Paul Auster died on May Day 2024 at 77 of lung cancer. He is famous for his novels, The Invention of Solitude (1982), City of Glass (1985) that is part of The New York Trilogy, and 4 3 2 1 (2017), among others. The New York Times obituary mentions in passing that Auster wrote poems, and The Guardian does not even mention his poetry. A major reason behind it is probably that Auster published poetry till the end of the 1970s, when he was in his 30s, and abruptly stopped thereafter. He perhaps felt he had explored the contours of what he sought to express in poetry and wished to concentrate on prose.
I have not read Auster’s prose. So I shall limit this obituary to his special poetry.
I bought his Collected Poems (Faber and Faber, 2004) at the International Book Fair in Delhi two years ago from a secondhand books dealer at less than half the price. There is a strange literary guilt in buying a good edition of a famous writer’s work cheaply. The guilt lies in the pleasure. You feel lucky to have cheated the capitalist standard of exchange and the market value of its product, but there is a gnawing feeling you have lowered the status of the book.
A French poet in English
An American Jew brought up by Austrian immigrant parents, Auster graduated from Columbia University. In 1970, he moved to Paris for four years. It left a formidable, lifelong impact on his writing. The French poets he translated into English – Stéphane Mallarmé, André Breton and Paul Éluard among others – had an abiding influence on his own poetry.
It is accurate to call Auster a French poet in English. Reading his poems, it is not difficult to notice that Auster has a striking similarity with his namesake, Paul Celan. He is a philosophical poet like Celan, where the acute nature of existential pain and urgency you find in Celan is replaced by a poignant reflection of a self that is withdrawn and unsure of one’s place in the world. This reflects the postwar Jewish migrant condition of the 1950s and 60s. Auster’s poems also echo the other anxiety of the migrant poet: the desire to connect with his roots and community.
Let me begin with the collection, Unearth (written between 1970 and 1972). Poem “13” reads:
“Other of I: or sibling
axe of shadows, born bright
where fear is darkest– I breathe
to become your whetstone.”
Auster is not the estranged, but intimate self who extends his fraternal warmth to those who suffered being Jew. Poetry is an act of breathing, an effort that brings words into the world, onto the page. Celan in his 1960 speech receiving the Büchner Prize called poetry “an Atemwende, a turning of our breath”. Hard and polished, the stone of Auster’s poems becomes the body where he wants his fraternal other to sharpen its pain. It is not just in the words that you share your pain of the other with the other, but also in the silence behind those words. In the poem, “Shadow to Shadow” from his next collection, Wall Writing (1970-1975), Auster writes,
“Against a façade of evening:
shadows, fire, and silence.
Not even silence, but its fire –
the shadow
cast by a breath”
To reach out to the other’s pain is not to reach out to a body but a shadow, and the act of poetry is becoming shadow to reach another. Only the poem, its language, has a body. The poet writing it is the shadow over the page. This passing of words from one to another occurs in the silence of the breath. To breathe words is an act of becoming other, where you release the air within you that is heavy with the other’s pain. Becoming is an invisible transformation of breath.
In the poem, “White Nights” from the same collection, Auster writes:
“I am no longer here. I have never said
what you say
I have said. And yet, the body is a place
where nothing dies. And each night,
from the silence of trees, you know
that my voice
comes walking toward you.”
Auster seems to suggest, he has withdrawn from the meanings of his old poems. He has left for another time, leaving his poems behind. He wants to relegate his older poems to anonymity, un-claiming the association between poem and poet. Yet, Auster resgisters the fact, the pain that resides and lingers in the body (and the body of the poem) remains. The pain remains in the poem as voice – what else is a poem, but voice? – and the voice seeks the other. Replace “poem” with “voice” and read Celan saying in his 1960 speech, “The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route.” The poem, for Auster, is that anonymous place the poet leaves behind that reminds you of the only thing that is not dead, what outlasts the poet.
In the poem, “Interior’, Auster writes,
“Night repeats. A voice that speaks to me
only of smallest things.
Not even things – but their names.
And where no names are–
of stones.”
