The Other Paul Auster
The Discovery Of Chance
This is a story of B in search of the pseudonym of A, a celebrated contemporary American writer. The whole thing took place in late 1980's, over a period of about a year. In the end, in his search for A, B finds more of himself than A. After all, they say A may be an unknowable, a rogue, perhaps even a hermit that wishes nothing less than absolute minimal contact with his readers. Yet somehow A refuses to be ignored perhaps for a reason, or perhaps his books have a way of evoking cult-like devotion to him without A's knowledge. Typically, A would have the audacity to summarize the whole story in the first paragraph, but I refuse to do so, partly because B wouldn't want to either, as a matter of pride if nothing else.
It was a book that started it all. Or rather, it had already started long ago, but the timely appearance of a certain book marked the beginning of this particular period of B's life. It seems now that what I'm about to tell you can only begin by telling you the way how all of it started, much like other events in B's life. That is to say, from the beginning, triggered by a random event, or a chance encounter. When I look back now, it seems impossible to ignore many coincidences in B's life that seemed arbitrary at first, but later turn out to be related to each other somehow. The randomness itself eventually seems to disappear into the web of inevitably connected relationships, as if intricately woven by a mysterious stranger. Over time, I've learned to accept this as a fact. Or, rather, I've become so used to the idea that I've developed a certain religious belief in the whole phenomena. Perhaps this is how the way things are, or how they should be. In any case, this is how it starts, quite randomly.
One afternoon, as chances would have it, B received a book from a strange book-of-the-month-club. Since B had never voluntarily joined a book club before, he became annoyed at finding yet another piece of junk mail, especially the kind that he may have to trouble himself to actually return to the sender. Moreover, B found it even more disturbing to find that his name was correctly spelled on the cover of the package, which had never happened before when he actually placed mail-orders from a catalogue company. At this point in his life, in the middle of yet another chaotic episode involving a stressful job and complicated relationships with his friends, B was intent on keeping a very solitary and cautious routine. B was perhaps even paranoid about seemingly trivial events that might jeoperdize his daily routine. New events were terrifying by nature, as B learned the hard way from his failures. A new event almost always leads to more events, and more events necessarily represent even more possibilities for him to screw up.
The book remained on the living room table for months, untouched. Each layer of dust on its cover representing B's reluctance to give into the random event that may alter his daily routine. The book signified nothing more than its dusty cover as long as it was left closed. Since B was afraid of changing anything in his life, after having worked very hard to achieve a comfortably monotonous life with minimal distractions, this was all too understandable. B's daily routine was simply too fragile to be interrupted, too precious and hard-won to be destroyed by a book.
Rather than giving into the book, which seemed to whisper perhaps silent contempt for B's relunctance as more dust gathered on its covers, B decided to read another book of his choice. It seemed a clever way to avoid the obvious trap presented by the odd book. In the end, B settled on the old books that he has read many times before. By reading the books that he already knew very well, he was hoping to avoid any problems that might occur from this new impulse to read something, which in itself was already an unwelcome side-effect triggered by the arrival of the mysterious book. He started reading Don Quixote, by Miguel Cervantes, which took him a good week to get to the end of Book One. But before beginning the Book Two, B began noticing disturbing changes in his routine. He was devoting excessive amount of time to Don Quixote, as if to avoid having to think about the other book. And as he slowly made his way through the labyrith of interesting characters and plot twists in book one, he started feeling as if the situation he found himself in was identical to the situation that drove Don Quixote into his misadventures. It was as if the uninvited book was mocking him, by making him read another book that was all about someone who goes mad after reading too many books about chivalric knights.
One night, B found himself half conscious, lying on the floor of his living room. It was very dark. His head felt like someone had hit him with a blunt object. Thirsty from many shots of Jack Daniels and beer chasers earlier at The Alley Cat, B clumsily reached for a glass of water on the table. Oddly enough, there was a bright spotlight on the table, which B mistakenly recognized as a glass of water. Of course, instead of water, B found the dusty book. B became furious and cursed at the book, yelling for some time. Yet for some reason, instead of getting up to fetch himself a fresh glass of water, B started to read this book, still cursing, tired of fighting, half conscious. And that's how it all started. The rest of this story is mere echoes of what had happened then. Because nothing will ever be the same anymore. Everything happens for a reason, even if there is no way of finding out about it.
