Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) (13 page)

I remember buying the Pawel book when it was first published (1984!—it doesn’t seem possible that so much time has passed) and thinking that it was by far the best work on Kafka I had read. I doubt that any subsequent biography has surpassed it. The passage you refer to is both chilling and insightful, a dissection of the same compulsion for self-sabotage I tried to evoke in my short, highly abstract young man’s piece. Kafka is an extreme example of food torment, but I agree with you that nearly all of us have “issues” with food, not necessarily the eating pathologies you refer to, but, let us say, “complicated relations” with what we put in our mouths. For the same reason you cite when referring to Freud: there is surely a psychological component that would explain why we are attracted to X on the menu and not Y. Does it all go back to buried memories from childhood? Probably.

I found all your points well taken, am not inclined to dispute any of them, but we might want to consider the social function of food, the rituals of feast days (the same dishes served every year at Christmas, Thanksgiving, Passover), the very concept of a meal itself. Why not simply eat when we are hungry, when our stomach tells us to eat? Who commanded that the day be divided into breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Reading about Kafka’s habit of eating alone, it struck me that most of us do not like to eat alone, that nearly everyone eats with others (couples, friends, families, children in school cafeterias) and that meals are generally an occasion for talk. Food goes into your mouth, words come out of it.

For the first half of my life, I had little truck with ceremonies of any kind. Birthday celebrations, national and religious holidays, anniversary parties—they all left me cold, and I shunned them as best I could. Then, twenty-nine years ago, I tiptoed my way into the Hustvedt clan and discovered the intricate protocols of Norwegian Christmas. Siri and her three sisters are all serious, free-thinking, secular people, and yet, under the guidance of their equally secular parents, the six of them demonstrated an absolute, unswerving faith in the importance of upholding this tradition. There is the tree, of course, and the giving of presents, but the heart of the tradition is the Christmas dinner—which never changes. Every item on the menu is exactly the same from year to year, ending with a dessert of rice pudding topped with raspberry sauce, one helping of which always contains a “magic” almond (put in there by Siri’s mother): the person with the almond in his or her bowl is given a prize, which turns out to be more food: a large tablet of chocolate.

The first time I attended one of these Christmas dinners, I didn’t know what to think. It struck me as absurd that six intelligent people would engage in such childish rituals, but at the same time the happiness and solidarity among the six participants was impressive. No family in my experience had ever seemed more harmonious, more closely knit.

As the years passed, the clan grew. Each sister married and had children, and by the time the family had attained its peak population (before the death of Siri’s father), there were nineteen people sitting around the table for Christmas dinner. The new generation has embraced the tradition with the same enthusiasm as the elders, and not one child has ever complained about having to eat the same food every year. The repetition of the menu seems to give everyone comfort, and with another Christmas looming up next week, I confess that I, the old skeptic of yore, am looking forward to it.

•

Thank you for the kind words you e-mailed to Siri about the Woodian attack on my work, my life, and whatever it is I seem to represent for him. I haven’t read it. I have stopped reading all reviews of my books, whether good or bad, but I heard enough from others about what he wrote to feel as if I had been mugged by a stranger. If you are punched, your impulse is to punch back. In this situation, that isn’t allowed—which is exceedingly frustrating—but the sting has lessened with the passing of time. Otherwise, according to my editor, Frances Coady, whom you met in Australia in ’08 (Peter Carey’s wife), response has been uniformly positive and they are about to reprint the book for the fourth time in six weeks. So I mustn’t complain, least of all about a man whose name suggests that one day he will be eaten by termites.

With a hearty Ho Ho Ho,

Paul

January 7, 2010

Dear Paul,

The picture you evoke of meals in the Hustvedt household is most interesting.

In the paradigmatic version of the family table there seem to be three stages. In the first you graduate from infanthood to a place at the table, where you spend some years cautiously observing how people older than yourself conduct themselves. In the second you begin to rebel against the order of the table, against “table manners,” which now seem to you to embody everything that is false and hypocritical about society and the family in particular. Your rebellion may proceed to the point where you take your plate of food to your bedroom and eat it there, or else sneak food from the refrigerator. Then in the third stage—the stage you describe—you rediscover the table as a site of integration, and even begin to assert the values of the table against rebellious younger participants.

What interest me are the customs that have developed around the table. Thus, despite the fact that the table is precisely a place to which one brings one’s animal appetites in order to satisfy them, manners prescribe that appetite should be reined in and—at least formally—yield place to the appetites of others (“Please, after you!”). Furthermore, it is not “good manners” to sate one’s appetite in silence: the dinner table becomes a sort of conclave where family matters of the more superficial kind are aired. In these family conversations, the first rule is that the passions should not be let loose, however much they may rage under the surface. (This is of course what children approaching the age of rebellion find most insufferable about family meals: the playacting.)

There is perhaps a fourth stage to the paradigm. The children have flown the nest, father and mother are left facing each other across the table. Will they speak (obeying, however, the rule that proscribes passionate speech) or will they lapse into a silence that will extend itself, and harden, year after year?

I should mention that I too have been the object of the attentions of the critic you name. It’s a peculiar position one finds oneself in. Quite aside from the question of animus on the critic’s part, there may be errors of fact in the review, or elementary misreadings. Should one react? Should one write a letter to the editor, a rejoinder to the unfair review? It is not as if editors would not welcome such a response—there is nothing their readers relish more than a good literary spat in the correspondence columns.

