by Lydia Davis
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Table of Contents
A Note About the Author
Copyright Page
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Preface
This book came about quite naturally: I thought it was time to collect the pieces of nonfiction I had had occasion to write over the decades and bring them together in one place. Since there were quite a number of them, I then had to decide whether to make one thick volume or two more reasonable ones. I summoned opinions and votes, weighed pros and cons, and, in the end, decided on two. They would reflect, to some extent, two of the main occupations of my life—writing and translating. This is the first book; the second will concentrate more single-mindedly on translation and the experience of reading foreign languages.
What I have collected here are essays, commentaries, reviews, prefaces, observations, analyses, and a few talks. The subject of writing predominates, inevitably, but the subject of translation does make the occasional appearance, as do the visual arts, the writing of history, the figure of Jesus, memoir, and memory. The earliest pieces were written in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the latest within the last year or two. They range in length from my quite long, digressive, and example-laden recommendations for good writing habits down to a response to the word gubernatorial and a summary description of five favorite short stories.
In reading through and preparing this collection, I have sometimes made small changes, either minor stylistic revisions or, in a couple of cases, the combining of two pieces into one. What had been a theoretical question before I began preparing the collection—will I revise published pieces or not?—was immediately answered as I began reading, since, even if most of the published pieces had already been extensively and closely revised, I could not leave untouched something that bothered me, even a little. I felt free, for example, to replace “trolley tracks in them” by “trolley tracks running through them” if I liked it better, or a plain descriptive title by one that struck me as more interesting.
I had also asked myself whether I would let an opinion stand if I no longer agreed with it. As it happened, however, I found that I did not generally disagree with what I had written years before—whether two years or forty-some. Once, only, in a review of a translated book, I was more dismissive of a translator’s work than I would be now, but for quite other reasons I have not included that review (interesting though the writer was and is—I highly recommend the novels of the Southern French author Jean Giono).
THE PRACTICE OF WRITING
A Beloved Duck Gets Cooked:
Forms and Influences I
The traditional literary forms—the novel, the short story, the poem—although they evolve, do not disappear. But there is a wealth of less traditional forms that writers have adopted over the decades and centuries, forms that are harder to define and less often encountered, either variations on the more familiar, such as the short-short story, or intergeneric—sitting on a line between poetry and prose, or fable and realistic narrative, or essay and fiction, and so on.
I would like to discuss some of these more eccentric forms, and specifically some of the ones I have read and thought about over the years as my own writing has evolved. So this essay includes something about my writing but is predominantly an excuse to study and read from other people’s writing, both poetry and prose.
* * *
I think of myself as a writer of fiction, but my first books were slim small-press books often shelved in the poetry section, and I am still sometimes called a poet and included in poetry anthologies. It is understandable that there may be some confusion. For instance, my collection of stories titled Samuel Johnson Is Indignant contains fifty-six pieces, including what could roughly be described as meditations; parables or fables; an oral history with hiccups; an interrogation about jury duty; a traditional, though brief, story about a family trip; a diary about thyroid disease; excerpts from a bad translation of a poorly written biography of Marie Curie; a fairly traditional narrative about my father and his furnace, though ending in an accidental poem; and, scattered through the book, brief prose pieces of just one or two lines as well as one or two pieces with broken lines.
When I began writing “seriously” and steadily in college, I thought my only choice was the traditional narrative short story. Both my parents had been writers of short stories, and my mother still was. Both of them had had stories published in The New Yorker, which loomed large in our life, as some sort of icon, though an icon of exactly what I’m not sure—good writing and editing, urban wit and sophistication? By age twelve, I already felt I was bound to be a writer, and if you were going to be a writer, the choices were limited: first, either poet or prose writer; then, if prose writer, either novelist or short-story writer. I never thought of being a novelist. I wrote poems early on, but to be a poet was somehow not an option. So if, eventually, some of my work comes right up to the line (if there is one) that separates a piece of prose from a poem, and even crosses it, the approach to that line is through the realm of short fiction.
In college, when I told one intelligent friend of mine, with confidence and exuberance, that my ambition was to write short stories and, specifically, to write a short story that would be accepted by The New Yorker, he was startled by my certainty. He was also somewhat scornful, and suggested that maybe this should not be the full extent of my ambition. I was so surprised by his reaction that the Manhattan street corner where we were talking is engraved on my memory: Broadway at 114th Street. My fixed ideas had been shaken.
