7. Kansas City was an arbitrary choice for Bowen’s destination – the first place that popped into my head. Possibly because it was so remote from New York, a town locked in the center of the heartland: Oz in all its glorious strangeness. Once I had Nick on his way to Kansas City, however, I remembered the Hyatt Regency catastrophe, which was a real event that had taken place fourteen months earlier (in July 1981). Close to two thousand people had been gathered in the lobby at the time – an immense open-air atrium of some seventeen thousand square feet. They were all looking up, watching a dance contest that was being held in one of the upstairs walkways (also referred to as ‘floating walkways’ or ‘skyways’), when the wide flange beams supporting the structure broke loose from their moorings and collapsed, crashing down into the lobby four stories below. Twenty-one years later, it is still considered one of the worst hotel disasters in American history.
8. The Lid Lifts by Patrick Gordon-Walker (London, 1945). More recently, the same story was retold by Douglas Botting in From the Ruins of the Reich: Germany 1945–1949 (New York: Crown Publishers, 1985), p. 43.
Just for the record, I should also mention that I happen to own a copy of a 1937/38 Warsaw telephone book. It was given to me by a journalist friend who went to Poland to cover the Solidarity movement in 1981. He apparently found it in a flea market somewhere, and knowing that my paternal grandparents had both been born in Warsaw, he gave it to me as a present after he returned to New York. I called it my book of ghosts. At the bottom of page 220, I found a married couple whose address was given as Wejnerta 19 – Janina and Stefan Orlowscy. That was the Polish spelling of my family’s name, and although I wasn’t sure if these people were related to me or not, I felt there was a good chance that they were.
9. Four years earlier, I had adapted one of the stories from my first book, Tabula Rasa, for a young director named Vincent Frank. It was a small, low-budget film about a musician who recovers from a long illness and slowly puts his life together again (a prophetic story, as it turned out), and when the film was released in June 1980, it did fairly well. Tabula Rasa played in just a few art houses around the country, but it was perceived as a critical success, and – as Mary was fond of reminding me – it helped bring my name to the attention of a so-called wider public. Sales of my books began to improve somewhat, it’s true, and when I turned in my next novel nine months later, A Short Dictionary of Human Emotions, she negotiated a contract with Holst & McDermott worth twice the amount I’d been given for my previous book. That advance, along with the modest sum I’d earned from the screenplay, allowed me to quit my high school teaching job, which had been my bread-and-butter work for the past seven years. Until then, I had been one of those obscure and driven writers who wrote between five and seven in the morning, who wrote at night and on weekends, who never went anywhere on his summer vacation in order to sit at home in a sweltering Brooklyn apartment and make up for lost time. Now, a year and a half after my marriage to Grace, I found myself in the luxurious position of being an independent, self-employed scribbler. We were hardly what could be called well off, but if I continued to produce work at a steady pace, our combined incomes would keep us floating along with our heads above water. Following the release of Tabula Rasa, a few offers came in to write more films, but the projects hadn’t interested me, and I’d turned them down to push on with my novel. When Holst & McDermott brought out the book in February 1982, however, I wasn’t aware that it had been published. I had already been in the hospital for five weeks by then, and I wasn’t aware of anything – not even that the doctors thought I would be dead within a matter of days.
Tabula Rasa had been a union production, and in order to be given credit for my screenplay I had been obliged to join the Writers Guild. Membership entailed sending in quarterly dues and turning over a small percentage of your earnings to them, but among the things they gave you in return was a decent health insurance policy. If not for that insurance, my illness would have landed me in debtor’s prison. Most of the costs were covered, but as with all medical plans, there were countless other issues to be reckoned with: deductibles, extra charges for experimental treatments, arcane percentages and sliding-scale calculations for various medicines and disposable implements, a staggering range of bills that had put me in the hole to the tune of thirty-six thousand dollars. That was the burden Grace and I had been saddled with, and the more my strength returned, the more I worried about how to get us out from under this debt. Grace’s father had offered to help, but the judge wasn’t a rich man, and with Grace’s two younger sisters still in college, we couldn’t bring ourselves to accept. Instead, we sent in a small amount every month, trying to chip away at the mountain slowly, but at the rate we were going, we would still be at it when we were senior citizens. Grace worked in publishing, which meant her salary was meager at best, and I had earned nothing now for close to a year. A few microscopic royalties and foreign advances, but that was the extent of it. That explains why I returned Mary’s call immediately after I listened to her message. I hadn’t given any thought to writing more screenplays, but if the price was right for this one, I had no intention of turning down the job.
10. I hadn’t made any serious progress, but I understood that I could improve Bowen’s condition somewhat without having to alter the central thrust of the narrative. The overhead light has burned out, but it no longer seemed necessary to keep Nick in total darkness. There could be other sources of illumination in Ed’s well-equipped fallout shelter. Matches and candles, for instance, a flashlight, a table lamp – something to prevent Nick from feeling he’s been buried alive. That would push any man over the edge of sanity, and the last thing I wanted was to turn Bowen’s predicament into a study of terror and madness. I had left Hammett behind, but that didn’t mean I intended to replace the Flitcraft story with a new version of ‘The Premature Burial.’ Give Nick light, then, and allow him a shred of hope. And even after the matches and candles have been used up, even after the batteries in the flashlight have lost their power, he can open the refrigerator door and cast some light into the room with the small bulb that burns inside the white enameled box.
More significant, there was the question of Grace’s dream. Listening to her talk that morning, I had been too shaken by the resemblances to the story I was writing to grasp how many differences there were as well. Her room was a sanctuary to be shared by two people, a small erotic paradise. My room was a bleak cell, inhabited by one man, whose only ambition is to escape. But what if I managed to get Rosa Leightman in there with him? Nick has already fallen for her, and if they’re trapped in the room together for any length of time, perhaps she would begin to reciprocate his feelings. Rosa was the physical and spiritual double of Grace, and therefore she would have the same sexual appetites as Grace – the same recklessness, the same lack of inhibition. Nick and Rosa could spend their time together reading passages out loud from Oracle Night, baring their souls to each other, making love. As long as there was enough food to sustain them, why would they ever want to leave?
That was the little fantasy I carried around with me through the streets of the Village. Even as I played it out in my mind, however, I knew it was deeply flawed. Grace had aroused me with her erotic dream, but in spite of the temptations it seemed to offer, it was just another dead end. If Rosa can get into the room, then Nick can get out, and once that opportunity is presented to him, he wouldn’t hesitate to leave. But the point is that he can’t leave. I had given him some light, but he was still locked inside that grim chamber, and without the proper tools to dig his way out, he was eventually going to die in there.
11. When Chang told this story to me twenty years ago, I was certain he was telling the truth. There was too much conviction in his voice for me to doubt his sincerity. Several months ago, however, while preparing for another project, I read a number of works on China during the period of the Cultural Revolution. In one of them, I came across an account of the same incident by Liu Yan, who was a s
tudent at the Beijing Number Eleven Middle School at the time of the book burning and witnessed the event. No teacher named Chang is mentioned. A female language teacher is referred to, Yu Changjiang, who broke down and wept at the sight of the burning books. ‘Her tears provoked the Red Guards to give her a few extra lashes, and the belts left ugly scars on her skin.’ (China’s Cultural Revolution, 1966–1969, edited by Michael Schoenhals; Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1996.)
I’m not saying this proves Chang was lying to me, but it does cast some suspicion over his story. Possibly, there were two teachers who wept, and Liu Yan didn’t notice the other one. But it should be pointed out that the book burning was a highly publicized event in Beijing at the time and, in Liu Yan’s words, ‘caused a major stir all over the city.’ Chang would have known about it, even if his father hadn’t been there. Perhaps he told this infamous story in order to impress me. I can’t say. On the other hand, his version was extremely vivid – more vivid than most secondhand accounts – which leads me to wonder if Chang wasn’t present at the book burning himself. And if he was, that must have meant he’d been there as a member of the Red Guard. Otherwise, he would have told me that he’d been a student at the school – which he never did. It is even possible (this is pure speculation) that he himself was the person who lashed the weeping teacher.
12. Grace had been a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, off on a junior-year-abroad program in Paris. Trause was the one who had written to her about van Velde, whom he had met once or twice in the fifties and who was known, he said, to be Samuel Beckett’s favorite artist. (He included Beckett’s dialogue with Georges Duthuit about van Velde in his letter. My case is that van Velde is … the first to admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world.) Van Velde’s paintings were rare and expensive, but his graphic works from the sixties and early seventies were quite affordable at the time, and Grace had bought the piece in installments with her own money, skimping on food and other necessities in order to stay within the allowance sent each month by her father. The lithograph was an important part of her youth, an emblem of her growing passion for art as well as a sign of independence – a bridge between the last days of her girlhood and her first days as an adult – and it meant more to her than any other object she owned.
