by Lydia Davis
Saying less rather than more, which sometimes means cutting some of what you have, can be very effective: for one thing, it speeds up the pace of the writing a little; for another, the more explanation you cut, the more active the reader’s mind has to be, making connections. The more active the reader’s mind, the happier the reader is, usually. That’s why we like jokes, or one reason why—because the joke happens in our minds; we the listeners are the ones who make the connection.
* * *
23. Cutting can be effective: it quickens the pace and involves more happening in a shorter space. But this does not mean that everything has to be short. You can write three thousand pages (as Proust did in In Search of Lost Time) and still be economical. In this case, economical simply means not saying more than you need to.
* * *
24. Keep in touch with the physical world. There is a lot of emphasis on sex and violence—two forms of physicality—in our culture. That is partly a result of lazy, unimaginative writing—writers for popular entertainment fall back on sensationalism to attract an audience. But maybe it is also a crude kind of substitute for the physicality that has in general been lost from our daily life. Imagine how physical life used to be. There was much more contact with animals, for instance, such as horses, cows, and chickens; the trades and crafts were individual and physical and very present on the street (the blacksmith, the shoemaker); and smells were more prevalent—horse manure, mildew, people’s sweat and unwashed clothes, tobacco, woodsmoke, the dust of the roads, flowering plants, etc.
Here is a description of dust by the Bengali English writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri, whose autobiography, by the way—speaking of long books—is in two thick volumes, the first alone, called The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, numbering 506 large pages. He is a patient writer of great skill. He writes at greater length than you would expect about the dusty road and going barefoot when he was a child. The passage is lovely, and economical. His thoroughness writing about the road reminds me of the thoroughness and beauty of James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Here is just a part of the Chaudhuri passage:
We held this soft deep dust in great affection. It offered not simply the childish delight of being able to make dust castles, but something more profound.… The best part of the pleasure of walking was to feel one’s bare feet sinking in the dust, just as the keenest edge of the joy of kicking, that activity so natural in children and so essential for them, was in raising dust as high as the head.… Our road … was so sensitive that we could always tell which way people had gone by looking at the footprints.… At midday, after the great litigious crowd had gone towards the courts, the toes all pointed westward, and in the early morning eastward. In addition, in every section of the road coinciding with each house-front, there were one or more bigger depressions, showing where the pariah dog or dogs belonging or voluntarily attaching themselves to that particular house had slept the night before.
In your prose or poetry, consider how present or absent the physical world is, meaning the world as perceived through the senses. We are physically in the world, we perceive it through our bodies. Use the five senses in your writing if you want the physical world to be more a part of it: consider sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Here are some more examples from a writer particularly good with description, especially smells, which are often neglected in descriptions. The examples are all from V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas:
The blanket was hairy and prickly; it seemed to be the source of the raw, fresh smell he had been smelling all day.
* * *
For eight months, in a bare, spacious, unpainted wooden house smelling of blue soap and incense, its floors white and smooth from constant scrubbing …
* * *
… trying to hide the smell of drink and tobacco on his breath.
* * *
The musty smell of old thatch was mingled with the smell of Mrs. Tulsi’s medicaments: bay rum, soft candles, Canadian Healing Oil, ammonia.
Cormac McCarthy is another writer in whose work the physical world is very present, as it is in Thomas Hardy. In the work of others, such as Anthony Trollope, though he writes in engrossing detail and with great subtlety about the machinations involved in love and politics and finance, it is hardly present at all. As you read, it is a good idea to observe this particular trait; pay attention to how the physical world is treated by the author.
* * *
25. Dialogue. As I have said, there are good and excellent writers who do not make their worlds very physical. There is no rule. Again, each writer’s writing should reflect the whole of that person, should grow organically out of that person’s being, character, and history.
So Grace Paley was, it seems, more interested in talk, in opinions and beliefs—political convictions, life stories, characters, friendships. Lush description is simply not her thing. You could take a paragraph of a Grace Paley story and see where or when the physical world, the senses, come in. But here, let’s look at dialogue, which is so important in her work.
Dialogue is an integral part of the interpersonal interactions central to her stories. A good example of her use of speech is the opening of her very short story “Wants.” Another is the monologue of Aunt Rosie, the narrator of “Goodbye and Good Luck,” which opens as follows:
I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt Rose. I wasn’t no thinner then, only more stationary in the flesh. In time to come, Lillie, don’t be surprised—change is a fact of God. From this no one is excused. Only a person like your mama stands on one foot, she don’t notice how big her behind is getting and sings in the canary’s ear for thirty years. Who’s listening? Papa’s in the shop. You and Seymour, thinking about yourself. So she waits in a spotless kitchen for a kind word and thinks—poor Rosie …
Poor Rosie! If there was more life in my little sister, she would know my heart is a regular college of feelings and there is such information between my corset and me that her whole married life is a kindergarten.
