Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (152 page)

I was twelve years old the first time I walked on water. The man in the black clothes taught me how to do it, and I’m not going to pretend I learned that trick overnight. Master Yehudi found me when I was nine, an orphan boy begging nickels on the streets of Saint Louis, and he worked with me steadily for three years before he let me show my stuff in public.

The speaker is Walt Rawley (echoes of Walter Raleigh who, although he didn’t walk on it, sailed on water virtuosically) and the year is 1927, when Lindbergh flew the Atlantic in the
Spirit of St Louis
(flying is another trick Yehudi teaches Walt).

In
Timbuktu
(1999) the narrator is a dog, Mr Bones, companion to a homeless Brooklyn man on a quest south. It is designed as homage to
Don Quixote
, the one book, Auster says, that he keeps going back to: ‘It seems to present every problem every novelist has ever had to face, and to do it in the most brilliant and human way imaginable.’ His stories, Auster has said, ‘come to me out of my unconscious. I never look for them. They find me.’ One, more topical, story that found him was
Man in the Dark
(2008), a novel which intertwines the American Civil War with the war in Iraq – another divisive conflict. Auster has, God willing, many more novels inside him. Of all writers, it is hard to predict what they will be.

I remember I wrote something that I worked on for three months and I showed it to Paul and he said, ‘you know what, you should just dump it.’ The thing was that it was awful and I knew there was something wrong with it which was why I showed it to him. I was so relieved to put that stuff in the garbage I can’t tell you.
Siri Hustvedt

Two lines of intertwined fiction and family extend out from Paul Auster. Both share his concerns about narrative, but work those concerns out in strikingly divergent ways. Lydia Davis, Auster’s first wife, was born in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her parents were both writers – her mother, Hope Hale Davis, being the more distinguished. Lydia arrived late in her mother’s eventful career. Hope (well named) was married four times. Her first husband, a ‘vaudeville scenery painter’, did not last long. In 1932 she moved on to an even shorter-lasting union with the gadfly British Marxist, Claud Cockburn (at the time a
Times
correspondent in America, soon to join the
Daily Worker
). Hope’s third marriage was to the German economist Hermann Brunck. By now she was writing short stories and was, with her husband, a clandestine member of the Communist party. Brunck killed himself in
1937, under the intolerable pressure, it is recorded, of having to pretend to be a Nazi sympathiser while spying for Moscow. In 1939, Hope made her fourth match with Robert Gorham Davis, a professor of English at Columbia University. This marriage endured until his death, in 1998. Hope Davis herself lived to be a hundred. To the end she wrote well-received short fiction and memoirs.

Lydia Davis was born in 1947. In interviews she lays stress on the simplicities of the ‘Dick and Jane’ books, which introduced her to the world of reading, during one of her father’s years’ teaching abroad, in Austria, in the early 1950s. The tightness of those infant fables formed her literary reflexes, she suggests. She earned her first degree from Barnard College in 1970 and took up work as a literary translator from French – a line of work which would, eventually, earn her high honours. In 1971 she went to Paris with Paul Auster – to prosecute her career as much as his, which was, currently, seriously adrift as he tried, single-handedly, to refashion the American novel. They moved back to New York in 1974 and married.

The Austers divorced some years later. There was one child, Daniel, who grew up living principally with his father and stepmother – Auster’s second wife, Siri Hustvedt. Davis went on to marry the painter, Alan Cote, by whom she had a second son. It was in this phase of her career that Davis began publishing the minimalist fiction which has earned such extravagant plaudits as Rick Moody’s: ‘The best prose stylist in America.’ Publicists never have to hunt far for a strapline to Davis’s paperbacks. Her first collection was entitled
Break It Down
(1986). The phrase is apposite. No writer has broken down fiction more dramatically into icy, glittering splinters. She has said that the epigrammatic brevity of her own narratives is a polar reaction to the sweeping prose of Proust, of whom she is her country’s leading translator.

