1At the end of 2022, when Paul Auster was finishing the writing of Baumgartner, he started to feel strange symptoms that would soon be identified as linked to cancer. Baumgartner was published at the end of 2023, and Auster died on 30 April 2024. The book’s eponymous hero is a seventy-year-old university Professor of philosophy at Princeton, a childless widower still mourning the sudden death, ten years before, of his lifetime love, Anna Blume, a translator and an unpublished poet (and an Austerian recurring character ever since In the Country of Last Things, published in 1987). Baumgartner faces old age, the fallibility of his body, the fantasies and illusions of a brief new sentimental relationship, and he delves into his memories as well as into his late wife’s papers, thus (re)discovering parts of their respective pasts and of their shared life. In many ways, Baumgartner stands as the aged counterpart of the young men who inhabit Auster’s early novels (Quinn, Fanshawe, Fogg, Zimmer, Nashe…), brothers-in-arms experiencing loss and loneliness. It is then tempting to see this last novel as Auster’s projection into old age, a reading made easier by many elements belonging to his often-fictionalized autobiography.

2And yet, Baumgartner hardly appears as the grand finale crowning Auster’s career, partly because Auster works on another variation on themes he has often explored. Travels in the Scriptorium (2006) and Man in the Dark (2008), for instance, already stage characters similar to Baumgartner, somehow worn-out, more or less diminished and even bed-ridden, crushed by the outside world or personal dramas, and revisiting parts of their works or of their lives—which, in Auster’s universe, easily amounts to the same thing. Above all, Winter Journal (2012), Auster’s fourth memoir, a long meditation on the body from childhood to the moment of writing, reveals his daily companionship with time passing, and with aging, as well as his being acutely attuned to a process of physical decline already at work. At the end of 2023, therefore, when Baumgartner comes out, the themes of a writer’s last years and end have already been rehearsed several times. At the beginning of the same year, Auster publishes Bloodbath Nation, an essay designed to “have the feel of an old-fashioned political pamphlet” (Wroe), and written to accompany black-and-white pictures of Spencer Ostrander, his son-in-law. An analysis of gun culture and mass shooting in the United States, the book also sends Auster back to his very first prose volume, The Invention of Solitude (1982), a memoir whose first part, devoted to his recently dead father, Samuel, explores, among other things, the long-buried story of Auster’s grand-father being shot dead by his wife in 1919, when Sam Auster was six; Bloodbath Nation also allows Auster to return to his political voice which his reader has grown accustomed to, especially after 9/11 and its international consequences. The book is a powerful essay, thoroughly documented and rationally argued, yet Auster sounds as if he knew how useless his and Ostrander’s joint attempt was in a country where such a debate cannot take place. He therefore produces some of his best writing, paying tribute to countless innocent victims as he already did in the text which he wrote for Long Live King Kobe (2022), a photographic assessment (and his first collaboration with Ostrander) of a family struck by loss and grief after the death of 21-year-old Tyler Kobe Nichols, randomly shot in his Brooklyn neighborhood.

4When looking back on his earliest works, though, those same readers might feel puzzled: was this really how Auster’s voice would fall silent? By going gentle into that good night? Was it not meant to be one of those voices ending with a flourish, embodying that “late style” in which the author offers one last daring, tormented, unsettling volume? After all, as a young writer, Auster immediately entered the already well-established, exclusive club of the postmodernist writers. As early as the 1970s, indeed, his poems resembled, in his own words, “clenched fists […] short and dense and obscure, as compact and hermetic as Delphic oracles” (Auster, 2010a 550), and his contemporary essays on some of the most experimental poets and novelists of the first half of the 20^th century were demanding, highly personal meditations, essentially on writing as failing. The Invention of Solitude (1982), his first text both as a prose writer and as a memoirist, boldly set out to break the rules of both biographical and autobiographical writing, establishing a vein that he regularly returned to and prolonged throughout his life. And finally, the playful, puzzling, misleading short novels which followed and which brought him success (The New York Trilogy, 1985-1986) were immediately labelled “postmodernist” for their subversion of several genres, their absurd dimension, the dizzying intertextual and intratextual networks they relied on, or their metafictional and autofictional games. Compared to many postmodernist writers belonging both to the former generation and to his own, Auster rapidly became quite an accessible writer, and quite a successful one too. And yet, he never stopped proposing novelistic experiments to his readers, from the dog-written Timbuktu (1999) to the overtly metafictional Oracle Night (2003) and Travels in the Scriptorium (2006), alternating with more classical novels such as Moon Palace in 1989, The Brooklyn Follies in 2005, or Sunset Park in 2010.

5This essay contends that the climax of Auster’s “late period,” a challenging one in many ways, took place just before his last volumes mentioned above, with the 2021 publication of Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane, an 800-page biography which took Auster two years of his life, and which was often overlooked or underestimated by critics. Considered as too long for such a short literary career (Crane died in 1900 at the age of 28), and very classical in its structure, filled with too many thorough analyses of Crane’s poems, stories and novels, not to mention his press articles and letters, Burning Boy was not read as a major piece in Auster’s own work. Cleverly disguised in very classic attire indeed, the book is paradoxically Auster’s last daring project in which he pays a vibrant, unreserved, awe-struck homage to Crane and, more broadly, to a writer’s years of apprenticeship. The book finds its place in a larger project occupying Auster’s last years, which shows him revisiting his whole trajectory, and reassessing the power of literature when a young mind still sees it as a large, mysterious, unlimited realm open to all possibilities.

(A) biography, finally

6The Invention of Solitude was published in 1982 by a small publishing house and did not get much attention. It was republished after the success of The New York Trilogy (1987), and a few years later, in a long interview with Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory (1989-1990), Auster answers questions about this first memoir which launched his prose writing: “It’s about the question of biography,” he says, “about whether it’s in fact possible for one person to talk about another person” (Auster, 2010a 554). Writing about his father was an impossible task, Auster realizes at the beginning of “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” the first part of The Invention of Solitude: “To recognize, right from the start, that the essence of this project is failure” (20), and adds: “Slowly, I am coming to understand the absurdity of the task I have set for myself” (32). His father remains in death the undecipherable, impenetrable being he spent his whole life composing. “So implacably neutral on the surface,” that the multiple angles which his son experiments to organize his text remain vain, barely resulting in a fragmented, incomplete portrait. The failure of biographical writing contaminates whatever Auster attempts to say about himself, both in “Portrait of an Invisible Man” and in the self-centered meditation which he develops in “The Book of Memory,” the second part of the volume. Quite in tune with the postmodernist Zeitgeist, Auster, in his interview, links his third-person autobiographical voice in “The Book of Memory” (“I was looking at myself in the same way as a scientist studies a laboratory animal. I was no more than a little gray rat, a guinea pig stuck in the cage of my own consciousness. The book […] was an attempt to turn myself inside out and examine what I was made of,” Auster, 2010a 554) and the autofictional writing which he developed in City of Glass, his following novel which features a character named Paul Auster:

I think it stemmed from a desire to implicate myself in the machinery of the book. I don’t mean my autobiographical self, I mean my author self, that mysterious other who lives inside me and puts my name on the cover of books. What I was hoping to do, in fact, was to take my name off the cover and put it inside the story. I wanted to open up the process, to break down walls, to expose the plumbing. (Auster, 2010a 555)

7Biographical writing and autobiographical writing are therefore bound to fail: in both cases, the subject is ungraspable, fragmented, dissociated, forever elusive.

