welcome to hardtalk from new york. i'm stephen sackur. this city has always had an outsize influence on american culture. the buzz in this nation comes from right here in terms of the arts, entertainment, publishing, the media, but what happens in new york when america's political culture is riven with division? well, my guest today is the great american novelist, new york resident, paul auster. if america is experiencing a culture war, is he ready to fight? paul auster, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. it is a pleasure to be in your home, your writing study is just below us, the floor below. just tell me, does it matter to you when you are writing what is going on in the world outside yourfront door? does it affect your writing? well, it depends on what you mean. if there's a fire engine screeching in front of my door, it will interrupt my concentration, and i might go out and see what's going on. but if there's a distant war going on in another place and i know about it, i'm not going to read about it while i'm doing my work for the day. but i certainly will inform myself about it later. you talk of distant wars. i'm thinking of wars much closer to home. you write a lot about your take on american politics. you've talked about your feelings through the course of four years of donald trump. you've talked about a country at war with itself. so the war isn't so very far away. yes, the war that we're engaged in here, fortunately, has not become, yet, a fighting war with guns, to a large degree. but we are divided in ways that i've never seen before. and i've been around a long time now. you've been around a long time, and you grew up with �*60s activism, you were a very vocal opponent of ronald reagan conservatism. you were a very vocal opponent of george bush's decision to go to iraq. true enough. so, are you telling me there is profoundly different about this division in america, this polarisation? cos you could argue we've been here before many times. well, i think it's been a series of steps that have been taken, and each time when i think it's gotten as bad as it can possibly be, it gets worse. because once obama was elected, and this, i think, is something that people don't talk about very much. there was a backlash by a sizeable percentage of the american public against the election of obama, a black man occupying the white house. just the symbolic resonance of that, i think, brought out all the hidden racism in the culture that people had forgotten about to the degree that it really continues to exist. and immediately, overnight, remember, the tea party grew up, and by 2010, two years later, the democrats were overwhelmed in the midterm elections, even though obama was re—elected in �*i2, the democrats never got a majority in congress again, and no serious legislation was passed for the last six years he was in office. you haven't even gotten to donald trump yet. not yet. and i'm just thinking to myself... i'm clearing my throat, i'm getting ready for that. but you know what i'm thinking, i'm thinking here speaks a man who americans of a different political persuasion will already be dismissing as a typical new york liberal elite intellectual. and jewish on top of it all. yeah. so, yeah. so, i'm just wondering whether, actually, you don't see any room for communication with your political opponents? you're a leftist, that's clear, but you're not really leaving much room for communication. i want to talk to people on the other side. they don't want to talk to me. it's... i'm perfectly happy to talk to anybody. but with respect, you dismiss the trump movement as jihadist. you talk about their use of the confederate flag as though it's a swastika. your clear implication is that what trump represents is something akin to american nazism. i wouldn't go so far as to say nazism, no, no, but i would say it's an anti—democratic impulse and it is an authoritarian impulse. i mean to say, look at the facts, it's just simply that. i mean, i think all these labels are unimportant. we have a government that is supposed to function, is supposed to be a democracy, it's supposed to be a government of "we, the people". trump... but it is, though, it is. joe biden replaced donald trump. admittedly, it didn't come easy, but it happened. i know that, i know that, and this is, you know, why the system is still standing. but, um, when trump got in, his mission was, and i don't think he really cared one way or the other, he allied himself with hard—right republicans who've been trying to diminish the size and scope of the government for decades, and they finally had a willing partner in the white house this time. this brings me back to my opening question about how you create and work when you're so passionate and so preoccupied with what is happening outside your own front door, cos the truth is, during the years you've just described, the trump years, you committed to a major new artistic enterprise, a biography of a writer born in the late 19th century, that many people outside the us will never have heard of, stephen crane. true enough. and did you do that because you felt there were resonances in his short life with the united states that you're living in in yourtime? not at all, not at all. this book was not generated by politics. this book was generated by the fact that after i finished writing my last very long novel, 4 3 21, i was a very tired person and i needed a break, and i spent some months not writing at all, anything for the first time probably in my adult life, and i was reading a lot, and i was reading books that i had somehow missed and had always wanted to read. i finally read middlemarch, for god's sake, my wife's favourite novel. i finally read to the lighthouse by virginia woolf, which i find one of the most beautiful novels i've ever read in my life, a masterpiece. and one of the writers i went back to was stephen crane, whom i had not read since i was a teenager. and for those folks who don't know him, stephen crane died very young, in his late 20s... 28. ..of tuberculosis, but had already written some extraordinary books that perhaps the most famous of which was a take on fighting in the civil war, the red badge of courage, which he wrote never having been a soldier and certainly born long after the civil war was over. exactly. but nonetheless a book which matters to many americans. yes. and clearly matters to you. yes, well, i think it's an extraordinary book. in any case, i started reading crane again, and i was astonished by how fantastically powerful and original it was. and then i got interested in his life, which was a fascinating life full of all kinds of adventures, and i decided after a while that it would be a good idea to write a little book about stephen crane, an appreciation to explain why i cared about his work and why i thought people should read it and to pay more attention to it than is being given to it now, and the little book grew into a big book. to 800 pages of book. yes, well, not quite 800, but it's a big book, and i kept asking myself, why am i doing this? what the hell has gotten hold of me? and the only thing i could think of was that in 4 3 2 i, there's a character, ferguson, and there are four of them. archie ferguson. archie ferguson, there are four versions of... you give him four lives. crane is ferguson five. that's how i kept thinking about it. and, in a way, trying to understand him was as daunting as trying to understand one of my fictional characters, and i had to go through the same process as a writer, emotional process, it's not even an intellectual process, an emotional process, trying to get myself inside him to understand his very erratic at times behaviour. see, it's interesting to me that you link that book to 4 3 2 i, because as you say, in that book, you imagine this guy, born in newark in the same year you were born, then you follow through different possibilities for his life depending on so many contingencies and coincidences and things that happen that might not have happened. right. and it seems to me, reading all of your work, one of your messages to all of us human beings is take nothing for granted, assume nothing, make plans but don't imagine they're ever going to work out because happenstance and the what—ifs of life always take over. well, i agree with you completely. and thank you for summing up my work so succinctly, i'm impressed. another way to put it is, and i believe this firmly, anything can happen, and that anything can happen at any moment. but you know what that tempts me to ask you is... what? in your own life, imagine you're sort of living a life where you could look back at moments, the sliding doors moments when things might have been different. are there now things you wish you have done or decisions you'd have taken in a different way which would have taken you down different pathways, different avenues? is there a human being of our age who doesn't feel some regret about some things we've done in the past? i can't imagine a human being who wouldn't have some second thoughts about a decision he or she made years before. what are your regrets? well... laughter. i don't even want to talk about it. why? they're too personal. i need to say, i suppose, you know, people that i, you know, attach myself to, without really understanding the nature of that other person fully enough. and let's leave it at that. see, sometimes i wonder whether you even regret being a writer, cos you have a love—hate relationship with what you do. you say you're compelled to do it, you cannot imagine not doing it, but you also describe how weird it is to make a decision to be a writer, to rather than go out into the world and live your life and experience in an outward sort of way, you turn inward. you go down literally to your basement, into your writing study, and every day you shut yourself in there and shut yourself away from it all. but i have no regrets about that. really? no, i think that i was made to do this, and i need to do it. and i don't feel that it's a going inward, you see, this is something i would dispute completely. the first time i had an impulse to write anything, i was nine years old. it was the first very beautiful day of spring, it was a saturday, there was no school. i remember getting up and feeling free and happy, and i left the house early in the morning and i took a walk through the neighbourhood, i went to a little park where, not far from the house, and the first birds were hopping around, the first robins of the spring. i felt ecstatically alive, and i had an impulse to write a poem. age nine. age nine, and i sat down and wrote probably the most wretched poem ever written about the coming of spring, ever written by a mortal human being in the new world, all right, and yet this was the feeling i had, that by trying to write about what was happening, i felt more connected to the world around me. i felt that i had found a place for myself inside this teeming chaotic reality outside of myself, not inside of myself. and i think that writing has always been away for me to connect rather than to separate. you have long been — i don't know if "enemy" is the right word — but you've long questioned the utility of creative writing, teaching writing. but i just wonder whether. .. well, wait, wait, wait — there's a big difference between the utility of writing and the practice of teaching writing — two different things. no, i've made the point that writing, or art in general, doesn't do anything tangible in the world. it doesn't fix the toilet the way a plumber can fix the toilet. it doesn't fix a broken arm the way a doctor can fix a broken arm. it is, in a sense, useless. but this uselessness, i think, is the very definition of what makes human life so exciting to live, is because we do have this ability to think and to reflect on what we're thinking and to think about the world and to make art out of that. and to value beauty. but it... exactly, but it doesn't have any concrete purpose in life in the way that all these practical occupations do. teaching writing, on the other hand, is something i don't really think one can do. i think it's very important for young writers to have guidance, that's something different, but these are people who are already committed to trying to become writers and they want some help about, say, how... "why doesn't the story that i've written work?" "why is this poem not succeeding?" and then you as, an older writer, can say, "all right. let's look at it and we can figure out where you went wrong and what you might be able to do." butl... sorry to interrupt, but i'm just thinking about so many young people today who have deep sort of creative urges, but aren't necessarily turning to fiction writing, the novel, as a platform. they're being reared in a world where, actually, words are mostly used on their smartphone, are mostly used in bite—size chunks on social media platforms, and i'm just wondering whether paul auster in 2021 worries that the next generation or the generation after that of people who have real creative gifts are not going to engage with the, as you havejust written, 800—page book. that's ok! i mean, there are all kinds of arts and there are all means of expression. far be it for me to, you know, make restrictions on what people should do. but i think you underestimate young people a little bit. i keep running into young people who are reading passionately and really care about it, and i think we in the so—called — or the people in the media, the people who are somehow the gatekeepers of our culture — have decided that the audience is stupid and that they don't really know anything. and i think this is what, you know, the capitalist market of art — i mean, art as business — has assumed all along. but then are you saying that in this market—oriented capitalist united states of america of 2021, where the internet and digital culture dominates all, are you saying that there... ..that writing fiction and the novel matters as much as ever? that, you know, you and the generation before you, of updike and bellow and roth and all these others... it doesn't matter because a book is read by one person at a time. and the book, in spite of everything, is the only... a novel, for example, is the only place, i think, in the human world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy. and that space that is created in the book is something very beautiful and precious. and whether ten people read the book or 10,000 people read the book or 10 million people read the book, it doesn't matter. the person reading it is alone with the writer are creating the book together. and the two of you, the writer and the reader, are creating the book together. and every reader reads a different book, and this is what's so beautiful about it. we all bring our own lives, our own sufferings, our ownjoys, our past to whatever it is we encounter in the world, and nothing, never more so than when we're encountering art and particularly literature, which requires time. i can look at the paintings on the wall in a glance and see what's there, but if i pick up this 750—page book, no, i can't take it all in at once, i have to give it time, and that time is the beautiful thing about it. let me ask you a somewhat different question, but it taps into your passion for good art, you know, whether it be great writing or great pictures or great movies. you have a thing for beauty, and you appreciate it. does it matter to you if you learn that the people who created that beauty were notjust deeply flawed but possibly criminal? that they did things which any right—thinking human being would regard as unacceptable? cos there is a real discussion right across culture now... iagree, iagree, and i have thought about this all my life, and the fact is, human beings are flawed and artists are flawed, too. and if we expect human perfection from every artist that we want to read or look at or listen to... yeah, but you're creating a false argument. it's not about expecting perfection, it's about... well... ..it�*s about placing somebody and their art in a context. and if that creator or that artistic genius, maybe, was so flawed that their behaviours were utterly unacceptable, then does that colour the way you see their creativity? let me give you an example. and it's funny you bring this up because just last night, my daughter and her husband were here, and i started telling them about the novels of louis—ferdinand celine, the french writer best known for the two novels that he wrote in the 1930s — journey to the end of the night and death on the instalment plan — which i think are two of the greatest novels of the 20th century — extraordinary, energetic, brilliant novels. celine was a horrible anti—semite fascist, and he wrote anti—semite tracts leading up to world war ii. and that doesn't matter in appreciating his art? those books? no, it doesn't really, because these books are great. and that would apply to some of the modern—day discussions about everybody from philip roth to woody allen to roman polanski, whom you've argued for? listen, it's, it's, it's... um, how shall i put it? if it's in the work, then there's a discussion to be had. if it's not in the work, i mean... i listen...we listen to the music of gesualdo, the