Essays One

by Lydia Davis

  sit with Joseph in the backyard, many times he would eat a meal consisting entirely of desserts, I know these things, but it is not necessary to know them to enjoy the postcard,

  Rockefeller Center, Christian Science, TO CHANGE ONE’S LUCK, Astral Candle of person who is object of wrath, Spark of Suspicion candle dressed with Domination Brand Oil, ORCHID Candle or Satan-be-Gone candle dressed with Uncrossing Brand Oil, Conquering Glory candles,

  collecting loved or desired things and putting them together in some kind of order within a frame, or excess, or jumble, lumber room,

  disregard position A as this applies to Exercise 17 only, each evening for 15 days or until satisfied,

  time and again, beehive forests and thimble gardens, as skillful as he was, the recipients, he did not share the accepted conception of the limitations of time, the past for him was not something that continuously receded, it was as available as the present, home poor heart,

  poor heart, marvelous and ordinary, available in 14 colors, note the two-color effect and speckles, available in authentic colors, TO HEAL AN UNHAPPY MARRIAGE, Astral Candle of husband dressed, Astral Candle of wife dressed, Fire of Love candle, should be moved two inches daily in direction of arrows, the Song of Solomon, TO OVERCOME A BAD HABIT, to symbolize the bad habit undressed, for he shall pluck my feet out of the net,

  in his yard bunny statues wandered, organic matter moved itself along but he tended to the decay of organic matter, pound cake was brought to harden in the sun, pears became softer and softer and more liquid by the day, it does not pay, it was not intended to pay,

  it was not intended to pay, its air, full of music, is a fog that turns from brown to yellow, from yellow to white, sunrise and sunset,

  his hours, compounded of foreign woods, the impetus was delight, gifts without the recipient’s knowing their origins,

  Red Candles or Radiant Health dressed with Crucible of Courage Oil, TO LEARN THE TRUTH, TO BRING CONFUSION TO ANOTHER WHO IS THOUGHT TO HAVE CAUSED UNFAVORABLE VIBRATIONS, let them be turned backward, let them be turned back for a reward of their shame that say, Aha, aha, TO BREAK UP A LOVE AFFAIR, and he heard me out of his holy hill, BLACK Crucifix Candles dressed with XX Double Cross Brand Oil, Red Candle UNDRESSED to symbolize sterility or barrenness, DO NOT move candle 4, thou hast broken the teeth of the ungodly, TO SOOTHE AND QUIET THE NERVES, Astral Candle of person in nervous condition, the enemies of the Lord shall be as the fat of lambs, they shall consume, into smoke shall they consume away, the Psalm should be read slowly and with careful attention and should be accompanied by a state of calm meditation, the steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and he delighteth in his way

  2001

  THE PRACTICE OF WRITING (2)

  Sources, Revision, Order, and Endings:

  Forms and Influences III

  When I was starting out as a writer, I thought, not knowing any better, that I would be a writer of traditional short stories, though I didn’t put it quite that way. As my writing developed, I began departing from this form, and I have departed further and further, as the years have gone by, but I have revisited it now and then because it is a solid and trustworthy form. One example of this return to a more traditional form is a story called “The Walk,” written about twelve years ago.

  “The Walk” is set in Oxford, England, during and after a literary conference on translation—this would be typical, very acceptable subject matter for a New Yorker short story, for instance. The main characters are a translator, modeled on myself, and a critic, who is a composite of a couple of people I know. Much of the action is taken from real events at the time of a real translation conference in Oxford, and some elements in it are fictional. (One of the turning points in my development as a writer was the realization that I could, with great satisfaction, write fictional stories that were accounts of actual events, only thinly disguised.)

  The main action in this story is simply a walk taken by the two principal characters. The central drama—not highly dramatic—is the narrator’s perception that there is a resemblance between the walk that she takes with the critic and a passage in her translation of Proust’s Swann’s Way. At another, more conventionally dramatic moment in the story, the narrator nearly sets off a fire alarm in the building where she is staying. In reality, the main character in the actual situation—I myself—did set off the fire alarm. But to recount this episode as it actually happened, with all the students evacuated onto the lawn, some in their bathrobes with wet hair, etc., myself apologizing profusely, would have completely overbalanced the story in the wrong direction. As it is, then, this is a highly intellectual, even rarefied story.

  As is almost always true of any story, this one was born of not just one thing but several. First of all, as I said, there is my ongoing love of the traditional form of short story, so that every now and then, when the opportunity presents itself, I like to reproduce it, though usually with some less traditional variations. I am, in a way, adopting even the traditional voice in which such a story is told, entering the persona of a certain kind of typical narrator, as in what follows, the quite traditional opening:

  A translator and a critic happened to be together in the great university town of Oxford, having been invited to take part in a conference on translation. The conference occupied all of one Saturday, and that evening they had dinner alone together, though not entirely by choice. Everyone else who had participated in the conference or attended it had departed, even the organizers. Only they had chosen to stay a second night in the rooms provided for them in the college in which the conference had taken place, a down-at-heels building with stained carpets in the hallways, a smell of mildew in the guest rooms, and creaking iron bedsteads.

  (Originally I had not named the town at any point in the story, because I prefer not to put place names on places, but then, considering that among other things the narrator of the story is looking for the home of the famous editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, this began to seem unnecessarily coy.)

  So, first, there was that abiding wish to write a traditional story, and therefore I was on the lookout, though I did not know it, for an appropriate subject. Second, I was moved by the physical beauty of Oxford as I had experienced it, especially at evening—the beauty of the buildings, with their varied architecture, in the evening light—and therefore wanted to describe the place. Third, I had for some years been interested in the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, which took place right there. In a wonderful book called Caught in the Web of Words, Elisabeth Murray, the granddaughter of the editor, James Murray, recounts how he worked; I was curious about the creation of the dictionary not only because of a general interest in philology, reference books, and people obsessed with language but also because of the human story, the fact that the man had involved his many children in the project, working in a little house in their backyard—and not only his children but also various correspondents from around the world, including incarcerated criminals, who would send him words and quotations containing the words. Fourth, I was moved to frustration by one critic’s remarks about my translation of Swann’s Way, and it was mildly enjoyable to give expression to some of my reactions in the guise of fiction. Fifth, I was pleased and amused by the actual event of the walk, which paralleled or alluded to the walk in Swann’s Way itself, and I wanted to reproduce that in the story. This coincidence was probably the starting point of the story, what sparked it.

  I was going to say that the desire was there from the beginning to include an element that would not have been allowed into a completely conventional short story, and that was the quoting of an extensive passage from Proust’s novel in not just one but two translated versions that to a casual reader would appear to be almost identical. But, really, I did not plan that from the beginning; it happened as I was writing.

  * * *

  Before I go on to talk about a completely different kind of story and its origin, I’d like to digress to quote two stateme
nts about the emotion common to inspiration itself, since what I’ve been talking about and will go on to talk about is inspiration—what makes a piece of writing come into being.

  The first quotation is actually about the impulse to translate, which I see as very closely related to the impulse to write something original. I have gradually, over the years, come to see the close parallel: that, just as I want to capture something outside myself in a piece of original writing, when I want to translate something I also want to capture it, in this case to reproduce it in English.

  Clare Cavanagh, the translator of Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska, has written an essay about translation called “The Art of Losing: Polish Poetry and Translation” which she closes with the following statement:

  Of course translating poetry is impossible: all the best things are. But the impulse that drives one to try is not so far removed, I think, from the force that sends the lyric poet out time after time to master the world in a few lines of verse. You see a wonderful thing in front of you, and you want it. You try reading it over and over, you see if you can memorize it, or copy it out line by line. And nothing works; it’s still there. So if it doesn’t already exist in English, you turn to translation; you try remaking it in your own language, in your own words, in the vain hope of getting it once and for all, of finally making it your own. And sometimes you even feel, for a while at least, for a day or two or even a couple of weeks, that you’ve got it, it’s worked, the poem’s yours. But then you turn back to the poem itself at some point, and you have to hit your head against the wall and laugh: it’s still there.

  Contrast this with a passage from Swann’s Way in which Proust describes what it is like for the young Marcel to want to capture in writing something that moves him:

  Then, quite apart from all these literary preoccupations and not connected to them in any way, suddenly a roof, a glimmer of sun on a stone, the smell of the road would stop me because of a particular pleasure they gave me, and also because they seemed to be concealing, beyond what I could see, something which they were inviting me to come take and which despite my efforts I could not manage to discover. Since I felt that it could be found within them, I would stay there, motionless, looking, breathing, trying to go with my thoughts beyond the image or the smell. And if I had to catch up with my grandfather, continue on my way, I would try to find them again by closing my eyes; I would concentrate on recalling precisely the line of the roof, the shade of the stone which, without my being able to understand why, had seemed to me so full, so ready to open, to yield me the thing for which they themselves were merely a cover.

  And, in fact, as I copied out this passage, I saw a connection here that I hadn’t seen when I chose to quote it, between Proust’s examples of a roof and a glimmer of sun on a stone and my being moved by the physical beauty of Oxford—because that was part of the beauty of the city for me, the way the sun as it lowered in the sky toward sunset shone with a warm, honey-colored light on the roofs of the town and the stones of the buildings and the cobblestone streets.

  * * *

  To go from Proust’s more sublime sort of inspiration to a more ridiculous one, perhaps—although, as I think about it, even though the subject matter is less sublime, the impulse feels the same: here is material that you relish, that you want to devour, somehow. The story was born of a group email I read. “Nancy Brown Will Be in Town” is about a woman returning to a community in order to prepare to move away for good.

  NANCY BROWN WILL BE IN TOWN

  Nancy Brown will be in town. She will be in town to sell her things. Nancy Brown is moving far away. She would like to sell her queen mattress.

  Do we want her queen mattress? Do we want her ottoman? Do we want her bath items?

  It is time to say goodbye to Nancy Brown.

  We have enjoyed her friendship. We have enjoyed her tennis lessons.

  Before I show you the email that inspired this story, I thought it might be interesting to quote an earlier version and explain how I revised it:

  NANCY BROWN

  Nancy Brown will be in town. We are told that Nancy Brown will be in town. We are told that Nancy Brown wants to sell her mattress. Do we want to buy Nancy Brown’s queen mattress? Do we want her ottoman? Do we want her bath items?

  If she will be in town, why is she selling her things? Oh, she is only coming back to town to sell her things. She will soon be leaving town again. She will not be coming back. It is time to say goodbye to Nancy Brown.

  We have enjoyed her tennis lessons. We have enjoyed her friendship.

  1. First, the title: “Nancy Brown” is okay, I like the name, but “Nancy Brown Will Be in Town” is even nicer, and I don’t mind repeating the title in the first line—something often done in poems, less often done in prose.

  2. You could probably hear that the earlier version was wordier, overall. Too wordy. It was 106 words as opposed to 72 in the final version. I like repetitions, but the earlier version included repetitions that didn’t move the piece forward much. It included thinking through questions and answers that could be cut back in the first little paragraph.

  3. I also removed the implied middleman when I took out “We are told.”

  4. Now, the last revision is the most interesting, to me: I changed—actually, reversed—the order of the last two sentences. Instead of “We have enjoyed her tennis lessons. We have enjoyed her friendship,” I now have “We have enjoyed her friendship. We have enjoyed her tennis lessons.” The first order was more “logical” or traditional. It is often true that we think more conventionally first, as though reflexively, and after that we may think more adventurously and more inventively. The first, logical order placed the less important, more particular “tennis lessons” first; the more important, and more general, “friendship” second—as though moving outward from the particular to end on an appropriately general note. And yet the reversed order was actually more interesting to me: the more familiar, and expected, “friendship” first; the more surprising, even absurd “tennis lessons” second, so that the piece, which is, after all, somewhat absurd, ends on an absurd note.

  As for the original email, it was the subject line, of course, that caught my attention: “Darcy Brown will be in town.” The sender was either aware or unaware of the felicity of the rhyme and the charm of it. Then, the body of the email:

  For those of you who have enjoyed Darcy Brown’s tennis lessons, cardio tennis classes, or friendship, she’ll be in town at the end of the week for about a week and a half. She’d love to see or hear from you.

  She is also getting rid of some items that she has in storage:

  1 Queen mattress

  1 Single mattress—box spring—frame

  1 Surfboard Table

  1 Scan Chair and ottoman

  5 boxes of Kitchen and Bath items

  etc.

  What allowed me to see this email as a possible, slightly absurd piece of writing was probably, first, the charm and the singsong lyricism of the subject line, and then the unexpectedness of the email, since I didn’t know Darcy Brown. I don’t know Darcy Brown, and yet I am suddenly drawn, intimately, into the world of Darcy Brown. Again, so much depends on context. Here, since I didn’t know her, I reacted—as though the email had been directed at me personally—by asking myself: Why do I care if Darcy Brown is moving away, and why would I want Darcy Brown’s queen mattress? I read down the list of her possessions and I was not so interested—as a writer—in the “Single mattress—box spring—frame,” but then I was struck by “ottoman.” I like the word ottoman—which reminds me of the Ottoman Empire and sounds so very elevated for a piece of furniture. So I wanted to keep that in my story. And then we come to the “Bath items”—why would I want this stranger’s bath items?

  Maybe I’m also struck by the sender’s including three things in the first sentence as though they were of equivalent value: “For those of you who have enjoyed Darcy Brown’s tennis lessons, cardio tennis lessons, or frie
ndship”—another reason to reverse the order of the last line of my piece, so that “friendship” is not climactic or conclusive.

  I also changed the woman Brown’s real first name (disguised here), which I liked, to Nancy, just to give a little protection to the real woman, though her name was common enough. Nancy Brown was also the name of someone I knew as a teenager—who at some point, incidentally, also changed her own name, to one much more exotic.

  * * *

  From the question of order at the end of “Nancy Brown Will Be in Town,” I’d like to talk a little more about the importance of order in general.

  A question I’m sometimes asked is: When do you know a piece is finished? Instead of addressing exactly that interesting question, I’ll address the writing of the very last lines of a piece, or, rather, I’ll give a partial answer to that question by saying that sometimes the piece as a whole may be more or less complete, but the very last lines are weak and need fixing, so it isn’t quite finished. I will go into a little detail about that in a moment, but first I want to say something about order within a line or a sentence.

  Order is very important, order in a list of any kind. You may have the elements you want in a list, within a sentence, but in an order that is arbitrary or a bit jumbled. The reader receives the content that you have offered, but doesn’t receive it in the best possible order, in an order that falls neatly into place in his or her mind: click, click, click.

  I’ll give an example of a very good order in a list, so that you’ll see what I mean.