Long Story Short

Lydia Davis’s radical fiction.

By Dana Goodyear
March 10, 2014
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Illustration by Chang Park / Photograph by David Levenson / Getty

Somewhere in the files of General Mills is a letter from the very-short-
story writer Lydia Davis. In it, Davis, who is widely considered one of
the most original minds in American fiction today, expresses dismay at
the packaging of the frozen peas sold by the company’s subsidiary
Cascadian Farm. The letter, like many things that Davis writes, had
started out sincere and then turned weird. Details grew overly specific; a
narrative, however spare, emerged. “The peas are a dull yellow green,
more the color of pea soup than fresh peas and nothing like the actual
color of your peas, which are a nice bright dark green,” she wrote. “We
have compared your depiction of peas to that of the other frozen peas
packages and yours is by far the least appealing. . . . We enjoy your peas
and do not want your business to suffer. Please reconsider your art.”
Rather than address her complaint, the company sent her a coupon for
Green Giant.

The story that resulted from her complaint, “Letter to a Frozen Peas
Manufacturer,” is only a couple of hundred words long and appears in
“Can’t and Won’t,” which comes out next month. “Can’t and Won’t” is
Davis’s first collection since 2009, when her “Collected Stories” was
published: some two hundred pieces, amounting to just seven hundred
pages, thirty years’ worth of work. (Her novel, “The End of the Story,”
was not included.) Before then, she had been known, if she was known,
as “a writer’s writer’s writer”—dismissal by hyperbole. Some said her
stories sounded like translations, vaguely alien. The “Collected”
surprised people; taken together, her work—cerebral, witty, well built,
homey, homely, sometimes vanishingly small—had heft. It was the kind
of book that could be used, as one critic attested, to jack a car and
change a flat. In May, Davis won the 2013 Man Booker International
Prize, Britain’s highest literary award for a noncitizen. Michael
Silverblatt, the erudite host of the Los Angeles radio show “Bookworm,”
says, “Literary people know that at the sentence level and the word level
she’s the best there is.”

Davis is sixty-six, with chin-length once blond hair, pale lashes, and
eyes the color of blue milk glass. Her eyeglasses are lined with pink, like
a conch. She wears small earrings in flattering shades of blue, and the
loose, dark clothing of a city shrink. She works from life, in the way that
Samuel Beckett did—life’s interactions partway estranged from their
contexts—with a notebook always secreted in her purse. Her subjects
can be humble to the point of mundanity: lost socks, car trips, neighbors,
small fights. (“He said she was disagreeing with him. She said no, that
was not true, he was disagreeing with her.”) According to the novelist
Jonathan Franzen, “She is the shorter Proust among us. She has the
sensitivity to track the stuff that is so evanescent it flies right by the rest
of us. But as it does so it leaves enough of a trace that when you read her
you do it with a sense of recognition.”

Davis lives with her husband, Alan Cote, an abstract painter, in a tiny
village in Rensselaer County, New York. Cote is large, warm, taciturn,
and wears a mustache. Their house is a converted elementary school,
built in 1930 by the W.P.A.: neo-Georgian, brick, with Boston ivy and
fifteen-foot ceilings. He paints in the gymnasium; the bathtub is in the
teachers’ lounge. On the fence outside, a sign made from found sticks
spells “L’Ecole.”

One recent morning, Davis sat at her kitchen table with a pocket-size
black notebook and a hardcover novel by a popular writer, whom she
asked me not to name. “I don’t like to hurt people’s feelings, and I don’t
like to knock other writers as a matter of principle,” she said. Though
enjoyably soap-operatic, the novel, that month’s selection for her book
club—local women, wine, family talk—was full of mixed metaphors.
“I’ve gotten very alert not just to mixed metaphor but to any writing
mistake,” she said. “A little bell goes off in my head first. I know
something’s wrong here. Then secondly I see what it is.” She opened the
notebook and read a sentence about an acute intimacy that had eroded
into something dull. “Acute is sharp, and then eroded is an earth
metaphor,” she said. She read another: “ ‘A paper bag stuffed with
empty wine bottles.’ I thought about that. You’d think he could get away
with it, but he can’t, because ‘stuffed’ is a verb that comes from
material. It’s soft, so it’s a problem to stuff it with something hard.”
There were sentences about camouflaging with a veneer, and girding
with an orb, and boomeranging parallels. “Whenever I read this kind of
thing, it tells me the writer is not sensitive to the full value of the idea of
comparison,” she said.

But to be curmudgeonly was not the point. As she was noting the
mistakes, she kept flipping to the back jacket to look at the author’s
photograph: a relaxed, good-looking man, smiling openly at the camera.
A little idea started to take shape, enough for a one-line story. “I just
write down one sentence,” she said. “This would be me assuming a kind
of yenta voice: ‘Such a handsome young fellow to write such bad mixed
metaphors.’ ” She smiled. “It’s me feeling a little sorry that I’m writing
down all his mistakes, because he looks so friendly and nice and in a
way innocent. Some author photos don’t look so innocent.”

In the summer of 1973, when Davis was twenty-six, she and her
boyfriend Paul Auster went to live in the South of France, as caretakers
of an eighteenth-century stone farmhouse with a red tile roof and an
enclosed garden. They had been in Paris for two years already,
translating French novels and poems and art catalogues and film scripts
—sometimes the pay amounted to five dollars a page—and working
assiduously on their own writing.

