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The World Is in My Head; My Body Is in the World

Interview with Gérard de Cortanze, "Le monde est dans ma tête, mon corps est dans le monde" - Magazine Littéraire 338, Décembre 1995, pp.18-25

Translated by Carl-Carsten Springer

Death, childhood, women, movies, Judaism, love, solitude, America, and baseball: a number of subjects which Paul Auster touches upon in an interview which we conducted in Brooklyn.

Brooklyn is a multicultural place where Caribbeans and Russians, Jews and Italians, Arabs and Haitians cross paths in the residential neighborhoods of Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope. It is in here that Paul Auster lives with his wife Siri Hustvedt and their daughter Sophie - Daniel, his adolescent son, has already left home to pursue the study of photography in Massachusetts. Park Slope is flanked by the lush greenery of Prospect Park and has Victorian buildings ornamented with late-nineteenth-century towers, neo-Roman building entrances, Baroque friezes and fountains, and open staircases which make the houses resemble Venetian palaces.

This old-fashioned calm of this "other" Brooklyn stands in striking contrast to the powerful existential anguish of an author deeply immersed in a work of which his phenomenal success has not estranged him. On the one hand, there is home, warm, open, kept by Siri, and old Jack, the affectionate mongrel who likes the smell of ground coffee. On the other hand, there is the office, a "stripped chamber," a "room of one's own," in the ground floor of an apartment building, with lowered metal blinds and a roaring air conditioner which drowns out the rest of the world.

The friendliness and readiness of Paul Auster for an interview are in contrast to his constant wish to trace the right word, his fierce determination to follow as closely as possible the thought or concept which he has in mind. Paul Auster, who has read Pascal and Montaigne as well as Shakespeare and Kafka, is a man who has a deep-rooted doubt. Between his outbursts of laughter and his moments of silence, he talks about death and childhood, women and movies, Judaism and love, baseball, America, and the art of solitude. Denouncing, in passing, the preconceived slots into which certain critics wish to press him, he shows us the way he really is rather than the way he is supposed to be. Tactfully baring his soul at times, he remains a man in search of the double truth of his twin writer with unfailing sharp sense. Going beyond the surface, he dares without hesitation what in baseball is called "the sacrifice bunt."

You write with difficulty... You once said, "It is like I have a tooth pulled every day..."

1. (Laughs.) Most of the time, yes. I write very slowly. I think my brain is too active. I am not passive. Each idea spawns dozens of others. I constantly have to restrain myself, turn myself back to the line of narration, and this is always very difficult. My major effort consists of not succumbing to digression!

Have you read a lot of the picaresque literature?

2. No. (Laughs.) The digression is one of the favorite themes of eighteenth-century English fiction. The most celebrated work on this subject, one which testifies this predilection, is Laurence Sterne's Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy. A whole book on digression! One of its chapters is entitled, "Digression on Digressing!"

One has the impression that for you solitude holds nothing negative... Is there no such thing as unpleasant solitude?

3. Solitude is not a negative thing, that is a fact. It is the truth of our lives, the exact place where there is no other: one is alone. In English, we distinguish between solitude and loneliness. Loneliness means that you feel abandoned. It signifies: I don't want to be alone, I resent the burden of solitude, I want to be with others. Solitude, in English, is neutral. It merely describes a state of being: being alone. Loneliness carries more emotion and sentiment. In French, there is only one word to describe both states; therefore it depends on the context.

A number of your books were written simultaneously. Some pages intended for Moon Palace found their way into The New York Trilogy. Fogg calls himself Quinn before that name appears in City of Glass. In the Country of Last Things was began while you were immersed in The New York Trilogy. Do you always write the same book? Or does each book represent an answer to its predecessor?

4. Absolutely. I always notice that. I also had to find that in the trajectory of my works there exists some sort of alternation between complex and labyrinthine works and other, more simple and direct ones. I always feel the necessity to change.

Still, one has the impression that Mr. Vertigo does not belong to that circle anymore.

