Lydia Davis / Interview / Sarah Manguso

Lydia Davis

LYDIA DAVIS

“I AM SIMPLY NOT INTERESTED, AT THIS POINT, IN CREATING NARRATIVE SCENES BETWEEN CHARACTERS.”

Appealing qualities of Samuel Beckett’s fiction:
The plain, Anglo-Saxon vocabulary
The intelligence
The challenge to the reader’s intelligence
The humor that undercuts what might have been a heavy message
The self-consciousness about language

Lydia Davis was born in 1947 to a fiction writer and a book critic. In first grade she learned to read English. In second grade (in Austria) she learned to read German. Her books include a novel, The End of the Story (1995), four full-length story collections—Varieties of Disturbance (2007), Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2002), Almost No Memory (1997), and Break It Down (1986)—and several small-press and limited-edition volumes.

Her writing defies generic classification. Some of her fiction could just as easily be called essay or poetry. Many of her stories are extremely short. Her narrators are often given a drastically narrow scope but an extremely sharp focus. Their observations might be described as dispassionate—sometimes humorously so—and for this reason the considerable emotional component of Davis’s stories is often subtextual.

Davis works as a translator of French literature and philosophy, and is well known for her translation of Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann, which earned her wide critical acclaim. Her other translations include books by Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Jean Jouve, and Michel Leiris.

She has won many of the major American writing awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship for fiction, and was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. She was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. On hiatus from teaching at SUNY Albany, Davis lives and works in upstate New York.

This interview was conducted via email.

—Sarah Manguso

I. “PERHAPS A PATTERN CAN BE
DETECTED AFTER THE FACT.”

THE BELIEVER: What are your working days like now that you’re on leave from teaching?

LYDIA DAVIS: My working days are divided between my own work and my current translation, which is a new version ofMadame Bovary for Penguin.

BLVR: Besides the fact that you probably do more of it now, does your own work seem to have changed—qualitatively, that is—since the MacArthur Fellowship?

LD: It has changed, but then it is always changing. It seems to me that I’ve become increasingly interested in working with other people’s texts—say, combining a translation with my own commentary, or combining my commentary with two or more other texts—and also with working on more extended pieces. But then recently I’ve been writing very short things of my own invention. So I never quite know what is around the corner.

BLVR: You’ve said Beckett was a deep influence from the beginning of your career as a reader.

LD: I came to Beckett very early on and was startled by his pared-down style. As I practiced writing (in my early twenties), I actively studied his way of putting sentences together. I copied out favorite sentences of his. What I liked was the plain, Anglo-Saxon vocabulary; the intelligence; the challenge to my intelligence; the humor that undercut what might have been a heavy message; and the self-consciousness about language.

BLVR: One of my graduate-school teachers carried around Beckett’s essay on Proust like a talisman. Are Proust and Beckett linked for you?

LD: I came to Proust relatively late; or rather, I did read two thirds of Swann’s Way in French about thirty years ago, but did not study him the way I studied Beckett. I think part of the pleasure I took recently in translating Proust was the pleasure of writing in a style that was not my own, and never would have been, but that was wonderful to try out.

BLVR: Does there seem to be some master plan linking Proust and Beckett to your own work?

LD: It seems to me that few writers have an overarching master plan or project—or at least, not one that begins when they are first beginning to write. I think that in any case I come to each stage of my writing by degrees. Perhaps a pattern can be detected after the fact, but as it proceeds, one’s development, though logical or inevitable in one sense, is in another sense chaotic.

II. “A STORY HAS TO HAVE

A BIT OF NARRATIVE.”

BLVR: I agree with your distinction between short story and story—that the word story, minus the short, can include more eccentric forms. I read that you’d choose to call Russell Edson’s prose poems (which he originally called “fables”) “stories.”

LD: I was simply reacting against Edson’s designation of his pieces as “poems,” which I have seen on the covers of his collections (more often than “prose poems” or “fables”). I might call them “fables,” except that this term usually implies a moral or precept, and I think his pieces are wonderfully free of morals. They are stories, for me, because they are full of narrative. The weight of emphasis in them is on the narrative, I think, not on the language. When the emphasis shifts onto the language, then maybe they enter the realm of poem.

BLVR: Do you find “story” to be a potentially larger category than “poem”?

LD: Yes, I suppose I do find the category “story” to be more elastic. But of course part of the problem is that we have only a limited number of familiar categories and into one or another of these we try to fit the work of writers such as Edson, Kafka, Peter Altenberg, Robert Walser, Jim Heynen, Henri Michaux, Léon-Paul Fargue, Peter Cherches, Francis Ponge, Geoff Bouvier, Martha Ronk, Phyllis Koestenbaum, Diane Williams.…

BLVR: Flash fiction, sudden fiction, short shorts, very shorts, prose poems, proems—do you think the solution to sorting the chaos is to create more categories?

LD: Where a need is felt for another category, I think it will be created and accepted, although that may take time. There is some acceptance of the terms flash fiction, sudden fiction, etc. But I think people may still be expecting a kind of miniature short story when they begin reading a piece of flash fiction, rather than the less usual offering that it might be—meditation, logic game, extended wordplay, diatribe—for which there is no good general name. Robert Walser was described by one critic (rather diminishingly, I think) as a “feuilletonist.” He sometimes referred to his work simply as “short prose pieces.”

