I first became aware of Paul Auster, who died on April 30, from reading old issues of The Columbia Review when I was a student at the university. He translated French Surrealist poetry and wrote prose fiction, set in a sort of silent-movie cityscape that anticipated his novels and films.
He was already established by the time I read him. He was a romantic, bohemian figure, living hand-to-mouth in a French villa with his first wife, Lydia Davis, and trying to coax a living from literary translation.
I felt a little bit like I was tracking him then: We both came from New Jersey (like Allen Ginsberg and Philip Roth, he was a proud son of Newark); attended Columbia; were drawn to French literature. We inhabited the same Morningside Heights world of the early 1970s, with its cranks and cults, mimeographed screeds and tracts. Surely Paul, too, patronized Marlin Café and the Moon Palace.
But I didn’t meet him until 20 years later, when I washed up in Park Slope — a disorienting experience after 20 years in Manhattan. Paul was living blocks away, and when I met him he made me feel as if the whole neighborhood welcomed me. He was generous, open and immediately took me into his confidence, conspiratorially.
I hadn’t spent much time in literary society — my friends are mostly visual artists — but Paul swept me into it with his animated dinners. There I met the likes of Don DeLillo and Salman Rushdie (who, in one post-dinner reverie, described his affection for Ross Geller from “Friends” while his bodyguards read tabloids in their car out front). He loved bringing people together, from across disciplines and genres and class lines, and paying enthusiastic attention to all of them. He was a first-class appreciator who didn’t stint on praise, whose laughs were explosive, whose speech had a characteristic rhythm, rushing forward and then drawing back, as if ebbing, to make room for his interlocutor.
He laughed a great deal; he knew great joy. But his life was shadowed by Daniel, the son from his first marriage, apparently troubled from early childhood, whose death — along with that of Daniel’s infant daughter — hastened his own end, Paul said.
Work was often a refuge. As a writer, Paul was blessed with the gift of flow. His paragraphs were a moving sidewalk — it was more comfortable to ride than to hop off — so you could read him for hours, as his plots twisted and turned. That made it possible for him to experiment variously, inserting literary high jinks under cover of an engaging yarn.
Paul was fascinated by 19th-century melodrama, with its preposterous coincidences and bifurcating plots; by the avant-garde adaptation of such popular literary tropes in the early 20th century by authors like Alfred Jarry and Raymond Roussel; and by the systematic application of constraints in the writing process by Georges Perec and the Oulipo group in the 1960s and ’70s.
He was very French in his orientation — and the French repaid the favor, according him pop-star status. His books were sold in supermarkets there.
He also nailed a certain flavor of timeless French romantic melancholy, hence his affinities with the novels of Patrick Modiano and the drawings of Pierre Le-Tan. But Paul’s work was always all about story, about that feeling of being actually transported by reading.
