By Stuart Mitchner

What you see is what you see….
—Frank Stella (1936-2024)

My name is Paul Auster. That is not my real name.
—Paul Auster (1947-2024), from The New York Trilogy

There are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half-credence in the supernatural, by coincidences of so seemingly marvellous a character that, as mere coincidences, the intellect has been unable to receive them.
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

Here’s my ideal reading experience: I’m on the top floor of the Fieldstone Suite at the Black Bass Hotel in Lumberville, Pa., it’s the last Sunday in April 2024, the hour before midnight, my wife is asleep in the bed by the window, and I’m watching the gleaming, darker-than-night waters of the Delaware River move relentlessly toward New Hope, Trenton, Whitman’s Camden, Poe’s Philadelphia, and points south and on into the Atlantic. The small book I’m holding half-open is the 1899 Raven Edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, which I’d stuck in my overnight bag at the last minute.

For the better part of 30 years, I’ve been meaning to read all 130 pages of this charismatic little volume with its charming deep-blue, deep-black cover, a raven perched in a grey circle at the center. At this hour of the night, with the window slightly open for a breeze, you can almost hear the water moving, and while I know the river is the Delaware, tonight it’s the Seine and the Hudson flowing as one, and it belongs to Poe, who has reimagined the murder of a New York girl named Mary Rogers as the murder of Marie Rogêt, a Parisian grisette, meanwhile rewriting the Hudson as the Seine, New York as Paris, Weehawken as the Barrière du Roule, and Manhattan’s Nassau Street as Rue Pavée Saint Andrée.

The first time I tried to read The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, lured by the title, I ran into a long quote from Novalis, in German. The English translation, with its reference to an ideal series of events that run parallel with the real ones, didn’t grab me either (I was maybe 11). Same thing with the first sentence of the story about coincidences so “marvellous” that the “intellect has been unable to receive them.” What finally drove me and my failed seventh-grade math “intellect” away was Poe’s reference to “the Calculus of Probabilities,” which is, “in its essence, purely mathematical.” More than half a century later, at the Black Bass, with the river darkly flowing outside the window, I read it all, from the Calculus of Probabilities to the last word, which is, as it was fated to be, detail (Poe’s italics).

Auster’s New York

The day after novelist Paul Auster’s death on Tuesday, April 30, I found a copy of his best-known work, The New York Trilogy, at Labyrinth Books. As soon as I saw the bright, brash, engaging cover design by Art Spiegelman, I was smitten, convinced that Auster’s New York would make a good fit with Marie Rogêt. When City of Glass, the first volume of the trilogy, appeared in the early 1980s, I was put off by the accompanying “postmodernist” buzz. Forty years later, I love the book on sight thanks to the design and the magic words “New York Trilogy” and on the back cover Spiegelman’s colorful map of the Hudson River, Central Park, and the Upper West Side from West 57th to the Cathedral Parkway, along with a circled insert of Spiegelman’s graphic depiction of the Tower of Babel.

The first book Paul Auster ever bought with his own money ($3.95) was the Modern Library Giant edition of The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. He was 9 and admits that in the beginning he “couldn’t make head or tail of it,” but after a year it became “comprehensible,” though I doubt that he’d have navigated the depths of detail in Marie Rogêt at that age. Nevertheless, Poe remains one of Auster’s guiding lights, his presence felt throughout the trilogy, from the first page of City of Glass, which is about Quinn, an author of mystery novels who writes under the name William Wilson — the title of Poe’s story about a man who ends up murdering his double and thus himself, a plot given a spin in the third and least interesting novel of the trilogy, The Locked Room. One problem is that by then New York has all but vanished from the narrative and is only a shadow of itself in the Brooklyn setting of Ghosts, the middle novel, which takes place in 1947, the year of the real Paul Auster’s birth and the year the real Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier. Highlights include a summary of the classic film noir Out of the Past, a foray into American literature with Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, and a color-coded narrative in which a man called White hires a detective named Blue to tail a suspect named Black.

