Paul Auster: The Invention of Solitude

The four brothers stuck together. There was something almost medievalabout their loyalty to one another. Although they had theirdifferences, in many ways did not even like one another, I think ofthem not as four separate individuals but as a clan, a quad­ruplicateimage of solidarity. Three of them—the youngest three— wound up asbusiness partners and lived in the same town, and the fourth, who livedonly two towns away, had been set up in business by the other three.There was scarcely a day that my father did not see his brothers. Andthat means for his entire life: every day for more than sixty years.

They picked up habits from each other, figures of speech, littlegestures, intermingling to such a degree that it was impossible to tellwhich one had been the source of any given attitude or idea. Myfather's feelings were unbending: he never said a word against any ofhis brothers. Again, it was the other defined not by what he did but bywhat he was. If one of the brothers happened to slight him or dosomething objectionable, my father would nevertheless refuse to passjudgment. He's my brother, he would say, as if that ex­plainedeverything. Brotherhood was the first principle, the unassailablepostulate, the one and only article of faith. Like belief in God, toquestion it was heresy.

As the youngest, my father was the most loyal of the four and alsothe one least respected by the others. He worked the hardest, was themost generous to his nephews and nieces, and yet these things werenever fully recognized, much less appreciated. My mother recalls thaton the day of her wedding, at the party follow­ing the ceremony, one ofthe brothers actually propositioned her. Whether he would have carriedthrough with the escapade is ano­ther matter. But the mere fact ofteasing her like that gives a rough idea of how he felt about myfather. You do not do that sort of thing on a man's wedding day, evenif he is your brother.

At the center of the clan was my grandmother, a Jewish Mammy Yokum,a mother to end all mothers. Fierce, refractory, the boss. It wascommon loyalty to her that kept the brothers so close. Even as grownmen, with wives and children of their own, they would faith­fully go toher house every Friday night for dinner—without their families. Thiswas the relationship that mattered, and it took pre­cedence overeverything else. There must have been something slightly comical aboutit: four big men, each one over six feet, wait­ing on a little oldwoman, more than a foot shorter than they were.

One of the few times they came with their wives, a neighborhap­pened to walk in and was surprised to find such a large gathering.Is this your family, Mrs. Auster? he asked. Yes, she answered, withgreat smiles of pride. This is —. This is —. This is —. And this isSam. The neighbor was a little taken aback. And these lovely lad­ies,he asked. Who are they? Oh, she answered with a casual wave of thehand. That's —'s. That's —'s. That's —'s. And that's Sam's.

The picture painted of her in the Kenosha newspaper was by no meansinaccurate. She lived for her children. (Attorney Baker: Where could awoman with five children like these go? She clings to them and thecourt can see that they cling to her.) At the same time, she was atyrant, given to screaming and hysterical fits. When she was angry, shewould beat her sons over the head with a broom. She demandedallegiance, and she got it.

Once, when my father had saved the huge sum of ten or twenty dollarsfrom his newspaper route to buy himself a new bicycle, his motherwalked into the room, cracked open his piggy bank, and took the moneyfrom him without so much as an apology. She needed the money to paysome bills, and my father had no re­course, no way to air hisgrievance. When he told me this story his object was not to show howhis mother wronged him, but to de­monstrate how the good of the familywas always more important than the good of any of its members. He mighthave been unhappy, but he did not complain.

This was rule by caprice. For a child, it meant that the sky couldfall on top of him at any moment, that he could never be sure ofanything. Therefore, he learned never to trust anyone. Not evenhimself. Someone would always come along to prove that what he thoughtwas wrong, that it did not count for anything. He learned never to wantanything too much.

My father lived with his mother until he was older than I am now. Hewas the last one to go off on his own, the one who had been left behindto take care of her. It would be wrong to say, however, that he was amother's boy. He was too independent, had been too fully indoctrinatedinto the ways of manhood by his brothers. He was good to her, wasdutiful and considerate, but not without a certain distance, evenhumor. After he was married, she called him often, haranguing him aboutthis and that. My father would put the re­ceiver down on the table,walk to the other end of the room and busy himself with some chore fora few minutes, then return to the phone, pick it up, say somethinginnocuous to let her know he was there (uh-huh, uh-huh, mmmmmm, that'sright), and then wander off again, back and forth, until she had talkedherself out.