BLVR: Lazy critics declare some of your stories not to be stories because they don’t resemble the stories they’ve seen in some magazine or other. I’m always looking for a positive definition of a story. How do you know a story’s a story?

LD: It’s a hard thing to define, but to be simple about it, I would say a story has to have a bit of narrative, if only “she says,” and then enough of a creation of a different time and place to transport the reader. But, of course, it is not a narrative poem. It is flatter, rhythmically different from a poem, and less elliptical.

BLVR: How is it rhythmically different? And by “elliptical,” do you mean “economical” or “deliberately obscure”?

LD: If I consider only poems with line breaks, then there’s an obvious rhythmical difference—the suspension at the end of each line, as opposed to the pause at the end of the sentence. But beyond that, I see each word or phrase in a true poem as being explosive, in a sense—it should open out or blossom in the reader’s mind. Whereas each word or phrase in a piece of prose does not contain compressed or condensed material in the same way. By elliptical, I don’t mean merely economical or deliberately obscure. Certainly a good poem should be economical (though not any more economical than a good piece of prose—Proust said his prose was economical, and I agree), but it may also actually leave out material that the reader may supply either explicitly or subliminally. (I say “may” because each poem operates by such different rules.) I don’t believe a good poet is very often deliberately obscure. A poet writes in a way necessary to him or her; the reader may then find the poem difficult.

Christopher Middleton writes: “The rhythm of a poem is a structure of variable tempos which realize its sounds as the radicles of meaning.” (I’m quoting him at one remove, but the plural realize seems to me correct.) This is a mouthful, but interesting to think about.

III. THERE’S NO SUCH

THING AS NO STYLE.

BLVR: Is it better to use the word prosaic because it’s the literal translation of prosaique, or to use the word dull because it occupies the same context in contemporary English as prosaiquedid in Proust’s French? You chose the former, [C. K.] Scott-Moncrieff chose the latter.

LD: I can’t re-create now what led to my choice of prosaic—but as I was translating Swann’s Way I did of course check and double-check every tricky choice to make sure the translation came as close as I could make it to conveying in English in these times what Proust conveyed in French in those times. In your example, I think I liked the closeness in sound of prosaic to the French: it has the same three syllables and the pr opening. It is historically, and rhythmically, entirely different from dull—which is a wonderful word in itself, of course, and one I would be much more likely to use in my own writing than prosaic.

BLVR: In similar situations, would you always choose the cognate?

LD: Whenever I could, I would use the cognate, but often enough that was for reasons of sound, rhythm.

BLVR: In his biography of Beckett, James Knowlson says that Beckett chose to write in French because in French it was easier for him to write “without style.” You’ve said similar things about translating—that it’s an exercise in not imposing one’s own style on the writing. It sounds like the least postmodern position one can possibly take—that there’s some essential truth that style only cloaks.

LD: No, I wouldn’t say there’s some essential truth that is cloaked by style—if I’ve understood your question. I’d say that if I were to translate into my own style rather than preserving, insofar as I could, the style of the original, I would change the nature of the work in an essential way.

I tried, once, for fun, translating Laurence Sterne into more contemporary English. It worked to some extent—some of the narrative content was preserved, some of the humor, quirkiness, etc.—but it was painful. Each time I abandoned some phrasing of his in favor of an “updated” version, an essential, delightful peculiarity of the work was lost.

BLVR: So you’re talking about the need, as a translator, to avoid covering the writer’s style with one’s own. Beckett, on the other hand, seems to suggest the possibility of writing without style. Do you think that’s possible? Maybe he was referring only to writing without the burden of his own familiar English-language style.

LD: I don’t believe, in the end, that there is any such thing as no style. Even a very neutral, plain style, one that doesn’t use colloquialisms, lyrical flourishes, heavy supplies of metaphor, etc., is a style, and it becomes a writer’s characteristic style just as much as a thicker, richer deployment of idiom and vocabulary. I would have to go look for Beckett’s own explanation, but I can imagine that he might have been resisting a Joycean sort of profusion that would have been natural to him in both speaking and writing English.

IV. “REAL LIFE”

BLVR: You aren’t secretive about the basic content of your personal life—you work as a translator, teach at universities, married and remarried, had two sons, studied music, write books. You must have been asked this before, but what of the apparent resemblance of Davis characters to Davis the human being?

LD: I’ll look to the Austrian Peter Altenberg again—many of his little stories concern himself or a character nearly identical to himself, and yet what interests me above all are the pieces themselves in all their integrity, the complete and independent life they have. In the end, I am not deeply interested in where they came from, how they were created, whether the main character is or is not Altenberg. Or I should say, I am interested, but it doesn’t affect my reading of the pieces as small fictions. It is quite interesting to see how he selected fragments from his own life—and it is a matter of selection—to create such a strong and complete, funny, agonizing world. These short works have just as much integrity and interest as the Russell Edson pieces, which one would hope are not, most of them, autobiographical, except perhaps emotionally.

And yet it is important to return to the idea of selection—and of tone, and of intention. A character in one of my stories may resemble me in certain ways, through a selection of biographical facts or psychological characteristics, but she is something different, a creation.

BLVR: Do you believe artistic creation to be a process of selection?

LD: Of course it is much more than that. What I mean is that when you take from “real life,” you select and thereby misrepresent, in a way—you distort your material, or, in fact, fictionalize it.

