Books about writing have a way of trying to put you off the job. In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard likened the writer to a blind and wayward inchworm that “wears out its days in a constant panic.” In his memoir of his early writing days, Hand to Mouth, Paul Auster warns that “you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.” Dillard and Auster aren’t wrong: writing well is difficult. But writing-guide logic seems to dictate that the joy of writing, the feeling of pleasure that comes from putting words to things that are hard to put into words, is always a distant thing lurking somewhere far o’er yon horizon.
In the craft essays that make up the bulk of Lydia Davis’ collection Essays: One, the pleasure is always immediate, the joy near at hand. Perhaps this peculiar but welcome sensibility comes from Davis’ affinity for the short story, which in her case is often as short as a sentence. Perhaps it stems from her work as a translator, where she engaged phrase-by-phrase with triumphs by Proust and Flaubert. (The forthcoming Essays: Two deals directly with translation.) Whatever the reason, Davis’ writing on writing possesses a candor and warmth that are rare in the genre, even while she demands an unusual amount of rigor.
Most of the craft pieces were written for a master class she taught at New York University in 2012 and 2013, and they display a lack of anxiety about influence: She’s open about her admiration for Kafka, Beckett, Bernhard, and others, and of her early efforts to mimic them after escaping an early urge to write familiar New Yorker-type stories. Having found her muses, writing became no easier, but the process could be more immediate. Davis’ work is often characterized as “experimental,” but she describes her approach as almost its opposite. “To me, ‘experimental’ implies that the writer had a plan to test some preconceived writing strategy and see if it would work,” she writes. “Since I generally prefer to start a piece of writing without much of a plan, and not to be exactly sure what I’m doing, I do not consider the stories that result in any way experimental.”
Her embrace of a freewheeling attitude is not a prescription for slovenliness. Throughout, she demands that writers hit the dictionary — a real one, a physical one with thorough etymologies — and explore word histories, test them for sound and effect. (A funny, witty essay, “As I Was Reading,” relates how a casual search on “millennium” provoked a deeper exploration of the Ice Age.) Davis is remarkably open about how she’s applied this to her own work: She relates the process of revising a single sentence, or a story called “Nancy Brown Will Be In Town” that was inspired by an email she received, or a piece imagined out of whole cloth — the classic prose poem “Head, Heart.” In the case of “Nancy Brown,” she was struck by the frisson between the musicality of the email’s subject line and the banality of the email’s actual contents — a list of household items Ms. Brown was giving away. Her revisions were designed to highlight the exoticism and strangeness of what was on offer. “I like the word ‘ottoman’ — which reminds me of the Ottoman Empire and sounds so very elevated for a piece of furniture … And then we come to the ‘Bath items’ — why would I want this stranger’s bath items?”
Davis is as adept at conducting this kind of close reading with others’ work as her own: In a study of a poem by Rae Armentrout she identifies minor words like “there” and “so” as — a beautiful phrase, this — “carriers of a wonderful burden of meaning.” Davis’ capacity to alchemize observation and revision into her work is perhaps inimitable. But close attention, she argues, is not beyond anybody the reach of anyone who takes writing seriously. Her practical advice on this point echoes the style of her work, plainspoken yet impishly recursive: “Be curious — be curious about as much as possible. Think, generally, about how curious you are, or are not, as a person. If you are not very curious, think about why not. And try to cultivate curiosity. If you are curious, you will learn things, and the more curious you are, the more you will learn.”
Indeed, though the craft pieces claim center stage in the book, Essays: One is effectively split in two thematically: Here, her case for why curiosity is important for a writer; there, what she did with her own curiosity. Sometimes her curiosity turns on particular writers — Lucia Berlin, Thomas Pynchon, John Ashbury, Flaubert. Artists like Joseph Cornell and Alan Cote stoke her excitement at engaging with abstraction. But the most charming of the non-craft essays is a piece on early 20th century Dutch tourist photographs, where you can feel her being drawn heedless into needing ever more information on the clothing, folkways, and routines suggested by the image. She had been pulled into this obsession after being asked to translate a few short pieces in the Dutch, a language she hardly knew.
And from caption to caption, she writes as if swept away by the details — the fishing boats, the children’s clothes, marketplaces — as well as what’s unknowable. Her questioning attitude leads to Davis-esque riffs that reflect bemused frustration. The caption for a photo of three women knitting concludes: “Though the costumes are not Dutch, the same elements figure, including the ever-present cap — here, one is black, while the others are white, surely signifying something.”
Surely signifying something — the words of a writer who believes that a writer’s job is to comprehend something unexplained, to be that quintessential Jamesian person upon whom nothing is lost. Her enthusiasm for esoterica isn’t guaranteed to be contagious — her writing on painters finds her at her fussiest, and her appreciations of relatively obscure French authors like Maurice Blanchot won’t necessarily raise their profiles, rooted as they are in her own peculiar interests in French literary history and style. But her enthusiasm per se, her searchingness, is relentless and appealing.
“Always work (note, write) from your own interest, never from what you think you should be noting or writing,” she writes. “If you want to be original, cultivate yourself, enrich your mind, develop your empathy, your understanding of other human beings, and then, when you come to write, say what you think and feel, what you are moved to say.” That bit of advice is common enough in writing-advice books, to the point where it can feel hollow and platitudinous. But in the context of Davis’ larger body of work, and within the context of this book, the suggestion implies an Everest-esque climb. So much labor is required to do it right. And yet it’s possible to enjoy the steps along the way.
[Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on November 12, 2019, 528 pages, $27 hardcover]