Paul Auster - Invisible

How to describe my response? Fascination, amusement, a growing sense of dread, and then horror. If I hadn’t been told it was a true story, I probably would have plunged in and taken those sixty-plus pages for the beginning of a novel (writers do, after all, sometimes inject characters who bear their own names into works of fiction), and then I might have found the ending implausible-or perhaps too abrupt, which would have made it unsatisfying-but because I approached it as a piece of autobiography from the start, Walker’s confession left me shaken and filled with sorrow. Poor Adam. He was so hard on himself, so contemptuous of his weakness in relation to Born, so disgusted with his petty aspirations and youthful strivings, so sick over his failure to recognize that he was dealing with a monster, but who can blame a twenty-year-old boy for losing his bearings in the blur of sophistication and depravity that surrounds a person like Born? He had shown me something about myself that filled me with revulsion . But what had Walker done wrong? He had called for an ambulance on the night of the stabbing, and then, after a momentary lapse of courage, he had gone and talked to the police. Under the circumstances, no one could have done more than that. Whatever revulsion Walker felt about himself could not have been caused by how he behaved at the end. It was the beginning that distressed him, the simple fact that he had allowed himself to be seduced, and he had gone on torturing himself about it for the rest of his life-to such an extent that now, even as his life was ending, he felt driven to march back into the past and tell the story of his shame. According to his letter, this was only the first chapter. I wondered what could possibly come next.

I wrote back to Walker that evening, assuring him that I had received his package, expressing concern and sympathy over the state of his health, telling him that in spite of everything I was happy to have heard from him after so many years, was moved by his kind words about the books I had published, and so on. Yes, I promised, I would adjust my schedule to make sure I could go to his house for dinner and would gladly discuss the problems he was having with the second chapter of his memoir. I don’t have a copy of my letter, but I remember that I wrote it in a spirit of encouragement and support, calling the chapter he had sent me both excellent and disturbing , or words to that effect, and telling him I felt the project was well worth seeing through to the end. I needn’t have said anything more, but curiosity got the better of me, and I concluded with what might have been an impertinence. Forgive me for asking, I wrote, but I’m not sure I can wait until next month to find out what happened to you after we last saw each other. If you’re feeling up to it, I would welcome another letter before I head for your neck of the woods. Not a blow-by-blow account, of course, but the gist, whatever you care to tell me.

Not wanting to entrust my letter to the vagaries of the U.S. Postal Service, I shipped it by express mail the following morning. Two days later, I received Walker’s express mail response.

Gratified, thankful, looking forward to next month.

In answer to your question, I’m more than happy to oblige you, although I’m afraid you’ll find my story rather dull. June 1969. We shook hands, I remember, vowed to stay in touch, and then walked off in opposite directions, never to meet again. I went back to my parents’ house in New Jersey, planning to visit for a couple of days, got drunk with my sister that night, tripped, fell down the stairs, and broke my leg. Bad luck, it would seem, but in the end it was the best thing that could have happened to me. Ten days later, Greetings! , and an invitation from the federal government to show up for my army physical. I hobbled into the draft board on crutches, was given a I-Y deferment because of the broken leg, and by the time the break mended, the Selective Service had instituted the lottery. I wound up drawing a high number, an obscenely high number (346), and all of a sudden, literally in a single flash, the confrontation I had been dreading for so long was permanently erased from my future.

Beyond that early gift from the gods, I mostly bumped along, struggling to keep my balance, lurching fitfully between bouts of optimism and blinding stretches of despair. Unaccountable, perplexing, perplexed. In the fall of 1969 I moved to London-not because England attracted me, but because I couldn’t stand living in America anymore. The poison of Vietnam, the tears of Vietnam, the blood of Vietnam. We were all out of our minds back then, weren’t we? All driven to madness by a war we detested and couldn’t stop. So I left our fair country, found myself a shithole flat in Hammersmith, and spent the next four years toiling in the sewers of Grub Street-cranking out countless freelance book reviews and accepting any translation that came my way, French books mostly, one or two in Italian, regurgitating into English everything from a dull academic history of the Middle East to an anthropological study of voodoo to crime fiction. Meanwhile, I continued writing my crabbed, gnostic poems. In 1972, a book was published by an obscure small press based in Manchester, an edition of three or four hundred copies, one review in an equally obscure little magazine, sales in the neighborhood of fifty-echoing those hilarious lines from Krapp’s Last Tape (which I remember you were so fond of): “Seventeen copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries beyond the seas. Getting known.” Getting known indeed.

I pushed on with it for another year, and then, after a bitter, anguished debate with myself, I concluded that I wasn’t making sufficient progress and stopped. It’s not that I thought my work was bad. There were occasional sparks, a few poems that seemed to have something fresh and urgent about them, lines I felt genuinely proud of, but by and large the results were mediocre, and the prospect of living out my life as a mediocrity frightened me into quitting.

The London years. The somber revelations of dashed hopes, loveless sex in the beds of prostitutes, one serious liaison with an English girl named Dorothy that crashed to a sudden halt when she found out I was Jewish. But, believe it or not, in spite of how grim all this must sound to you, I think I was growing stronger, finally beginning to grow up and take charge of my life. I finished my last poem in June 1973, ceremoniously burned it in the kitchen sink, and went back to America. I had sworn not to return until the last U.S. soldier had left Vietnam, but I had a new plan now, and I didn’t have time for such high-minded claptrap anymore. I was going to throw myself into the trenches and fight it out with my bare fists. Good-bye, literature. Welcome to the thing-in-itself, the sensorium of the real.

Berkeley, California. Three years of law school. The idea was to do some good, to work with the poor, the downtrodden, to involve myself with the spat-upon and the invisible and see if I couldn’t defend them against the cruelties and indifference of American society. More high-minded claptrap? Some might think so, but it never felt that way to me. From poetry to justice, then. Poetic justice, if you will. For the sad fact remains: there is far more poetry in the world than justice.

Now that my illness has forced me to stop working, I’ve had ample time to ponder my motives for choosing the life I did. In a very concrete way, I think it started that night in 1967 when I saw Born stab Cedric Williams in the belly-and then, after I had run off to call for an ambulance, carry him into the park and murder him. For no reason, no reason whatsoever, and then, even worse, for him to have gotten away with it, to have skipped the country and never to have been judged for his crime. It would be impossible to overstate how terribly this grieved me, has continued to grieve me. Justice betrayed. The anger and frustration have not diminished, and if that is how I feel, if this sense of justice is what burns most brightly in me, then I’m certain I chose the correct path for myself.