Ignaszewski, David
LYDIA DAVIS
Issue #32
Upon the release of her sixth short-story collection, the writer-translator extraordinaire talks about the comfort of watching TV, reading Dick and Jane stories, and channeling Proust in her e-mails
By Jen Girdish
Published: June 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
Lydia Davis insists that she wasn’t much fun in her 20s. Romanced by the Hemmingway, ex-pat life, she moved to Paris. But the Paris of the ’70s was quite different than Paris in the ’50s — less sexy, less easy. She scraped together a living by translating movie scripts and art books when she could. Despite an Aretha Franklin album here and there, she wasn’t seduced by pop music or other things with which the girls in America seemed to occupy themselves. She instead absorbed herself in Beckett and Kafka, trying out the writing thing.
This self-described “not-so-interesting” girl emerged as a writer of extraordinary wit and perception. Her previous short-story collections (Break It Down
In her own writing, Davis is an anthropologist of the human condition. She falls in love with characters that plod along, and more often than not, can’t seem to get it right. Her humor is most exact and piercing when she points her arrow toward domestic life. In one of her latest stories “Television,” the narrator observes, “It’s not that I really think this show about Hawaiian policemen is very good, it’s just that it seems more real than my own life.”
With her new collection, Varieties of Disturbance: Stories
Was there a particular book or author that awakened you to writing?
The first books that opened my eyes to a different way of writing was Beckett’s Malone Dies
Especially after Samuel Johnson is Indignant was released in 2001, you’ve been known for your wit and humor in your writing. Does that stem from humor you see in your own life?
In life, I find a sense of humor extremely important. It often makes life bearable, because even as something happens, I can see the funny side of it. If something is funny at the same time it’s difficult, it makes it a lot easier to endure. I don’t think humor in literature is necessary at all, but it’s nice that we have such a variety of books that we can turn to and pick up at different moods.
You’re also known for doing a lot of French translation, like Proust’s Swann’s Way. Does translation make you more conscious of word choice, or the necessity of the right word, in your own writing?
It makes me think a lot of about the shades of differences between synonyms. In my house, my father was always going to look in the dictionary, always asking, “Do you know where this word comes from?” That became second nature to me, but then translating something like Swann’s Way, I went to a whole different level. I was looking up the French words, the etymologies. Since I was trying to get as close to Proust as I could, in a way that I never had ever tried before, I was really looking at synonyms in English, and saying “Well, this one has one syllable, that one has two.” He worked with rhythms a lot. He would end with three adjectives, three syllables, two syllables, and one syllable. I would try to do the same thing, so I got super-conscious.
I see some similarities between your writing and Proust: the repetition, the rhythm, and fixating on particular images.
Well that’s nice! I sometimes think that even though I didn’t remember it consciously, maybe it had some influence on my novel. I do think things you read, even nursery rhymes, sink into your mind and determine a certain pattern, and shape of your work.
I found that when I was e-mailing friends, writing in a more relaxed way, suddenly I would be writing like Proust in the sense of making all sort of digressions and including all kinds of extraneous things, and I would sort of cut that back and say, “Wait, my friends don’t want to hear that.”
Proust supposedly did most of his writing in bed, at night, in a cork-lined room. Do you have any writing idiosyncrasies?
My mind will keep on working as I do the dishes, and I will come up with one more sentence that would be better than the one I had. I have to keep turning off the water and go over to the shopping-list pad and write down another idea. Or I’m watching a movie with my husband, and a character uses a certain phrase or a certain word. I’ll say, “That’s just what I need,” and again I’ll have to run to a pad of paper and write it down. I’ve learned to keep pads of paper everywhere, just in case. Once you get those thoughts, you don’t usually remember them unless you write it right down.
How long do you work on a collection like Varieties of Disturbance?
The essay, “Get Well Letters,” was so laborious, because it really was an analysis of fourth graders’ letters. I had to go back and forth between the letters, counting sentences. Some of the others, the stories that are one paragraph, I write very quickly, and they only work well if I can write them very quickly.
In your shorter pieces, you often use repetition in words and images. What value do you think the repetition brings to the pieces?
I never have a plan ahead of time of how I’m going to write them. It’s me trying to figure something out — sort of my own exploration rather than a deliberately chosen style.
Varieties is billed as extending your reach “as never before.” How far away from your comfort zone are you reaching in this
collection?
I’ve always tried different sorts of forms and I’ve always mixed autobiographical material into fiction. This one goes much closer to nonfiction than some of the other pieces, like “Helen and Vi” and
“Get Well Letters,” where the only fictional element is the narrator who is posing as a sociologist or anthropologist.
One of my favorite pieces in the collection is “Television” because the relationship between the narrator and her television is so accessible, and the humor is very deadpan. Could you talk a little bit about the inspiration for that piece?
I wrote a lot of it a long time ago when I was living alone with my first son. I guess it was a bit lonely, and the television was very comforting or something in that it became kind of a companion. I thought a lot about it as I was watching it, and — as you can see from the piece — I used to watch the made-for-TV movies and got fascinated by that form. The only thing I had a doubt about was the tiny sentence or two about the dot in the center of the screen. Because of course, we don’t have that dot in the center of the screen anymore, when the television was a proud part of the family furniture.
Do you have a favorite piece in the collection?
I like “Jane and the Cane.” I wasn’t even sure whether to put that one in, but I have a real soft spot for it because I learned to read from the Dick and Jane readers. “Get the ball Jane,” said Dick. I loved them — I didn’t need any plot. The exciting part was
learning to read.
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