The​ ‘Why I Write’ talk or essay has always seemed the most peculiar of literary subgenres, flying as it does in the face of the time-honoured and pretty much unimpeachable injunction to trust the tale not the teller. Lecturing at Berkeley in the spring of 1975, Joan Didion confessed that she had stolen the title of George Orwell’s celebrated attempt at an explanation because she liked the idea of ‘three short unambiguous words’ that ‘share a sound’. ‘In many ways,’ Didion declared, ‘writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act.’ The point Orwell made in his essay, first published in 1946, was that he had felt it necessary during the previous ten years to subordinate the pleasures of ‘prose style’ to a dogged defence of democratic socialism. None of this sounds at all like Lydia Davis. It’s no surprise, then, that the invitation to deliver the Windham-Campbell Lecture on the topic of ‘Why I Write’ at Yale in the autumn of 2024 should have resulted in a short book with a frankly diversionary title. Or that the book itself should prove so hard to describe, let alone characterise.

The first few pages of Into the Weeds give the impression of someone starting to regret that she ever agreed to conduct a behind-the-scenes tour of what amounts in the four volumes of the uniform edition to an imposing body of work. The Collected Stories came out in 2009, to be followed, after the award of the Man Booker International Prize in 2013, by Can’t and Won’t (2014) and two volumes of Essays (2019 and 2021). In 2023, Davis produced a further collection of stories, Our Strangers, which you won’t find on Amazon because it’s only available from independent booksellers. Then there’s a novel, The End of the Story (1995), and an array of much praised translations of Flaubert, Proust, Blanchot and others. Davis, it turns out, is more than happy to talk about how she writes; as to why, not so much. But she does spend a lot of time reading. So there’s something to be said for investigating the work of some of the writers who have found it as hard as she does to distinguish motive from method.

This approach yields an immediate result. John Ashbery once remarked that he had been sufficiently ‘grabbed and bothered’ by his first sight of Parmigianino’s enigmatic Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror to feel that he ought to ‘do something’ about it. Sensing a kindred spirit, Davis squares up at once to her original brief. ‘Here is a very concise and truthful answer: the reason I write a particular story may be because something – which I call “material”, as in “raw material” – bothers me until I “do something” about it. In these cases, “bother” is wholly positive.’ A writer as capable as Davis of conjuring a found object from the merest shred of overheard conversation is not likely to lack raw material. By this reckoning, the vagaries of the material served up by daily life provide the motive for the method. ‘It is in some sense found in a field. And the first pleasure is this encounter with something coming in, or wanting to come in.’ There’s quite a lot of Davis herself, we might guess, in the view held by the comically disgruntled narrator of ‘Not Interested’: ‘These days, I prefer books that contain something real, or something the author at least believed to be real. I don’t want to be bored by someone else’s imagination.’

Concise and truthful Davis’s formula may be. But it scarcely seems conclusive. Since when did things agree to bother us in a positive way only? The formula is less an answer than a sort of rhetorical found object. A stickler for etymologies, Davis is no doubt aware that ‘bother’ is a word of uncertain origin, singularly lacking in semantic pedigree. It may be a variant of ‘pother’, which means a commotion of some kind, or even, according to Merriam-Webster, a ‘choking cloud of dust or smoke’. What follows over the next fifty pages or so of Into the Weeds is often little more than a pother of fleeting references to other people’s books. It’s all a bit chaotic. One particularly turbulent paragraph cites, in no particular order, George Sturt, J.A. Baker, James Agee, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana Jr, Knut Hamsun and Elizabeth Smart. But I’m not being entirely fair. For one of these writers has already been singled out for extensive analysis.

It’s an odd choice. Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923) is a book Davis would have been unlikely to come across, she says, let alone dwell on, had it not happened to arrive as a Christmas present at the very moment when she was starting to address the topic of her lecture. Chance, she may have felt, is where the weeds grow most vigorously. On his father’s death in 1884, Sturt gave up a career in school-teaching to run the family’s long-established business in Farnham, Surrey. He gradually learned the wheelwright’s trade from the skilled craftsmen in his employment. By the time he sold up in 1920, he had come to believe that the skills required to design and build a horse-drawn wooden wagon amounted to a culture or way of life; and that he himself was in the best possible position to record this way of life, already overtaken by widespread mechanisation, before it disappeared altogether.

