Essays One

by Lydia Davis

  It is always something dead given by your mother to her husband, said her father, like my dead daughter, dead inside herself; there is nothing living there, no heart, no child.

  That is not true, said the daughter, I am in here trying to live, but afraid to come out.

  If you’re in there oh do come out, we’re having a special treat, dead daughter for breakfast, dead daughter for lunch, and dead daughter for supper, in fact dead daughter for the rest of our lives.

  And here is a drama involving inanimate objects as well as human beings (When Things Go Wrong):

  A woman had just made her bed. A wall leaned down and went to sleep on her bed. So the ceiling decided to go to bed too. The wall and the ceiling began to shove each other. But it was decided that the ceiling had best sleep on the floor. But the floor said, get off of me because I am annoyed with you. And the floor went outside to lie in the grass.

  Will you stop it all of you, screamed the woman.

  But the rest of the walls yawned and said, we’re tired too.

  Stop stop stop, she screamed, it is all going wrong, all is wrong wrong wrong.

  When her father returned he said, why is my house destroyed?

  Because everything went wrong suddenly, screamed the woman.

  Why are you screaming and why is my house destroyed? said the father.

  I don’t know, I don’t know, and I am screaming because I am very upset, father, said the woman.

  This is very strange, said the father, perhaps I’ll walk away and when I return things will be different.

  Father, screamed the woman, why do you leave me every time this happens?

  Because when I return things will be different, said the father.

  Edson opened a path for me for several reasons. One reason was that not every one of his stories succeeded. Some were merely silly. Maybe this had to do with the way Edson went about writing them.

  As Natalie Goldberg describes it in her book Writing Down the Bones:

  He said that he sits down at his typewriter and writes about ten different short pieces at one session. He then comes back later to reread them. Maybe one out of the ten is successful and he keeps that one. He said that if a good first line comes to him, the rest of the piece usually works. Here are some of his first lines:

  “A man wants an aeroplane to like him.” …

  “A beloved duck gets cooked by mistake.” …

  “A husband and wife discover that their children are fakes.”

  “Identical twin old men take turns at being alive.”

  Some of the stories I found brilliant, but others faltered. Yet the stories that did not quite succeed showed me two things that were helpful to a young writer: they showed more clearly how the stories were put together; and they showed how a writer could try something, fail, try again, partially succeed, and try again. A third thing the stories showed me, both the brilliant ones and the faltering ones, was how you could tap some very difficult emotions and let them burst out in an unexpected, raw, sometimes absurd form—that perhaps, in fact, setting oneself absurd or impossible subjects made it easier for difficult emotions to come forth.

  I read this book, and I began writing paragraph-long stories, sometimes just one story on one day, sometimes more.

  They, too, arose from different sources and worked in different ways. One, “In a House Besieged,” used the landscape where I was living at the time, taking real features of it but putting them together in such a way that the piece sounded like a fable or a fairy tale:

  In a house besieged lived a man and a woman. From where they cowered in the kitchen the man and woman heard small explosions. “The wind,” said the woman. “Hunters,” said the man. “The rain,” said the woman. “The army,” said the man. The woman wanted to go home, but she was already home, there in the middle of the country in a house besieged.

  Another, “The Mother,” was entirely made up, but was based on an emotional reality:

  The girl wrote a story. “But how much better it would be if you wrote a novel,” said her mother. The girl built a dollhouse. “But how much better if it were a real house,” her mother said. The girl made a small pillow for her father. “But wouldn’t a quilt be more practical,” said her mother. The girl dug a small hole in the garden. “But how much better if you dug a large hole,” said her mother. The girl dug a large hole and went to sleep in it. “But how much better if you slept forever,” said her mother.

  Some of the stories remained unfinished, rough. Some grew to be a page or two long, or longer. These short-short stories, as a group, had a different feel to them from what I had done before—they were bolder, more confident, and more adventurous; they were more of a pleasure to write, and they came more easily. Whereas until this point writing had often felt like hard work, now I began to enjoy it.

  One of the longer stories was “Mr. Knockly,” which begins: “Last night my aunt burned to death.” It was only much later that I realized that this story had very likely been influenced by an Edgar Allan Poe story, “The Man of the Crowd”: the main plotline of both stories is the narrator’s obsessive pursuit of a man through the streets of a town. And over time I have seen how certain forms, even the forms of nursery rhymes, may impress themselves on us when we hear or read them, and that some of our later work may slip right into these preestablished matrices.

  I did not go on to read every one of Russell Edson’s books over the years after that. One book was enough—as, often, even a single page of a piece of writing may be enough—to cause a change of direction. I no longer felt that I had to write in accordance with an established, traditional form. After that, although I remained loyal to the traditional narrative short story and revisited it from time to time, I also kept departing from it to try other forms. Sometimes the forms simply occurred to me, and sometimes they were directly inspired by another writer’s piece of writing.