The Real New York

If I referred to the “real Paul Auster,” it’s because City of Glass is set in motion by a mysteriously misdirected phone call to Quinn intended for a detective listed in the phone book as “Paul Auster.” The assignment is to prevent a murder-to-be by shadowing Peter Stillman, a scholar of languages who has vowed to execute his severely disabled son, also named Peter Stillman, whom he had locked in a room and abused for nine years, an “experiment” that landed him in the asylum from which he has just been released. Most of the second chapter is consumed by a deranged, robotic, third-person monologue by Peter Stillman, the son, that reveals at great length the psychic damage done to him by his father, thus sentences such as “Every time Peter said a word, his father would boom him. At last Peter learned to say nothing. Ya ya ya. Thank you.”

Already troubled by something that for lack of a better phrase, I’ll call the aura of postmodernism, I didn’t connect with the “real New York” until Quinn stopped for a hamburger at the Heights Luncheonette on 112th, where the boss, “a small balding man with curly hair and a concentration camp number tattooed on his forearm” sat in his “domain of cigarettes, pipes, and cigars reading the Night Owl edition” of the Daily News while Quinn and the Puerto Rican counter man talked about last night’s Mets game. The talk of baseball and the sound and smell of “gristle-studded hamburger patties” hissing on the grill blitzed the postmodernist aura and put everything back into an Upper West Side reality.

What can I say? I’ve reread that passage numerous times because for me it puts the city I love, like Faulkner’s Lord’s Prayer metaphor for great writing, “on the head of a pin.” Here you are at maybe three in the morning, with two guys, a Puerto Rican and a writer of mystery novels, rapping about the miseries of the mid-1980s Mets, a few years before the second miracle of the 1986 World Championship. For several years they’ve been talking about baseball; “in the winter they talk of trades, predictions, memories,” during the summer it’s always about the most recent game. Forget the shifting identities routine, they don’t even know each other’s names: “They were both Mets fans, and the hopelessness of that passion had created a bond between them.”

Enter Dupin

Soon after Quinn leaves the luncheonette, Auster quotes Poe’s detective C. Auguste Dupin, the forerunner of Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, and numerous film noir private eyes right up to 21st-century sleuths like Holder and Linden, the Lincoln Lawyer, and Sugar. What Dupin has to say concerns the “identification of the reasoner’s intellect with that of his opponent.” At this point the “reasoner” is the faux detective Auster shadowing his “opponent” Peter Stillman. Regardless of whether Quinn’s Auster identifies with Stillman senior, it’s apparent that he’s gambling with his sanity, which becomes clear when the chapter ends with this direct address to the reader: “I do not think this is a game. On the other hand, nothing is clear. For example, who are you? And if you think you know, why do you keep lying about it? I have no answer. All I can say is this: listen to me. My name is Paul Auster. That is not my real name.”

And I tell myself “keep smelling the hamburgers.”

“Wordless Things”

In the Columbia University library, detective Auster/Quinn reads Peter Stillman senior’s scholarly book, The Garden and The Tower: Early Visions of the New World, which concludes that the story of the Garden “records not only the fall of man, but the fall of language,” which is essentially what Stillman inflicted on his son by locking him up for nine years. Having read Stillman’s book, the deranged detective feels ready to talk with him, eye to eye, as it were. During their first conversation, Stillman sounds like Dupin discussing evidence when he says, “The world is in fragments, sir, and it’s my job to put it together again.” It all comes down to “a neverland of fragments, a place of wordless things and thingless words.”

Looking at the Hudson

I escaped wordlessly and thinglessly back to the room overlooking the river at the Black Bass Hotel after the next conversation, which took place in Riverside Park, “on a knobby outcrop at 84th Street known as Mount Tom.” On “this same spot, in the summers of 1843 and 1844,” Auster writes, “Edgar Allan Poe had spent many long hours gazing out at the Hudson. Quinn knew this because he had made it his business to know such things. As it turned out, he had often sat there himself.” As Poe gazed at the Hudson and reimagined it as the Seine, he would have been thinking about “the Calculus of Probabilities” he’d presented to Dupin in The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, which ran in Snowden’s Lady’s Companion between November 1842 and February 1843. As Dupin ponders the way the press has exploited the details surrounding Marie’s murder, he says, “We should bear in mind that, in general, it is the object of our newspapers rather to create a sensation — to make a point — than to further the cause of truth.”

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Note: Frank Stella’s quote helped launch this column. In my mind’s eye I’m hanging one of the 226 works in his “Moby Dick” series on the wall of the Heights Luncheonette, perhaps “Jonah: Historically Regarded,” which is reproduced in my June 27, 2018 review, “Soundings: Art, Music, and Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick.’”