Yale
Review by David Starkey
Anyone familiar with the wry and tricksy stories of Lydia Davis will not be surprised that in Into the Weeds—her book-length response to the question proposed in Yale’s “Why I Write” series, i.e, “Why write?”—she initially refuses to answer the question at all. “I’m not sure I want to know why I write,” she tells us. “But I don’t mind talking about how I have written certain of my stories.”
And she does recount the genesis of several of her briefest stories, including “When We Are Dead and Gone,” in which she imagines how comforting it might be to hear someone call out, “Housekeeping!” from the hall, even though you are dead inside a hotel room. “I was in a hotel room,” she explains, “when there came that knock on my room door. I don’t think the housekeeper came in, or I would have forgotten the idea of writing this story.” Davis enjoys playing the faux-naïf, though it’s clear she’s declaiming from the perspective of someone who knows her craft exceedingly well.
And indeed, there ends up being quite a lot in Into the Weeds about why she writes: “the first pleasure is this encounter with something coming in, or wanted to come in. Something that demands, in an impersonal way, to be formed into something else. As she ruminates, at times she sounds a bit like Gertrude Stein: “It is one thing to want to write something, and go ahead and write it, and it is sometimes another thing to want to show it, and in what form.” And she’s very meta, often telling us when and why she started and stopped writing the book, what the weather was like, what she saw in the fields outside her window.
Overall, though, she seems most interested in talking about her responses to what she has read. Among the books she returns to throughout Into the Weeds are John Ashbery’s Norton lectures, Other Traditions, and, perhaps to the point of tedium—an area of writing which she finds formally interesting—two books in particular: George Sturt’s 1923 The Wheelwright’s Shop, a nonfiction work about how to build a horse-drawn wagon, and Knut Hamsun’s 1949 On Overgrown Paths, a journal he kept at the end of his life as he waited to find out what kind of penalty the Norwegian government was going to impose on him for supporting the Nazis during World War II.
If your immediate response to knowing that you will hear in great detail about these final two books is something along the lines of, “I think I’ll pass,” that’s not surprising. However, in her deceptively simple way, Davis manages to draw you into both The Wheelwright’s Shop and On Overgrown Paths. Of the former, she says that her interest was sustained not only by learning new things about Victorian woodworking, but also by “the author’s character as it comes through” and “the style of the writing itself.” And thought Hamsun’s character is hardly exemplary, his mastery of words is consummate; “the immediacy of his writing” means that every prosaic detail of Hamsun’s unhappy life is potentially mesmerizing.
Davis confides that another reason she writes is because it allows her to relieve herself “of strong feelings, by taking them out of myself and putting them into an objective form, a form that can also be shared by others out in the world.” So concludes this strange short book from an author of so many wonderfully strange short stories. Would I recommend it to someone interested in the wonders and vagaries of the writing process? Strangely, yes, I would.