In Culture and Environment (1933), F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson use The Wheelwright’s Shop and Sturt’s other accounts of village life to illustrate their ideal of an ‘organic community’. According to Leavis and Thompson, the things these Surrey villagers made (cottages, barns, ricks, wagons) ‘constituted a human environment, and a subtlety of adjustment and adaptation, as right and inevitable’. More recent commentators have been less charitable, dismissing Sturt as a disciple of John Ruskin whose nostalgia for an ancient England could not altogether mask a deep condescension towards its few remaining survivors. It’s also possible to argue, however, that the spirit of Sturt’s early contributions to the Commonweal, the newspaper of William Morris’s Socialist League, continued to animate both the published work and the extensive private journal he kept. A reluctant entrepreneur, Sturt remained fully alive to the anomalies of his situation. He it was, he admits, who – ‘say in 1889’ – introduced modern machinery into the wheelwright’s shop: ‘a gas-engine, with saws, lathe, drill and grindstone’. The painful consequence of his innovations was that the workmen he still thought of as friends had been reduced to ‘machine “hands”’.

The Wheelwright’s Shop is not an easy read. During the mid-1890s, Sturt corresponded extensively with Arnold Bennett, at a time when each was drafting his first (and in Sturt’s case only) novel. They read a lot of avant-garde French fiction. ‘You find fault with Maupassant for his wealth of irrelevant (à vous entendre) detail,’ Bennett complained. ‘Frankly, I think you would do well to follow him some way in this. I don’t think his detail is irrelevant.’ Sturt seems to have taken this advice to heart. The account he offers of the manufacturing process of wagons of every conceivable shape and size is painstaking to a punitive degree, as Davis admits. But she can’t help warming to what we might want to call its exactitude: a quality or habit of being exact in which an impulse at once moral and aesthetic contrives to exceed mere accuracy of observation without ever intending to disown it.

As an outsider confronting the intricacies of an esoteric craft, Sturt remains acutely aware throughout The Wheelwright’s Shop of two of the primary meanings of the word ‘tell’: to narrate and to ascertain. The men he employs are able to tell exactly what needs to be done at each step in the construction of a wagon wheel with a sureness he cannot match. But the story of the way of life they have helped to create through their expertise will never be told unless he undertakes the task. Nowhere is the tension between narration and ascertainment more evident than in an extraordinary description of the cleaving of timber:

Fascinating work this was, by the way. With the wedges cleaving down between the clinging fibres – as he let out the wood-scent, listened to the tearing splitting sounds – the workman found his way into a part of our environment – felt the laws of woodland vitality – not otherwise visited or suspected. No professional person ever dreamed of that strange world; no sawyer even got there. Intellect might hear of it; but the senses alone can know, and none may tell, what the world is like down there in the grain of the oak butt, the fir-tree stamm.

What makes this apparently casual aside begin to feel like a story by Lydia Davis is the abrupt introduction into it – by means of a parenthesis – of a specific point of view, a ‘character’ even, nameless but vividly present as he inhales the wood-scent. Sturt’s aim, evidently, is to emphasise the limitations of abstract knowledge. His parenthesis is a flagrant narrative act, a writer’s flourish. But the story it tells about the workman who has found his way into a part of our environment nonetheless constitutes an invitation to ascertain. Practical, embodied knowledge alone can tell what the world is like down there in the grain of the oak butt.

Davis doesn’t comment on Sturt’s preoccupation with telling. But there’s evidence of something not entirely dissimilar in a passage in her translation of Madame Bovary describing the day of the agricultural fair at Yonville-l’Abbaye. She uses the word ‘tell’ to indicate both the pride which the apothecary Monsieur Homais takes in his ability to distinguish between plants (‘discerner les plantes’) and the desire of the innkeeper Madame Lefrançois to detain him further with some choice local gossip (‘pour lui en conter plus long’). Flaubert undoubtedly felt ‘some modicum of respect’, as Davis puts it in her introduction, for the intellectual curiosity nurtured by the boisterously self-important Homais, however offensive its exercise. Homais is, after all, a journalist as well as an apothecary. It’s hard, Davis adds, ‘not to think that he must represent a comment on the role or the practice of the writer, or one aspect of it.’ There are many examples in her own work of the use of the word ‘tell’ to indicate an act of discernment. ‘Helen and Vi: A Study in Health and Vitality’ even includes a latter-day Homais. ‘Her grandfather taught the children to recognise certain healthful wild plants, and in particular to tell the male from the female of certain flowers, since each had different properties; then they would be sent to gather the plants themselves.’

