by Lydia Davis
This time I did not want first to absorb the material and then to invent a traditional fictional short story, as I had earlier; rather, I wanted to preserve the material largely intact, in its fragmented form. I saw the possibility of a form that would mirror the very intermittent and continuing nature of the battle of wills as it had been. I did not make anything up; I simply rearranged what I found. I say “simply,” but of course the arranging was a long process: selecting, ordering, cutting, making little modifications, rereading, deciding how much of the Spanish not to translate, deciding whether to use italics for speech, letting it sit for a while, rearranging it yet again.
I called the story “The Dreadful Mucamas,” which was what my mother herself had called the mother and daughter at a certain point, though not to their faces, of course.
The story was written in very short segments, one of the longest coming close to the beginning:
They are very rigid, stubborn women from Bolivia. They resist and sabotage whenever possible.
* * *
They came with the apartment. They were bargains because of Adela’s low IQ. She is a scatterbrain.
* * *
In the beginning, I said to them: I’m very happy that you can stay, and I am sure that we will get along very well.
* * *
This is an example of the problems we are having. It is a typical incident that has just taken place. I needed to cut a piece of thread and could not find my six-inch scissors. I accosted Adela and told her I could not find my scissors. She protested that she had not seen them. I went with her to the kitchen and asked Luisa if she would cut my thread. She asked me why I did not simply bite it off. I said I could not thread my needle if I bit it off. I asked her please to get some scissors and cut it off—now. She told Adela to look for the scissors of la Señora Brodie, and I followed her to the study to see where they were kept. She removed them from a box. At the same time I saw a long, untidy piece of twine attached to the box and asked her why she did not trim off the frayed end while she had the scissors. She shouted that it was impossible. The twine might be needed to tie up the box some time. I admit that I laughed. Then I took the scissors from her and cut it off myself. Adela shrieked. Her mother appeared behind her. I laughed again and now they both shrieked. Then they were quiet.
* * *
I have told them: Please, do not make the toast until we ask for breakfast. We do not like very crisp toast the way the English do.
* * *
I have told them: Every morning, when I ring the bell, please bring us our mineral water immediately. Afterwards, make the toast and at the same time prepare fresh coffee with milk. We prefer “Franja Blanca” or “Cinta Azul” coffee from Bonafide.
* * *
I spoke pleasantly to Luisa when she came with the mineral water before breakfast. But when I reminded her about the toast, she broke into a tirade—how could I think she would ever let the toast get cold or hard? But it is almost always cold and hard.
* * *
We have told them: We prefer that you always buy “Las Tres Niñas” or “Germa” milk from Kasdorf.
* * *
Adela cannot speak without yelling. I have asked her to speak gently, and to say señora, but she never does. They also speak very loudly to each other in the kitchen.
* * *
Often, before I have said three words to her, she yells at me: Sí … sí, sí, sí…! and leaves the room. I honestly don’t think I can stand it.
I had done something like this before, even quite far back—using found material and keeping it almost intact. The stories “Lord Royston’s Tour” and “Excerpts from a Life” both consisted of texts by other people cut and rearranged and put to a very different use. The first was made from a series of letters written home to England by an actual young Lord Royston from the exotic places where he was traveling. The second was taken from an autobiographical book by Shinichi Suzuki that was required reading for parents of children who were studying an instrument by the Suzuki method. The element of fiction comes in, in the case of “Lord Royston’s Tour,” with the transformation from a collection of letters into a single continuous narrative, and, in the case of the Shinichi Suzuki, with the transformation from straightforward first-person life story to stylized first-person narrative by fictional character—fictional because now not quite the same as Suzuki himself. My intervention, along with the change of form—from continuous narrative to short, titled, almost epigrammatic sections—in turn alters the personality and approach of the narrator.
I have also used found material and arranged it, with minimal rewriting, quite recently, with the stories I made from anecdotes contained in Gustave Flaubert’s letters—something I will discuss later.
* * *
In fact, in addition to those two stories—“The Housemaid” and “The Dreadful Mucamas”—there is a third story, quite a little one, that was inspired by the situation in Buenos Aires with the cook and the maid. As I looked through the material in the folder, I saw that one particular piece of material might stand alone as a story consisting of only a few lines and a title. Because it is so brief, its effect is very different from that of the coherent, traditional short story “The Housemaid” and also from the fragmented, punctuated, and extended “The Dreadful Mucamas”:
THE PROBLEM OF THE VACUUM CLEANER
A priest is about to come visit us—or maybe it is two priests.
But the maid has left the vacuum cleaner in the hall, directly in front of the front door.
I have asked her twice to take it away, but she will not.
I certainly will not.
One of the priests, I know, is the Rector of Patagonia.
Now we move on to another country, another setting, another time, long after the Argentina experience. The intervening years have included college but also periods, longer or shorter, of living in France and Ireland. Now I have returned to the United States to live, and I’m twenty-eight years old. During this particular month or two I am up north, in Canada, staying in a borrowed house. I spend my days in much the same way I spent them in France and in Ireland, sitting at a desk, working not only at a translation job but also at some task I have assigned myself, usually a piece of my own writing but also, in Canada, the intermittent study of German, which has been another constant in my life, though it has no immediate purpose. I sit at a desk and stare out the window from time to time.
I have always kept a notebook by my side when I’m working or trying to work, and it becomes the repository for any stray thought or description that occurs to me—I try to catch every one. In those years I wrote a lot in the notebook because of a certain restlessness: if I was having trouble with a piece of writing—and I usually was—I could at least write something in the notebook. I could at least record in the notebook how much trouble I was having with what I was trying to write. Or I could record an idea for another story, as Kafka did in his notebooks. I might never continue the story, or I might continue it right away or later. The notebook might also contain the germ of an idea that would later find its way into a story without my realizing where the idea came from.
* * *
Here is one of those notebook or journal entries, this one dating from 1975, and then two stories that resulted from it many years later. First, the journal entry, which is relatively undistinguished—although I must digress to say that I cared very much whether a journal entry was well written or not, and if I happened to read it over, I would always revise it in small ways until it was as good as it could be, whatever its value. I still do this.
My rather opinionated journal entry is just a couple of long sentences (I have changed the family’s name for the sake of discretion):
A concrete mixer has come and gone for the house next door where the Charrays are building a proper wine cellar because fire insurance for their thousands of bottles of good wine is too expensive in the present cellar. They have very good wine and some fine paintings—many of Riopell
e’s and one of Joan’s—but otherwise their taste in clothes and furniture and their whole way of life is dull, mediocre, strictly middle class.
You wouldn’t think you could do much with that limited observation, but when I reread it years, or rather decades, later, something about it must have struck me: maybe the judgmental tone—here was this rather unexceptional young person with a strong opinion who felt she was in a position to pass judgment. Perhaps also the idea of the inquisitive neighbor, any neighbor, peering through the window and observing the people next door, perhaps even for a moment living vicariously through the people next door. Perhaps also the absurd extravagance of the situation that produced the activity outside her window—although whether it is absurd or not may depend on one’s point of view or situation: in the situation of the young observer with not much money and no career, building a better wine cellar was absurd; but in the context of the successful medical doctor with a high income and a good collection of wine, building a better wine cellar made perfect sense.
Here is the story that resulted, about thirty years later:
REDUCING EXPENSES
This is a problem you might have someday. It’s the problem of a couple I know. He’s a doctor, I’m not sure what she does. I don’t actually know them very well. In fact, I don’t know them anymore. This was years ago. I was bothered by a bulldozer coming and going next door, so I found out what was happening. Their problem was that their fire insurance was very expensive. They wanted to try to lower the insurance premiums. That was a good idea. You don’t want any of your regular payments to be too high, or higher than they have to be. For example, you don’t want to buy a property with very high taxes, since there will be nothing you can do to lower them and you will always have to pay them. I try to keep that in mind. You could understand this couple’s problem even if you didn’t have high fire insurance. If you did not have exactly the same problem, someday you might have a similar problem, of regular payments that were going to be too high. Their insurance was high because they owned a large collection of very good wine. The problem was not so much the collection per se but where they were keeping it. They had, actually, thousands of bottles of very good and excellent wine. They were keeping it in their cellar, which was certainly the right thing to do. They had an actual wine cellar. But the problem was, this wine cellar wasn’t good enough or big enough. I never saw it, though I once saw another one that was very small. It was the size of a closet, but I was still impressed. But I did taste some of their wine one time. I can’t really tell the difference, though, between a bottle of wine that costs $100, or even $30, and a bottle that costs $500. At that dinner they might have been serving wine that cost even more than that. Not for me, especially, but for some of the other guests. I’m sure that very expensive wines are really wasted on most people, including myself. I was quite young at the time, but even now a very expensive wine would be wasted on me, probably. This couple learned that if they enlarged the wine cellar and improved it in certain other specific ways, their insurance premiums would be lower. They thought this was a good idea, even though it would cost something, initially, to make these improvements. The bulldozer and other machinery and labor that I saw out the window of the place where I was living at the time, which was a house borrowed from a friend who was also a friend of theirs, must have been costing them in the thousands, but I’m sure the money they spent on it was earned back within a few years or even one year by their savings on the premiums. So I can see this was a prudent move on their part. It was a move that anyone could make concerning some other thing, not necessarily a wine cellar. The point is that any improvement that will eventually save money is a good idea. This is long in the past by now. They must have saved quite a lot altogether, over the years, from the changes they made. So many years have gone by, though, that they have probably sold the house by now. Maybe the improved wine cellar raised the price of the house and they earned back even more money. I was not just young but very young when I watched the bulldozer out my window. The noise did not really bother me very much, because there were so many other things bothering me when I tried to work. In fact I probably welcomed the sight of the bulldozer. I was impressed by their wine, and by the good paintings they also owned. They were nice, friendly people, but I didn’t think much of their clothes or furniture. I spent a lot of time looking out the window and thinking about them. I don’t know what that was worth. It was probably a waste of my time. Now I’m a lot older. But here I am, still thinking about them. There are a lot of other things that I’ve forgotten, but I haven’t forgotten them or their fire insurance. I must have thought I could learn something from them.
The story is one long paragraph. There is a big difference in effect between a single paragraph, especially a long one, and a sequence of two or three paragraphs, even in a short piece. In the case of three paragraphs, the first paragraph is the beginning; the first paragraph break implies that we have settled into the story a bit and now we’re going on. After the second paragraph, we take another breath and then go on into the third paragraph and wind down to our conclusion. A series of paragraphs may also imply that the narrator is somewhat organized, somewhat in control. The one unbroken paragraph, on the other hand, can imply more passion and less organization: it can create the illusion that the narrator has launched into this rant or this lecture almost involuntarily and is hardly even aware of it herself. And before she knows it, she’s done—she stops short, she runs out of steam. The single paragraph can be more immediate.
As for the narrator of this story, I see her as hapless: either not so smart, or a little scatterbrained, or just disorganized and unproductive, someone who doesn’t have a very high opinion of herself in general but who thinks even so that she can make pronouncements and give advice; someone who sits around a lot of the time, contemplates doing things, doesn’t do them, has ideas, doesn’t carry them through—the character is very clear to me as soon as I start to speak in her voice. She is probably an exaggeration or distortion of the young person I was then, though I see her as older, even in her forties by now.
* * *
Generally I resist the label “experimental,” which people sometimes reflexively apply to any nontraditional form of fiction or poetry, or to any form that puzzles them, that seems odd or strange. To me, experimental implies that the writer had a plan to test some preconceived writing strategy and see if it would work; that what resulted might or might not prove anything, and might or might not be successful. It seems to me both preplanned, deliberate, conceptual, and at the same time rather tentative. Since I generally prefer to start a piece of writing without much of a plan, and not to be sure exactly what I’m doing, I do not consider the stories that result in any way experimental.
But there are exceptions. A second story resulted from that little journal entry, and it could accurately be called experimental: I wanted to see if I could use a finite amount of material to tell the same small story both forward and backward. The first half of it stays quite close to the journal entry, while the second half tells the same story with the content presented in the opposite order.
REVERSIBLE STORY
Necessary Expenditure
A concrete mixer has come and gone from the house next door. Mr. and Mrs. Charray are renovating their wine cellar. They own thousands of bottles of very good wine. For this reason, their fire insurance is very expensive. If they improve their cellar, however, the fire insurance will cost less. They have very good wine and some fine paintings, but their taste in clothes and furniture is strictly lower middle class.
Expenditure Necessary
The Charrays’ taste in clothes and furniture is dull, and strictly lower middle class. However, they do own some fine paintings, many by contemporary Canadian and American painters. They also have some good wine. In fact, they own thousands of bottles of very good wine. Because of this, their fire insurance is very expensive. But if they enlarge and otherwise improve their wine cellar, the fire ins
urance will be less expensive. A concrete mixer has just come and gone from their house, next door.
In discussing the form of “The Dreadful Mucamas,” with its short sections, I thought of books I had read early on in my writing life that were written in brief increments. I have already mentioned Kafka’s Diaries. Of course, Kafka did not conceive of the diaries beforehand as a formal work, but composed them entry by entry; they achieved that form by accumulation. And then, once they existed in that form, and were published, they exerted their influence on succeeding generations of writers as a model of that form.
The two volumes of the Diaries, covering only fourteen years, run to more than 660 pages in the edition I have—a great deal of material, and very engaging to delve into. I open at random and find three types of entries on two pages: one type is the abbreviated factual notation, in this case an odd juxtaposition of current events and his own activities (these particular pages were written in 1914, the first year of World War I), thus:
August 2. Germany has declared war on Russia.—Swimming in the afternoon.
Another type of entry is what appears to be a possible story impulsively begun and just as suddenly abandoned:
July 30. Tired of working in other people’s stores, I had opened up a little stationery store of my own. Since my means were limited and I had to pay cash for almost everything____
Yet another type of entry is the more finished opening to a possible story, this one thoroughly characteristic of Kafka in the following ways: its choice of subject matter, confidence, incisiveness, use of repetition, beautifully balanced structure, negativity, paradoxical conclusion, and humor:
