Auggie Wren's Christmas Story

I'm back from Paradise - turquoise sea glimpsed through skinny manuka and beech trees, golden beaches, ineffable bush tracks, waterfalls, fantails around my tent ... no internet, no cell, no TV, no alcohol, no showers ... swimming in the sea as the sunrises, dancing on the sand in the evening, kayaking in the open water, marvelling at the courage and curiosity of children and the strength and patience of the best sort of adult  ... and I've discovered the rest of the world has moved a little closer to Christmas....

Now there are presents to buy, menus to plan ...  and books to review... It's a bit of a ramble but nonetheless here's the link to a review I did today on radio about this lovely book - Paul Auster's Auggie Wren's Christmas Story. Auster, with his writer characters and his stories inside stories, always ties me up in knots when I have to explain them, and this book was trickier than usual, despite being a slight 41 pages long. This is because it has had two previous incarnations: as a short story in the NY Times on Xmas Day in 1990, and as part of the marvellous movie Smoke which director Wayne Wang and Paul Auster collaborated on. It's one of my favourite movies - I blogged on it here. In fact, this story has also been published in book form once before, but this new edition is illustrated with verve by Argentinian illustrator Isol and is charmingly produced.

As I said in the review, this is an unsentimental Christmas story about truth and lies, giving and taking, trust and goodness. It's also about taking the time to see ... and to be. A lovely gift - the sort you'd get out each Christmas and read and be renewed by. But then again, I was a fan before I'd even opened it.

Typewriters: the fates and fingers of authors

Oh Olivetti! My Olivetti. I am sure this is it. My first typewriter. I just found it on mytypewriter.com and this is what they say about it: A worldwide favorite of students, its also the perfect portable for everyone from poets to PTA secretaries. Yes, poets. That was me - tapping poems on those keys with the small dip for a finger tip, just so, and each key pressing a metal arm with two small metal letters on the end [lower case and upper case], or a question mark or colon or quotation mark, and each tap would push that letter or mark into the paper, and leave a small shapely dent. 

Then there was the ower of the 'shift' - push it down and the whole of the key structure would lift like subjects before royalty to make a lower case letter a capital letter. At the end of each line, the lever had to be grabbed and pushed along so the black rubber paper roller [known as the carriage] pulled the page up and along to the start of the next line. Ch-ding. And sometimes the ribbon spool would stop feeding the ribbon through and I'd need to fiddle with a tiny clip to make it run again, sometimes I wouldn't notice and the metal letters would tap on the same spot long enough to cut right through it, or sometimes the ribbon would run dry of black or red ink and need replacing. And to correct mistakes, there was whiteout in bottles or on slips of paper which you put under the key before pressing the letter again.

[You know, I wonder if the second Olivetti is more like mine in fact - plainer, a little heavier?]

There's something about the act of typing, something expressive about it. The whole body wields the arms which push the hands which tap those finger tips, and it's like the fingers push and dig at the same time. They work to get those letters onto the paper. And the act of pushing the carriage along to get to the next line is like being a conductor of an orchestra with all the energy and showmanship it implies. I remember my father - his big hands tapping, his whole body throwing itself behind them, chucking that roller along at the end of a line with a loud and satisfying DING. My mother was more circumspect more compact about it, less ding-y, really.

I suppose the amazing thing is both my parents used typewriters as both of them are writers. The Olivetti was theirs. I inherited it. I tapped my early poems on it, and my student essays. Stories sometimes too. I loved it. It made my poems look like poems and my essays look tidy and formal. It helped make me a real writer.

For some reason, after university when I left NZ to live in England, I bought myself a new typewriter. Had the old one broken? Or did I just want something fancy and new and mine? I bought an Olympia. It's still in the garage in its case. Or I think it's an Olympia. I should just go and check, but it's late. It certainly looked very like this - but perhaps a little smaller and lighter? I like the blurb that goes with it: The writer's typewriter of the 70s. Ever since their introduction, Olympia SM 8 & 9 models have been very closely tied to the fates and fingers of authors and writers. They're dependable, comfortable to use, and nice and solid in feel and function. This machine is probably the most preferred writing tool for anyone prefers a manual and it sure will serve for many years to come.

'The fates and fingers of authors and writers', well who can argue with that? I've just found out on typewriter.com [which has a host of bios of typewriting authors] that Paul Auster got an Olympia in the 70s, not long before I got mine. This is him on the left. But back when I typed on my Olympia in our small London flat not too far from Primrose Hill, I didn't know Auster's work. Back then, I was like Sylvia Plath, angrily tapping angry stuff, enough to annoy the elderly Hungarian refugee downstairs. Except this was Plath's typewriter below [the actual one apparently]: a large, heavy Royal.

Nik, one of my writing students, bought himself a Royal this year - like Hemingway rather then Plath. In fact here, thanks to the power of the internet, is Hemingway's actual typewriter. 