mediaeval composer. he murdered his wife, but he is truly the best mediaeval composer. i mean, it's undeniable that his music is beautiful. well, and he murdered his wife. i mean, so the fact that he did that means we can't listen to the music? it's a murky subject. it is! i don't have a final answerfor you on this, i'm just saying for me it's complicated because i have to be able to say that artist did a beautiful work and i have to also say i don't like that artist personally and i find abhorrent many of his or her ideas. but what. .. how can i reconcile them? you can't. i mean, life is complicated! i mean, if we can all make simple solutions for all of life's complications, then would life really be worth living? i mean, it's messy! it's complicated! you're taking me into end thoughts and philosophy here with life and its worth, and i want to end with you and a personal thought. you've talked about entering the winter of your own life. i meant chronologically! i know you did, i know you did, but i'm extrapolating from that, because there are writers — i'm thinking now of martin amis, for example, who said, "frankly, any writer writes their best work when they are still" — quote, unquote "young", that "old people do not create their best work". i know martin. martin comes out with all kinds of remarks and there again, we can start laughing about all this, too. i don't agree with that. you've said yourself... you've said, "you know what? i've written pretty much the things i wanted to write. i will only write more if i find it to be" — and it's an interesting phrase you used — "really necessary". is it really necessary any more? or are you kind of done? no, i've started writing some new things, and as long as i feel excited about what i'm doing, then i'm going to keep doing it. i'd prefer to do it. it's just simply i don't ever feel the need to write just to write. that's not how i've ever functioned. yeah. and i'm... listen, when i first started out, i thought, "maybe i'll be good enough to finish one book that will be good enough to be published, and that might be the whole thing," and then i was amazed to find myself some time later having a new idea for another book that excited me just as much as the first. and i thought, "well, maybe that's the end," and i've "maybe this is the end" and there's — something new always seems to happen. paul auster, there are a lot of people around the world who would be delighted to hear of that. thank you very much indeed for being on hardtalk. thank you for inviting me. hello there. the big weather story for the rest of this week, and of course that means the rest of this year, is all about exceptionally high temperatures. this chart shows the temperature compared with the average. as these deep red colours spread northwards across the chart, that shows that temperatures will be significantly higher than we'd expect them to be at this time of year. daytime highs of 16—17 degrees, some very mild nights. there will be some rain at times as well, and during tuesday, it's this area of low pressure responsible for bringing some wet weather. and on the southern flank of that low, also some quite windy weather. so, as our area of low pressure slides eastwards, we will see outbreaks of rain through the morning across parts of england and wales. a lot of mist and murk and low cloud around as well. should brighten up from the west. northern ireland and scotland certainly turning brighter by the afternoon. 0nce any early fog has lifted, there should be quite a lot of sunshine around. relatively light winds in the north, but down towards the south, particularly for western and southern coasts, we're likely to see gusts of 40—50, maybe 55 mph. and still quite a split in temperatures for the time being. 5—6 degrees in northern scotland, i2—i3 in southern england. then as we head through tuesday night into the early part of wednesday, a drier, quieter interlude before another band of rain swings its way in from the west. a little bit chilly again across northern parts of scotland, very mild down towards wales and the south west of england. and for wednesday, that band of rain associated with the frontal system will continue to journey its way north—eastwards, so we will see some wet weather for a time on wednesday. clearing many areas quite quickly. that rain lingering, though, for a good part of the afternoon in northern scotland. behind it, there will be some spells of sunshine, some areas of cloud, too. but some increasingly mild conditions, 15—16 degrees in the south, 13 there for belfast, ten in glasgow. the milder air is journeying northwards. it will continue to do so on thursday. quite a cloudy day for many, some mist and murk, some rain especially in the west. best chance of any sunshine in eastern parts, but highs of 16 or maybe 17 degrees. but even northern scotland will be up into double digits by this stage. another quite windy day in prospect. for friday, new year's eve, a lot of cloud around, some rain, especially in the west. best of any sunshine in the east, and still milder than it should be for the end of december. highs of 11—16 degrees. this is bbc news, i'm david eades. our top stories. america's leading health body halves the isolation period for patients with asymptomatic covid from ten days to five. france gets tougher on covid restrictions — working from home becomes compulsory, as infection rates exceed 100,000 a day. the political stand—off in somalia escalates — as the president and the prime minister engage in a power struggle, after delayed elections. and cape town's city hall is bathed in purple light to honour archbishop desmond tutu, as south africa holds a week of mourning and commemoration.

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