Essays One

by Lydia Davis

  … it gave the rubbled grass

  And the dull hollows where its ripple ran

  Lithe scintillas of exuberance,

  Moving the way a chance felicity

  Silvers the whole attention of the mind.

  That’s the end of the poem. Sparrow’s plainer version may not quite succeed as a poem, and some readers will prefer the richer original. But Sparrow’s translations raise several interesting questions about writing, and about form in particular—which is what I’ve been exploring here.

  The most pressing question, of course, is one that would take us, if we pursued it, straight into the realm of translation theory and all its intriguing conundrums: Can you say the same thing in radically different ways? If you write it so differently, are you, in fact, saying the same thing?

  2007, 2012

  Commentary on One Very Short Story

  (“In a House Besieged”)

  First version:

  [IN A HOUSE BESIEGED]

  In a house beseiged lived a man and a woman, with two dogs and two cats. There were mice there too, but they were not acknowledged. Around the From [where they cowered in] the kitchen the man and woman heard small explosions. “The wind,” said the woman. “Hunters,” said the man. “Smoke,” said the woman. “The army,” said the man. The woman wanted to go home, but she was already at home, there in the middle of the country in a house beseiged, in a house that belonged to someone else.

  Final version:

  IN A HOUSE BESIEGED

  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.

  In those days (fall of 1973, age twenty-six, living in the country in France), I would force myself to stay at the desk for a certain number of hours, writing in my notebook whatever came to mind—often descriptions of what I could see or hear, or thoughts or memories—as a way of bringing myself to the point of writing something like a story.

  “In a House Besieged” grew directly out of my situation and the descriptions I wrote in the notebook. There were, in fact, hunters and army units in the countryside around the house. So the paragraph in the notebook that directly preceded the first draft of this story reads:

  The shots of the hunters this morning (as I lay in bed still trying to order my thoughts): an explosion, a pop: then the echo or reverberation like clouds of smoke washing to the hills and back again. And everything is silent and peaceful until there is another muffled shot.

  As for the changes to the story from first draft to final draft, the two cats and two dogs, as well as the mice, were cut. The animals were part of my real situation, but I probably felt that they lessened the ominousness of the story, “domesticated” it, and certainly the bit about acknowledging the mice was chatty and distracting—getting away from the point of the story. The insertion of “where they cowered in” adds explicit drama, whereas if I had said simply “from the kitchen” the drama would be less, especially since kitchen has comfortable associations (until one has to cower in it). The change from “smoke” to “rain” replaces something inaudible by something audible. Ending the story on the phrase “in a house besieged,” especially if it echoes the title—though the title was added later—is stronger than the rather anticlimactic and irrelevant “in a house that belonged to someone else”; it is confusing and adds new information that is beside the point. Last change: By the time of the final version, I knew how to spell besieged.

  2014

  From Raw Material to Finished Work:

  Forms and Influences II

  I’m going to start this discussion of forms and influences by returning to some early influences for a couple of reasons. One is to give an example of the sort of traditional fiction I attempted when I was just starting out. The other reason is to describe how two very different stories emerged from the same experience, one early and the other written some forty years later. The experience that inspired all three of these stories took place the summer I turned eighteen, just after graduating from high school.

  My parents were living in Buenos Aires. My father had been teaching there and in La Plata since the winter. I went down to join them in June and for two months lived with them in a large apartment they had sublet on the Avenida del Libertador from a British record company executive.

  I spent my days practicing the violin, attending dance classes, volunteering in a Catholic orphanage, teaching myself Spanish, going to concerts with my mother, taking walks by myself, and writing in my journal. I know from reading my journal that in the course of my walks I observed the caged chickens in the markets and talked in halting Spanish to butchers and embassy guards, and back at home wrote descriptions of the mist-filled city parks at night and the glimpses, through the windows of private houses, of “gray heads” bent over their tea. I was interested in what was exotic to me—a gypsy girl selling lemons on the sidewalk, the wheels of horse-drawn delivery carts twinkling in the sunlight, a gaucho roasting whole goats in a restaurant window—but I missed my friends and did not always know what to do with myself.

  * * *

  My memories of that time, though sparse and fragmented, remained vivid, and a year later, after my first year of college, I wrote a short story set in the city as I remembered it and depicting the sort of life I thought I could imagine there.

  “Ways” was written in the summer of 1966, when I was turning nineteen, for a summer-session fiction workshop at Columbia University. Fiction workshops were much less common in those days, and this was the only one I ever enrolled in, although I did take one creative writing course when I was a senior in college, a few years later. There was no such thing as a creative writing major at Barnard or most other colleges. The idea, at that time, was that if you wanted to “be a writer,” you would major in English literature and then, after graduation, most logically, find work as an editor at a publishing house. Or at least that was what I thought would be the progression—what advice or guidance I received, I can’t remember now.

