Mr. Vertigo
by Paul Auster
List Price: $12.95
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0140231900
Publisher: Penguin USA
The grandson of Jewish immigrants, Paul Auster was born in Newark in 1947,
and grew up in South Orange and the New Jersey suburbs. He received an
undergraduate degree and a master's in comparative literature from Columbia
University in New York City. Then, after a six-month stint as an ordinary
seaman on a tanker in the Gulf of Mexico, he spent four years in France,
writing poems and doing translations to eke out a living. Back in New
York, Auster got married, had a son, Daniel, and published four volumes
of poetry - "only read by other poets," he claims. In 1979 his
marriage broke up, his father died, and Auster found himself writing prose.
Published in 1982 as the first half of a book called The Invention
of Solitude, Portrait of an Invisible Man is a family memoir
of a story Auster's father never told: the murder of his grandfather at
the hands of the man's wife, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 1919. Auster never
went back to poetry. He has published eight novels in the last ten years,
though he says in this interview, "Just because you've written one
book doesn't mean you'll be able to write a second." A literary celebrity
in Europe, Auster's work has been translated in to twenty languages and
published to growing critical acclaim in the United States. He has just
finished working on two movies in collaboration with Wayne Wang: Smoke,
starring William Hurt and Harvey Keitel, for which he wrote the screenplay;
and Blue in the Face, which he co-directed. In 1981 he met Siri
Hustvedt, a novelist of Norwegian descent, at a poetry reading. They married
in 1982, and live in a row house in Brooklyn's Park Slope with their daughter,
Sophie, who is seven years old.
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Q: What drew you to the story of Mr. Vertigo?
A: That's a great mystery to me. I don't know where it came from. For years I'd
been walking around with a tale of a master and a disciple in my head,
never very clearly defined, and never much of a story, just a situation.
When I sat down to write it, I thought it would be about twenty pages.
Obviously, I was wrong.
Q: You once told an interviewer that "very strong emotions, traumas
even, generate [my] stories." Was that the case with Mr. Vertigo?
A: Again, every book I've ever written has been a conundrum to me. I don't know
what I'm doing, or why I'm doing it. There is simply the compulsion to
do it, the absolute necessity of getting that story down on paper. Sometimes,
later, after a book is written, I have little glimmers of understanding
about where it came from, little hints. With Mr. Vertigo, I think
it has something to do with the idea of falling from high places. I say
that in the way an anthropologist would say it, strictly based on observation
and the evidence of my own eyes. I can think of several books I've written
in which people fall. In the most important scene of In the Country
of Last Things, Anna Blume jumps through a window on the top floor
of a building in order to save herself; she's not killed, but it changes
the course of her entire life. In Moon Palace, Fogg's obese father
falls into an open grave and breaks his back. Everything in Leviathan
revolves around a man falling off a fire escape. All this, I think
(but how can I really know?) might be connected to something that happened
to my father when I was a little boy. He was working on a roof in Jersey
City and fell off, just like that. He slipped and started tumbling through
the air. If not for a clothesline that broke his fall, he probably would
have been killed. Though I didn't see it happen, I walked around with
that image in my head all through my childhood: my father flying through
space. Maybe that's the source, the thing at the bottom of my strange
obsession.
Q: One of my favorite things about the book is the combination of the spiritual
and the utterly mundane. Both are certainly present in the character of
Master Yehudi: sometimes he sounds like a Zen priest, sometimes like a
carnival huckster.
A: He's a very complex character. On the one hand he's a con man, a charlatan, an
operator trying to make a lot of money--just like everyone else in America.
On the other hand, he has a very deep spiritual side. He's interested
in spiritual truths. Defying the laws of nature, as he proposes to do
with Walt, puts him in a very precarious and interesting position with
God, with the universe, with man. And Master Yehudi thinks about these
things. He takes them seriously.
Q: Where does he come by his spiritual leanings?
A: Hard to say. He was there, fully formed in my head before I started writing. Later
on I realized that his biography was quite similar to Houdini's, who was
also a Hungarian Jew who came from a family of rabbis. His real name was
Erich Weiss. The contrast between what you might call the mythical and
the everyday, how they combine and live side by side in the same world,
is part of what this book is about. It's what establishes its tone. Recently
I stumbled across an interview with Peter Brook, the theater director,
that had a tremendous impact on me. He managed to articulate something
I'd been reflecting on for years. He said - and I don't know if this is
an exact quote, but it's the gist of it - that what he's striving for
in his theater work is the closeness of the everyday and the distance
of myth. He said, "Without the everyday you can't be touched, and
without the myth you can't be amazed." It's a very deep remark, a
statement that comes from years of thinking about what he's doing. I was
very moved by those words, and in some way I think they articulate precisely
what I was hoping to achieve with Mr. Vertigo.
Q: Walt uses a lot of religious language and imagery too. Where does it come
from?