BLVR: Ben Marcus said this about your stories: “It’s the empirical method of science, rather than an intuitive style of storytelling, that drives [Davis’s] best stories.” I like thinking of writers as mechanical engines, not just great big bags of emotions.

LD: How about an intuitive style of empirical storytelling? Both models (bags of emotions and mechanical engines) leave out the guiding intelligence. One wonderful thing about that guiding intelligence is that it can absorb and assimilate scientific principles and bring them to bear on human psychology and emotion. I was just thinking about science per se today, because a friend was explaining to me the difference between convection and conduction, and then went on to talk about thermal radiation. (This started with a bottle of champagne cooling in a sink full of water.)

There is something very pleasing about the principles of science and the rules of math, because they are so inevitable and so harmonious—in the abstract, anyway.

A poet I like a lot, Rae Armantrout, has a deep interest in certain of the sciences. Scientific principles and facts are inevitably an integral part of her poetry because they are an integral part of her thinking.

BLVR: Wow. There goes my tidy little dialectic. So, if I’m getting it right, you’re saying it’s a governing intelligence, in the end, that makes art happen—assuming that active processing (of information and of feelings) is always happening in the background of that intelligence.

LD: Governing intelligence, yes, but at the origin of the work there has to be strong feeling, if it’s going to be any good. Of course, that strong feeling can be a delight in language.

BLVR: What do you like about Armantrout?

LD: Oh, her humor, her intelligence, her precise imagery, her lyricism, her care with language—the surprises that occur in each poem. I wrote a short essay about her work called “Why Stop with a Barnacle?”—the title is a line of hers, the kind I like so much.

V. AUTISTIC NARRATORS

BLVR: Ben Marcus also said of your stories: “There’s a nearly autistic failure to acknowledge the emotional heart of the matter, and a curious lack of interest in narrative scenes between characters.”

LD: I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters. Maybe I’m shying away from a certain artificiality that I perceive to be present in many such scenes as written. Although, as soon as I say that, I think of other possible reactions to that perception of artificiality: how a writer like Jane Bowles, for instance, lets a certain acknowledged artificiality be an effective part of those narrative scenes between characters.

BLVR: What’s artificial about those scenes? How are they more artificial than the rest of a story?

LD: We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don’t usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I’m saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place.

BLVR: This might be a long shot, but I have to ask—have you ever thought of your narrators as specifically autistic (or to have any other neurological diagnosis)?

LD: No, I haven’t! That really never occurred to me. The characters do focus on one thing at a time, maybe, or the narrators do—as we tend to do in life. As the writer, I may choose to ignore the emotional heart of the matter, and focus on details, and trust that the heart of the matter will be conveyed nevertheless. For instance, in “We Miss You,” a story from the most recent book, the almost maniacally single-minded narrator (presumably a sociologist) focuses unwaveringly on a detailed analysis of the children’s letters without betraying any emotional reactions of her own. And yet there are hints that she is fighting to maintain her own neutrality and her “scientific” detachment. Emotion is central to the story, as it is to most of the stories.

BLVR: Your narrators often sound as if they want to make sense of the world, but sometimes they sound to me as if, even after all their efforts, they’re praying for a little bit of leftover mystery.

LD: My narrators, I suppose, don’t at all mind living surrounded by mystery—in fact, they like that. But at the same time, there are particular situations that they want to understand completely. Their desire has the same urgency we feel when we become caught up imaginatively in any drama, whether fictional or real life, and want to know how it “comes out.”

I often pose questions to myself and want the answers. The questions may be psychological or emotional. Or they may involve botany or, in this case, for instance, physiology: how does my body know that I am holding two pieces of paper between my thumb and forefinger, rather than one?

I am very curious about strangers I observe—as in a bus line. I am very attached to finding out answers. But as I said, these are isolated events in a context of mystery with which I, and my characters, are quite comfortable.

BLVR: Isolated events in a context of mystery—that sounds like a workable model for your fiction, not to mention the universe.

Sarah Manguso is the author of the story collection Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape(McSweeney’s, 2007) and of two poetry collections. She lives in Rome.

January 2008

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200801/?read=interview_davis

Real also
Biography of Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis / Interview / Francine Prose

Lydia Davis
Photo by Jerry Bauer

Lydia Davis

by Francine Prose

BOMB 60/Summer 1997, LITERATURE

I was a fan of Lydia Davis’s work for a long time before we became friends. Precise and meticulous yet impassioned and obsessive, intense yet often hilarious, painstakingly logical yet oftenveering more or less sharply in the direction of the demented, the stories in Break It Down— the first of her books that I read— expanded my ideas of what fiction could be, what language could accomplish. Frequently, I reread her stories and her remarkable novel, The End of the Story, when I feel that I’m becoming too narrow, too rigid, too limited in my own ideas about writing. I was glad for a chance to talk to her about her new story collection, Almost No Memory, and for an opportunity to ask questions I’d wondered about for years—to try and find out what makes her writing so original, so unique, so thrillingly peculiar.

---

Francine Prose Do you remember learning to read?

Lydia Davis Yes, and my memories of the Dick and Jane books are very happy memories. I loved learning the words “look” and “see”: “Run, Jane, run. See Jane run.” It was so clear and easy and unconfusing and neat. Actually I spent my second grade year in Austria. I had one year of learning to read in English and then I learned to read in German. I still have the German textbooks in which the letters got smaller and smaller as the pages progressed through the book.

FP How sadistic!

