THE FOLIO SOCIETY

So begins ‘City of Glass’, the first of the three stories in Paul Auster’s hugely influential work, The New York Trilogy. The voice at the other end of the phone asks protagonist Quinn if he can speak to someone named ‘Paul Auster’ – reality intruding into a fictional world with dazzling results. In ‘Ghosts’, a private eye named Blue is hired by a man called White to investigate a Mr Black. Are they real people or characters in someone else’s fiction? And in the final story, ‘The Locked Room’, a failing writer ‘borrows’ the work and family life of his more creatively fertile friend when the latter disappears.

Set in a distinctly noir New York, fiction and reality meet and identities meld unnervingly in all three stories. Auster uses – and skews – the conventions of the mystery genre to force his characters and the reader to question the concept of identity. In so doing, he creates a whole new approach to story-telling. His taut, page-turning narratives lead the reader on through increasingly labyrinthine, psychological mind-games.

This is the very first illustrated edition of The New York Trilogy. Tom Burns’s evocative pictures enhance the author’s portrayal of the great city as a place of loss, a world as unfathomable, it turns out, as the very nature of existence.

How to Publish a Classic Work of Fiction... Not Overnight

ROBERT McCRUM

In my twenty-odd years as a publisher I must have scanned many thousands of manuscripts, as book submissions are imprecisely known in the trade. Looking back, they blur into a ziggurat of unpublished – often unpublishable – material bound together with string, rubber bands and, occasionally, pink ribbon. From this tottering monument of literary ambition, one 'manuscript' stands out unforgettably (I can still see it with my inner eye): the bundle of typescript and unbound proof pages that represented the fiction debut of an unknown thirty-something Brooklyn writer named Paul Auster.

I would like to be able to claim that, from my first reading of this material (two short novels, City of Glass and Ghosts, in proof from a small Californian press, and the typescript of a third, The Locked Room), I swiftly made a substantial offer and proceeded, in a well-oiled sequence of decisions, to a triumphant book launch. Alas, it was not so, at least to start with. The Auster manuscripts were submitted to Faber and Faber with the usual covering letter by the elfin figure of the late Maggie Noach (pronounced ‘NOack’). Maggie was a wonderful literary agent, but a small one. When her submissions arrived at our offices in Queen Square there was not, shall we say, the urgency that should attend the recognition of future greatness. In a word, the Auster manuscript had to wait its turn.

When I look at my diary for the autumn of 1986 I see that I was flitting about the English-speaking world in a zigzag of international flights; here visiting an author in Australia, there attending a literary festival. There was simply not enough time to sit and read Paul Auster’s work in tranquillity. My recollection now is that I read one of the novellas, probably City of Glass, was struck by its brilliance, and passed the rest of the material to my assistant Fiona McCrae to report on while I was travelling.

There was something here that had caught my attention, but I wanted a more thoughtful response to the work before committing to a contract. The ways of publishing are often opportunistic, even inglorious. 'Quinn...found a spot for himself in a narrow alleyway, and settled in for the night' Fabers' acquisition of Paul Auster was typical of the process. As it turned out, Fiona confirmed my instinct. She found these novellas exceptional: seductive, fresh, original, teasing and allusive. Here was the holy grail of publishing, the new ‘voice’ that editors are always looking for.

When I came to make my offer, I quickly discovered that the mysterious Mr Auster was not as ‘new’ as I thought. Not only had he published essays and poetry in New York throughout the 1970s, he had already sold a haunting memoir of his father, The Invention of Solitude, and had just completed another novel, In the Country of Last Things, as well. We were not just looking at three novellas but an oeuvre. How should we go about it? With this conundrum, thankfully, my nomadic habits could assist. I was due to pass through New York, making my way home from a literary festival in New Zealand, in the spring of 1986. So I could meet Auster for myself. I had an idea about how best to launch his work in the UK, but it was something I wanted to discuss face to face.

The tall, dark and extraordinarily handsome young man who walked into our rendezvous, a coffee shop on Madison Avenue two blocks from the Morgan Library, has become such a dear friend over so many years since then, that I am probably bound to mythologise our first encounter, but one thing is certain: we clicked at once.

I discovered that the author of the five books I had just acquired was as much a European as an American, a friend of Samuel Beckett, a translator steeped in French literature and a fine poet in his own right. And then, in the quirky kind of connection that might have come from one of his own books, he was also distantly related by marriage to Michael Flanders of 'Flanders and Swann', a childhood favourite of mine. So we drank our espressos and talked. I, jet-lagged, ordered more coffee, and chocolate cake, something we laugh about to this day. Now came the moment I had been dreading. How would it be, I asked, if Fabers were to put the novellas into a single volume, on the model of a Faber classic, Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, and give it a new title? To my relief and astonishment, Paul responded with delight and enthusiasm. This, he said, had always been his idea. He even had a title for such a volume: it should be called The New York Trilogy.

Now, finally, I began to learn the painful truth behind these extraordinary stories. Paul’s father had died in 1979, and with the money he had left to him, a few hundred dollars, his son had been able to buy some time to fulfil his ambition and write for himself. The Invention of Solitude had been the first fruit. Completed in 1981, this strange and haunting memoir had appeared in 1982, and been well received.

Then came disappointment. City of Glass was written in 1981–2. Ghosts had followed in 1983. The Locked Room had been completed in 1984. All three had received no fewer than seventeen rejections. In the end, Auster’s work had been rescued by Douglas Messerli's Sun and Moon Press in California. Messerli had embarked on publishing The New York Trilogy in single volumes, on the grounds that everyone would 'make more money' 'Pretending not to notice Stillman, he sat down on the bench beside him' that way. The next day I flew home. I had a new friend, a wonderful book, and now a title. All Fabers had to do was launch it.

Remembering the Auster manuscript is one thing. Its publication in the winter of 1986 was something else. It was, quite simply, sensational. In a way that would now seem suicidal for the launch of a new novel by an unknown American, we had scheduled The New York Trilogy for late November. Paul, as it happened, was passing through London that month with his wife Siri Hustvedt and baby daughter Sophie.

So, in advance of the reviews, we organised a dinner for the literary press at the Groucho Club – a huge success – and then sat back to await the critical harvest. It’s often said that book reviews today don’t have the impact they used to in the days of Cyril Connolly. If that's so (which I doubt) then this was a last hurrah. The Independent, Time Out, The Scotsman and finally the Daily Mail all hailed a work of dazzling originality and promise. Malcolm Bradbury, writing in The Sunday Times, described the book as 'the sensation of the winter', words we used again and again in our advertising that season. In The Glasgow Herald, the poet Douglas Dunn perceptively noted that The New York Trilogy 'echoes much American fiction of the past, as far back as Hawthorne'.

By the new year of 1987 Fabers was into a second, and then a third reprint; The New York Trilogy was a No. 1 bestseller, and Paul Auster was famous. But not, as you see, overnight. Whatever the myth, classics aren’t made that way.