As soon as he started to read, B became inexplicably devoted to the book. When the book is devoured, B found it more disturbing than before. It turned out that the entire plot of the story was summarized in the first paragraph of the book. Such clever yet contemptible audacity! It seemed almost as if the book's author, A, was insulting his readers, B in particular, as if telling B that it was inevitable from the beginning. All that was needed was the reading of the first paragraph. And the rest was history. The wrong delivery of the book was in fact not an error. It was intended for B all along. Because whatever followed the first encounter was mere echoes of what the was already written in the book. Nobody was to be allowed sufficient time to digest the aftermath of the first paragraph. The book could no longer be tamed. "Who does he think he is? This A! Is he playing with my mind?" B concluded A must have huge balls, muttering to himself, "such audacity!"
Years later B found out that this was typical of A's writing, and only one of many A's idiosyncratic tendencies. A might have never meant anything so grand as to trap his readers by summarizing the whole complicated tale in one paragraph at the beginning of his books. For the time being, not understanding A's peculiar traits, B felt exhausted. He literally felt physical pain from the act of reading A's books. His body felt stiff and his bones were cold, transmitting terrible aches to his tired brain. Not only because of his hangover, but because of the haunting characters in A's novel who seemed to suffer from the painful memories and dreams that were so familiar to B. A's book was filled with characters that abruptly severed their relationships, discarded their belongings, immersing themselves in terrible solitude, and ended up wandering the vast space of random territories, in search of something, but not knowing. The same idiotic faith in invisible connectedness in seemingly random events of one's life. All of the memories, implications, and solitude. The book was a personal history with no bounds. So real that it could kill, or destroy all the painful lies one must accept in a life. A was indeed a very uncompromising guy who went through a great deal of personal sadness. Not necessarily because A was a strong survivor, but because, as Mallory said, "it was there." B was almost breathless from this overwhelming weight of finding one's own story in someone else's book. Who is this A?
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The Beginning Of Solitude
B was hooked. Whatever books he could find that had A's name on it, B consumed greedily like a heroine addict shooting up his fresh load. As he finished each book, he suffered each time from the same intensity of the first book that brought him physical pain. The real world had gradually become unimportant to him. In the beginning, B's friends tried to find out what was happening to B. Most of his casual friends soon decided that B must be going out of his mind and left him alone. Some managed to find out what B's been up to, and started their own reading of A's novels, perhaps to find out why B feels so strong about A's novels, or perhaps for no reason at all. Nothing came out of it. Or at least nothing as far as B was concerned. Years later, B discovered that there were many others who went through a similar experience with A's novels, all initiated by that first book. People ended up selling off all their clothes, books and other comfort items and started living like a hermit, reading and re-reading A's books. But, for now, this is not relevant to the story. What is important is that B now had very few friends. Most of his friends quickly left B alone, for good. B welcomed the change, surprising himself. It felt somehow inevitable that such things would happen since B felt no real friendship in them. It was proper to be rid of such friends. With more time to spend on his own, B paid all his attention to A's books. The rest of his life slowly disintegrated.
One morning, B woke up alone in his bed to find that he is left with very little in his life now: a job which he hated with a passion, a small apartment with very few items of comfort. B sold most of his books, except those written by A, packed a few essential things and moved into a warehouse building located in the industrial part of west Oakland. There was no longer any reason to allow himself trivial comforts of a proper home. What he needed was empty space which allowed his solitude to be experienced without distractions. After the move, B got increasingly dissatisfied with his job. When B started working for the company, it was very small, populated with a handful of socially conscious people who were at least superficially aware of the good and evil, which was the main reason why B started working for them. For a few years, B was more or less satisfied with his mundane work. He sometimes even enjoyed the useless task of writing esoteric computer programs. But as the company grew more successful and bigger, B noticed a disturbing change in people's attitude. More of the MBA types started working at the company, more sales were being targeted towards the military market. It got to a point where majority of the major customers were military related. B resigned from his job, refusing all of the company stock options entitled to him at a considerable financial cost, and continued on with what's left of his life, reading and re-reading A's books.
At some point B realized that his life was changing. In his deepest thoughts he understood that all the changes in his life were occurring for a reason. He could not understand what the reason might be, but he was convinced that there had to be a reason. B was sure that whatever the reason might be, it had nothing to do with A's books. On the surface, it looked as though B was acting out his fantasies as one of A's characters. But it made B sick to think of himself as one of A's obscure characters. The real reason had to be something deeper, something that was waiting to happen for a long time. It just so happened that A's book triggered B into action. Nothing more. Or so B thought.