LD That’s right, very sadistic.

FP Do you think about the rhythms of Dick and Jane?

LD I always liked clarity and simplicity and balance. All rhythms can be seductive. I was attuned to the music of language as well as the music of music. Learning another language when I was seven probably made me hyperconscious of language; also the German language in the classroom was a wall of incomprehensibility around me. Gradually the words began to have meaning. But first I heard the language as rhythm.

FP So do you write for rhythm now?

LD Yes, it’s always rhythm. I always hear it in my head.

FP There are lots of books that make me think: I don’t care what’s in them as long as they’re written beautifully.

LD In fact Beckett said somewhere that he didn’t care what a text said as long as it was constructed beautifully, or something like that—all of meaning, all of beauty is in the construction.

FP It’s rare that people pay attention to that any more. What were your favorite books when you were a kid? Do you remember?

LD A turning point for me was Dos Passos’ Orient Express. That was one of the first “grown-up” books that made me excited about the language. It was one of the first I wasn’t reading for plot. Another was The Unnamable by Beckett. I got into that at 13.

FP You read Beckett at 13?

LD Yeah, I didn’t read the whole thing.

FP Where did you find it?

LD My father was an English professor, and somehow it must have been in the house. It made a very strong impression because it was so different from anything I had read. I opened this book and it said on the first page, “I’m lying here. I’ve dropped my pencil.” Later, in high school, I would go through one novelist after another—Nabokov, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, Joyce—and read everything.

FP Do you think about Beckett a lot now?

LD He was very important to me in my early twenties. I studied him. I was really picking apart sentence structures, seeing exactly how he constructed a sentence. Why it worked so beautifully. I suppose I wanted to do it as well as Beckett. So if I was going to do it as well as he did, I had to learn how he did it.

FP So you knew you wanted to write?

LD I knew from a very early age—maybe 12—but the funny thing was that it was more of a burden than a pleasure.

FP (laughter) How prescient.

LD Right. I knew it would be a lot of hard work. Like a Chinese emperor, the child knowing he’s going to grow up to be emperor. He may not really want to, but has no choice in the matter. I wasn’t reconciled or really content with the idea until I was in my twenties. As a child, what I really loved was music! I enjoyed writing a story when I had to write one, but what I really sought out was music.

FP Playing the piano?

LD Playing the piano, and I loved listening to music. I would listen to a record over and over again. Then I would go out and get the score and listen to the record with the score because I wanted to get as deeply into it as I could. I didn’t go into my room and write stories or write a novel the way some kids do. I spent all my time on music.

FP If you had to think of a modern writer . . . who’s the closest to music? Beckett and Joyce often seem to be writing more for the music of the language than for content.

LD How about Nabokov? Do you include him?

FP Well Nabokov, yes, he’s sort of like Bartók. What was the first thing you wrote, the first thing you thought was really something?

LD I can remember a day when the teacher read aloud my story and also a story by a classmate. I loved her story. I wasn’t so fond of mine. So I can say her story was a big influence on me, the first thing that I really remember liking. You know the book Iron and Silkwhere the English teacher asks a class of Chinese students to describe their most memorable experience? One of the students hesitates and hesitates and finally says that his most memorable experience was when his wife went to Beijing and ate duck there. He didn’t go. She went, but that was his most memorable experience.

FP I can remember some dreadful little moralistic tales that I wrote in grade school and horrible little love poems in high school.

LD In high school I was more excited by essays because I was discovering how to think things through and come to new thoughts.

FP When did the stories in Break It Down start?

LD The earliest ones were written about ten or 12 years before they were published. They were written when I was in France after college. I was having trouble writing a traditional narrative story. There was one long story that I worked on endlessly. Looking back at the notebooks, I realize it took me over two years to finish it, trying another version and another version. In the meantime, I started doing these very short stories to break myself out of the rut of not writing or resisting writing. I told myself: You have to write two tiny stories every day. It didn’t matter how silly they were, I just had to finish two one-paragraph stories.

FP This is probably an impossible question, but when you say a story’s “not working” or “working,” what does that mean?

LD It’s flat. It’s dull. There were two stories, one called “What Was Interesting”.

FP Oh, I love that story.

LD The other was “The Center of the Story.” Both of those didn’t work as they were. The core of the story didn’t work. I left them alone for a long time. The way I rescued them was to come back and address the question as a part of the story. Why isn’t it working? The problem with one of them was that it had no center. The problem with the other was that it just wasn’t interesting enough.

FP Speaking of “What Was Interesting,” why do you think that obsessive love is such an interesting subject? It’s not in fact a condition that people find themselves in all the time, or even most of the time. And yet it’s always somehow riveting, and a number of the stories in Break It Down are about that.

LD It’s one of the first things we experience when we’re changing from being children to being adolescents. One of the signs is that we suddenly start falling in love with a camp counselor or with a teacher. Usually the first objects of our affections are at a distance, rather than someone who falls in love with us in return. Maybe it’s so compelling later because of those first experiences.

FP There’s that dreadful familiarity each time you have those first experiences all over again.

LD Obsessive or foiled or frustrated love is very compelling because you don’t have control over it. It’s the most extreme example of not being able to control another person.

FP It also puts you smack up against some unknowable mystery that I think at some points, or for some people, wisely gets turned into religious emotion. It’s that sense of the unknowable. In some of the stories in Break It Down it’s the question: Why is this guy doing this? You might as well be Job asking God why He’s done what He’s done.

