Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) (9 page)

What does a phenomenon like this mean: a more or less intelligent person like myself living in an age of easy travel, who as he nears the end of his life must recognize that his manifold experience of the visible world adds up to nothing worth retelling, that he might as well have spent his life in a library?

Or is it perhaps that I have been picking up the wrong sort of signs—that the only signs I see, because of my idiosyncratic blindness, are signs that tell me that life is the same everywhere in the world, rather than signs of the distinctiveness of every tiny part of creation?

If the born travel writer is preternaturally alert to signs of difference, am I the born anti–travel writer, alert only to signs of the same?

The whole business puzzles me. I say to myself,
You have just come back from a visit to the United States, what were your impressions?
And again and again, blocking out every other image, comes a memory of a young man in nondescript clothing riding a battered old bicycle, nonchalantly, in the wrong direction, against the traffic, in a Manhattan street. What does it mean, this solitary, overriding image? Why, when I say to myself
Give your
impressions
or
Summon up your
images
, is this the only image that comes back? Is there some absurd faculty inside me trying to tell me the young man riding the wrong way says something about America in 2009?

I travel but don’t write travel books. Nor do you; or perhaps you do, but publish them under a pseudonym: Peter Westermann, Nicole Brebis. Do you have first impressions that you trust? I don’t trust mine in the slightest.

Yours ever,

John

August 24, 2009

Dear Paul,

I have been thinking about names, about their fittingness or unfittingness. I would guess that names interest you too, if only because of having to find good, “right” names for your imaginary persons. Neither of us seems to go in for calling characters A or B or Pim or Bom.

I was brought up within the linguistic orthodoxy that the signifier is arbitrary, though for mysterious reasons the signifiers of one language won’t work as signifiers in another language (
Help me, I am dying of thirst!
will get you nowhere in Mongolia). This is supposed to be doubly true of proper names: whether a street is named Marigold Street or Mandragora Street or indeed Fifty-fifth Street is supposed to make no difference (no practical difference).

In the realm of poetry (in the widest sense) the doctrine of the arbitrariness of the signifier has never won much credence. In poetry the connotations of words—the accumulations of cultural significance around them—matter. “Mandragora,” via Keats, calls up bliss and death. “Fifty-fifth Street,” which at first sight seems anonymous, turns out to connote anonymity.

Through a supreme act of poetic power, Franz Kafka has given a letter of the alphabet allusive (connotative) force. Roberto Calasso’s recent book is called simply
K.
We look at the jacket and we know what it will be about.

I once called a character K (Michael K) as a stroke to reclaim the letter of the alphabet that Kafka had annexed, but didn’t have much success.

Few of us write novels, but most of us, one way or another, end up producing offspring, and are then compelled by law to give our offspring names. There are parents who accept this duty with joy, and parents who accept it with misgiving. There are parents who feel free to make up a name as they choose, and parents constrained (by law, by custom, by anxiety) to choose a name from a list.

Parents with misgivings try to give the child a neutral name, a name without connotations, a name that will not embarrass it in later life. Thus: Enid.

But there is a catch. Name too many daughters Enid, and the name Enid comes to signify the kind of child whose parents reacted with misgiving to the duty of naming a child and thus gave their girl-child as anonymous a name as they could. So “Enid” becomes a kind of fatality awaiting the child as she grows up: diffidence, caution, reserve.

Or someone far away, someone you have never heard of, disgraces your name. You grow up in the Midwest of the United States, and everything is fine until one day someone asks you, “Are you by any chance related to Adolf Hitler?” and you have to change your name by deed poll to Hilter or Hiller or Smith.

Your name is your destiny. Oidipous, Swollen-foot. The only trouble is, your name speaks your destiny only in the way the Delphic Sibyl does: in the form of a riddle. Only as you lie on your deathbed do you realize what it meant to be “Tamerlane” or “John Smith” or “K.” A Borgesian revelation.

