NONFICTION
For Lydia Davis, Language Is Character
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ESSAYS ONE
By Lydia Davis
By Lydia Davis
In the preface to this ample assembly of her essays, Lydia Davis offers a modest account of the book’s origin. “I thought it was time to collect the pieces of nonfiction I had had occasion to write over the decades and bring them together in one place.” “Occasion” is a freighted word here, for almost everything in “Essays One” is “occasional” in an old-fashioned sense: derived from an opportunity, pretext or invitation. There are tributes and introductions to some of the writers Davis has translated — Gustave Flaubert, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Butor. There are sage and agile talks delivered to writing students at N.Y.U., crisp essays for magazines and even a lovely thesaurus entry. At their best, Davis’s essays resemble her celebrated short stories — her most recent collection is “Can’t and Won’t” (2014) — which are wryly occasional too: worked up from dreams, diaries, notebooks, letters of complaint and stray phrases from emails.
Four of the five N.Y.U. lectures are subtitled “Forms and Influences,” which sounds awfully professorial. They are actually deadpan narrative lessons in how to pay attention like Lydia Davis — both to the word and the world. At 12, Davis knew she was a writer, and fixed her ambitions on The New Yorker, where both her parents had published stories. Then she found Kafka, Borges, Isaac Babel. “I was in my early teens when I first laid eyes on a page of Samuel Beckett,” she writes. “I was startled.” Her ambitions sharpened as her ear tuned to Beckett’s Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, his tortured but exact syntax, the sonic perfection of his prose as it sought the comic depths of human suffering. Davis’s approach to writing, and to teaching writing, is virtually all there in her brief account of discovering Beckett. She recommends unstinting regard for language and sedulous habits of self-revision; then she throws in, like an afterthought, an extra moral dimension: “Work on your character.”
Perhaps for Davis language, or a painstaking attitude to language, is character. It’s a matter first of judgment, then of invention. In an essay on “Revising One Sentence,” she describes the fixes, cuts and inclusions required to compose this poised sentence: “She walks around the house balancing on the balls of her feet, sometimes whistling and singing, sometimes talking to herself, sometimes stopping dead in a fencing position.” (A sentence, by the way, that Davis may never even use in a story — it exists for its own sake as a notebook flourish.) In “A Note on the Word ‘Gubernatorial,’” which Davis contributed to the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, she enjoys the word’s sound, “incorporating two voiced plosives and the word ‘goober.’” More important: Knowing why “gubernatorial” conceals its “softer, silkier, cousin, ‘govern,’” means that you, fretful thesaurus user, will deploy these and other words with more lively precision from now on. Abstract words, Davis tells her students, almost always conceal a real thing, such as a herd, a seed, a rodent, a goat. “Know what that concrete thing is.”
[ Read an excerpt from “Essays One.” ]
Finding the right word is one thing, taking it for a walk another. Like most writers who are called “experimental,” Davis shrugs off the label — it suggests rules or protocols, when in fact she proceeds by intuition, accident and divination. She can seem, in her fiction and the way she talks about it, like a writer who is all minimalist control. There is a beautiful account here of how she wrote certain stories based on Flaubert’s letters to his lover, the writer Louise Colet. Davis agonized over how much detail to alter, whether to keep an occasional “etc.,” and how much breathable white space to dilate Flaubert’s dense paragraphs with. But there are exuberant economies in writing too, as Davis says of Henry James and Marcel Proust, whose books seem baggy only if you’re not concentrating. In an essay on Joseph Cornell, Davis delights in the measured extravagance of lists. Here’s just a fragment from one of hers: “a meridienne, banquette, pouf, ottoman, ear, stile, cross rail, stretcher, cross stretcher, crinoline stretcher, cornice, top rail, diamond point.”
“Essays One” is dominated by pieces about writers and writing. It’s a joy to read Davis on John Ashbery’s wedging solid Anglo-Saxon words into his Rimbaud translations, on Lucia Berlin’s admirable monosyllables or on the young Thomas Pynchon’s “heady sense of a smart college boy’s power over language.” But the Cornell essay — “a response by analogy” — is another sort of adventure, oblique and incantatory, something closer to a prose poem than a critical essay in its mysterious affinity for the artist’s work. Davis’s essays about visual art (including one on her husband, the painter Alan Cote) are consistently stranger and more compelling than her merely wise and brilliant reflections on literature. Best of all is “Dutch Scenes,” a series of extended captions to snapshots of the Netherlands taken by a friend’s great-great-grandfather in the early 1900s. Here Davis reaches the tireless attentive ambiguity of a story like “The Cows” (from “Can’t and Won’t”); observing the hats of turn-of-the-century Dutch women, she deadpans: “Here, one is black, while the others are white, surely signifying something.”
A planned second volume of Davis’s nonfiction (“Essays Two,” I presume) is to include her many writings on translation; it will be worth it alone for the thrillingly detailed pieces she has written about translating the first volume of Proust. There is a question, I suppose, about whether Davis’s disparate, occasional nonfiction deserves the weighty presence of two fat volumes titled “Essays.” Outside of a handful of more intimate pieces — on her great-great-grandfather’s meeting with Abraham Lincoln, for instance — she is not really an essayist, critical or personal, in a determined sense. Or is she? In its skewed relation to the real, her fiction already lives on the outskirts of the form. No matter. One gets the impression that even the most fleeting of pieces in “Essays One,” such as a few paragraphs about her favorite short stories, written for a British tabloid, has been given the precise and playful Lydia Davis treatment: “Subtly, or less subtly, you always want to surprise a reader.”
Brian Dillon is the author, most recently, of “Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction.” He is working on a new book about sentences.
ESSAYS ONEBy Lydia Davis
Illustrated. 512 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.
Illustrated. 512 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.
A version of this article appears in print on , Page 16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: In a Word. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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