It’s​ not hard to spot compatibilities of method between Davis and Sturt which when taken together hint at a shared motive. In that light, the subsequent helter-skelter invocation of big novels by Melville, Stein and the rest begins to make sense. Genre is not the issue. Of equal interest, we learn, is the fact that Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project, having grown over thirteen years to ‘epic proportions’, was ‘evidently on its way to being interminable’. Or that the Catalan writer Josep Pla ‘took the slim record he had begun on his 21st birthday, covering just twenty months of his life, and spent the next fifty years annotating and elaborating it’. Davis had first discussed Pla’s The Grey Notebook in a ‘masterclass’ given at NYU in 2012. There she noted that the edition she was using ‘numbers 638 pages’. She does like to keep score. Among the several voluminous writers she has translated is the almost literally interminable ethnographer and card-carrying Surrealist Michel Leiris, whose death in 1990 was merely the prelude, by her account, to the posthumous publication of a journal of ‘more than eight hundred pages’. Davis has by this juncture in Into the Weeds identified a kindred spirit among writers like Sturt and herself, whose exactitude or compulsion to tell the truth (in both senses) results in an epic compilation of journal and notebook entries.

Epic compilation is not what we’ve been led to expect from Davis. Discussions of her work tend to focus on the yield from pithiness and extreme brevity, from a vocabulary stripped down to the bare bones. What she most admired in Joyce and Beckett, she once said, was a ‘pattern of development through different forms over a lifetime of writing’. The example she herself chose to follow was that of ‘writers within the traditional form but abbreviated’: Isaac Babel, Grace Paley. She’s on record as an admirer of the fragmentary and the unfinished. In her twenties, she spent a lot of time with Kafka’s Diaries. ‘In just a few words, he offers a different way of seeing a commonplace thing. I wondered if I could write a piece that short – a title and a line or two – that would still have the power to move, or at least startle, or distract, in a way that was not entirely frivolous.’ But brevity wasn’t ever her sole ambition. After all, Kafka composed the diaries entry by entry over a period of thirteen years. Whatever form they came to possess as a whole was achieved, Davis notes, by ‘accumulation’: the two volumes ‘run to more than 660 pages’. There’s just a suggestion here of dialectical process. At the end of the 1990s, she has remarked, days spent translating the ‘long, complex sentences’ of Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann made her want conversely to see how brief she could make a piece of writing and ‘still have it mean something’. ‘The Other’, her first one-sentence micro-story, appeared in Almost No Memory (1997).

By Into the Weeds, any remaining reluctance to discuss the virtues of what we might call inadvertently long-form writing has long since disappeared. Witness the illuminating account Davis offers of the composition of ‘The Cows’, published as a pamphlet in 2011, and then in Can’t and Won’t. In this case, the raw material really was ‘found in a field’: the one just across the road from her house. Davis had no ‘overall plan’ for her ‘observations’, which she entered in a notebook among other jottings. Days might go by, or weeks, or months, before she felt moved to add a further entry. ‘And so the set of 83 observations was written by accumulation over several years.’ She has spoken in a recent interview of the ‘many, many, many, many pages’ of her journals which ‘never were used in stories and never will be’. About halfway through Into the Weeds, she comes clean. Asked to write about why she writes, she eventually settled, she says, on a form that bears ‘some resemblance’ to a diary. This text, too, has been allowed to accumulate. Its method is the enactment rather than the exposition of a motive.

