Paul Auster - a homage

My story of how I discovered Paul Auster the writer and the impact it left on my own writing

It's a sad thing to reflect on the older you get that after a certain stage in your life your creative inspirations all start passing away.

I had this both with Scott Walker and Mark Hollis, ex of Talk Talk in 2019 and it left me empty for weeks after. Hollis hadn't been active for a long time, but Walker was a different matter, be it slow producing masterpiece after masterpiece from tilt in 1995 to completing a soundtrack Vox not that long before he died and had wrote lyrics for another proposed album.

I couldn't hope to match either of those two as musicians but as a writer that is a completely different where over the past two decades, I've found my writing developing through a few key examples of writers who inspired to keep pushing myself as a artist.

It is stated elsewhere that I really started writing when I went into university from 1998 to 2001, a lot of the work I produced there was work although which had the ideas but not the focus that I needed.

Where Helen, somebody I briefly knew from 2003 to 2005 or so and came close to dating at least twice (long story there) came up with sending me the idea of Paul Auster's book of illusions, I have no idea to this day. She did know I had fallen in love with silent films at university with films as wide-ranging as the wind,  Pandora's Box , Metropolis and even the more shocking films like Birth of a Nation or Intolerance

I think I had watched Metropolis and Nosferatu in a bit of a drunken stomper where she lodged at on the outskirts of kemptown (Brighton) and about a month and a half later on the day before my birthday, I received in the post a paperback saying  'i think this could be your cup of tea, love n light Helen'.

The book was book of illustrations by Paul Auster.

The book was described as " One man's obsession with the mysterious life of a silent film star takes him on a journey into a shadow-world of lies, illusions, and unexpected love. After losing his wife and young sons in a plane crash, Vermont professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours mired in grief. Then, watching television one night, he stumbles upon a lost film by silent comedian Hector Mann, and remembers how to laugh . . . Mann was a comic genius, in trademark white suit and fluttering black moustache. But one morning in 1929 he walked out of his house and was never heard from again. Zimmer's obsession with Mann drives him to publish a study of his work; whereupon he receives a letter postmarked New Mexico, supposedly written by Mann's wife, and inviting him to visit the great Mann himself. Can Hector Mann be alive? Zimmer cannot decide - until a strange woman appears on his doorstep and makes the decision for him, changing his life forever. Written with breath-taking urgency and precision, this stunning novel plunges the reader into a universe in which the comic and the tragic, the real and the imagined, the violent and the tender dissolve into one another.”

I'd never heard of Auster before and I didn’t know what to think whether Helen was taking the piss slightly or being serious, but I remember putting in my bag on the way to work that morning on the bus thinking it would probably be rubbish and I would end dumping in the Charity Shop at lunchtime two down from work and having to buy a newspaper for the journey home.

Of course, the reality was far from this, and the strangeness and the usualness of the book left me sitting there all the way to work and home at the end of the day thinking I wish I could write a book like this.

I forgot which book came next for me, I think it was Country of Lost Things or New York trilogy, but both surprised me with the same careful attention to detail and the same use of postmodernism or ways of looking at writing whether at the End of the World or a reinvention of the detective novel leaving me both spellbound and encouraged me to find my own feet as a writer.

I never met Auster (a regret) but without him, I would have never ended up being the writer in the way I am and What I am heading into next.

My first novel birth was Auster ish I guess in the way of the way Auster kept reinventing himself with none fiction, films, poetry and translations, it pushed me to first try using my Poetry in different ways, and now my first novel ‘Birth’ which is about the beginning of creativity (and my forthcoming second novel ‘Death’ which has a slight nod to Auster’s ‘White Spaces is about the end of it) and what I have planned beyond (which does include a third novel and a play).

While it is a sad thing Auster has now gone, the way I look at it he never sat still as a creative person, and I believe as Creative people it is important we never sit still with our creativity whether Poetry, Novels, Music (I don’t think Auster did any music but would love to hear some if so) or Podcasting.

“a man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened

Albert Camus”