Lydia Davis in France in the 1970s

From April 1971 to mid-July 1974, with the exception of a five-month stay in Sligo, Ireland and a shorter trip to Dubrovnik, Croatia, Lydia Davis lived in France. The spring following her graduation from Barnard College in New York in 1970, she travelled to Paris aged 24 to reunite with an "on-again-off-again companion"1 to whom she was later married. 

The period, sparking a life-long rapport with landmark works of French literature — Leiris, Blanchot, Duras, Proust — also scored a heady, sensual immersion with the people, culture and landscape of France itself, under-documented in receptions of Davis's oeuvre. Drawing on unseen materials from the author's archives, I will show how this brief interlude in France impacted Davis's writing at the time as well as later projects. In her own words, in 1971 Davis "chafed"2 to leave Manhattan and long years of formal schooling to begin her own life as a writer in earnest. In a memoir piece originally published in 2010 for an edition of American Vogue themed "Nostalgia," the author recalls how

The striking parade of textures on display in this short fragment distil the acute sensory charge France held for Davis, which infuses her writings from this interlude. At the same time, this inventory of items for spending a period of time in Paris, whilst in keeping with the glossy signifiers of high-end fashion magazines, snags the reader more au fait with Davis's production as unusual. The assemblage even strikes as comically, hubristically decadent, given the austerity of circumstances sketched unsparingly in the remainder of the piece.4 Davis's enumeration of the odd, scabrous succession of Parisian living arrangements, memorably including the back room of a beekeeper's apartment and numerous "seedy hotel rooms"5 she inhabited during these intrepid post-collegiate years soberly amass the concrete sacrifices freighting the vocation of a "writing life." They puncture any pastel fantasy of "going over" and refuse the worn trope of the "American in Paris," or any florid take on the fêted "Year Abroad." With signature lucidity and keenness, Davis paints her Paris in this slim vignette as a city of long hours spent inside, chiselling a single paragraph: of "simple meals on a single gas burner"; "odd jobs"; "cheap restaurants"; and washing "dishes in the bidet."6 "Nostalgia," distilling impulses within Davis's fiction and essays more broadly, exposes the gap which often cleaves appearance and reality, yet avoids rushing to redeem it for the sake of the reader's (or the author's) comfort. Near the close of the essay, Davis's idealized trousseau of sorts is briskly overturned as the author reveals 

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Davis's relationship to the French language was not a flight of fancy. She first learnt French at ten years old, when she entered a new school and, by her own account, encountered an "old-school Frenchwoman of a certain age"8 eager to catch her up to the level of other students. (She had previously been first exposed to German aged seven in a classroom in Austria.)9 Her recollection of this time is visually and sensorially evocative; unlike her very short stories, which conform to a painstakingly revised, almost paratactic register, her memoir writings, and particularly those that detail her time living in France, undulate with adjectival amplitude and experiential texture. Even at the stage of still acquiring French proficiency, Davis remembers with cinematic precision how in her former school classroom 

The memory presented in "Nostalgia," of shipping back the velvet and the silver, is more legibly Davis-like in its forensic self-analysis. But despite the author's self-reproach for indulging "some romantic stage play that had existed only in my own mind,"11 the postwar American romance with France was a much broader phenomenon than Davis here allows herself compassion for, particularly amongst a specifically twentieth-century generation of writers and poets. Figures such as James Baldwin, Patti Smith, and Susan Sontag to cite only a few, succumbed, for periods of varying duration, to the allures of voluntary exile from the US as a generative crucible for writing.12 Though the world of Davis's French capital could shrink at times to the narrow confines of a drab hotel room — a letter excerpt from 1972 rather ironically describes a puddle visible from her ground-floor window on the rue Royet-Collard as the author's personal "Walden Pond"13 — the sense of expectation and ambition soldered to the city must have felt doubly weighted given that the boyfriend Davis "went over" to join was also a writer (to name him specifically, the fellow author Paul Auster). 