Another writer worth looking at to see how much he relies on dialogue alone is the Irish novelist Roddy Doyle. He is very funny. His subject is family life.
* * *
26. More about dialogue. Listen to people talking and copy down the choicer bits of what you hear. Copy phrases, sentences. In this way, you will learn how people really speak. We don’t usually speak very coherently or neatly. We are often very brief in our exchanges. We often communicate in sentence fragments—that is, when we’re not being overly long, stumbly, and messy, as we grope to express what we mean. Your dialogue should reflect how we speak, though it will often be notched up a degree or two in order to be more intense, more colorful, and more dramatic. But above all, dialogue should not consist entirely of neat, complete sentences.
A little story developed in my notebook out of a single line of dialogue overheard at the next table in a Soho restaurant. The story consists of a (very long) title and two lines:
MATURE WOMAN TOWARD THE END OF A DISCUSSION OF RAINCOATS OVER LUNCH WITH ANOTHER MATURE WOMAN
She says, in a reasonable tone,
“It doesn’t have to be a Burberry!”
Here, again, what interests me is probably a couple of things: first, what a single line of speech reveals about a person’s culture, background, class, and character; and second, the language itself, in this case the word Burberry. It is, really, a funny word, in itself, but it also carries a freight of meaning for some people.
* * *
Language always catches my attention—as in the notebook entries recording “caramel drizzle” and “going potty.”
I relish the way people talk. And it is not just the combination of words, the sound of the language, the perhaps unexpected vocabulary, but also, of course, what it reveals about the people who are speaking.
Here is more dialogue recorded in the notebook:
a. Youngish couple in airport shop, with baby, staring at a shelf:
Husband: �
��Let’s go somewhere else—these are all packaged.”
Wife: “But that’s what we’re looking for!”
In fact, a favorite recent hobby of mine is listening to people who are having these short conversations so as to arrive at a decision together—this is especially good to listen for when you are traveling, because that is when couples are often making decisions together, acting as a single unit. And they are a little tense or preoccupied, so they are not likely to notice you listening in on their conversations.
b. Older married couple standing outside the restrooms in the airport:
Woman: “I’ll wait here.”
Man: “You’re not going to go?”
Woman: “Well, maybe I should.”
Man: “It might be a good idea.”
A long wait in a doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room is another opportunity for eavesdropping and taking notes.
c. A rather gloomy elderly man sits next to his wife in the eye doctor’s waiting room. He is looking around the room. He says to her, after a silence, looking not at her but at a door next to the receptionist’s desk:
“They’re going to come through that door there.”
What I liked here was, first, the language—“that door there”—and the drama it suggested, and, second, the way the old man supplied to his wife a small and quite unnecessary item of information, as though thinking aloud.
* * *
Here is some Denis Johnson dialogue. It fulfills no less than six requirements of dialogue for this kind of fiction: (1) it sounds natural, (2) but it is more vivid and more interesting; (3) it reveals character or is in character; (4) it reveals the relationship or is true to the relationship; (5) it reveals or enhances the characters’ situation; and (6) it enhances or advances the story.
This passage is a small part of a great deal of dialogue in Johnson’s story “Steady Hands at Seattle General”—really, the whole story is dialogue, after the introductory couple of paragraphs that set the scene and one later, very brief paragraph of description. One patient (the first speaker) is shaving his roommate in a rehab or detox:
“Someday people are going to read about you in a story or a poem. Will you describe yourself for those people?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m a fat piece of shit, I guess.”
“No. I’m serious.”
“You’re not going to write about me.”
“Hey. I’m a writer.”
“Well then, just tell them I’m overweight.”
“He’s overweight.”
“I been shot twice.”
“Twice?”
“Once by each wife, for a total of three bullets, making four holes, three ins and one out.”
“And you’re still alive.”
“Are you going to change any of this for your poem?”
“No. It’s going in word for word.”
The story ends (roommate speaking first):
“Well, I’m older than you are. You can take a couple more rides on this wheel and still get out with all your arms and legs stuck on right. Not me.”
“Hey. You’re doing fine.”
“Talk into here.”
“Talk into your bullet hole?”
“Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I’m fine.”
* * *
27. A few last pieces of advice, the first about complex characters:
As you are observing people, observe the traits of complex people in particular. We are all mixtures of qualities: be aware of this, look for it, analyze your own complexity and that of the people you are close to or know well; reproduce this degree of complexity in your more important characters. What does complex mean? You might start with the idea of contradictory, and then see what other qualities go to make up a complex character.
* * *
28. Learn at least one foreign language in your life, either on your own (it can be enjoyable) or in a class; read regularly in that foreign language; it will give you perspective on English and teach you more about English; and it will develop your mind and character—to go back to that.
