Paul La Farge, z"l
Paul La Farge, a writer among the ruins, January 2021
On my way to synagogue yesterday, my wife and I were talking about our dear friend, Paul La Farge, who died this past Wednesday after a long battle with cancer. Even though for weeks we had known the end was nigh, that didn’t make death’s advent any less of a punch in the gut. I was reminiscing about him, and also feeling guilty about not having seen more of him over the past two years, not having been more continuously present in his life.
When we were younger, that presence was easy, and didn’t have to be continuous. We spent only one year in close proximity, the year after college when we were both living in New York, earning almost nothing and working on novels that neither of us ever finished. After a year of companionable frustration, I got a day job that turned into a career, and hung up my shingle for a time, while Paul moved to San Francisco and kept writing. We visited each other as often as we could, read drafts of each other’s work (or, rather, I read his until I started writing again and he could start to return the favor). Paul flew back to be in my wedding, as one of the chuppah holders. Eventually, and I think in part out of post-9-11 solidarity, he moved back to New York, where he met his wife, Sarah; I remember well the venue where they married, a renovated barn with a honey-colored interior and bales of hay suitable for our young son to bounce on. That was up in the Hudson Valley, where they summered for years and eventually moved year-round. I remember visiting them there repeatedly for Temporary Canada, the absurd and transparently ineffectual annual protest/party that he and his wife Sarah first threw in response to the Iraq War, a symbolic secession from a country he no longer understood complete with immigration officers and visa documents.
There's a French word, flâneur, an idler—probably the most idiomatic English translation would be “beatnik” though that term refers to idlers of a very different era—that Paul, in his youth, adopted as a badge. Paul never actually was an idler—he was always working on something—but I suppose the original flâneurs and beatniks were too, at least the ones who have been remembered, or we’d have nothing to remember them by. The point wasn’t to do nothing but to do nothing useful: to cultivate a kind of detachment, a critical distance from the world that would allow you to properly appreciate its absurdity. I valued enormously in Paul his utter lack of interest in doing—or writing—what the world wanted as opposed to what was meaningful to him. And I valued his consistent commitment to play as being at least as important, if not more important, than work. Games were enormously compelling for Paul in that they offered that opportunity to secede from and thereby recreate reality; there’s a reason his longest and probably most-celebrated piece of nonfiction is his essay “Destroy All Monsters,” about Dungeons & Dragons. He even turned one of his books into a game; chafing, perhaps, against the realism of his most realistic novel, Luminous Airplanes, he expanded it online into a hypertext fiction that could be read in any direction, and so had no proper end, and he launched the book by creating an art installation that sent us all scurrying for clues hidden in gloomy library stacks that I suspect represented Paul’s mind.
For all his critical distance from reality, though, Paul was deeply committed, deeply attached to his people. In my mind’s eye, he was always surrounded by friends, by fellow writers and artists, always engaged in conversation or playing a game—or playing a game that was a conversation, having a conversation that was a game. And you can’t really play games without other players, without people.
Over the last few years, though, and since the pandemic especially, Paul’s and my connection grew more attenuated. In part that’s because his illness kept him closer to home; his social circle shrank drastically, and he had to husband his energy to continue teaching and writing. The best thing for morale, it turns out, is to do things that are useful after all. Our last phone conversation was about how he planned to go back to teaching this spring, even if he needed to do it in a wheelchair with oxygen. Maybe it was just age that made the time go more swiftly, but it seemed to vanish in an instant. I remembered the long weekend visit that I paid him in January of 2021; that’s when we climbed to the ruins of Overlook Mountain House pictured above. After that, I saw him briefly in September of 2022, but otherwise it was all phone calls and the occasional Zoom, and not enough of either. I wished I had been more cognizant of the limited time we had, and had made more of it.
I was saying all of this to my wife on our walk, engaged in a mix of guilt and reminiscence, when suddenly she interjected: wait a second. Didn’t you go up for an overnight visit with him in January of 2022 as well? Oh, yes; I recalled the visit now that she mentioned it. We played Scrabble over dinner at his house, and had a long and appropriately meandering conversation about Tristram Shandy, which I had finally read and not appreciated as much as I ought to have. Talking about it sent Paul into gentle rhapsodies; a measure of his attachment to Sterne’s experimental novel can be taken by the fact that Paul’s most constant companion in recent years, his dog, bears the name of “Shandy.”
Right, my wife continued—and didn’t all three of us meet for dinner in the fall of 2020 that time we visited Storm King? And again for lunch in the spring of 2021, the time we saw The Extinctionist at PS21? Why yes, we did; I remembered our pandemic-era dinner outside in the brisk fall air warmed by towers of flame, and the indoor-outdoor negotiations vis-a-vis the spring rain (we went indoors). And I remembered him talking cagily about the new novel he was working on, both wanting to talk about it and not wanting to actually say anything lest the unfinished pages in his mind, like ancient manuscripts, crumble to dust upon exposure to the open air.
There, she said, doesn’t that make you feel a bit better? You saw more of him than you remembered.
It did make me feel a bit better—but it also made me feel worse. Here I was, wishing that I had more time to spend with Paul, wishing that I had been more in his life when I still had time, and yet I could not even recall the times we had had together. Oh, yes, the memories were there, lodged somewhere in my skull, at least fragments of them were, but if I couldn’t call them to mind at this moment of longing when would I ever? The third paragraph of the unetanneh tokef prayer compares a human life to a fleeting dream by way of emphasizing its transience. How much more terrible for life to dissipate like a dream even as it is being lived.
These are, as it happens, very appropriate thoughts to be thinking as I mourn the death of my friend. If there was a single dominant theme to Paul’s writing, it was the simultaneous evanescence and persistence of lost time. It’s there in his first published essay, “Pük, Memory,” about a forgotten artificial language that aimed to wipe clean the human linguistic slate and start anew and was now itself an object of quixotic nostalgia. It’s there in what I believe was his last published essay, “Noise-Canceling Headphones,” which conceives of the novel not as a mirror of the ever-changing times but as a form standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” yet hoping history never actually hears it yelling because “what we can hope for is not to scare the future away but to remain separate from it.” Paul’s first novel, The Artist of the Missing, was a fantastical story about a footloose young artist in a mythical city too large to ever be encompassed, whose friend and, he hoped, lover-to-be vanished one day, a loss that leads him to a new occupation, drawing portraits of the burgeoning ranks of the city’s vanishing citizens. His second novel, Haussmann, or the Distinction, is another fantasy of urban memory, about the secret romantic life of the man who remade Paris, turning its crooked lanes to wide boulevards and providing an efficient mechanism for the transportation of the city’s dead. And so on, down to his fifth, final and most-successful book, The Night Ocean, another tangled tale of sudden vanishing and haunted pursuit, this time triggered by a scholar's discovery of a lost sexual memoir by H.P. Lovecraft. Paul was always writing about holding on to people and things that were determined to slip away, and finding things and people that had vanished long ago, but never truly left.
He knew he would leave, of course, knew on some level he would be forgotten, but he developed some novel strategies (as it were) to frustrate that inevitable eventuality. His second novel, Haussmann, presented itself as having been written not by Paul himself but by a nearly forgotten early twentieth-century French poet, Paul Poissel. This conceit was not sufficient, though, to embed Poissel in the world, so Paul next brought out a little book of prose poems, The Facts of Winter, also purported to have been written by Poissel and translated by La Farge, with an extensive afterward describing Paul’s fictional investigations into Poissel’s life and the creation of this peculiar text. The title is a French pun, faits d’hiver being pronounced the same as faits divers, little journalistic tidbits about the underbelly of city life that dominated French newspapers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the book itself is a collection of dreams, dreamt by real or fictional denizens of Paris in 1881, which coalesce into a portrait of an unseen city. Paul Poissel’s intent may have been to live more of his life by making sleep obsolete, but Paul La Farge’s seems to have been nearly the opposite. Most of us dream of cheating death by extending our lives indefinitely into the future — in the case of writers, through work that we hope will life on after us. Paul, quixotically, aimed to do so by extending his life a century into the past, creating an alter-ego who was an already forgotten dream that he could rediscover and bring back to waking life. I can imagine him smiling at the thought that he, himself, was the backward-cast creation of some future writer like himself; perhaps the prospect that such writers would still exist in the future might have given him solace.
More likely it’s my own solace I’m really speaking about. Paul was a writer, through and through, and I’ve been talking about him primarily as a writer because I want to inspire my readers to read him, and thereby keep him alive, in our dreams. But I had the pleasure of knowing him as a friend, and I miss him terribly as such. I cannot be fully comforted by the companionship of his prose. I want to hear his novel thoughts, and I want him to hear me, too. I don’t want him to be still, but still to be.
I’m going to close with one dream from The Facts of Winter that seems particularly apropos to how I am feeling right now:
On the eighth of the same month, the captain of the garrison of the Military Academy hears a strange noise in the courtyard of his barracks. He finds a young woman sitting in a corner of the courtyard, opening and closing the lid of a small metal box. “What are you doing?” asks the captain. “Getting rid of my sorrow,” the young woman says. Obviously the captain demands some further explanation; he learns that she is a servant, twenty-two years old, who let herself be seduced by an adjutant, or a lieutenant, or anyway a military man. And anyway he left her. “And the box?” “Oh, that.” Not long after her officer vanished, the young woman had a dream in which her mother told her that if she wanted to get rid of her sorrow, she should shut it up in a box and release it on terrain that belonged to the army. Which she has done. “And you know, I feel better already,” the young woman says. Before he lets her go, the captain can’t help but ask one last question: “How did you get your sorrow into that little box?” “It was the easiest thing in the world. I baked it in an oven until it shrank to the proper size.” She shows him what’s in the box: a heap of ashes.
