Essays One

by Lydia Davis

  Thus, yes, there is other action and interaction in the book besides the concrete action of the narrator and the interaction between narrator and a possible other person: for instance, there is also the interaction between the narrator and an abstract actor such as thought; and, climbing to a further, almost vertiginous level of abstraction-made-concrete, between the narrator and the absence of the abstract entity. (As in so much of Blanchot’s writing, absence is a compelling presence and a compelling character in the work.)

  In this narrative, then, in which paradox and impossibility are incorporated as perfectly natural elements of the action, an attempt to identify actors and types of action and to separate out concrete actors from abstract, as well as permutations of both, yields these notations:

  1. There are concrete actors, such as the narrator.

  2. There are abstract elements that perform as actors, such as the narrator’s “desire” or “immobility.”

  3. There are possibly but not certainly imaginary actors, such as a figure, possibly of the narrator’s invention, who may be sitting in the room.

  4. There is concrete action in concrete space, and the narrator declares it positively (e.g., “I moved”).

  5. There is possible concrete action in concrete space; the narrator qualifies it (e.g., “I think I moved”).

  6. There is a possible concrete situation; the narrator is even more tentative about it (e.g., “I had the feeling someone was sitting in the armchair”).

  7. There is a concrete interaction, but it takes place between one concrete entity and one abstract entity (e.g., “I was stopped by my own immobility”).

  8. There is “concrete” interaction between things that do not concretely exist, that exist only in the narrator’s mind or imagination—thoughts, sensations, illusions.

  9. There is no interaction between the narrator and, say, an imaginary figure; but there is interaction between the narrator and the effect, on the narrator, of that lack of interaction.

  The list could go on.

  2007

  Stendhal’s Alter Ego:

  The Life of Henry Brulard

  The other day I was listening to a program about astronomy on the radio, and in the space of about half an hour I learned at least five or six startling things, among them that most meteors are no larger than a raisin; that a meteor the size of a grape would light up the entire sky as it descended; that if we could see him, a person poised on the edge of a black hole would appear, from the vantage point of the earth, to hover there indefinitely, frozen in time, whereas from the vantage point of the black hole itself he would be swallowed up instantly. Some of this was hard for me to understand, and while I was still agog with it, along came the next and most disturbing comment, one concerning the nature of time: there is, they said, a good deal of evidence suggesting that at the deepest level of reality, time as we are accustomed to imagine it does not actually exist, that we live in an eternal present.

  If I can comprehend it at all, this idea is not a very comfortable one. I would prefer to think of objective time as an unbroken stream of equal intervals stretching infinitely far back and far forward; then I may peaceably watch subjective time as it defies measurement by behaving in its usual capricious, elastic, elusive manner, shrinking and expanding unexpectedly or collapsing in on itself. And this was my habit of thought before I heard the radio program and while I was engrossed in reading Stendhal’s Life of Henry Brulard. For time is very much one of the subjects of this Life, which remarkably transfigures or transcends it, as Stendhal looks back at his past and speaks forward in time to his readers of the future, but also, by his manner of writing, brings those readers into what now seems to me, after the radio program, to be an eternal present.

  Stendhal wrote this strangely fragmented, digressive, and yet beautifully structured pseudonymous memoir in four quick months over the winter of 1835–1836. He had written The Red and the Black five years earlier, in 1830, and he was to write The Charterhouse of Parma (another quick book, occupying the seven weeks from early November to late December) less than two years later, in 1838. At the age of fifty-three, he is looking back at the first seventeen years of his life, at the events of what we would call—and what he would recognize as—his “formative” years and subjecting them to a close examination and analysis “so as to work out what sort of man I have been.”

  Yet he is also looking ahead, contemplating and occasionally addressing the readers who will pick up his book in 1880, readers who, he thinks, may be more sympathetic to him than his contemporaries—though just as often, he frets that they will be intolerably bored by the minutiae of his life. “I have no doubt had great pleasure from writing this past hour, and from trying to describe my feelings of the time exactly as they were,” he says, “but who on earth will be brave enough to go deeply into it, to read this excessive heap of Is and mes?”

  He occasionally, even, looks beyond the readers of 1880 to those of 1900, 1935, and, surprisingly, our own 2000. He is not sure, he says, if the reader of the future will still be familiar with Les Liaisons dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos—yes, we still know it, we would like to answer him. He believes the reader of 1900 and one hundred years later will certainly have a more enlightened understanding of Racine. Well, there we would probably disappoint him.

  Whenever we read a book, of course, time, in a sense, collapses: we feel we are reading in the same moment the writer is writing, or that we cause him to speak, and as he speaks we hear him—there is no interval, and the converse is also true, that we have only to stop reading for a moment, and he stops speaking. What immediate authority the handwritten message of a dead parent still has! Reading is the necessary completion of the act of writing. Yet Stendhal’s Life, more than most, jumps beyond the bounds of its time and tradition, speaks across nearly two centuries in an intensely personal voice.

  How does it achieve such immediacy? And why is this minutely detailed tabulation by this irascible grumbler so appealing?