All the best,

John

August 29, 2009

Dear John,

First, allow me to pounce on Fifty-fifth Street—which “turns out to connote anonymity.” For the sake of argument, let us assume that the Fifty-fifth Street in question happens to be located in New York, the borough of Manhattan to be precise, east side or west side not indicated, but Midtown Manhattan for all that, and then anyone who lives in this city will be able to conjure up vivid mental pictures and a flood of personal memories about that street whose name is not a word but an anonymous number. You write “Fifty-fifth Street,” and I immediately think about the St. Regis Hotel and an erotic encounter I had there when I was young, about taking the French writer Edmond Jabès and his wife there for tea one afternoon and seeing Arthur Ashe enter the room in his tennis whites, about lunching there with Vanessa Redgrave and discussing the role she was about to play in my film,
Lulu on the Bridge
. The numbers tell stories, and behind the blank wall of their anonymity they are just as alive and evocative as the Elysian Fields of Paris. Mention to a New Yorker the following streets, and his mind will swarm with images: 4th Street (Greenwich Village), 14th Street (the cheapest stores in the city), 34th Street (Herald Square, Macy’s, illuminated Christmas decorations), 42nd Street (Times Square, “legitimate” theaters, Give my regards to Broadway), 59th Street (the Plaza Hotel and the grand entrance to Central Park), 125th Street (Harlem, the Apollo Theater, Duke Ellington’s song about the A train). Just two blocks up from 55th Street, on West 57th, there is the building in which my grandfather used to have his office (intense childhood memories of going in there and being allowed to play with the typewriters and adding machines), which happens to be the same building that for many years housed the
New York Review of Books
(intense memories from early adulthood of sitting with Bob Silvers as we discussed the pieces I had written for him)—so that the mere mention of 57th Street will summon forth for me an entire archeology of my past, memories layered on top of other memories, the primordial dig.

And yet, as you say, the signifier is arbitrary, and until or unless that signifier is filled up with personal associations, it will remain indistinguishable from any other signifier. Just the other day, when Siri and I returned from Nantucket (that is, before I had read your letter), the taxi driver from the airport took a shortcut through a Brooklyn neighborhood I was not familiar with, and as we rode down Ocean Parkway, we traversed twenty-six consecutive cross streets named after the letters of the alphabet, from Avenue A to Avenue Z, and I remember thinking that none of this meant anything to me, that unlike the Avenue A in Manhattan (the East Village), which I know and therefore have a personal connection to, the Avenue A in Brooklyn is a complete cipher. I found myself pondering how boring it would be to live on a street named Avenue E or Avenue L. On the other hand, I also thought: Avenue K wouldn’t be bad (for all the reasons you mention), and other interesting or tolerable letters would be O, X, and Z—the nothing, the unknown, and the end. Then I walked into the house, which is also on a street designated by a number, and read your fax about K and 55th Street. Perfect timing.

The first book published by George Oppen, the American poet I am so fond of, was called
Discrete Series
(circa 1930)—a mathematical term, as I’m sure you know, and the example Oppen always gave to describe a discrete series was this: 4, 14, 23, 34, 42, 59, 66, 72. . . . At first glance, a meaningless collection of numbers, but when you learn that those numbers are in fact the station stops along the IRT subway line in Manhattan, they take on the force of lived experience. Arbitrary, yes, but at the same time not meaningless.

Many years ago, when I wrote my little novel
Ghosts
, I gave all the characters the names of colors: Black, White, Green, Blue, Brown, etc. Yes, I wanted to give the story an abstract, fable-like quality, but at the same time I was also thinking about the irreducibility of colors, that the only way we can know and understand what colors are is to experience them, that to describe “blue” or “green” to a blind man is something beyond the power of language, and that just as colors are irreducible and indescribable, so too are people, and we can never know or understand anything about a person until we “experience” that person, in the same way we can be said to experience colors.

