Paul Auster’s Ethereal ‘Baumgartner’

 

I referenced this book in my prior entry and decided not burden an already long entry with a review.  Now that I’ve sat down with this lovely slender book in hand, this is not a formal “review” but, instead, an impression, and how it relates to my own life. 

 

Thankfully, I have not experienced a loss of a spouse, the main theme hanging over the protagonist, Sy Baumgartner who lost his wife, Anna to a drowning accident, after 40 loving years of being together.  She becomes almost a ghost which follows his next ten years.  It is a skillful memory novel, the author stepping into the past and then back to the present, and as a metafictional piece, into the process of writing, even giving Anna a voice from her poems and essays, and frequently blending Baumgartner the protagonist with the author, Auster.  There are so many tributaries he sets sails on, including his most personal one; a trip to Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine in 2017 which Auster had written about before and now reiterates as Baumgartner’s journey to find traces of his grandfather and his Jewish roots, but they are all skillfully connected. 

 

Three important characters fall into his life, Ed Papadopoulos, a seemingly ungainly new employee of the Public Service Electric and Gas Company, but a man with a heart of gold, and watch how he comes back into Sy’s life later in the novel.  Judith, the first woman he allows himself to love after dealing with such a prolonged bereavement, and, finally a young scholar, Beatrix Coen, who has discovered Anna’s work, wants to write her doctorate thesis on the thinly published poems, as well as her unpublished works and essays.  This gives Sy (and thus Auster) a reason for the next chapter in the book, one which is not there.  The book ends abruptly.  I have my ideas where that goes; yours may be different. I think Auster carefully thought through the unusual conclusion. As with his own his life, abrupt endings can be expected but not easily anticipated.

 

I said that there were also connections to my own life noted in my review of his novel, Brooklyn Follies.  There the main character (Auster as well) lived in Park Slope, as I did earlier in my life.

 

In Baumgartner his early adult years, where he connected with Anna, were on 85^th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam on NYC’s upper West Side, Mine were on the same street just off Columbus when I connected with my own wife-to-be, Ann.  Auster and I apparently missed each other by a year.  He doesn’t go into the detail about the UWS as he does about Park Slope in Brooklyn Follies, but the coincidence was a little eerie.

 

More significant, to me, the book serves as a wake-up call to finish my memoir, not that the story of my life or writing can compare to Auster’s, but we all share mortality and I think his later works reflect an acceptance of this reality.  When he (Baumgartner – now a retired philosophy professor -- and no doubt, Auster, who died only last April) has an epiphany about time running out, and the need to tie things together, Baumgartner thinks about a book he has not yet completed, interestingly entitled Mysteries of the Wheel.  He is seventy one while having this thought, daydreaming in his backyard, living in Princeton, now, about deceased friends, increasing memory lapses.  His writing is exquisite, greatly introspective and stream of consciousness, moving from amusing anecdotes to profundity, and he might as well personally be relating a cautionary tale to me:

 

Nothing to be done, he thinks, nothing at all. Short-term memory loss is an inevitable part of growing old, and if it’s not forgetting to zip your zipper, it’s marching off to search the house for your reading glasses while you’re holding the glasses in your hand, or going downstairs to accomplish two small tasks, to retriever book from the living room, and to pour yourself a glass of juice of the kitchen, and then returning to the second floor with the book, but not the juice, or the juice, but not the book, or else neither one because some third thing has distracted you on the ground floor and you’ve gone back upstairs empty-handed, having forgotten why you went down there in the first place. It’s not that he didn’t do those kinds of things when he was young, or forget the name of this actress, or that writer or blank out the name of the secretary of commerce, but the older you become the more often these things happen to you, and if they begin to happen so often, that you barely know where you are anymore and can no longer keep track of yourself in the present, you’ve gone, still alive but gone. They used to call it senility. But the term is Dementia, but one way or another Baumgartner knows, and even if he winds up there in the end, he still has a long way to go. He can still think, and because he can think, he can still write, and while it takes a little longer for him to finish his sentences now, the results are more or less the same. Good. Good that Mysteries of the Wheel is coming along and good that he has stopped work early today and is sitting in the backyard on this magnificent afternoon, letting his thoughts drift wherever they want to go, and with all the circling around the business of short term memory, he is beginning to think about long-term memory as well, and with that word, long, images from the distant past star flickering in a remote corner of his mind, and suddenly he feels an urge to start foraging  around in the thickets and underbrush of that place to see what he might discover there. So rather than go on looking at the white clouds and the blue sky and the green grass, Baumgartner shuts his eyes leans back in his chair, tilts his face toward the sun, and tells himself to relax. The world is a red flame burning on the surface of his eyelids. He goes on breathing in and out, in and out, inhaling the air through his nostrils, exhale through his partially open lips and then, after 20 or 30 seconds, he tells himself to remember.