Although I now did not have quite the same confidence in The New Yorker, I did not immediately see an obvious alternative to writing short stories, so I continued to work in that form and develop in that direction for the next several years, though the subject matter of the stories gradually moved away from the most conventional. I found the writing difficult; it was pleasurable or exciting only at moments. I worked on one short story for months and months; I spent about two years on another one. I followed the oft-repeated advice, which was to combine invented material and material from my own experience.
My reading might have shown me other possibilities. In addition to a healthy diet of the classic short-story writers, such as Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, John Cheever, Hemingway, Updike, and Flannery O’Connor, I was already reading writers who were more unusual formally and imaginatively, such as Beckett, Kafka, Borges, and Isaac Babel.
I was in my early teens when I first laid eyes on a page of Beckett. I was startled. I had come to it from books that included the steamy novels of Mazo de la Roche—though not too steamy to be included in a very proper girls’ school library—and the more classic romances of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, as well as the social panoramas of John Dos Passos, the first writer whose style I consciously noticed and relished. Now here was a book—Malone Dies—in which the narrator spent a page describing his pencil, and the first plot development was that he had dropped his pencil. I had never imagined anything like it.
When I look at Beckett now, to try to identify more exactly the qualities that continued to excite my int
erest as I read his work over the years and did my best to learn from him, I find at least the following:
There was his precise and sonorous use of the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary—especially, in this example, the way he gives a familiar word like dint a fresh life by using it in an unfamiliar way: “the flagstone before her door that by dint by dint her little weight has grooved.”
There was his use of Anglo-Saxon and alliteration to produce what were almost pieces of Old English verse: “worthy those worn by certain newly dead.”
There was his use of complex, almost impossibly tangled, yet correct, syntax for the pleasure of it, though perhaps also as a commentary on composition itself: “Were it not of him to whom it is speaking speaking but of another it would not speak.”
There was his deft handling of image and his humor, almost certainly poking fun at more traditional romantic or lyrical writing that I myself quite enjoyed: “the little summer house. A rustic hexahedron.”
There was the way he balanced the sonority of rhythm and alliteration with the unexpectedly compassionate depiction of character: “So with what reason remains he reasons and reasons ill.”
And lastly, there was his acute psychological analysis, so closely accurate that it became absurd and yet moving at the same time: “Not that Watt felt calm and free and glad, for he did not, and had never done so. But he thought that perhaps he felt calm and free and glad, at least calm and free, or free and glad, or glad and calm, or if not calm and free, or free and glad, or glad and calm, at least calm, or free, or glad, without knowing it.” (Here he is no doubt again poking fun at conventional sentimental writing.)
If Beckett interested me more for the way he handled language—the close attention to words, the mining of the richness of English, the ironic distance from prose style, the self-consciousness—and less for the forms in which he wrote, still, as with Joyce, Beckett’s example provided a pattern of development through different forms over a lifetime of writing: both these writers started by writing poetry and went on to write short stories, and then novels, and then, in Joyce’s case, the most intricately inventive, nearly impenetrable novel Finnegans Wake, in Beckett’s case the plays and the briefer and increasingly eccentric fictions. Both evolved to a point where they seemed to leave more and more readers behind and write more and more for their own pleasure and interest.
I had the example of writers within the traditional form but abbreviated, as, for instance, Isaac Babel with his condensation, emotional intensity, and richness of imagery, especially in Walter Morison’s translation of the Red Cavalry stories. One of these, “Crossing into Poland,” ends with the thin pregnant woman standing over her dead old father:
“Good sir,” said the Jewess, shaking up the feather bed, “the Poles cut his throat, and he begging them: ‘Kill me in the yard so that my daughter shan’t see me die.’ But they did as suited them. He passed away in this room, thinking of me.—And now I should wish to know,” cried the woman with sudden and terrible violence, “I should wish to know where in the whole world you could find another father like my father?”
The ending is abrupt; the story, for all its power, is only a little over two pages long.
I had the example of Grace Paley, who defied conventional pacing and packed every sentence with so much wit, richness of character, and worldly wisdom that the lines were often explosive. Her story “Wants” is, again, all of two pages long. Here is the opening page:
I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library.
Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified.
He said, What? What life? No life of mine.
I said, O.K. I don’t argue when there’s real disagreement. I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them.
The librarian said $32 even and you’ve owed it for eighteen years. I didn’t deny anything. Because I don’t understand how time passes. I have had those books. I have often thought of them. The library is only two blocks away.
My ex-husband followed me to the Books Returned desk. He interrupted the librarian, who had more to tell. In many ways, he said, as I look back, I attribute the dissolution of our marriage to the fact that you never invited the Bertrams to dinner.
