I know, I realise, it’s almost a literary genre now. Whether it’s about memoir, intimate journal or a work of fiction, there are countless books (usually slim and wise) that feature an elderly bourgeois dealing with widowhood. From the progenitor Diary of a pain by Clive S. Lewis, over which we all shed warm tears, passing through The year of magical thinking by Joan Didion, poignant and unbearable as if not more than Five seasons by Abraham Yehoshua, to the point of brooding but in many ways equally painful Levels of life by Julian Barnes, books dedicated to the chronicle of mourning abound. Based on my experience as a capricious and erratic reader, I think that Didion represents a virtuous exception. Judging by the inflation of such works written by males, in fact, one is led to believe that widowers are more inconsolable than widows.
Now it’s Paul Auster’s turn. After the tour de force 4 3 2 1 (his masterpiece?) and the long digression on the life of Stephen Crane, here he returns to fiction with a short novel, with impunity sophisticated, mournfully hilarious. Already from the title which coincides with the name of the protagonist – Baumgartner -, we understand that it is a novel by Auster, one of the intimate ones of the last happy season inaugurated by Brooklyn Follies. I wouldn’t write about it if I didn’t think that this is the kind of novel, apparently minor, in which one of the greatest writers of our time reveals the most intimate core of his inspiration.
To avoid any misunderstanding, let me say that Auster does not correspond to my ideal of an artist. Too right-thinking. There is no virtuous cause that has not seen him at the forefront in recent decades, nor a Pen Club petition to which he has not added his signature. In the words of the poet, Auster is the undisputed standard-bearer of “magnificent and progressive fortunes”. He does not belong to the lineage of the great neurotic solipsists: Bellow, Roth, Updike; nor to that of apocalyptic curmudgeons, such as Pynchon or DeLillo. In a certain sense, he is the progenitor of that generation of very respectable Jewish novelists who preferred Brooklyn and its beautiful brownstones to the old Upper West Side. What distinguishes him from his many followers is his style. Enlightened as he is by such natural grace as to dispel any doubt about the eminent place he occupies in contemporary literature. A plush and frugal writing, an absent-minded and colloquial tone, an impressive naturalness in chiseling environments, situations and characters. He takes his sentences. They seem short but they are very long, punctuated by the syncopated dance of commas. More persuasive than muscular, they are designed to reassure the reader but also, and here comes the difficult part, to disturb and move him.
Seymour Baumgartner is a philosophy professor originally from Newark. On the threshold of retirement, he lives and teaches in Princeton. For ten years, from the day his wife Anna – a translator and poet with a vibrant and modest talent – died in a banal sea accident on Cape Cod, Baumgartner has essentially stopped living. Having finished the one on Kierkegaard, he is now grappling with a new essay. In a manner appropriate to the circumstances, it is dedicated to the so-called “cut limb syndrome”. While he writes it, as is right, he thinks of himself, of his own mourning, but also “of the mothers and fathers who mourn their dead children, of the children who mourn their dead parents, of the women who mourn their dead husbands, to men who mourn their dead wives and to their suffering which closely resembles the after-effects of an amputation, because the leg or arm that no longer exists was once attached to a living body, and the a person who is no longer there was once attached to another living person, and if we are the ones who continue to live, we discover that our amputated part, our phantom part, can still be the source of a deep, unworthy pain . Sometimes certain remedies can alleviate the symptoms, but there is no definitive cure.” To account for this pain, Auster describes his character struggling with grotesque and pathetic rituals, such as rearranging his deceased wife’s underwear: “Lace panties, cotton panties, bras, slips, stockings, pantyhose , socks, gym shorts, tennis shorts, swimsuits, t-shirts”.
Apparently, for ten years Baumgartner’s existence has been reduced to a dreamy suspension characterized by a strong propensity for injury. Seymour often falls, gets hurt, but doesn’t show it, nor complains about it, he’s a stoic, a real man. Up to this point we are at the heart of the widower’s novel genre. Just move forward, however, to understand that Auster has in store for his professor (and for us readers) a series of unpredictable turns capable of transforming the narrative into something else, which I really don’t know how to define.After a strange accident nocturnal, halfway between dream and hallucination, in which his revived wife invites him to put his soul at peace, Baumgartner makes an abrupt return to life. He gets together with Judith who then abandons him to get together with someone else, younger than him. A painful experience, certainly, a new blow, but not so frightening as to take him away from his living duties again.
The book then becomes a balance sheet, the reader is catapulted into the protagonist’s youth. Baumgartner’s father and mother re-emerge from the past. The portrait that Auster offers us of the former is memorable. Baumgartner senior’s life was marked by the most Jewish of punishments: the sense of duty. To keep his family and the small shop that provides them with a living, he had to sacrifice his intellectual ambitions. At least apparently he had no choice, even if, if you think about it, “everyone has a choice, and it doesn’t mean that his father had made the wrong one, even though it had poisoned his life, but if he had the opposite choice and had he run away to become a history professor or a lawyer or a troublemaker on the loose, then probably the unforgivable sin of having abandoned his family in the moment of greatest need would have tormented him for life, and this suggests that he would not there was a right choice and a wrong choice but only two right choices that in the end would turn out to be wrong.”
This is but a small sample of Auster and his hero’s way of proceeding, a calm and hesitant way that makes Baumgartner a beautiful novel. For the themes covered and the setting, it may recall The Dying Animal or Everyman, even if it is clear that it was not Philip Roth who wrote it, but his younger fellow citizen Paul Auster. To the Shakespearean nihilism of the late Roth, Auster opposes a secular Epicureanism, tinged with irony and fatalism. An extremely appropriate recipe for facing old age and resisting death.