  Certainly it shares some of the qualities of other eccentric autobiographical works that continue to strike us as fresh and new despite the passage of time (if time does indeed pass): Kafka’s Letter to His Father, Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave, J. R. Ackerley’s Hindoo Holiday, Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Michel Leiris’s Rules of the Game. For one thing, the style of The Life of Henry Brulard is plain and straightforward, conversational and direct. For another, it is full of keenly observed and striking detail—a room so cold the ink freezes on the tip of the pen, a dying man carried home on a ladder, clothes “smelling of the makers.”

  It is written with passion. Stendhal, like the narrator of a Thomas Bernhard novel, is terribly attached to his every feeling. He is just as furious today (at the time of his writing and our reading) as he was at age fourteen, when his greatest love was mathematics (“I fancy I said to myself: ‘True or false, mathematics will get me out of Grenoble, out of this mire that turns my stomach’”) and he was endlessly frustrated by the complacency and hypocrisy of his teachers: what a shock, he says, “when I realized that no one could explain to me how it is that a minus times a minus equals a plus (− × − = +)!” Further rage when no one will resolve another puzzle: Is it or is it not true that parallel lines, when produced to infinity, will eventually meet?

  Clear-eyed about his good points and bad, Stendhal aims for accuracy (“I am witty no more than once a week and then only for five minutes,” he tells us), and what a complex and interesting person emerges from this self-examination. Stubborn, opinionated, and cantankerous yet brilliant, minutely observant, and appealingly fallible. Not an easy friend; someone in whose company one would be always on edge—he would be sure to pounce on any sign of fatuousness or mental sloth. Intellectually ambitious, and not merely concerning literature and politics: he still thinks he ought to study worms and beetles—“which nauseate me”—as he had intended to do while he was a soldier fighting und
er Napoleon.

  He has much to say about memory because he is relying entirely on that unreliable faculty in his re-creation of his early years. There is a great deal, he tells us, that he had forgotten until the present moment of writing: things come back to him that he has not thought of for decades. He often says that a certain memory is obscured because of the great emotion he experienced at the time: the emotion wiped out the memory. He points out, further, that if he remembers this much of an event, he has also forgotten a great deal more, but that if he were to begin supplementing the truth with his imagination, he would be writing a novel and not a memoir. “I protest once again that I don’t claim to be describing things in themselves, but only their effect on me.”

  Yet The Life of Henry Brulard has several even more unusual features. For one thing, there are the aide-mémoire sketches, nearly two hundred of them, thin, spidery diagrams with scribbled explanations showing where young Stendhal was positioned in relation to others, in a room or on a mountainside, in a street or a square (“I clouted him with all my might at O”), and these sketches, minimal, crabbed, and repetitious as they are, oddly enough make his memories more real to us, too.

  For another, there is his abiding and multilayered pretense at self-concealment. He not only refers to himself at points as a certain overly loquacious “Dominique,” but more significantly titles the book (on the title pages of several sections of the manuscript) as Life of Henry Brulard written by himself and then describes it, for the benefit of “Messrs the police,” not as an autobiography, but as a novel in imitation of the very bland and innocent Vicar of Wakefield. Now, all the layers of the self-concealment are quite transparent: he is not Henry Brulard, he is not writing a novel, and this book does not in any obvious way resemble Goldsmith’s tale. It seems unlikely that he is making a serious effort to protect himself, or even that this is merely a sustained joke. It seems more likely that the man we obligingly refer to as Stendhal, but who was of course actually Henri Beyle, and who made a habit of adopting a variety of pseudonyms in his published writings, must have been more comfortable erecting a screen of fiction behind which he could give himself permission to write with utter sincerity. There is in fact a wonderful moment well into the book when the real and the fictional names are forcibly melded in an act of sheer impudence, as Stendhal refers to “the five letters: B,R,U,L,A,R,D, that form my name.”

  And then, the book appears to be unfinished. Certainly it is unusually rough. Passages of expansive, fully developed narrative will be followed by a succession of terse one-sentence paragraphs, fleeting afterthoughts, qualifications, or digressions inspired by his narration—and perhaps such brief paragraphs are a perfect representation of the disconnected way in which our thoughts sometimes move. Stendhal has left blank spaces in the text where he has forgotten a name or can’t think of the right adjective. He has abbreviated words freely, motivated sometimes by haste and sometimes by (he says) a fear of censorship. He includes occasional cryptic private references and secret codes. He inserts reminders to himself throughout the text, usually in the margins, or corrects errors as he goes along (below a diagram: “Entrance steps or rather no entrance steps”). He repeats himself, twice asserting, for instance, that the only passions that have remained with him throughout his life (besides the desire to write and to live in Paris) are his love of Saint-Simon and of spinach. Other marginal notes describe his present state as he writes: “18 December 1835. At 4.50, not enough daylight. I stop.… From 2 to half-past 4, twenty-four pages. I am so absorbed by the memories unveiling themselves to my gaze I can scarcely form my letters.”

  And so it is a curiosity, an anomaly: the book appears rough, unfinished, and yet there are suggestions throughout that this may be just what its author intended. I would like to know—because if Stendhal meant to leave it as it is, he has in effect written a surprisingly modern book. Did he or didn’t he plan to fill in the blank spaces, write out the abbreviated words, delete the notes to himself, and in general revise and rewrite to “smooth it out”? Reading with this question in mind, I came to a clue in a marginal note: “Idea. If I don’t correct this first draft, perhaps I shall manage not to tell lies out of vanity.” It would seem that this thought came to him only as he was writing. Not far away another clue appeared: “I’m well aware that all of this is too long, but I get amusement from finding these early if unhappy times reappear, and I ask M. Levavasseur to shorten it should he publish. H. Beyle.” Apparently, at this point, he did not intend to go back and shorten it himself. Toward the end of the book, I came to another: “I shall perhaps have to reread and emend this passage, contrary to my intentions.” (The book ends with seven drafts of “Testaments” bequeathing the manuscript to a host of possible publishers, including the bookseller Levavasseur, with instructions to publish it fifteen years after Stendhal’s death with all the women’s names changed and none of the men’s.)

  Why is the fragmented, the rough, sometimes so much more inviting than the seamless, the polished? Because we are closer to the moment of creation? (“Handwriting,” he notes in a margin. “This is how I write when my thoughts are treading on my heels.”) Because we are intimate witnesses to the formulation of the thought? Inside the experience of the writer instead of outside? Because we are closer to the evolution by which an event of the past, long forgotten—though evidently somewhere present in the brain cells of the writer—is reawakened, reimagined, re-presented, put into words? (“My heart is pounding still as I write this thirty-six years later. I abandon my paper, I wander round my room and I come back to writing.”) As though we were taking part ourselves, involved in and identifying with the action, the action being in this case the re-creation and understanding of a life?

  Perhaps, too, a work that comes to us so fresh, so raw, from the writer’s mind is more exciting because we see how precarious is the writer’s control—the material is almost more powerful than he is. As Stendhal himself says, it was the material—his ideas, his memories—that commanded him, not some “literary ideal.” And so it is a work that changes as he writes it, that is full of his own discovery as he goes along; and for his own purposes, and to our delight, he notes the elaboration of this memoir even as he writes it.

  At one point in his narration Stendhal refers casually to a moment later in his life when he was in mortal danger: alone in a Silesian field, he saw coming toward him a company of Cossacks. He does not go on to tell us what happened next. I wondered, as I continued reading, whether he was merely being artful and would satisfy my curiosity before the book ended. I suspected he would not, and he did not. His intention in the book, after all, is not to tell a dramatic story. Yet a different, and greater, drama unfolds as we read, because of the constant double surprise: being alongside him as he works, rather than being handed the result of a later revision, we surprise him in the very act of writing even as he surprises himself in the act of remembering and understanding. And so we are privileged to watch what is really the very dramatic moment, enacted again and again, of the unremembered or half remembered being fully brought to mind, the unformed being formed, the internal becoming external, the private become public.

  2002

  Maurice Blanchot Absent

  It was with Maurice Blanchot’s Death Sentence that I had my extended initiation into translating very closely and very exactly, more closely and exactly than ever before—for in the case of his words one would not be willing to paraphrase, or to normalize; every word and its placement in relation to every other word had to be respected. This was in 1974 or so. In the years after, until about 1991, I was often working on M. Blanchot’s prose, as I translated three more of his novels and a novella, as well as the selection of literary essays that went to make up what was titled The Gaze of Orpheus. During those years, I corresponded with him at intervals, with sometimes a year or more passing between letters, and he became a benign presence abiding near the work. Once, when I was planning to be in Paris, I asked him if we could meet, knowin
g that he rarely met with anyone anymore, but thinking he might make an exception for me. He declined with a gracious explanation: I live henceforth altogether in retirement and have put such a distance between myself and the world that …

  The experience of translating the essays was the most difficult I had ever had in translating, and almost the most difficult I would ever have. (A poem by Anne-Marie Albiach was equally difficult, but for a different reason, because the words and phrases so often appeared in isolation, or with almost no context.) As though this experience were, in fact, a piece of fiction by Blanchot, the meaning of a difficult phrase or sentence became a physical entity that eluded me, that ran from me, that I nearly overtook, that I failed to overtake, this pursuit being enacted inside the arena of my brain even as my brain was also the pursuer of this fleet, evasive thing, the meaning. Understanding became an intensely physical act.

  It was during this translation that I experienced another strange struggle with meaning: although, in a simpler paragraph, I found I could follow the thread of M. Blanchot’s argument from one sentence to the next, and that it made sense to me, I could not seem to summarize, at the end of the page or even at the end of the paragraph, what I had just read. I thought that this was my own intellectual weakness; then, when I described this difficulty to others, I found that it was true for them as well: it seemed to be in the nature of M. Blanchot’s argument to resist summary, even though resisting summary did not mean resisting understanding. Somehow the experience of reading had to take place moment by moment; one had to remain in the moment and not look back on the whole; or one had to dwell inside the moment and not stand back from it; one’s understanding proceeded like the guide’s flashlight, which illuminates one by one the animals painted on the wall of the prehistoric cave while all else remains in darkness, or at least dimness.