The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
"Story" starts "The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis". It is a rough start. The story of "Story" (1986) is that the narrator is concerned with the whereabouts of her ex-husband (I assume, given the narrator of other stories), has an argument concerning it, and then tries to understand the situation logically.
The denouement:
The fact that he does not tell me the truth all the time makes me not sure of his truth at certain times, and then I work to figure out for myself if what he is telling me is the truth or not, and sometimes I can figure out that it's not the truth and sometimes I don't know and never know, and sometimes just because he says it to me over and over again I am convinced it is the truth because I don't believe he would repeat a lie so often.
I'm not against the concept, but the psychological depth and the matter are lacking. I hope I do not appear as one of those vociferous critics of Jane Austen. Where Austen's lens was a panorama around the room, lingering on this person's thoughts on this and that, creating a universe of opinions and musings, Davis here is simply trying to unspool the strings of her thinking, which is so commonplace so as not to be surprising and therefore arguably not worth writing about.
Then there is this groaner of social commentary in "The Fears of Mrs. Orlando" (1986), behind the eyes of the titular protagonist:
She has been attacked by a man in an elevator, downtown. It was at night, the man was black, and she did not know the neighborhood. She was younger then. She has been molested several times in a crowded bus. In a restaurant once, after an argument, an excited waiter spilled coffee on her hands.
I like to think I understand Davis's viewpoint. She is not commenting on this particular character necessarily, she is commenting on all thinking, of all kinds of anxieties, of all kinds of paranoia concerning life, and how that molds around certain events and certain stereotypes. Nevertheless, this is just commentary; as the matter is constrained around this thoroughly unthinking character, there is no analysis on top of the commentary, and there is not much else beyond the commentary interesting in the depiction.
"St. Martin" (1997) stands out as having many of Davis's worst impulses. Evidently based on a personal account, a narrator recounts a series of events while watching a house in St. Martin. Where a writer would wisely thread these recollections together, she remarks on each of them without much chronology or much interest. Her habit of hollowing out her characters so that only "he" and "she" remain is ill-fitting for this instance. One ought to take advantage of the remembering itself, as well as our unconscious tendency to edit and re-interpret them, which Davis does in fact do in a number of other short stories. For another kind of writer, they may cohere through an aesthetic theme, making a kind of poetry out of them. Yet she instead takes postmodern doctrine to a kind of extreme, happy with the events as fact or a bit of nifty knowledge. It ends with the non-sequitur, "Its song was not really unlike the song of a mockingbird, with warbles, and twitters, and trills, warbles, chirps, and warbles again, but it issued in the midst of the silence of the night, in the dark or in the moonlight, from a spot mysteriously hidden among the black branches." This is not all too bad a sentence, but the rhythm is choppy - "with war / bles, and / twit ters, / and tr / ills" is good, but "war / bles, ch / irps, and / war bles / a gain", "again" is a chunky dead-end in the mouth after the t, r and uh sounds - and the imagery is rather stale, the final race of "night", "dark", "moonlight", "mysteriously hidden" and "black branches" letting us know that it was indeed a dark night, in my so saying there is no surprising quality in the thing observed. Where even in Davis's blandest writing I can latch onto a piece of psychology, I found nothing to keep my attention on, subsequently got sleepy, and focused instead on the television which by chance had Smackdown showing.
When the mind gets bored, quite predictably it begins to wander. It wonders how it is the author came to certain decisions, why people like the writing, what publication took the pains to trump up this collection, and why it is that it is reading the selected work. And so I wandered.
It must have been the winter of 2013. My mind always plays games such as this, concerning dates, schedules, events. No, wait, it could not have been winter, it must have been spring. The submissions for the contest were due in the winter, and there is another reason yet why it must have been spring.
So, it was spring, of 2014, not 2013. I must have mistook the day for winter because it was quite dark outside, and possibly a little chilly. I would be wearing a red sweater, school's colors, but only matching in color; I would never buy anything but books in the campus bookstore. At that time of night, I suppose 7 or 8, the evening sun had long tucked itself into bed beneath the horizon and the arc lamps of the university acquired a misty yellow or orange glow. Spring brings sweet-smelling flowers. But I had been hunting for pizza. No better place to hawk for free food than the celebration of the recent winner of the Man Booker Prize.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute holds a yearly contest for writing submissions, fiction and non-fiction, named after Dr. McKinney, Class of 1884. The winners are announced in a fairly modern building made of glass - upon leaving the Commons, one goes down the stairs, takes a left, following the arrowheads of a bronze-colored fence, and then takes a right into campus proper, where all the critical book-learning takes place; through here, one steps through fields of flowers and fake-looking grass, which are alighted by fattened earthworms during the times of rain, until one reaches the furthest end of the aforementioned modern-looking building which seems composed only of offices, offices, offices. Was it the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies? My mind is foggy, but it must be. A twist of irony, that small auditorium discussing fiction of all things in that official-sounding building.
Rensselaer, or RPI, is an engineering school. It's not known for any liberal arts program, except maybe in video game design. Nevertheless, Lydia Davis recently had been given a major honor, and she happened to be a professor for the University at Albany, which was an hour away from Troy, New York.
For this reason, as well as another, I was not looking forward to this event. I was looking forward to free pizza, sure, but I had a dim view on what the school's brightest of the bright had to offer in terms of poetry and short fiction. "They're fans of science fiction and Tolkien." I fancied myself an aficionado of James Joyce. I had wanted to go to New York University, whose Yusuf Komunyakaa, another venerable writer, that prior day me would also have sneered.
Which goes to say I further had a dim view of anyone who "won" things, a view that, to tell the truth, I carry on to this day because the days have only confirmed it more, though my attitude has softened. James never won anything. Neither had Kafka. But my mantra was fanatical stylistically speaking, so if my school liked her, I could not like her. There is nothing about the truth hurting, but there is in being a jerk.
So I can only fail in describing the auditorium's small round shape - it contained maybe forty to fifty of us, in rows of ten, red leather upholstered seats with arm rests - its smooth honey-colored walls constructed of mahogony planks or finished with fake mahogony polish, the carpeted floor, grey I believe, the dim light overhead, and the descending steps leading to the stage and podium she spoke on, as well as the projector moved on a cart decades old that I would bet was stored in the basement of the Darrin Communications Center, or the DCC.
There she stood, modestly holding the microphone to her chest, which was awkwardly passed from person to person during the Q&A phase, wrapped in a scarf and cardigan, cold apparently, her nose wrinkled, her hands folded below her waist, grey glasses spectacled, looking every bit like the woman she writes about.
Okay, New York Times bestseller, show me what you've got.
She read excerpts from her stories. The two most memorable were "Can't and Won't", which recounts a dream of a rejected submission to The New Yorker as a result of it containing the words "can't" and "won't" too often, and passages inspired by Flaubert's letters. The writing was funny. The writing was a little sad. The writing was earnest.
I confess I was stubborn to accept Davis's writing because I myself was engaged in microfiction at the time. I would not be proud in showing my pieces of that era. Though, neither would I be proud of showing some of Davis's pieces. Microfiction is a beast that way. What is really the lesson here is that everyone has their own path, but in one's youth you blame all paths because you are intensely suspicious of your own.
For the Q&A, I recall one specific question only. Well, I recall two: the other was by a sensitive associate professor of computer science, who had won that year for non-fiction, whom I had the pleasure of meeting, whose question in my memory was a good one about the writing process or the nature of writing, though acquaintance may have blurred the truth.
A red-headed man, skin milky, bearded and pockmarked, in a single-colored T-shirt arose, and asked:
"Do you think video games are art?"
to which I groaned and put my head in my hands.
Lydia Davis was born in 1947. At that time, she was 66, turning to 67 in the upcoming summer. She answered that she had no idea, and, to placate her interviewer: Maybe. All to deaf ears. He fumbled and provided his Internet arguments. From this experience, I have developed an intense dislike for that question.
