Paul Auster: A Brief Biography

A youthful Auster graces the cover of the memoir Hand to Mouth, published by Henry Holt in 1997. You can order your copy from Amazon, buy it at Borders, or track it down at whatever bookstore is handy. A brief review is available on your host's Recent Reading page.

Paul Auster was conceived while his parents were on their honeymoon in Niagara Falls, and was born in Newark, New Jersey on 3 February 1947. His father, Samuel Auster, was a landlord, who owned buildings with his brothers in Jersery City. His mother, Queenie Auster, was some 13 years younger than her husband. The family was middle-class, the parents' marriage an unhappy one. Queenie had realized, even before the end of the honeymoon, that the marriage had been a mistake, but her pregnancy made escape impossible.

Auster grew up in the Newark suburbs of South Orange and Maplewood. When he was 3½ years old, a younger sister was born. By the time she was five, her psychological instability was becoming apparent, and in later years she would be debilitated by mental breakdowns. Auster, meanwhile, began to feel, as he discloses in his memoir Hand to Mouth, like "an internal émigré, an exile in my own house." Mad magazine comforted Auster with the knowledge that, in questioning the older generation's values, he was not alone.

In 1959 his parents bought a large Tudor house in their town's most prestigious neighborhood. It was here that Auster's uncle, the skilled translator Allen Mandelbaum, left several boxes of books in storage while he traveled to Europe. The young Auster read the books enthusiastically, and his developing interest in writing and in literature further accentuated his sense of separation from his parents. Auster further benefitted from Mandelbaum's proximity when he began writing poems as a teenager: "He was very hard on me, very strict, very good," Auster recounted in a Publishers Weekly interview.

In his early teen years, Auster's parents regularly sent him to summer camp in upstate New York. It was here that, in late July 1961, Auster saw a fellow camper killed by a lightning strike. Auster narrowly escaped electrocution himself.

Auster attended high school in Maplewood, some 20 miles southwest of New York City. His summer jobs included a stint as a waiter at summer camp. He also worked at his uncle Moe's appliance store in Westfield, New Jersey. At the end of Christmas vacation his senior year, his parents announced that they were divorcing. Auster was not surprised. His mother moved, with his sister and him, to an apartment in the Weequahic section of Newark. His father—perhaps because the divorce agreement stipulated that his mother be given half of the proceeds of the house if it was ever sold—remained in the large house until he died.

Instead of attending his high-school graduation, Auster headed for Europe. He visited Italy, Spain, Paris, and, in homage to James Joyce, Dublin. While he traveled he worked on a novel he had begun in the spring.

He returned to the United States in time to start at Columbia University in the fall. The summer after his freshman year he worked as a groundskeeper at a hotel in the Catskills, and during his sophomore year he was fired, his first day on the job, by a company that produced educational filmstrips. In early 1966 he began his relationship with Lydia Davis, the daughter of writer-teachers Robert Gorham Davis and Hope Hale Davis. Lydia Davis, now a writer of considerable distinction, was at that time attending Barnard College, and was a good match for Auster's intellect (she had developed an interest in the work of Samuel Beckett, for example, when she read Malone Dies at the age of 13). Her father, then a professor of English at Columbia, introduced Auster to the French poet Francis Ponge. During the summer of 1966, Auster and his new girlfriend traveled together to a remote part of Maine.

In 1967 Auster again left the continent to attend Columbia's Junior Year Abroad in Paris. Disillusioned by the program's routine, undemanding academic requirements, Auster quit college and lived until mid-November in a small hotel on the rue Clément. When he returned to New York, a sympathetic dean reinstated him at Columbia.

Auster's undergraduate years at Columbia coincided with a period of social unrest, though Auster was only peripherally involved in the politics of the time. He published articles on books and films in the Columbia Daily Spectator and the Columbia Review. He supported himself with a variety of freelance jobs, and at one point was interpreter for a speech given by Jean Genet. He made the acquaintance of the novelist H.L. Humes, who temporarily took over Auster's living quarters. In June 1969 Auster was granted a B.A. in English and comparative literature. The following year he received his M.A. from Columbia, where the literature of the Renaissance had become his primary field of study.

A high lottery number saved Auster from having to worry about the Vietnam draft, and instead of pursuing a Ph.D. he took a job with the Census Bureau. During this period he also began work on the novels In the Country of Last Things and Moon Palace, which he would not complete until many years later. His stepfather Norman Schiff got him a job as utilityman, and then messman, on a tanker called the Esso Florence, which made its way between the Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico.

In mid-February 1971 Auster left once again for Paris. He supported himself there with a variety of odd jobs—minor literary tasks, operating the nighttime swtichboard for the Paris bureau of the New York Times, translating the North Vietnamese Constitution. He made the acquaintance of a film producer for whom he worked on several miscellaneous projects, and he went to Mexico for one month to assist the producer's wife on an abortive book project about Quetzalcoatl. The Mexico trip turned out to be, Auster says in Hand to Mouth, "among the grimmest, most unsettling days of my life." Auster's father had visited him immediately before his departure on this strange trip. It was Samuel Auster's only trip to Europe.

Auster returned to Paris at the conclusion of his Mexican adventure, but by late 1973 he was running out of money and contemplating a return to America. A job offer saved him from that fate, and he and his "on-again off-again" girlfriend Lydia Davis (this description of their romance is from "The Red Notebook") made their way to Provence, where they became caretakers of a farmhouse in the northern Var. They had already collaborated artistically, editing a little magazine titled Living Hand, and decided that the very different sort of collaboration necessary in maintaining a household on a minuscule income was preferable to returning to the U.S. The interlude, fraught with financial difficulties, is recounted by Davis in her short story "St. Martin," reprinted in the 1997 collection Almost No Memory.

In July 1974 Auster and Davis returned to New York.

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Creada: 22/02/2000 Última Actualización: 17/01/2001