13. The conversation ended with my agreeing to visit Jacob – alone. I was willing to do John that small service, but I was appalled by what he’d said about the boy’s animosity toward Grace. Even if there was some cause for envy on his part (the neglected son cast off in favor of the beloved ‘goddaughter’), I felt no sympathy for him – only disgust and contempt. I would go to the clinic for his father’s sake, but I wasn’t looking forward to the time I would have to spend in his company.
As far as I could remember, I had met him only twice before. Knowing nothing about his history with Grace, it had never occurred to me to question why she hadn’t been with us on those occasions. The first was a Friday-night outing to Shea Stadium to see a game between the Mets and the Cincinnati Reds. Trause had been given tickets by someone who owned a season box, and because he knew I was a fan, he’d invited me to go along with him. That was in May 1979, just a few months after I’d fallen in love with Grace, and John and I had met for the first time only a couple of weeks earlier. Jacob was about to turn seventeen then, and he and one of his classmates rounded out the foursome. From the moment we entered the stadium, it was clear that neither boy had any interest in baseball. They sat through the first three innings with bored and sullen expressions on their faces, and then they stood up and left, supposedly to buy some hot dogs and ‘wander around for a while,’ as Jacob put it. They didn’t return until the bottom of the seventh – giggling, glassy-eyed, and in far better spirits than before. It wasn’t difficult to guess what they’d been up to. I was still teaching then, and I’d seen enough kids high on pot to recognize the symptoms. John was wrapped up in the game and seemed not to notice, and I didn’t bother to mention it to him. I scarcely knew him at the time, and I figured that what happened between him and his son was none of my business. Beyond saying hello and good-bye to each other, I don’t think Jacob and I exchanged more than eight or ten words the whole night.
The next time I saw him was about six months later. He was in the middle of his senior year and in danger of flunking all his courses, and John had called up with a last-minute invitation to spend an evening shooting pool. He and Jacob were barely on speaking terms then, and I think he wanted me to come along to serve as a buffer, a neutral third party to prevent war from breaking out between them in a public place. That was the night Jacob and I talked about the Bean Spasms and I acquired my reputation as a cool person. He struck me as an exceedingly bright and hostile kid, determined to screw up his life in every way he could. If I detected any shadow of hope, it was in his determination to beat his father at pool. I was a lousy player and quickly fell behind in every game, but John knew what he was doing, and somewhere along the line he must have taught his son how to play. It brought out the competitiveness in both of them, and the mere fact that Jacob was concentrating on something struck me as an encouraging sign. I didn’t know then that John had been an expert pool hustler in the army. If he’d wanted to, he could have run the table and wiped Jacob out, but he didn’t do that. He pretended to be trying, and in the end he let the boy win. Under the circumstances, it was probably the right thing to do. Not that it did them any good in the long run, but at least Jacob cracked a smile when they finished and walked over to his father and shook his hand. For all I knew, it could have been the last time that ever happened.
Author biography
Paul Auster was born in New Jersey in 1947. After attending Columbia University he lived in France for four years. Since 1974 he has published poems, essays, novels, screenplays, and translations. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Also by Paul Auster
Novels:
THE NEW YORK TRILOGY
IN THE COUNTRY OF LAST THINGS
MOON PALACE
THE MUSIC OF CHANCE
LEVIATHAN
MR VERTIGO
TIMBUKTU
THE BOOK OF ILLUSIONS
Non-fiction:
THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE
THE ART OF HUNGER
HAND TO MOUTH
COLLECTED PROSE
Screenplays:
SMOKE & BLUE IN THE FACE
LULU ON THE BRIDGE
Poetry:
SELECTED POEMS
Editor:
TRUE TALES OF AMERICAN LIFE
Translation:
CHRONICLE OF THE GUAYAKI INDIANS
by Pierre Clastres
Copyright
First published in the United Kingdom in 2004
by Faber and Faber Limited
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2008
All rights reserved
© Paul Auster, 2003
The right of Paul Auster to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
ISBN 978–0–571–24616–8 (epub edition)
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
I had been sick for a long time.
Author biography
Also by Paul Auster
Copyright
Table of
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
I had been sick for a long time.
Author biography
Also by Paul Auster
Copyright
Paul Auster, Oracle Night
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