‘Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman’

 I love a particular kind of short story. Bernard Malamud called them “fictive biographies” or “biographed stories.” They are biographies compressed into short stories.

In my mind, Guy Davenport was a master. His short fictions were superbly researched. Readers know that only a fiction writer could raise a historical character from the dead. But it’s hard to tell what’s fact and what’s simply the writer’s imagination.

Lydia Davis wrote a masterpiece in this form, “Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman.”

The story is in 45 sections. Three sections are one-sentence observations. Some are vignettes. Some are anecdotes. Here’s the first sentence of the section on “Character”:

 

From birth, Marie possesses the three dispositions that make brilliant subjects, cherished by professors: memory, power of concentration, and appetite for learning.

 

She leaves Poland to study in Paris. We see her poverty and the austerity she adopts as a defense:

 

She sometimes faints from having fed herself exclusively on radishes and tea.

 

Marie is courted by Pierre Curie, who brings her a scientific paper instead of chocolates. Academic types, especially those in the sciences, weren’t paid well. But the couple’s devotion and their almost religious pursuit of scientific inquiry attracts fellow workers.

They win a Nobel together. Then Pierre, the absent-minded professor, wanders into the path of a freight wagon.

 

It is the back left wheel that crushed Pierre’s skull.

 

Marie won’t allow his name to be spoken, especially in front of the children. Then the letters start.

 

She beings to write to Pierre, a sort of laboratory notebook of grief.

 

Her research finally received financial support from Andrew Carnegie. She won a second Nobel. Everyone knows that the radiation she passionately studied killed her.

I love history. I love nonfiction. But I spent an hour in the presence of Marie Curie the other day. I felt her personality, not just her historical significance.

I say that kind of fiction has to be a magical art.

• Sources and notes: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis; New York: Picador, 2009. “Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman” is on pp. 404-22. The quotations are on pp. 404, 406, 413 and 414. For more on these kinds of stories see “Davenport: ‘John Charles Tapner,’” Nov. 22, 2022, and “Malamud: ‘In Kew Gardens,’” March 20, 2024.