  I was going to say that I followed quite a different course in the years after college, but, in fact, it’s true that after working for a temp agency for a while, I did find a job as an editorial assistant at W. W. Norton & Co. and stayed there a few months, saving as much money as I could. Then I went to live in France, and I didn’t work in publishing again.

  * * *

  Here are the first few paragraphs of “Ways,” enough to show how traditional it was:

  This afternoon the wind blew in gusts along the street. The women’s cheeks warmed with color, their hair tousled, the men spread their woven and fringed scarves over their shoulders. Today was Sunday, the fruit stands boarded up, gratings lowered on all the store fronts. As the afternoon darkened there were only a few breaks in the dusk in each block; a confitería on the corner with its glass doors closed, men inside leaning over their tea, their scarves rumpled against their collars, their hands gesturing or cradling their cups in the cold and white light. Here and there along the street trays and tiers of candy flowered from booths between the stores. Curtaining above them hung lines of tickets for the national lottery. The proprietor sat reading a folded newspaper on a stool behind the counter. On the corner across the street from the confitería a neon sign glowed down the front of a parrilla, where grilled beefsteaks were sold.

  The old man crossed over the cobblestones of the street to look in at the parrilla. Its white tablecloths glimmered and a few white-jacketed mozos stood talking behind the bar. Just after dark: people would not begin arriving until nine. Peering in the window, his eyes sparkled a moment under his heavy eyebrows. Slowly he put his hands to his collar and turned it up. Away from the window he folded his hands across the soft ends of his shawl, paused a moment, and walked on.

>   Such a very difficult matter to decide, he began to think. I do not want him in the house with me. He is not quiet like an old man, and he eats and drinks a great deal. He would never be content with a little omelette and vegetable. He frowned and then thought of other things. Should he take tea there on the corner or go on home and have a little maté? He walked along slowly and imagined each experience carefully. It comforted him to hold the silver maté cup in his palms, to stir the leaves about with the long silver strainer. To sit quiet with his considerations, with his own damp and undisturbed smell, with the noises he was accustomed to, the clanging of elevator gates in the hall beyond the door and an occasional drift of voices, the ticking of a small alarm clock in his room, the other rooms silent. He could sit at the kitchen table with La Prensa folded before him and look again at the review of Ricci’s first appearance in the city. It was comfortable to suck up the hot bitter drink while he read about the brilliant cadenza that opened the Ginastera concerto, while he remembered the perfect intonation of the violin. Ricci seemed alone there on the edge of the stage, with the orchestra silent behind him. The old man frowned again and rubbed his hands across his eyes; he was ashamed and humiliated when he couldn’t stop coughing. He wanted to hear every sequence and every interval, but he wheezed and choked. Three thousand others were quiet. He said angrily to himself, I am an old fool spoiling the music.

  I don’t remember thinking of Hemingway as one of my influences, but I now see resemblances: the simple language, the repetition, the concrete descriptions, the setting in a foreign, Spanish-speaking place with the foreign names for things.

  Here, for comparison, is the opening of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” which, even though it is so often anthologized and assigned, has lost none of its effectiveness as a beautifully constructed depiction of a place and three characters. Hemingway’s sympathetic portrait of the old man in this story may even have inspired, in part, the old man in my own story. I wonder if it is possible—though this just occurred to me now, as I was looking at the connection to Hemingway—that certain material or settings may trigger a response in a writer that awakens subliminal memories of earlier responses to a significant piece of writing she has studied in the past: that is, the exotic foreign setting of Buenos Aires, the Spanish language, the sight of certain types of men in the street may, taken together, have sparked a synaptic connection in my brain back to the text of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”:

  It was late and every one had left the café except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the day time the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference. The two waiters inside the café knew that the old man was a little drunk, and while he was a good client they knew that if he became too drunk he would leave without paying, so they kept watch on him.

  The differences are apparent, too, of course. In the Hemingway passage there is a more deliberate use of repetition—“The two waiters … knew that the old man was … drunk, and … they knew that if he became too drunk”; there is also the deliberate and eccentric use of repeated “and”s in that paragraph—“and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference”; there is a conspicuous lack of commas where another writer might include them; there is also the insistence throughout the story on certain elements of the physical description: the light, the shadows, the leaves and the tree, the dust and the dew, the quiet. The recurrence of the images and the simplicity of the syntax add to the distinctness with which they are impressed on us.

  * * *

  A few years after college, now living in France, I wrote another story inspired by my experiences in Buenos Aires. I need to explain, first, that the apartment my parents were subletting there included the services of a mother-daughter team of live-in cook and maid; as was traditional in a large luxury apartment, their rooms were behind the kitchen. The rent for the apartment, including the cook and the maid, must have been far lower than it would have been in the United States, because this was, I hasten to say, not the way we lived back home—where at first four of us, and then three, lived in a rather cramped though comfortable enough apartment near Columbia University—galley kitchen, sleeper sofa, no maid, no cook, no terrace.

