Paul Auster: A Brief Biography
Part 3: The Prose Years (1980-1990)
by Kenneth Kreutzer
By early 1980 Auster had moved from his dismal lodgings on Varick Street to an apartment in Brooklyn. There he worked on "The Book of Memory" and on a bilingual anthology titled The Random House Book of Twentieth Century-French Poetry. It was here that a pair of wrong-number phone calls intended for the Pinkerton Agency planted the seed that would become City of Glass.
On 23 February 1981 Auster attended a poetry reading at the 92nd Street Y. There he met Siri Hustvedt, a tall woman of Norwegian ancestry, born in Minnesota in 1955. Her mother was Ester Vegan Hustvedt, her father Lloyd Hustvedt, a professor and biographer of Norwegian-American scholar and Amerika editor Rasmus Bjorn Anderson. Indeed, the Anderson connection might be seen as one of the odd coincidences that pervade Auster's life and fiction, considering the uneasy relationship between that Wisconsin intellectual and Knut Hamsun—an author whose work conspicuously influenced Auster's thinking. Siri Hustvedt had received her B.A. from St. Olaf College in 1977 and an M.A. from Columbia University just two years earlier, in 1979. Auster and Hustvedt very quickly fell in love and were married on Bloomsday.
The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry was published in 1982, as was the British edition of The Art of Hunger—a collection of essays that was released in an expanded edition by Sun & Moon Press some ten years later, and in an even more expanded paperback edition by Penguin Books in 1993. Auster's translations of the Mallarmé fragments and of Joseph Joubert's notebooks followed in 1983, courtesy of North Point Press, which was at the time one of the best publishing houses in America.
Auster's mood, meanwhile, had improved considerably as a consequence of his relationship with Hustvedt, and he began work on City of Glass, which in the McCaffery-Gregory interview he termed "an homage to Siri, ...a love letter in the form of a novel." The novel—the first of Auster's New York Trilogy—proved a difficult sell to publishers. Auster collected seventeen rejections, steadfastly refusing to make changes in the novel, before he connected with Douglas Messerli at Sun & Moon Press in Los Angeles. Messerli accepted City of Glass, and with it the still unwritten remaining volumes of the Trilogy. City of Glass appeared in 1985 to considerable acclaim, and was nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America—somewhat surprising, given its extremely unconventional employment of genre conventions. Ghosts followed in 1986, reconfiguring elements of the discarded play Blackouts; and The Locked Room completed the trilogy in 1987.
What was clear from the evolving Trilogy was that Auster's sensibilities were becoming, not only increasingly novelistic, but increasingly American. His poetry had always seemed most at home alongside the work of the French poets he had translated—André du Bouchet, Philippe Jaccottet, Jacques Dupin, Philippe Denis—though one could, in a pinch, trace its affinities with George Oppen and Carl Rakosi. And The Invention of Solitude's intellectual sources appeared largely Continental. But Ghosts, though cast in an effectively sparse prose that perhaps reflected its origin in Auster's Beckettish play, was dominated, Auster told Joseph Mallia, by "the spirit of Thoreau.... Walden Pond in the heart of the city." And The Locked Room owed more than just a character's name to Nathaniel Hawthorne and his fellow 19th-century American novelists.
While Auster was between writing Ghosts and The Locked Room, he began to think once again about a novel that he had started in 1970 and that had continued, from time to time, to resurface in his head—the work that would later become In the Country of Last Things. He wrote some thirty pages for the beginning of the novel and showed them to Hustvedt, who judged them the best work he had ever done. She insisted he complete the project, and, in part to guarantee to himself that he would actually do so, he published the fragment in the Paris Review. Auster completed the Trilogy before he returned to work on what Hustvedt had come to refer to as "my book." The novel's dystopian setting was designed to embody modern horrors—the siege of Leningrad, poverty in Cairo, the gradual disintegration of New York City—rather than futuristic ones, and Auster referred to his novel-in-progress with the phrase "Anna Blume Walks Through the Twentieth Century."
By the time it was published, Auster had become a far more attractive commodity to major publishers. Auster's translations of Philippe Petit (best known for walking a high wire between the towers of the World Trade Center) and Maurice Blanchot had appeared in 1985. In 1986 Auster had taken on a position as lecturer at Princeton University—a post he would continue to hold until 1990. Most importantly, the component pieces of the Trilogy were receiving excellent reviews. In the Country of Last Things was published by Viking in 1987—the same year that the Trilogy was released in a single-volume British edition by Faber and Faber and paperback reprints of City of Glass and Ghosts made available by Penguin. Auster's relationship with Viking Penguin would be a lengthy one, and he became the third baseman of the publishing company's baseball team.
Readers who knew Auster from the Trilogy and In the Country of Last Things had a chance to acquaint themselves with his poetry when, in 1988, Woodstock's Overlook Press issued a collection of Auster's selected poems, Disappearances. But these same readers could not help being surprised by the direction Auster took with his next work. Next to the taut structures of his previous novels, Moon Palace, published in 1989, seemed like one of the "large loose baggy monsters" that Henry James referred to in his introduction to The Tragic Muse. Despite its comparative bulk and wandering narrative, Auster's Bildungsroman was held together by a complex web of associations linking the personal development of its protagonist, Marco Stanley Fogg, with the movement of American history. When the critical history of Auster's oeuvre has at last been written, it may be Frederick Jackson Turner's famous essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" that provides the best explication of Moon Palace.
By this time, Auster and Hustvedt were living in an apartment in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, and Auster's writing was done in a studio about a block away. The couple now had a daughter, Sophie, and Hustvedt's name was filtering into the periphery of the literary world's vision with published fragments of the novel that would become The Blindfold and her 1987 translation, in collaboration with David McDuff, of Norwegian scholar Geir Kjetsaa's biography of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Auster's 1990 novel, The Music of Chance, developed the basic motif of his failed Laurel and Hardy play. The novel proved an unexpected challenge to write, and underwent major changes while in progress. Auster finished The Music of Chance, his novel about men building a wall, on 9 November 1989—the same day the Berlin Wall fell.