At Barnard, where Davis went to college, she had been a distracted

student, occasionally accompanying Auster to his classes at Columbia
rather than attending her own. (They met in the spring of their freshman
year.) They played touch football and one-on-one basketball. Davis had
long honey-colored hair and a dreamy affect. “She had pheromones, and
men and boys followed her around panting,” an old friend said.

Auster was sunken-eyed and soulful, with a cocked eyebrow, or, as he

puts it, “a dark-haired Jewish boy from New Jersey with a public-school
education.” Davis had gone to Brearley, and then to Putney, a boarding
school with farm work, in Vermont. Her father, Robert Gorham Davis,
taught English at Columbia—modern short stories—and her mother,
Hope Hale Davis, wrote fiction for women’s magazines and
occasionally for The New Yorker. First they were Communists, then
liberals (he was questioned by the House Committee on Un-American
Activities); always they were avid party-givers. Lionel Trilling came to
the apartment, Erica Jong, Grace Paley, Edward Said. In memoirs,
Auster portrays himself as helplessly impressed by Davis, loving more
than he was loved. He writes, “For the most part you were the pursuer,
and she alternated between resisting your advances and wanting to be
caught.” Among their friends—“arcane, avant-garde intellectuals,”
Mitch Sisskind, who was one of them, said—Davis was the eccentric.
“We were all reading Kafka,” he told me. “She read Kafka, too—and
you can see the influence—but she also read ‘The Making of a
Surgeon.’ ”
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In the country, Auster wrote poems; Davis struggled to write traditional

short stories, of the kind her parents admired. (Later, they would say,
Why don’t you write about your travels or something more cheerful?)
She copied out lines of Beckett to understand how the sentences
functioned, and tacked them to the wall. The stories, however, were too
masterly to imitate. She read mysteries, weighed herself, threw pebbles
in an urn. She tried to make herself stay at her desk till lunch. Auster, on
the other hand, could easily work all day.

At the end of August, Davis happened to read a strange little book of

very short stories by the poet Russell Edson. Here was a contemporary,
an American, whose stories, unlike those of her literary heroes,
sometimes failed. Within days, she had started writing strange little
stories of her own. She set a goal, two per day. “I didn’t think too hard
about what I was going to do,” she told me. “I just snatched an idea from
the air, I just went with it, and I didn’t think about what the meaning was
of the story, and I still don’t like to do that.” She started to enjoy herself.
A month after reading Edson, she wrote “The Thirteenth Woman,” a
hundred-and-thirty-eight-word story in two sentences, which she sees as
“the first seminal story.” The same day, she wrote “The
Transformation,” a page-long fable about a woman who turns into a
 stone. She worked in a plain cardboard notebook, with a studied hand.
“Must conquer this afternoon malaise,” one late-September entry starts,
followed by six stories. “She would get an idea, three or four sentences
or a paragraph, and she would write it clean off the top of her head and
that would be it,” Auster told me. “The stuff she labored over never
turned out as successfully.”

Anything Davis wrote might turn, unbidden, into fiction. In her

notebook, she composed a letter to her friend Jack LeVert (part of their
Kafka-reading, touch-football-playing crowd), who was planning to visit
them at the farmhouse:

If you were to look in on us, you would be amazed at the elegance in which we live.
You would see us sweep into the driveway in a pale green station wagon, casually pat
our thoroughbreds as we entered our restored, pre-revolutionary home with its thick
beams and red tiled floors. . . . You would see us during the day with dreamy looks in
our eyes writing poetry and little dibs and dabs of nothing, as though we had been
born to idleness. Perhaps I would invite you to go sketching and we would take the
folding chairs and our pads of sketch paper. Perhaps later we would listen to an opera
from where we lounged beside the bright medieval fireplace, our Labradors sleeping
at our feet on their deerskin rug. But as dinnertime approached you would notice that
we grew nervous. At first it would be hardly perceptible, the smallest haunted look in
our eyes, a dark shadow on our faces. You would intercept embarrassed glances. I
would blush suddenly and turn pale and when dinner arrived, though the pottery were
of the finest quality, hand turned, and the mats from Japan and the napkins from India,
the beans would stick in your throat, the carrots would break the tines of your fork and
you would recognize the taste of cat. How much more painful is poverty for the
caretakers.

“The new piece of paper you like to keep on your desk came in.”
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The hardship was romantic, self-imposed. “We both came from families
that had enough money to rescue us,” Davis said. “This was all our own
choice, really. It was for our so-called art.” When they finally ran out of
money, they returned to New York, nine dollars between them. Davis’s
father helped get them an apartment on Riverside Drive, and they were
married there in the fall of 1974. (Auster, in “Winter Journal,” a memoir:
“Given the frequent changes of heart that had afflicted the two of you
from the beginning, the constant comings and goings, the affairs with
other people, the breakups and makeups that followed one another as
regularly as the changing of the seasons, the thought that either one of
you should have considered marriage at this point now strikes you as an
act of delusional folly.” Davis: “I read about some town in Northern
California, where the pastor at the church—or is it the law?—said you’re
not allowed to get married without three or four visits to the pastoral
counselor ahead of time to discuss your expectations or habits or needs.
It’s worked out very well. People don’t get divorced.”) Davis briefly
studied to become a speech therapist. Instead, she and Auster moved to
Berkeley and published a collection of her pieces, “The Thirteenth
Woman and Other Stories,” in an edition of five hundred. The poets in
their circle loved it.