It's been lovely reading typewritten work again. The way it's not absolutely perfect. The way you can see how the letters have found their place on the page, and without too much trouble you can imagine the noise and the orchestration behind them; and then it's no small leap to imagine the brain fitting those letters together to make the words. This is writing as a physical act, a theatrical, memorable act - my father throwing the carriage along so hard I suspected it might part with the typewriter one day, neighbours agitated with the angry clatter of my poems, and Auster - look at him - his fingers are fair twitching with expectation.

Dream Days in the Hotel Existence

I want to talk about happiness and well being, about those rare, unexpected moments when the voice in your head goes silent and you feel at one with the world.

I want to talk about the early June weather, about harmony and blissful repose, about robins and yellow finches and bluebirds darting past the green leaves of trees.

I want to talk about the benefits of sleep, about the pleasures of food and alcohol, about what happens to your mind when you step into the light of the two o'clock sun and feel the warm embrace of air around your body.

I want to talk about Tom and Lucy, about Stanley Chowder and the four days we spent at the Chowder Inn, about the thoughts we thought and the dreams we dreamed on that hilltop in southern Vermont.

I want to remember the cerulean dusks, the langurous, rosy dawns, the bears yelping in the woods at night.

I want to remember it all. If all is too much to ask, then some of it. No, more than some of it. Almost all. Almost all, with blanks reserved for the missing parts.

The beginning of the chapter Dream Days in the Hotel Existence from The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster [Faber, p. 166]

It's not often happiness jumps out of the pages of a novel like this. As poet Bill Manhire says - and he's quoting others I believe - 'happiness writes white'. It is simply not interesting enough to jump from the page; it struggles to its feet and then falls back again helplessly blending with the white of the paper. All too often we skim over hapless happiness to get to the more colourful and various stuff of misery. I like the way Paul Auster unselfconsciously rounds up joy and makes it vivid.

Today, after a very rough start, I had unexpected moments of happiness. There were no robins or bluebirds or mild June weather, but there were yelps of excitement with friends over a wonderful discovery, high-fives with a daughter who's been offered something she's dreamed of for years, a son home for pizza who might have a job at last.

And there was a cerulean dusk. The sky blending with the sea, and people swimming and a ferry docking, and a languorous, liquid light.

It's a perplexing, strange and beautiful place Hotel Existence.

Like Twenty-one Elephants

When I was in New York last month - a wide-eyed first timer - I was told the story of P.T. Barnum walking 21 elephants over the Brooklyn Bridge in 1884. It was a stunt to prove the safety of the audacious new suspension bridge built to link Lower Manhattan to the then City of Brooklyn. Unlike the elephants, I didn't get to cross the bridge - too much to do in Manhattan and too little time with a daughter with stars in her eyes - but I have put it top of my list for next time.

The main reason for crossing the bridge is one of my favourite writers: Paul Auster, whose The Brooklyn Follies I read while away. Park Slope, Brooklyn, is one of those places I think I know well because Auster has served it up to me so brilliantly in novels and screenplays (remember the joys of Smoke?) But a place is never quite as you imagine it to be is it? I thought I knew Manhattan thanks to Woody Allen, Sarah Jessica Parker, Jennifer Aniston, De Lillo, Wharton, James, Auster etc, but having been there now I know I know it better, or rather differently. I can see the geography more clearly for sure (see the casual way I can drop in a phrase like 'Lower Manhattan') and between the lines of a book set in NYC I can now take in with little effort the concentrated-jostling-multi-lingual-cheek-by-jowl-living-in-the-canyons-skyward-thrusting-angst-energy-hubris thing that defines it.

And Park Slope is part of that, right? Well it is and it isn't. The 'isn't' is what I know and don't know. And what I don't know doesn't materially matter, this is fiction after all. When I open the pages of a book set in Brooklyn it will always be in my Brooklyn - as sketchy or as detailed as I want. It would just be nice to underline the writing of an Auster book like Brooklyn Follies with glimpses of the real Brooklyn. The 'oh yes' moments I got reading McGrath's Ghost Town while in Manhattan.

The Brooklyn Follies is a terrific novel. One of those stories which rolls forward with only brief glances backwards - a tale told by the protagonist as if he's reading from the book he's writing (in this case a collection of stories of human folly). It begins 'I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn....' Nathan is 59 and suffering from lung cancer and a life he'd rather forget. In Brooklyn, random events and chance meetings with people that include a slippery bookshop owner, a depressed nephew and a runaway nine-year-old help Nathan forget. And he writes it all down ...

So there it is: the usual Auster meta-fictional story-telling where the character is the author ... to a point... and the reader doesn't always know what is story story and what is real story, and the author directs and sums up what's happening like one of the Brothers Grimm, or - as he puts it - the Ancient Mariner. Nathan is also one of those dudes Auster likes to write about that has had setbacks and for whom random stuff and strange coincidences are a transformation of sorts, there is the democratic cast of characters Auster readers have come to love - each person with a story that's given space and is worth hearing, there are those long conversations which can become speeches and range from banal to philosophical, there's the author's constant playfulness with identity and the stuff of family, and the sudden breakouts from the momentum of the story to lay out out clearly on the page what is good in this corner of the planet. Finally there is his love of place: Brooklyn.