5. The circle has been closed. Mr. Vertigo represents a leap into a different realm. After Leviathan, which was a very difficult book for me to write, very rough, on the whole a draining experience, I wanted to attach myself to a lighter, more aerial, project. At the bottom, this desire to talk about levitation was like resistance against gravity, against a certain ponderousness of the preceding novel. Mr. Vertigo is different to my other books. Why has this text emerged in this shape? I have thought a lot about this question. In my novels, the central character wants to be a good person, this is his essential purpose: to lead an exemplary life, moral and just. But around these "heroes" gravitate other characters, the ones who are like all the world, who think of money and sex, who love to eat and drink. For the first time, I've let one of these average people occupy the central position: Walt is very close to somebody like Patty [Tiffany] in The Music of Chance or Boris Stepanovich in In the Country of Last Things. Walt has not come out of nothing. My books are really full of Walts who live in the shadow of the central character.

The writing of poetry represents an important stage in your work. Could one say that you have abandoned poetry for prose?

6. When I was very young I wanted to become a novelist and write stories. I literally immersed myself into literature, especially into the poetry which lies at the basis of all literature, as it is all an effort to express oneself in words. At the same time I wrote prose, but the results never satisfied me. I kept my prose texts in my drawers. I don't know why, but my poems seemed to me more suited to being published... When I was around 29 / 30 years old, I went through a terrible crisis. I didn't write poetry anymore. I was unhappy with my life and found it more and more difficult to work. I thought that everything was over for me, that I would never be a writer. In spite of my hopes and all my work, I had to decide to face a different future. Then, I don't know why, something came loose within me: a new state of mind, a new desire to write. In a different form: that of prose, and I decided to follow that impulse, without really breaking with poetry. It is very difficult for me to understand this phenomenon clearly, to have come out of that dark forest, but these are the facts... Looking back I can assert that my poems are a part of myself that I do not deny. It may well be the origin of what I am writing now.

You have also translated a number of authors - Sartre, Joubert, Blanchot, Mallarmé, Char, Dupin, etc. - and written several essays.

7. I don't have any great desire to translate anymore. It looks to me like a phase that I have left behind, that lies in my youth, when I wanted most of all to discover, to "devour" literature of other writers and penetrate their words. That was, on the whole, exciting enough... I don't write any more essays; they correspond to a period of slowly becoming mature, the years of formation. I had to go through this stage: writing about others in order to understand myself.

In discussing your works you have often been connected with the detective novel. I find this absurd. Like Cervantes utilized the conventions of the chivalresque novel in Don Quixote, you help yourself to the conventions of a certain literary genre in order to surpass it.

8. Yes, I find such suggestions absurd as well. I discovered detective novels during the period when I was writing poems and essays. I was soon tempted by their form. Over some four years I read hundreds of detective novels. After that, I lost interest. I wrote a pseudonymous detective novel, purely for financial reasons. That is the only time in my life that I have tried to write for the money. I found myself in such a pressurized situation that I came close to prostituting myself. But in spite of my readiness (laughs) it didn't work at all. City of Glass has taken its form from the detective novel, although it is not really one, since it remains faithful to the incident that inspired the novel: a phone call in the middle of the night where erroneously I was asked whether I was a private detective working for the Pinkerton Agency! Despite my respect for the genre and my admiration for writers like Hammett and Chandler, this literature really isn't of any importance in my life.

Your work often touches upon the distinction between fiction and biography. In Moon Palace, Effing edits his obituary. Peter Aaron in Leviathan carries your initials. Benjamin Sachs, also in Leviathan, has written a novel (Luna [? The New Colossus]) rejected by sixteen publishers - which was also the case for City of Glass, etc. Is it possible to speak of anybody else than this invisible person of self and thus narrate the story of the surrounding people?

9. This interests me to the highest extent... Exactly this question lies at the origin of my desire to write novels. I have explored the problem in The Invention of Solitude - which is not a novel. But this was when I found myself confronted with a fundamental enigma: how to speak about my father? And, more generally, how to speak about somebody else? This idea poses enormous difficulties, and one constantly finds oneself confronted with numerous contradictions which never cease to fascinate me. In a way, most of my novels adopt the form of somebody's biography. It is the overall trajectory of a life which interests me. Not only some isolated moments but the whole range of a life, with all its meandering.

But still you haven't reached the point where you want to write the biography of someone who has existed?

10. Exactly. I prefer to write imaginary biographies. Of course, I could choose to narrate an imaginary life of Shakespeare... It is ten years since I read an extraordinary book about Mozart: a biography in the shape of meditations on the possibility of writing a biography. I stand fully behind this approach. When I was younger I had in mind a project of editing biographical meditations on the fates of the people that interested me. I never accomplished this, except for one short essay on Sir Walter Raleigh.

