Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure ANNOTATION
The author ponders the writer's attempts to stay financially afloat.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
This is the story of a young man's struggle to stay afloat. By turns poignant and comic, Paul Auster's memoir is essentially an autobiographical essay about money - and what it means not to have it. From one odd job to the next, from one failed scheme to another, Auster investigates his own stubborn compulsion to make art, and describes his ingenious, often farfetched attempts to survive on next to nothing. From the streets of New York City and Paris to the rural roads of Upstate New York, the author treats us to a series of remarkable adventures and unforgettable encounters and, in several elaborate appendixes, to previously unknown work from these years. Here are three plays that contain the seeds of inspiration for some of Auster's future work, a tabletop baseball game (complete with cards and rules), and a pseudonymous detective novel - the author's first full-length novel. Each is an example of Auster's effort to make money; each is an illustration of the artist's mind at work. The result is a book of manifold delights and discoveries, an autobiography that resembles no other.
FROM THE CRITICS
Dwight Garner
In his late 20s and early 30s, Paul Auster was down on his luck. His career as a novelist had yet to take off. He was married, he had children, and he was forced to scrape to survive. (Auster moonlighted as a translator and screenwriter, among other things.) There's nothing surprising about any of this -- few are the young novelists who don't experience lean times. What is surprising about Hand to Mouth, Auster's new memoir about his hungry years, is how smug and self-aggrandizing he is about his suffering. Hand to Mouth isn't merely the least winsome book Auster has written. It's among the least winsome literary memoirs in recent years.
Auster grew up middle-class in the Jersey 'burbs, then clawed his way to Columbia University, where he was dumbstruck by the realization that "Art was holy." Auster developed a distaste for the kind of literary hackwork that keeps many young writers alive, so he set off for what he calls "blue-collar" adventure -- working on tanker ships, loitering in European capitals. One problem with Hand to Mouth is the way Auster over-dramatizes these events. His time on that oil tanker takes up a heap of space in this book, for example, but in fact he worked on it for only a few months. Later, as a young married, he moans about the "constant, grinding, almost suffocating lack of money that poisoned my soul and kept me in a state of never-ending panic." He ululates as if he'd been born an untouchable on Calcutta's mean streets; in reality, he's just another struggling writer who's behind on a few bills. (In the South, they call this poor-mouthing.) Worse is Auster's narcissism about his artistic purity. "We weren't rich kids who could depend on handouts from our parents," he says about his writer-friends at Columbia, "and once we left college, we would be out on our own for good. We were all facing the same situation, we all knew the score, and yet they acted in one way and I acted in another. That's what I'm still at a loss to explain. Why did my friends act so prudently, and why was I so reckless?" To put this another way, he is asking: Why did my friends all sell out and become orthodontists, while I stuck to my guns and became a brooding international lit-world sex symbol?
Hand to Mouth exaggerates some of Auster's other weaknesses. As a stylist, he has always been suave yet sluggish; he's an impassive arranger of minor chords. Auster needs a strong story to tell in order to be a compelling presence on the page. His earlier memoir, The Invention of Solitude, which reads like a work of detection, tells such a story -- Auster pries into not just his father's psyche but a 60-year-old family murder mystery as well. Hand to Mouth finds him simply floundering.
As if to make up for this thin, underwhelming slice of memoir, Auster pads the book with examples of his juvenalia, items that the book's publicity copy warns are "three of the longest footnotes in literary history." Here's what these "footnotes" actually consist of: a mystery novel that the young Auster published under the pseudonym Paul Benjamin; a series of plays; and a card game he invented called "Action Baseball." None of these recycled items reward serious attention; even the Auster groupies who wade through them are likely to wind up scratching their noggins. Hand to Mouth makes you want to put your hands to your eyes. -- Salon
Publishers Weekly
Auster, the highly talented novelist (New York Trilogy), poet and filmmaker (Smoke) was not always as successful as he is now, and the title section of this oddly conceived book (most of which is comprised of Auster's unpublished work) is a penetrating memoir of a young writer desperately trying to make his way. Seldom has the helpless obsession, utter marginality and crushing poverty of the unsuccessful author been better conveyed than here; even the work Auster did purely for the money, forsaking his literary ambitions, didn't come off, and the memoir ends with recognition nowhere in sight. The rest of the volume, made up of what the publisher coyly calls "three of the longest footnotes in literary history," shows us some of the material that failed. There are three short plays (the kind that get staged at off-off-Broadway theaters); an ingenious card game that simulates baseball (an Auster passion), which, surprisingly, has never been marketed; and a brief but absorbing private-eye novel, "Squeeze Play". As Auster justly remarks, "As an example of the genre, it seemed no worse than many others I had read, much better than some." It is a noirish tale of the death of a baseball idol with a strange obsession, and apart from some heavy-handed flip dialogue and rote violence, it broods along stylishly enough. (The novel was ultimately published by Avon, netting Auster a sum in the high three figures.) As a cautionary tale for writers, this is a superb book; as an addition to an oeuvre, it's on the slight side. Author tour. (Sept.)
Library Journal
Coming upon this "chronicle of early failure," readers of translator, poet, screenwriter, and novelist Auster (Mr. Vertigo, LJ 6/15/94) may be charmed by his new publisher's presentation though left puzzled by the derivative offerings. The work consists of one original, down-beat essay, "Hand to Mouth," a flat record of Auster's inauspicious early years struggling to make money while writing (the essay was recently excerpted in Granta), and three appendixes: a medley of Beckett-inspired plays, an "action baseball" card game that Auster was convinced would make his fortune, and a Chandleresque detective novel, "Squeeze Play"all of which failed in one way or another when first created. Auster's collection of essays and reviews, "The Art of Hunger" (Sun & Moon, 1991), develop more fully and satisfactorily the author's literary development, while the appendixes here will interest few but devoted literary archivists. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/97.]Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"
Kirkus Reviews
Artistic failure, financial woes, and broken love are the subjects of Auster's wide-ranging philosophical memoir, a candid assessment of the demands and rewards of art, work, and money. Auster's (Mr. Vertigo, 1994; Leviathan, 1992; etc.) success provides an ironic subtext to this catalog of misery: The author of 14 books of fiction, poetry, essays, screenplays, and translations laughs last, since this putative chronicle of failure includes work that originally lacked an audience. That material, presented in three appendixes, includes a trio of one-act plays (one of which, Laurel and Hardy Go to Heaven, isn't bad); Action Baseball, a nifty game complete with cut-out playing cards that failed as a desperate get-rich-quick scheme; and "Squeeze Play", a thinking man's mystery featuring a wise-cracking Ivy League gumshoe. All provide interesting footnotes to Auster's development as a novelist. The main attraction, though, is the long title essay, a bare-knuckles grapple with the choices he made during a rocky literary apprenticeship. The central problem, Auster writes, "was that I had no interest in leading a double life" like writers who "earn good money at legitimate professions" and write in their spare time. He took the old-fashioned approach, eschewing MFA programs (both as a student and teacher) to earn his chops in the school of hard knocks. He shipped out with the merchant marine, explored France and Ireland, won a few minor grants. But despite help from friends like Mary McCarthy (whose influence led to a memorable freelance gig translating a new Vietnamese constitution in 1973), Auster spent years of penury doing "literary hackwork" while his fiction wentnowhere and his marriage foundered. Even an attempt to sell out ended with his publisher kaput and a detective novel languishing in a warehouse. Risk and failure—common themes in Auster's work—gain real- life urgency as autobiography. Required, inspiring reading for Auster-holics and aspiring writers.
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