Paul Auster coils the smoke of Brooklyn

A short 1995 conversation with the late novelist-translator-poet-screenwriter-director-Brooklynite

I'm a sucker for Brooklyn, a tightly packed city of diverse neighborhoods with more than a little resemblance to Chicago.

Smoke, a gentle, contrived and delightfully strange shaggy-dog fable, is novelist Paul Auster's chatty love letter to the Brooklyn neighborhood where he's lived and worked for over a decade. As directed by Wayne Wang, Smoke's Short Cuts-like collage of the crisscrossing lives of the patrons of a Brooklyn cigar store bears all the hallmarks of a novelist's first produced script. There are smart, colorful digressions allowing for terrific performances by the estimable likes of Harvey Keitel, William Hurt, Stockard Channing, Forest Whitaker and Ashley Judd, but there are also bald-faced coincidences and occasional scenes that make no emotional sense.

When Auster starts to talk about Smoke, his voice is charged with enthusiasm, but his fervor seems rehearsed. For someone used to the solitude of the novelist, several months talking up the film (and a semi-improvised film, Blue in the Face, that was shot afterwards) may have calcified his responses. But Auster finally lights up when I ask about the use of specific Brooklyn cafés and street corners, and the splendid, airy quality of the film's lighting, by Adam Holender.

"That's part of what this film is about," Auster says. "It's a secret little homage to the neighborhood I live in, Park Slope, which is a very interesting part of New York City, an interesting part of the world, really. It's not a huge neighborhood, but there is a degree of heterogeneity there that is extraordinary, I think, for any part of the city."

Some people, I say, think your picture of Brooklyn and New York race relations is unrealistic. Auster considers this. "You generally think of New York as breaking down into ethnic neighborhoods. But this place is inhabited by everybody from all over the world. Every color, every race, religion, nationality, they're all jammed together in this area and get along reasonably well. The fact that this neighborhood works reasonably well is a kind of miracle. It only seemed right to do it in the right locations. It wouldn't have worked if we had been in Toronto."

Is writing about Brooklyn that much different from selecting locations and sets for a film set there? "There's no difference. I can't separate those two questions at all. The books I write are the reflection of how I perceive the world. Wayne and I decided that we wanted to do something very low to the ground, that is, as unpretentious—as simple and un-cynical as possible. I think Smoke is uncynical, but it's not sentimental. This story is more about everyday life and more optimistic than anything I've ever published as a novel. It is essentially a rather optimistic view of the human condition—that friendship is possible, people really can, at times, reach out to each other and help each other. But at the same time, nothing is neatly wrapped up."

Wang's loose, almost slack framing of most scenes, allowing his performers, rather than the camera, a chance to move about, captures the nuance of a street or the traffic on a corner or a writer's crummy Brooklyn walk-up with more acuity than some of Auster's story complications.

Auster's two original scripts are published as "Smoke & Blue in the Face, "and the excisions are judicious, suggesting the form of Wang's contributions to the script. "Writing a novel is a more organic process, most of it happening unconsciously. Writing a screenplay is putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, which I did enjoy, and writing dialogue that is dramatic instead of narrative. But even though the first draft took about three weeks, we worked on it for several drafts until we found all the solutions we needed." The film's uncertain tone is reflected in its ending, a brilliantly acted, almost ten-minute monologue by cigar store proprietor Harvey Keitel. Unhappily, under the end credits, the story's acted out in a black-and-white flashback with Keitel and another actor. It's superfluous, and nowhere as fluent as Keitel's superb moment.

Talking about the story's origins, Auster reverts to his smooth disingenuousness. "Well how to put it. I smoke these cigars. Schimmelpennincks. I like them a lot. They're little Dutch cigars. in some way, when I was asked to write a Christmas story for the New York Times, that's how this whole crazy business started. The editor of the op-ed page called me and said, 'Can you write a Christmas story for Christmas day?' 'That's an interesting proposal, but I don't know if I can do it. Give me some time to think about it.' I had no ideas and one day I was just sitting at my desk and I looked down and I saw my cigar tin there and the story started to come out of that cigar tin. So that's where it came from. There's no political, or moral or philosophical thinking about cigars or cigarettes. It's just simply a fact—people smoke."

Has the filmmaking bug bitten Auster? "I certainly have no desire to give up my other life, my real life as a writer. I'm getting back into that now. It's been a time-consuming, draining experience. It's been a year-and-a-half since we started preproduction for Smoke and we're still working on these two movies. This is not Hollywood, this is not the big time, these are small movies. But still, the atmosphere around the film business is so different from anything I'm used to. I don't know how you can live your life in that world. There's so much pressure, so many crises, so many disasters happening around you that it takes a very strong soul to get through it."

A pause and Auster's intensity melts. "But Brooklyn. You should move here. It's great."

Smoke originated with “A Brooklyn Story,” commissioned by the New York Times and published December 25, 1990, reprinted in part in 2010. “Auggie and I have known each other for close to eleven years now. He works behind the counter of a cigar store on Court Street in downtown Brooklyn, and since it’s the only store that carries the little Dutch cigars I like to smoke, I go in there fairly often… In a small, windowless room at the back of the store, he opened a cardboard box and pulled out twelve identical black photo albums. This was his life’s work, he said. Every morning for the past twelve years, he had stood at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Clinton Street at precisely 7 o’clock and had taken a single color photograph of precisely the same view. The project now ran to more than 4,000 photographs.”

Paul Auster was seventy-seven when he died in April 2024.