LD Right, and I’m not allowed to ask. I can ask, but he won’t really tell me. Just as I can strive for grace or perfection but maybe it won’t be granted to me.

FP Or strive for knowledge. (pause) When did you figure out that the self watching the self write was a permissible thing to put in the story? So many of the stories have that element. It’s one of the things that give them dimension and textures and layers.

LD In The Unnamable, Beckett certainly includes the self watching the self write. There’s a story within a story. The old man who keeps losing his pencil is trying to tell a story about a strange family whose name I forget—Saposcat or something. I didn’t do it for a long time, because everything I read said you don’t do that.

FP You’re not supposed to do that.

LD So even though I got that from Beckett right away, it’s as if you have to go through the stages of writing more traditional stories before you can go back to what really spoke to you first.

FP Right. Here I am trying to write, trying to describe this thing for which there are no words, for which there is no point in writing, which I don’t understand the point of writing. Before that, there was Flaubert with all those pronouncements about how the writer should be as invisible in the work as God is in creation.

LD That’s why I felt as though I was cheating with “The Center of the Story.” I added another layer, and that other dimension or perspective automatically made the stories richer and more interesting. But is that cheating or not?

FP Why would you think it would be?

LD I guess this is why: either I should have had that intention from the very beginning, it should have been part and parcel of the whole conception; or the story should have been strong enough to stand on its own, anyway. My slightly uneasy feeling was, couldn’t I do that with each story that didn’t work? Here’s another story coming along with a broken leg. This one is just too slow. How can I speed it up? Ah, here comes another with another problem. I often seem to work in pairs: whatever impulse I have with one story there’s enough of that impulse left to do another story.

FP I was going to ask you about that, if the stories led to other stories or if they were all discrete stories?

LD They usually don’t lead to others, except that as I’m writing, I get a certain level of energy going that makes me more inclined to think of other stories. So in that sense one story will spawn a lot of other beginnings. I got into a strange thing at one point: “How He Is Often Right I & II” ended one way in one version and went off in another direction in another version. I simply didn’t know which was better. They seemed like two alternatives. I did publish them as “I & II” in a couple of instances, and then in another instance I combined the two into one. I decided one was weaker and one was stronger. I got very intrigued by that dilemma when I was writing the novel, feeling like I could have done it like this or just as well like that. It’s so much more comfortable when you’re writing a story and you see there’s only one way to go with it, but when you see that there are all these forks in the road and you’re not sure you’ve taken the right one . . .

FP But it’s also because the consciousness of the narrator in most of the stories is the consciousness of someone who can see a number of different possible explanations or paths or interpretations.

LD Yes. It’s very unnerving. It was very unnerving with the novel not to be sure that this or that decision was right.

FP How far in advance do you know?

LD Know what?

FP What’s going to happen with a story or the novel?

LD I hate to say “right from the beginning” because that contradicts everything I’ve ever thought and studied and learned and taught students—that you shouldn’t know. But of course in most pieces even if you know, there are a lot of things you don’t know that will happen along the way. With the novel I knew roughly what events and what time period I wanted to cover. But in the one-paragraph stories, I didn’t know exactly where a certain argument was going to land. But that’s a different problem because those are not plotted stories. In a plotted story I might know that X was going to get sick and better again, but in these logical argument stories, I really do have to write them over and over again.

FP You say “logical argument,” but it’s always a kind of logic that’s just teetering on the edge of absurdity.

LD Right, it’s got to be water-tight logic within an absurd situation or starting from an absurd premise.

FP That’s what’s thrilling about them. You’re reading it and you’re absolutely convinced, and it’s not until the end that you go, “Huh?”

LD Yes. I’m thinking of one called “Ethics.” I heard on a television program that the idea of “Do unto your neighbor as you would have him do unto you” was the basis for all systems of ethics. Then I realized if I applied it to one person I knew, it wouldn’t work because he would really want certain people to be angry and hostile towards him because he was already feeling that way towards them. So I had to work that out.

FP What is it that you’re trying to get to in “What I Feel”?

LD The revelation that the character has is that her feelings may someday not seem very important to her. Once they’re not important, then life is a lot easier. But it’s still important to her what she feels, or it still plays a big part in how she reacts to things. I guess what’s so hard to get is the very end, that she’s comforted both because she realizes “Ah, I am free of this horrible burden of my feelings” and that she realizes “Someday I will be free of this horrible burden of my feelings.” I still haven’t quite got it.

FP I always think how much of what the Buddha said made perfect sense, and yet is difficult and impossible to follow. Still, it’s comforting to think that you can get to that point.

LD Exactly. But I can’t even get the last sentence. It’s 95 percent there, but not 100 percent. I was still working on it in the copyediting stage. So that really is an example of the thought not being quite there until the writing is there. As long as it’s not expressed quite right I haven’t brought it to some sort of completion or realization.

FP So I guess the question is: Do you think about, I don’t know how to even put it, the religious states of consciousness?

LD More and more, I suppose. Maybe because I’m approaching 50. It seems much more urgent to . . . I have always loved the language of the King James version of the Bible. It’s hard not to love that. I was asked to write an essay on the New Testament last year and I did.

FP What was the essay about?