 

And so I try “to remember” writing what is tentatively entitled “Explaining It To Me.”  It is a race with time to finish and publish it so it may accompany the ones I’ve already published, Waiting for Someone to Explain It: The Rise of Contempt and Decline of Sense, my 2019 book dealing with my times’ social, political, and economic breakdowns, and Explaining It to Someone: Learning From the Arts, published in 2020, a collection of hundreds of my theatre and book reviews, which might suggest some answers from our writers and playwrights.  “Explaining It To Me” will be personal and therefore even more challenging to write and finish.  Maybe I can complete and publish it next year if there is enough time to “forage around in the thickets and underbrush.” I have a first draft but it needs much more work and there are so many appointments to keep.

 

Summer Reading: A Refulgent Novel and an Erudite Sports/Social History

 

First, the novel: Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies is another under-the-radar American classic, joining others I’ve read and written about in this space, Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, John Williams’ Stoner, and A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley

 

The likeable narrator and protagonist, Nathan Glass, is a lung cancer survivor, now retired from a life insurance company.  He is divorced and seeks anonymity by relocating to his old Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope.  He envisions it as the place for his life’s ending.  Instead, it would be a new beginning.

 

Park Slope is the perfect setting for the metafictional parts of the novel as Auster himself lived there.  He passed away earlier this year; it was his obituary that reminded me to read him.  I was interested in this particular novel as I too had lived in Park Slope as a young adult during my first marriage. 

 

Nathan has no relationship with his ex wife other than being disdained by her.  He is estranged from his only daughter, Rachel, and Auster engineers their reconciliation as the consequence of a subplot.

 

So much of modern literature is about families coming apart.  Instead, Auster sees Nathan as a change agent, endowing him with a charisma that is instrumental in bringing families and people together, including a niece Aurora (“Rory”) and nephew, Tom.  In this regard, this is an unusually joyous post modern piece of fiction of redemption and second chances, so deeply satisfying.

 

Tom was a brilliant graduate student when Nathan last saw him years before.  Chance encounters plays a significant role in the novel such as when Nathan finds a dispirited Tom working in Brightman’s Attic, a local bookstore.  That encounter sets everything in motion.  He takes his nephew to lunch at Cosmic Diner where Nathan flirts more than usual with his favorite waitress, Marina, not only to impress Tom but because he was in “such buoyant spirits. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed [Tom}, and now it turned out that we were neighbors – living, by pure happenstance, just two blocks from each other in the ancient kingdom of Brooklyn, NY.”

 

From there, a cast of unrelated characters are brought together in some way:

  Tom, his nephew and Rory, his niece (who was held captive by her second husband, a religious cult member).

  Rachel, Nathan’s daughter.

  Lucy, Rory’s nine year old daughter (who Rory sends alone to Tom in a daring attempt to free her daughter from the cult).

  Harry Dunkel (aka Brightman), ex convict, gay, a lover of books but engaged in art and manuscript forgery.

  Nancy Mazzuchelli (aka the “B.P.M. – Beautiful Perfect Mother”), who Tom has an unrealistic crush on, Uncle Nathan straightening that out, and who figures prominently at the novel’s denouement.

  Stanley Chowder, proprietor of the Chowder Inn in Vermont, which Tom and Nathan think of buying with Brightman, their idea of “Hotel Existence.”

  Honey Chowder, Stanley’s daughter, a 4^th grade unmarried teacher who invades Tom's life.

  Joyce, Nancy’s mother, a widow, who unexpectedly becomes Nathan’s lover.