8Nevertheless, forty years later, Auster launches into a huge, exhaustive literary biography of Stephen Crane. As early as page four, he writes that he has “spent the past two years poring over every one of Crane’s works, […] read through every one of his published letters, […] snatched up every piece of biographical information [he] could put [his] hands on,” and indeed, the reader easily believes him. The book, which includes a dense set of notes and a thirty-page index testifying to Auster’s impressive bibliography, is a massive, quite classical, chronological biography, unravelling over the course of five sections, Crane’s life, travels, and writings. The first part, “Stevie,” methodologically sketches the subject in fifty pages: it offers a brief, synthetic overview of Crane’s short life and career, outlines his historical context, his family background in Newark, his growing up as a “both robust and sickly child” (Auster, 2021 22), independent and “ready, ready for anything” (50), his very first writings as a precocious boy, his education, and his dropping out of three colleges. The second part, “The Pace of Youth,” is the longest section (three hundred eighty pages) and it retraces Crane’s early adulthood in New York between 1891 and 1896, his struggles to earn money and keep it in his pocket, his talent for observing people which shines through his first short pieces published in newspapers, followed by long, immersive reports, then by his first serious attempts at fiction writing with his impressive, permanent switching between different forms (short stories, poems and novels), his both unreliable and loyal personality, his traveling west, his shy love stories and his sleeping with prostitutes, his determination to write differently, his cautious happiness facing the success of The Red Badge of Courage (1895). In only five years and a half, Auster writes, Crane “progress[es] from floundering apprentice to ferocious innovator, an artist in full possession of his talents and vision of the world” (52). This hectic, rich, colorful slice of life abruptly reaches an end when Crane, at the end of 1896, testifies at the trial of a young woman accused of soliciting, and loses both the friendship of Teddy Roosevelt, then Police Commissioner of New York, and his reputation. The third part, “Exile” (two hundred eighty pages), opens on Crane fleeing to Florida in November 1896, then to Cuba, intent on covering the Spanish-American war, demonstrating courage and detached heroism on several occasions, and above all, it covers his meeting with Cora Taylor, a fearless admirer, married woman and former brothel madam, whose adventurous life seemed to predestine her to follow in Crane’s footsteps. The lovers cover the Greco-Turkish conflict (Cora writing as Imogene Carter), live in Paris and then London where Cora, in spite of their acute shortage of money, fosters two children, to Crane’s great delight. Auster, once again, intertwines Crane’s hectic life and his frantic writing, despite his deteriorating health and his growing awareness that his time is running out. In the even shorter Part 4, “The Dark Side of the Moon” (seventy pages), Auster focuses on Crane in 1898, writing in bursts of furious energy, plagued by poverty and disease, desperately hoping to pay off his debts, signing both fiction and news reports. Crane goes back to Cuba and then Puerto Rico as a war correspondent, working in extreme conditions, locked in a terrible “pact to return the money by pulling words out of a body that had been ruined by the quest to find those words” (660). The final part of the biography, entitled “A Brutal Extinction” (seventy-seven pages), begins in January 1899. Crane has a little over a year to live. Back in England, he grapples with a new novel but produces superb short-stories as well as a strange, memoir-like text in which Auster detects a new literary voice in the process of emerging, a “multivoiced, free-flowing, improvisatory vein” (703). In the house that he shares with Cora, Crane is visited by Joseph Conrad, Ford Maddox Ford, H. G. Wells, and Henry James, who all praise his talent and innovative vision. In spite of Cora’s care, Crane wastes away, consumed by pulmonary tuberculosis, a disease likely rooted in his childhood. In June 1900, he dies in a sanatorium in the Black Forest where a desperate Cora has taken him.