You have called The Music of Chance something like a realistic fable. Mr. Vertigo, your latest book, again goes much further. Is it related to your poetical works?

11. I consider Mr. Vertigo a realistic book. The only element in it which has no "verisimilitude," but which one can still accept, is the theme of levitation. Admitted this much, all is realistic: the psychology of the characters, the historical references, everything. This story, which unwinds in front of a realistic background, literally emerges from the ground of things, from truth. It is not, in the proper, and derogatory, sense of the term, a fairy tale. Magic realism does not interest me.

Are you returning to the tradition of the novel showing the development of a character?

12. Yes, that's possible. But not consciously. I am very much interested in the years of youth. When I read the biographies of famous persons, writers or not, I am always most interested in the chapters that deal with the person before his becoming known. The years of development are something that is always fascinating. Which path do you choose to become yourself... Maybe this is the reason why many of my books are similar to what in German is called the Entwicklungsroman. In the Country of Last Things, Mr. Vertigo, Moon Palace, The Locked Room could all, to some extent, be ranked in this category...

All of your protagonists try to give a sense to their lives and lose it to the extent that they get near to it. Is living always to go towards increasing obscurity?

13. Each of them tries to decipher his own chaos within that of the others, in this dense thicket of confusion. But some of my protagonists make progress in their lives. Anna Blume, Nashe, Walt end up understanding who they are and managing to decipher the world that surrounds them. Sometimes they recoil: this is what Quinn does. All my protagonists are very distinct people, very different from one another. There are many similarities among them, especially in their ways of talking to themselves, but also important distinctions. Their wishes are always different. Like every novelist, I am inside each of my protagonists. But I am deeply convinced that these people exist in their own rights, that they are not me! (Laughs.) This is always evident in those books narrated in the first person... The prose of Anna Blume, that of Peter Aaron and of Walt all have their own style, because they are all different people who think and express themselves and live in their own ways. Sometimes I have the impression that in writing a novel one becomes an actor. One penetrates into another character, another imaginary being, and ends up becoming this other character and this other imaginary being. It is for this reason, without doubt, that I have had so much fun working with the actors of Smoke and Blue in the Face. The writer who writes stories and the actor who acts both take part in the same effort: to penetrate into imaginary beings, to give them a body and life-likeness, to impart on them weight and reality.

One always reads that "chance" plays an important part in your work. I don't think that it has anything to do with that. Isn't your novelistic universe more a victim of necessity, of what Sartre has called "contingencies"?

14. "Paul Auster and chance"... well, I find this very irritating! There is necessity and there are coincidences, and life is nothing but coincidences.. You just have to open your eyes, to look at the lives of your neighbors, those of your friends, to see how no existence unfolds on a straight path. We are always subject to everyday coincidences. I always think of one word: accident. It has two meanings: philosophical and everyday - in the way one speaks, say, of a car accident. By definition, an accident is unforeseeable. It is something that occurs - unforeseen. And our lives are made up of such accidents. I am also interested in the accidents that do not occur! That possibility also exists... The man who crosses a street and who just about avoids being run over by a car... This millimeter thanks to which he stays alive fascinates me; this tiny distance contributes to making up a life.

Your novels are full of people afloat, lost ones, who pretend to be another in order to feel alive. Aren't you yourself an uprooted being in the United States, someone between the Old and the New World, who should have found his founding myths after his return from France in 1974?

15. No, this isn't true. I wrote many pages of Moon Palace, all full of the idea of America, long before my stay in France. America has always interested me. It is much simpler than what you suggest. Almost all artists consider themselves distanced from life and society. They dwell in a different state of mind. They are not really concerned with the activities of the others. In 1965 I read Joyce with relish and therefore desired to explore his city... I spent two weeks alone in Dublin, not speaking with anyone. I didn't dare to enter a pub. I didn't do anything but literally pace the streets of Dublin. It was dreadful to see this imbecile hampered by such timidity! Later, in the courses at university, I would never respond unless addressed directly by the teacher, and then I would stammer some faltering reply. This period was very difficult for me to live through... I always felt excluded... It wasn't the others who exiled me but my own inability... On the other hand, the fact of being Jewish in the United States always isolates you. I grew up in a town in New Jersey where there was an even mixture between Jews and Protestants. Each winter we rigged up small theatrical pieces to celebrate the end of the year. I obstinately refused to sing Christmas songs, an attitude which nobody had demanded from me and in which I hardly knew myself. I have a memory of these festivities when the whole class took part in the celebration and I found myself desperately alone... These are all small things, accumulated in the course of a lifetime, which isolate you from those of the others. So one looks, one turns oneself into an observer. One is a citizen of one country but at the same time feels like a stranger. One sees the inside but also the outside. Yes, all this has definitively contributed to my development. Now, at forty-eight, I have accomplished a certain "progress," that is to say, while being human. I manage to talk to people. Twenty years ago I wouldn't have been able to.

