INVISIBLE FATHER
By W.S. Merwin
THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE
By Paul Auster.
174 pp. New York: SUN. Paper, $6.
PAUL AUSTER'S book starts with an
event at once ordinary and unique, commonplace and incommunicable. His father,
after a divorce and 15 years of living alone in a big house in New Jersey, ''in
the best of health, not even old, with no history of illness,'' suddenly died.
Their relationship had been composed in great part of remoteness and absence.
Most of the feelings it had engendered and fostered had been unarticulated and
unnoticed. Indeed, his father's inability to notice him had seemed to Mr.
Auster one of the principal and abiding elements of their knowing each other.
''It was not that I felt he
disliked me. It was just that he seemed distracted, unable to look in my
direction. And more than anything else, I wanted him to take notice of me. ...
The more aloof he was, the higher the stakes became for me. ... I realized that
even if I had done all the things I had hoped to do, his reaction would have
been exactly the same. Whether I succeeded or failed did not essentially matter
to him. ... his perception of me would never change ... we were fixed in an
unmoveable relationship, cut off from each other on opposite sides of a wall.
Even more than that, I realized that none of this had anything to do with me.
It had only to do with him. Like everything else in his life, he saw me only
through the mists of his solitude.''
It is not surprising that his
father's sudden death -the abrupt ending of a bond so frustrated, unexplored,
undeveloped, so seldom, apparently, present - should have stunned Mr. Auster.
It overwhelmed him not only with shock but also with a desperate need to
examine at last his memory of the man who had been his father, his own feelings
about both their lives, and to put it all into words. When he first heard the news
at 8 o'clock on a Sunday morning, he ''could not muster a single ennobling
thought.'' But then, ''Even before we packed our bags and set out on the three
hour drive to New Jersey, I knew that I would have to write about my father. I
had no plan, had no precise idea of what this meant. ... I thought: my father
is gone. If I do not act quickly, his entire life will vanish along with him.''
''The Invention of Solitude''
starts with Paul Auster's urge to save his father's life from vanishing along
with his father. It leads initially to an evocation of his father's conduct and
oddities, a reconstruction made of remembered scraps and impressions. The
groping account takes the form of a series of relatively brief paragraphs and
essays that examine his father's behavior toward his family and business
acquaintances, as well as his social life after his divorce.
The account arrives inevitably at
a consideration of his father's own parents. There is a dramatic, if tenuous,
consistency in the fact that Mr. Auster, rummaging through his father's
effects, should discover that ''One very big album, bound in expensive leather
with a gold-stamped title on the cover - This is Our Life: The Austers - was
totally blank inside'' and that a photograph from his father's childhood (of
his brothers, sister and mother) had had the image of Mr. Auster's grandfather
torn out of it. The woman in the picture, Mr. Auster's grandmother, had shot
and killed her husband in 1919 and had been acquitted. The murdered man's
brother had tried and failed to kill her in revenge. The violence occurred when
Paul's father was an infant. What it explains is certainly beyond fathoming;
but it and the events leading up to it and on from it obviously entered into
the subsequent character of Mr. Auster's father, the youngest child.
The consideration of what has
survived in Mr. Auster's memory, his ''Portrait of an Invisible Man,'' occupies
the first half of the book. The approach to the subject is clearly as direct as
he could make it: an effort to get the ''material,'' as he suddenly conceived
of it, into language. The notion that there is in fact a relatively solid body
of material that exists on its own and can really be put into words is one of
the abiding and essential delusions of writers - a delusion that may assert
itself with particular vigor at moments when the subject is pressing. Partly
because of it, I think, the first section of ''The Invention of Solitude'' has
some of the virtues and rawness of letters written under stress. The clearest
and most telling passages - including those that convey glimpses of remoteness,
absence and speechlessness - are direct and immediate and seem to have emerged
more or less as they are out of the guiding impulse.
But the telling itself was a
surprise for Mr. Auster. ''When I first started, I thought it would come
spontaneously, in a trancelike outpuring. So great was my need to write that I
thought the story would be written by itself. But the words have come very
slowly so far. ... No sooner have I thought one thing than it evokes another
thing, and then another thing, until there is an accumulation of detail so
dense that I feel I am going to suffocate. Never before have I been so aware of
the rift between thinking and writing. For the past few days, in fact, I have
begun to feel that the story I am trying to tell is somehow incompatible with
language.'' The result is a fraying of the impulse: The evocation of a life is
distracted into general statements whose purpose is to explain. Sometimes they
do or seem to, and sometimes, as he says of his father, ''he seemed to lose his
concentration, to forget where he was, as if he had lost the sense of his own
continuity.'' The subject, approached directly, eludes the pursuer. Evanescent
to begin with, it dissolves. Mr. Auster therefore turns from his subject to an
examination of the attempt to write about it, self-consciously tracing a
selfconsciousness that occasionally affects the style and form of his account
without benefiting them.
For years Paul Auster has been a
gifted, sensitive, learned translator of contemporary French literature,
especially poetry, and the practice of responsible translation may have served
to nourish the illusion of a discrete body of material waiting only to be
written down. His book was conceived and begun with honesty, earnestness and
intelligence. When his subject proved invisible, he moved in the second half of
the book to an extended examination of analogous situations bearing on his
relationship with his father and to the themes of isolation and speech, memory,
and the present.
This part of ''The Invention of
Solitude'' is called ''The Book of Memory''; while it contains some ambitious
and illuminating passages, it is marred, more than the first part, by recurrent
pointless mannerisms apparently suggested by contemporary French
''experimental'' writing - among them a tendency toward ponderous and
sententious notation. He decides to refer to himself in the third person and
informs us of this grave decision. ''He walks back and forth between the table
and the window. He turns on the radio and then turns if off. He smokes a
cigarette. Then he writes. ''It was. It will never be again.'' And so forth.
The value of the book and above all of the second half emerges in spite of some
of the means and flourishes employed to set it forth; even the most original
and penetrating sections are sometimes impaired by the author's urge to supply
a final weighty generalization.
BUT there are in the second part
of the book moving, delicately perceived portaits of lives and relationships.
And there are a number of glosses that reflect on Mr. Auster's own story -
commentaries on Collodi and Pinocchio, in particular, on Jonah and on Vermeer.
Mr. Auster has also written criticism for years, and perhaps it is not surprising
that some of these pages of critical comment, ostensibly the most distant from
his original subject, are among the most skillful, sure and realized in the
book. And having found both his father and his father's father to be invisible
in the first section, the account of his maternal grandfather's life and death
in the second part is a clear and unhesitating evocation of a touching, likable
man. The mode that Paul Auster affects at moments throughout ''The Invention of
Solitude'' - that of the notation intended or half-intended or as though
intended for later writings - is often obtrusive in this book, but it suggests
that much of the story has yet to be told.
W.S. Merwin is the
author of ''Unframed Originals,'' a collection of family portraits. His latest
book of poems, ''Opening the Hand," will be published this spring.
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