Essays One

by Lydia Davis

  In the following little story, about half its length is contained in the first sentence; the second and third sentences are fairly short, though not simple; and the last is, again, long and complex (I have numbered the sentences for ease in finding them):

  CONSISTENCY

  [1] At the end of a philosophical discussion that had tormented two professors from the University of Graz for decades and had brought not only them but also their families to total ruin and which, as they are reported to have perceptively told a third colleague one day, like all philosophical discussions led to nothing and which, finally, in the nature of things, ruined and actually drove this colleague, who had also become embroiled in their discussion, insane, the two professors from Graz, after inviting their third colleague and adversary, out of habit, so to speak, into the house they had rented jointly for the sole purpose of their philosophical discussion, had blown the house up. [2] They had spent all the money they had left on the dynamite necessary for the purpose. [3] Since the families of all three professors were present in the house at the time of the explosion, they had also blown up their families. [4] The surviving relatives of one of the professors and adversaries, for whom the decades-long philosophical discussion—as they themselves had clearly demonstrated—had proved fatal, considered suing the state because they were of the opinion that the state’s moral and intellectual bankruptcy had driven all three to their deaths, but they did not bring such an action after all, because they realized the futility of such an action.

  Notice, again, how new material is introduced throughout even such a brief story, especially the idea of the state’s responsibility introduced in the last sentence, which could not have been anticipated earlier.

  * * *

  Another tiny Bernhard story returns us for a moment to the territory of dreams. As with the first little story, the opening sentence is, in itself, about half the length of the story (again, I have numbered the sentences):

  NEAR SULDEN

  [1] Near Sulden, years ago, in a quiet inn to which I had withdrawn for several weeks so as to see as few people as possible and to have contact only with what was absolutely necessary, for which the area around Sulden is suited like no other—and it was above all for the sake of my diseased lung that I had gone to the remoteness of Sulden, which I knew from earlier days—a Herr Natter from Innsbruck, the only guest in the inn aside from myself, who stated that he had once been rector of the University of Innsbruck but had been dismissed from office because of a libelous attack and had actually been thrown into prison, though shortly thereafter his innocence had been established, told me each day what he had dreamed the previous night. [2] In one of the dreams he told me about, he had run around to hundreds of Tirolean authorities to get permission to have his father’s grave opened, but this had been denied him, whereupon he had tried to open his father’s grave himself and, after hours of the most exhausting digging, had finally succeeded. [3] He said he had wanted to see his father once more. [4] However, when he opened the coffin and actually removed the lid, it was not his father lying in the coffin but a dead pig. [5] As usual, Natter wanted to know, in this case, as well, what his dream meant.

  Notice how the fourth sentence is carefully constructed to end with the unexpected element: the dead pig. Bernhard does not stop there, which would have left the story depending entirely on that surprise for its impact, but returns us to this character Natter’s obsession with dream interpretation and his persistence, which are comical. The last sentence, though following naturally from earlier material, is still somewhat surprising.

  7. A Bernhardian story

  One of my own, quite recent, pieces was surely inspired by Bernhard, though it originated, like “Nancy Brown Will Be in Town” and “Hello Dear,” both discussed earlier, in the material of an email. Once again, there are (at least) two sources for the inspiration: (1) my analytical readings of Bernhard’s short pieces, all the closer since I was working on them with a class; and, more immediately, (2) the raw material—the email I encountered. The emotional impetus for the piece—since there is always, for me, strong feeling behind a piece of writing—was at least twofold: (1) amusement at what Bernhard does in his brief stories and at the content of the email; and (2) admiration for Bernhard’s writing and a desire to do something similar, although I did not see the influence of Bernhard (obvious to me now) until after I had written it. My story, however, does not contain the elaborate Bernhardian constructions and is longer than his.

  NEGATIVE EMOTIONS

  A well-meaning teacher, inspired by a text he had been reading, once sent all the other teachers in his school a message about negative emotions. The message consisted entirely of advice quoted from a Vietnamese Buddhist monk.

  Emotion, said the monk, is like a storm: it stays for a while and then it goes. Upon perceiving the emotion (like a coming storm), one should put oneself in a stable position. One should sit or lie down. One should focus on one’s abdomen. One should focus, specifically, on the area just below one’s navel, and practice mindful breathing. If one can identify the emotion as an emotion, it may then be easier to handle.

  The other teachers were puzzled. They did not understand why their colleague had sent them a message about negative emotions. They resented the message, and they resented their colleague. They thought he was accusing them of having negative emotions and needing advice about how to handle them. Some of them were, in fact, angry.

  The teachers did not choose to regard their anger as a coming storm. They did not focus on their abdomens. They did not focus on the area just below their navels. Instead, they wrote back immediately, declaring that because they did not understand why he had sent it, his message had filled them with negative emotions. They told him that it would take a lot of practice for them to get over the negative emotions caused by his message. But, they went on, they did not intend to do this practice. Far from being troubled by their negative emotions, they said, they in fact liked having negative emotions, particularly about him and his message.