When the event was over, I stole another slice of pizza, a cookie, scoffed at the copies of her book selling for twenty dollars - my current copy of "Collected Stories" is twenty-five, so joke's on me - scurried to the basement of the DCC and opened my book of "Zeno's Conscience". That's why it must have been spring: the preceding fall I finished "Ulysses", the winter "At Swim-Two-Birds", the beginning of the winter semester "Anna Karenina" and then fell, unfathomably, irreversibly, transcendentally in love with Svevo/Schmitz's comic masterpiece on life and love and the pains of age that spring. I will forget dates, schedules, birthdays, doctor appointments and anniversaries, but I don't forget beautiful books and the seasons I read them.
Lydia Davis impressed me. Arrogant thing to say surely; perhaps I phrased that sentence incorrectly. Her writing impressed me. This is the highest honor a writer could be given, when their creation, separate from them, detached from their mind and their reputation, earns honors on its own merits. I respect her and I respect her opinions; she was the one who introduced me to Karl Ove Knausgaard, another interesting cat.
Even if I had no time to read her - the bookshelf is always growing, regardless if one pays attention to it or not - I knew I would one day come back to her. Her cadence and questions left an impression on me. Age would also make me appreciate her all the more. And so here I am now.
It is OK to not be right. The anthology is the right place for the reader not to be right.
The beginning stories of Farrar, Strauss and Giroux's "Collected Stories of Colette" are not among Colette's best. The opening story, "Clouk", has too much gilt and is full of paper people; some of its psychological material belongs in a scandal rag and it reads like a rather silly conversational drama. In fact, Colette never really rid herself of this kind of sentimentality, over emotionality, throughout her career - her later dialogue and denouements feel rehearsed on a stage. (I realized, after revisiting it nearly a decade later, that some of my most superficial, lightest and airiest prose have been inspired by my early ventures with Colette.) "Cheri" at least has the character Lea, whom Colette, then in her mid-30s and alone often after an acrimonious first marriage, must have empathized with greatly.
Yet "Clouk" begins quite early with this sentence: "He [, Clouk,] wipes his monocole with the corner of his handkerchief and at the same time closes his bad eye, which the lights in the restaurant, so white they are mauve, sting to the point of tears" (translated by Matthew Ward). "Lights" "so white they are mauve"...stinging to the point of tears.
That sentence is entirely Colette's. It doesn't matter what age you find her in - the weepy stage drama of her early writing (probably influenced by first husband and professional asshole "Willy"), the psychological intensity of her middle years, or the fantastical, precisely magical transformations over memory and sensation she was able to perform in her later years, Colette always had impossible control over a scene. Like Mickey Mouse in "Fantasia", everything comes to life in her writing, arguing with the protagonist, and in so arguing asserting their existence and phenomenal nature. For a lot of her life Colette was miserable, but she paid attention to every bit of it, and she was able to convert the smallest of details - say, the soup the dancers ate, the regulars of a cabaret, the particular humidity of a day, the construction of a lamp - into rolling, flying, beautiful sentences.
You read Colette's early stories because no one has captured the ism of fin de siecle France better than she did. But you also read them for her later stories. Everyone talks about Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, but no one talks about Colette's cabaret days, which she describes only partially in "Gribiche", the culmination of the "Backstage at the Music Hall" section:
I never arrived before quarter past nine. By that time, the temperature and the smell of the basement of the theater had already acquired their full intensity. I shall not give the exact location of the music hall in which, some time between 1905 and 1910, I was playing a sketch in a revue. All I need say is that the underground dressing rooms had neither windows nor ventilators. In our women's quarters, the doors of the rows of identical cells remained innocently open; the men...far less numerous in revues than nowadays...dressed on the floor above, almost at street level. When I arrived, I found myself among women already acclimatized to the temperature, for they had been in their dressing rooms since eight o' clock. The steps of the iron staircase clanged musically under my feet; the last five steps each gave out their particular note like a xylophone - B, B flat, C, D, and then dropping a fifth to G. I shall never forget their inevitable refrain. (Translated by Antonia White)
The "Varietes of Human Nature" section is when Colette enters full lyrical strength. Where some great authors have maybe years of genius, Colette had decades.
