Moving Memoir

My copy of this book

Some weeks ago I reviewed a memoir in these pages, viz., Staring at Lakes.  Here, I wish to review another memoir, this time one by Paul Auster called Winter Journal (Faber & Faber, 2012).  It differs greatly from that of Michael Harding.  Harding's work is one which is centered on the Self as an ontological reality as encountered in meditation, in deep philosophical thinking and in that exacting way, I know only too well, of the person who suffers from clinical depression.  Auster's work is not as intense at all as its guiding force is that of a phenomenological exploration of what it means to be a human being in today's modern world. 

I was intrigued by Auster's approach which I deem one of remarkably sharp observation. Like every other human being, mortality rears its ugly head for this author in this wonderfully honest book.  We meet him in its pages as an embodied self, whereas in Harding's work we meet the writer as an ensouled body.  Auster's focus is on the body primarily and soul secondarily while Harding's is on the soul primarily and the body secondarily.  In short, Auster's is a phenomenological exploration of what it means to be human while Harding's is an ontological exploration of the same theme.

One thing I like about this book is its lists of places and things.  In fact, he lists all the places - houses and apartments - where he has lived throughout his whole life and tells us the memories associated in his mind with each one.  He also enumerates all the injuries he has sustained over all his earthly life in exact detail, the first of which (when a little boy) he describes thus:

.... a long nail low enough to be at the level of your face, and before you can stop yourself, your left cheek is pierced by the nail as you go flying past it.  Half your face is torn apart.... The scar has grown fainter and fainter as the years have passed, but it is still there whenever you look for it, and you will carry that emblem of good fortune (eye intact! not dead!) until you go to your grave. (pp. 6 - 7)

The reader will have noticed from the quoted extract here that Auster writes this memoir in the second person singular, and this adds greatly to a more objective and phenomenological feel about the work as a whole.

He also lists all the types of foods he has eaten in his lifetime - another unusual, if not interesting and engaging take on human life.  In short, this book describes the journey of one body through time and space and how that body defines and identifies itself as unique through its encounters, or "collisions with the world." (p. 5)

He also records all his physical ills and several times gives us very realistic descriptions of what it is like to experience panic attacks during which he often "lay on the floor and howled, howled at the top of your lungs, howled because death was inside you and you didn't want to die," (p. 33)

This book catalogues well his sexual juxtaposition with other human beings, namely prostitutes in times of sheer loneliness, but of the many times he engaged therein only one was a real human encounter.  He recounts with equanimity his first marriage which failed because neither of them knew what they were doing as they were so young.  There are also searing passages where he recalls utter loneliness and debilitating emptiness. However, he lovingly describes his first meeting with his second and present wife who has been his close companion for over thirty years.

This is a searingly honest memoir that recounts his abject failures like failing to speak up for others, or failing to reprimand his uncle for telling a sympathizer at his father's funeral that he was not welcome there.  However, he does report also his successes like reprimanding a teenager for using a Nazi flag.

Interestingly enough, for a 2012 book, Auster tells us that the provenance of this book is a hand-written diary.  He is old enough indeed to be pre-Personal Computer: "Looking at your right hand as it grips the black fountain pen you are using to write this journal, you think of Keats...." (p. 164 - 165)  Not surprisingly, he lists all the things his hand has done over the years from picking his nose to masturbating to shaking hands and the list goes on and on.  He even quotes Joyce's most famous quip to a woman who wished to shake the hand that wrote Ulysses.* 

For any book lovers out there, Auster and his wife live with the physicality of thousands of books and many bookshelves. Indeed, the present reviewer would instinctively feel very much at home in their company.

All books, especially autobiographies and memoirs are attempts to answer the question of self-identity.  Here is Auster's meditation on that fact:

You would like to know who you are.  With little or nothing to guide you, you take it for granted that you are the product of vast, prehistoric migrations, of conquests, rapes, and abductions, that the long and circuitous intersections of your ancestral horde have extended over many territories and kingdoms, for you are not the only person who has travelled, after all, tribes of human beings have been moving around the earth for tens of thousands of years, and who knows who begat whom begat whom begat whom begat whom to end up with your two parents begetting you in 1947? (p. 115)

This is not a sad memoir whatsoever.  In fact, it is a remarkably balanced one in which his wife and children appear quite forcefully if irregularly (unlike Harding's memoir where his wife and child appear merely ephemerally and very much out there in the distance). 

He winds up this memoir with a reflection from Joseph Joubert (1754 – 1824) who said that "one must die lovable if one can" (p. 215) or as an old friend of mine said before he died in his eighty sixth year one must "navigate one's old age and dying with the grace of a skilled boatman."  Auster finishes with one of his usual lists, that recounts this time all the people he has held in his life. 

Some reviewers have found this memoir meandering and lacking in focus, but such I believe, is merely a failure to quite understand a phenomenological approach to reality that underlines the whole exercise: "Perhaps it is just as well," Auster writes, "to put aside your stories for now and try to examine what it has felt like to live inside this body from the first day you can remember being alive until this one. A catalogue of sensory data.  What one might call a phenomenology of breathing." (p. 1).

Endnote:

* Once a woman came up to Joyce at a book reading or some other such social or literary occasion and declared to the author that she "would like to shake the hand that wrote Ulysses." Apparently, Joyce held up his hand and then offered it to her saying, "Madam, it has also done a lot of other things, too!"  Keats, apparently, was once, too, transfixed by the sight of his hand which held his quill, and observed that it would all too soon perish and disappear from this earth.  Keats had been a medical student who knew that he was doomed to die very young from consumption, having recently observed how he had coughed up "arterial blood" onto his pillow.  This poet died from tuberculosis at the early age of 25 years.  Now think of all the wonderful poems he made during that short span of life and what he might have achieved had he lived longer.