WEDNESDAY NEWSLETTER: 5/1/24
A Parc, Some Quiche, A Cinema, Caramel Madeleines, and a Secret Place for Coffee Where You Can Hear Yourself Converse Without Having to Compete with Parisian Palaver and the Tête-à-Têtes of Tourists
(Above: Parc Montsouris in the 14th arrondissement. It opened in 1869.)
(1) The writer and filmmaker Paul Auster has died of lung cancer at the age of 77. Though born in New Jersey and considered a Brooklynite, he was beloved by the French. He and his first wife, fellow writer Lydia Davis, lived here in Paris in their twenties during the 1970s until their poverty proved no longer romantic - like their marriage. They divorced in 1977. But the literary and cultural love affair between Auster and Paris never waned and only deepened over the years. I went looking for any information about his favorite places here in Paris to list one in this week’s newsletter but couldn’t readily find any information like that - but he and geography never gibed. One of the things I did pull up in my Google search was a 2014 interview he did with the French journal Transatlantica, which focuses on American studies. I have written here about my being a flaneur in this now yearly Parisian part of my life lived as a pilgrimage, and the journal’s Editor-in-Chief Nathalie Cochoy began the interview by talking about how important walking was to Auster which led to them discussing the pilgrim’s life.
“When thinking about the art of walking,” she said, leading off the interview. “I often think of Thoreau and his concept of ‘sauntering.’ In Walking, Thoreau simultaneously associates the French etymology of the word ‘sauntering’ with a loss—être sans terre—and a form of pilgrimage—aller à sainte terre. You also seem to consider getting lost as a means of finding yourself. … I remember these ambivalent lines in one of your poems: ‘A footstep / gives ground,’ evoking a form of relinquishment and a form of birth. Is this something you often experience? Is walking a means of returning to the origins of your art?”
Auster: “You’ve probably read Winter Journal, in which I make a confession about my geographic illness. I have difficulty orienting myself in space, and I’m probably one of the few people who gets lost in Manhattan. As I say in the book, I get out of the subway, and I invariably go in the wrong direction, east instead of west, north instead of south… So, for me, the pleasure of walking through the city is not exactly knowing where I am at any given moment. [It’s something I talk about often] … the idea of being lost, of having to figure out who you are in relation to space. …
“There is a double rhythm in all human beings. We are binary beings—two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears. Two legs for walking. And the heartbeat thumping in our chest mirrors that. Even when I’m just sitting at my desk, I have to get up every twenty minutes or so and walk around, walk around, walk around, and then I can go back to the page. I can’t just sit there for hours at a time. Language comes out of the body as much as the mind. Reading, at the deepest level, is a physical experience. Most people are not attuned to this, most people don’t learn how to read—poetry for example, or high-quality prose. They’re used to reading magazines and newspapers, which are only of the mind, but not of the body. Take a report. It’s dry, the sentences are clunky and unfelicitous, they’re just conveying information. But it seems to me that if you’re fully engaged in a great piece of literature, once you enter the rhythms of the language, which is a kind of music, meanings are being conveyed that you’re not fully aware of. They enter into your subconscious. They’re creating as much of the story as the actual words printed on the page are. It’s something I always feel alert to. I write different kinds of sentences, depending on what the book is, and what the project is. I see my work evolving. I’m writing long sentences now, something I didn’t use to do. I had some kind of breakthrough, five or six years ago, in Invisible, and in Sunset Park after that. I discovered a new way to write sentences. And I find it exhilarating. Sometimes a sentence goes on for a page or three quarters of a page, two pages—each sentence a kind of musical composition.”
One of Auster’s literary heroes was Samuel Beckett - once in a review he was glibly dismissed as a “gateway drug” to Beckett although I think Auster might have considered that a bit of compliment. So I’d like to honor Auster’s memory this morning by using it as a gateway to honor Beckett. I think he might have liked that, considered it complimentary … and complementary.
Beckett also loved Paris but found a way, unlike Auster, to live and die here. He is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery . He lived here for over 50 years, serving in the resistance during WW II. Beckett would meet his contacts, who had information about Nazi troop movements, while he sauntered through Parc Montsouris, both flâneur and espionner. Fluent in French, Beckett would then translate the secret information into English and pass it along to an operative known to him as “Jimmy the Greek” who would, in turn, send the information to London. Beckett, shrugging off the political danger, claimed its deeper importance was to his artistry for it taught him how to write not in longer sentences but with économie.
Parc Montsouris is located at 2 Rue Gazan. I think I’ll buy some Beckett and Auster and saunter over this month to read them while sitting on a bench. Or maybe I’ll just sit there watching the interactions of people and les petits espionnages du quotidien.
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