It is a lost world. And it strikes him to realise that it will be lost forever. The boy will forget everything that has happened to him so far. There will be nothing left but a kind of after-glow, and perhaps not even that. All the thousands of hours that A. has spent with him during the first three years of his life, all the millions of words he has spoken to him, the books he has read to him, the meals he has made for him, the tears he has wiped for him – all these things will vanish from the boy’s memory forever. (CP 142)
There are passages in The Book of Memory, Paul Auster’s memoir-as-meditation, which are heart-breaking to read. Dispersed throughout a fragmentary text defined by Auster’s metafictional concerns, intertextual digressions and musings on identity formation in the transhistorical present are a number of touching domestic moments with his young son, Daniel – moments which are wholly embedded in the very real contingencies of Auster’s domestic situation at that time: estranged from his wife, separated from his child, living in a small garret room at 6 Varick Street, New York. The book begins on Christmas Eve, 1979 – a date which throws Auster’s isolation and failures as a father, a husband, and a writer into sharp relief: “He cannot call it home, but for the past nine months it is all he has had” (CP 62). It continues where the preceding part to The Invention of Solitude – Portrait of an Invisible Man – left off: “An image of Daniel now, as he lies upstairs in his crib asleep. To end with this” (CP 60).
Read today, the book enacts a dramatic foreshadowing of future events. Given what we know about Daniel’s subsequent life, many of these depictions of prelapsarian innocence are loaded with an unbearable weight:
He watches his son. He watches the little boy move around the room and listens to what he says. He sees him playing with his toys and hears him talking to himself. Each movement engenders a word, or a series of words; each word triggers off another movement: a reversal, a continuation, a new set of movements and words. (CP 141)
Today Daniel is, of course, an adult – the same age, in fact, that his father was when he wrote The Book of Memory. His privacy is perhaps understandably now closely-guarded, but to all intents and purposes his public identity has been fixed in two periods of his life: as an infant, and as an adolescent. He exists in the between-space: a textual character, and a living, breathing human being; the son of divorced parents, carrying the physical and emotional traits of each, yet disassociated from both. Is he a child, a man-child or a man? Has Auster’s inclusion of a version of him in his books been a blessing, or a curse? Will he ever escape that childish incarnation: puer aeternus?
Infamy has bruised Daniel's identity. There’s no doubt that the Melendez affair would have been an incredibly painful period for Auster, particularly when re-contextualised by the events of Daniel’s early life. In many respects, it is the sum of all paternal fears. There is an inherent difficulty for writer-parents in deciding whether or not to keep their private and public lives in separate realms. Even depicting a relationship to a child – fictionalised or not – presents a problem: one risks either being too scientific or too sentimental. Writing about our own children entails a degree of distancing (note the pun within the pronoun 'father'). This difficulty also extends to the practical problems facing all writers who have children: how to fit writing around family responsibilities – or how to fit family around the writing.
This notion is pushed to its disturbing conclusion in Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel The Shining (1980). The paterfamilias of the Torrance family is a blocked writer who exhibits the irrational tendencies of someone desperately trying to finding time, space and inspiration to write, only to find it hampered by the dual demands of being a father and caretaker at the Overlook Hotel. Haunted to the point of psychopathy by the hotel’s spirits and his parental responsibilities, he plots a murderous narrative from the ruins of his unwritten novel, one which will be inscribed by the blood of his wife, Wendy, and child, Danny.
Kubrick’s schlocky movie is, naturally, an extreme example. By contrast, Tom Raworth’s beautifully spare imagist poem 'Three' (1966) depicts the parental warmth and the contingency of filial interaction, how responsiveness and responsibility coexist domestically:
smell of shit when i lift him he knocks the book from my hand
i hold him up she pulls at my leg the other comes in with a book
he give me his book she pulls at his arm
the other
is pulling my hair i put him down he pulls at my leg she
has taken my book from him and gives it to me i give him
his book
give her an apple touch the other’s hair and open the door
they go down the hall all carrying something
Raworth’s poem blends the olfactory (“smell of shit”) with the gustatory (“give her an apple”) and sensuous (“touch the other’s hair”) to establish balance within an otherwise chaotic domestic scene. The activity is molecular, energised, atomic, reflected in the flowing lyricism of Raworth’s free verse – a system of perpetual exchange that ends with the empathetic payoff: “they go down the hall all carrying something”. The depiction of the children inculcates an inchoate chain of small, localised events that lead inexorably on to a larger, more meaningful statement: Anne Stewart has pointed to a broader reading of the poem, taking from the “tangle of body parts and subliminal responses… the whole mess of religion and social and political suppression” – a movement from mimesis to metonymy.
The sense of the otherness of children encapsulated in Raworth’s short, affecting poem – how their presence intrudes upon, reshapes and reflects their parents' world – is also detectable in The Book of Memory. Auster’s tone is one of tempered concern and continual revelation. Lost children litter the textual landscape – “The children who will vanish, the children who are dead”: Stephane Mallarme’s dying son Anatole, and the poem-as-memorial his father writes for him; Anne Frank, whose former house in Amsterdam A. visits and whose birthday Daniel shares; Etan Patz, who vanishes from the streets of New York around the time that Auster and his wife separate. Auster reflects:
The days went by, and each day a little more of the pain inside him was dragged into the open. A sense of loss took hold of him, and it would not let go. And there were times when this loss was so great, and so suffocating, that he thought it would never let go. (CP 84)
As with the passage above, this pervasive sense of loss constitutes an external force operating on Auster; yet, in another regard, it is self-consciously generated. His ruminations in the passages of Portrait of an Invisible Man infer that Auster considers himself to be a “LOST CHILD” (CP 84). Existing critical approaches to Auster’s memoir-as-meditation have singled out his canonical engagement and exploration of Jewish identity in the shadow of the Shoah, proposing that the book operates as a fragmented, transhistorical mise-en-abyme. In terms of textural structures, Auster’s attempt to define his relationship with his son nestles within these other contextual considerations; in my reading of the book, these moments with Daniel predominate over the others. Unlike the preceding part to The Invention of Solitude – in which Auster directly responds to the death of his father with very few references to his son – father-son dialectics give shape to this fragmented aesthetic, with the microcosmic and macrocosmic meeting in dovetailed alignment.
In one particular scene, Auster references Leibniz after ejaculating into the mouth of topless dancer in an instance of acute anomie: “Each man, therefore, is the entire world, bearing within his genes a memory of all mankind. Or as Leibniz put it: ‘Every living substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe’” (CP 95). This invocation of Leibniz’s words provokes Auster to consider “the furtive microscopic cell that has fought its way up through his wife’s body, some three years earlier, to become his son”(CP 95). Despite this application of cold science, the contrasting realms of the “irreducible monad” and the “puer aeternus” organically and emotionally align within the myriad constellations of the imaginative mind. In short, we cannot speak of the universe, without first speaking of the quotidian – the olfactory, the gustatory, the sensuous: “To wander about in the world, then, is also to wander about in ourselves. That is to say, the moment we step into the space of memory, we walk into the world” (CP 142). Mimesis moves towards metonymy – but that moment can also be reversed inside the fluid frame of the mise-en-abyme.
