Reminiscences of Paul Auster (1947-2024) [by Mitch Sisskind]

Reminiscences of Paul Auster

Tom’s Restaurant
The waitress brought some hamburgers to our booth. Paul said, “What if the food suddenly started eating us? That would be amazing.” A few years later I wrote a story based on Paul’s speculation. It was called “A Day I’ll Never Forget,” Paul showed it to Maxine Groffsky, the fiction editor of The Paris Review, and she published it in that esteemed periodical. George Plimpton was furious.

The College Inn
The College Inn was a restaurant down the street from Tom’s. A day or so after the big police bust in 1968 Paul and I had lunch there with one of the most radical students, an intense guy who could really inspire a crowd. He had made his bones in the Progressive Labor Party. He had been a track star in high school. He had a tic that caused him to keep bouncing up and down on his chair. But now he seemed concerned. He said, “Well, I liked how the Barnard girls were chanting the cops eat shit, but we need to get the cops back on campus. Get more kids hit over the head. As many as possible.”

Living Hand
In Paris we started a literary mag called Living Hand. The title was from a fragment Keats wrote in the margin of a poem he was working on. Paul got some French heavyweights – poets, not boxers – to contribute their work. Best of all, Joan Mitchell gave us a pen and ink drawing for the cover.

Joan Mitchell
Paul and I took a train to meet with Joan Mitchell. She was in a town outside Paris, in a house where Monet had lived. Joan Mitchell was an artist proprement dit. At about eleven o’clock in the morning we met her in a bar, drinking with some truck drivers. One of the drivers walked back with us to the Monet house. He never spoke during the light lunch served by a servant girl. Some dogs were lying around. Paul mentioned that a movie producer in Paris had hired him to go to Mexico to help his wife write a play. Joan seemed skeptical that writing a play was what this was all about. But Paul disagreed: “He just wants her to be happy.” Paul said the producer also wanted to put him in the new “Three Musketeers’ movie but he’d have to learn to sword fight.

The Cockroach
We were at an expensive restaurant in Los Angeles with Ricky Jay, his wife Chrissann Verges, and the novelist Mona Simpson. Suddenly a cockroach jumped down from the ceiling onto Chrissann’s plate. Or was it a startling illusion by Ricky Jay? No, it was the real thing. The staff was very apologetic. But they didn’t comp us for the dinner and maybe added the cost of the roach.

Envoi
A few years ago I asked Paul what he was working on and he mentioned a new book called 4321. He said it was very long. “Don’t drop it on your foot.”

The truth is, until a few weeks ago I had not read any of Paul’s books, but when I saw a review of Baumgartner I got it immediately. The book describes a lonely older man, a retired academic, whose wife Anna was killed years ago in an accident at the seashore.

Baumgartner is still intensely mourning Anna. He’s kept her writings and photographs as a kind of shrine. Later he’s contacted by a female grad student from Michigan who’s eager to meet him, and is even driving halfway across the country to do so. But by the book’s end they haven’t met and maybe never will.

Well, Anna was taken by the ocean, and the new young woman may never reach Baumgartner. But what comes across in the novel is a man’s inexorable disconnecting from a woman’s touch and his mourning for that specific loss.

I sensed that in my last phone conversation with Paul about two weeks before he died. He talked about his illness and the treatment and even seemed mildly optimistic. But then he spoke about Siri and his love for her, about what she’s meant to him, how he treasures every minute he’s ever been with her.

It was so moving to hear this. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a man express himself in quite this way before. Whatever else I may remember about Paul, I’ll never forget this. Farewell.

4321
Paul

Note: All posts by Mitch Sisskind are copyright (c) 2024 by Mitch Sisskind. All rights reserved

Comments

[Bob Holman]

Beautiful Remembrances

[Summer Brenner]

Yes, it is beautiful, Mitch, with your special infusion of mystery and irony.