Some of the reviews I've read (spoiler alert on the linked review - last para gives the end away) think Auster is taking the easy route with this his tenth novel and simply ticking the boxes. Well, you see, I read Auster because I like the boxes he ticks. Very much indeed.

Which is why I want to cross the bridge. It's not just about real glimpses of a place I haven't been, it's a fandom thing - seeing where these excellent books have come from, what inspired them. Breathing the same air. My friend, David, tells me there's a bookshop in Park Slope Auster hangs out in, and I might just spot him there. Better start saving.

Imagining it otherwise

This was the NASA Image of the Day yesterday - the one I see on my google page. Usually it's universes colliding, stars exploding, black holes hoovering, or rockets poised to launch against a sunrise. See the thin plume of smoke? The photograph was taken on Sept 11, 2001.

NASA said:

'This image is one of a series taken that day of metropolitan New York City by the International Space Station's Expedition 3 crew that shows a plume of smoke rising from the Manhattan skyline .... Commander Culbertson said, "It's horrible to see smoke pouring from wounds in your own country from such a fantastic advantage point. The dichotomy of being on a spacecraft dedicated to improving life on the earth and watching life being destroyed by such willful, terrible acts is jolting to the psyche, no matter who you are.'

Not sure about that 'improving life on earth' concept, but the simple plume of smoke couldn't be more eloquent and disturbing. On the literature front, I notice that Paul Auster's new novel Man in the Dark has stepped into the 'genre' of 9/11 fiction. It will hopefully be a better read than De Lillo's intriguing but ultimately opaque and heartless Falling Man. A review of Falling Man in the Quarterly Conversation says it is a post-modern novel struggling 'to present the unpresentable', enabling us 'to see only by making it impossible to see.' (my emphasis) So it's not opaque for the sake of it, then, but paradoxically to illuminate the, well, man in the dark. I certainly found the passages set in and around the twin towers stood out starkly and chaotically against the controlled and distant world De Lillo had created. It was hard to breathe there.

'It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night.' FALLING MAN

Jonathan Safran Foer’s 9/11 novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close takes another step away from that. I enjoyed it for its playfulness and cleverness, even though, after some thought, I decided the conceit of the wise, knowing, other-worldly child was a cop out. The erudite QC reviewer regards it as 'facile'.

What else is there? I heard Patrick McGrath read - brilliantly - from Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now a story about a psychiatrist infatuated with a patient who began visiting a prostitute after the events of 9/11. He didn't finish the story, but the Wellington writers' festival crowd were rivetted by the telling. Was it offering us more on the darkened and collapsed interiors of Manhattan's inhabitants?


Of Man in the Dark the Guardian writes:

'Paul Auster's latest is replete with his trademark tricksiness, but is no less germane. In Man in the Dark, a widower fantasises an escape from the pain of his loss by imagining an America where 9/11 never happened. But the civil war he conjures up in its place teaches him to treasure the tender hope his equally bereaved granddaughter represents.'

So yet again fiction elects to glance away from the event itself. Which is not a bad thing for fiction to do. The mass media has laid it on with a trowel, and space is needed for the imagination to construct 'the unpresentable' in the appalled air around that nonchalant thread of smoke.

Gathering Smoke

'This is the first important lesson that the writer must learn. Writing a novel is gathering smoke.'

For the rest of this quote by Walter Mosely go here. It is wonderfully argued and resonates with me today especially because last night I watched one of my favourite films (again): Smoke by Wayne Wang and Paul Auster (author of NY Trilogy, The Brooklyn Follies).

It is a little movie set in and around a tobacco store in New York. Harvey Keitel is the shop owner Auggie Wren and William Hurt is the author Paul Benjamin who has writer's block. There are, as you'd expect with an Auster creation, stories within stories within stories. Truth and lies and 'bullshitting'. Lots of lingering moments of telling and listening and waiting.

One of the first stories, told by Benjamin in the tobacco shop, is about how Sir Walter Raleigh attempted to weigh smoke. He says Raleigh weighed a cigar, then smoked it - keeping the ash and the butt - and then weighed those. The difference between the two weights was the weight of the smoke.

Interesting to know how that would apply with a novel ... I suppose you'd need to reverse that experiment, after all you start with the smoke and end with the cigar.

Keitel's character Auggie is full of stories too. His approach is simple:

'People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open you're going to see just about all that you can handle.'

Here is one of Auggie's stories. We see it acted out like this only after he's told it to Benjamin - a stunning piece of cinema with the camera staying on Keitel's face for almost all of the ten minutes it takes. The music is by the inimitable Tom Waits. Sublime.

To end, here's a quote from Paul Auster who's interviewed in the collected scripts of Smoke and, the follow-up movie, Blue in the Face (Faber).

'Writing a novel is an organic process, and most of it happens unconsciously. It's long and slow and very gruelling. A screenplay is more like a jigsaw puzzle.'