Writing for The New Yorker, James Wood described Lydia Davis’ body of work as “unique in American writing, in its combination of lucidity, aphoristic brevity, formal originality, sly comedy, metaphysical bleakness, philosophical pressure, and human wisdom.” Her first of her six collections of stories was The Thirteenth Woman – and the next four were gathered in that recognizable, peach-hued tome, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. Her more recent collection, Can’t and Won’t, was published in 2014. She has also published a novel, The End of the Story.
Although Davis said she would never translate her own work into French (more on that shortly), her reputation is equally measured by her translations of French literature and philosophy, most notably Marcel Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.
In November, Davis published Essays One, a substantial selection of her pieces on writing and reading. Her nonfiction commentary details how her many influences exerted their own edits on short story drafts or helped her to confront a blank page. We conversed over email about how reading — and sometimes not reading — and even music shaped her voice and storytelling.
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Sara Black McCulloch: As much as Essays One is a guide to writing, it’s also a lesson on reading. How crucial is close reading to developing a writing style or a singular voice?
Lydia Davis: I do place a lot of emphasis on close reading. We writers need to study the masters closely in order to learn how they “did it” — though each achieved that mastery in a different form. I advocate close reading in order to learn technique — technique of all kinds, including character development, description, and so on — but not so much in order to develop one’s own writing style or singular voice. Those come in a different way — by writing from deep within one’s own convictions and honestly from one’s own attitude toward life, personality, set of beliefs, etc. In other words, you develop a style and a voice by writing as yourself, but you won’t be able to do that successfully if your technical skills aren’t good.
Essays One opens with one of your lectures. I’m thinking of your short story “The Letter to the Foundation” from Can’t and Won’t and how your father also taught writing. I’m curious to know how you approach teaching. Do you still feel like a student yourself — that you’re constantly learning new things? Do you compartmentalize both roles or do they converge in some ways?
Well, I’m no longer teaching — I retired a few years ago. Certain aspects of teaching were difficult for me — for instance, walking into the classroom! Other aspects were enjoyable, such as devising exercises for the students, discussing them in class, talking to the students one on one. I don’t feel like a student myself. I was able to feel like the teacher when I was in the classroom, but I do feel that I am constantly learning new things — about the world but also about writing.
Were you a good student?
It depends which level of schooling we’re talking about. As a child, I was good in the subjects that interested me and not in the others. In college, too, I could earn high grades if I worked hard, but I would also get distracted by life outside the classroom, stop working, and earn poor grades as a result. I was on academic probation, I’ll confess, during one semester, then I more or less pulled my act together.
Have you ever stopped writing? Or wanted to?
I have stopped writing only for short periods, usually because I have embarked on a translation that took most of each working day. I haven’t had any desire to stop writing. But I have questioned its usefulness from time to time, particularly when political or social action seems more important than sitting at home, in my study. I try to strike some kind of balance. For a long time, Grace Paley’s approach was my model: politics, family, and friendships first — it seemed, anyway — and writing second. I may have that wrong, or may be idealizing, but that seems to me at the moment a good balance.
You’ve mentioned that you don’t always read an entire book, especially if it’s one that interests you stylistically. If and when you do revisit the book, what brings you back to it? Or surprises you?
Sometimes — in fact, quite often — I never return to the book. But sometimes I feel a strong desire to be back in the world of that book, and I return to it — that is the case, at present, with a thick book by an important Catalan author, Josep Pla. It’s a diary that he kept when he was young and that he added to, years later, with extensive commentary. It’s called The Gray Notebook. I like returning to that book.
There’s a difference in tone in your earlier journal entries when compared to the more recent ones. In the older ones, you’re still learning, and in the newer ones, you’re instructing. Did you notice any shifts when you revisited these entries?
Oh, I’m surprised to hear that you observed a difference, since I didn’t quote very much, I think. I wasn’t aware of the difference as I was quoting from the journal. But certainly there is a difference, if I read journal entries from years ago. I’m not instructing, in the more recent journal entries, but simply observing. However, maybe my observations are more confident. I’d have to do some studying to answer that question properly.
What are you currently reading — or re-reading?
At the moment, I’m reading a novel by Elizabeth Taylor called At Mrs. Lippincote’s. I like her novels very much when I want an escape. She always writes well and she has some of the humor of Barbara Pym. The novels are set in England, mostly in the 1950s and 1960s. Escape is important to me — especially since one of the last books I read (and in this case I read every word) was The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. It’s a devastating account. But I’d rather be well-informed about what we are going through, since this is our world now.
How do you sort between what material in your journals is useful to your writing and what isn’t?
In fact, a piece of writing often begins immediately, as soon as I begin writing in the journal — it’s a matter of instinct, feeling that the material, or the opening sentence, is compelling to me, compelling enough for me to want to stay with it and see how I can develop it. Less often, I go back and read through a journal and pick out entries that seem to have possibilities for development. I suppose they need to have a certain emotional urgency, or intellectual interest, or both — they have to be more than just a passing whimsical notion.
You analyze the writing and art that you’ve relished and that has greatly influenced your work. What, in your opinion, does it mean to be moved — by writing, art or even by something you’ve overheard?
