Notes I Have Now and Then Made… Items from the Lydia Davis papers
On display in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library are selections from one of the library’s most significant recent literary acquisitions– the papers of writer Lydia Davis. Davis, a short-story writer, novelist, essayist, translator, and Barnard alum, is perhaps best known for her inventive very short stories—many as short as a sentence or a paragraph—which often draw on personal experience.
Davis’s papers span from childhood to the present day and are rich in materials linking her art to the everyday work of being a writer. A meticulous collector of drafts and materials, Davis revises constantly: the archive contains fifteen, twenty, even twenty-five versions of some manuscripts, which a patient reader can track backwards to almost unrecognizable early forms. If writing draws on revision, then form is a structure for creating distance between herself and her work. Sometimes, as she writes in her only novel, The End of the Story, prying life and writing apart is difficult:
Certain things I wrote down in the first person, and others, the most painful things, I think, or the most embarrassing, I wrote down in the third person. Then a day came when I had used she for I so long that even the third person was too close to me and I needed another person, even farther away than the third person. But there was no other person.
Davis’ archive mixes manuscripts with artifacts from domestic life, capturing the daily grind of a working writer: teaching classes, corresponding with editors and agents, paying bills. When preparing the papers for the public, Columbia archivists found entire drafts of stories folded into letters and invoices. At times, these experimentations seem to elude Davis herself, as she playfully fictionalizes in The End of the Story:
I have just been staring at a note I wrote to myself some time ago. It is typical of the unhelpful notes I have now and then made. It has two blanks in it that must have seemed to me at the time too obvious to need supplying. It reads: “Strangely enough, once she had written down x—— it seemed ——. But then, that feeling disappeared.”
Such self-reflexivity is common to Davis’s work, which is often about the process of writing and the process of having written. For Davis, even the process of organizing her archive has been generative: “Since I had to check every page of every journal—lengthy job!—I read enough of each entry to know what it was about, and for some of the journals—not all—I was deliberately on the lookout for material that might make more stories.”
As the items on view in these cases show, Davis both writes long-hand and prints out drafts before marking them up in pen. She also kept conceptual and planning notes, which capture the process of ordering the components—a creative act of balancing cadence and topic—in the story collection Can’t and Won’t.
The exhibition will be on view through April 2026.