She taught creative writing at Bard University and was awarded a five-year MacArthur ‘Genius’ Award in 2003. Her reputation has grown to rival, even outshine, that of her ex. It’s a thought-provoking rivalry. She wrestles with the same intractable generic problems: how, that is, to bend (or buckle, in her case) fiction to the needs of the ‘real thing’. His solution has been artful genre fusions, in which Paul Auster is both fictional protagonist, subject matter and author. Her solution is compression to a diamond-like narrative crystal.

Like the diamond, her stories, so to call them, glint with faceted meanings. The following, for example:

Collaboration With Fly

I put that word on the page,

but he added the apostrophe.

A fly, we gather, has landed on the page as she writes, creating an unwanted effect
of punctuation – an inverted comma. But is it misleading? ‘Apostrophe’, as a figure of speech, not punctuation, means something along the lines of ‘breaking off’ (flying off?) to directly address the reader. And why is the interfering fly ‘he’? The well-read reader will recall William Blake’s song of innocence on the fly – also a ‘Man’:

Little Fly,

Thy summer’s play

My thoughtless hand

Has brushed away.

Am not I

A fly like thee?

Or art not thou

A man like me?

Davis’s narrative miniatures use resonance rather than depiction. They do not yield their meanings – they suggest them. In the Lilliput dimensions she works in, Davis’s fiction can be extraordinarily rich. The following ‘story’, for example, of marital ennui (another favourite subject, particularly, one may note, in the period after her separation from Auster):

Childcare

It’s his turn to take care of the baby. He is cross.

He says, ‘I never get enough done.’

The baby is in a bad mood, too.

He gives the baby a bottle of juice and sits him well back in a big armchair.

He sits himself down in another chair and turns on the television.

Together they watch
The Odd Couple.

The TV series, one notes, ran in the US from 1970 to 1975, with re-runs for a few years thereafter. Roughly coincidental, that is, with the Austers’ marriage. It is tempting to ‘read into’ the broken-down relationship chronicled in so extraordinarily few words.

*

Auster married his second wife, Siri Hustvedt, in 1981. She was born, of Scandinavian-American descent (something carried over into the dramatis personae of all her fiction), in Northfield, Minnesota. Her father, Lloyd, taught Scandinavian literature at the local college, which Siri herself duly went on to attend. Her mother had immigrated from Scandinavia at the age of thirty. Norwegian was the primary language spoken at home during what seems to have been a happy upbringing, tempered by inherent Scandinavian gloom.

After graduating with her first degree, Siri moved to New York to work on a
doctorate from Columbia. Her thesis on Dickens’s
Our Mutual Friend
was accepted in 1986. Columbia was, over these years, a hotbed of ‘literary theory’ and – as well as an affection for Dickens’s traditional realisms – Hustvedt cultivated a career-long interest in contemporary debate on the poetics of fiction. She decided against an academic career. Had she chosen that route she might well have moved, she says, across into art history. None the less there remained something donnish in her creative personality. Characters writing dissertations, along with dour Norwegian-Americans, crop up in all her novels. Hustvedt and Auster met at a poetry reading. At the time they were both ‘completely unknowns’. She was beginning her thesis: he was suffering his seventeen rejections for the manuscript of
City of Glass
. ‘We’ve shared his whole prose career’, Hustvedt insists, with a backward glance at her predecessor, who, we apprehend, preceded that prose career – or, at least, its published manifestation.

There were two children in the second Auster marriage: Daniel (the son by Lydia Davis) and a daughter, Sophie. Hustvedt, like her husband, followed a traditional route into fiction, publishing first poetry then short stories. Her earliest work displays her fascination with perception-altering brain malfunction – principally migraine. She herself is a ‘migraineur’ and, for some time, ran a blog on the ailment in the
New York Times.
The truths of fiction and the fictionality of truth are nagged-at Hustvedt themes. We use narrative, her narratives suggest, to shape experience. Without that narrative reshaping (and falsification) we see nothing. The idea is prominent in her first novel,
The Blindfold
(1992). Hustvedt’s second published novel,
The Enchantment of Lily Dahl
(1996), is set in the nowhere of her native Minnesota. The heroine, a short-order waitress, has her banal existence disturbed by a visiting Jewish artist. Love and violence ensue. Distant allegories of her marriage to Auster (small-town Norwegian American girl/New York Jewish novelist) may be detected. Hustvedt consistently teases the reader with glimpsed elements of her own life. Her early stories, for example, centred on a character called Iris – ‘Siri’ spelled backwards.