A night voice
Auster’s poetic voice is night-voice. His poems are night-poems. When all has been destroyed (by denunciation, hatred, humiliation and war) it is most urgent to recover the “smallest things”. The smallest things are all that escapes, all that remains, because they are hidden by deep interiority. Often, those things are simply names, names of others, names of things that are not simply things. Naming is an act of recovery against violent erasure. And where even names don’t exist, stones alone stand as spectators of the past. The heart of the poem is heavy like a burial ground.
Auster’s poem “White” is in Celan’s memory:
“For one who drowned
this page, as if
thrown out at sea
in a bottle.”
The poem is sunk in the grief of Celan’s suicide, drowning himself in the Seine by jumping from the Mirabeau on April 20, 1970. It evokes the “bottle” that Celan picked up from Osip Mandelstam’s 1913 essay, “On the Interlocutor” (“The letter sealed in the bottle is addressed to the one who finds it.”) and changed the letter into a poem: “A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the – not always greatly hopeful –belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land...” Auster’s poem is written like a poignant echo– “an echo / of the earth / might sail towards him, / filled with a memory of rain”– that travels through mountain and sea, to become the unfulfilled promise of a “dove” that did not return after “forty days / and forty nights”. The bottle with the message is still out at sea, undelivered. Auster probably suggests a no-place for his poetry, where the only hope for the migrant soul is the promise of return. But return to a memory without place.
In the collection, Effigies (1976), Auster dedicates a poem titled “Siberian” to the memory of Mandelstam:
“Shadow, carted off my wolves
and quartered, half a life beyond
each barb of the wire, now I see you,
magnetic
polar felon, now I begin
to speak to you
of the wild boar…”
Auster refers to Mandelstam’s deportation to the Siberian camps by Stalin for writing the famous poem, “The Stalin Epigram” (1933). The poem evokes zoological metaphors for Stalin and his henchmen who imprisoned Mandelstam to turn his life into shadow, and cut his winged spirit. Auster’s poetry is full of allusions to prewar and postwar Europe. He discovers his Jewishness as an American other. It explains the poetic dislocation his self undergoes in his encounter with Europe.
Finally, I pause over his poem, “Clandestine”, from the same collection:
“Remember with me today – the word
and counter-word
of witness: the tactile dawn, emerging
from my clenched hand: sun’s
ciliary grasp: the stretch of darkness
I wrote
on the table of sleep.”
Paul Aster, the Jew
Auster writes about his Jewish predecessors from Europe and registers their witnessing of history’s cruelties. What does Auster witness apart from witnessing the past on the pages of grief?
In a recent article, James Folta reminded us of Auster’s documented participation in the 1968 anti-Vietnam war protests at Columbia University. In an opinion piece on April 23, 2008, for The New York Times, Auster recollects the days of 1968 when he turned 21 years old. It was a year when, he writes, “half a million American soldiers in Vietnam, Martin Luther King had just been assassinated, cities were burning across America, and the world seemed headed for an apocalyptic breakdown.”
Times overlap as Columbia University students are currently facing the force of both state police and university administration in their protests against America’s unethical complicity in aiding Israel in its war on Gaza. To be sure, Auster is moved by the political moment, not as a political ideologue: “I see myself as a quiet, bookish young man, struggling to teach myself how to become a writer, immersed in my courses in literature and philosophy at Columbia.” Un-ideologically political, Auster is the strange other amidst the protestors. What leads him to join the demonstrations speaks of his poetic passion for justice: “I went because I was crazy, crazy with the poison of Vietnam in my lungs”.
It is interesting Auster mentions “lungs”, which are the source of breathing and words, where he also discovers poetry as Atemwende. From inhaling the poison of Nazism reading the poets and writers of Europe to inhaling the poison of America’s war against Vietnam in real time, Auster can finally claim his own uncertain place in history and stand up for himself as a witness. The act of witnessing is to name the “counter-word”, Auster writes in “Clandestine”, where the “clenched hand” too is a word-as-gesture, a language that challenges the darkness of time. In his assessment of the anti-war protests at Columbia, Auster writes: “You can’t change government policy by attacking a private institution… We at Columbia were powerless, and our little revolution was no more than a symbolic gesture. But symbolic gestures are not empty gestures, and given the nature of those times, we did what we could.”
All vulnerable gestures in history, be it the clenched hand or the luminosity of words breathe in the sphere of the symbolic. A poem, like a gesture of protest, remains an unforgettable moment in time. It is enough reason for such gestures to exist as reminders against power.