A few months passed without any notable change in B's routine. Each morning, B woke up late and started to read one of A's books. He ate a quick meal around four o'clock in the afternoon, and continued to read. Then, around eight B went out to have a drink at The Alley Cat. B repeated the same daily routine, ever since he started reading A's books. For the moment, B was oblivious to the details of his stiflingly boring schedule. On the contrary, B found the familiar list of activities he built around himself quite comfortable. He was almost happy about the monotony of eating, reading, drinking, and sleeping. Sometimes B found it hard to utter enough words to order his drinks at the bar, after not talking to anyone all day. This was not a big problem for B most of the time, as a regular at the bar he was immediately served a shot of Jack with a beer chaser as soon as he sat down at the bar. However, after the old lady bartender named Rosie died and a new bartender started working at the bar, he found it necessary to actually tell the bartender what he wanted to drink. But that's about the only thing he found undesirable. Eventually B stoped going to the bar altogether, partly because he was bothered by the memory of the silent bartender who passed away, partly because it became increasingly harder to say those few words to order his drinks. The act of actually speaking to someone at the bar was defeating the whole purpose of his visits to the bar.
Eventually, as he feared from the very beginning, B ran out of books to read. B has already read all of A's books several times, including A's cryptic translations of French poetry, and all of the essays printed as introductions to A's edited materials. B was desperate enough to read the back covers and sleeve-notes written by A's publishers over and over trying to decypher the person behind those short descriptions. Sometimes B spent hours just looking at A's pictures on the book covers. Indeed, B found that as much as A hated to be compared to K, he looked remarkably like K. A sort of distracted version of K, perhaps smoking too many cigarettes, but with just as many questions in his head. And perhaps without any of the answers K might have had in his deathbed.
What I have told you so far is a faithful reconstruction of what was described to me by B. It's unclear how much of his story is true although I believe that most of what he said is true. He also told me about what happened after he ran out of A's books to read but his account of what happened thereafter sounded less credible. B tended to be inconsistent in his telling of his story, espcially with small details. Instead of telling you, the reader, what B has verbally communicated over a drink many years ago, I find that it would be best to simply quote from his journals from that period of his life. For one thing, I believe that his journals show more detailed account of the events following his dry spell over A's books. Moreover, it was by force of chance that I discovered his journals buried under stacks of books he gave me as an exchange for writing this story. I am not certain why B wanted his story to be known to others. All I know is that he wanted someone to know about this part of his life. Perhaps B wanted me to make the journal available as part of the story after all, carefully planting it among the books. In any case, it seems only proper to tell his side of the story as written by him at the time of the event. A keen reader will recognize this as "a book inside another book", a much favored literary device, used often by A, as well as our Miguel Cervantes. However that is not my own intent. As B told me the part about reading Don Quixote, he seemed to suggest in his cryptic disguised way, that somehow the story he was telling was someone else's story, as if he was quoting from someone else's biography. Without further ado, as Cervantes refers Cide Hamete Benegeli for the History of Don Quixote del la Mancha, I will present B's writing in full account of his activities in pursuit of a missing book.
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From The Pages Of B's Journals
It is listed in many of A's books, that A has written a popular detective novel under a pseudonym. The number of times this information is repeated in various books of A's is irritating enough, yet curiously there is no mention of the said book's name, nor the pseudonym itself. I find this contemptible. I am angry that I can't just go out and get this book; I desperately need it to get away from having to read A's other books again. Yet I also realize that the whole thing could be one of A's tricks. It seems clear to me that A is quite interested in letting his readers know that he wrote a popular detective novel. It is stated as if to categorize his other books differently. Just what does that mean? A popular detective novel. As opposed to what? Real literature? In any case, while A wants his readers know this enticing trivia, he also seems to be taunting his readers to find out what it is on their own. A wants his readers, most of whom as bored with their lives as I am, to go out there and do some detective work to find out about this pseudonym, this mystery book. It occurs to me that A might have been less than careful with his pseudonym. Yes, that is very likely. If I were to be systematic in my search, I should be able to find out about this book in no time. I just need to ask the right questions to the right people. A must have spilled his guts about this pseudonym to some people, perhaps a celebrity interviewer, a pretty young literature student, or whoever he wants to impress. But as exciting as the prospect of prompt discovery is, I feel that it is the wrong way to go about solving this little puzzle. Yes, A wants a little game. I will play along. It all seems clear now. It is so typical of A. It's almost as if A is taunting me to search for this book, much like Cervantes supposedly had to search for the book written by the Arab author, to finally discover the real story of Don Quixote. I decided I will play this little literary detective game, if A so wishes. Or, perhaps, I do so knowing that I might be crazy. Crazy enough to do anything to feel alive.