Here is the same advice from Sparrow, in his entertaining small-format book called How to Survive the Coming Collapse of Civilization and other helpful hints!:
18. STUDY A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
It doesn’t matter which language you study. What’s important is confronting words like szökik.*
*Hungarian for “jump.”
29. Translate at least one piece of writing, no matter how short, in your life—you owe it to your fellow Anglophone readers, who may be monolingual, and you owe it to the literatures of other cultures. The English language is so dominant in the world today that when a writer is translated into English, he or she immediately reaches a larger audience, potentially worldwide, an audience that may include a translator who will in turn translate the work further, into yet another language.
And unlike what you may have assumed, or been taught, the most important skill you can have as a translator is not expertise in the foreign language, but the ability to write well in your own language.
* * *
30. Finally, maintain humility with regard to language and writing.
2013
VISUAL ARTISTS: ALAN COTE
Energy in Color:
Alan Cote’s Recent Paintings
Alan Cote is an abstract painter who lives and paints in an old brick school building, vintage 1930. His studio is the former gym and auditorium, where the community used to gather in the evenings, coming in by the building’s side entrance, for talent shows and the like. The stage is at the far end of the large space, up a few steps, and now serves as his office. The deep and spacious main part of the room, where the little orchestra played and the audience sat, can accommodate comfortably his tall, double-sided drawing table, his three sturdy carts of paint cans, his rolling scaffolding, the stacked canvases leaning against a side wall, and the one large wall on which he paints. The arched windows on two sides are lofty and ample, filling the space with floods of northeastern and northwestern light. Cats wander in and out, sit on one or the other of the two large speakers and watch what he is doing, or settle to sleep on a chair before a low table piled with books, or stretch out along the tops of the leaning canvases.
After fifteen years of the life of a New York City painter (Greenwich Street in Tribeca, when that part of town was the fruit, vegetable, and dairy market district and rents were $200/month; when dealers sought painters instead of vice versa), Cote moved north a couple of hundred miles to live and work in a vast old tugboat shop that looked out on the Rondout Creek, a tributary of the Hudson. In the early spring he could hear the ice booming; waterfowl nested in the rotten, half-submerged barges against the far bank. Now he has moved again, farther north and deeper into the country, at the edge of a rural village. Here he has increasingly concentrated his focus on what can be done within a few consistent constraints. He finds there is great freedom within constraints—even, perhaps, more freedom than with no constraints at all.
Cote’s paintings have always been large, occasionally, in the past, filling an entire wall of a sizable gallery. He sometimes does a small or very small painting, but this is a rare departure. A number, at various times, of the earlier paintings were shaped canvases, but most of his paintings, over the years, have been single rectangles or squares. Now, for the past two decades or so, he has been working with two-panel paintings. This was a form in which he worked briefly some decades ago, and, oddly—as the painter has little control over the eventual fate of his work—some of those panels were sold separately, consigned to exist the rest of their lives on their own. One hangs, without its partner, in a college library. Its matching panel is in a museum collection; another he has reacquired, and it leans against other paintings in his storage barn, while its partner is in a private collection somewhere out West.
Figure 1 (2013, 72 × 130 in.)
This, then, is one consistent feature of Cote’s recent paintings. Each of the two p
anels is painted with a colored ground, the colors of the two grounds being sometimes radically different; sometimes exactly the same, as in the orange/orange painting, Figure 1, as reproduced here; and sometimes close in color and/or tone—tone meaning lightness or darkness of the color—as in, for instance, Figure 2, the darker yellow/lighter yellow painting in which the two yellows converse and interact, the activity heightened because the tones are so close.
Why two panels rather than a single rectangle? What is the different effect of two panels on the viewer? Whereas the single canvas tends to act somewhat as a window, the viewer looking directly at and into the canvas, with the two-panel painting, the relationship is radically altered: there is interaction between the two panels, with viewer either as onlooker—some of the tension shifting from the relationship between viewer and painting to the relationship between the two panels—or as participant in a triangular relationship: panel to panel to viewer. Another consistent feature has been the repeating shapes painted on the grounds, which could be called bars, but which Cote calls by a more neutral, and nonreferential, name—elements. Cote sees the element as something between a line and a shape, and having some of the characteristics of both. For a time, the elements were thinner, and precisely taped before being painted, whereas now the human hand is allowed a more visible presence. They are drawn directly on the ground in colored pencil, using a shaped cardboard guide. They are then painted freehand. The result is precise, geometrical, and neat, but not mechanically precise, not ruler-straight; rather, there is the slightest imprecision in the straight line, which subtly evokes the presence and motion, and the vulnerability, of the fallible human hand: they are not intended to be perfect.
