A New York folly: Remembering Paul Auster

By Nick Canfield

Early Tuesday morning brought the sad news that the author Paul Auster — maybe the most-Brooklyn novelist of the last half century, a literary force who supremely captured the essence of life in our corner of the world — had died.

His books like “The New York Trilogy” feature the city as a character and show the uniqueness of his voice. However, it was an encounter I had with the author in 2008 that left the greatest impression on me, and said the most about him as a writer and a person.

I had gone to a screening of a documentary called “Doc,” about the writer and Paris Review co-founder Harold “Doc” Humes. Auster, appearing in the film, was there for a Q&A. It turns out that Doc Humes had set a young Paul on the path to being a novelist.

Auster grew up in New Jersey and came to the city to attend Columbia University in the heady hippie days of the late 1960s. One afternoon, Auster met Humes while the older man was handing out money to passers-by on campus. Humes had fled Paris after falling out with his Paris Review co-founders George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen, upon learning that Matthiessen was briefly a clandestine agent for the CIA — which had also provided seed funding for the famed literary journal.

Humes had written a couple of reasonably successful novels, but he didn’t fit into mainstream society and had decided to come to the Columbia campus to give away the earnings from his books. After meeting Auster on the street, Doc promptly moved onto his couch and set himself up as a philosopher king among the students, using Auster’s apartment as his permanent salon. Auster, in turn, was catapulted into being co-host of this counter-cultural scene, writing in his memoir, “Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure,” that “I could no more ask him to turn them away than I could ask the sun to stop shining.”

This moment had no small part in putting Auster on his postmodern journey to literary stardom. Humes’ radical social gospel and his groundbreaking novel “The Underground City” were major influences on the young writer. And as Doc’s impact on the students grew, so did their desire to protest the Vietnam War and disrupt the administration. In April 1968 they took over several school buildings, in a 56-year preamble to this past week’s protests. Auster himself occupied the Mathematics Hall for seven days until the administration called in the police, when he was pulled out by his hair and arrested.

Auster was unsure they had accomplished much but said he had no regrets about that time. “I was proud to have done my bit for the cause. Both crazy and proud,” he wrote in the New York Times. After graduation, he followed in Doc’s footsteps, moving to Paris for a few years to write essays and do French translations. Upon returning to New York, he moved to Brooklyn and published “The Invention of Solitude” in 1982, the acclaimed debut memoir that lifted him to fame.

Over the next four decades, Paul Auster became one of the most celebrated authors in New York literary history. He was incredibly prolific, penning notable titles such as “Leviathan” and “The Brooklyn Follies,” and writing several screenplays including “Smoke.” Though I remember that he seemed to look back on those formative years as giving him the context to discover the author that he was, and his work’s questioning style. It all started for Auster because he said “yes” to letting a man he called in his memoir “a ravaged, burnt-out writer who had run aground on the shoals of his own consciousness” crash on his couch and teach him a few things. Perhaps that’s a lesson for every artist.