9It is difficult to imagine a more thorough study of Crane’s “life and work,” as the subtitle indicates, both of which are placed in precise historical, political, economic, editorial, and cultural contexts. Auster’s biography is exhaustive, thorough, and yes, very classical, as if such an academic structure was designed to highlight, by contrast, Crane’s utter lack of academicism: the biographical space which Auster builds is obviously here to serve its subject, not its author. In the 1970s, Auster published literary essays on writers and poets that he highly respected, and each text was highly personal, his voice often reflecting that of the writer, standing on its own, with no reference whatsoever to existing criticism. Later gathered in Groundwork and The Art of Hunger, the essays are exercises in admiration, in which an aspiring writer engages in a dialogue with his models, seeking, lyrically and sometimes even obscurely, to understand and articulate the heart of their works, while forging his own path. But Burning Boy is written at the end of Auster’s career, when he has nothing left to prove. No longer a young writer learning his trade, he immediately presents himself, on the contrary, as approaching his subject “not as a specialist or a scholar but as an old writer in awe of a young writer’s genius,” motivated by the oblivion into which Crane has fallen (Auster, 2021 4). In the acknowledgements concluding the volume, a hopeful Auster begins by declaring that his eight-hundred-page-long biography “is intended as an introduction to the life and work of Stephen Crane and has been written for those who know little or nothing about him” (753). He then pays a long tribute to the generations of scholars and biographers whose works he has “relied heavily on,” as evidenced by the numerous quotations and references mentioned throughout the biography. He then returns to defining his own position, noting that he has “not taken a scholarly approach,” and has “steered clear of traditional criticism,” choosing instead “a writer’s approach,” intending to cast a light on Crane’s work so as to show his reader “the nuts and bolts of how it is done” (753). In Burning Boy, therefore, an old, accomplished writer devotes his time and efforts to a long-gone prodigy, talking shop, as it were, without feeling the need to impress anyone by his own writing. On the contrary, Auster goes at great length in his acknowledgements to thank a specific Crane scholar (among others) who was kind enough not to ignore his letters, showing him generosity and assistance as he “blundered [his] way forward,” proofreading his pages, and above all “welcom[ing him] in as a brother lunatic, a member of the tribe” (754).

The old, experienced master reading the eager beginner

11How does an acclaimed author, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, who has gone through half a century of literary revolutions, read a writer who composed his work at the end of the nineteenth century? By reading each single word on the page, Auster answers, proceeding to do so before his own reader’s eyes, taking his time, going through Crane’s newspaper articles or longer reports, through each novel, short story, poem, quoting them at length, putting his finger on Crane’s narrative choices, bold innovations, and rare weaknesses. In his review of Burning Boy in the New Yorker, a book which he defines as “a labor of love of a kind rare in contemporary letters,” Adam Gopnik yet underlines how strikingly “little in common” Auster, so “voluminous in output and long-breathed in his sentences,” has with “the terse, hard-bitten Crane.” “A postmodern luxuriance of reference and a plurality of literary manners is central to Auster’s own writing,” Gopnik argues, somehow contrasting Auster’s “postmodernity” (or postmodernism?) with Crane’s sharp, intense writing: “The quotations from Crane’s harsh, haiku-like poems spit out from Auster’s gently loquacious pages in unmissable disjunction,” he remarks, before concluding that Auster loves, and wants his reader to love, Crane for his “own far-from-sweet sake.” For Gopnik, we understand, Auster’s style in Burning Boy, so free-flowing in his thorough reading and exhaustive demonstrations, clashes with Crane’s own style, of which Gopnik then proceeds to offer a long analysis coinciding with Auster’s, with a few exceptions. But if, in his “gently loquacious pages,” Auster is so talented at quoting young Crane’s “harsh” poems, young Auster’s own poetic experimentations may have something to do with it; and there is perhaps not much “disjunction” between Crane’s poems and those which Auster crafted in his youth. That Auster’s postmodernity/ism should be reduced to “a luxuriance of reference and a plurality of literary manners” probably says a lot about how imprecise the label has always been, and still is. In the long conversation that Auster and I. B. Siegumfeldt published in 2017, Auster makes it clear that criticisms celebrating his work (and especially The New York Trilogy) as postmodern/ist or as illustrating French theory leave him cold: “I was not involved in any of this” (Auster and Siegumfeldt 90). What he often repeats throughout their exchange is that he has “always been interested in exposing the inner workings of what [he is] doing” (15), that he has always wanted to “turn everything inside out,” to play with conventions, “to expose traditional norms and stretch them into their limits” because he is “fascinated by the artificiality of literature” (92). But in Burning Boy, Crane stands alone on stage, and Auster does not seek the light for his own sake. His capacity for reading and analyzing Crane’s short but productive work gains its legitimacy, if needed, precisely on his having once walked a similar path along which experimentations, the subversion of models and forms, and a blundering search for unheard-of verses or narrative structures were daily occupations. His writing, in Burning Boy, can afford to be simply explanatory and even didactic because his thought and voice, over eight hundred pages, are committed to serving and analyzing Crane’s literary genius. Auster’s writing comes across as warm, affectionate, admirative, but it is above all set on offering a most serious biographical narrative of Crane’s career since, as he simply states almost at the end of his enterprise, “if that life is worth examining now, it is only because of the work that came out of it” (Auster, 2021 613), thus going back to the beginning, when he introduced “a weird and singular life, full of impulsive risks, an often pulverized lack of money, and a pigheaded, intractable devotion to his calling as a writer, which flung him from one unlikely and perilous situation to the next” (4).