What, then, is proper? I remember the lacerating beauty of one of A's characters in _Moon Palace_. Marco Fogg. Marco had strangely confiding qualities about him in his self destructiveness. His tendency to punish himself is different from other generic characters obsessed with self mutilation. There seemed to be no petty reason for his self-destructive tendencies; his suffering tended to be based on every day matters, yet it grows quickly into something much larger than that, something that is beyond his domain, terribly assertive, yet unreachable. No doubt I am easily influenced by this, especially by the way Marco goes about mourning his uncle's death. Marco's way of dealing with his loss was to read all of the books that were given to him by his uncle, one at a time. Given the staggering number of books, it takes him a while, during which time he lives on the little sum of money he gets from selling the books he's finished reading. Since he had been using the boxes of books arranged as if they were furniture in his apartment, as the books are read and eventually sold, the reading itself had concrete physical effect, as if parts of his life were slowing disintegrating in front of him. Is this what A had in mind? Does he actually think that the readers will be crazy enough to read random books endlessly to find out his pseudonym? I am not easily willing to do so, just to find out the pseudonym, but to find the mystery book, the content of which might contain something entirely different than A's other writings? That is all too tempting.
It took me a week to decide whether or not I should start on random readings in search of the mystery book. In the end, I was faced with a decision. I really didn't have a choice. It was decided when I first opened the first page of A's book. It was all a matter of following through this fateful path of my dealings with A. What will come out of this marriage is uncertain. But it's not as if I had chosen to do any of this in the first place. I will start with a simple strategy: binary search based on author's last name. Start with authors who are named with A, then Z, then B, then Y, etc. Since the book is supposedly a "pop" book, B starts with a number of chain bookstores: waldenbooks, crown books, etc. Not a very pleasant task, but someone has to do it.
How many cheap detective novels have you read? What of all the ones whose authors' last name start with A's? This is madness. There are so many of them. Many of them are just too poorly written to be A's. If one of them happens to be A's, it's just too bad. Perhaps this game was fixed to begin with. But I actually tried my best to read most of the books that are absolutely intolerable. There has to be a level of hell where the authors of these terrible books have to read their own books forever and pay for their sin. Nevertheless, I have to be careful. It would be just like A to choose a pseudonym that starts with A. Maybe it's even very similar to A's real name. Then a horrible thought. Perhaps the book doesn't exist at all? What if I manage to read all these detective novels and never find the mystery book written by A? What if it's all some cruel joke? No, I need to slow down, take a deep breath and continue my search. It will take a long time. It started already, it has to be carried out. Until the end.
After almost three months of reckless reading, I had to give up on the A-list of books. I've read all that I could find. All those that are still in print. All those that are still being sold in popular bookshops. Some of them come close to A's style, but none of them are very convincing. I have logged all the worthy candidates in my red notebook. Sometime later I will go back and examine them again. There aren't that many books whose authors have the Z-starting names. And none of them are even close to what I consider as a possible candidate. I wonder if I'm going about this the wrong way. Perhaps I should have started with all Jewish sounding names. Or perhaps I should visit the entire A-list again. Perhaps I missed the book already. I give up on Z. It seems unlikely that even A would be so cruel as to pick a name that starts with Z.
It's winter. my warehouse is cold; the slumlord refuses to install a gas heater in the unit, even though I always pay my rent on time. Pretty soon I will run out of his savings, and after that, I'll either have to stop reading books and go back to work, or get kicked out of my warehouse. It won't make a whole a lot of difference if he's evicted. Inside of my warehouse is just as cold as outside. The freezing northern california winter rain seeps through the ceiling, walls, and windows of B's warehouse. It's much like being outdoors. Except there is even less light. When I'm not reading in bookstores or libraries, I'm at home either drinking or watching the walls, or both. I spend a lot of time examining the rain drops that make a sort of invisible link between the ceiling and the floor momentarily, periodically. Short in time, long in the fall. Much like the circle of life we waste our time in. When it gets too cold to stay still, I go to the bookstores to warm my bones, and to read. This continues for a while.
One cold evening, I visit a Waldenbooks chainstore. And randomly I pick out a book from the stacks. And just like that, so incredibly random was the discovery of this book. The book had the familar colorful visuals on the cover, with all the tacky trimmings to fit the genre. But the name of the author! Somehow it sounds familiar. It could be the first name, which happens to be the same as A's. But A's first name is common enough biblical name. Yet, even after so many books, so many sleepless nights of reading similar books, I am strangely taken by this book. Something impossible to explain, something less than touchable, yet so familiar. The same feeling B remembers from the dusty first book he discovered by chance. Perhaps the same sensation Cervantes must have felt when he found ancient parchments containing the story of Don Quixote del la Mencha purely by chance.