  * * *

  About twelve years after I first read Edson, for instance, I was reading a poem by the American poet Bob Perelman on a train going down the coast of California. I was startled—he was incorporating a grammar lesson into his poem! Could one really do that?

  Here is the lesson in Perelman’s poem, called “Seduced by Analogy,” from his collection To the Reader:

  With afford, agree, and arrange, use the infinitive.

  I can’t agree to die. With practice,

  Imagine, and resist, use the gerund. I practice to live

  Is wrong.

  A train, or in fact any public transportation, is often a very good place to think and write. After I read this poem, I realized you could teach French in a story. You could write the story in English but incorporate French words and ideas about language. I began writing “French Lesson I: Le Meurtre” right there on the train, without any more plan than that:

  See the vaches ambling up the hill, head to rump, head to rump. Learn what a vache is. A vache is milked in the morning, and milked again in the evening, twitching her dung-soaked tail, her head in a stanchion. Always start learning your foreign language with the names of farm animals. Remember that one animal is an animal, but more than one are animaux, ending in a u x. Do not pronounce the x. These animaux live on a ferme.

  And the lesson continues, with a short vocabulary list at the end.

  Which is to say that a good poem is bound to offer you something surprising in the way of language and thinking, even if some of its meaning eludes you.

  * * *

  The American contemporary Charles Bernstein is another interesting poet and one of the originators of the so-called Language School of poetry. Bernstein ventures into all sorts of new formal territories—he has even written the libretto of an opera based on the work and life of the critic Walter Benjamin.

  One of Bernstein’s long sectional poems, “Safe Methods of Business,” includes a letter protesting a parking ticket. In part it reads:

  The summons charges me with parking at a crosswalk on the

  northe
ast corner of 82nd street and Broadway on the evening

  of August 17, 1984. The space in question is

  east of the crosswalk on 82nd street as indicated

  by the yellow lines painted across the street. This space

  has been a legal parking space during the over ten years I

  have lived on the block. Cars are always parked in this space

  and have continued to (unticketed in several observations I

  made yesterday and today). Apparently, new crosswalk markings

  are currently being painted in white on both 82nd street and

  83rd street. At this time, the process is not complete.

  When these new lines are finished, several spaces may be

  eliminated. However, as they looked at the time I received

  the ticket, they did not appear to override the yellow lines

  according to which I was clearly in my right to park in the space.

  I read Bernstein’s poem as a poem, de facto, partly because it has line breaks, partly because it is one section (twenty-six lines long in its entirety) of a more obviously poem-like long poem, and partly because it is included in a collection of poems and is surrounded by other poems. Yet how does it work as a poem? Certainly not by the same rules as the poem by Perelman above. What it does show is how other factors besides the style, form, and language of a poem, particularly the context in which we read it, may determine how we receive it—and this in itself can open up new possibilities for a writer.

  Perhaps this unusual form of “poem” lodged in my brain somewhere, so that years later a letter of complaint seemed a good form for a story, and I wrote “Letter to a Funeral Parlor,” objecting to the use of the word cremains. This letter started out as an actual, sincere piece of correspondence and then got carried away by its own language and turned into something too literary to send.

  After I wrote it, I realized how many other things I had to complain about and wrote three more: “Letter to a Hotel Manager,” in which I objected to the misspelling, on the menu, of scrod, the famous Boston fish; “Letter to a Peppermint Candy Company,” in which I reported that in the expensive tin of peppermints I had just bought, there were only two-thirds the number of peppermints the company claimed to have put in it; and “Letter to a Frozen Peas Manufacturer,” objecting to the artwork on the package.

  Some influences reveal themselves only long after the fact, but some are quite conscious. Once, many years ago, I was reading David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. It was difficult to read, because the men are truly hideous. But the form is a powerful one—in each interview, we are given the answers at length, but the questions have been left blank. I did not finish reading it, but the form stayed with me. And some time later, after I had had the interesting experience of being on call for jury duty and wanted to write about it, this form felt like the perfect one to use. The content of the story, which is titled “Jury Duty,” was taken nearly completely from my own experience, but the story was transformed into fiction by the illusion of the questioner, or examiner.

  Here is the opening of the story:

  Q.

  A. Jury duty.

  Q.

  A. The night before, we had been quarreling.

  Q.

  A. The family.

  Q.

  A. Four of us. Well, one doesn’t live at home anymore. But he was home that night. He was leaving the next morning—the same morning I had to go in to the courtroom.

  Q.

  A. We were all four of us quarreling. Every which way. I was just now trying to figure it out. There are so many different combinations in which four people can quarrel: one on one, two against one, three against one, two against two, etc. I’m sure we were quarreling in just about every combination.

  Q.

