Paul Auster - Invisible

Twenty-seven years of legal aid work, community activism in the black neighborhoods of Oakland and Berkeley, rent strikes, class action suits against various corporations, police brutality cases, the list goes on. In the long run, I don’t think I’ve accomplished much. A number of satisfying victories, yes, but this country is no less cruel now than it was then, perhaps more cruel than ever, and yet to have done nothing would have been impossible for me. I would have felt that I was living in a fraudulent relation with myself.

Am I starting to sound like a self-righteous prig? I hope not.

Income was meager, of course. The kind of work I did does not a rich man make. But there were family resources that fell into my lap-my lap and my sister’s lap-following the deaths of our parents (mother in 1974, father in 1976). We sold the house and our father’s supermarket for a considerable sum, and because Gwyn is a clever and practical woman, she invested the money well, which meant that I always had enough to live on (modestly, but comfortably) without worrying too much about what my work brought in. Playing the system in order to beat the system. A fine little twist of hypocrisy, I suppose, but everyone has to put food on the table, everyone needs a roof over his head. Alas, medical bills have made a severe dent in my savings these past two years, but I think I’ll have enough to carry me through to the end-assuming I don’t last too long, which doesn’t appear likely.

As for matters of the heart, I staggered along in my clumsy, retarded way for a good many years, too many years, crawling in and out of various beds, falling in and out of love with various women, but never felt any temptation to settle down and marry until I was thirty-six, when I met the one person who ever really counted for me, a social worker by the name of Sandra Williams-yes, the same last name that belonged to the murdered boy, a slave name, a common slave name borne by hundreds of thousands if not millions of African-Americans-and although an interracial marriage can pose numerous social problems for the couple (from both camps), I never considered it to be an impediment, for the truth was that I loved Sandra, loved her from the first day to the last. A wise woman, a brave woman, a spirited and beautiful woman, just six months younger than I was, already married and divorced when we met, with a twelve-year-old girl, Rebecca, my stepdaughter, herself now married and the mother of two, and the nineteen years I spent with Sandra turned me into someone better than I had been, better than I would have been alone or with anyone else, and now that she is dead (of cervical cancer, five years ago), not a day goes by when I don’t long for her. My only regret is that we never managed to have children together, but making a family is beyond the power of a man who turns out to have been born sterile.

What more to say? I am well cared for by my housekeeper (who will cook dinner for us on the night of your visit), I see Rebecca and her family often, I talk to my sister on the telephone nearly every day, I have many friends. When health permits, I continue to devour books (poems, history, novels, among them yours-the instant they are published), still take an active interest in baseball (an incurable disease), and fitfully indulge in the escapism of watching films (thanks to a DVD player, loyal friend to the solitaries and shut-ins of this world). But mostly I think about the past, the old days, that long-ago year (1967) when so much happened to me, happened in me and around me, the unexpected turns and discoveries of that year, the madness of that year, which pushed me toward the life I wound up living, for both good and bad. Nothing like a fatal illness to sharpen one’s thoughts, to make one want to tote up the accounts, to produce a final reckoning. The plan is to write the book in three parts, three chapters. Not a long book, not a complicated book, but it has to be done right, and to be stuck in the second part has become a source of terrible discombobulation. Rest assured, I am not expecting you to solve the problem for me. But I have a suspicion, perhaps a groundless suspicion, that a talk with you would give me the kick in the pants I need. Beyond that-and before that-that is, above and beyond my minuscule travails, there will be the tremendous pleasure of seeing you again…

I had been hoping for a word from him, but it never occurred to me that he would write more than a couple of paragraphs, that he would be willing to put in the time and effort to share such a full account of himself with me-I, who was hardly more than a stranger to him at that point. Many friends or not, he must have been lonely, I thought, he must have been more than a little desperate, and while I still couldn’t grasp why I was the person he had chosen to be his confessor, he had latched on to me in such a way as to make it all but unthinkable not to do everything I could for him. How swiftly the weather changes. A dying friend had reentered my life after an absence of close to forty years, and suddenly I felt an obligation not to let him down. But what kind of help could I give him? He was having trouble with his book, and for some inexplicable reason he had deluded himself into thinking I had the power to say the magic words that would get him started again. Did he expect me to hand him a prescription for a pill that cured struggling authors of their writer’s block? Was that all he wanted from me? It seemed so paltry, so painfully beside the point. Walker was an intelligent man, and if his book needed to be written, he would find a way to do it.

That was more or less what I told him in my next letter. Not straight off, since there were other subjects to be addressed first (my sadness over his wife’s death, my surprise over his choice of profession, my admiration for the work he had done and the battles he had fought), but once those matters had been dispensed with, I said quite bluntly and simply that I believed he would figure it out on his own. Fear is a good thing, I continued, repeating the word he had used in his first letter, fear is what drives us to take risks and extend ourselves beyond our normal limits, and any writer who feels he is standing on safe ground is unlikely to produce anything of value. As for the wall he had mentioned, I said that everyone hits those walls, and more often than not the condition of being stuck arises from a flaw in the writer’s thinking-i.e., he doesn’t fully understand what he is trying to say or, more subtly, he has taken a wrong approach to his subject. By way of example, I told him about the problems I had encountered while working on an early book of mine-also a memoir (of sorts), which had been divided into two parts. Part One was written in the first person, and when I began Part Two (which was more directly about myself than the previous part), I continued writing in the first person, grew more and more dissatisfied with the results, and eventually stopped. The pause lasted several months (difficult months, anguished months), and then one night the solution came to me. My approach had been wrong, I realized. By writing about myself in the first person, I had smothered myself and made myself invisible, had made it impossible for me to find the thing I was looking for. I needed to separate myself from myself, to step back and carve out some space between myself and my subject (which was myself), and therefore I returned to the beginning of Part Two and began writing it in the third person. I became He , and the distance created by that small shift allowed me to finish the book. Perhaps he (Walker) was suffering from the same problem, I suggested. Perhaps he was too close to his subject. Perhaps the material was too wrenching and personal for him to write about it with the proper objectivity in the first person. What did he think? Was there a chance that a new approach might get him up and running again?