The comical side of his obtuseness. And sometimes it served him very well.

I remember a tiny, shriveled creature sitting in the front parlor ofa two-family house in the Weequahic section of Newark reading theJewish Daily Forward. Although I knew I would have to do it whenever Isaw her, it made me cringe to kiss her. Her face was so wrinkled, herskin so inhumanly soft. Worse than that was her smell—a smell I wasmuch later able to identify as that of cam­phor, which she must haveput in her bureau drawers and which, over the years, had seeped intothe fabric of her clothes. This odor was inseparable in my mind fromthe idea of "grandma."

As far as I can remember, she took virtually no interest in me. Theone time she gave me a present, it was a second- or third-handchildren's book, a biography of Benjamin Franklin. I remember readingit all the way through and can even recall some of the epi­sodes.Franklin's future wife, for example, laughing at him the first time shesaw him—walking through the streets of Philadelphia with an enormousloaf of bread under his arm. The book had a blue cover and wasillustrated with silhouettes. I must have been seven or eight at thetime.

After my father died, I discovered a trunk that had once be­longedto his mother in the cellar of his house. It was locked, and I decidedto force it open with a hammer and screwdriver, thinking it mightcontain some buried secret, some long lost treasure. As the hasp felldown and I raised the lid, there it was, all over again—that smell,wafting up towards me, immediate, palpable, as if it had been mygrandmother herself. I felt as though I had just opened her coffin.

There was nothing of interest in it: a set of carving knives, a heapof imitation jewelry. Also a hard plastic dress-up pocketbook, a kindof octagonal box with a handle on it. I gave the thing to Daniel, andhe immediately started using it as a portable garage for his fleet oflittle trucks and cars.

My father worked hard all his life. At nine he had his first job. Ateighteen he had a radio repair business with one of his brothers.Ex­cept for a brief moment when he was hired as an assistant in ThomasEdison's laboratory (only to have the job taken away from him the nextday because Edison learned he was a Jew), my father never worked foranyone but himself. He was a very demanding boss, far more exactingthan any stranger could have been.

The radio shop eventually led to a small appliance store, which inturn led to a large furniture store. From there he began to dabble inreal estate (buying, for example, a house for his mother to live in),until this gradually displaced the store as the focus of his attentionand became a business in its own right. The partnership with two of hisbrothers carried over from one thing to the next.

Up early every morning, home late at night, and in between, work,nothing but work. Work was the name of the country he lived in, and hewas one of its greatest patriots. That is not to say, however, thatwork was pleasure for him. He worked hard because he wanted to earn asmuch money as possible. Work was a means to an end—a means to money.But the end was not something that could bring him pleasure either. Asthe young Marx wrote: "If money is the bond binding me to human life,binding society to me, binding me and nature and man, is not money thebond of all bonds! Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not,therefore, the universal agent of separation!"

He dreamed all his life of becoming a millionaire, of being therichest man in the world. It was not so much the money itself hewanted, but what it represented: not merely success in the eyes of theworld, but a way of making himself untouchable. Having money means morethan being able to buv things: it means that the world need neveraffect you. Money in the sense of protection, then, not pleasure.Having been without money as a child, and therefore vulnerable to thewhims of the world, the idea of wealth became synonymous for him withthe idea of escape: from harm, from suffering, from being a victim. Hewas not trying to buy hap­piness, but simply an absence of unhappiness.Money was the pan­acea, the objectification of his deepest, mostinexpressible desires as a human being. He did not want to spend it, hewanted to have it, to know that it was there. Money not as an elixir,then, but as an an­tidote: the small vial of medicine you carry in yourpocket when you go out into the jungle—just in case you are bitten by apoisonous snake.