The book is instantly devoured. And as I quickly scan the words on the last page, I am convinced that I've found the book. Somehow it feels empty. True, it's wasn't exactly an easy thing to accomplish. Yet somehow I feel as though all of my work during the search to find this book was somehow cheapened by the experience. The sheer randomness of the event is almost degrading. Instead of joy, I am temporarily overwhelmed by disgust. I step out of the bookstore, light up a cigarette, inhale a long breath of fresh smoke. As I watche the smoke rising and dissipating, in ghostly forms, my whole body feels weightless, floating with the cloud. Dizzy. I feel temporary blackout of vision.
After the initial reaction of disgust, I sat down to verify my findings. I carefully catalogued a list of clues as I reviewed the book. By now, I have collected a list of familiar artifacts, a kind of recurring fixtures and props in A's books. First, the baseball. A's obsession with baseball is repeated in A's other books. Then there is the Saab purchased with the money left by his father, the failed marriage which still seems to sting A at times, and the struggle of nurturing a young son who resembles Stephane Mallarme's son. The New York City, in which all of A's earlier novels were situated. The Columbia University affliation, and the University libraries. Paris, the city of A's youthful adventures. The list goes on and on. More important than all of these amazing list of elements that are typical of early writings by A are the undeniable style in which A writes his prose. It seemed as though A was trying to write in the pop style: more direct, raw, perhaps intentionally less artistic. Yet, A's voice comes through despite his efforts, in the way that cannot be mistaken. Each word, each sentence, each twist and turns and each incident follows another in a complicated web of relations. One might say typically A. Typically outrageous. Yet compelling. Such audacity. Huge balls.
Who else would write a story like this? I check a few other facts. This book was apparently written around 1978, which would make it A's first full length novel. Before City Of Glass. Even before Invention Of Solitude. It makes sense that A would have experimented with a full length detective novel before the new york trilogy. It's almost as though he was testing out lines in a sketch before getting dirty with paints. Or perhaps the necessity of financial nature dictated the outcome of this novel in a way? A is known to have been quite penniless back then. Still the book is far from a hack job. A may not readily admit the authorship of this book, but it's doubtful that he would be ashamed of it. Regardless of all this, one thing is clear, if A were to write a book such as this, he would have written it about at the time this book was written. There really is no doubt about it. Did the writer of this book write another detective novel? After all, this book is rather well received, having been in print for a number of years. It might even qualify as a big seller. A popular writer of this sort of book would likely have written more books in the same genre. Yet this is the only book written by him. Just as expected. My red notebook is by now filled with a list. All of which point towards the final truth of discovery, which may never be confirmed but finally at rest at least as far as I'm concerned.
A Place Of Ripeness
I have come so far for you,
The voice
That echoes back to me
Is no longer my own.
-- Paul Auster, Fire Speech
This is how B's journal ends.
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The Web Of Things
It is hard to finish a story like this. What else have I left to say? All of this seems so long ago, so many years ago. The nearness of this in my memory is what keeps me from remembering it so much. Yet, I do remember. As much as I remember the haunting words at the end of B's journal. It is true that I experienced certain perverse pleasure reading B's search for the other name of A. The kind one might expect from depression or grief, but ultimately that of affirmation and hope underscored by the darkness inherent in our travels of life. But that was all in the past. The truth is, I have not thought much about the whole affair for a long time. Then, out of the blue, as A would say, I found a web page dedicated to A, called Stillman's Maze, Stillman here obviously being one of A's characters in his trilogy. Then I found out that the author of this page was recently in communication with A himself in which A casually revealed the name of the mystery book and his pseudonym as if it was no real secret. As most people have seen A's recent movie in which the name is just as carelessly given away, none of this is a mystery anymore. For B, it seems that it was the experience that counted. My thoughts are with B, in his cold warehouse, and that winter which lasted until the next spring when things finally settled down into their own reserved places.
It seems that no matter how hard the answer might be to obtain, there are many different ways of getting to it. And the harder your way of getting to the truth, perhaps the less it matters in the end. Truth remains neutral; it does not care. Yet, the truth can only be revealed when the time is ripe. When one's own place has been reached, in due time. When a voice from the past echoes back to you with a whisper reminding you of the past. Reminding you of your own story left behind you, your long forgotten nights of anguish, moments of despair, and days of discovery. Your dark rooms filled with silence, all the faces you have forgotten one by one, and all the places you have left never to return. All that is no more and is past.
Is life then too painful to remember? Perhaps. A's words are still echoing in my head.
"It was. It will never be again. Remember. Remember."