That’s possible, I said. But really, if you remember: first, my father was sick that Friday, then the children were born, then I had those Tuesday-night meetings, then the war began. Then we didn’t seem to know them any more. But you’re right. I should have had them to dinner.
(Notice, by the way, in this excerpt, how fond she is of short sentences, often following the same pattern, which is the simplest one: subject, verb.)
Yet I was apparently not ready to try the sort of story she was writing. And it took me another decade to see that you could derive the material of a story very largely from your own life, as I suspect she did, or even, though in a selected version, almost entirely from your own life, as I later did.
* * *
I also had the example of Kafka’s very brief Parables and Paradoxes, some of which were not so much stories, of course, as they were meditations or logical problems. I studied them closely. Yet I seemed to think that only Kafka, not I or anyone else, could write such odd things.
They all work in slightly different ways. One, for instance, “The Sirens,” might be a reinterpretation of a familiar legend:
These are the seductive voices of the night; the Sirens, too, sang that way. It would be doing them an injustice to think that they wanted to seduce; they knew they had claws and sterile wombs, and they lamented this aloud. They could not help it if their laments sounded so beautiful.
Another, “Leopards in the Temple,” might be the creation of, and commentary upon, a ritual:
Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.
Another might be the reinterpretation of a moment of history (“Alexander the Great”):
It is conceivable that Alexander the Great, in spite of the martial successes of his early days, in spite of the excellent army that he had trained, in spite of the power he felt within him to change the world, might have remained standing on the bank of the Hellespont and never have crossed it, and not out of fear, not out of indecision, not out of infirmity of will, but because of the mere weight of his own body.
(Kafka himself, apparently, was inspired by two of his contemporaries or predecessors who wrote in the very short form: the Swiss Robert Walser, also a novelist, whose late writings, almost illegibly tiny, were only recently deciphered; and the Viennese coffeehouse bohemian Peter Altenberg, writing at the turn of the twentieth century.)
* * *
For a long time, I did not see Kafka as a model to be emulated, nor other more eccentric or unconventional writers. I did not yet know the work of many writers who later, over the years, became interesting to me or influential: the strange narrative voices and bizarre sensibilities in the stories of the American Jane Bowles or the Brazilian Clarice Lispector or the Swiss Regina Ullmann (whose 1921 collection of stories was not translated into English until 2015, nearly a hundred years after it appeared in German); or the startling and calmly violent, syntactically complex single-paragraph stories of the Austrian Thomas Bernhard’s collection The Voice Imitator, which I discovered by chance in an airport bookstore; or the tiny chapters of the Brazilian Machado de Assis’s novel Epitaph of a Small Winner; or the autobiographical paragraph stories of the Spaniard Luis Cernuda; or the many, many small, whimsical tales written in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, of the Cuban Virgilio Piñera; or, finally, the meditative, semi-autobiographical, very brief stories of the Dutchman A. L. Snijders or the Swiss Peter Bichsel, so appealing to me that I have been translating them for the past five years or so.
But those discoveries were still to come.
At the age of about twe
nty-six, after having ignored the model of Kafka for so long, I was jolted into taking a new direction, at last, after reading a collection of stories by the contemporary American prose poet Russell Edson.
I had been slogging away at a stubborn story. I had been fighting off my inertia and apathy. I would read, go for a walk, eat. In the midst of this inertia, a friend who had been witnessing it said, “You just sit around all day doing nothing.” (I wasn’t doing nothing—I was agonizing!) Then I read Russell Edson’s book called The Very Thing That Happens.
Russell Edson is an unusual writer: you could characterize many of his stories as brief, fantastic, and often funny tales of domestic mayhem involving family members but also, sometimes, their pots and pans, animals, buildings, parts of buildings, and so forth. But some of the pieces are lyrical meditations, or sunnier moral tales. Edson himself calls them poems, sometimes fables. Here is one on the idea of generations (“Waiting for the Signal Man”):
A woman said to her mother, where is my daughter?
Her mother said, up you and through me and out of grandmother; coming all the way down through all women like a railway train, trailing her brunette hair, which streams back grey into white; waiting for the signal man to raise his light so she can come through.
What she waiting for? said the woman.
For the signal man to raise his light, so she can see to come through.
Here, in “Dead Daughter,” is a rather brutal family interaction:
Wake up, I heard something die, said a woman to something else.
Something else was her father. Do not call me something else, he said.
Will it be something dead for breakfast? said the woman.