A virtuoso of the short story, Lydia Davis's work is surprising and memorable
The acclaimed American writer and translator spoke with Eleanor Wachtel in 2007
This fall, as Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33 year run, we're revisiting episodes selected from the show's archive. This interview originally aired June 10, 2007.
Called "one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction," Lydia Davis's work is difficult to describe. Some of her short stories read like poems, running for just a few pages and sometimes even a few lines. When she won a MacArthur "Genius" Award in 2003, the foundation called her stories "literary miniatures," and praised the way Davis's enigmatic prose explores ordinary moments.
Davis's work has appeared in both The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Poetry. Her 2007 short story collection, Varieties of Disturbance, was a finalist for the National Book Award and she won the 2013 Man Booker International Prize. In addition to her own work – short stories, essay collections and a novel – Davis has also published translations of Proust and Flaubert. Her newest title, Our Strangers, contains 144 short stories in 300 pages.
Davis spoke to Eleanor Wachtel in 2007 on stage at the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal.
Growing up in a 'language-saturated' household
"Both of my parents started as fiction writers. My mother went on and continued to be a fiction writer of short stories. My father gave it up eventually and became a professor of English and a critic.
"I imagine at three I didn't mind, but at a certain age we couldn't speak without being aware of how we were saying something — how it was being phrased as well as what we were saying. So if we made a clumsy repetition, one of them might very well point that out, sort of lightly with a smile. But it was a very language-saturated household.
At a certain age we couldn't speak without being aware of how we were saying something: how it was being phrased as well as what we were saying.- Lydia Davis
"And my father loved etymologies — which I inherited from him. So he would often go to the dictionary and say, 'I wonder where that word came from,' and find some fascinating origin, which was truly entertaining to a child.
"I would be very aware [of what I was saying], a little less so with my mother, who was a little more garrulous. And so she was sort of waiting for a chance to start talking as soon as I was done.
"But my father would consider very carefully what I had said and that made me feel very insecure about what I said.
And I don't know if this is a good example, but I remembered it just the other day. When he was even in the nursing home, I was trying to say the things that you don't want to have forgotten to say. So our family was not, as you can imagine, given to that sort of spontaneity. But I said to him, 'You've been a very good father.' I just wanted him to know that. And he said, 'In what respects?'"
A year spent in Germany
"The very first foreign language I was surrounded by was French because we stopped in Paris on the way to Austria.
"So it was actually in the Tuileries Garden that I first heard another language around me and asked my mother, 'What's going on? Why are they speaking in this language? Why are they speaking this way and still having fun?'
"But then they put me in the first grade of a convent school and German was what was spoken in the classroom. And as I remember, the teacher herself had some English, but was not fluent in English. Some of the children could speak a little English, but I more or less had to learn German. And after a month I was reading in German.
"The rest of that year I existed pretty happily in German with my school friends. And of course, even though it was 1954, the war felt still very close and there were still wounded people in the street and a sort of depression hanging over the city. My mother was also very ill and had to go into the hospital there so it was a difficult year emotionally — and that was all in the German language.
It's not that I don't know French anymore — I know it by now. But it's still a strange language to me. It's not home. And so I keep bringing it into English.- Lydia Davis
"Somehow I do relate it to becoming a translator: that experience of being in the classroom, being surrounded by language I didn't know and yet knowing it meant something and then having it become transparent and something I understood … I think I'm just repeating that over and over.
"It's not that I don't know French anymore — I know it by now. But it's still a strange language to me. It's not home. And so I keep bringing it into English."
Becoming a French translator
"I went from a comfortable small town, Northampton, Mass., to the big city of New York when I was 10.
"I was put into a big, burly school and felt very lost there, but had to go to tutorial sessions with a French teacher to catch up with the other children who had been studying French since kindergarten.
"In those comfortable little sessions with my French teacher, I again made a little home place or a little comfortable place in the strange city and the strange school.
On a writing life
"My parents kind of left me alone as far as I can remember, which is good. They didn't put pressure on me to be a writer, but so many of their friends were writers, so much of what they talked about was writing and I was good at it.
"And they helped me. If I read a poem to them that I was going to take into school, they would talk to me about rhymes and rhyme schemes and how it could be a little better, but in a nice way.
"I showed my mother a short story I'd written that had a not very nice mother in it. And she was a little hurt by it because it was so close to home. And yet she was giving me all the suggestions she could. 'Develop this part more and a little less of that…'
"So there was a lot of encouragement but no pressure."
"Writing wasn't a happy fate when I first started out but it became happy.
There were always moments of elation in the middle of it and happiness, but the whole thing wasn't happy.- Lydia Davis
"When I was first working hard at it and copying sentences from my favourite writers and trying to work on my own stories — for some of them endlessly — one took two years of work before it seemed at all finished — that was difficult.
"There were always moments of elation in the middle of it and happiness, but the whole thing wasn't happy. It wasn't until a few years later, when I just found happier forms that I began to really take pleasure in it."
Lydia Davis's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
