Few novelists ever inhabited their vocation with more conviction than Paul Auster, who died last week of lung cancer at the age of 77. This picture, taken in 1993 by Arnold Newman, captured the writer in his element and among the objects that defined him.
The author of The New York Trilogy is pictured in his basement study in the Brooklyn brownstone house that he shared with his wife, novelist Siri Hustvedt (she wrote in a room in the attic). The white walls and bare lightbulbs cast the 19th-century workspace in 20th-century light; you are reminded that his contemporary and friend Don DeLillo had, the previous year, described Auster’s fictional method as “building a traditional storytelling architecture with sharply modern interiors”. There is the ever-present authorial cigarette – Auster’s 1995 film Smoke was set in a Brooklyn tobacconist (he belatedly switched to a vape in 2018) – and, centre stage, the Olympia manual typewriter on which he produced every word of his novels and which was itself the subject of a short 2002 book.
That latter stunt was typical of the author. His gift was to bring the riddling metafictions of the European novel to the noirish streets of his home city. “I’m not just interested in the results of writing, but in the process, the act of putting words on a page,” he said in the Paris Review. “As a young person, I would always ask myself, where are the words coming from?”
The immediate answer to that question was that they were emerging from the battered keys and ribbon of the trusty machine on his desk. “Like it or not,” he wrote in The Story of My Typewriter, “I realised we [Auster and his Olympia] had the same past. And as time went on,” he suggested, “I came to understand we also had the same future.”