We tend to romanticize writers. We think they have some unforeseen depth. Really when we place them under our rational powers, they are nothing but strange people. The greatest of them have spent years constructing a language of their own, many under the necessity caused by duress. They work, work, work. "Il faut travailler, rien que travailler," so Rodin instructed Rilke.
With a sufficiently great writer, even in their soggiest or purplest of prose, we see some reflection of them in their sentences. The critic is not some pursuer of "greatness", a word so close to perfection that its precision must be off; the critic is in pursuit of ideas, the critic is a pursuer of the person behind the page, ever elusive though they are.
So, let's start again.
Let us return back to "Story", particularly that sentence I had critiqued. Let's turn from the what and the how of the matter, and focus on the why. What makes Davis's writing appealing, particularly in our postmodern milieu, is that she reduces metaphysical concepts. She plays with the concept of the "truth", which is really only the "truth" in so far as it is validates the narrator's viewpoint, like a hockey player plays with a puck, bouncing it back and forth through variations.
Yet that alone would not make the writing interesting, as that idea has been taken up by many writers, in far more ambitious work; I can think of the works of two masters in French literature already, Celine and Samuel Beckett, whom Davis must have some lodestone connecting to. The other necessary key comes from the ultimate passage of "Liminal: The Little Man" (1986):
Then she says to herself, Where is there some help in this? And the figure returns, to her surprise, standing above her right shoulder; he is not so small, not so plump, not so modest anymore (years have gone by) but full of gloomy confidence; he could tell her, though he does not, but his presence tells her, that all is well and she is good, and she has done her best though others may not think so - and these others too are somewhere in the house, in a room somewhere down the hall, standing in a close line, or two lines, with proud, white, and angry faces.
When Davis allows herself to go beneath the surface, go beneath the logical lines of writing, of story, of narration, she finds often a dreamy underbed where all human desires and fear, and consequently meaning, reside, just as Plato said: "The very things which they [, geometers,] mold and draw, which have shadows and images of themselves in water, these things they treat in their turn as only images, but what they really seek is to get sight of those realities which can be seen only by the mind." (Translated by Paul Shorey.)
There's certainly a Kafkaesque nature to her writing. Take this passage from "The Housemaid" (1986), a lovely short story:
[...] My dream is nearly the same, except that when I am feeling angry and unhappy I look across the table at her clawlike hands and hope that she will choke to death on her food. Then no one would be there to stop me from going into her closet and breaking open her money box. I would put on her dresses and her hats, and open the windows of her room and let the smell out.
Whenever I imagine these things, sitting alone in the kitchen late at night, I am always ill the next day. Then it is my mother herself who nurses me, holding water to my lips and fanning my face with a flyswatter, neglecting her duties in the kitchen, and I struggle to persuade myself that she is not silently gloating over my weakness.
Compare it to the tension, not dramatic but melancholy, of the description of the narrator's eleventh son in Kafka's "Eleven Sons" (translated by Willa and Edwin Muir):
My eleventh son is delicate, probably the frailest of my sons; but deceptive in his weakness; for at times he can be strong and resolute, though even then there is somehow always an underlying weakness. Yet it is not a weakness to be ashamed of, merely something that appears as a weakness only on this solid earth of ours. For instance, is not a readiness for flight a kind of weakness too, since it consists in a wavering, an unsteadiness, a fluttering? Something of that nature characterizes my son. These are not, of course, the characteristics to rejoice a father; they tend obviously to destroy a family. Sometimes he looks at me as if he would say: 'I shall take you with me, Father.' Then I think: 'You are the last person I would trust myself to.' And again his look seems to say: 'Then let me be at least the last.'
In Davis and Kafka is an intimacy between the proposed and the real, how one wants to be and how one falls direly short of it, and how the backlash, emotional, of this kind of regret is strong enough to intrude in our physical realm. Yet even in this crippling pain there is an unexpected reserve of generosity discovered, which perhaps makes the pain all the more stinging.
