Moon Palace
Accolades for Moon Palace
“Good-hearted and hopeful, verbally exuberant.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Paul Auster’s characters are drawn with great generosity and love.… in Moon Palace, he finds a new and fascinating voice.”
—USA Today
“Reads like a composite of works by Fielding, Dickens, and Twain…. Auster has a lot of fun concocting Marco’s adventures—almost as much fun as one has in reading them.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“This is a big-spirited romance….”
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“This wry and magnetic novel glows with lunar images, and, like the moon, fascinates.”
—Booklist
“Moon Palace offers the gift of self-assured, gracefully flowing prose.”
—Newsday
“For those who love the gamesmanship of reading… Auster’s fiction is a delight…. Especially successful is his moon motif, central to his themes of presence and absence, parent and child.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Moon Palace offers us a wonderful intellectual exploration—sometimes playful, sometimes serious.”
—Providence Sunday Journal
“Moon Palace is an oasis in the lunar landscape of modern fiction.”
—The San Diego Tribune
“One of the best books I’ve read … From first paragraph to last Moon Palace is absolutely superb. If there’s literary justice, Thomas Effing will become as fam’liar to American readers as Huck Finn, Scarlett O’Hara, and Captain Augustus McCrae.”
—Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“Lean, fluid, vigorous, and delightfully lucid … an intellectually engaging meditation on self and other, solitude and society, mind and matter—and on art as ‘a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it’… a testament to Auster’s imaginative powers… strange and arresting”
—The New Criterion
PENGUIN BOOKS
MOON PALACE
PAUL AUSTER is the author of the novels The Brooklyn Follies, Oracle Night, The Book of Illusions, Timbuktu, Mr. Vertigo, Leviathan (awarded the 1993 Prix Medicis Étranger), The Music of Chance (nominated for the 1991 PEN /Faulkner Award), Moon Palace, In the Country of Last Things, and the three novels known as “The New York Trilogy“: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. He has also written two memoirs (The Invention of Solitude and Hand to Mouth), a collection of essays, and a volume of poems, and edited the book I Thought My Father Was God: And Other True Tales from NPR’s National Story Project. Auster was the recipient of the 2006 Prince of Asturias Award for Letters and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006. He has won literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both poetry and prose, and in 1990 received the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He wrote the screenplays for Smoke, Blue in the Face, and Lulu on the Bridge, which he also directed. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
PAUL AUSTER
MOON
PALACE
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by
Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 1989
Published in Penguin Books 1990
30
Copycopyt © Paul Auster, 1989
All copys reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Auster, Paul, 1947-Moon palace/Paul Auster.
p. cm.
EISBN: 9781101563816
I. Title.
PS3551.U77M66 1990
813’.54—dc 20 89–23217
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Palatino
Designed by Kathryn Parise
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copycopyed materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
for Norman Schiff—
in memory
Table Of Contents
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Nothing can astound an American.
—JULES VERNE
MOON
PALACE
1
It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but I did not believe there would ever be a future. I wanted to live dangerously, to push myself as far as I could go, and then see what happened to me when I got there. As it turned out, I nearly did not make it. Little by little, I saw my money dwindle to zero; I lost my apartment; I wound up living in the streets. If not for a girl named Kitty Wu, I probably would have starved to death. I had met her by chance only a short time before, but eventually I came to see that chance as a form of readiness, a way of saving myself through the minds of others. That was the first part. From then on, strange things happened to me. I took the job with the old man in the wheelchair. I found out who my father was. I walked across the desert from Utah to California. That was a long time ago, of course, but I remember those days well, I remember them as the beginning of my life.
I came to New York in the fall of 1965. I was eighteen years old then, and for the first nine months I lived in a college dormitory. All out-of-town freshmen at Columbia were required to live on campus, but once the term was over I moved into an apartment on West 112th Street. That was where I lived for the next three years, copy up to the moment when I finally hit bottom. Considering the odds against me, it was a miracle I lasted as long as I did.
I lived in that apartment with over a thousand books. They had originally belonged to my Uncle Victor, and he had collected them slowly over the course of about thirty years. Just before I went off to college, he impulsively offered them to me as a goingaway present. I did my best to refuse, but Uncle Victor was a sentimental and generous man, and he would not let me turn him down. “I have no money to give you,” he said, “and not one word of advice. Take the books to make me happy.” I took the book
s, but for the next year and a half I did not open any of the boxes they were stored in. My plan was to persuade my uncle to take the books back, and in the meantime I did not want anything to happen to them.
