How long do you think you could stare at a field of cattle? (Assuming, that is, you are not a farmer, a vet or any class of herding dog.) Looking out from her kitchen window in upstate New York, Lydia Davis kept it up, and took notes, for a couple of years.
The result was The Cows, a short story of sorts in which little happens apart from the bovine back and forth of black-and-white bodies: “So often they are standing completely still. Yet when I look up again a few minutes later they are in another place, again standing completely still.”
The cows make forms and patterns against the green background of their field, or sometimes come ambling to the gate for attention, and the writer’s task is simply to record what she sees. But this being Davis, there’s more going on between the placid herd and the rapt, fretful watcher: The Cows is a masterpiece of attentiveness, half-expressed feeling and formal adventure.
It is also one of the few stories of her own that Davis names in Into the Weeds: a book-length lecture she delivered in 2024 to honour that year’s recipients of the Windham-Campbell Prizes for fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama. Davis was invited to speak about why she writes, a request apt to elicit stunned silence from most authors, or a gush of well-meant cliche.
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Davis’s first instinct is to answer the question by describing her feelings at having been asked in the first place: “When I was invited, last fall, to write on this topic, I agreed. But the subject proposed is difficult. I drew a blank, although I do have a lot to say, generally speaking.”
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She cycles through obvious answers: that it’s more interesting to think about how and why a writer reads, or that she would prefer to speak about other writers anyway, the less well known the better. But soon Davis hits on something more specific: like John Ashbery, she writes because she is bothered.
What sort of bothering happens to a writer as seemingly cerebral as Davis, whose svelte, funny stories often hang on niceties of speech or writing? “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.”
The cows across the road, the shadow of a grain of salt on a counter, the way a Starbucks employee asks “Drizzle or syrup?” – all of these are bothersome to the writerly mind and imagination, nagging away until Davis can find a way to make something out of them, writing and rewriting a thought or a scene in her notebook until it sounds right.
What exactly “right” means – like most writers, she knows it when she hears it, in her own work or in the books she admires. In James Baldwin’s No Name in the Street, a racist Southern waitress has “a face like a rusty hatchet, and eyes like two rusty nails – nails left over from the Crucifixion”. Aside from the nice repetition of “nails”, Davis is struck by “left over”, which suggests both the banality of the work of torture and just how deeply this woman’s hostility is embedded in the culture.
By hapless contrast, in an unnamed book “the writer revealed his carelessness in a brief description of a first sexual encounter by describing a woman’s nipples as ‘fragile’.” Nipples are not fragile, says Davis, “they’re tough”.
It’s partly because of her love of precision that she spends a good deal of Into the Weeds talking about an unlikely volume: The Wheelwright’s Shop by George Sturt, in which the English author recalls in great detail the labour and the lexicon of his trade in the last years of the 19th century. Yes, she says, this book is sometimes tedious. But it is evidence of forces moving through the worker-turned-writer: skill, care, language and a desire to pass on eloquently what he has seen and known.
Into the Weeds contains many wise passages on more renowned writers, among them Herman Melville, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Smart and Annie Dillard. But Davis’s eccentric attention to The Wheelwright’s Shop – a concentration that’s not at all ironic or patronising – says the most about how or why she writes: because something seizes her, because she must do it justice and get herself out of the way.
Brian Dillon’s memoir Ambivalence is published in May by Fitzcarraldo Editions. He is working on Charisma, a novel
