. Bobbs-Merrill. Indianapolis, 1965. |
| page 138 | Proust. Swann’s Way . Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. Random House. New York, 1928. |
| page 140 | Freud. “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming.” In On Creativity and the Unconscious . |
| page 147 | Nadezhda Mandelstam. Hope Abandoned . Translated by Max Hayward. Collins & Harvill. London, 1974. |
HAND TO MOUTH
A Chronicle of Early Failure
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 Céline 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 codirector 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.