  That is the piece as it stands, but it went through another change, and then a change back to its present form. After I had written it and saw the possibility that Bernhard had in part inspired it, I had the idea of making it even more Bernhardian by including overt violence in it. I added another paragraph, the following:

  Only one teacher was so angered by the message that for several days he was speechless. Then, instead of writing back, he went out in the middle of the night with a bag of excrement to the home of the teacher who had sent the message and wrote on his front porch, in excrement, “Negative Emotion.”

  I had doubts about that last paragraph. I sent the whole piece to a friend of mine to whom I send pieces occasionally. I told her I had a question about the piece that I would ask her after she read it. She wrote back that she liked it very much, but she didn’t think the last paragraph belonged, somehow. Or rather, that was my interpretation of what I remembered of what she said. (This was some months ago.) Memory often falsifies, at least a little, and usually in the direction of the way you want to remember something. Her exact words, now that I’ve found them, were “I don’t know why I don’t like the last paragraph as much. If I don’t know why, I’m not sure I should even say it. Somehow I like it ending with the seeming paradox of their liking having negative emotions (even though I know they were being sarcastic). But maybe I’m wrong.”

  She was confirming my own doubts, so I immediately got rid of that added paragraph.

  8. The three-sentence daily diary entry

  I recently had the idea of recording, every day, one brief experience in the form of three fairly short sentences. (I say “short” to preclude the sorts of sentences written by Bernhard in the very short stories above.) I haven’t yet done more than two of these brief descriptions, and I am satisfied with only one of them, but I like the idea. Certainly it is an interesting way of imposing on yourself the daily diary entry—yes, I must make a daily entry, but it can be
one that requires a careful choice of subject and then a careful choice of how to express the experience, and it can remain short.

  Here is the first one I tried (since I did not write it down right away, as I so fervently recommend to others, I lost some of the wording, which I think was better):

  The wind blew hard across the fields behind the old farmhouse.

  We were out for a walk, heading down toward the railway bridge.

  Below the road, a woman filling some bottles at an artesian well looked up and smiled.

  Very simple—Zen practice would say “nothing much.” I first imagined this would be a little prose paragraph. Then, when I typed it out, I started each sentence on a separate line and found that that had a different effect, something of the effect of a haiku. In an earlier version, the first and third lines were longer than the middle one, the symmetry adding to the haiku effect, and that could be part of the prescribed form, if you liked. Of course, in the case of the haiku, the middle line is longer, not shorter.

  9. Félix Fénéon

  Maybe I was influenced, in conceiving of this form, by reading a few years ago the French man of letters, publisher, translator, and newspaper reporter Félix Fénéon (1861–1944). Fénéon did not publish a book of his own while he was alive. In response to a proposal to publish a collection of his own work, he remarked, “I aspire only to silence.” He did, among his many other literary activities, write little fillers for the newspaper, very brief, usually sensational accounts of crimes or accidents, what we would call police blotter material and the French call faits divers, which literally means “various facts or deeds.” Fénéon restricted these accounts to three lines of type (not necessarily three sentences), and worked carefully over making them, within the prescribed length and presentation of the facts, as vivid and expressive as possible, sometimes macabre, sometimes humorous or bizarre. After his death and then that of his mistress of fifty years, it was found that she had carefully preserved all his faits divers in an album. These were collected and published—there were 1,220 of them—and a few years ago a selection was translated into English by Luc Sante and published by New York Review Books under the title Novels in Three Lines.

  Here are some of Fénéon’s faits divers, or police blotter notices:

  At five o’clock in the morning, M. P. Bouget was accosted by two men on Rue Fondary. One put out his right eye, the other his left. In Necker.

  * * *

  There was a gas explosion at the home of Larrieux, in Bordeaux. He was injured. His mother-in-law’s hair caught on fire. The ceiling caved in.

  * * *

  In Le Havre, a sailor, Scouarnec, threw himself under a locomotive. His intestines were gathered up in a cloth.

  * * *

  Notary Limard killed himself on the landing stage in Lagny. So that he would not float away if he fell in, he had anchored himself with string.

  * * *

  Charles Delièvre, a consumptive potter of Choisy-le-Roi, lit two burners and died amid the flowers he had strewn on his bed.

  * * *

  The sinister prowler seen by the mechanic Gicquel near Herblay train station has been identified: Jules Ménard, snail collector.

  Sante, in his introduction, compares Fénéon’s three-line novels to Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony: The United States (1885–1915): Recitative, a book-length poem that derived all its material from transcripts of criminal court cases. (Trial transcripts, by the way, along with oral histories, are productive resources for a writer studying how people, a wide variety, actually speak.) Reznikoff’s research was massive: as he explained, he might go through a thousand pages of transcripts to find the material for a single poem. His accounts of, usually, disturbing incidents are, like Fénéon’s, terse and abruptly concluded.

