Essays One

by Lydia Davis

  [July 30.] The director of the Progress Insurance Company was always greatly dissatisfied with his employees. Now every director is dissatisfied with his employees; the difference between employees and directors is too vast to be bridged by means of mere commands on the part of the director and mere obedience on the part of the employees. Only mutual hatred can bridge the gap and give the whole enterprise its perfection.

  I used to study Kafka’s diaries, back in my twenties. They were important to me for several reasons: the quantity of good writing they contained; the insight they gave me into what went on behind the finished pieces of writing—the rough attempts, the more finished attempts, the thoughtfulness, the persistence; and the window they opened into Kafka’s mind—his combination of fictional invention and more mundane daily preoccupations, particularly the way his fictions grew organically out of his daily life. And perhaps they were more accessible than the finished work, being so brief, so unfinished.

  * * *

  If Kafka’s diaries grew by accumulation and were not originally planned to be a single work, certain other writers such as Blaise Pascal, in his Pensées, did intend that form from the outset. Another interesting case is that of the Catalan writer Josep Pla. Starting at the age of twenty-one, for a relatively short period of time, March 1918 to November 1919, he kept a traditional diary. Then, over the next forty-odd years, amid much other writing, he returned to those original entries and expanded on them. In the end, the book, in the edition I have, numbers 638 pages. It retains something of the disjunctiveness, the abrupt changes of subject, of the original diary, but is generously inclusive of long sequential passages of anecdote, commentary, history, moral reflection, and so forth. Among his many other works, The Gray Notebook (English translation by Peter Bush), described by one commentator as “an autobiography built of fragments,” became arguably his major work.

  I discovered Josep Pla only recently, but there is another book by a young writer, based on the entries in his loose-leaf notebook, that I read early on, at about the time it was first published. This one was by an American, Kenneth Gangemi. It is The Volcanoes from Puebla, published in 1979, about Gangemi’s travels by motorcycle in Mexico. He, too, returned to his notebook for the material out of which to create his book, but this one is constructed as a sequence of alphabetical sections: Acapulco, Aesthete, Aguas, Alarma!, Amecameca, Americans Part I, Americans Part II, Anti-Americanism, Azotea, Bach, Back in the USA, Bakery, Barber, Beggars, Bicycle, etc. I found it an appealing and stimulating way to organize a book. Gangemi is direct and opinionated, clear, vivid, and informative.

  * * *

  When I think of writing that is in fact truly experimental in the strict sense of the word, I think of writing within an artificially imposed constraint. For some reason, alphabetical constraints come to mind first, and the Gangemi book would count as one of those, though the constraint is very loose, allowing sections of any length and including any number of entries under each letter.

  Another book that uses an alphabetical constraint is Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Africa, with a much more severe limitation: the first chapter can use only words beginning with the letter a; the second adds words beginning with b; the third adds words beginning with c; and so on. In the twenty-sixth chapter, the last one in the first half of the book, Abish can use words beginning with any letter of the alphabet. In the second half of the book, he reverses the process, working his way back down to using only words beginning with a in the last chapter.

  Then there is an alphabetical poem by David Lehman, a New York City poet of my generation who often works under a constraint—there is, for instance, his book Daily Mirror, the result of his challenge to himself to write one poem each day, a challenge that could bear good fruit for any of us.

  Lehman’s alphabetical poem, “Anna K.”—about the character Anna Karenina—from his 2005 book, When a Woman Loves a Man, has two parts, both of which work under the constraint of the alphabetical sequence, one letter of the alphabet beginning each word. A second self-imposed constraint is the limitation of just two words to a line:

  1.

  Anna believed.

  Couldn’t delay.

  Every Friday

  grew heroic

  infidelity just

  knowing love

  might never

  otherwise present

  queenly resplendent

  satisfaction trapped

  under Vronsky’s

  wild x-rated

  young zap.

  2.

  Afraid. Betrayed.

  Can’t divorce.

  Envy follows

  grim heroine,

  inks judgment,

  kills lust.

  Mercy nowhere.

  Opulent pink

  quintessence radiates

  suicide trip—

  unique vacation—

  worst Xmas,

  yesterday’s zero.

  And then there is Georges Perec’s novel La Disparition, written without using the letter e. The ingenious English translation, also written without using the letter e, is by the Scottish novelist Gilbert Adair and is called A Void.

  In the English version, Adair, to match Perec’s e-less parodies of famous French poems, includes e-less versions of well-known English-language poems, including the following, of Poe’s “The Raven” (here, the “symbol” he refers to is the letter e):

  “Sybil,” said I, “thing of loathing—Sybil, fury in bird’s clothing!

  By God’s radiant kingdom soothing all man’s purgatorial pain,

  Inform this soul laid low with sorrow if upon a distant morrow

  It shall find that symbol for—oh for its too long unjoin’d chain—

  Find that pictographic symbol, missing from its unjoin’d chain.”

  Quoth that Black Bird, “Not Again.” …

  And my Black Bird, still not quitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

  On that pallid bust—still flitting through my dolorous domain;

  But it cannot stop from gazing for it truly finds amazing

  That, by artful paraphrasing, I such rhyming can sustain—

  Notwithstanding my lost symbol I such rhyming still sustain—

  Though I shan’t try it again!

  But in the case of the novel by Perec, who has no fewer than four e’s in his own name, the deliberate elimination of the e was perhaps not just a conceptual antic but had an emotional source and an emotional effect. Absence played a large part in Perec’s life: his mother was taken away when he was six years old, and died most probably in Auschwitz; his father had already been killed fighting for the French. It has been suggested that the silent disappearance of the letter e from his novel might be emblematic of the experience of the Jews during World War II. (He has also included the Holocaust and life in a concentration camp in his semiautobiographical novel W, or the Memory of Childhood, which interweaves two narrative threads: the portrayal of island life under a fictional totalitarian regime; and memories of his own childhood, or fictional memories of what he wishes had been his own childhood.)

  * * *

  Now, to return—from that digression into experimental alphabetical constraints—to the use of found writing, I would like to conclude by talking a little about Gustave Flaubert’s letters and how they became the inspiration for a set of stories.

  At a certain point, as I was working on the first draft of my translation of Madame Bovary, I decided to read Flaubert’s letters from the period during which he was writing the novel. Fortunately for posterity, he had, during that period, a lover with whom he corresponded voluminously, for a time, and to whom he expatiated on, among other things, his progress in writing the novel Madame Bovary. His lover, the poet Louise Colet, did not live where he lived, so they had to stay in touch by letter: her home was in Paris, whereas he shared a house with his mother and his little niece in a village outside the city of Rouen. Every so often Flaubert and Colet would meet about halfway in
between, in the city of Mantes, and spend a few days together in a hotel. Then they would take their separate trains in opposite directions and return home. Unfortunately for posterity, and particularly for Flaubert researchers, they fell out, and separated, when Flaubert was about two-thirds of the way through the novel. But while he was still writing to Colet, Flaubert described to her in detail which scenes he was working on, and his difficulties and triumphs in the work. (It must be added that he also lavished considerable effort and many pages, over that time, on thoughtful and admiring critiques of her poems and suggestions for revisions.)

  I turned to Flaubert’s letters for several reasons: simply to get to know him better; to learn what he felt and thought about the work and about his characters; to look for insight into the composition of the novel; and to observe what his style was like when he was writing more spontaneously, without revising, and how it differed from his more polished style.

  Some of the material in the letters was not interesting to me—he regularly wrote about literary politics involving personalities most of whom I did not know—but he wrote a good deal about Madame Bovary and, in the course of this, revealed his own sympathy for his characters. For instance, he showed a degree of grudging affection for the conniving pharmacist Homais and described how ill he himself had become when working on the scene of Emma Bovary’s death from poisoning by arsenic.

  As I read along, every now and then I would come across a little story he was telling Louise, something that had happened to him the day before or recently. I enjoyed these little stories, and after a while it occurred to me that they could be extracted from the letters and shaped a little to make freestanding, independent tales. They were a bit lost, or wasted, where they were in the letters. First I extracted the most obviously complete stories, and then, later, I returned to the less obviously complete material to see what I could do with it. I tried to preserve Flaubert’s original as much as I could. I did not add anything fictional. I sometimes cut material, or wrote transitions, or made two sentences into one, or vice versa. In one case I combined two separate accounts into one. In another case, I did a little research about a man he mentioned so that I could fill in the story and add a bit of color to it. Often Flaubert would end his anecdote with an exclamation. I kept them. Once, the exclamation was the cryptic “Oh, Shakespeare!” I kept it even though I was not sure what he meant.

  * * *

  Here is one of the earlier stories, “The Cook’s Lesson”:

  Today I have learned a great lesson; our cook was my teacher. She is twenty-five years old and she’s French. I discovered, when I asked her, that she did not know that Louis-Philippe is no longer king of France and we now have a republic. And yet it has been five years since he left the throne. She said the fact that he is no longer king simply does not interest her in the least—those were her words.

  And I think of myself as an intelligent man! But compared to her I’m an imbecile. (96 words)

  Here is the original passage, from a letter to Louise Colet dated April 30, 1853:

  Today I have learned a great lesson from my cook. This girl, who is 25 years old and is French, did not know that Louis-Philippe was no longer king of France, that there was a republic, etc. All that does not interest her (her words). And I think of myself as an intelligent man! But I am no more than a triple imbecile. One should be like that woman. (69 words)

  Until I compared them recently, I had forgotten how many little changes I made, without actually changing the content much, or the order in which the ideas unfolded. I did not change Flaubert’s exclamation toward the end—“And I think of myself as an intelligent man!” I did look up a fact—the date when Louis-Philippe left the throne—so that I could supply the “five years.” It makes a difference to Flaubert’s surprise whether the republic has existed for a few months or for five years—and this is something that Flaubert and Louise Colet knew, but that someone reading my version of the story would not otherwise know. I also end the story on the word imbecile—a strong ending—rather than Flaubert’s milder remark: “One should be like that woman,” or, more literally, C’est comme cette femme qu’il faut être (“It is like that woman that one ought to be”).

  When I was on a campus visit not long ago, a French professor looked at both versions of the story and told me she thought I should have kept Flaubert’s “etc.”—it summed up, she felt, all the ideas that Flaubert would have included in the comment about France now being a republic. I saw her point, and agreed, and also liked the idea that we were giving some time and attention, standing in a rather cavernous auditorium, to such a small word.

  * * *

  Here is another story, “The Washerwomen,” which I extracted later from one of Flaubert’s letters:

  Yesterday I went back to a village two hours from here that I had visited eleven years ago with good old Orlowski.

  Nothing had changed about the houses, or the cliff, or the boats. The women at the washing trough were kneeling in the same position, in the same numbers, and beating their dirty linen in the same blue water.

  It was raining a little, like the last time.

  It seems, at certain moments, as though the universe has stopped moving, as though everything has turned to stone, and only we are still alive.

  How insolent nature is!

  In this case, I made very few changes to the original. But one thing I did was to break up Flaubert’s single paragraph into many short paragraphs: I sometimes do that just so it will be read more slowly, with a pause between sentences, and so that each sentence will reverberate, have an impact of its own.

  So how does this differ from a straight translation of Flaubert’s letter? Well, it is not a complete letter, but a part of a letter; it is presented as a story, not a letter; the story is extracted from the letter and to a smaller or greater extent reshaped and rewritten. I would never claim this story as wholly my own: this is a “story from Flaubert”—in other words, created first in his mind from material belonging to his life history.

  Maybe there is a little parallel here, something I hadn’t thought of before, between my stories from Flaubert—there are thirteen of them now, plus one rant—and Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, written in 1807. You may or may not be aware of that book, but it was standard reading for well over a hundred years and is still considered a classic. In it, the brother-and-sister team of Charles and Mary Lamb retold the stories of all the Shakespeare plays, interweaving their own language with Shakespeare’s, in a form that was easier for schoolchildren—and for grown-ups, for that matter—to understand. What the authors said about their work could equally well apply to my adaptations of Flaubert’s stories:

  His words are used whenever it seemed possible to bring them in; and in whatever has been added to give them the regular form of a connected story, diligent care has been taken to select such words as might least interrupt the effect of the beautiful English tongue [here, read French tongue] in which he wrote: therefore, words introduced into our language since his time have been as far as possible avoided.

  The stories as written by the Lambs did not replace the plays, but they were certainly an aid to reading them or seeing them performed. My Flaubert stories aren’t wholly mine, and they don’t replace Flaubert’s letters: when the stories Flaubert tells are encountered in the context of the letters, their meaning shifts a little or a lot—which is evidence, yet again, of the importance of context.

  2012

  A Note on the Word Gubernatorial

  Gubernatorial: Even though I have never used it in a story, and probably never will, this word has always fascinated and pleased me because of its odd divergence from its noun, governor. Why did the noun and the adjective develop in different directions? The adjective is actually closer to the origin of both, which was the Latin gubernator, “governor,” and gubernare, “to steer.” The original, primary meaning of “to govern” was “to steer.” In fact, there is a maritime word in French, gouvernail, t
hat means “rudder,” or “helm”—what we need to steer a boat. The Latin gubernator evolved into the Old French gouverneur and hence, eventually, into our English governor—our governor is one who steers the metaphorical ship of state. (The Latin also evolved into the Spanish gobernador—keeping the b—and the Italian governatore.)

  But of course it is all more complicated, as the development of language always is: the English word gubernator, meaning “ruler,” was also in use starting in the 1520s, though it was rare—and so was gubernatrix, meaning a female ruler. Gubernator disappeared from use and governor remained. I do not know why our adjective did not evolve in the same way as our noun. Why did it not turn into governatorial or governorial? Simply because it was not spoken as often?

  I have always enjoyed pronouncing gubernatorial, as though its rather crude sound, incorporating two voiced plosives and the word “goober,” is concealing its more elegant, softer, silkier cousin, “govern.” Gubernatorial swings us closer to our Spanish friends, governor to our Italian. During the U.S. presidency of Jimmy Carter, former governor of Georgia, there was much talk of his association with the cultivation of peanuts (colloquially known as “goobers”); thus, goober-natorial, as applied to the office of the governor of the Peanut State, was doubly appropriate.

  2011

  VISUAL ARTISTS:

  JOAN MITCHELL

  Les Bluets (1973, 110.5 × 228.25 in.)

  Joan Mitchell and Les Bluets, 1973