Today you are renowned. The name Paul Auster on the cover of a book, this also means: I exist, I am known...

16. I have always known that I existed, but, how shall I say, in a bit of a "closed" place. To see my name printed on the cover of a book strikes me as something exterior to myself. I am always here, in myself. The things around are real, but this hardly touches me... This is a bit bizarre, isn't it?

Borges is always made out to be the least Argentinean of Argentinean writers! Nobody is more Argentinean than Borges. One always reads: "Paul Auster, the most European of American authors." This is totally wrong.

17. The critics love their categories. And when one of them starts to write something, the others are content to repeat it. It is senseless. As a matter of fact, the art and literature of each country have their individual properties. But one is also part of a vaster common: that of world literature. Translations have existed since the invention of printing. Writers are subjected to influences from outside their native countries. Look at the evolution of the sonnet: born in Italy, it became popular throughout Europe, which gave it, among others, the French and the English sonnet. In the middle of the sixteenth century the excellent poet Thomas Wyatt reinvented Petrarch in English. Nothing is more English than this poetry which is also "imported" poetry. The Frenchman Flaubert has strongly influenced the Irishman Joyce, who has strongly influenced the American Faulkner, who has strongly influenced the South American Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who has strongly influenced Toni Morrison. These frontiers are nonsense. Read closely the novels of Herman Melville, who is for me the greatest novelist in the history of American literature. His books are totally beyond anything one does... His novels are practically incomprehensible and by all means unclassifiable. He is the greatest American writer and his books have nothing to do with American literature. On the other hand, in response to your question, I have to alter my statement: one lives somewhere and this place constitutes the essential world of each individual. Artists or writers, no matter what, respond to the environment they live in. In my books, I respond to the reality that surrounds me: an American reality.

A part of reality is baseball, the game that is present in all of your books.

18. Well, where shall I start? First of all, it is a sport that most people play in their youth, and so everyone has this nostalgic attachment to that time of their lives. On the other hand, it is a game which holds a lot in esthetic terms. There are the visible lines in the field with their particular brightness, which contribute to create persisting memories. One can remember a game in a vivid and strongly present way. Each game unfolds slowly and steadily, with highly energetic moments, with ample movement, with lulls. Rhythm is an important factor. What is particularly tempting with baseball is that the show does not end after a fixed time, as is the case with other spectator sports. Even if a team is way ahead of the other in the beginning, it may, after daring play, end up winning. All reversals of situations are possible. On the other hand, this sport is played every day for one season - that means, half of the year, or 162 games! Therefore each team necessarily suffers its ups and its downs, its injuries and uncertainties; some teams start full of power and don't hold out for the season, others, in contrast, finish with a grand finale. This sport is also deeply rooted in American history. The Baseball Encyclopedia, a book of over 4,000 pages, is the true history of the United States. Every game since the beginning of this sport is scrupulously recorded in it, in thousands of columns of digits. One learns, for example, that Rigges Stephenson played for forty years, participated in 1310 games and achieved 4000 chances at base. He was nicknamed "Dummy," the dumb one. One remembers the achievements of Elston Howard, one afternoon in 1920, while forgetting what the great social movements of that time were, and who was President. We also have to keep in mind that baseball has rapidly turned into an immigrant sport, a democratic sport which facilitated integration. My grandfather loved baseball, and playing it he became American! Yes, essentially baseball is a wide subject to which I am very much attached. Each time I open the newspaper during the season I begin scanning the scores of the games which were played the day before. It's like a ritual. When you possess visual and physical experience in this sport, you can piece together a whole game on the basis of these scores: they provoke images, and within a few seconds you find yourself in the field surrounded by the players.

In In the Country of Last Things the rabbi says that each Jew has the impression of being part of the last generation of Jews. You are the grandson of Jewish immigrants: how do you live this past, this culture?