12Auster therefore classically analyzes a writer’s work which is anything but classical, and his biography turns into a most thorough and meticulous close reading: Crane’s texts are contextualized, summed up, quoted, and Auster dissects their structure, their rhythm, their sentences, their departing from what was written at the time, and the effects they produce on the readers. Crane first comes out as a journalist immersed in his investigations to the point of jeopardizing his health by living among the homeless, or risking both his health and his life as a war correspondent, and writing articles that carefully avoid the bombastic effects of the then fashionable sensationalism of the yellow journals in which they were published. A most gifted observer, Crane feels empathy for the “poor devils” (144), the outcasts, the homeless, the opium smokers or the miners, whose lives he shares, and his reports leave no aspect of their lives unsaid (which causes whole paragraphs to be edited out before publication); but above all, he looks at them and describes what he sees. As is the case in Maggie, Auster writes, Crane develops “a literature of pure telling, with no social analysis, no calls for reform, and no psychological reflections to explain why the characters do what they do. They simply act, and Crane tells. For the first time in American fiction, the reader is not told what to think—only to experience what happens in the book and then to draw his or her conclusions” (90). Part of Auster’s analysis revolves around Crane moving away from didactic realism in order to progressively focus on what his characters confusedly feel without being able to express it (Henry Fleming’s internal chaos on the battlefield; the many children in Crane’s short stories confused by so many situations), and on what they say which remains unexplained (the ongoing, incomplete, awkward, and interrupted dialogues in The Third Violet). Each publication contains an attempt at revolutionizing literature, Auster argues: Crane’s prose-poems, short and powerful, are “some of the strangest, most savage poems of the nineteenth century,” even more so than “the norm-breaking deviations of Whitman and Dickinson” (3); his short stories anticipate Joyce’s Dubliners and his desire to “build on the realism of Flaubert and inject a spiritual quality into the mundane, earth-bound struggles of ordinary human beings—which evolved into one of the central ambitions of twentieth-century modernism” (206). In his war novel, Crane makes the war disappear to focus on “a drama about consciousness itself,” and to produce a “study of that mind—that adolescent mind—the true subject of his book” (165); finally, Crane’s unsuccessful novel of manner, The Third Violet, in which characters are not even physically described and stand as sheer voices, the reader being left to guess what this unconvincing love story is by listening to their awkward, often broken conversations composing this novel is described by Auster as “[n]ot only […] the world’s first screenplay [but] probably the world’s first postmodern novel as well” (328). Auster’s whole book aims at proving what an instinctive and innovative writer Crane was—how ahead of his time too, heralding modernism and more, identifying visionary themes that twentieth-century literature would explore such as shell-shocked soldiers, absurd violence, and adolescent malaise. He experimented with multiple points of view, including that of a black man at the center of his novella The Monster, played intratextual games—Henry Fleming coming back as an old man in “The Veteran”—and mixed facts and fiction, as in “The Open Boat” for instance, which Auster defines as “perhaps, a documentary fable” (459) between journalism and short-story writing. Auster patiently unravels his demonstrations. For instance, when he analyzes the subtlety of the end of The Third Violet, a novel panned by the critics at the time and still neglected today, by focusing on a simple adverb, Auster says, the end can be seen completely differently, leaving the reader with “two opposite and equal endings, a strategy that is fully in tune with the parodic, self-reflexive spirit of the book as a whole”—“intricate, maddeningly nuanced stuff,” he concludes (327), which escapes readers and critics at the time.