  A. I don’t remember now. Funny. Considering how heated it was.

  The form is enjoyable because of what you can do with the unspoken questions. Sometimes it’s obvious what the question has been. For instance, later in the story we know the questioner has had trouble understanding the name Sojourner Truth—the former slave and women’s rights activist—because it has to be repeated several times; but at other points in the story we cannot guess what the questioner has asked: I end the story with the answer “Yes!”—and you will never know what the question was.

  * * *

  Some years ago, during the extended period in which I was working on my translation of Proust’s Swann’s Way, not wanting to stop writing altogether and yet having no time, I tried another form that intrigued me: perhaps because I was spending the days translating such long, complex sentences—though I found this activity engrossing and even exciting—I wanted to see just how brief I could make a piece of writing and still have it mean something.

  Perhaps I had also been influenced by a postcard I had kept up on my bulletin board for years. It contained a three-line poem—a translation from the Cheremiss—by the Finnish poet Anselm Hollo:

  i shouldn’t have started these red wool mittens.

  they’re done now,

  but my life is over.

  Even though it’s so short, it surprises me each time I read it—which is something I think a good piece of writing should do.

  Perhaps, too, the idea for this very brief form was planted in me years ago by some of the entries in Kafka’s Diaries, which I read very closely when I was in my twenties. For instance, here is one entry, in its entirety:

  The picture of dissatisfaction presented by a street, where everyone is perpetually lifting his feet to escape from the place on which he stands.

  In just a few words, he offers a different way of seeing a commonplace thing. I wondered if I could write a piece that short—a title and a line or two—that would still have the power to move, or at least startle, or distract, in a way that was not entirely frivolous. I also wanted the piece to stay firmly in the realm of prose.

  Here is one, “Lonely,” that has some of the rhythms of the Hollo poem:

  No one is calling me. I can’t check the answering machine because I have been here all this time. If I go out, someone may call while I’m out. Then I can check the answering machine when I come back in.

  There are two that are shorter:

  HAND

  Beyond the hand holding this book that I’m reading, I see another hand lying idle and slightly out of focus—my extra hand.

  INDEX ENTRY

  Christian, I’m not a

  Legend has it that Hemingway once wrote what he called a one-line short story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”—an ephemeral variation by someone on the internet reads “For sale: baby crib, never used.” But writers working in very short forms are usually poets. There is Samuel Menashe, who often wrote in four short lines and whose interesting work is too often overlooked:

  (UNTITLED)

  Pity us

  by the sea

  on the sands

  so briefly

  Another poet who is a master of brevity and the concrete is Lorine Niedecker, one of the less well-known poets in the so-called objectivist group that followed a generation or so after Ezra Pound. Here is one of her short, pithy poems, untitled, about a thing that comes back, or might come back, to haunt the poet, having a life and will of its own:

  The museum man!

  I wish he’d taken Pa’s spitbox!

  I’m going to take that spitbox out

  and bury it in the ground

  and put a stone on top.

  Because without that stone on top

  it would come back.

  Then there is an interesting, anarchic poet near Woodstock, New York, known only as Sparrow. Some years ago he became famous—in small circles, anyway—for staging a one-man protest in the reception area of The New Yorker for several days, objecting that the magazine published only bland, predictable poetry, rather than offbeat, eccentric poetry such as, in particular, his own. Eventually, in fact, the magazine bought three o
f his poems and published at least one of them. (Sometimes it pays to be persistent, and to protest.)

  Sparrow has written many very small poems, such as the following (“Poem”):

  This poem replaces

  all my previous poems.

  The poems of his that interest me are not lyrical. I like the ones in which he sees things in a different way—as Kafka does in some of his diary entries, as I do in my piece “Hand.”

  Here’s another small poem, “Perfection Wasted”:

  The problem with dying

  is you can’t be funny anymore,

  or charming.

  When I read this, I thought it was an original poem of his, but in fact it is a “translation” of a sonnet by John Updike that appeared in The New Yorker. I found it in a group of poems by Sparrow called “Translations from the New Yorker.” This was in a book of his called America: A Prophecy: A Sparrow Reader.

  Another translation of his is “Garter Snake.” I’ll quote Sparrow’s translation first, then a little of the original:

  A snake moved through grass

  and I watched.

  It looked like an S.

  When it stopped, it was very still.

  The grass shook slightly when it moved.

  The original, by Eric Ormsby, has a lot more words in it, which is one thing I suppose Sparrow is trying to get away from. Here is the first verse of the original:

  The stately ripple of the garter snake

  In sinuous procession through the grass

  Compelled my eye. It stopped and held its head

  High above the lawn, and the delicate curve

  Of its slender body formed a letter S—

  For “serpent,” I assume, as though

  Diminutive majesty obliged embodiment.

  Further along in the poem, where Sparrow’s translation reads “The grass shook slightly when it moved,” the original reads: