Essays One

by Lydia Davis

  sometimes whistling and singing (okay after all, can be one after the other)

  sometimes stopping dead and assuming a fencing position (no. too many -ings in there. but I know I have to end with fencing position—it’s the culminating, striking image; it’s what made me write the sentence down in the first place. it’s also a strong phrase, and the word position is a strong word)

  sometimes stopping dead in a fencing position (cutting solved the -ing problem)

  1982, 2002, 2004

  Found Material, Syntax, Brevity, and the Beauty of Awkward Prose:

  Forms and Influences IV

  In this essay I will continue several topics from earlier discussions, including the origins of some of my stories, using found material or appropriating, complex and simple syntax, brevity in pieces of writing, and the beauty of awkward prose. I’ll start by talking about another poem of mine—one actually written, or arranged, to be a poem with broken lines—that uses found material from an email, this time an email from a stranger, in other words not meant for me personally.

  1. Another email-inspired piece: “Hello Dear”

  HELLO DEAR

  Hello dear,

  do you remember

  how we communicated with you?

  Long ago you could not see,

  but I am Marina—with Russia.

  Do you remember me?

  I am writing this mail to you

  with heavy tears in my eyes

  and great sorrow in my heart.

  Come to my page.

  I want you please to consider me

  with so much full heartily.

  Please—let us talk.

  I’m waiting!

  I was drawn to this material by the awkward language and the lyricism of it—some deliberate and some accidental—and its inadvertent pathos. I have searched for the original email to see how I changed it, but I could not find it. (I am somewhat irrationally afraid of keeping scam mail, for fear of infection.) But I remember moving phrases around, inserting line breaks, and no doubt cutting.

  I enjoy awkward nonprofessional writing and incorrect language use partly because of the unexpected combinations that simply wouldn’t be produced by the brain of a practiced writer of English—such as “with so much full heartily”—or, if attempted, might not be as good.

  2. Modified found material: dream pieces

  Another adventure in the use of found material resulted in a long series of what I have called dream pieces, amounting to about twenty-eight in all, at latest count. In this case, the raw material was, mostly, my own dreams and those of friends, as well as some waking experiences of ours that resembled dreams.

  Dreams are strange phenomena: You try to tell someone your dream in the morning, and he’s usually pretty bored. That is because there is a radical difference between your experience of your dream and his experience of hearing about it. To you, the experience was real, as it was happening, and often you reacted with the full depth of feeling to the dream experience that you would have brought to a waking experience. You were sitting with your mother, who, though in reality dead, was alive again. Or you were in love with some lovely man who also loved you. Or you were at the top of a cliff with—really—no way down and you were terrified. Etc. But to your listener, these experiences were all thin and colorless, simply because they weren’t real.

  I recently learned that a part of the brain is in fact “turned off” while you’re dreaming, a part whose name I can’t remember; this is the part that would have told you that what you were experiencing couldn’t be true. This part of your brain is actually inoperative, and that’s why you believe that you are talking to your deceased mother, or that your twenty-four-year-old son is only eleven and is already smoking, or that a rather dim-witted gym teacher has instructed his team of basketball players to keep their eyes shut while they’re throwing and catching the ball so that they don’t risk hurting them.

  Dreams have been used to predict the future; they have been used in psychotherapy to expose psychological trauma; they have been used as the starting point for making a piece of art, as when Coleridge dreamed of Kubla Khan. I had not been particularly interested in my dreams before as possible subjects for writing, only as occasionally fantastic entertainment.

  The dream pieces started from a conjunction of at least two things: a book I had read some time before and an uncannily dreamlike experience I had while out driving. (Often—or maybe always—it is the conjunction of at least two things that inspires a form or an individual piece of writing, another example being my story “Jury Duty,” which arose from my actual experience of jury duty and my interest in the form of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.)

  I had some time ago read a book by the French surrealist and ethnographer Michel Leiris called, in the English translation by Richard Sieburth, Nights as Day, Days as Night. This book was a collection of the more interesting dreams Leiris had recorded over forty years. The surrealists, of course, were very interested in the potential of dreams, since their project was to use irrationality to disrupt reality and its conventions.

  What was particularly interesting about Michel Leiris’s book was that besides collecting all of his interesting dreams, he also mixed them in with accounts of waking experiences that resembled dreams. He seemed to be demonstrating how fine the line was between the irrationality of the dramas that take place while one is asleep and the weirdness of events in everyday waking life, some events being obviously strange even as they happen and others including elements of strangeness that can be isolated in a piece of writing by excluding the more familiar aspects of the experience. In other words, the account of the waking experience can be written in such a way as to include only the strange elements and leave out the elements that might have “normalized” it in the telling.

  I’ll quote three of the shortest of Leiris’s dream accounts, all working in slightly different ways. The first is almost no more than an image:

  NOVEMBER 20–21, 1923

  Racing across fields, in pursuit of my thoughts. The sun low on the horizon, and my feet in the furrows of the plowed earth. The bicycle so graceful, so light I hop on it for greater speed.

  The second is longer, more typically dreamlike, still sounding like the report of a dream, but now also like a tiny story:

  APRIL 12–13, 1923

  One evening, upon entering my room, I see myself sitting on my bed. With a single punch, I annihilate the phantom who has stolen my appearance. At this point my mother appears at a door while her double, a perfect replica of the model, enters through a facing door. I scream very loudly, but my brother turns up unexpectedly, also accompanied by his double who orders me to be quiet, claiming I will frighten my mother.

  And finally, one that Leiris dreamed nearly forty years later and that to me sounds like a complete little story:

  NOVEMBER 6–7, 1960

  “Charity! Charity!” I am wandering through the streets of an unfamiliar neighborhood, trying to catch a small dog who bears the name of this theological virtue. He was given to me by a baker; I was careless enough to walk him without a leash, and he ran away. A butcher (or some other shopkeeper) has already had a good laugh hearing me call after the dog that he has just watched race by. Shouting at the top of my lungs like some incensed beggar, I could very well be taken for a village idiot or for an escaped lunatic whom the police will swiftly move to arrest. Who cares. I go on shouting as loudly as I can, not only because I am so mortified at the loss of the little dog but also because I am drunk with the sound of my own voice: “Charity! Charity!”

  I have talked before about surprises in a short piece, and surprises in general, and how you should in some way keep surprising the reader, not be predictable. In this little dream of Leiris’s, the opening, the name of the dog, is a surprise, as is the image of this man wandering the streets calling “Charity!” New information is constantly added in the piece. And after repeating more familiar information�
��that he regrets the loss of the dog—it ends with yet another piece of new information—that he is drunk with the sound of his own voice.

  The image of the narrator wandering the streets like a lunatic reminds me of an image that has stayed with me for a long time: the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser went through periods of mental instability and during one such period, toward the end of his life, murdered his wife (this was in 1980). After his release from the psychiatric hospital, he used to wander the streets of Paris shouting: “I am the great Althusser!” What interests me about this is that he was indeed, if not great, at least important. A person wandering the streets shouting something that is not delusional can still be described as a bit of a lunatic.

  * * *

  To return to Leiris and his dream pieces, what interested me first was not so much, in fact, how to narrate a dream, though I liked the idea of giving the shape of a little story to the sometimes sprawling and incoherent narrative of an actual dream, by selecting from it. I was more interested in how to narrate a waking experience as though it had been a dream. And then, I was interested in combining actual dreams and waking experiences intermingled in the same group so as to blur the line between waking and sleeping. As I said above, I used not only my own dreams and waking experiences but those of friends, too.

  As for the writing of these pieces, I had to figure out what it was about the narration of a dream that made it sound like a dream, and then work to make the piece fit those requirements. For one thing, the material had to include some element of the irrational or the surreal, to a greater or lesser extent. For another, it had to be told in a dream narrative style, meaning: in short sentences (mimicking our style as we grope to remember or reproduce a dream); with some (optional) element of uncertainty; maybe with some mystery as to the identities of people and places; sometimes or always with strong and striking imagery. And it had to be just long enough to sound like a complete dream experience.

  * * *

  These two are actual dreams, though I was half awake in the first:

  AWAKE IN THE NIGHT

  I can’t go to sleep, in this hotel room in this strange city. It is very late, two in the morning, then three, then four. I am lying in the dark. What is the problem? Oh, maybe I am missing him, the person I sleep next to. Then I hear a door shut somewhere nearby. Another guest has come in, very late. Now I have the answer. I will go to this person’s room and get in bed next to him, and then I will be able to sleep.

  DINNER

  I am still in bed when friends of ours arrive at the house for dinner. My bed is in the kitchen. I get up to see what I can make for them. I find three or four packages of hamburger in the refrigerator, some partly used and some untouched. I think I can put all the hamburger together and make a meatloaf. This would take an hour, but nothing else occurs to me. I go back to bed for a while to think about it.

  And this last was a real-life experience told as a dream:

  IN THE TRAIN STATION

  The train station is very crowded. People are walking in every direction at once, though some are standing still. A Tibetan Buddhist monk with shaved head and long wine-colored robe is in the crowd, looking worried. I am standing still, watching him. I have plenty of time before my train leaves, because I have just missed a train. The monk sees me watching him. He comes up to me and tells me he is looking for Track 3. I know where the tracks are. I show him the way.

  3. Drastically shortened dream pieces

  Some of the pieces that I wrote intending them to be dream pieces were, in their final versions, too short to feel like dream narrations. I liked them, but I no longer considered them dream pieces. Here is a literary one:

  CAN’T AND WON’T

  I was recently denied a writing prize because, they said, I was lazy. What they meant by lazy was that I used too many contractions: for instance, I would not write out in full the words cannot and will not, but instead contracted them to can’t and won’t.