Early style vs late style: the admirable trembling of a novice hand

14In Burning Boy, Auster reverses the perspective: the shortness of Crane’s life turns him into an eternal apprentice. His boyish personality (his friend Corwin K. Linson, who so often photographed him, once used the expression “the unoffending candor of a boy” about Crane, Auster, 2021 243) was what struck people first—his carelessness about money, his immature sentimental relationships, his detached attitude towards life in general. Although he was aware of his fragile health, Crane never seemed to take it into account, deliberately choosing dreadful living or working conditions until the end, as if, precisely, this end that everyone could read as imminent on his face (including Auster staring at his photographs) remained invisible from his constantly changing standpoint. Crane was still busy learning how to live and how to write when death finally caught up with him. The testimonies of his closest friends (Conrad especially) show how conscious Crane was of his impending death in his final months, of course; but Auster sees it less as a sudden realization than as Crane’s way of consenting to acknowledge the long companionship which he had shared with death only at the very last moment—when it could no longer be ignored, disregarded, or perhaps converted into frantic writing. What Auster is fascinated by, therefore, is not “the admirable trembling of art,” this unvoluntary trembling of an old, skilled hand suffering the ravages of time, but the no less admirable controlled trembling of a young, inexperienced hand, a bold hand that is afraid of nothing and that experiments with everything. In other words, in his old age, Auster is not so much interested in the potentially remarkable achievements of late style as he is in what impatient, messy, early style is capable of—in the stirrings of a beginner’s writing, the tremors of an emerging voice, the first manifestations of a budding talent, and the flowering of a writer’s genius.

15How indeed could such a young man, in such a short period of time (a little more than eight years between his first article and his last piece), produce so many works, and so many masterpieces? The question runs through Burning Boy and Auster endeavors to answer it first by portraying Crane as a strange creature animated by some sort of electric current running through it. The metaphor of fire, present in the title, is carried throughout the biography: if Crane “developed far more rapidly as an artist than he did as a man” (Auster, 2021 239), it is because of a “nervous energy coursing through him, the keyed-up, playful, opinionated, quickness of a body and mind in constant motion” (243), Auster argues:

None of this can be fully known—for the simple reason that it is impossible to stand inside another person’s skin—but it strikes me as incontestable that there was something singular about Crane’s neurological makeup, that he was more tightly wired than most people, which allowed him to perceive visual phenomena more rapidly and precisely than most of us, that something in him was constantly buzzing. An extreme example of such a person can be found in Crane’s contemporary, Nickola Tesla, the inventor who gave the world alternating current, neon light, remote control, and the principles of the radio before Marconi, and who, it is said, was so highly sensitive to sound that he could hear a fly land on a wall in the next room. Crane did not dwell at that far edge of semi-delirium, but he too was an excessively vibrant, vibrating creature—a human tuning fork—and the strangeness and originality of his work is as much a product of the body he was born into as the mind he cultivated and developed: the visual immediacy of it, the primitive force of its animism, and above all the steady bombardment of color. (249-250)

16Fire and electricity: the same image explains the way certain people “buzz” and “vibrate” more than others. They instantly perceive the world differently—with synesthesia, in Crane’s case— and connect to it and render it in ways more rapid, precise, and intense, their creative hand naturally trembling with vibrant, electric waves. Such a rare “neurological makeup” therefore endows Crane or Tesla (one of the secondary characters in Auster’s 1989 Moon Palace) with unique capacities, including that of developing several projects “at the same time,” Auster concludes. Indeed, young Crane did not “progress in a straight line” but by maintaining multiple activities going concurrently:

At the same time. It is a phrase worth remembering, for the intensity and volume of Crane’s output was made possible only because he was always working on several things at the same time, meaning that when he was at work on his novels he was also writing short stories, sketches, and journalism, not just because he had to (out of financial necessity) but because he wanted to, and not just because he wanted to but because he had to (out of financial necessity). (52)

17By packing a myriad of simultaneous, ongoing projects into a short time span, Crane soon reaches an unusual, almost unheard-of production: in his second chapter entitled “The Pace of Youth,” which covers Crane’s New York period between mid-1891 and the end of 1896, Auster lists two short novels (Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and George’s Mother), two longer novels (The Red Badge of Courage and The Third Violet), The Sullivan County sketches and stories, a collection of poems (The Black Riders), the Civil war stories gathered in The Little Regiment and over a hundred other works of fiction and nonfiction (52-53). “And all of those books, stories, poems, and sketches with all of their varied approaches and registers were sparking in him at the same time—which is to say, the young man had caught fire, and the question to be examined now is what caught that fire to ignite […],” Auster marvels again (53). A hundred and seventy pages later, when he returns to the mystery of Crane’s intensive production in those five years, he notes a climax which he calls of “the efflorescence of 1894,” a zenith about which he uses the word “many-ness”:

What intrigues me most about Crane is his many-ness. Not just the several selves he carries around with him in his small body (every one of us is a spectrum of multiple, contradictory selves) but his talent for being able to think one thought while also thinking another thought and perhaps a third and even a fourth without losing track of the first, or, to put it in another way, the ability to inhabit different states of mind in rapid, vertiginous succession. Without that talent, the efflorescence of 1894 would be inexplicable. (222)

It is the strongest, most inventive piece of work he wrote during the last year of his life, and in ways he had never quite allowed himself to do earlier, he opens up and speaks to the reader directly about himself—and with the veil suddenly lifted, he manages to establish an intimate, deeply personal manner of telling, a voice of multiple, shifting tonalities that range from the somber to the buoyant and everything in between, the full Crane in all his contradictory manyness. (631)

19The “I” that Crane uses allows him to mix together journalism, self-writing, and autofiction, suddenly and briefly giving birth to “a multivoiced, free-flowing, improvisatory vein” (703) in which his “manyness” (a word Auster now writes without a hyphen), which is the “manyness” of the subject-narrator, fully unfolds. In other words, this “manyness” which, in Auster’s eyes, was up to that moment a prodigious mental capacity to carry out several projects in parallel, turns into a writing strategy, a literary embodiment. “What if Crane had understood that ‘War Memories’ was not just a slapdash concoction written as a favor to his friends but a door that opened onto an immense new kingdom of fresh possibilities?” Auster wonders (702-703), before imagining him producing texts sounding like Céline’s or Beckett’s. Although he never uses the expression about it, “War Memories” is the closest Auster comes to identifying a “late style” in Crane’s abundant but time-compressed production: a text written for a secondary purpose, almost by chance, which resembles nothing that was published at the time, and nothing that Crane himself had ever written. It reads like a sudden intuition of what first-person writing could lead to on the part of a twenty-seven-year-old writer, both youthful and exhausted, consumed by disease, who was not to see the twentieth century in which so many of his literary ideas and experimentations would be pursued.

When the time of late style comes: celebrating the hunger of youth

20Auster started working on Crane’s biography after the publication of 4321 (2017), his enormous novel in which the hero, Archie Ferguson, born in 1947 like Auster himself, experiences four different, parallel lives: the stunning architecture of the book, indeed, develops four simultaneous storylines. Ferguson’s childhood and youth change as familial, social and political circumstances dictate. An imaginary representation of a human being’s potential “manyness,” the book is also a celebration of the beginning(s) of life, of a human being’s early years as complex periods of formation and opportunities, containing multiple bifurcations opening onto countless possibilities. The novel is both openly autofictional and intratextual, as many elements belonging to Auster’s life and previous writings keep appearing. Auster’s work on his two massive books, 4321 and Burning Boy, took place in a phase during which he was also revisiting his whole career, putting together several volumes. First, A Life in Words, a series of conversations with scholar I. B. Siegumfeldt, came out in 2017, followed by two volumes of collected works which prolonged a compilation project starting with Collected Prose, published first in 2003 and then in an expanded version in 2010. Talking to Strangers: Selected Essays, Prefaces, and Other Writings, 1967-2017 was published in 2019, and Groundwork: Autobiographical Writings, 1979-2012 in 2020. When Burning Boy came out in 2021, therefore, Auster had reread, organized, edited, and published these two volumes containing various non-fictional writings which had appeared here and there over the course of fifty years, and adding unpublished, sometimes forgotten texts.