Davis crosses the ford onto interesting land when she goes beyond narrating and enters speculation. These two sentences ending "Mildred and the Oboe" (1986) describe her appeal perfectly: "I am a sober person, a mother, and I like to go to bed early - but how can I lead a regular life in this building? It is a circus of vaginas leaping and prancing: thirteen vaginas and only one penis, my little son." What odd imagery, and what triumphant affect, that Colette herself might find commendable.
Her writing, because it is so diverse, exists occasionally on opposite ends. "Lord Royston's Tour" (1997) is not badly written, but the latter half of the material is almost devoid of psychological interest; she loses interest in the precise "British"-ness of her narrator's thoughts, or her thoughts on the "British"-ness of her narrator's thoughts. In sharp contrast, "The Cats of the Prison Recreation Hall" (1997) is a delightful read, written almost with the same cadence as "Lord Royston's Tour" in that she is acting merely as a voyeur for the following events, and yet she somehow, in her subtle pithy, thinks from the perspective of the prisoners, the governor, even the cats. Thought does not need quotation marks to become thought.
[...] The warden and the cat dodged back and forth for a time, the warden struck out at the cat, and the cat streaked around him and away, making no false moves.
Now the warden saw cats everywhere.
We have the excellent "The Outing" (1997):
An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly in the water, a refusal to end the argument on the flat stones, a cry of anger on the steep bank of dirt, a weeping among the bushes.
The final piece of the puzzle of Davis's appeal is her distinctly American humor, distinguishing her prose and particularly her matter from Kafka. Take the fifth piece/chapter in "Examples of Confusion" (1997):
Driving in the rain, I see a crumpled brown thing ahead in the middle of the road. I think it is an animal. I feel sadness for it and for all the animals I have been seeing in the road and by the edge of the road. When I come closer, I find that it is not an animal but a paper bag. Then there is a moment when my sadness from before is still there along with the paper bag, so that I appear to feel sadness for the paper bag.
I can identify at least four regional types of American humor: Northeast, South - these likely subdivide by latitude - Midwest and West. Davis possesses firmly a Northeastern sense of humor; she specializes in the self-deprecating and over-intellectual, or overwrought, Kurt Vonnegut / Joseph Heller / Woody Allen / Mel Brooks type of humor, which is of course a very Jewish type of humor, Davis touching on this in "Once A Very Stupid Man" (1986) and on the Abrahamic religions generally in several other stories. For cosmopolitan New York City, there are also elements of the muted affect and understatement seen in German and French humor reserved for the absurd and fantastical; in fact, Davis is often a Munchausen. "Examples of Confusion" is a good example of the comedy of mistaken identity, though often concerning the mundane.
The immaturity of earlier Davis comes from the idea that life is either dramatic or clinically un-dramatic, as if life is only the presence and absence of drama. The aforementioned "The Outing" works because the drama is ridiculed, recounting an argument without the arguers and varying the action through the locations, which contain invisibly the arguers' feet.
Though we disdain to admit it, Aristotle was correct in concluding that drama was on a greater order, even a cosmological order, than our everyday play with passions. I think not a few of Davis's stories prove this, by reaching for two goals: 1) attempting to make the audience empathize with the matter i.e. an argument with a lover, a personal failing, death, and 2) failing that, emphasizing the peculiarity of a situation by stacking details, which 1) works only for the audience who had experienced the matter and were inclined to empathize anyway and, 2) lacking that, cannot work by attempting to disguise itself in more sentences. Writing is a flow; the sentences, as they were, are following their predecessors as if they were literally holding the others' coat tails.
We receive a literary lesson from the French from none other than the sculpturist Rodin. In his infamous nude of Balzac, we learn that the truly great - writers, artists, thoughts, questions, phenomenon - cannot be humiliated; so, laugh away. Beckett's carving life into a grey and grotesque hollow did not remove life's beautiful qualities, it accentuated them. I believe Davis in her later phase inhabits this space. She doesn't play with plot or meaning, she plays with the language itself, manipulating the peculiar phonetic qualities of English itself, as we see in "Oral History (with Hiccups)" (2001):
[...] I will set up my machine d ownstairs in the living room. We will put a bunck bed for the girls in my s on's old room. It is a fair-sized room with one cl oset and one window, and the bathroom is just down the h all. [...] If we can't w ork things out right away, they can always go to their r oom and c ool off until they're ready to come back out and be c ivil. Excuse me.