Though for a time creatively fruitful (Davis and Auster collaborated on a number of translation projects in various genres — art books, filmscripts, a novel — during this period) the relationship, as Davis signals in the Vogue piece, was stop-start and erratic. To save "emotional energy"14 and also extra money, the couple alternated in these years between living together and living apart in various estranged Parisian milieux. In a memoir-fragment published for BOMB magazine in summer 2020, Davis reconstructs a trip to a small seaside town outside Caen in Normandy, taken alone during this time to gain temporary shelter from the affair's "stormy"15 interpersonal dynamics. Yet the crux of the piece, as foregrounded by the title, is how the exact name of the coastal area she visited completely dropped out of her memory afterwards, and kept, even if the author was later reminded of it, dropping out again:

On initial reading, it is tempting to infer this amnesia as a symptom of a period in time eager to be actively repressed. Yet a comparative geographic blurriness and temporal indeterminacy shrouds most of the France pieces, even those which Davis stamps assertively as "memoir" as opposed to fiction. Many outputs from this three-year period, departing from the author's tendency towards ethnographic observation and exhaustive list-like structures elsewhere, resist overt archival indexing. Several are infused with the same somnambulant abstraction as the "Dream" vignettes in the 2013 work Can't and Won't, resonating with the trenchant cadences of the latter's most incisive stories. With equal parts declarative forthrightness and enigmatic opacity, Davis writes in the "Caen" piece, "in those troubled times I left Paris and went away to stay somewhere in Normandy by myself just for a few days, in a small hotel where people stared at me, a young American woman eating by herself every night."17 With echoes of the earlier story "Eating Fish Alone,"18 a sense of surveillance and concurrent desires for anonymity also surface in the Vogue piece, where Davis registers how, as a young woman new to Paris, "Parisian women looked at me with what I imagined was icy disapproval of my stumbling French and my lack of sophistication."19 

In its purposeful vagueness and aesthetic absent-mindedness, the "Forgetting Caen" essay skewers such panoptic vigilance and frustrates any project of memoir as exact recuperation or recall. At the same time, it shimmers with abundant local detail, countering a worry expressed by Davis in writing diaries from the period that "I am not in the thick of it. I have not engaged or committed"20 in the practice of her art. On the contrary, as a woman travelling alone, momentarily emancipated from relational entanglements and the urban ligatures of Paris, in Caen Davis registers "gardens of red-flowering shrubs"; a "little yard with a slender tree of purple lilacs" and "a blackbird tumbling around in a bush of fat and dry rustling hydrangeas larger than softballs."21 She is fully immersed in her surroundings. She indexes the humble meals laid out by her lodgings every night, so often irrigated by cheap local cider and concluded with a bitter cup of black coffee. 

In "Forgetting Caen," Davis recalls that, in lieu of a travel companion, "At night and in the afternoons, I was reading [Rousseau's] Confessions."22 She continues, in a deft nod to the sometimes-unreliable narration of the piece the reader holds before them, as well as the elusive quality of autobiographical endeavours more generally, "I thought I was learning from Rousseau how to tell things honestly."23 Though Davis claims not to have been an avid student of France or French culture before the move,24 her scholarly French contexts stretch back to a thesis written on the dramatist Antonin Artaud at Barnard College, and another written on the work of Michel Butor, in the context of the innovations of the nouveau roman.  Samuel Beckett, whose profound influence on her work Davis details in a piece later collected in Essays: I ("Now here was a book — Malone Dies — in which the narrator spent a page describing a pencil, and the first plot development was that he had dropped his pencil. I had never imagined anything like it"25) was another seismic reference. Beckett's hard-won migration to Paris in the 1920s, in part a yearning towards linguistic divestment, or a desire to slough off the mellifluous verbosity of his native Irish English and its interference with starker existential revelations, reflected Davis's project to "invent out of smaller, compressed means"26 and to increasingly write "very short and succinct things."27 Beckett's influence, indeed, loomed so magisterially in this period that, upon spontaneously sighting the man himself in the Jardin du Luxembourg one afternoon with a friend, Davis wonders in a piece she titles "Sighting Beckett,"28 if she mustered his presence via mental alchemy alone: 

Again, though, Davis rescues the account from over-perfumed homage by including the mundane markers of the encounter; the wider context behind the punctuating, singular event.  She recalls how Beckett stopped to briefly witness a tennis game taking place on the Jardin's dedicated courts, and how she felt "privileged"30 to have communed in this private moment. Then, with quintessential oddball humour, she narrates, "decades later," her "patient pilgrimage to his apartment building on the rue St. Jacques and then to the stationery store around the corner from it, where I guessed that he must have bought his note cards and envelopes."31 Eschewing the more obvious monument of Beckett's grave in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, Davis opts for the more humdrum shrine of where "Monsieur Beckett" tended to purchase materials for daily correspondences. 