At times, his reluctance to spend money was so great it almostresembled a disease. It never came to such a point that he would denyhimself what he needed (for his needs were minimal), but more subtly,each time he had to buy something, he would opt for the cheapestsolution. This was bargain shopping as a way of life. Implicit in thisattitude was a kind of perceptual primitivism. All distinctions wereeliminated, everything was reduced to its least common denominator.Meat was meat, shoes were shoes, a pen was a pen. It did not matterthat you could choose between chuck and porterhouse, that there werethrowaway ball points for thirty-nine cents and fifty dollar fountainpens that would last for twenty years. The truly fine object was almostto be abhorred: it meant that you would have to pay an extravagantprice, and that made it morally unsound. On a more general level, thistranslated itself into a permanent state of sensory deprivation: byclosing his eyes to so much, he denied himself intimate contact withthe shapes and tex­tures of the world, cut himself off from thepossibility of experienc­ing aesthetic pleasure. The world he lookedout on was a practical place. Each thing in it had a value and a price,and the idea was to get the things you needed at a price that was asclose to the value as possible. Each thing was understood only in termsof its function, judged only by how much it cost, never as an intrinsicobject with its own special properties. In some way, I imagine it musthave made the world seem a dull place to him. Uniform, colorless,with­out depth. If you see the world only in terms of money, you arefinally not seeing the world at all.

As a child, there were times when I became positively embar­rassedfor him in public. Haggling with shopkeepers, furious over a highprice, arguing as if his very manhood were at stake. A distinct memoryof how everything would wither up inside me, of wanting to be anywherein the world except where I was. A particular inci­dent of going withhim to buy a baseball glove stands out. Everyday for two weeks I hadvisited the store after school to admire the one I wanted. Then, whenmy father took me to the store one evening to buy it, he so exploded atthe salesman I was afraid he was going to tear him to pieces.Frightened, sick at heart, I told him not to bother, that I didn't wantthe glove after all. As we were leaving the store, he offered to buy mean ice cream cone. That glove was no good anyway, he said. I'll buy youa better one some other time.

Better, of course, meant worse.

Tirades about leaving too many lights on in the house. He always made a point of buying bulbs with low wattage.

His excuse for never taking us to the movies: "Why go out and spend a fortune when it will be on television in a year or two?"

The occasional family meal in a restaurant: we always had to orderthe least expensive things on the menu. It became a kind of ritual.Yes, he would say, nodding his head, that's a good choice.

Years later, when my wife and I were living in New York, he wouldsometimes take us out to dinner. The script was always precisely thesame: the moment after we had put the last forkful of food into ourmouths, he would ask, "Are your ready to go?" Im­possible even toconsider dessert.

His utter discomfort in his own skin. His inability to sit still, to make small talk, to "relax."

It made you nervous to be with him. You felt he was always on the verge of leaving.

He loved clever little tricks, prided himself on his ability toout­smart the world at its own game. A niggardliness in the mosttrivial aspects of life, as ridiculous as it was depressing. With hiscars, he would always disconnect the odometers, falsifying the mileagein order to guarantee himself a better trade-in price. In his house, hewould always do his own repair work instead of hiring a profes­sional.Because he had a gift for machines and knew how things worked, he wouldtake bizarre short cuts, using whatever materials were at hand to rigup Rube Goldberg solutions to mechanical and electrical problems—ratherthan spending the money to do it right.

Permanent solutions never interested him. He went on patching andpatching, a little piece here, a little piece there, never allowing hisboat to sink, but never giving it a chance to float either.

The way he dressed: as if twenty years behind the times. Cheapsynthetic suits from the racks of discount stores; unboxed pairs ofshoes from the bins of bargain basements. Beyond giving proof of hismiserliness, this disregard of fashion reinforced the image of him as aman not quite in the world. The clothes he wore seemed to be anexpression of solitude, a concrete way of affirming his absence. Eventhough he was well off, able to afford anything he wanted