Whereas the French take their humor to be art and thus very seriously, there is something very American about taking nothing seriously, even our art and language.
"Our Trip" (2001) would have been insufferable if it were not written as a comedy. The usual bickering between parties is not observed with sadness, but with a grimace and a shrug. And so its triumphant ending:
At the rest stop I had been thinking that about 50 percent of the people I saw looked as though they'd had a better vacation than we had. But then 50 percent of them looked as though they'd had a worse one, so I felt all right about it.
When we were twenty minutes from home, Junior wanted to stop at a Holiday Inn and spend the night and couldn't understand why we said no. But I realized about then that as a family we have a certain kind of loyalty to one another, and the way it works is that no two of us will get mad at the third one at the same time, except occasionally, as in the case of the Wet Ones.
One of Davis's longer stories (6 or more pages), "Thyroid Diary" (2001) is a triumph. As mentioned above, the worst of Davis is bogged down into details. "Glenn Gould" (1997) is an example of this - the idea is interesting, threading several thoughts on the "Mary Tyler Moore Show" and the town she is living in with the eccentric pianist, but there doesn't seem to be a specific flow of thought connecting these bits together. "Thyroid Diary" blames this lack of focus on the narrator's underactive thyroid, to wonderful comedic effect. She confuses her dentist's wife with a sailor, gets tangled up on the topic of gardening, is unsure about her current doctor, all the while wondering if her underactive thyroid is causing her loss of attention. It's a brilliant set-up.
If Davis's writing is to persist by the end of the century, I think we would need to approach it much like the above "Collected Stories of Colette". "The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis" is too long. The Early Stories section of "Colette" ends by the 100 page mark; the Backstage at the Music Hall by the 200 page mark. By that point, you have soaked up Colette's idiosyncrasies and are ready for the remaining 400 pages, which is Colette at the height of her command. Just as much, you can shave off 100 pages of same-y sounding material of Davis's, so we may all the quicker get to "Samuel Johnson is Indignant" (2001) and "Varieties of Disturbance" (2007), as the general rule is that writers get better as they grow older. Because I can't quite put my finger on Davis; I am not sure if I am annoyed at certain of her material as I am annoyed at her writing, or if I am annoyed in the same vein I am annoyed at Joyce's "Portrait of A Young Artist", "A Little Cloud" and "Eveline": the frost begins to thaw into forgiveness when you get around to greatness of "The Sisters", "Grace", and "The Dead". That is the critic's job, after all: see the The Three Hundred Tang Poems. There's something quite unique and beautiful in Davis's prose, but sometimes the critic is just as much a participant in the artist's greatness.
And thus we end on a favorite short story, "A Mown Lawn" (2001):
She hated a mown lawn. Maybe that was because mow was the reverse of wom, the beginning of the name of what she was - a woman. A mown lawn had a sad sound to it, like a long moan. From her, a mown lawn made a long moan. Lawn had some of the letters of man, though the reverse of man would be Nam, a bad war. A raw war. Lawn also contained the letters of law. In fact, lawn was a contraction of lawman. Certainly a lawman could and did mow a lawn. Law and order could be seen as starting from lawn order, valued by so many Americans. More lawn could be made using a lawn mower. A lawn mower did make more lawn. More lawn was a contraction of more lawmen. Did more lawn in America make more lawmen in America? Did more lawn make more Nam? More mown lawn made more long moan, from her. Or a lawn mourn. So often, she said, Americans wanted more mown lawn. All of America might be one long mown lawn. A lawn not mown grows long, she said: better a long lawn. Better a long lawn and a mole. Let the lawman have the mown lawn, she said. Or the moron, the lawn moron.
Actually, no, let's end on "Money" (2001). I shall return her voice back to her.
I don't want any more gifts, cards, phone calls, prizes, clothes, friends, letters, books, souvenirs, pets, magazines, land, machines, houses, entertainments, honors, good news, dinners, jewels, vacations, flowers, or telegrams. I just want money.