In one sense, Auster is looking forward to the moment when his son ‘walks into the world’; in another, it terrifies him by signalling his hastening demise. The Book of Memory revolves around the axis of what Auster terms, “nostalgia for the present” (CP 61):
His life no longer seemed to dwell in the present…Even as he stood in the present, he felt himself to be looking at it from the future, and this present-as-past was so antiquated that even the horrors of the day, which ordinarily would have filled him with outrage, seemed remote to him, as if the voice in the radio were reading from a chronicle of some lost civilization. (CP 61)
Auster's deployment of the noun 'nostalgia' - meaning sentimentality for the past - is paradoxical, contradictory, as if a more pertinent term has eluded him. This sense of nostalgia is partly located in Auster’s ambivalence towards his physical, temporal and philosophical isolation; it is also embodied in his patriarchal concerns as a financially-struggling father to a young dependent. If anything Auster, though his third-person persona "A.", has been shaken loose from the comforts of the past by a reversal of fortune. In a passage prefaced by an epigraph from Freud, Auster’s anthropological observation of Daniel implies a conscious distancing from his son; symbiotically, his son’s activities outside the frame of the text draw Auster’s non-fictional writing into his childish world of imaginative play. At three years of age, Auster records, his son is “indeed very little”:
A wisp of puniness against the bulk of his father, he dreams of acquiring inordinate powers to conquer the paltry reality of himself. He is still too young to understand that one day he will be as big as his father, and even when it is explained to him very carefully, the facts are still open to gross misinterpretations: ‘And some day I’ll be the same tall as you, and you’ll be the same little as me. (CP 113)
My son and I have shared similar conversations: “Daddy, these trousers are getting too big for me”, and so on. Misunderstandings about linguistic value and etymology as the child’s intellect gradually develops are founded in the contradictions of signification. This process of cognition, much like Auster’s écriture, is a solitary pursuit that takes place within the interior world of perception; but it is not realised until it is expressed, vocalised and made explicit within the exterior world of objects:
Another time, the boy went into the bathroom, closed the door and did not come out. A. asked through the closed door: ‘What are you doing in there?’ ‘I’m thinking,’ the boy said. ‘I have to be alone to think.’ (CP 110)
Elsewhere Auster writes: “It sometimes seems to A. that his son’s mental perambulations while at play are an exact image of his own progress through the labyrinth of a book” (CP 142). That linguistic play and procedural play are purposefully confused in the text is important: in citing Freud, Auster reflects that the two are inherently self-referential, and fundamental to the development of identity. This from Freud:
You will not forget that the stress laid on the writer’s memories of his childhood, which perhaps seem so strange, is ultimately derived from the hypothesis that imaginative creation, like day dreaming, is a continuation of and substitute for the play of childhood. (CP 141)
It’s a doubly ironic approach, with a doubly discomforting edge. Despite the profession of ‘play’, there is much at stake in the book. With their dispassionate delivery, Auster’s depictions of Daniel seem oddly mannered and distanced. Given what we now know, what impact could reading this have had on his young mind? It is also the question Auster asks himself at the close of Portrait of an Invisible Man: “To wonder what he will make of these pages when he is old enough to read them” (CP 60). Is the root of Daniel’s downfall somewhere within these pages? The fact is, we don’t know – and nor should we expect to find out.
Despite the self-conscious distancing noted above, there is a significant amount of emotional warmth in The Book of Memory. Book Eight describes Auster and his son reading Collodi’s Pinocchio together: “Little by little, they both began to gravitate toward one book […] For A. and his son, so often separated from each other during the past year, there was something deeply satisfying in this passage of reunion” (CP 110-11). There is something deeply satisfying for the reader who divines the affection in Auster’s lines. This is despite his writing – in reference to the Disneyfication of the Pinocchio tale – that conscious expression of emotional motivations in narratives “sentimentalizes them, and therefore trivializes them” (CP 111-12). It is these resonant moments which lend meaning to The Book of Memory for both writer and reader. By contrast, it is the image of the son saving the father contained within in Collodi’s version of Pinocchio “that gives the story meaning” to Daniel (CP 113). For Auster, these excursions into Daniel’s imagination have saved him:
The son saves the father. This must be fully imagined from the perspective of the little boy. And this, in the mind of the father who was once a little boy, a son, that is, to his own father, must be fully imagined. Puer aeternus. The son saves the father. (CP 113)
In a simplistic sense, the joint reading of Pinocchio provide the impulse, the inspiration and the raw-material to give shape to the text, a reflection upon and record of preservation of their limited time together; they refer back to and refocus Auster’s writings about his father in his companion-piece Portrait of an Invisible Man; and they speak to exteriority, giving necessity to the urge to speak, to testify, to transcribe the transhistorical, ethical memorial The Book of Memory has become:
Each time A. reads the story aloud to his son, he cannot help seeing (for it is not thinking, really, so quickly do these things happen in his mind) certain clusters of other images, spinning outward from the core of his preoccupations. (CP 113)
Puer aeternus. The son saves the father. In 2003, Disney Pictures revisited the Pinocchio legend in the Pixar-animated movie Finding Nemo, in which an overprotective clownfish scours the Pacific in search of his lost son: “this act of saving is in effect what a father does: he saves his little boy from harm” (CP 66). In this narrative, the act of finding – by active search or sudden rediscovery – is contiguous to chance and a sense of self-criticism. In the closing act, the father, Marlin, is transported in the mouth of a sperm whale to Sydney harbour, where he is, at last, reunited with his son. Nemo's palpable absence saves Marlin from paranoia and the perils of being an overbearing parent, the inverse – according to Auster’s depiction – of his relationship with Daniel:
When the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at his son and sees himself in the face of the boy. He imagines what the boy sees when he looks at him and finds himself becoming his own father. Inexplicably he is moved by this. It is not just the sight of the boy that moves him, nor even the thought of standing inside his father, but what he sees in the boy of his own vanished past…Inexplicably, he finds himself shaking with both happiness and sorrow, if this is possible, as if he were going both forwards and backwards, into the future and into the past. (CP 66)
There are gradations of patriarchal helplessness and failed masculinity at work here: from Auster’s lost relationship with his own father, to the transference of this sense of loss to his own son, to his sorrow at no longer being a child. The suggestion is that we, as fathers, become that which mortality necessitates, fixed in the centre of a temporal zone which rushes towards and away from us, caught in a bewildering sense of "nostalgia for the present". In a later text, Hand to Mouth, Auster writes:
Watching Daniel come into the world was a moment of supreme happiness for me, an event of such magnitude that even as I broke down and wept at the sight of his small body and held him in my arms for the first time, I understood that the world had changed, that I had passed from one state of being into another. Fatherhood was the dividing line, the great wall that stood between youth and adulthood, and I was on the other side now forever. (CP 225)
There are two things to note about the above quote. Firstly, Auster expresses an explicit happiness which is absent from the pages of The Book of Memory. Secondly, there is implication that fatherhood presents an obstacle, or blockage, that must be overcome or navigated as part of a process of negotiation with the newly-negated former self. The old, youthful identity must now be projected into the past, and the new, aged identity stepped into like a pair of hand-me-down slippers.
There is more than a kernel of truth in Auster’s paternal ambivalence. When my first son was born, like Auster I wept; although, unlike him, my son was not in my arms. I crept into the toilet just off the delivery room and silently sobbed, careful that no one, especially my then-partner (now wife), would be able to see me. The shift from expectant father to confirmed parent was equal parts ecstatic, traumatic and anticlimactic, and it left me feeling emotionally hollowed-out – as if something had been lost within me and my son by the fact of his arrival: the possibilities of his pre-existence, his uterine immortality.
When my second son was born, at the point of delivery I once again found myself at the brink of tears but it wasn’t until later, while my wife and new born son were kept in hospital and I was caring for my first son at home, that I eventually broke down. Then I cried, out of sight of my eldest. Again, I felt as though I was crying for him, and his former identity which would in all likelihood irretrievably disappear as he became the elder sibling. With the two of us often alone in the flat, at times it felt like our relationship was mirroring that of Auster and Daniel’s (coincidentally in the weeks prior to the birth of my second child I had been reading The Invention of Solitude).
This is the first time I have written about those occurrences, and haven’t discussed them with anyone before. For writing about them these somehow constitutes a betrayal: absolute honesty often invites concern, opprobrium or disdain, and can be hard for a partner or wife to read (see Auster’s negative depiction of his first wife Lydia Davis in The Book of Memory). However, the need by the writer-as-father to express this conflict between love, passivity and desolation is driven by an undeniable impulse impulse to lay throw open the doors to the chamber of the imaginative mind: “He finds a fresh sheet of paper. He lays it out on the table before him and writes down these words with his pen. / It was. It will never be again. Remember” (CP 148). Finishing The Book of Memory leaves the reader with the sense of having shared in a heart-breaking work of emotional rectitude – one in which the writer establishes a moving, unsentimental rapprochement with the epistemological, ontological and transhistorical concerns triggered by becoming a father.
All quotes from Paul Auster, Collected Prose (New York: Picador, 2010).
Except for Tom Raworth, 'Three' in Fifty Fifty Anthology - Fifty Poems from Fifty Years of the Poetry Library (London: Southbank Centre, 2003), p. 26.
Photo credit: Jean-Christian Bourcart/Getty Images