Author talks about authenticity and being avant-garde

Lydia Davis

Frick Fine Arts Auditorium

Thursday… Lydia Davis

Frick Fine Arts Auditorium

Thursday at 8:30 p.m.

Hosted by the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series

Event free to the public

The best story Ernest Hemingway ever wrote, in his estimation, was one sentence long: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” If brevity was the writer’s rallying cry, it’s a safe bet he would be a Lydia Davis admirer.

Davis — who will give a free lecture at the Frick Fine Arts Auditorium this Thursday — is famous for controlled vignettes that run as short as a paragraph or even a line. Unlike Hemingway, however, Davis’s fiction is arrestingly self-conscious, and lauded as such by authors like Jonathan Franzen. Also unlike Hemingway, Davis is an established translator, with a repertoire encompassing everyone from Flaubert to Proust.

The writer recently spoke to The Pitt News about artificiality, followers and the problem with the word “experimental.”

The Pitt News: Many of your stories seem to transpire almost entirely within a character’s mind. What do you think are the advantages of this approach, as opposed to the more extroverted narratives readers are familiar with?

Lydia Davis: I don’t know about advantages, but it’s closer to what actually happens in my own life — it feels less artificial to me than creating scenes of the more traditional kind. I am always interested in the mind and how the mind works, how feelings work — that sort of thing — and I can look at it more directly, cleanly, clearly by working that way [rather] than in the more traditional way, when the material’s more removed and more obstructed. I guess that’s the advantage for me.

TPN: In an interview with literary magazine The Believer you said character interaction, as well, seemed artificial because it’s hard to recollect entire conversations. Is artificiality something you’re constantly trying to bypass when you’re writing? How did you develop that sense of artificiality?

LD: Oh, it’s hard to say. I started out by writing more traditional stories … Maybe it was one long story that took forever to get right that made me impatient, finally, in setting up scenes. That story took about two years to get right. Obviously not two years of working every day, but coming back to it again and again. I felt much happier when I stopped writing that way and wrote shorter, short, short stories. Even those were not necessarily based on my life or coming from my head, but they felt more immediate, and they did bypass a lot of that artificiality. They were sort of fable-like stories. So I think that’s when I broke free of the more traditional forms, but I do keep coming back to them now and then, in one way or another.

TPN: You’ve often expressed dissatisfaction with terms like “experimental writer.” Do you think writers should be evaluated as part of a group, or is it more appropriate to evaluate them on a purely individual basis?

LD: Well, I guess the term “experimental” in particular bothers me because, as a friend of mine said, it implies failure. Experiments fail more often than they succeed. And when you set out to write a piece, you don’t think of it as an experiment, you think of it as, “This is what I really want to do today.”

But as for classifying, yeah, I think each writer should be appraised just on his or her own terms — but I know these terms are useful. Maybe avant-garde is a little preferable, because it literally means the “advanced guard,” the forefront of something, the ones who go ahead into new territory. And that’s pretty legitimate: If you’re doing something that most people aren’t doing, that hasn’t been done for a while, or ever, then you are going into unknown territory.

TPN: Do you hope that other writers will imitate your style, or do you not give that any consideration?

LD: I really don’t. You always start out writing in very private situations;. Especially when you’re a young writer, very few people care all that much what you do. And that’s actually a good thing, I think: You write to please yourself. No, I would feel embarrassed if a lot of people were using my work. I guess I’d rather everybody did their own thing, made their own invention.