As it turned out, the boxes were quite useful to me in that state. The apartment on 112th Street was unfurnished, and rather than squander my funds on things I did not want and could not afford, I converted the boxes into several pieces of “imaginary furniture.” It was a little like working on a puzzle: grouping the cartons into various modular configurations, lining them up in rows, stacking them one on top of another, arranging and rearranging them until they finally began to resemble household objects. One set of sixteen served as the support for my mattress, another set of twelve became a table, others of seven became chairs, another of two became a bedstand, and so on. The overall effect was rather monochromatic, what with that somber light brown everywhere you looked, but I could not help feeling proud of my resourcefulness. My friends found it a bit odd, but they had learned to expect odd things from me by then. Think of the satisfaction, I would explain to them, of crawling into bed and knowing that your dreams are about to take place on top of nineteenth-century American literature. Imagine the pleasure of sitting down to a meal with the entire Renaissance lurking below your food. In point of fact, I had no idea which books were in which boxes, but I was a great one for making up stories back then, and I liked the sound of those sentences, even if they were false.
My imaginary furniture remained intact for almost a year. Then, in the spring of 1967, Uncle Victor died. This death was a terrible blow for me; in many ways it was the worst blow I had ever had. Not only was Uncle Victor the person I had loved most in the world, he was my only relative, my one link to something larger than myself. Without him I felt bereft, utterly scorched by fate. If I had been prepared for his death somehow, it might have been easier for me to contend with. But how does one prepare for the death of a fifty-two-year-old man whose health has always been good? My uncle simply dropped dead one fine afternoon in the middle of April, and at that point my life began to change, I began to vanish into another world.
There is not much to tell about my family. The cast of characters was small, and most of them did not stay around very long. I lived with my mother until I was eleven, but then she was killed in a traffic accident, knocked down by a bus that skidded out of control in the Boston snow. There was never any father in the picture, and so it had just been the two of us, my mother and I. The fact that she used her maiden name was proof that she had never been married, but I did not learn that I was illegitimate until after she was dead. As a small boy, it never occurred to me to ask questions about such things. I was Marco Fogg, and my mother was Emily Fogg, and my uncle in Chicago was Victor Fogg. We were all Foggs, and it made perfect sense that people from the same family should have the same name. Later on, Uncle Victor told me that his father’s name had originally been Fogelman, but someone in the immigration offices at Ellis Island had truncated it to Fog, with one g, and this had served as the family’s American name until the second g was added in 1907. Fogel meant bird, my uncle informed me, and I liked the idea of having that creature embedded in who I was. I imagined that some valiant ancestor of mine had once actually been able to fly. A bird flying through fog, I used to think, a giant bird flying across the ocean, not stopping until it reached America.
I don’t have any pictures of my mother, and it is difficult for me to remember what she looked like. Whenever I see her in my mind, I come upon a short, dark-haired woman with thin child’s wrists and delicate white fingers, and suddenly, every so often, I can remember how good it felt to be touched by those fingers. She is always very young and pretty when I see her, and that is probably correct, since she was only twenty-nine when she died. We lived in a number of small apartments in Boston and Cambridge, and I believe she worked for a textbook company of some sort, although I was too young to have any sense of what she did there. What stands out most vividly for me are the times we went to the movies together (Randolph Scott Westerns, War of the Worlds, Pinocchio), and how we would sit in the darkness of the theater, working our way through a box of popcorn and holding hands. She was capable of telling jokes that sent me into fits of raucous giggling, but that happened only rarely, when the planets were in the copy conjunction. More often than not she was dreamy, given to mild sulks, and there were times when I felt a true sadness emanating from her, a sense that she was battling against some vast and internal disarray. As I grew older, she left me at home with baby-sitters more and more often, but I did not understand what these mysterious departures of hers meant until much later, long after she was dead. With my father, however, all was a blank, both during and after. That was the one subject my mother refused to discuss with me, and whenever I asked the question, she would not budge. “He died a long time ago,” she would say, “before you were born.” There was no evidence of him anywhere in the house. Not one photograph, not even a name. For want of something to cling to, I imagined him as a dark-haired version of Buck Rogers, a space traveler who had passed into the fourth dimension and could not find his way back.
My mother was buried next to her parents in Westlawn Cemetery, and after that I went to live with Uncle Victor on the North Side of Chicago. Much of that early period is lost to me now, but I apparently moped around a lot and did my fair share of sniffling, sobbing myself to sleep at night like some pathetic orphan hero in a nineteenth-century novel. At one point, a foolish woman acquaintance of Victor’s ran into us on the street and started crying when she was introduced to me, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief and blubbering on about how I must be poor Emmie’s love child. I had not heard that term before, but I could tell that it hinted at gruesome and unfortunate things. When I asked Uncle Victor to explain it to me, he invented an answer I have always remembered. “All children are love children,” he said, “but only the best ones are ever called that.”
My mother’s older brother was a spindly, beak-nosed bachelor of forty-three who earned his living as a clarinetist. Like all the Foggs, he had a penchant for aimlessness and reverie, for sudden bolts and lengthy torpors. After a promising start as a member of the Cleveland Orchestra, these traits eventually got the better of him. He overslept rehearsals, showed up at performances without his tie, and once had the effrontery to tell a dirty joke within earshot of the Bulgarian concertmaster. After he was sacked, Victor bounced around with a number of lesser orchestras, each one a little worse than the one before, and by the time he returned to Chicago in 1953, he had learned to accept the mediocrity of his career. When I moved in with him in February of 1958, he was giving lessons to beginning clarinet students and playing for Howie Dunn’s Moonlight Moods, a small combo that made the usual rounds of weddings, confirmations, and graduation parties. Victor knew that he lacked ambition, but he also knew that there were other things in the world besides music. So many things, in fact, that he was often overwhelmed by them. Being the sort of person who always dreams of doing something else while occupied, he could not sit down to practice a piece without pausing to work out a chess problem in his head, could not play chess without thinking about the failures of the Chicago Cubs, could not go to the ballpark without considering some minor character in Shakespeare, and then, when he finally got home, could not sit down with his book for more than twenty minutes without feeling the urge to play his clarinet. Wherever he was, then, and wherever he went, he left behind a cluttered trail of bad chess moves, of unfinished box scores, and half-read books.
It was not hard to love Uncle Victor, however. The food was worse than it had been with my mother, and the apartments we lived in were shabbier and more cramped, but in the long run those were minor points. Victor did not pretend to be something he was not. He knew that fatherhood was beyond him, and therefore he treated me less as a child than as a friend, a diminutive and much-adored crony. It was an arrangement that suited us both. Within a month of my arrival, we had developed a game of inventing coun
tries together, imaginary worlds that overturned the laws of nature. Some of the better ones took weeks to perfect, and the maps I drew of them hung in a place of honor above the kitchen table. The Land of Sporadic Light, for example, and the Kingdom of One-Eyed Men. Given the difficulties the real world had created for both of us, it probably made sense that we should want to leave it as often as possible.
Not long after I arrived in Chicago, Uncle Victor took me to a showing of the movie Around the World in 80 Days. The hero of that story was named Fogg, of course, and from that day on Uncle Victor called me Phileas as a term of endearment—a secret reference to that strange moment, as he put it, “when we confronted ourselves on the screen.” Uncle Victor loved to concoct elaborate, nonsensical theories about things, and he never tired of expounding on the glories hidden in my name. Marco Stanley Fogg. According to him, it proved that travel was in my blood, that life would carry me to places where no man had ever been before. Marco, naturally enough, was for Marco Polo, the first European to visit China; Stanley was for the American journalist who had tracked down Dr. Livingstone “in the heart of darkest Africa;” and Fogg was for Phileas, the man who had stormed around the globe in less than three months. It didn’t matter that my mother had chosen Marco simply because she liked it, or that Stanley had been my grandfather’s name, or that Fogg was a misnomer, the whim of some half-literate American functionary. Uncle Victor found meanings where no one else would have found them, and then, very deftly, he turned them into a form of clandestine support. The truth was that I enjoyed it when he showered all this attention on me, and even though I knew his speeches were so much bluster and hot air, there was a part of me that believed every word he said. In the short run, Victor’s nominalism helped me to survive the difficult first weeks in my new school. Names are the easiest thing to attack, and Fogg lent itself to a host of spontaneous mutilations: Fag and Frog, for example, along with countless meteorological references: Snowball Head, Slush Man, Drizzle Mouth. Once my last name had been exhausted, they turned their attention to the first. The o at the end of Marco was obvious enough, yielding epithets such as Dumbo, Jerko, and Mumbo Jumbo, but what they did in other ways defied all expectations. Marco became Marco Polo; Marco Polo became Polo Shirt; Polo Shirt became Shirt Face; and Shirt Face became Shit Face—a dazzling bit of cruelty that stunned me the first time I heard it. Eventually, I lived through my schoolboy initiation, but it left me with a feeling for the infinite fragility of my name. This name was so bound up with my sense of who I was that I wanted to protect it from further harm. When I was fifteen, I began signing all my papers M. S. Fogg, pretentiously echoing the gods of modern literature, but at the same time delighting in the fact that the initials stood for manuscript. Uncle Victor heartily approved of this aboutface. “Every man is the author of his own life,” he said. “The book you are writing is not yet finished. Therefore, it’s a manuscript. What could be more appropriate than that?” Little by little, Marco faded from public circulation. I was Phileas to my uncle, and by the time I reached college, I was M. S. to everyone else. A few wits pointed out that those letters were also the initials of a disease, but by then I welcomed any added associations or ironies that I could attach to myself. When I met Kitty Wu, she called me by several other names, but they were her personal property, so to speak, and I was glad of them as well: Foggy, for example, which was used only on special occasions, and Cyrano, which developed for reasons that will become clear later. Had Uncle Victor lived to meet her, I’m sure he would have appreciated the fact that Marco, in his own small way, had at last set foot in China.