Oh, that’s a hard question — since we can all recognize when we’re moved, I think, but we’re moved in different ways. For me, I suppose I suddenly see things a little differently, or I become excited, or a little light seems to go on inside me. I’m talking about being moved artistically or intellectually. I can also be moved to sadness, or grief.
In the past, you described translating as inhabiting a disguise — has that helped you in taking on different narrative voices? How has translation affected your writing?
Well, it’s not really so much a disguise as a slightly altered persona — I’m writing, after all, as Proust or Flaubert, not as myself. This alteration comes about naturally as I begin to work on the translation. It comes along with the narrative voice in which I’m translating, and both come about quite naturally and inevitably through trying to stay close to the original text and follow its intentions. Translation has sometimes left me little time for my own writing, but the search for the best way of expressing a set text in another language has certainly made me more agile and resourceful in English.
Have you ever been shocked by what you’ve written, or by what stories have come to you?
Not that I can remember now. I think it would be difficult for me to shock myself, since the stories are written in a sort of controlled spontaneity from quite deep inside the person I am — not artificially constructed to produce an effect.
You take very meticulous notes and discuss how Kafka’s diaries helped you notice the value of unfinished pieces or fragments. Have they helped you in confronting the blank page? Or writer’s block?
The practice of keeping a notebook in itself helps to avoid the problem of the blank page. I can remember that blank page, but it was a very long time ago. I had things the wrong way around then: I sat in front of the blank page saying to myself that I must write something, as though it almost didn’t matter what. But really, it should be the material that asks to be formed into a piece of writing. The notebook allows me to write down what interests or moves me — it’s a place to record the material, which can then be formed into a piece of finished writing. As for writer’s block, I haven’t suffered from that. It helps to have several projects going at once.
There’s a particular rhythm to your writing. I know you once played the piano and violin and I wanted to know if music, in any way, has had any influence on your writing?
I’m quite certain by now that all the music training I had as a child and young adult was immensely helpful to my writing, in many ways. A few years ago, I realized this and began listing these ways. I discovered more and more. There was the close ear training, for instance, in playing the violin, which taught me to listen with great discrimination. And in both instruments there was the constant practice to learn how to play a passage correctly and sensitively — the discipline of that. And so on. Classes in music theory taught me to sense the structure of a piece. I never became very good at playing either instrument, I have to say, but the training wasn’t wasted.
We get to learn more about the writers you admire, especially through diaries, unfinished and unsuccessful pieces. For instance, when Flaubert talks about his stories in his letters, the meaning of the story shifts — again, this importance of context and reception. Is Essays One also a tool, in a way, that helps your readers to better understand your own writing? To shift, in a sense, the context we’re so familiar with? Or will this be a helpful tool for future translators of your work?
The discussions in Essays One of how my own stories evolved are really meant not so much to enlighten people about my work as to help young, or developing, writers see how a piece is born, constructed, revised, finished. The five essays on forms, influences, and good writing practices began life as talks to students of writing. I knew my own process best, so I drew on that.
Will you ever translate your own work into French?
I would never be able to translate my own work effectively into French. Translating out of one’s own language into another is a very different matter from translating into one’s native language. In English, I have total familiarity, endless understanding of the resources and capacities of the language. I don’t have that in French. As we all know from learning a foreign language, understanding comes long before effective writing or speaking.
You observe how Beckett and Joyce evolved and subsequently left more readers behind. You also discuss how writing is a cooperative venture — that it requires a reader to complete it, distort it and forget it. How important is a readership to you? Do you ever consider the reader when you’re shaping a story, especially when it comes to toying with expectations or humor?
I do believe the reader is the necessary completion, really, of the act of writing. But of course every reader is different. And I have often been surprised by the reactions of readers, or the ways they may complete a story of mine, or the associations they may bring to it. I very rarely consider a reader at a specific moment in writing a story. I consider only what the story itself needs in order to be complete. But the idea of reading, receiving, comprehending — all this is already inherent in the way I approach handling the language. The question is extremely complicated!
Flaubert had sympathy for his characters, especially when he was writing Madame Bovary. I find that you often extend sympathy — a very different kind — to your narrators. Have there ever been ones you simply did not like? Or who haunt you?
Not that I can think of at the moment — though many of the characters in my stories, these days, are based on actual people, so I’d have to say that I have more or less the same response to the character as to the person in life. But that response isn’t usually dislike — most people have a good side to them, or at least a very human one. And there are none who haunt me.
How important is intuition in writing?
I find intuition very important. I do not usually plan out a story before I begin writing. I just begin. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a part of my brain may be chaotically trying to keep some order as I write, but usually it would be fatal for me to stop dead and plan. After a while, I can pause and take stock of what’s going on. Writing instinctively, or intuitively, I think, allows you to be in touch with deeper and more important parts of yourself.
I know that you’ve been working on an ongoing false biography, Goodbye Louise or Who I Am. Have you added to the list recently?
Yes, it’s an ongoing record of both the mistakes that have been made about my name or my biographical data and the odd identifications that have been pasted on me, whether accurate or not. Two of the latest additions to the section called “What I Am” have been: “testatrix” and “part of the Cliradex family.”