Hustvedt’s emergence as something other than the novel-writing wife of novelist Paul Auster was established with her third effort,
What I Loved
(2003). If the preceding novel had teased with its suggestions of autobiography, this novel did so sensationally. In 1998 Hustvedt’s twenty-year-old stepson, Daniel Auster, was arrested for involvement in a horrific murder. The victim was a drug dealer, Angel Melendez, who supplied the Manhattan club world with its necessaries. After a quarrel about money, Melendez was murdered by a New York ‘party promoter’, Michael Alig, who forced Drano down the luckless pusher’s throat, strangling him with a rope before finishing him off with a hammer. He and an accomplice then chopped the body into pieces, stuffed the dismembered flesh and bone into a cardboard box and threw it into the Hudson River. Melendez was identified, months later, by dental records.
Alig meanwhile had partied on. The trial was sensational and further sensationalised by the movie
Party Monster
(2003), with Macaulay Culkin in the Alig role. Hustvedt’s novel was released two months before the film. The connection between them was transparent – at least to anyone who read New York newspapers. Daniel Auster (reportedly) admitted being actually present at the murder, but passed out on heroin. He pleaded guilty to stealing $3,000 from Melendez and was sentenced to five years’ probation. Alig and his accomplice got twenty years in prison for pleading down, on their side, to manslaughter.

Paul Auster has never spoken publicly about his son’s crime or written about it. Hustvedt has.
What I Loved
is narrated by an aged Jewish art history professor at Columbia, Leo Hertzberg, who is slowly going blind as his past life becomes clearer to him. The most important person in that life is not his wife, Erica, from whom Leo is separated, but his friend, the concept artist Bill Wechsler. Wechsler’s art is marked by ‘a brutal desire for purity and resistance to compromise’. He believes that ‘seeing is flux’ – and only art can ‘fix’ the flux. His works of art are contained in transparent boxes. Hustvedt admits to Wechsler being inspired by Auster. After the death of his own son, Matt, in a freak accident at summer camp (one recalls the boyhood friend of Auster’s, struck dead by lightning at a summer camp), Leo’s ‘story’ has stopped. In his loneliness, he assumes the role of favourite uncle to Bill’s son, Mark. Mark (an exact contemporary of Leo’s lost son, Matt) is, it gradually emerges, an incorrigible psychopath. Obliquely it is suggested that this may be the fault of his mother, Bill’s first wife, the minimalist poet Lucille Alcott. The daughter of a professor of law, Alcott is cold and ruthlessly self-contained. The gossip circuit in New York has implied that Hustvedt had Davis in her sights.

Bill, having broken up with Lucille, makes a second marriage with a young woman of Scandinavian descent and Minnesota background, Violet Blom. Warm to Lucille’s cold, she is ‘more beautiful’ even than her husband’s portraits of her. Violet is engaged on writing a dissertation at Columbia when they meet. The subject of the dissertation is women’s hysteria and their spectacular nervous ailments, as something culturally conditioned. (Why, for example, did Victorian women faint so epidemically? Why did Salem girls actually ‘see’ the Devil? Hustvedt eventually published a book along these lines,
The Shaking Woman, or a History of My Nerves
, in 2009.) Mark falls in with the demonic Teddy Giles, a transvestite ‘she monster’, whose preferred art form is homicidal sadism. The action climaxes with the torture, murder and dismemberment of a Spanish kid, Rafael Hernandez, whose remains are stuffed into a suitcase and deposited in the river. He is identified by his dental records. Mark is present and implicated in the murder but finally exonerated, although his stepmother Violet continues to have ‘doubts’ and, as her final comment on the matter, says ‘I hate Mark’. The title,
What I Loved
, echoes ironically.