In the "Living in Paris" essay for American Vogue, Davis evokes other storied characters whom she met in the city at the time. A burgeoning friendship with the editorial director of the Galerie Maeght on the Rue du Bac, Jacques Dupin, who was also a poet, appears particularly to have opened doors socially for Davis and her then-companion. Davis writes how Dupin, a man of exceptional generosity "invited us to dinner and introduced us to some of the gallery's artists, who in turn became our friends, though of a very different sort from the wandering American college grads and the young French poets we were coming to know."32 

This new crop of contacts, somewhat outdazzling the peripatetic academics, further numbered the artist Joan Mitchell, whom the couple would sometimes "spend the day with" at her house in Vétheuil;33 the novelist Mary McCarthy34; and Alberto Giacometti's widow, Annette, who Davis confesses "would call when she was suffering from a bout of dépression nerveuse and wanted the distraction of a walk or a drink or a movie."35 

Dupin also proved instrumental in securing Davis and Auster fledgling translation work — initially of exhibition catalogues— thus triggering the start of their translation careers in earnest. In the Vogue piece, Auster and Davis's translation of the text of a Joan Miró catalogue secures them an invite to the artist's birthday party "in an old windmill on the outskirts of the city."36 In contrast to the austere hours spent inside poring over texts, the account of the event surges with high-octane glamour: "I know I rode the carousel, drank far too much champagne, believed my ample cotton skirt with its many shades of orange was perfectly acceptable, and felt a warm camaraderie with this roomful of people."37 Such descriptions fit the burnished tone of a themed Vogue dossier, yet Davis does not elevate the fascination of these rare festivities over the more solitary stretches in stripped-down Parisian apartments. "I did have confidence, in the end," she writes, "in the value of what I was trying to learn in those hours by myself, in whatever room I might happen to be living in."38 In the original print version, the essay's editorial sub-title narrates how "In early-1970s Paris, Lydia Davis found an eccentric world of poets and artists," yet also "the discipline to follow her own path."39 

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For a period in the 1940s, Samuel Beckett, together with his companion Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, retreated to the Roussillon in Southern France to work in a vineyard. In summer 1973, Davis and Auster travelled from Paris down to the Var, a département in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region of southeastern France, to be the gardiens (caretakers) of a house owned by Roselle and Bill Davenport, an American couple, then directors of Reid Hall (now home to Columbia University's Parisian outpost in the 14^th arrondissement). This period, albeit lasting only until June the following year, when Davis and Auster briefly re-encountered Paris before leaving the city to return definitively to America in July, shapes the second half of Davis's French sojourn, defined less by urban landscapes and bohemian artistic enclaves than provincial wildness and secluded rurality. Though the primary motive for the relocation was economic (the country-house, in exchange for its upkeep, was offered to the couple as essentially rent-free and came with a modest, though significant, $40 monthly stipend) these months in the Var would prove more financially cramped than the leanest times endured in the capital. 

The traces — material, intellectual, emotional, and indeed financial — of the time spent in the Var are especially discernible in the stories written by Davis included within Break it Down (1986), published roughly a decade after the return from Europe, and Almost No Memory, from 1997. In the former collection, Davis's first, "The House Plans," "In a House Besieged," "Sketches for a Life of Wassilly, and "French Lesson" all harbour references or sketches from this marginal care-taking period, thick with both surreal and more quotidian events (from foreboding local winds and conflicts with neighbours to the more singularly haunting experience of losing a dog trusted to the narrator's care). From Almost No Memory can be added: "The Mice"; "The Cedar Tree"; "St Martin," the name of the property itself looked after by the couple; "Lost Things"; and "Smoke," which crafts a spectral, claustrophobic portrait of the Southern landscape, in which "it has been a long age since anyone saw a sky."40 