  Both these works—Fénéon’s three-line “novels” and Reznikoff’s Testimony—may have served as models, years after the fact, for a recent piece of mine called “Local Obits.” This story consists of a number of very brief extracts from obituaries of local, more or less ordinary people—for example, Ethel, eighty-three, who loved to garden, and Richard, eighty-nine, who was a World War II vet and sang in the Polish glee club. Here, like Reznikoff (1894–1976), I am working with found material about strangers. Unlike Reznikoff, who composed poems of varying lengths with lines short and long from a considerable amount of material, I am confining the extract to, usually, just a few lines in newspaper obituary style. The entries are brief, like Fénéon’s, but unlike Fénéon, I am selecting the material, not reporting it, and I am interested not in the sensational but in the oft-repeated ordinary.

  I heard George Saunders say in an interview on the radio a few years ago that he believes the subconscious is not only very rich but also very well organized—which was a new idea for me. I had always known it was rich in accumulated material, but I had thought it was rather chaotic. If I apply what I think he meant to the way influence works for me, I’d say that the subconscious is storing things away, things like the Fénéon three-line “novels” and the Reznikoff Testimony, and that then, when I read the obituaries in my local paper and am touched by these lives and also by the way the obits are written, the influences of Fénéon and Reznikoff assert themselves, still without my knowing it, still subconsciously, and I write a piece in the form of “Local Obits.” Maybe Saunders would say that the material was neatly shelved in my subconscious and filed under various headings, and that my efficient retrieval system zipped through and found them as models.

  10. Sets of three lines and haiku: Padgett

  Proceeding by association here, I’ll go on from compositions in sets of three sentences or three lines to a little more about the haiku.

  A writer friend of mine once said, whether seriously or not, that the only poem he had ever memorized was also one of the most useful, and that was the poet Ron Padgett’s definition of the haiku, which is a haiku. It’s called “Haiku”:

  First, five syllables.

  Second, seven syllables.

  Third, five syllables.

  Neat, and memorable.

  11. Bashō and his most famous haiku

  For years, I’ve read, off and on, a slim little work by the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō—his Narrow Road to the Interior (as translated by Sam Hamill), which I first knew in a different version probably called Narrow Road to the Deep North. It has several captivating qualities: the beauty of the imagery, the spirit behind it, the moments of humor, the compactness, and particularly the form in which it is written. It is an account of a journey into Japan’s remote northeastern region, or, metaphorically, into the poet’s inner self. It is written mostly in prose but interrupted now and then by a haiku that describes or distills a physical or emotional moment at that point in the journey. There is thus a pleasing alternation—a moment of relief from the prose; then back to the prose. The form has a name in Japanese: haiban.

  But I did not know until very recently about another haiku attributed to Bashō, one that is not in Narrow Road to the Interior. I discovered it through reading an article in The New York Review of Books by Ian Buruma, the Dutch writer and academic, about Japan:

  The great poet Matsuo Basho, traveling in the northeast of Japan in 1689, was so overcome by the beauty of the Island of Matsushima that he could only express his near speechlessness in what became one of his most famous haiku:

  Matsushima ah!

  A-ah, Matsushima, ah!

  Matsushima ah!

  I associate Bashō’s near speechlessness with several things: Fénéon’s remark that he aspired to silence; the fact that certain poets chose to stop writing poetry, either for many years, as in the case of Gerard Manley Hopkins and George Oppen, or forever, as in the case of Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891), who gave it up around age twenty-one; and Proust’s narrator in Swann’s Way, when he was quite young, whose reaction to the assault of inspiration was the expressive but unrefined utterance: “Zut, zut, zut, zut!” (A complicated translation pro
blem, by the way.)

  I would also relate Bashō’s Matsushima haiku to the paradox that when we are most powerfully moved, we are often least articulate—and this is something a fiction writer has to keep in mind when putting dialogue in the mouths of characters at emotional moments. Bashō’s haiku may also remind us of the careful balance we need to maintain as writers. We may aspire to a certain degree of articulateness and eloquence in whatever our chosen form may be, but we must guard against crossing the line and indulging in an excessive eloquence or cleverness, one that distracts the reader from the work itself: we must be willing to stay modestly in the background and let the focus of attention be on the work itself.

  12. Edwin Morgan and Louis Zukofsky

  And following from the idea of silence, and brevity, I will end with what must be one of the shortest poems in print, having a three-word title and a one-word text. The poem is by a prominent Scottish poet, Edwin Morgan, who died in 2010 at the age of ninety.

  Here is what James Campbell in The Times Literary Supplement had to say about him, quoting the poem:

  The event that might have pleased him most … was the publication of Dreams and Other Nightmares: New and Uncollected Poems. The book gives equal space to two faces of [Morgan] with which his readers will be familiar—the lunatic lexicographer and the anxious confessor—and contains the wittiest one-word poem ever written, “Homage to Zukofsky”: