Auster's Missing Ego

Writer Auster's Missing Ego While arguably more well-known per capita in France than America, Auster is by no means an author whose popularity has become significant in the last five years. Paul Auster, really, has been around forever. The first installment in the New York Trilogy was published 17 years ago, and he'd already been writing and publishing for more than a decade by then. Five years ago, in fact, the films Smoke and Blue in the Face (which Auster wrote and cowrote/codirected, respectively) were already two years in the past, and they had been part of one of those surges in popularity that arise during a lifelong artist's lifetime.

But so it goes with the French?or perhaps all lit-minded Europeans?who not only enjoy their own genius, but the genius in their ability to recognize and embrace genius. This guy eventually had one good question: "If you tell us to read the old dead authors, why do you think we should read you?"

"I don't," Auster replied. Delivered not with self-effacing smugness, not with a smirking cuteness fishing for knowing chuckles from a media-laden audience, not with a single drop of false modesty. Unlike so many of the media-darling writers who clog this city's artistic arteries, Auster has just read to an audience of students and civilians without a hint of ego or climbing purpose.

The 55-year-old Brooklyn writer is the spring 2002 Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College's Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, and judging from the 95-percent student crowd, this reading and "conversation with" was part of the syllabus. It was, however, open and free to the public, and it drew a good number of non-students to the warm auditorium last Tuesday night.

For an hour, Auster read several short stories and anecdotes he's written over the last decade. Most were observations of coincidence, casual questions of the power of incidence on memory and relationships. He recently brought this theme to NPR's National Story Project, which yielded I Thought My Father was God and Other True Tales, a collection of 180 essays culled from more than 4000 submissions from the program's listeners. In his own work, and in those he chose for inclusion in the collection, Auster suggests if you're an open, willing observer, you will find countless footnotes and meta-tags embedded in your life, coincidences surrounding us that make the true events of life more entertaining and sometimes more ridiculous than any fiction.

There were several stories of children in peril, including one in which a friend's toddler knocked over a vase in the hallway, prompting Auster to be in the right place at the right time when his own child took a potentially disastrous spill down the stairs, launched headlong toward a window. In another, Auster as a child yanks a neighbor girl out of the path of a moving car. More than just relating interesting vignettes, in these anecdotes Auster quietly examines the idea of defining moments. He puts the question of how incidents such as these can affect us deeply, yet not equally. For instance, for years after pulling the neighbor girl to safety, Auster held that rescue as a defining moment in his existence: he might very well have saved someone's life. Years later, however, he asked the girl-grown-woman for her recollection of this near accident, and she had none.

In another tale, young Auster encounters Willie Mays after a baseball game but is unable to secure an autograph because neither he nor anyone else in his family has a pencil. He recalls being "revolted" with his eight-year-old self not just for being unprepared, but for subsequently crying his eyes out in disappointment. After that day, he began religiously carrying a pencil with him, and has come to believe that if there's a pencil in your pocket, there's a good chance you will eventually begin to use it. That, he says, is how he became a writer.

Two friends of mine?one domestic, one imported?recently attended the 2002 Armory Show, an art world Event where galleries from around the world gather to showcase their artists. So many of the artists in attendance, they lamented, were so wrapped up in name-dropping and party-hopping that the work became inconsequential. This is not a new observation, but it reinforces that too much of art in New York City, maybe in much of this world, is overridden and overwritten by the tangential distractions of ego and ambition. More artists in this city should just sit down to present and discuss their work without looking for the cameras and shaking all the right hands.