  Another that became too short was “Ph.D.” The original material for this piece was the recurring anxiety dream of a friend of mine who, in the dream, believed that because she had failed to take one important exam, though she had done all the other required work—the coursework and the thesis—she had in fact never been awarded her Ph.D. In its original version, that dream was fully recounted, including the missed exam. Then I cut the piece more and more until in its final form it reads, simply:

  PH.D.

  All these years I thought I had a Ph.D.

  But I do not have a Ph.D.

  (In truth, she did earn her Ph.D. at NYU, her thesis—the result of long and extremely meticulous editing—being The Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn.)

  4. From dream accounts to Bernhard stories

  At the time when I was working on the dream pieces, I discovered a very helpful book by Thomas Bernhard that presented me with yet another model for a tightly organized and written very short story, ensuring that the dream pieces would be not solely dependent on the impact of the dream material for their effect, but fully developed and integrated and well-structured pieces in themselves, though approached in this new way, coming from the perspective of seeing life as material for dream pieces.

  I discovered the Bernhard book between flights in O’Hare Airport. I had a lot of time to kill, came upon a surprisingly good bookstore there in the airport, and went in. Instead of browsing idly through the fiction section, which was quite large, I decided, in one of those impulses of slightly fanatical orderliness that we all have from time to time, to proceed alphabetically, starting with the very first book in the A section and looking at every title. When I was just a short way into the Bs, I was astonished to discover a book by Thomas Bernhard that I had never heard of and that couldn’t have been better suited to me just then.

  5. Thomas Bernhard as novelist

  Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989) was a rather misanthropic and vitriolic Austrian writer, mainly a novelist, the author of Concrete, Old Masters, The Loser, Gargoyles, Correction, and Wittgenstein’s Nephew, among others. It is typical for him to rage against the horrors of his own country, Austria. His writing is moving and horrifying, but also funny. His first-person narrators rave and fume, and the form of his novels is often one long paragraph. The writing is entrancing, spellbinding. His books were an important model for me when I was working on my own novel, The End of the Story, since what I was looking for was a sustained, emotional, controlled, single-breath, one-voice outburst—I included pauses (white spaces) but no chapter divisions, which would have implied control. I wanted to convey the sense, from the tone of the narration, that this was an autobiographical confession. (Other models were Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights and Marguerite Duras’s The War and The Lover.)

  Here is the beginning of Bernhard’s 1975 novel, Correction—a single sentence:

  After a mild pulmonary infection, tended too little and too late, had suddenly turned into a severe pneumonia that took its toll on my entire body and laid me up for at least three months at nearby Wels, which has a hospital renowned in the field of so-called internal medicine, I accepted an invitation from Hoeller, a so-called taxidermist in the Aurach valley, not for the end of October, as the doctors urged, but for early in October, as I insisted, and then went on my own so-called responsibility straight to the Aurach valley and to Hoeller’s house, without even a detour to visit my parents in Stocket, straight into the so-called Hoeller garret, to begin sifting and perhaps even arranging the literary remains of my friend, who was also a friend of the taxidermist Hoeller, Roithamer, after Roithamer’s suicide, I went to work sifting and sorting the papers he had willed to me, consisting of thousands of slips covered with Roithamer’s handwriting plus a bulky manuscript entitled “About Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, with special attention to the Cone.”

  This opening sentence is more than ten lines long. (According to a note I made in the book, the first eleven pages have only sixteen sentences.) It is
worth repeating, however, what I have previously said about Proust: that to be exact and economical does not necessarily mean to be brief. One can be verbose in a short poem, and one can be succinct in a long novel full of long sentences.

  About the voice in that opening: it is immediately established as a voice filled with conviction. The sense of conviction is created by several things at once, stylistically: the almost pedantically correct construction of it, indicating high seriousness (and a degree of self-importance); the urgency of it, the sense we get that the narrator wants to tell us all about this; the level of detail about such things as the narrator’s illness and Roithamer’s manuscript; the narrator’s strong opinions—his sarcasm in his references to such things as internal medicine and taxidermy; the use of italics stressing his opinion versus the doctors’; the naming of the people and places, as though the narrator and we the readers, too, recognize that these particular facts are important.

  For me, Bernhard was already an admired and studied writer when I discovered that book of his in the airport. The book was The Voice Imitator, translated by Kenneth J. Northcott. It contains 104 stories, each a paragraph long. I had not even known that Bernhard had written tiny stories.

  6. Thomas Bernhard’s short works and complex constructions

  What is remarkable about these stories is not only their tight structure, completeness, and negativity of attitude but also the hypercomplex syntax of some of the sentences, as in the opening of Correction.

  I have given students in writing classes the assignment to read, analyze, and then imitate stylistically one of Bernhard’s small stories. Younger writers these days often have trouble constructing long, complex sentences. They often restrict themselves to short, simple sentences, and when they try a longer, more complex one, they run into trouble. I see this in otherwise good writers—including good published writers. In this case, the translator, Northcott, has reproduced the complexity with a skill that appears effortless.