LD I wrote about a book written by the Jesus Seminar about what Jesus actually, probablysaid. It’s a fascinating work of detective analysis to try to discover what in the Gospels is actually quoting or nearly quoting. They color-code it so that only what’s printed in red are the words that Jesus probably spoke. And there are very few, some of the parables and then the word Abba, which I love. Aramaic for “father.” The word Abba is the only thing he quite certainly said. It’s partly my fascination with detective work, but I love the idea of taking this figure who has really been such a problem and trying to put all of the images or the preconceptions and misconceptions to one side and try to get to what the man actually said. You get to one word, Abba. Which is also pleasing because of the pattern of the letters, a rhyme scheme in poetry: ABBA.

FP And also a palindrome.

LD And the first two letters of the alphabet.

FP Why is Jesus a problem for you?

LD The figure of Jesus has been so overlaid with sentimentality. It has served so many political agents. It has been so completely co-opted by certain groups of people.

FP Also it seems to me that one of the things that you’re writing about is how difficult it is to practice the things that the scriptures make sound easy. Kindness, charity, patience—all the virtues. So many of the stories in Almost No Memory are about what happens if you actually think about those things for two seconds, or try to put them into practice. It’s impossible.

LD Like a good Christian, which I’m not, I wrestle daily with these problems. How to have more patience, how to love someone.

FP And the situations for which you need the most patience are precisely the most difficult ones to be patient in.

LD Right. If it’s easy for you to be brave, are you really being brave? If it’s easy to be patient, are you really being patient? It may be easier to be brave in a heroic situation than patient in a boring, mundane situation. So you should get more credit for being patient with your two-year-old in the supermarket than you should for saving somebody’s life. It’s the tedious things that are more difficult.

FP I want to go back to the self-watching-the-self-write question. One of the things I like best about writing is that it shuts off the voice of the self when you really get into the work, all those voices, “What are we having for dinner?” or “Why did blah-blah say that to me?” or “How are we going to pay the bills?”—shut up. I think this is one reason I write, because it’s the only way I can get some peace and quiet. How does the self watching the self write enter into that equation? Is it also a way out of distraction, or is it just using the distraction?

LD It is definitely just as far from the annoying distractions of daily life. I seem to be moving in the direction of less and less fiction and more and more philosophical investigation. But then there’s another part of me that says that it would be really very enjoyable to write a straightforward novel in which fictional characters interact in fictional situations. A simply told novel—that would be fun, too.

FP In Break it Down a number of the narrators wear glasses. Are you nearsighted?

LD Definitely. And now I’m bifocal. I probably have an astigmatism, or I’m myopic. I don’t know all the technical terms. My father wore trifocals—the ultimate English professor.

FP One of the things that I love about the stories is that there’s something out of focus that reduces everything to first principles. Only in very few stories does the reader know where the story is taking place—what city—and only in very few stories do the characters have names. Or they have odd generic names like Wife Number One. When I was a kid I didn’t wear my glasses for years because I was too vain. And when I first read the stories they recreated that sense of not seeing exactly, but somehow feeling that not seeing is more accurate than seeing.

LD When you’re not wearing your glasses, all you can see is what is close to you. You can’t see the context. You can’t see the rest of the room or across the street. I also didn’t wear my glasses some of the time out of vanity. I have thought about this because I notice it all the time—that in reading students’ work or discussing other peoples’ work, I don’t have much trouble focusing on detail, word to word, sentence to sentence, but I have to make a major effort to step back from a piece of writing and summarize what its themes are. As a child I resisted knowing much about the outside world—politics, international situations. In college I had only a very vague sense of facts, of distances. I remember being asked in some psychological test how far it is from New York to London, and even though I’d been to Europe at least twice already, I said about 15,000 miles. I was terrible at current events in school. I did well on one assignment which was to take a newspaper article and point out where the reporter was showing bias. Again, that was a close textual analysis.

FP It was just about language.

LD I hated history because the events could have come out too many different ways. Whereas I loved math because there was only one way a problem could come out.

FP And languages?

LD I was very good at languages. I loved Latin. Latin actually made more sense than French, probably because of the math element again.

FP I loved Latin, although I hated math. That the two things were related never occurred to me. I loved Latin because of how logical it was, like solving a crossword puzzle. There was an answer, and you got it.

LD When you’re solving the problem of the Latin sentence, there are two things going on: the pleasure of solving the puzzle, but also the emotional satisfaction of finding out what this mysterious thing is. Then there’s another pleasure—the pleasure of putting it into English words. I like English best. People assume because I translate French I’m a Francophile, but the fact is I don’t like French as much as I like English.

FP What is it about English?

LD The plainness. I love the Anglo-Saxon words as opposed to the Latinate. Bread, milk, love, war, peace, cow, dog. The English word “and” seems much more solid, like an apple. Maybe it has to do with those early Dick and Jane books again. Words beginning with “a”, “and” and “apple” are somehow healthy. The Spanish “y” is just preposterous. It’s weird and strange. (laughter)

FP Does translation help in other ways besides taking up so much of your time?

LD I get a lot of pleasure out of it. I’ve been doing it for about 25 years and it’s become even more enjoyable, but I worry that as it becomes more enjoyable maybe I’m becoming a worse translator. I’m worrying about this with the latest text I’ve been working on, Michel Leiris’ Rules of the Game, a four volume autobiographical essay. I did the first two volumes and then I started working on the third volume in a sort of blissful state, because I was translating it almost literally rather than reworking a sentence. That’s the way I like to translate anyway, keeping, as much as possible, the same word order and the same words. If I could use a cognate of the French word I would. It was like a hand in a glove. But then I began to worry: Have I gone too far? Am I creating a language that is going to read as a stilted difficult language in between French and English?