The sage writer will be cautious here. He will know that to betray irritation, to say nothing of outrage or (God forbid!) hurt feelings, will be fatal: it will turn him into a figure of fun. Knowing this, the critic is further emboldened. He becomes like the child lobbing pebbles at the gorilla in the zoo, knowing he is protected by the bars.

All good wishes,

John

January 12, 2010

Dear John,

At Christmas dinner the other week, I asked the youngest members of the family (ages seven, ten, and fifteen) if they found it unpleasant to be forced to eat the same food every year—with no variations whatsoever—and they all said that they loved it, that the sameness was what made it so enjoyable, and that they looked forward to that dinner with great eagerness every year.

The consolations of ritual. A ritual in which religion plays no part. The consolations of family ritual.

Siri, who cooked the meal at our house, neglected to prepare one of the traditional offerings: boiled red cabbage—which, I would venture to say, no one in the Hustvedt clan eats except at Christmas. When the absence of the dish was finally noted, a general lamentation was heard around the table. Siri apologized for her forgetfulness and promised to be more attentive next year.

It would seem that every detail counts.

•

Critics. You are right: it would be fatal for a novelist to respond publicly to a malicious attack. In recent years, however, I’ve heard of two such incidents—neither one consisting of an exchange of letters. The eighty-year-old Norman Mailer punching a critic in the stomach for giving him a bad review. And Richard Ford spitting in the face of a younger novelist who had written a vile, mean-spirited article about his latest book. My sympathies were with the puncher and the spitter—probably because I myself am too well mannered to punch or spit, much as I have sometimes wanted to.

Twenty years ago, I had my chance, but I couldn’t go through with it. A book critic from the
Los Angeles Times
(who had previously worked as a theater critic for the
New York Times
) wrote an extremely hostile review of
Moon Palace
. Not just a negative review, but an out-and-out assault. Roughly a year after that, the editor of the
New York Times
op-ed page commissioned me to write a Christmas story—my one and only commission, my one and only short story, which evolved into the film
Smoke
a few years later. It was the first work of fiction ever published in the
Times
(not counting the erroneous news stories they have printed, of course), and the editor was proud of himself for having thought of the idea, pleased with the results and the favorable comments from readers, and so he invited me out to lunch as a way of thanking me for my efforts. We went to a restaurant near the
Times
building, a place heavily frequented by
Times
employees, and when the lunch was over and we were about to leave, he spotted the reviewer from the
L.A. Times
, his former colleague in New York. “Look, there’s X,” he said. “Let’s go over and say hello.” I didn’t have time to tell him that X had written a nasty review of my novel and that I had no desire to meet him. When the op-ed page editor announced my name to X, the man’s face went white, and I saw fear in his eyes. He looked like someone who was expecting to be punched, and I confess that for a brief instant I felt tempted to oblige him. But only for an instant. It seemed far better to pretend that I had no idea who he was, had never heard of his name, had never read the review, and therefore I politely shook his hand and told him how happy I was to meet him. He looked both shocked and relieved—there would be no punch, after all—and for those few moments I felt a strange sense of power (never felt before, never felt since), knowing that I was in complete control of this man’s fate, that he was utterly in my hands. I had behaved beautifully, I thought, and I left the restaurant basking in my moral triumph.

Now, I’m not so sure I did the right thing. Years passed, many years, and eventually X returned to the
New York Times
as an occasional reviewer of books. As I mentioned in my last letter, I have stopped reading reviews of my work, but last year (fall 2008) I opened my morning copy of the
Times
to read over breakfast, and there, to my surprise, was a review of
Man in the Dark
by X. No one had told me the review would be running that day, and with the piece directly before my eyes, my resolve weakened, and I read the article in spite of myself. Another blistering assault from the man I probably should have punched twenty years ago. One sentence has stuck with me and will never be expunged from my mind: “Paul Auster does not believe in traditional fictional values.” What on earth does that mean? It sounds like something a right-wing politician might say during an election campaign.

•

Somewhere, somehow, I happened to learn that our birthdays fall during the same week. Mine is February third, and yours, I believe, is the ninth. If I am correct, then a significant milestone is looming in your immediate future, and I send you warmest good wishes from across the seas.

I suspect that you are not someone who cares much about these things, but I wonder if Dorothy is pushing you into some kind of celebration, or if you will allow the day to go by without any fuss. This is not a personal question. I’m interested in why some of us actively embrace celebrations and rituals (i.e., Siri and Christmas), and others of us do not.

We have been back from Spain and France for a few days now and have more or less readjusted to New York time. Very cold there, very cold here, and, it seems, very cold in parts of Australia as well. Already, I am longing for spring.

Best thoughts,

Paul

February 19, 2010

Dear Paul,

I know you are not an habitué of literary salons, but you do live in a cultural metropolis and are therefore fated to cross paths now and then with the folk who review your books. I, on the other hand, run little risk of meeting the sort of person who makes a living by saying clever things at other people’s expense, and consequently, unlike you, I have never needed to restrain myself from punching one of them on the nose.

For someone as thin-skinned as myself, at least in my everyday dealings, I have always found it puzzling that I don’t take bad reviews to heart. Puzzling, but not puzzling enough for me to want to find out why this is so, in case I should suddenly lose that useful carapace.

An incapacity to get upset by what other people say about me, and its obverse, an incapacity to sympathize thoroughly with people who do get upset, is, I suspect, the weakness at the heart of a book I published in 1996 under the title
Giving Offense
. Why be offended by insults to your religion (or your country or your race or your moral standards), I ask there—why not simply shrug them off and get on with your life?

The answer that many (most?) people would give is: Because I can’t. Because my sense of myself is under attack. Because failing to take offense would leave me feeling humiliated.