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If you're hoping for a glimpse into the soul of a writer, Paul Auster's Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure is going to disappoint. His 1996 memoir is an ode to failure, revelry of falling on hard times. Now a success with countless novels on the market (Leviathan, The Music of Chance, Moon Palace, The New York Trilogy) and films under his belt ("Smoke," "Blue in the Face," "Lulu on the Bridge"), Auster goes through great pains (as does the reader) in sharing his utter misfortune in the literary climb.
His life, his persona, perhaps a better descriptive, has been built on the stubborn philosophy that in order to be a writer, one must do nothing else--i.e., being a writer is undeniable fate, a birthright. He tells us solemnly, sullenly, he would have to work twice as hard as anyone else does to succeed. It's a hollow shell of a memoir, a chronicle, to be sure, of life stories. What's lacking is a sense of genuine torment.
Sure, the stories add up to one giant heartbreak, but with no heartfelt emoting. Here's my pathetic story, do with it what you will, I have to get back to writing. And while one may be tempted to feel sympathy for this self-portrait of pain and suffering, the excessive self-deprecation gets on the nerves.
For instance, he begins, "In my late twenties and early thirties, I went through a period of several years when everything I touched turned to failure." He suffered " ... a constant, grinding, almost suffocating lack of money that poisoned my soul and kept me in a state of never-ending panic. ... There was no one to blame but myself." Give the man a cross--the martyrdom grates.
This categorical invocation is Biblical in flair, and about as believable, too. He sounds plain hammy at times, intending, I'm sure, quite the opposite: "Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days."
He says he has no complaints of his fate, but why, then, this elongated preface of grandiose suffering? Perhaps it's the reader's bitterness rising here, the aspirations of the writerly falling victim to the potential destitution, the hard road of hard knocks, the utter agony in being rejected, dejected and dragged into the depths of one's pitiful existence. The resignation in doing something "else" rather than the something intended. And perhaps it's impatience with this sort of hard-and-fast rule that, to the exclusion of a life any other way, is bound to complicate matters.
And it does, for Auster. He has money issues--his mother was extravagant, affording of luxuries (a new coat, brand-name groceries) while his father was a miser (buying clothes in bulk at a New Jersey discount warehouse).
He talks a lot about his philosophy on money--from young-boy go-getter, mowing lawns, shoveling snow, to exile from middle-class comfortability: "My parents valued money, and where had it gotten them?"
Having dipped his youthful toes into the wading pool of capitalism (at the ripe age of preadolescence), he knew, then, he was done with it. He would suffer for the masses of have-nots by becoming one himself. His sympathies, he confesses, were squarely in the corner of "the downtrodden, the dispossessed, the underdogs of the social order."
He suffered, with grace: a series of odd jobs--a waiter at a summer camp, an appliance store hack--a trip to Paris following high school graduation and his parents' bitter divorce. He suffered, with relish: Columbia college, the nagging prospect of having to draft-dodge during Vietnam, working as a groundskeeper in a Catskills hotel, studying abroad in Paris. Later, he suffered to sustain himself: translating French works into English, working for a major movie producer (unnamed) while living in Paris, again, and working for an outfit that marketed 20th-century art in catalogs.
And the list of afflictions goes on and on, a peppering of odd jobs, the stories of which, when involving lengthy missives about other people, are quite interesting. A failed production of his play preceded the birth of his first, and only, son, Daniel, which, frankly, is the most believably heartfelt moment in the memoir, and lasts not even one page in its telling. He divorced, but eventually, found love again.
He suffered humiliation. His creation of the card game Action Baseball, and some unsavory dealings with the business types he strove to avoid throughout his writing career, is far and away the clearest picture of Auster's astonishing ignorance of entrepreneurship, and perhaps, then, validation, finally, for all his ramblings about triumphing (or suffering long enough to classify a modest clearing of one hurdle or another) over "the odds."
Tired as that phrase gets, one reads, and reads, to find the light at the end of this horridly bleak tunnel. But the at-once emotionlessness of the journey and the forced stringing of words to produce something moderately introspective are his shortcomings.
It's not a sentimental journey, nor should it be, but more a straightforward, methodical timeline of occurrences, of chance happenings--of tales that make the reader ultimately long only to spend as much time in Paris as Auster did. His fiction is his strength, to be sure. His memoir, well, this is proof that selling out--his greatest accomplishment, its avoidance--is not the only way to lose yourself.