Paul Auster talks death, Trump, and 4 3 2 1

Walk into Manchester’s HOME this month and you can’t miss Paul Auster; the cult author is all over the venue. An ambitious and visually inventive stage production of Auster’s City of Glass, the lead novella in The New York Trilogy, is in the middle of its debut run in HOME’s theatre. A mini film season celebrating the author’s connection to movies, Paul Auster: Man of Cinema, is also underway: Kieslowski’s Auster-esque Blind Chance and Auster’s own film The Inner Life of Martin Frost are still to screen. And as soon as you walk through HOME’s double doors you’re met by a virtual reality take on Auster's writing, which takes the form of a mind-melting confrontation with Peter Stillman, the disturbed young man from City of Glass.

The ubiquity of Auster at HOME makes it all the more ironic that his much-anticipated public talk at the venue last week was so fleeting. The 70-year-old Brooklynite made a rare appearance in the UK for a Q&A to promote his new novel, 4 3 2 1, an epic near-900 pager about a New Jersey man who leads four parallel lives. A large crowd filled most of HOME’s main theatre, many of them with Auster’s hefty tome on their lap, but they were soon shuffling out the door again barely half an hour later after a 20 minute reading from the book and a bizarrely curtailed Q&A session. The reason for the brevity? Auster had to make time for book signings; it appears Manchester lit fans would rather have the author’s signature in their hard back copy than hear what he has to say.

“I had never seen a dead body before”

Luckily, like his writing, Auster can pack a lot into a short space and his brief talk was riveting. He kicked things off with a chilling story from boyhood. “This is not an autobiographical book,” he began, “but it shares my geography and my chronology. And yet there is something that is transformed in the novel that comes out of an event that took place when I was 14.”

Auster describes, after a clear moment of trepidation, how as a boy at summer camp, he and his troupe got caught in a violent electrical storm while hiking in the woods.

“There was lightning shooting down all around us, and horrific thunder, and pounding rain; the lightning was very scary. The general feeling was we should get away from the trees, get into a clearing, which I think is the correct thing to do. We found a clearing, but in order to get to it we had to climb under a barbed wire fence. We went single file, and as we were going through, the boy directly in front of me… as he was midway through, lightning struck, hit the barbed wire and electrocuted him. Killed him on the spot.

“I had never seen a dead body before. I didn’t even know he was dead. I pulled him through and spent an hour in the rain and the thunder trying to warm him up and revive him as his face was turning blue because indeed he had been killed instantly.”

As you might imagine, the experience that day changed young Auster’s life: “I knew then anything could happen to anybody at any moment. I have been lucky in my life to have been spared war, or a blitz, or having my city be occupied by a foreign army, but this was the kind of thing a child will discover in a war: that you can be alive one second and dead the next.

"It had such a profound and haunting effect on me; I think it’s affected my work, how I think about the world, and it’s embedded inside this book.”

“I kept thinking, 'I don’t want to die before I finish the book'”

The Q&A didn’t get any cheerier with the second question. Auster also described another life-changing moment many years later when he was 31, and his father died suddenly. “He was a man of perfect health,” said Auster. “He never smoked, never drank, he played tennis every day, and then he dropped dead of a heart attack at the relatively young age of 66.” That incident was what inspired Auster’s first prose book, The Invention of Solitude, his 1982 memoir and meditation on fatherhood.

As the author approached the age at which his father died, another spurt of creativity was unleashed. “Oddly enough, I started [4 3 2 1] at 66,” he explained, “and so there was this eerie feeling of outliving my father in the sense that I was getting older than he ever got to be, which seemed uncanny, wrong, some kind of cosmic transgression.”

Like the incident as a 14 year old when he was confronted with death, Auster began to think of his own mortality: “I felt maybe it was going to happen to me. I just started the book, and I imagined it would take me five or six years to write it. And I was so worried – and this is all silliness, melodrama, but you know, sometimes we get carried away – I kept thinking, 'I have to write, I have to keep going, because I don’t want to die before I finish the book.'

"So I didn’t do anything else: I refused meetings, interviews, invitations to travel. Siri [Hustvedt], my wife, who’s also a writer, was writing her head off at the same time, so we didn’t do anything but write for three straight years, we barely saw anybody or did anything.”

“[Trump] doesn’t like the smell of books”

Auster wasn’t all doom and gloom, and ended his brief appearance with some inspirational musings on the power and importance of art, which feels particularly pertinent in today’s fractured society. “Well it’s a democratic act in that the novel concentrates on the inner lives of ordinary people. It’s not that it ennobles people, it focuses on people, who often wouldn’t be noticed in the grand scheme of things. They’re certainly not going to be on the evening news anywhere.

"But people write these stories about their fellow human beings, and then we as readers can get inside – through our imaginations – the skin of other beings. And I think this is ultimately a humanising effect."

The author interrupted his train of thought to say, “I’m not saying that there aren’t monsters who enjoy reading novels. Criminals and murders and all kind of people.” 

“And presidents…” added Walter Donohue, senior editor at Faber & Faber, who is moderating.

“Well not this president; he doesn’t read,” said Auster wryly. “He doesn’t like the smell of books.”

For the author, every work of art, and particularly every novel, is a political act. Although he’s quick to point out writers shouldn't feel pressure to be overtly political: “A writer is a citizen, just like anybody else. If they feel compelled to speak out they should – I think we all should – but I never tell writers that they must address a particular social issue or political idea at any given moment, because that’s not what art is about.

"We need books, we need paintings, we need music, we need films, we need plays, and if you don’t think it’s true, try to imagine a world without any of those things. You’d be living in a desert. It would hardly be worth living if we didn’t have stories, and pictures to look at, and books to read, and ideas to think about.”

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4 3 2 1 is published by Faber & Faber
City of Glass continues at HOME until 18 Mar
City of Glass Virtual Reality Experience continues at HOME until 18 Mar
Blind Chance screens at HOME 15 Mar
The Inner Life of Martin Frost screens at HOME 19 Mar