22The writing of Burning Boy is therefore one manifestation among many testifying to Auster’s fascination for and exploration of youth as “that hopeful, anarchic time when all horizons are open to us and the future appears without limits.” What contemplating Crane’s “frank, boyish face” and what reading his texts allow him to do is to go back, once again, to the enchanted territory of youth and to relive a magical period when a young person is eaten up by books, by the desire to write, and launches into many projects at the same time, fueled by unlimited energy and creative fever. Having entered the “winter of his life” (Auster, 2012 230), Auster puts the work of his lifetime in order, thus exposing the roots of the whole structure, dwelling on the early years when it all started, and he indulges in a most classical biography of a meteor who will remain forever young. “A burning boy of rare precociousness who was blocked from entering the fullness of adulthood, he is America’s answer to Keats and Shelley, to Schubert and Mozart, and if he continues to live on as they do, it is because his work has never grown old,” Auster writes in his first pages, adding: “One hundred and twenty years after his death, Stephen Crane continues to burn” (Auster, 2021 3).

Conclusion

23There is a sweet, deeply satisfying irony in Auster’s passionate declaration of love to Crane, and in his no less intense desire to enhance both the deep marks that his works left on late nineteenth-century US literature and their inspiring sparks that heralded the most daring literary forms of the dawning twentieth century. Indeed, Auster’s first writings were deeply influenced by the postmodernist creed of the time: the “Art of Hunger” which he embraced, following Hamsun, Beckett, Blanchot or Jabès, taught him that language was necessarily imperfect, that writing was merely survival, a predictable failure to make sense of a meaningless, chaotic world, deserted by God and hope, a self-imposed asceticism. His first novels all stage characters who disappear into thin air, leaving behind them suitcases of manuscripts with instructions to destroy them, meaningless reports and maddeningly obscure notebooks which are barely decipherable, readable, in which “each sentence erase[s] the sentence before it, each paragraph [makes] the next paragraph impossible” (Auster, 1988 314). But in the last period of his career, Auster turns himself into the editor of his own work, carefully organizing it, and into the biographer of Stephen Crane, in whose eternal, radiant youth he contemplates his own, long-gone and yet omnipresent, as the place where everything started in joyful confusion. Crane’s short life and his buzzing manyness offer Auster a perfect laboratory in which the study of a writer’s beginnings is made possible. Towards the middle of the biography, Auster quotes a journalist who once interviewed Crane: “His method, he told me, is to get away by himself and to think over things. ‘Then comes a longing for you don’t know what; sorrow, too, and heart-hunger.’ He mixes it all up. Then he begins to write” (Auster, 2021 356). Auster repeats the expression, “Heart-hunger,” italicizing it, marveling at the fact that 24-year-old Crane had understood that writing is that “search for something that cannot be named,” that “the solution to the mystery of how art gets made is itself the ultimate mystery” (356). And he seems to have come full circle: he started writing under the demanding, ruthless influence of an “Art of Hunger,” and he now discovers, in Crane’s “Heart-hunger,” an opposed image to convey the beginner’s insatiable eagerness. Paul Auster would perhaps agree with Marc Chénetier when, in a 1994 essay entitled “Should the Post-modern Really Be ‘Explained to Children’?,” an answer to François Lyotard’s Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants, he considers that such a project would put the children at too great a risk, and not only because he “would not mind it if some of them eventually became interested in literature” (Chénetier 11): “Too many things depend on them” (15), he concludes. Crane, Paul Auster’s prodigy, is the perfect illustration of what only young writers grappling with the audacity of youth can produce. In Burning Boy, early style is the new late style.