We finally catch up with the book’s title on page 113 out of 139. Still at a loss as to why she writes, Davis offers a detailed account of the ‘obsessive project’ she has undertaken in a park four minutes by car from the village in upstate New York where she lives. Here she plants native trees, shrubs, perennials and grasses with the encouragement of her friend Hank. Hank, who is ‘old, but not too old to ride a bicycle, though slowly, as slowly as you can ride without falling over’, comes ‘wavering along’ suitably ‘helmeted and goggled’ to see what she is up to. He lives in the next hamlet to the north. In his youth, he tells her, a blacksmith still worked at the smithy just up the road from where they stand talking. But the hamlet is no longer the ‘centre of industry’ it once was. Nearby, the ruins of what had once been a schoolhouse ‘are barely visible, as they subside further and further into the weeds each year, in a grove of scrubby evergreens backing on the creek.’ There’s to be no escape for the metaphor which informs the book’s title from a basis in literal fact.

We’ve been here before, or somewhere quite like it. There’s a bit of Beckett in Hank, but he wouldn’t have been wholly out of place, either, in the ample account Henry Thoreau provides in Walden of the former inhabitants of the by then largely abandoned woodland area a mile or so from Concord where he set up camp for a couple of years during the mid-1840s. ‘But this small village,’ Thoreau asks, ‘germ of something more, why did it fail while Concord keeps its ground?’ Among the villagers was Hugh Quoil, an Irishman said to have fought in the French army at Waterloo, who comes alive most vividly in the journal entry from which Thoreau drew in writing Walden:

He was here, the likes of him, for a season, standing light in his shoes like a faded gentleman, with gesture almost learned in drawing-rooms; wore clothes, hat, shoes, cut ditches, felled wood, did farm work for various people, kindled fires, worked enough, ate enough, drank too much. He was one of those unnamed, countless sects of philosophers who founded no school.

After Quoil’s death, Thoreau went to inspect the house in which he had lived, still strewn with his possessions, and a garden ‘now overrun with weeds, with burrs and cockles which stick to your clothes’. Quoil, in turn, might have settled happily enough among Davis’s ‘Old Men around Town’, in Our Strangers.

The dismal conclusion of a long war waged against the weeds infesting his bean field led Thoreau to acknowledge that the field existed as much for the woodchuck’s benefit as for his own. ‘How, then, can our harvest fail?’ he adds in a not entirely convincing fit of Emersonian brio. ‘Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds?’ Writing in the TLS in October 2019, Davis described the way an increasing preoccupation with what her own garden’s ‘small parcel of earth’ could be made to yield had drawn her to Thoreau’s Wildflowers, a selection of extracts from his journals. She imagines him at work in his native Concord landscape – ‘150 miles east of where I am, on more or less the same latitude’ – in the decade or so before his death in 1862, steadily amassing the knowledge that secured his status as the ‘town botanist’. What moves her most, she says, is the evident pleasure Thoreau took in the fact that a weed such as the common ragwort ‘should have withheld itself so long, biding its appointed time, and now without fail be coming up all over the land’. Here’s someone else happy to have been lured off the beaten track into the surrounding vegetation, literal and metaphoric.

Davis makes no mention of Thoreau in Into the Weeds, but she, too, born in Northampton, Massachusetts, is a New Englander, albeit of a more prodigal variety than the man who tended to confine his roaming to the area around Concord. There is, of course, a world of difference between the Provincetown we encounter in Thoreau’s posthumously published account of the four expeditions he undertook to Cape Cod and the Provincetown described by the narrator of Davis’s ‘Cape Cod Diary’, who has settled there for the summer in order to complete an essay about an unnamed 19th-century French historian. But at least one incident in the story confirms Thoreau’s view of the seashore as a ‘wild, rank place’ with ‘no flattery in it’, a ‘vast morgue’ strewn with flotsam and jetsam. Davis is the author of a poem adapted from Our Village, a memoir by Thoreau’s exact contemporary Sidney Brooks, her great-great-grandmother’s younger brother, who lived in Harwich, at the other end of the Cape from Provincetown. There’s some shared local history here, as well as affinity.

Davis has identified the moment at which she understood that it is possible to derive the material of a story ‘almost entirely from your own life’ as a turning point in her development as a writer. Thoreau wouldn’t have disagreed. ‘Is not the poet bound to write his own biography?’ he once observed. ‘Is there any other work for him but a good journal?’ In his case, the ‘good journal’ amounted to some two million words. There was philosophy, too, in his accumulations. ‘Do not tread on the heels of your experience,’ he once warned. Don’t make an instant song and dance of it. ‘Poetry puts an interval between the impression and the expression – waits till the seed germinates naturally.’ The writer’s exactitude, like the common ragwort’s, is in the waiting.

The book uppermost in her mind as she wrote about Hank and his blacksmith, Davis remarks, was naturally The Wheelwright’s Shop. What she doesn’t tell us is that Sturt’s arrival at 6 a.m. each day to unlock the shop provided an unexpected impetus to his literary ambitions. ‘I thoroughly enjoyed getting afterwards into my gas-lit office and flattering myself that I was writing like Thoreau.’ No wonder, really. Like Sturt, Thoreau had devoted a great deal of time and effort to the improvement of the family business (pencils, in this case, rather than wagons). That Into the Weeds should if not exactly encourage then at least leave room for such tracing of affinities is itself evidence of the increasing emphasis on locality in Davis’s recent fiction. Can’t and Won’t includes ‘Local Obits’; Our Strangers has ‘Here in the Country’ and the slyly Thoreauesque ‘A Person Asked Me about Lichens’, as well as ‘Pardon the Intrusion’, which would appear to have been downloaded from a WhatsApp neighbourhood group chat.

Thoreau remains the most explicit of the three in his conviction that the exactitude so painstakingly nourished in the development of local knowledge is an activity with (paradoxically) far-reaching moral, social and even political implications. Walden aside, he is now best known for leveraging a relatively trivial event – a night spent in jail for refusing to pay a state tax – into the manifesto-like ‘Civil Disobedience’, a no-holds-barred denunciation of slavery and warmongering. Fire-eating is not Davis’s style. But there’s a steeliness to her diffidence. The account she gives in Into the Weeds of how and why she came to write ‘The Cows’ includes a revealing aside about the strengths and limitations of the fellow feeling nurtured by exact observation:

I could see what these particular cows, my neighbour cows, preferred when given the almost complete freedom they had – to go in and out of the open door of their barn, to drink from a bathtub by the fence, to walk to a particular spot in their large field, in winter to stand still in the snow, broadside to the warm sun.

Almost complete: the ultimate constraint on the occupants of the field just across the road is a one-way trip to the abattoir. Thoreau proposed a more extravagant notion of freedom. He would like nothing better, he once declared, than to see his neighbour’s cow break out of her pasture early in the spring and swim ‘boldly’ across the nearby river, a ‘cold, grey tide’ swollen by melted snow. Davis opts instead for a determination to do justice to the dignity attained by the least ostentatious lifeforms – weeds and the occasional bug – as they go about their daily business.

The​ most ostentatious lifeform of them all has of course had a great deal to say over the centuries about what it feels like to find yourself walking, day after day, to a particular spot in a rather more elaborate version of a field. We train ourselves so laboriously to the fulfilment of our daily routines that they never quite settle into automatism. In Davis’s more expansive (and to my mind most compelling) stories, feeling does not so much erupt within routine as amplify its curvature. People witter on at considerable length about all the stuff that bothers them, a good deal of it in a wholly negative way. Their accounts are unhurried, business-like and deceptively toneless. The details they provide cluster until, under the sheer weight of accumulation, one or other of them pops open to telling effect. A weed has flowered, as Thoreau might have put it, in the interval between impression and expression.

Davis’s skill is to notice the way feeling snags on the various contingencies which by their indifference to its clamour make it visible to itself: a cane, a rug, a furnace, a caterpillar, an old shirt, a plate of chilli, the Mary Tyler Moore Show, a sock draped absent-mindedly from a back pocket, a man spelling out his name for the benefit of the clerk at a hotel reception desk. In ‘The Seals’, a woman broods during a long train journey on the death of a sister she had always loved but never, she feels, got to know. Her recollections settle at the story’s end on a particular present from the sister: a pair of ‘little white seals with perforated backs’ meant to absorb the odours in a refrigerator. Any refrigerator? Or just one like hers, testimony to a life lived alone? ‘If I bend down and move things around,’ she observes, ‘I can see them lying back there under the light that shines through some dried spilled things on the shelf above.’ The story dares to imagine that this not especially likeable person may yet discover an almost complete freedom in the shared exactitude of a gift made precious by the note of reproof in its playfulness. Reason enough, surely, to want to write.