Changing My Mind: On sources, revisions, and order

80 hen i was starting out as a writer, I thought, not knowing any better, that I would be a writer of traditional short stories, though I didn’t put it quite that way. As my writing developed, I began departing from this form, further and further as the years have gone by, but I have revisited it now and then because it is a very solid and trustworthy form. One example of this return to a more traditional form is a story called “The Walk,” written about twelve years ago. Changing My Mind On sources, revisions, and order Lydia Davis essay W CHANGING MY MIND | 81 “The Walk” is set in Oxford, England, during and after a literary conference on translation—this would be typical, very acceptable subject matter for a New Yorker short story, for instance. The main characters are a translator, modeled on myself, and a critic, who is a composite of a couple of people I know. Much of the action is taken from real events at the time of a real translation conference in Oxford, and some elements in it are fictional. (One of the turning points in my development as a writer was the realization that I could, with great satisfaction, write fictional stories that were accounts of actual events, only thinly disguised.) The main action in this story is simply a walk taken by the two principal characters. The central drama—not highly dramatic—is the narrator’s perception that there is a resemblance between the walk that she takes with the critic and a passage in her translation of Proust’s Swann’s Way. At another, more conventionally dramatic moment in the story, the narrator nearly sets o≠ a fire alarm in the building where she is staying. In reality, the main character in the actual situation—I myself—did set o≠ the fire alarm. But to recount this episode as it actually happened, with all the students evacuated onto the lawn, some in their bathrobes with wet hair, etc., myself apologizing profusely, would have taken the story in the wrong direction; as it is, this is a highly intellectual, even rarefied story. As is almost always true of any story, this one was born of not just one thing but several. First, every now and then, when the opportunity presents itself, I like to reproduce the traditional short story, though usually with some less traditional variations. I am, in a way, mimicking even the traditional voice in which such a story is told, entering the persona of a certain kind of typical narrator: A translator and a critic happened to be together in the great university town of Oxford, having been invited to take part in a conference on translation. The conference occupied all of one Saturday, and that evening, they had dinner alone together, though not entirely by choice. Everyone else who had participated in the conference or attended it had departed, even the organizers. Only they had chosen to stay a second night in the rooms provided for them in the college in which the conference had taken place, a down-at-heels building with stained carpets in the hallways, a smell of mildew in the guest rooms, and creaking iron bedsteads. (Originally I had not named the town anywhere in the story, because I prefer not to put place names on places, but then, considering that among other things the narrator of the story is looking for the home of the famous editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, this began to seem unnecessarily coy.) Second, I was moved by the physical beauty of Oxford as I had experienced it, especially at evening—the beauty of the buildings, with their varied architecture, in the evening light—and therefore wanted to describe the place. Third, I had for some years been very interested in the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, which took place right there. In a wonderful book called Caught in the Web of Words, Elisabeth Murray, the granddaughter of the editor, James Murray, recounts how he worked; I was interested in the creation of the dictionary not only because of a general interest in...