A: What interests me about American language, the language of the people, is that it's very
crude, very lively, very inventive. But at the same time, there's a Biblical
component to it, especially the Bible in the King James version, which
is undoubtedly the most read book in American history, as well as the
book that has been most listened to. For many people, especially people
of earlier generations, it was the only literature they knew. So there's
an astonishing combination in the American vernacular of what you might
call the high and the low. Walt's speech is a perfect example of that.
Q: Isn't Walt searching for some sort of truth?
A: No more or less than anyone else. We're all looking for the truth, aren't we?
Something to believe in, something solid to stand on. You can read this
book in many different ways, and I don't think that one reading is more
valid than another. They all coexist. You can look at it as a parable
of childhood, but you can also look at it as a piece of American history.
You can look at it as a novel about the public and the private, about
money, about show biz, about success and failure. I would be the last
person to try to impose an interpretation on a reader.
Q: Why did you write the story in the first person?
A: Another question I can't answer. That's just how it came to me, the old man looking
back. You could say, though--assuming you're a literary critic-that a
first-person narration is less reliable than a story told in the third
person. A third-person narrator is omniscient; you trust the voice, you
accept it on faith. A first-person narration is more complex, because
you have to take into account who's saying what, and why. What if the
narrator is lying on purpose? You can never ignore that as a possibility.
Q: It's pretty dramatic to make poor Walt choose between his testicles and
stardom. How come you shaped the story that way?
A: I couldn't think of a more dramatic conflict.
Q: Explaining why Mrs. Witherspoon won't be joining them on tour, Master
Yehudi says, "If you just stand there and wait, there's a chance
the thing you're hoping for will come right to you." Do you think
his fix on romantic love is as off-base as Walt does?
A: For many of the things one most ardently wants, patience is a great virtue. Sometimes
things do come to you, including love. But Master Yehudi makes one mistake
after another where Mrs. Witherspoon is concerned. He doesn't play his
cards right.
Q: Mrs. Witherspoon's a lusty lady. Do you think sex is important to men
and women in the same way?
A: I don't think she has a different approach to her sexuality than either Walt or
Master Yehudi. Mrs. Witherspoon is my kind of woman, and I would venture
to say that her view of sex is a lot less unusual than people might think.
To give you some idea of how my books get written, I have to confess that
when I started the novel there was no Mrs. Witherspoon. She just emerged.
She started making appearances as I was writing, and became more and more
important as the book continued. Actually, and this is occurring to me
for the first time, if there's any book that Mr. Vertigo is connected
to, it's Pinocchio, a book that I've thought about long and hard
over the years. In some odd way you could say that Walt is Pinocchio,
Master Yehudi is Master Geppeto, and Mrs. Witherspoon is the Blue Fairy.
Q: Walt the Wonder Boy says, "You have to keep testing yourself, pushing
your talent as hard as you can.... People begin to sense that you're out
there taking risks for them." Is this true of writing?
A: As a writer, I don't think about the audience in the way an actual performer does.
When I wrote that passage, I was thinking about real entertainers, people
who stand up in public and do their work in front of a crowd of strangers.
Q: In your opinion, who are the great storytellers?
A: The anonymous men and women who invented the fairy tales we still tell each other today,
the authors of the 1001 Nights, the European folk tales, the
whole oral tradition that started the moment men learned how to talk.
They're an unending source of inspiration to me.
Q: Are those the sorts of books you like to read? What's on your bedside
table?
A: It's very cluttered right now, which probably means it's a good cross-section of
the kinds of things that interest me. My wife and I just bought two books
for our daughter, who is almost eight, but I claimed them first: a collection
of Yiddish folk tales and another one of French folk tales. I was recently
sent the unabridged, enormous, first English translation of The Man
Without Qualities, by Robert Musil, and that's there too. Then there's
a book about intelligence in dogs, because I'm trying to write about a
dog. Low Life by Luc Santo, and A Void by Georges Perec,
a novelist I admire very much. Also... let me think... a book of poems
by Charles Simic... and one or two others.
Q: Talking about writing in The New York Times Magazine, you say,
"You suffer a lot. You feel inadequate. The sense of failure is enormous."
Do you still feel that way in the light of your growing reputation?
A: Oh yes. The longer you go on writing, the harder writing becomes. You set higher
and higher standards for yourself, and the risks you take become bigger,
more dangerous, more disturbing. Just because you've written one book
doesn't mean you'll be able to write a second, and just because you've
written a second doesn't mean you'll be able to write a third. The struggles
go on right to the end. When I read nice things about me or my work, it's
as though they're talking about someone else. People also say a lot of
nasty things, and if you've made up your mind not to let that get you
down, the only honest way to deal with praise is to ignore it, too.
Q: In the same interview you describe writing as "certainly a stupid
way to live your life, isolating yourself every day, making something
nobody really needs or wants." Do you really believe that?
A: Much of the time, yes. Some of the time, no. But, for better or worse, writing
is what I do, it's what I do best. I'm not good for anything else.
- Ashton Applewhite
© Copyright 2012 by Paul Auster. Reprinted with permission by Penguin USA. All rights reserved.
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