19. Judaism is the whole of myself, it is where I come from. However, I have strong reservations concerning the practicing of religion - not just concerning Judaism but all religions. I am not religious. The essence of religion itself holds something positive, but the practice perverts this. See how religious fundamentalism is today, in all areas, a frightening and dangerous practice. I feel close to the history, the tradition of thinking, and the whole world-view of Judaism. Judaism, in contrast to the other religions, including Christianity, proposes codes of living which allow a life not idealistic but realistic. The golden rule of Christianity is, "Treat others in the way you want to be treated." Judaism says instead, "Don't treat others in the way you don't want to be treated." This is fundamentally different. Jews have inverted the basic ideas of the problem. The one is an injunction; the other puts us into a state of "live and let live." Each reading of the Old Testament is a lesson. I always return to it. I feel very close to the history of the Jewish people, with all its ramifications. But I don't feel any desire to write about Judaism. It is not my principal source, rather one element among others, which, like the others, has contributed to my formation.

Moon Palace was a story about families and generations, somewhat like David Copperfield. Isn't all writing like family research? The question is always somehow the same: who am I who writes here?

20. I know my paternal grand-parents and my maternal great-grand-parents. I cannot go any further back... Among the immigrants who came to the United States there was, I think, a strong desire to start anew. The question of origins does not really plague me. It represents a mystery which like every mystery opens up many questions. Essentially, the matter of generations is always skirted in Moon Palace. It is mainly the question of the immediate family that interests me, the search for a parent or grandparent...

The past may hold horrible facts... In this way you discovered that your grandmother killed your grandfather in January 1919 by shooting him in the kitchen, and that in 1929, the year of the depression, Edison dismissed your father, who had just been working in his laboratory for two weeks, because he found out that he was Jewish!

21. It is difficult to live, to accept, but every family has its stories. One always comes up with madmen, criminals, violence - simply because this is a part of life.

In Moon Palace lightning plays an important part. Isn't that the same lightning which killed a summer camp comrade before your eyes when you were fourteen? My question is simple: the books, all of them, don't they originate in the past?

22. Yes, certainly. One has many memories which are deeply entombed. It is the process of writing which brings these small bits of memory to the surface. But one isn't aware of it. One doesn't know where they come from. One cannot put them into focus. From time to time one is able to retrace the path and reach the origin. It needs luck and enough of these materials which have appeared from the dark. The writer's works are born from these hidden springs.

What kind of relationship do you have with America? While in Leviathan the actual Statue of Liberty is not bombed, its replicas are...

23. This is a vast subject. What fascinates me about this country are the contradictions. It is a wonderful country which has changed the outlook of the whole world, which has contributed to what has turned into a new idea of a nation, and whose admirable principles represent something like a model for the rest of the world. At the same time it is a country that bathes in complete hypocrisy, that has been founded on racism and slavery. I watch this country, so full of energy, with its admirable freedom and its depressing weaknesses. I feel that I am in a constant conflict with the United States... I am not alone in that... The United States is different to other countries; it is an invented country, it has been founded... France is inhabited by the French, and this is why you cannot the question of idea of there being the country France. Since America exists, people have never ceased to ask, "But what is America? What does it mean to be American?" There is no American race: it has come from the four corners of the earth! It is an inexhaustible topic.

Tocqueville's essay, Of Democracy in America, remains to this day the longest book ever written on the United States...

24. Though edited in 1838, it contains remarks which are still extremely penetrating today. The concept of democracy and liberty for all is a magnificent idea. To accept the idea of democracy is a difficult step which does not come by itself. The struggle between authoritarianism and true democracy has existed since the founding of the United States. Twenty-five years ago some Americans distributed the Declaration of Independence in the shape of a leaflet, pretending that it was a petition which had to be signed. A majority of people refused to sign this strange paper which everyone took to be communist propaganda! Our country today lives in a terrible split: one half of it is looking at the other half. Those on the one side think that they have some responsibility for the others and that it is the duty of the citizen to believe that this is the best of worlds for the majority of people. On the other side there are the others who do not reason in terms of society but think that the individual alone counts. Life, therefore, amounts to a struggle between the winners and the losers.

Like Peter Aaron in Leviathan maintains, "America has lost the north"?

25. Yes. That's what I mean. And America has also lost its ideal. The return to the right of power today in the United States is something dreadful. Read its program carefully: it is nothing less than a new form of fascism. Unfortunately, at this time there is no opposition worthy of that name able to oppose it. And this is very harmful.

One has the impression that America does not know anymore how to muster itself except through "distractions," in the Pascalian sense of the term, cleverly orchestrated by the media: deaths, scandals, rivalry between skaters, the Simpson trial, etc...

26. Quite so! Since the beginning I have refused to waste my time with scandals. Today, the media in the U.S. concentrates on diverting the people's attention on unimportant subjects. For several years a succession of scandals has systematically occupied the attention of a scattered and divided nation which has neither a history nor a debate as a common good. In fact, these scandals have become the sole debate able to bring the country together. There are no common topics apart from the communal participation in a brainwashing business. The O.J. Simpson trial represents the sad apogee of this infernal chain.

Are all your books political?

27. One doesn't escape politics! To refer to that model I suggested earlier, I belong to the first group - that which thinks that we live together in a society and that we all stand together. In this sense, yes, every work of art, consciously or not, is a political act.

You have yet to talk about books you have read. Kafka, for example. You once said, "I don't understand him, it is like a dream, a dream which haunts and gives rise to very serious reflections on things."

28. The authors who impress you remain, this much is certain. Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville... Always Cervantes... Shakespeare who, in my view, remains the model... I always think about Kafka... I can easily remember several of his texts. Yes, he represents something that I carry within me. At Princeton I had my students work on Kafka. That was five years ago, and I haven't read him since.

Among other French authors you mention Proust, but more often Pascal and Montaigne...

29. Always Montaigne. What fascinates me about him is that he was the first to consider himself a writer. He really examined himself. He possessed an exceptional open-mindedness. He had the courage to pursue his digressions. To engross yourself in Montaigne is like reading a contemporary. He is very direct and honest. He has no religious filter. There is neither myth nor ideology between him and his topics. For me, Montaigne was a real revelation. He has taught me a lot. I continue to think about him. I can say about him as well that I carry him within me. There are other authors, of course...

Like H.D. Thoreau, Benjamin Sachs's favorite author, who has declared himself "a man first, and secondly, an American"?

30. Thoreau is, above all, a great stylist. There is such sharpness, such mental energy in him. In my view he remains one of the best prose writers of the English language. But his great ideas, notably those collected in his essay "Civil Disobedience," have a sort of extreme modernity. His great concept of "passive resistance" went around the world. It decisively influenced Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. Resisting the war the United States waged against Mexico, he refused, as a sign of disapproval, to pay his taxes. Put into prison, he received, as legend goes, a visit from his employer Emerson, who asked him, "Henry, why are you here?" Thoreau answered, "Why aren't you?" - But his greatest work remains Walden, in which he speaks about the experience of solitude. He was one of the first to perceive the contradictions in this vast agrarian country, the United States, which was gradually changed through industrialization. Thoreau didn't like what he saw. The years 1850-52, which preceded the Civil War, turned society into a state of exploding on its contradiction and perishing in a sea of blood. We have to remember that this war caused more deaths than all the others fought by the United States put together. Thoreau was a brilliant visionary, and this is what touched me in him.

The only anchorage that Nashe, the protagonist of The Music of Chance, has is his daughter, who is brought up by his sister and whom he sees regularly. In the interview that follows "The Art of Hunger" you say very true and moving things about children... Is childhood a subject that particularly touches you?

31. I still consider myself close to my own childhood... There is a good sentence in Joseph Joubert, whom I translated in 1983: "There are those who remember their childhood and there are others who remember school." I have very vivid memories of my childhood. I remember some of the dreams I had as a young boy in great detail. The fact of becoming a father has changed me very much. In some way this has closed a circle. One could say that I didn't consider myself complete, and so that nobody does before having a child. The idea of becoming an element in a continuity is of vital importance. It is interesting to find that I didn't begin to write novels until after becoming a father. Despite my efforts, I didn't manage to do this before the birth of Daniel. I think that there's a link between these two facts. Also, a child is one of the most interesting romantic characters.

Which place do you give to women in your work? Are they creative, dominating, disturbing, or unpredictable? Do they have their minds set on love sacrifice? Do they wake the poets who pseudonymously write about the poles in the night? Are they warm-hearted saviors like Kitty Wu in Moon Palace?

32. Except for Anna Blume in In the Country of Last Things, the protagonists of my novels are all men. In Leviathan the women crop up and play a significant part. I remember some interesting criticism, unfortunately written by a woman, of the Music of Chance film. She criticized that this adaptation does not leave enough space for the importance that women have for Nashe. This is a capital remark. In the book, Nashe is surrounded by women: his spouse [?!], his daughter, his mother, his ex-wife, his lover Fiona whom he plans to marry, Tiffany the prostitute... These are women who characterize Nashe more fully. A characterization which it is easy to see as one of a member of the male sex.

What kind of relationship do you have to the movies?

33. When I was very young I was a well-informed cineast. Later I wasn't so interested. These last two years, as you know, I've been drawn into the film world - in 1993 Philip Haas adapted The Music of Chance, and I have just filmed two films with the director Wayne Wang -, and I have found it fun. But I prefer to be here in my studio writing a book. Smoke is ninety-nine percent a new story. "Auggie Wren's Christmas Story" was the trigger that made me meet Wayne Wang, and the story is told at the end of Smoke. However, the story of the screenplay is something entirely new, it was never supposed to become the framework of a novel. It was written for the movies. Having read the book you know that the text was longer than the film. We had to make cuts...

Still, this screenplay fits into your work. One finds your universe, your obsessions...

34. Oh, sure. It is a part of my work. I took the writing of this screenplay very seriously, although its story is a little bit lighter than those that usually form the basis of my books. I wanted to do something very simple, about ordinary people. And Smoke is a rather optimistic film. Sure, one sees anguished people in it, lost people, people with lots of problems... Just like in life... But the circumstances are such that each person tries to learn from the other what is best or what he thinks is best. And this is possible, this happens. It is not something invented by a writer. It is simply an approach towards things, towards other beings. Since the beginning of the project, Wayne and I have talked a lot about this matter. What did we want to do? I soon insisted on an aspect which I considered essential: I didn't want to make a cynical film. Almost all films shown in the United States nowadays are cynical ones. This cynicism is a reflex of our time, but it is as wrong as the smug sentimentalism of Victorian times. Moreover, my books are never cynical: they are full of hope. It is too easy to be cynical. We still aren't sure about the reception of the film. Its modest success, considering that it is a low budget production - although the budget turned out to be much bigger than we had expected -, and that it is still running five months after its release, is mainly, I think, due to this absence of cynicism. It is something the audience appreciates.

One has the impression that the two films are complementary. One cannot watch Smoke without watching Blue in the Face... Do each of them have a structure of its own?

35. Yes. The structure of Smoke is rather bizarre, since the last section, "Auggie Wren's Christmas Story" told by Harvey Keitel, has nothing to see, much in contrast to the rest of the film, or at least the preceding scenes. It is no conclusion. When Auggie tells the story he opens new subjects. I like it when things open up and do not end. Blue in the Face, now, is mainly a playful tribute to Brooklyn. We let the actors improvise for a few hours before sewing the different parts together. We produced a kind of unusual panorama. The result is something very, very loose. Nothing was foreseen. But after Smoke nobody wanted to leave. I hadn't expected this, and it pushed me into a new direction. I had to do something totally different to what I usually do and that made me a bit crazy. In the movies, every new day produces a new crisis. There is a lot of tension and moments of extreme concentration. In the end, the experience has helped me to relax me somewhat to accept other views better. In the movie business there is something terrible happens every day; one has to remain calm. And keep extraordinarily calm.

Can you say anything about a new book in process?

36. No, I'd rather not. It's dangerous to speak of things which haven't been completed yet. I could return to it tomorrow, find the book very bad and stop writing it...

Anna Blume ends up burning books...

37. I don't. I respect them too much. I admire them...

New York Public Library has recently bought all your manuscripts to be placed from now on side by side with those of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Vladimir Nabokov, Henry Miller... It that important, extravagant, or vain

38. It's practical! (Laughs.) For some reason that escapes me now I have always kept my manuscripts, my notes, letters, and all sorts of things that pile up, in cardboard boxes which I no longer opened... I simply wasn't able to throw them away... I couldn't... All this was standing around here, piled up and crammed in my old boxes. And then one day a manuscript salesman rang me and asked if I wanted to sell my papers. I found it a bit extravagant and told him that I'm not yet dead, that I had never thought about what comes after me... (Laughs.) "Well, you could start right now," he replied. Basically, I didn't consider it such a bad idea: my old papers would be cleared away and put into a safe place where they would be protected, and I would even get paid for it. Between us, it wasn't a terribly difficult decision. And it hasn't changed anything: I continue to write and pile my new papers in new cardboard boxes...