The white album

Two memoirs within two years tells us that novelist Paul Auster is taking inventory, exploring his inner space. It started with Winter Journal from 2012, and continued with last year’s Report from the Interior. One focuses on the body, the other on the mind, and whether it’s Auster taking scope of his 66 years on the planet, or merely treading water, the literary approach works for him.

Winter Journal sets out to do something so simple, yet something rarely actually completed: a physical inventory of one’s life, taking into account earliest sense memories, sounds, touches, sights and smells, and moving onward through the years and decades to encompass all the changes the body goes through.

Auster has experienced a few changes. Most alarming, for him, was the onset of panic attacks soon after his mother passed away in 2002, when he was 55. He describes it in chilling, claustrophobic detail. (Curiously, Auster tells his own story in second person, addressing himself as “You.” Even curiouser, the tactic doesn’t seem to distance the author from himself, or us while reading it. It’s as though Auster is describing his life from a perch of understanding. We adopt his bird’s eye view.)

Then your pulse quickens, you can feel your heart trying to burst through your chest, and a moment after that there is no more air in your lungs, you can no longer breathe. That is when the panic overwhelms you, when your body shuts down and you fall to the floor. Lying on your back, you feel the blood stop flowing in your veins, and little by little your limbs turn to cement. That is when you start to howl. You are made of stone now, and as you lie there on the dining room floor, rigid, your mouth open, unable to move or think, you howl in terror as you wait for your body to drown in the deep black waters of death.

Fortunately, he gets better. And much of Winter Journal details a life rife with physical pleasures, not just contemplations of the abyss: there are Auster’s first experiences with sex (including a French prostitute who recites Baudelaire to him), his marriages and various domiciles he’s occupied over a long literary life, ending in Brooklyn. There are passages where he details the things his hands have done besides writing, and it’s a welcome bit of humor in a somewhat somber book.

From the start, he tells us, the journal must necessarily emanate from his physical being, because “that is where the story begins, in your body, and everything will end in the body as well.”

Even writing is tied to the physical. Murakami wrote about running and its relation to writing. Here, Auster writes about walking: “Walking is what brings the words to you, what allows you to hear the rhythms of the words as you write them in your head… You sit at your desk in order to write down the words, but in your head you are still walking, always walking, and what you hear is the rhythm of your heart, the beating of your heart.”

His childhood memories are spotty: looking out a bedroom window at snow falling on branches (age 6); the shortness of distance between his vision and the ground at age 4, and the “little world of crawling ants and lost coins, of fallen twigs and dented bottle caps”; playing baseball, and finding pleasure in being good at it (age 7). As with most memoirs, we tend to be a little skeptical about how events are presented: isn’t this just the author’s side of a particular quarrel, of a certain series of actions? Such questions — about identity, about truth and how the word invents reality — are the very stuff of Paul Auster’s fiction as well.

“You would like to know who you are,” he writes at one point. “With little or nothing to guide you, you take it for granted that you are the product of vast, prehistoric migrations, of conquests, rapes and abductions.” The author has long questioned how we come to be who we are, what we are made up of. But what’s interesting in Winter Journal is how those ponderous questions are cast aside in the face of something more real, more immediate: his own fear, and his own sense of mortality. 

Flashbacks glide the author back through time, to events that seem to shape him, or at least shape his reality. Like Proust’s madeleine, little things set Auster off, and the memories, dredged up in this manner, can be most unpleasant. One bout of gonorrhea, another of crabs. Slights and offenses, failures of courage, things said that shouldn’t have been said. (Isn’t it the case in that we remember the worst things people say precise detail, almost like a YouTube video loop?) There are glimpses of Auster’s dark side — a temper, when righteously challenged, that leads to violence; an abhorrence of crowds and chaos; and an air of irritation at how people behave around him; you get the sense that this is a “warts and all” memoir, take him or leave him.

Winter Journal is compact: it’s not an exhaustive measure of the body after all (the companion volume, as noted above, takes up the mind’s journey). Rather, it finds its purpose, its meaning, as it begins to circle round and round again to his mother’s death, and how that event changes the author’s contemplation of his own existence. Before, death was elsewhere, something abstract, and then, in the last 80 pages or so, it’s everywhere. It’s tattooed on him like an unerasable story.

Brief reflections on love — finding his second wife, also a writer; someone he could spend 30 years and more with — are punctuated by passages on visiting the cold Minnesota of his wife’s family for Christmas — a place where temperatures are stuck at 30 below zero. Winter is everywhere.

As he turns the corner on yet another winter, the one framing this short volume, Auster quotes French essayist Joubert: “One must die lovable (if one can).” This instantly leads him to a practical problem: “The question is to what degree a person can remain human while hanging on in a state of helplessness and degradation.”

At the end of 209 pages devoted to Paul Auster’s physical existence, we realize he has only really scratched the surface.