  Although my mother had a certain infatuation with the grand life, and at this time undoubtedly enjoyed throwing parties and taking a long vacation from preparing the family meals, it turned out to be rather more than she had bargained for: she was hardly born to the role of managing servants, having grown up in a family of modest means headed by a thrifty widowed schoolteacher.

  The cook in Argentina was a large, confident woman who liked to argue vigorously with my mother. The young maid, her daughter, was sour and angry.

  Bewildering and frustrating as it was for my mother, the situation fascinated me for the very reason that it was so unlike our usual way of life. The mother and daughter would disappear through the kitchen door at night, reappear in the morning. I never saw their rooms. There was also a tiny child living with them, a little dark-haired and dark-eyed girl—it was not clear whose child she was. The little girl would creep into my room to watch me practice the violin. The maid, rather simpleminded and always in a temper, would eventually come in search of her, charge into the room, and yank her away by her thin little arm.

  * * *

  Years later, I wrote a story called “The Housemaid.” Although the mother and daughter in the story were based on the women in Argentina, the setting of the story was not a Buenos Aires apartment but a large stone manor house of the kind I had in the meantime seen in the Irish countryside, with, in the basement, a wide flagstone corridor and whitewashed storage rooms, and, upstairs, a succession of empty, drafty, high-ceilinged formal rooms. The mother and daughter in the story looked after a lone man named Mr. Martin, with whom the housemaid was, in her own way, in love. The character of Mr. Martin may possibly have been modeled on the British executive who had sublet the apartment in Buenos Aires to my parents. But in his behavior he resembled more closely a strangely silent and gloomy Edgar Allan Poe protagonist—again, perhaps, my choice of character connecting back to what lessons I had absorbed from reading Poe.

  Here is the opening of “The Housemaid”:

  I know I am not pretty. My dark hair is cut short and is so thin it hardly hides my skull. I have a hasty and lopsided way of walking, as though I were crippled in one leg. When I bought my glasses I thought they were elegant—the frames are black and shaped like butterfly wings—but now I have learned how unbecoming they are and am stuck with them, since I have no money to buy new ones. My skin is the color of a toad’s belly and my lips are narrow. But I am not nearly as ugly as my mother, who is much older. Her face is small and wrinkled and black like a prune, and her teeth wobble in her mouth. I can hardly bear to sit across from her at dinner and I can tell by the look on her face that she feels the same way about me.

  For years we have lived together in the basement. She is the cook; I am the housemaid. We are not good servants, but no one can dismiss us because we are still better than most. My mother’s dream is that someday she will save enough money to leave me and live in the country. My dream is nearly the same, except that when I am feeling angry and unhappy I look across the table at her clawlike hands and hope that she will choke to death on her food. Then no one would be there to stop me from going into her closet and breaking open her money box.…

  Whenever I imagine these things, sitting alone in the kitchen late at night, I am always ill the next day. Then it is my mother herself who nurses me, holding water to my lips and fanning my face with a flyswatter, neglecting her duties in the kitchen, and I struggle to persuade myself that she is not silently gloating over my weakness.

  * * *

  Things have not always been like this. When Mr. Martin lived in the rooms above us, we were
happier, though we seldom spoke to one another.

  And from the end:

  This is only a rented house. My mother and I are included in the rent. People come and go, and every few years there is a new tenant. I should have expected that one day Mr. Martin too would leave.

  As I reread the story, I can see that it also expresses a teenage girl’s typical ambivalence toward her mother: she may resent her, harbor angry fantasies about her, but then, in times of illness or despair, she often finds herself turning to that same mother for help.

  * * *

  Decades later, after my mother died, I found a folder she had kept documenting all her difficulties with the cook and the maid in Argentina. It included copies of letters she had written to friends, and drafts of letters she had written to the cook—she found it easier, sometimes, to put her ideas in writing than to have a direct conversation, whether her antagonist was the cook or, in fact, her own teenage daughter. I found pieces of paper on which she was trying out individual sentences in Spanish to use in her next confrontation, along with corrections that a Spanish-speaking friend had made.

  This found material was both moving to me and funny. As has so often happened, the story I wrote was inspired by a combination of pathos, humor, and the role played by language itself—in this case my mother’s attempt to express her desires and difficulties in Spanish.

  My approach to using this material was, by now, after all these decades, very different from my approach when I wrote “The Housemaid.” In the earlier story, I had more or less followed the advice given to young writers: draw on material with which you are familiar to create fictional characters and a fictional situation with a plotline that arises naturally from the characters and the situation.