We grow into the names we are given, we test them out, we grapple with them until we come to accept that we are the names we bear. Can you remember practicing your signature as a young boy? Not long after we learn how to write in longhand, most children spend hours filling up pieces of paper with their names. It is not an empty pursuit. It is an attempt, I feel, to convince ourselves that we and our names are one, to take on an identity in the eyes of the world.

In some cultures, people are given new names after reaching puberty, at times even a third name after committing a great or ignominious deed in adulthood.

Some people, of course, are saddled with atrocious names, comical names, deeply unfortunate names. The most pathetic one I have ever run across belonged to a man who married a distant relative: Elmer Deutlebaum. Imagine walking through life as Elmer Deutlebaum.

My Canadian-born grandfather, the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants, out of some incomprehensible loyalty to the British crown, named my mother Queenie. It took her many years to grow into that one. When she was eight or nine, after years of teasing from her classmates, she decided to change it to Estelle. Not as bland as Enid, perhaps, but hardly an improvement. The experiment lasted for approximately six months.

Not to be forgotten in all this is our common ancestor, Adam. According to the Old Testament, God gave Adam the task of giving names to all things animate and inanimate. As interpreted by Milton in
Paradise Lost
, Adam—in his innocence, in the state of grace he lived in before he came to know good and evil and was expelled from the Garden—is able to reveal the essences of each thing or creature he names, to reveal the truth of the world through language. After the fall, words were severed from things, and language became a collection of arbitrary signs—no longer connected to God or a universal truth.

Needless to say, I have spent my whole life exploring and meditating on my own name, and my great hope is to be reborn as an American Indian. Paul: Latin for small, little. Auster: Latin for South Wind. South Wind: an old American euphemism for a rectal toot. I therefore shall return to this world bearing the proud and altogether appropriate name of Little Fart.

Write again soon.

Yours ever,

Paul

September 13, 2009

Dear John,

Just back from Ireland (yesterday) and the immense relief to have the “Beckett Address” behind me. A dinner with Edward Beckett, the nephew and executor, born 1943, a professional flautist and former music teacher, ensconced in London for many years, a shy, pleasant man, unsophisticated in literary matters, well meaning, earnest, more attached to his uncle as uncle than as literary hero. He was happy with my talk, said so several times, and that, finally, was all I was hoping to achieve: not to fall on my face in front of him and the other 500 people in the room. Gripped the podium tightly, my knees locked out of tension during the 50-minute discourse, and by the time I left the stage, my legs were so stiff I could barely move and nearly did—literally—fall on my face.

They plan to do this every year. I suggested you for the next one, and the organizers were enthusiastic. Perhaps you will hear from them in the coming months. It’s your call, of course, whether to accept or not, but if you do accept, rest assured that you will be treated well.

While there, we learned that you are up for the Booker Prize. Fingers crossed on your behalf—and felicitations.

And then, this anguishing dilemma. We have been invited to a screening of
Disgrace
on the 17th—a film I am eager to see, in spite of your reservations—but it turns out that we have a conflict. A prior commitment, made many months ago, and when I suggested we break that date to attend the screening, Siri said she would never talk to me again, perhaps even kill me. I don’t doubt that she means it. In today’s
New York Times
, however, which lists all the new films of the upcoming season, I see that the movie will be opening on Friday. We will go next weekend, then. Would you like me to clip local reviews for you—or would you rather not know?

With big hugs to you and Dorothy,

Paul

September 26, 2009

Dear Paul,

You write about the associations that the name “55th Street” has for you, and mention in passing Avenues A through Z in Manhattan. At once my thoughts go to the long poem of Galway Kinnell’s on Avenue C. What a feat for a poet to have pulled off: a stranger from faraway Africa, hearing mention of avenues named after the letters of the alphabet, is at once transported (transpoeted, I nearly wrote) to the “God-forsaken avenue bearing the initial of Christ”!