When Paul Auster was 14, he saw a young boy struck by lightning. This was at a summer camp in upstate New York, in July 1961. The boys were on a hike in the woods. A storm broke – “the summer storm to end all summer storms”, as Auster described it in his 1995 essay Why Write? “verywhere we went, we were met by more lightning.” At last, someone spotted a meadow. “o get to it, we had to crawl under a barbed-wire fence.
The incident “absolutely changed my life”, Auster told a BBC interviewer in 2012. “I think about it every day. It never goes away.” The lesson Auster learned from Ralph’s death was the lesson of contingency. “There are very few necessary facts,” he said, in that BBC interview. “Once we’re born, we’re destined to die, and pretty much everything in between is up for grabs.”, of complications associated with lung cancer. In between, much was “up for grabs”.
Neither Auster nor Davis publicly discussed these events; nor did Siri Hustvedt, the writer to whom Auster was happily married from 1981 until his death. But Daniel, or a Daniel-like figure, appears in Auster’s 2003 novelAuster’s habitual method, in memoir and in fiction, was mosaic. Between the tiles of significant memory, what? Often, the answer was padding, or cliche.“surpassingly beautiful”. Others were not so charitable.
You could also say that a cloud of cliche is not just an aesthetic failing; it can also be a place to hide. Auster’s work – across 40-odd volumes of fiction, nonfiction, poetry – teeters bewilderingly between the higher evasiveness and the lower evasiveness . Now you see him, now you only think you do.
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