 

There are more characters in the air, but these are the ones who Nathan, survivor of chemotherapy, keeper of “The Book of Human Folly,” his notebook of "every blunder, every pratfall, every embarrassment, every idiocy, every foible, and every inane act I have committed during my long and checkered career as a man,” comes to touch or rescue in some way.  He literally rescues his niece, Rory:  “Aurora chose to talk to me because I was the one who had gone down to North Carolina and saved her, and even if we had been out of contact for many years prior to that afternoon, I was nevertheless her uncle, her mother’s only brother, and she knew that she could trust me.  So we got together for lunch several times a week and talked, just the two of us, sitting at a back table in the New Purity Diner on Seventh Avenue, and little by little we became friends, in the same way her brother and I had become friends, and now that both of June’s children were back in my life, it was as if my baby sister had come alive in me again, and because she was the ghost who continued to haunt me, her children had now become my children.” 

 

234 Lincoln Place

I had such a personal investment in reading this book as I lived at 234 Lincoln Place for a couple of years.  I remember running from that brownstone apartment, frantically trying to get a cab on Flatbush Avenue at 2:00AM one night in late February, 1965 to get my ex wife who was in labor to the Brooklyn Hospital.  Auster mentions The Berkeley Carroll School at 181 Lincoln Place which would have been a half block from where we lived.  Such a school could not have existed then, before gentrification.  In fact, that is what stands out so strikingly reading the novel: the degree to which the neighborhood has changed just during my lifetime.  It’s become Brooklyn’s version of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, another one of my old abodes.  Many of the places he mentions, the diners, the bookstores, the schools, didn’t exist then.  But streets, such as Carroll Street, where our friends at the time, Morris Eaves and his wife lived, and 7^th avenue where we did our shopping, and of course Prospect Park, resonate.  The mention of Carroll Street reminded me of Morris, so I Googled my long forgotten acquaintance and school-mate who became a Professor and a well known William Blake scholar.  I thought I’d write him, sadly only to find his recent obituary. 

 

We moved from Park Slope as my ex wife wanted to go to graduate school after our son was born, so we moved back to downtown Brooklyn to be near LIU. 

 

I envy that Auster had developed deep roots there and his love of everything Park Slope glitters in this novel. 

 

Our protagonist/narrator, Nathan, after performing such healing reconciliations and introductions, has a medical emergency which again parallels one that deeply resonates.  He had all the symptoms and the pain of a heart attack.  And suddenly he’s in a hospital.  He was convinced his life was over. “I was in there with myself, rooting around with a kind of scrambled desperation, but I was also far away, floating above the bed, above the ceiling, above the roof of the hospital.  I know it doesn’t make any sense, but lying in that boxed-in enclosure with the beeping machines and the wires clamped to my skin was the closest I have come to being nowhere, to being inside myself and outside myself at the same time.  That’s what happens to you when you land in a hospital.  They take off your clothes, put you in one of those humiliating gowns, and suddenly you stop being yourself.”

 

In the ER and in his room, while tests are being made, other patients come and go; they face a common foe.  I’ve been there myself on a number of occasions, and I know the feeling which Auster painfully resurrects.  While lying there his mind works overtime, trying to make sense of all of it and he has an epiphany for a business: “to form a company that would publish books about the forgotten ones, to rescue the stories and facts and documents before they disappeared – and shape them into a continuous narrative, the narrative of a life” (Actually, a damn good idea as he envisions the financing to be a surcharge on a life insurance policy – something he knows something about.  In effect, it’s a vanity book, but fully paid for via the insurance policy.  Why not?)

 

“[O]nce the pages had been printed and the story had been bound between covers, they would have something to hold on to for the rest of their lives.  Not only that, but something that would outlive them, that would outlive us all.”…“One should never underestimate the power of books.”  I emphasize the last sentence as it aptly describes The Brooklyn Follies and I can imagine the author talking to me, as a motivational statement to finish my own memoir which I now have in draft form, dragging my heels to complete merely because of ‘who cares?’ outside family and friends.  I think Auster would say “who cares who cares?”

 

Spoiler alert here about the ending (although I knew it in advance – there is even some foreshadowing --and the knowledge only intensified the impact for me).  Luckily for Nathan, the presumed heart attack turned out to be merely an inflamed esophagus and he is discharged from the hospital and is on his way home early in the morning on Sept. 11, 2001, in a joyous mood about the future. “Overhead, the sky was the bluest of pure deep blues.” The conclusion of this early post 9/11 novel comes down like a sledgehammer.

 

There is a segue from the Auster book to the second, a work of non-fiction:  Auster was a baseball fan and in fact it was said he became a writer because as a kid he had an opportunity to get Willie Mays’ autograph but he didn’t have a pencil.  From there on in, he carried one, and a pad, and that began his writing career.  (No doubt the beginnings of “The Book of Human Folly”.) So as I was reading the Auster novel I was finishing what would most aptly be called an encyclopedic narrative, The New York Game, Baseball and the Rise of the New City, by Kevin Baker.  It really deserves its own full blown entry, but how does one review an encyclopedia?  It has New York City in common with Brooklyn Follies, and like the novel it makes a special personal connection.

 

The story of the unique, almost symbiotic development of the city and baseball is laid out by Baker as a Dickinsonian novel with a huge cast of characters.   “Whitman called it ‘America’s game; it has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere; it belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly as our laws; it is just as important in the total of our historic life’” “To Mark Twain it was ‘the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming, 19th century’“.

 

Mirroring American life, the game’s owners were “in the game for the most American reasons: organize commercialize monopolize“

 

Before 1890 its development was a somewhat random event.  By then it began to resemble the game which we follow today and became our only major professional sport at the time.

 

In NY it was a multi ethnic affair, mirroring the city itself, German, Irish, even eleven known Jewish players, but like other sins of society, Afro Americans were not accepted, even in NY.  They began to develop their own leagues; many of those teams and players of major league caliber. 

 

As the sport grew, “the vertical city was born, “skyscrapers, bridges, churches, museums but perhaps the greatest creations during the beginning of the century were the city’s train stations.  “Built less than 10 years and a few blocks apart, “the new Beau Arts Grand Central terminal, lavish with statues and it’s soaring, 125 – foot ceiling adored with a gorgeous blue map of the zodiac. And across town, Charles McKim’s Pennsylvania station, a symphony and steel and honey marble, large enough, in the novelist, Thomas Wolf’s phrase ‘to hold the sound of time’ yet still a structure of measureless beauty.“

 

It’s all here in this definitive work, with all the heroes and miscreants that made up our national pastime and the building of the world’s greatest city.  The writing is spellbinding such as these two pages describing the glories of the city in the 1920’s.  The reader feels a part of a previous era:

 

Baseball, NY, and the 1950’s was my childhood.  On our way to school we’d argue about who is the best centerfielder in NY.  I said Mantle, a Dodger fan said Snyder, and the lone Giant friend said Mays.  He was right of course. 

 

Mays and Ruth are a category onto themselves.  The book ends before the Mays era though.  In fact I was finishing this book when the Say Hey Kid’s death was reported.  He began his career in the Negro leagues, playing briefly for the 1948 Birmingham Black Barons joining Ruth as the greatest baseball player ever.  Ruth‘s heroic feats and gargantuan appetite for everything life had to offer though are covered in detail in Baker’s book.

 

Negro Leagues Kansas City Monarchs 1920-1965

So many of the minor players can be found in its pages; such as Phil Rizzuto who went to my high school and was rejected by the Dodgers and Giants, but the New York Yankees recognized his fielding, bunting, and love of the game and the rest is history.  When Ann and I were having dinner at the Stadium Club sometime in the 1980s, and he was broadcasting with Bill White, they came in to have dinner before the game.  He called out to everyone that he had a headache and was wondering whether anyone had an aspirin.  My wife’s handy pill box came out while she exclaimed, “I have some, Phil.”  He came over to the table and I told him that my father went to Richmond Hill High School with him to which he exclaimed his patented “Holy Cow.”

 

I can’t remember another social / sports history that can compare to The New York Game, Baseball and the Rise of the New City, by Kevin Baker.  Holy Cow!

 

‘Going All The Way’ Rings True

 

 

They grew the boys down on the farm the same sex starved way they did on the East Coast.  No wonder Willard (”Sonny”) Burns of Indianapolis is reminiscent of Portnoy and Holden Caulfield, as portrayed in Dan Wakefield’s 1970 novel, Going All the Way.  This is an unlikely read for me but I was led to it via a recent New York Times obituary of the author, by a NYT writer who had, himself, died three years earlier, David Stout. 

As Wakefield was 91 when he died and had no longer been writing, retiring to the community he came from in the environs of Indianapolis, and had stature as a writer of non-fiction, fiction, and as a magazine writer, this was one of those prepared obits waiting for its inevitable moment.  

 

I am now a regular reader of obits as I consider them to be an overlooked source of sometimes great writing (and Stout’s is among the best), reflecting on the lives of others who are about my age who were enveloped by the same times as mine.  More frequently there are ones of people I either knew or at least knew of. 

 

Also, my friend Ron is from Indiana and he has told me a lot about his childhood experiences.  Between those and reading this obituary, scenes of “Hoosiers” and the evocative music of Jerry Goldsmith drifted through my mind. 

 

Wakefield was like a Thomas Wolfe character in “You Can’t Go Home Again” as when he left Indianapolis, he felt he couldn’t return having written about his childhood memories and friends.  But he finally returned after becoming a very successful writer of both fiction and nonfiction.  His memoir Returning: A Spiritual Journey was highly praised, detailing his personal round trip journey from being a man of faith to becoming an atheist and then to humanism and spiritualism in his later years.

 

The obituary led me to what is considered to be his definitive work of fiction but I was really drawn by the concluding paragraph:

 

Asked to define his philosophy of life, Mr. Wakefield quoted Philo, the ancient philosopher of Alexandria, Egypt: “Be kind, for everyone you know is fighting a great battle.” As for his life beyond writing, reading and reflecting, he said, “No golf, no horseshoes, no stamp-collecting, no hobbies.” And, he added, “No regrets.”

 

Amen to that.

 

Wakefield’s seminal novel Going All The Way (an amusingly lurid title), was published in 1970 and a movie was made from it in the 1990’s.  His novel was praised by another graduate of his high school, Kurt Vonnegut.  I have no idea how the novel and the film went under my radar at the time other than I still had my shoulder too much to the grindstone of work 

 

This would have appealed to me, and still does as the travails of its protagonist, Sonny, are painfully familiar.  I was the same timid boy in high school, wanting to fit in, but not considered to be part of the chosen cliques.  That was usually reserved for the jocks and the extraverts who also had their fair share of sex, if you believed them. 

 

The level of testosterone level ran high.  It is almost laughable in retrospect as to how much of our lives were consumed by trying to have sex.  And that is what Wakefield’s novel is about, Sunny trying to fit in, having his sexual fantasies fulfilled, and breaking loose from the hypocrisy of parental expectations.  

 

Returning from a stint in the service on the train in the early 1950s he has a chance meeting with another ex serviceman, one of the “chosen ones” in high school, Tom Casselman (“Gunner.”); you get the picture, a handsome popular boy, a jock. 

 

Sonny tries to act cool and is surprised that Gunner remembers him: “You were one of the quiet ones, you just sat back and observed. Watched us run around chasing our tails, a bunch of green asses. You were a detached observer.” Sonny shifted uneasily and took a gulp of beer. “Well sort of,” he said. The truth was he had been an unattached observer because he was never asked to be a participant. Now it was like he was getting credit for being something he had no other choice than to be. It was sort of weird….Denying the credit for having been something he couldn’t help being, Sonny realized it probably sounded like genuine modesty making him seem even more nobler.”… Gunner had this particular picture of him, and he liked the way that picture of himself looked.

 

It gradually becomes a coming-of-age buddy novel. Ironically, Sonny had a steady girlfriend who would have done anything for him sexually, but, oh no, he wanted what we all wanted at that age, the idealized, hard to get girl next door as pictured in popular culture and our favorite magazine Playboy, if you were fortunate enough to find your father’s stash, or successfully buy one at the corner store without being recognized.

 

As Sonny’s quiet presence with Gunner is mistakenly interpreted as his being profound, a notion he continues to do nothing to discourage, it culminates in Sonny having the opportunity to meet his ideal, set up by Gunner and his girlfriend, a blind double date in a parent’s empty house stocked with booze.  The latter renders Sonny unable to perform and this in turn leads to the kind of humiliation which Sonny (spoiler here) thinks about resolving with a razor blade and his wrist.

 

As a consequence, Gunner now feels an obligation to “fix” Sonny, which leads to an automobile accident (again, booze), minor injury to Gunner, but a major one to Sonny with a long recovery period during which Gunner sets out for NYC to find himself and reconnoiter for Sonny when he eventually emerges from the hospital and the cocoon of the mid-West.  Then life can begin as it so often does in the big Apple.  Mine did.  My wife’s did.  Wakefield’s did.  Add millions before and after.

 

It is a touching coming of age novel, funny, uncomfortably true, a young man making his way through the uncertainty about the future.  Page after page there were experiences I can relate to.  Dan Wakefield could have been a friend if I had met him.  And now I feel as if I did.