FP But it does make you more conscious of the words and of the necessity of dithering long enough to find the right word. I always wish my students would understand that one word may actually be better than another word, and it’s worth the time to get that word no matter how long it takes.

LD That’s one thing that I really like about translating—I don’t have to think up the next word. I don’t have to use my imagination. That’s why it’s a relaxing thing to do, and at the same time it’s a form of writing.

FP Do you take notes on, as they say, real life?

LD If I’m in that really nice awake, alert frame of mind I’ll take copious notes. I like to be in that frame of mind because it usually means I’m working on something, but sometimes for months and months at a time I’ll just stop writing. Then at other times I write just about everything down.

FP I love when that happens—when everything seems related to what you’re writing. It’s like everything has a little message that you’re being sent that will be useful to you someday. Oh, look at the way that person holds that chicken drumstick!

LD And listen to what they just said. Everything you notice forms a nice sentence. I’m afraid I sometimes take notes on telephone conversations even as they’re going on, but I hasten to say only within my own family.

FP Thank God! (laughter)

LD My own family—because I’ve been hearing the way they talk and the sorts of things they say for so long, sometimes I’m thinking more about how they’re talking than what they’re saying. My family tends to say rather funny things. My mother will refer to “the nicest Republican you could find.” My sister will mention a man with three premature nephews. So I am sometimes guilty of what most people would probably think of as how a writer works. People are afraid a writer will take notes on what they’re saying or doing and use it as material.

FP I do that, too. I think that my job is to notice the things that you’re not supposed to notice. The things that people say that are just supposed to be normal conversation or friendly chat, but that are searingly unkind. I can’t stop noticing them. Of course when you put those things in your book no one ever thanks you for it.

LD I have to say, though, that I’ve never put anything into a story that my mother or sister has said. I have used things that my husband has said. I think it’s uncomfortable for people to be written about even when it’s very positive, because they feel as if they’re being used.

FP Do you think so? I think people are often flattered.

LD One friend was very uncomfortable. Another friend skimmed the story to find all the places she appeared to see if they were okay. Then she settled down and read it again from the beginning. She said it actually had a very good effect on her because at that time she was feeling: What does my life add up to? She’s in her forties, and enough decades have gone by so she was feeling a little discouraged. When she saw herself in print and saw all the things that she had said and done and thought, she had a different feeling. Her life did add up to something. She was a real person. Not because she was in the book, but because the book showed her to herself. That was very nice.

FP It also means that on the simplest level somebody’s been paying attention or listening, which I think everyone wants. Or at least that’s what I try and tell myself when I’m afraid of the other response which is: How dare you invade my privacy and use me?

LD Even though a lot of my friends are writers, I’ve rarely felt troubled by that, are they going to go home and make a note of our conversation?

FP You’re right, it never occurs to me. (laughter)

LD It never occurs to me, either. I ought to know better.

FP One of the things about your work—even though I’m not sure what I mean—is if you took Lydia’s name off the story, you would still know it’s a Lydia Davis story. What do I mean? Maybe you know.

LD Well, I was just writing a letter yesterday to a man who read my novel and wrote about it in exactly the way you would want someone to read a book of yours.

FP Where was this?

LD This was in The London Review of Books. Michael Hofmann wrote it. It was smart. It was beautifully written. He saw things I didn’t see. He caught everything I would have wanted someone to catch. He called the book a comedy—toward the end of this very serious discussion—which pleased me to no end. What I found interesting was after a couple of months of enjoying this review I began having this uneasy feeling that maybe he just read it the way I would like someone to read it, but that doesn’t mean that’s what the book was, or is. I really had to face up to the philosophical idea that a book is completed by the reader. Suddenly the book didn’t have a single existence anymore. And maybe another review, a short little dismissive review that it also got was just as accurate. I mean that reader saw this negative version of the book which had been my worst fear as I was working on it.

FP If somebody’s response is what you intended, it’s as if you asked a question and got an answer. The right answer. If no one in the entire universe understood the thing you were trying to do, then maybe you weren’t able to do it. But if someone actually got it, as this guy clearly did, then it was there to be gotten and someone else just didn’t get it.

LD Well, that would be nice. But, if he’s the only one who got everything, then was it written for only one person?

FP Hardly anyone can read anymore, that’s the trouble.

LD That might be one answer. Hofmann used some very nice phrases. Here’s the phrase that sprang to mind when you asked how would you know a story was by me—he used the phrase “fussy drone.” (laughter) What he appreciated was the shapeliness of thought, the shapeliness of structure. He implied that there was a sensuality to the structure of the sentences and the structure of the thought. If all the sensuality is contained in the shapeliness of the grammar or the structure of the sentence then that structure has to be exactly right. The sentence has to be just right and the thought has to be just right because if it isn’t, well, it’s not as shapely.

http://bombsite.com/issues/60/articles/2086


Read also
Biography of Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis / The Mother

THE MOTHER

by Lydia Davis

The girl wrote a story. “But how much better it would be if you wrote a novel,” said her mother. The girl built a doll-house. “But how much better if it were a real house,” her mother said. The girl made a small pillow for her father. “But wouldn’t a quilt be more practical,” said her mother. The girl dug a small hole in the garden. “But how much better if you dug a large hole,” said her mother. The girl dug a large hole and went to sleep in it. “But how much better if you slept forever,” said her mother.


Read also
Biography of Lydia Davis

Tim Walker / The Surreal World of a Spellbinging Genius

Tim Walker, Giant doll kicks Lindsey Wixson, 

Eglingham Hall, Northumberland, 2011. 

Tim Walker

THE SUUREAL WORLD

OF A SEPELLBINGING GENIUS

Somerset House has been transformed into a veritable fairyland, a surreal world belonging to the magical stylings of Tim Walker.  Walker has always been fascinated by the make-believe since as a 19-year old intern at Vogue he established their Cecil Beaton Archive.  After completing his studies at the age of 25 he shot his first Vogue fashion story; the rest, as they say, is history.  He was the recipient of the second ‘Isabella Blow Award for Fashion Creator’ at the British Fashion Awards in 2008 and the following year he received an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York. His photos are instantly recognisable including many famous fashion campaigns such as those of Mulberry (who are supporting the exhibition), Hèrmes and Valentino.

The extravagant and dazzling exhibition seeks to replicate the photos.  The first room contains a life-sized Spitfire, a prop used for a 2009 Burberry shoot for Vogue starring Lily Donaldson.  Here, it has crashed and erupted through the fireplace.  There’s no slow start.  This is Walker – take it or leave it.

Tim Walker, Lily Donaldson and Blue Spitfire, Glemham Hall, Suffolk, 2009. 

The exhibition guides us through Walker’s collaborations with some of the biggest names in contemporary fashion and culture: Alber Elbaz sporting a pair of rabbit ears (fairy tales are frequently referenced); Karen Elson up against it with a giant crocodile; Agyness Deyn in the sand dunes of Namibia; Tilda Swinton in Iceland; Alexander McQueen and a memento mori of skull and cigarettes; Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton turning an Essex garden centre into a danse macabre; Stella Tennant in a pink cloud among the rhododendrons of an English country garden and a visitor from outer space who surprises a foxhunt in Northumberland.  Some of the scenes are a bit bizarre to say the least but they are not scary – in fact they are mesmerising.  Walker’s images are characteristically British – from the models and design to the background.

Tim Walker, Stella Tennant and pink powder cloud, Eglingham Hall, Northumberland, 2007. 

As with the Spitfire, props from the photographs are brought into the gallery.  I, for one, love bringing props into exhibitions and so they were onto a winner here with me but, when busy, this can make the display seem cluttered.  In particular, the room with the giant swan is very difficult to navigate especially as all the cold skaters from the Somerset House ice rink are migrating inside, seeking warmth from anywhere, even an art gallery.  The wall labels are also quite amateurish and some are even peeling off – a shame considering how the rest of the show has been thought out.  The wall labels and quotes are printed on corners making you move with them – the photos aren’t straightforward and the display follows this.  Despite these flaws this is a really fabulous show where the new East Wing at Somerset House has truly found its feet.

Skaters at Somerset House.  

In this exhibition, we are transported to Walker’s world where his imagination comes alive. And what a world it is!  Walker shoots entirely in film – for him, the easy part is pointing and shooting and the camera ‘is simply a box put between you and what you want to capture’.  The magic, and his genius, lies in the designs of these amazing sets that show off his models and all their couture finery.  The team involved here includes hair and make-up artists, fashion stylists, costume fitters, model makers, set designers, builders, producers, painters, prop suppliers and models with Walker at the centre waving his magic wand.

Tim Walker, Olga Shearer on blue horse, Sennowe Park, Norfolk, 2007. 

Somewhat surprisingly, Walker’s preference when looking at this show is his portraits, favouring the stripped back contrast of the faces to his previous flamboyance.  He feels it’s time for something new but I find it very hard to believe he’s going to leave all this behind.  Who knows?  Let’s see.

Tim Walker 
Alexander McQueen with skull and cigarettes 
Clerkenwell, London, 2009. 

Looking at Walker’s photographs feels as if we are somewhere else, in his own surreal land.  The soft focus, framing devices and clever lighting enhances this.  It is, in fact, the experience of viewing the photograph that stays with us longer than some of the specific images.  The works are an incredible cross between fashion, theatre, design and art.  They don’t have to come down in one place as they encapsulate all these things; and they encapsulate them faultlessly. 

And so it was time for me to journey to my own winter wonderland and don some skates at the Tower of London to be whisked away once more, this time onto the ice.

Tim Walker: Story Teller is at Somerset House until 27^th January 2013

www.somersethouse.org.uk.

http://chloenelkin.wordpress.com/tag/photography/

Oliver Sacks

My hero: Oliver Sacks

by Hilary Mantel

He has been a patient, too, and is wise enough to know he cannot leave himself out of the story


Hilary Mantel
The Guardian, Friday 8 February 2013 13.31 GMT

"Which book changed your life?" is a question it's tempting to answer with a shrug; the truth is, books can seldom do that by themselves. But in 1970, before he was a household name, Oliver Sacks wrote a book called Migraine. More modest and more technical than his big hits – Awakenings or The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat – the book is still remarkable in its shrewd perceptions and breadth of reference. It changed my life, and I dare say that of thousands of other sufferers, by increasing my knowledge of this strange condition. And for a patient, knowledge is power.