Many of the aforementioned pieces condense salient features of this peculiarly pressured period into Davis-like aphoristic telegrams, spryly elusive and elliptical. Yet "St Martin" is a more expansive, even panoramic look at the time spent in the South of France, seductive in its seeming closeness to "real-life" events. The story, which numbers close to twenty pages, opens with the following, tantalising paragraph: 

The account bristles with luxuriant descriptions of the rugged landscapes burgeoning outside the property: "the smell of wild thyme" and "truffles,"42 as well as almond and olive trees and what the earlier story "The House Plans" evokes as the "acres of abandoned vineyards and overgrown farmland."43 Yet these environs taunt the couple's for the most part confinement to the sphere of the house itself, and general lack of roaming in these months. This was due both to the unshielded nature of Saint-Martin, which it was their duty to defend, and the general scarcity of money at this time. 

In a letter extract from the period, dating to September 21^st, 1973, Davis's parents record their resolve to send $50 per month, "for a while until the clouds lifted."45 Otherwise, the couple held out for the intermittent visits of a friend, a National Geographic photographer on assignment, who would pay them on the magazine's expense account for a night's lodging in the drafty country maison and then almost always take them out for dinner after, too. In the story version of 'St Martin,' accounts of actual creative or translation work are sparse and almost dwindle to nothing, the ennui of making it through long, pennilessly rural winter days eclipsing the cerebral challenges of the emergent writing life. "We often sat inside the house trying to work, not always succeeding. We spent a great deal of time sitting inside one room or another looking down at our work and then up and out the window, though there was not much to see,"46 Davis recalls. A restless quality courses through the piece, torn between ambivalent desires for both greater inclusion in the local landscape and the longing for escape, despite there being nowhere concrete to escape to.  As is related in the story "In a House Besieged," "The woman wanted to go home, but she was already home, there in the middle of the country in a house besieged."47 

The dynamic of the time spent in the Var comes to visceral conclusion in a story told within the story "St Martin" of an unsuccessful, much-cathected onion pie. As Davis narrates it, "One afternoon we had almost no money left, and almost no food. Our spirits were low."48 In desperation, the cupboards are searched, and with dizzy elation, the couple find they have just about the right ingredients — "onions, an old but unopened box of pastry crust mix, a little fat, and a little dried milk'49 — to approximate the most rudimentary of allium tarts. They make it, bake it, try a piece or two and place the rest back in the oven to further cook while they eat. ("It was surprisingly good,"50 Davis notes). Yet, with wincingly acute dramatic irony, having momentarily relaxed before the prospect of an imminent good meal, the rest of the couple's desperate creation burns, their source of food for the next few days irredeemably incinerated.51 

Many of the "France" pieces from this period reveal the mythic figure of "the writer" not to be a lone creative monad, but rather to exist as a relational agent, enmeshed in, and dependent on, other people in the world. Following the nadir-moment of the failed onion pie, "St Martin" tells how "by pure chance, or like an angel," the benevolent photographer showed up at the stone house later the same afternoon, "arriving to rescue us at the very moment we had used up our last resource."52 A neighbouring farmer, not long afterwards, after they have helped him gather eggs from his henhouse in heavy rain, feeds the couple, charmingly, with "a salad full of garlic" and "then some Roquefort,"53 recalling his days in the Resistance as they eat. The couple, much more sated and robust, resume their daily walks, spring about to succeed winter, "drifts of daffodils and narcissus blooming in the fields,"54 yet before too much satisfaction can take root, the aforementioned dog disappears, failing to return one night after being let out to do its business, either stolen, trapped or poisoned in the fields. ("That he was not our dog only made it worse," Davis notes.55) In "St Martin," the abortive onion pie and escaped dog take us a long way, metaphorically at least, from the original "set of old silverware and a dark-blue, backless velvet evening gown." As depicted in these stories, the reality of this French interlude in Davis's career was far richer than any fantasy-tableau she might have put together for her time in France. And mercifully free of fusty evening wear.

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Alice Blackhurst (@aliceblackhurst)is a writer and currently a Stipendiary Lecturer in French at St John's College, Oxford. Her work has appeared in n+1; The Guardian; The White Review (for whom she interviewed Lydia Davis in March 2021); The New Left Review, The Paris Review Daily, and Texte zur Kunst. Her academic monograph Luxury, Sensation and the Moving Image was published by Legenda in December 2021. 

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