I first learned about the writer Lydia Davis on the Facebook
feed of the Paris Review. Perhaps she'd
just won the Booker Prize and they were reprinting a critique of her work they'd
published years ago. She sounded strange, and interesting.
This summer, at a sparsely attended noon book event in front
of the football stadium downtown, I noticed on a flyer put out by the
university that she would be speaking here in the fall.
A few weeks later I ran across an advance reading copy of Davis's
collected stories at a library sale in downtown Duluth on sale for a dollar.
Naturally, I bought it.
Hilary and I were on a mid-week vacation, and though the
book is thick—740 pages—I found it very easy to dip into. Some of the
"stories" are so short that they, and similar works by other writers,
have been described as "flash fiction." Here are three examples:
Lonely
No one is calling me.
I can't check the answering machine because I have been here all this time. It
I go out, someone may call while I'm out. Then I can check the answering
machine when I come back in.
Honoring the Subjunctive
It invariably
precedes, even if it do not altogether supersede, the determination of what is
absolutely desirable and just.
Information from the North Concerning the Ice
Each seal uses many
blowholes, and every blowhole is used by many seals.
I do not think that a book filled with such creations would
go very far. But I could well be wrong. (Now I'm starting to sound like her, deliberating, doubting my own judgment.) In any case, Davis's
collections include pieces that are a paragraph, a page, and even ten pages. Here's
another one:
We know only four
boring people. The rest of our friends we find very interesting. However, most
of the friends we find interesting find us boring: the most interesting find us
the most boring. The few who are somewhere in the middle, with whom there is
reciprocal interest, we distrust: at any moment, we feel, they may become too
interesting for us, or we too interesting for them.
From even these brief examples, it should be clear that Davis often prefers repetition to succinctness, and that a
melancholy cloud hangs over much of her work. Interior monologues are the norm.
In the course of her ruminations we get to know the narrator, who is often
someone very much like Lydia Davis, and we begin to enjoy her quibbles, false
steps, doubts, anxieties, assertions, and perplexities.
Yet there are also
plenty of stories that have a little more meat on their bones. For example, in
"Glenn Gould," she introduces us to a woman who enjoys playing the
piano, listens to Glenn Gould often, and also watches the "Mary Tyler
Moore" show religiously. Davis describes this woman's scattershot thoughts when she
learns that Glenn Gould was also an avid fan of that show. In "Kafka Cooks
Dinner" Davis sets herself the task of recreating the thoughts of that
writer as he prepares to cook a meal for his girl friend. Here are the opening
lines:
I am so filled with
despair as the time grows near when she will come and I have not even begun to
make a decision about what I will offer her. I am so afraid I will fall back on
the Kartoffel Surprise, and it’s no surprise to her anymore. I mustn’t, I
mustn’t. I tell myself each morning that it will be different this time, I will
plan the meal today, days ahead of time, but no—as though I am indeed my own
enemy, the hours pass and I thrust the thought away from me: dinner, no, I will
not think of it. Oh, such sickness, this is truly the sickness unto death.
Davis's style bears obvious similarities to the crotchety and obsessive book-long monologues of Thomas Bernhard,
though the tone is entirely different, and her penchant for brevity might seem
to ally her work more closely to that of Samuel Beckett. One thing is clear:
she takes no interest in conventional dialogue or story-line. As she remarked
at the reading the other night, with characteristic deliberateness, "Sometimes these experiments are
successful; at other times they're less successful."
It's always fun
to return to campus and mingle with the crowd. I spent eight years at the U, I
had a good time, and I learned quite a bit, though nothing really came of it.
It's good to see kids continuing to learn, continuing to strive, continuing to pursue
enthusiasms and create little social worlds with their friends.
Then there are the tweedy academics who have developed
specialties, explored arcane regions of history and thought, and perhaps made a
name for themselves within their chosen field. A fairly high percentage of the
attendees were women of a certain age, often arriving in pairs or small groups.
It's a vibrant and attractive scene. One thing I never would
have guessed is how many translators were in the crowd. This is because the promotions
for Davis's talk never mentioned that it was part of the 2017 American Literary
Translators Association conference. And checking that conference schedule, I
see that there was no official connection. Yet Davis is well known for her
translations of Flaubert and Proust, and her presentation was devoted to
enumerating the 17 ways that translating books can be pleasurable.
We arrived early and took two seats in the seventh row.
After listening for several minutes to a man in the row behind us describing
the plot of The Elegance of the Hedgehog
to his friends in great detail in a painfully unctuous voice, Hilary suggested
we move back a few rows, ostensibly so we could see more of the crowd as the place filled
up. And we did.
The seats immediately behind us were soon occupied by three young female
students who seemed to be deeply immersed in the world of undergraduate creative
writing.
"Like, I was going to take intermediate poetry, you
know, I never took intro but they would have let me, but intermediate turned
out to be at night, and like, no way, that wasn't for me. So I went for
non-fiction."
"Is Maud in that class?"
"OH, MY GOD. Like, she volunteers to lead the class,
and then, like, walks in twenty minutes late and says to the teacher, 'Why
don't you lead it?' which she already
was doing. I don't know what her
problem is."
Davis's began her talk by remarking that one great pleasure
of being a writer is that you do it at home, by yourself. Giving a talk is
something else again. She read her talk, listing the seventeen pleasures of
translating and elaborating on them one after another. The main point was
that when you're translating a book, you don't have to generate the material
yourself. It already exists. So you go about solving particular problems,
though you also begin to inhabit other worlds.
It was an interesting talk, though I think this article by her that appeared in the Paris Review on a similar subject is more interesting.
In any case, the chief pleasure of such events is the
experience of seeing a famous author, perhaps one you admire greatly, in person:
how she talks, walks, answers questions. Lydia Davis talks in the same
deliberate way she writes. She questions herself and amends her remarks with a vaguely
melancholy humor. As I listened, I was reminded of one of her very short stories,
"A Position at the University."
I think I know what
sort of person I am. But then I think, But this stranger will imagine me quite
otherwise when he or she hears this or that to my credit, for instance that I
have a position at the university: the fact that I have a position at the university
will appear to mean that I must be the sort of person who has a position at the
university. But then I have to admit, with surprise, that, after all, it is
true that I have a position at the university. And if it is true, then perhaps
I really am the sort of person you imagine when you hear that a person has a
position at the university. But, on the other hand, I know I am not the sort of
person I imagine when I hear that a person has a position at the university.
Then I see what the problem is: when others describe me this way, they appear to
describe me completely, whereas in fact they do not describe me completely,
and a complete description of me would include truths that seem quite
incompatible with the fact that I have a position at the university.
To my mind, Davis does not seem really to be the sort of person who
would have a position at the university. She exhibits that sort of deep honesty
that a writer in her solitary room can cultivate, but which an academic at a
committee meeting often cannot. Her work is original, largely due to Davis's devotion
to her self, her problems, and the things she needs to work out personally—things
that are often aesthetic problems rather than personal problems, and in either case, have far less to do with pedagogy than with art.
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