Guy Davenport: Postmodernism and After (Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies)

Guy Davenport

STUDIES AGM

AVANT-GARDE & MODERNISM

Guy Davenport Postmodern and After A N D R E

Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois

F U R L A N I

Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2007 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2007. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10

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isbn-13: 978-0-8101-2385-4 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-8101-2385-1 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-8101-2389-2 (paper) isbn-10: 0-8101-2389-4 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Furlani, Andre, 1961– Guy Davenport : postmodern and after / Andre Furlani. p. cm. — (Avant-garde & modernism) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8101-2385-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-8101-2389-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Davenport, Guy—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Series: Avant-garde and modernism studies ps3554.a86z66 2007 813⬘.54—dc22 2006026836 ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum 䊊

requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.

To my wife, Mechthild Bauschen (1961–2002) “zur Begegnung führende”

Contents Acknowledgments, ix Introduction: For Davenport, xi 1

The Invention of the Archaic, 3

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The Prose Ideogram, 25

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“By Pan”: Eclogues, 52

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To Write Paradise, 76

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Everything Could Be Otherwise, 100

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“This Too Can Be Shown”: Sexuality, 123

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Postmodern to Metamodern, 145 Notes, 189 Bibliography, 215 Index of Figures, 227 Index of Works by Guy Davenport, 241

Acknowledgments Thinking and thanking are cognate, as work on this study never failed to remind me, and with this ever in mind I give thanks to Concordia University of Montreal, for the award of a research grant, and to Suzanne Buffam, for her researches; to Marjorie Perloff and the anonymous readers at Northwestern University Press, as well as to Stephen Bruhm, for editorial counsel; to Paul Mendelson, for copyediting; to Darragh Languay, for proofing; to Charles Lock, Brian Jones, Todd Hopkins, and Jessica Hutchings, for advice on the manuscript; and to David Eisenman and Alison Rieke, for placing private documents at my disposal. Additional thanks to Brian Jones, for the index. And above all, to the memory of Guy Davenport. “Journey is place / end beginning.” So for this. Earlier versions of portions of this book appeared in Contemporary Literature 43, no. 4; Style 36, no. 1; Literary Imagination 8, no. 2; and in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). Permission to reprint is gratefully acknowledged. For permission to quote from the literary estate of Guy Davenport, as well as for her help, my gratitude to Bonnie Jean Cox.

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Introduction: For Davenport Force

For Guy Davenport “every force evolves a form.” It was typical of him, who made this epigram the title of both an essay and a book, to find an avant-garde formula in an eighteenth-century evangelical leader (Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers). He scarcely trusted an idea that was not on closer inspection an old one. For Davenport it was always later the same day. Like the modernists on whom he was a scholarly authority, he showed a predilection for syncretic structures. “You must say the new and yet, as clearly, the old”: he obeyed Ludwig Wittgenstein’s injunction (Wittgenstein 1984c, 505).1 In Davenport’s work a Lascaux aurochs and a Picasso bull share their pigment, a pre-Socratic fragment and a Wittgenstein Zettel their ink. “A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible,” declares his preface to Every Force Evolves a Form (Davenport 1987, xi). Davenport sought out forms corresponding to the range of forces inhering in his literary subjects, for he assumed that a new subject entails the renegotiation of convention. The result is one of the most eclectic and innovative bodies of fiction in contemporary American literature. Davenport ventured an almost unprecedented abundance of forms, including travelogue, memoir, journal, letter, postcard, dramatic monologue, propaganda piece, eclogue, decasyllabic mime, biblical legend, and utopian romance. A typical story defies categorization, containing elements of realistic narrative, learned essay, historiography, poetry, and visual devices both pictorial and typographical. During a period when first-person retrospective narration has nearly monopolized American short fiction, Davenport almost entirely eschewed the form, except to adapt it. Thus the boy who recalls a missionary’s bungled attempt at conversion in “The Trees at Lystra” is retelling an incident of Paul’s ministry recorded in Acts of the Apostles, while the Kiplingesque infantryman who narrates “The Juno of the Veii” turns out to be a Roman veteran of the Etruscan campaign retelling an incident recorded in Plutarch. Narrated by teenagers, both “The River” and “O Gadjo Niglo” omit all punctuation except the period and the question mark. All four of these stories contain, or are structured as, excursions. Excursus is indeed Davenport’s prevailing mode. The excursus is not only

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travelogue but digression, appendix, gloss. It implies deviation and infringement. Line and lane converge. The joyfully promiscuous Bordeaux rambles of Davenport’s “On Some Lines of Virgil” are songlines. Its youths traverse, and its digressions and glosses describe, not only a region but its epochs, from the Aurignacian to the Roman and the Renaissance. The story remembers that the vers of Montaigne’s essay “Sur de vers de Virgile” are lines of verse and lines of travel, turns of speech and turns of the road. Davenport knew that the Pythagorean parallelogram of his friend Ronald Johnson’s A Line of Verse, a Row of Trees was, for Virgil, a single versus: “Here— / both lines of poetry, rows / of trees, / shall spring all // seasons” (Johnson 2000, 4). The excursuses of Davenport fuse pedestrian processes and linguistic formations. His mode of bricolage treats writing as a complementary practice of errancy. In The Practice of Everyday Life Michel de Certeau claims the homology between verbal and peripatetic figuration constitutes a field of social resistance smack within the homogenizing domain of global commerce, technology, and mass culture. Walking for de Certeau is a space of enunciation. To an internalized sens des mots corresponds an externalized sens de la marche. Walking has its own, specifically asyndetic, rhetoric: as in writing so in walking the asyndeton “selects and fragments the space traversed; it skips over links and whole parts that it omits. From this point of view, every walk constantly leaps, or skips like a child, hopping on one foot. It practices the ellipsis of conjunctive loci” (de Certeau 1984, 101). Montaigne recommends just this kind of movement as a literary style in Sur des vers de Virgile. Davenport’s excursionists elude both the egotistical sublime of the Romantic promeneur solitaire and the connoisseurship of the flâneur. They are neither self-tormenting prodigals nor persecuted exiles. Congenial, curious, and sanguine, they are lovers whose erotic anticipation fosters a broader receptivity to the sights along the way. Therapeutic models of secular pilgrimage are renounced nostrums. Walking is not an anodyne but a mode of engagement. It is a social act and, as de Certeau and Situationist Guy Débord propose, a possible mode of collective dissent. Davenport has narrative excursuses on, inter alii, the Peloponnesian wanderings of Pausanias, originator of the travelogue (“The Antiquities of Elis”), as well as the evangelical wanderings of Saint Paul in Lycaonia (“The Trees at Lystra”); he sardonically imbricates Nixon and Kissinger in China with Gertrude and Alice in Assisi (“The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag”); he imagines a surreal railway itinerary (“The Haile Selassie Funeral xii Introduction

Train”), visits Pound in Rapallo (“Ithaka”), and devotes three stories to Kafka’s excursions. His many idylls of intellectual and erotic metamorphosis include, and often are structured as, rambles (such as “Badger” and “The Meadow”). He wrote a study guide to The Odyssey, the preface to Donald Frame’s translation of Montaigne’s Travel Journal, and among many other travel books reviewed new editions of William Bartram’s Travels. The literary excursionist himself was meanwhile sedentary and reclusive. Davenport had neither a driver’s license nor air miles. “I am a bad traveler,” he admits in “Finding” (Davenport 1981b, 264). After settling permanently in Lexington, Kentucky, at the age of thirty-six, he seldom traveled. From then on he would travel by raven quill. It carried him hither and yon. “The originals are not original” states an Emerson axiom that Davenport’s work confirms (Emerson 1875, 180). The Romantic priority given to unbounded yet transitory inspiration yields in Davenport to the classical constraints of recombination and conjunction. (T. E. Hulme, the early modernist promulgator of a new classicism, is the protagonist of “Lo Splendore della Luce a Bologna.”) Davenport’s art is a highly deliberate one of selection, distillation, and rearrangement, remote from the skylarks of unpremeditated art. Many stories emerge from precisely delineated antecedents. “John Charles Tapner” is derived from an anecdote in Victor Hugo’s Choses vues, “Pyrrhon of Elis” from a short Hellenistic biography. “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” is based on an article of Kafka’s and “The Chair” on one of his letters. Several stories are inspired by photography (such as Bernard Faucon’s in “The Lavender Fields of Apta Julia”) and by painting (such as Henry Scott Tuke’s in “August Blue”). Some are essayistic (e.g., “The Concord Sonata” and “The Kitchen Chair”), while “The Invention of Photography in Toledo” is a travesty of a scientific essay. A Davenport text often interlaces imaginative and archival narratives. “Fifty-seven Views of Fujiyama” alternates between a translation of Basho’s travel book The Narrow Road to the Deep North and contemporary vignettes of travel, while “The Wooden Dove of Archytas” embeds a Southern interracial anecdote within an account of an ancient Greek scientific experiment. “Boys Smell like Oranges” alternates between the conversations of two strolling social scientists and the pair of soccer players they pass. “August Blue” and “The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag” intertwine multiple narrative strands. Text and graphics are integrated in Davenport’s fiction. In demand as an illustrator, both for books (he produced the hilarious caricatures for Hugh Introduction

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Kenner’s The Stoic Comedians and The Counterfeiters) and as a staff artist for such journals as the Kenyon Review, Parnassus, Arion, and Paideuma, Davenport decorated in pen and ink many of his own diverse works, including his translation of Sappho and his guides to Homer. Already his earliest stories, published as an undergraduate in the Duke University journal the Archive, incorporated illustrations. So too did the columns he contributed to his school newspaper, the Yellow Jacket, and, while still attending Boys High School in Anderson, South Carolina, those he contributed to two area newspapers, the Independent and Ware Shoals Life. “The decorations for this volume are all quotations,” Davenport writes of his drawings in the long poem Flowers and Leaves (Davenport 1966, 4), and this holds for the “decorations” to his stories. They are citations in no way subordinate to the text’s verbal elements. “The prime use of words is for imagery: my writing is drawing,” Davenport stated in an interview (Hoepffner 1995, 123). He liked to recall Jean Cocteau’s adage: “Cocteau said of his drawings that they were untied and retied in a different way” (Davenport 1991, unpaginated). He ceased to incorporate images only because of their unsatisfactory reproduction in his books. In the preface to his Fifty Drawings, he laments the design of Apples and Pears: The designer understood the collages to be gratuitous illustrations having nothing to do with anything else, reduced them all to burnt toast, framed them with nonsensical lines, and sabotaged my whole enterprise. I took this as a final defeat, and have not tried to combine drawing and writing in any later work of fiction. (Davenport 1996c, unpaginated) Although he refused to market his canvases, Davenport was an accomplished painter in styles no less diverse than his literary styles. “Curiously,” he joked in an interview while undergoing therapy for the lung cancer that ended his life at seventy-seven in January 2005, “in my own neighborhood here, the children think I am a painter. A world-famous painter. How this happened I do not know” (Young 2005, 29). His well-lit upstairs studio was visible from several yards, so the kids probably assumed as much from all the time he spent there at his easel. The inseparable relationship between Davenport’s literary and pictorial work is shown in Erik Anderson Reece’s monograph on the paintings, A Balance of Quinces. A number of Davenport’s finest stories concern historical or imaginary artists. And some of his fiction was inspired not only by work he had admired but by work he had printed. While working as a teen for local newspapers xiv

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Davenport had acquired typesetting skills, and in the mid-1960s he collaborated with Laurence Scott to print an unpublished letter by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska to John Cournos (Ezra’s Bowmen of Shu—the instigation of Davenport’s story “The Bowmen of Shu”) and a first edition of Ezra Pound’s Canto 110 (much revised when Pound republished it in 1968 in Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII ). Long before he began writing fiction commercially, Davenport thus had the technical training to grasp that the page is foremost a visual unit. The layout of Sappho: Poems and Fragments and of Flowers and Leaves capitalizes on this expertise. “I’ve spent five years doing printing (commercial and very fine, for Claire Leighton),” he writes concerning the latter book in a May 5, 1966, letter to Jargon Press publisher Jonathan Williams, “and there are pages in the two copies I’ve seen that would have got my ear pulled if I’d offered them even as rough proofs” (Davenport and Williams 2004, 74).2 Davenport’s art results from a poet’s ear and a printer’s hand. He chafed at the writer’s limited means for conveying surface. For a writer so formidably intellectual, Davenport aspired to sensuous effects and (resisting his own pedagogical temperament) correspondingly disdained discursive statement. In a handwritten December 30, 1966, letter to Williams he calls for a tactile poetics: “Too much talking ABOUT a subject (that’s for prose) and too little MAKING the subject. Ideas have damned near ruined poems (+ prose). It’s the feeling of touch that communicates in a poem—or maybe a poem communicates by touch; certainly not by wobbling about among ideas. You don’t talk about ‘things,’ but reconstruct ’em” (Davenport and Williams 2004, facsimile 85). When at the end of the 1960s Davenport returned after a twenty-year hiatus to fiction, it was because he had found ways of “making the subject” in prose as well as in verse. One of the first stories to emerge from this experimentation concerns the artist Vladimir Tatlin because the constructivist had triumphantly freed the image from the flat surfaces of the framed artwork. Davenport includes in “Tatlin!” magnificently grainy drawings—the raven-quill hatchworking busy with defiance of the smooth print surface—of Tatlin’s pieces, displayed for admiration of their ingenious liberation into three-dimensional planes. Davenport’s stories are allusive and intricate; they are not obscure, hermetic, or formless. “American poets,” Hugh Kenner notes in A Sinking Island, “had begun to show the classroom’s stamp in Pound’s and Eliot’s generation, and the tradition persists (Olson, Zukofsky, Davenport)” (Kenner 1988, 249). There is, however, nothing gratuitous about that impress in Introduction

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Davenport’s stories. Many of them depict Orphic descents to recover greatness from oblivion, and themselves function as such a descent. Indeed the stories of his first collection, Tatlin!, make up a Lethean cortege: many of the collages of the constructivist Tatlin are no longer extant, while most of his engineering designs went unrealized; “Robot” concerns the discovery of Neolithic cave paintings hidden for twenty thousand years; “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” depicts an air show the accounts of which are inconsistent (and most of the works of the story’s main character, Franz Kafka, were written in obscurity and only published posthumously); “Herakleitos” describes the enigmatic Greek philosopher preparing a book of which only fragments are extant; “1830” is a lie that Edgar Allan Poe recounted about his period of anonymity (and like Poe himself the story withholds his identity); while in “The Dawn in Erewhon” Charles Fourier drafts in squalid anonymity his utopian books, many of which were not published until over a century after his death. Davenport’s writing, Laurence Zachar proposes, is situated “on the intergeneric borders” (“aux frontières intergénériques”) where manifold modes and borrowings ultimately coalesce in an arresting and provocative vision of cultural unity. The study of Davenport’s work from the perspective of generic hybridity does indeed make clear the profound coherence of a work that on the surface often might appear chaotic . . . Astonishing in Davenport is the way in which this material, which appears the very incarnation of chaos (hermetic, enigmatic, obscure, with its excess of allusions), reveals itself in fact to be constructed, ordered, structured. The deeper one plunges into it, the more one discerns cohesion in the texts. (Zachar 1994, 62) 3 Davenport’s generic hybridity begins in the extensive notebooks he kept throughout his adult life. Many of his stories exploit the elasticity, variety, and receptivity of the journal, commonplace book, and workbook. He experimented with the genre even in his nonfiction, for A Balthus Notebook is just that, as are such essays as “Every Force Evolves a Form,” “Micrographs,” and “Scripta Zukofskii Elogia.” Like his beloved Samuel Butler, who revised his notebooks for publication, he also published excerpts from his own notebooks.4 In an uncollected essay on the artist’s sketchbook, Davenport writes that “the sketchbook is both playground and testing place, the free exercise of pure intellect whether in doodling (the draftsman’s daydreaming) or in copying nature with precision. The xvi

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creative mind is prodigal, and its extravagance is at home in the sketchbook, before its submission to the economy of the finished work of art” (Davenport 1991, unpaginated). Composition for Davenport was often the happy manipulation of independent passages, both original and incorporated from other sources, entered into his heterogenous notebooks. Where editing usually follows drafting, here it in a sense preceded it—and indeed was integral to it at every stage. “My writing unit is such that I start literally with scraps of paper and pages from notebooks,” he explained in a 1976 interview. “Every sentence is written by itself; there are very few consecutive sentences in my work . . . Single sentences, which are revised eight or nine times. And I find a place for them, so that the actual writing of any of the stories of Tatlin! was a matter of turning back and forth in a notebook and finding what I wanted” (Alpert 1976, 5).5 Encounter and self-encounter so finely overlapped that the distinction got effaced. The method has a close, indeed self-conscious parallel with Thoreau’s own method of culling notebooks to construct his books and essays. Davenport’s collage story “The Concord Sonata” appropriately treats Thoreau as a model forager in the dual realms of natural history and transcendental idealism. In it, Davenport searches out the textual sources of Thoreau’s enigmatic account of his own searches. A prose analogue to the allusive Charles Ives composition from which it derives its title, “The Concord Sonata” integrates incidents from the life—and phrases from the writings— of Thoreau with passages from, for example, Mencius, W. E. B. DuBois, Wittgenstein, and an ancient Chinese ode to create an Ivesian medley of citations. The meanings emerge from the pattern of its parts; indeed, they are inherent in the mode of inquiry rather than limited to the results. Reliance on notebooks did not, in Davenport’s case, lead to an autobiographical emphasis in his fiction or his verse. Indeed, he assailed expressivist theories of creativity and insisted on textual autonomy. Typically situated in distant lands and diverse periods, and peopled with historical characters, his work is notably impersonal. This is reinforced by a prose style resistant to mimetic illusion and a verse style immunized against the modes of self-expression popularized by the Beats and Robert Lowell.6 Davenport resisted the self-disclosure that the 1960s urged and rewarded, choosing instead to obey the ancient Egyptian axiom he translated from Boris de Rachewiltz’s Italian version: “Don’t open your heart: a mistaken word released from your mouth returns with enemies. You fall into ruin because of your own tongue” (Davenport 1983b, 28). The man Hugh KenIntroduction

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ner called “the resident hermit of Lexington, Kentucky” (Kenner 1996, xi) found there the equivalent of a discreet Egyptian retreat: “Build yourself a pretty house in the valley of the desert, where you can hide yourself away” (Davenport 1983b, 28). On September 19, 1964, soon after settling there to join the Department of English at the University of Kentucky, he wrote to Jonathan Williams, “I chose the remotest offer with the most pay” (Davenport and Williams 2004, 15). Lucrative subsequent offers could not dislodge him from this refuge, and he died in Lexington just over forty years later. Traces of Davenport’s life are thus scant in his works. The reader, for instance, of his Penguin editions of O. Henry receives few hints that Davenport, recipient of the prize named in his honor, was like O. Henry a Carolinian. Yet his literary precocity reveals the gestation of a brilliant writer of the South. Already as a teen he was contributing illustrated features to local newspapers on subjects ranging from the assault on Fort Sumter to regional architecture and landscape, local characters, high school life, even Anderson dialects. Some of his first reviews are of Southern writing, such as Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (Archive 61, no. 7 [April 1948]: 16, 17, 23). Several of the poems as well as four of the five stories he published between 1947 and 1949 in the Archive have Southern settings. The young black protagonist of the first short story he published, “That Lonesome Road to Macon,” yearns to escape the racism and squalor of his predominantly white rural town: “Why can’t a fellow pick up and pull out of this? What the hell makes it so hard? It’s yours and it’s not yours” (Davenport 1947, 7). Davenport picked up and pulled out of it. At sixteen he left high school in Anderson and, having persuaded officials of Duke University to admit him, moved to Durham, North Carolina, receiving a bachelor’s degree in English and classics in 1948. He won a Rhodes scholarship, and at Merton College earned a B.Litt. in 1950 with the first Oxford University degree thesis on Ulysses. After serving two years in the Army’s Eighteenth Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg and then teaching English at Washington University in St. Louis, in 1954 he entered Harvard University, where he wrote the first doctoral dissertation on Pound’s Cantos. In 1960 he moved to Pennsylvania to become an assistant professor of English at Haverford College. When he resettled permanently in the South in 1963, it was not with an eye to collecting local detail for fiction. Indeed, after his undergraduate appearances in the Archive, Davenport did not publish another story until “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” appeared in the Hudson Review in December 1969. xviii Introduction

His stories now took place not in the minutely particularized South of the early fiction but in ancient Ionia, Belle Époque Italy, revolutionary Russia, occupied France, and contemporary Holland. Poe is one of his only Southerners, and in “1830” he is incognito in an imaginary Petersburg. Davenport said in an interview: At Duke I took Prof. Blackburn’s Creative Writing course (Bill Styron and Mac Hyman were in the class) and got the wrong impression that writing is an eff usion of genius and talent. Also, that writing fiction is Expression and deep inner emotion. It took me years to shake off all this. Writing is making a construct, and what’s in the story is what’s important. And style: in what words and phrases the story is told. (William Blackburn, the full name. His guiding us all toward autobiographical, confessional, “emotional” writing is—in reaction—why I write about concrete objectivities that are fairly remote from my own experiences. I like to imagine how other people feel in a world different from my own.) (Renner 2002, unpaginated) Only a single collected story—one of his very shortest—takes place entirely in the South where Davenport spent most of his life. And the auditory richness of “A Gingham Dress,” a farmer’s affectionate monologue about the novelty of her young son’s preference for dresses, indicates that Southern regionalism was deprived of a contemporary master. He sometimes lent vivid Southern idioms to his ancient rustics. A nineteenthcentury episode in “August Blue” describes a Jewish professor fleeing for his life from the racism of the University of Virginia. Nor, except indirectly, did Davenport draw on his military service in the Airborne Corps stateside during the Korean War. The experience perhaps enhanced the discipline of an astoundingly productive teacher, scholar, writer, editor, and artist, but otherwise it simply gave heightened verisimilitude to the atmosphere and dialogue of his few army episodes. (And all of these, to be sure, are historical, like the brief Civil War episode of “Idyll.”) Asked in the same interview why his stories are set outside the United States, Davenport replied: A clever critic might note that they are all set in the USA. “Tatlin!” is a fable about totalitarian governments strangling creativity, not always blatantly and openly. At the time I was lecturing on Hermann Broch’s Introduction

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The Death of Virgil, the classic study in our time of Government and The Poet. Vladimir Tatlin’s genius suffocated by Stalin seemed to me to be paradigmatic and timely. I learned from Kafka’s Amerika that you don’t have to have a realistic knowledge of a place, and from Nabokov that “realism” is simply a fashionable mode. (Renner 2002, unpaginated) Plot and characterization proceed in Davenport on the principle of historical analogy. His texts manipulate obliquely apropos correspondences between epochs, events, and personalities. The recurring figure of Adriaan van Hovendaal is constructed out of parallels to Wittgenstein. Austere and retiring, the youthful Dutchman is a philosopher of first things who is drawn to bright, gracious youths. An iconoclastic and reluctant professor who once fled the academy to work as a gardener, he secludes himself in a remote northern cabin to fill notebooks, one result of which is a book called “The Blue and Brown Baltic Notebooks.” Since Davenport’s stories take place where the historical and the mythic converge, this Amsterdam avatar of Wittgenstein is at the end of Davenport’s first novella “The Dawn in Erewhon” reading the newly published Zettel. Even mythologized figures are not permitted to lose their diachronic integrity. In “The Concord Sonata” Thoreau is portrayed with reference to Diogenes, while Diogenes, in “Mesoroposthonippidon,” is partly a portrayal of Thoreau. Wittgenstein and F. Buckminster Fuller are concealed in the protagonist of “Herakleitos,” while the hero of “C. Musonius Rufus” is the Roman paradigm of Ezra Pound in Pisan detention. The principle of historical analogy was, of course, Pound’s own (indeed, he himself suggested the parallel to the obscure Stoic philosopher), and notably Spenglerian. In The Decline of the West Oswald Spengler, adapting Goethe’s notion of morphology, proposes that the means to identify living forms (Gestalten) rests not in diachronic etiology but in syncretic analogy. Meaning inheres not in explanatory distillations of data but in attention to what he calls physiognomic correspondences. One mark of Davenport’s continuity with modernism is his Spenglerian mode of characterization. Including self-characterization. Although in his early Lexington years, after his brief marriage had ended, he liked to compare himself to “a Lakedaimonion Roderick Usher” (Davenport and Williams 2004, 40), and even allowed himself to be photographed by Ralph Meatyard in the guise of Poe’s character, Davenport settled on less parodic antecedents. In the disingenuously whimsical short essay “Keeping Time” he applies Spengler xx

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to identify himself under the rubric of both classical psychology and a classical forerunner. He invokes the Pythagorean belief in daimons, souls purified and dispatched to guide mortals, defined elsewhere as “the moral climate of a man’s cultural complex (strictly, his psychological weather)” (Davenport 1995, 16). Without specifically naming him, Davenport confides the identity of his own as the fourth-century poet Ausonius: “My daimon (we’re great pals) was a minor poet in the autumn of Roman time, polite, bashful, and pensive. His daimon, however, had been a charming lout too comfortable with himself to amount to anything but a joy to his enemies and a nuisance to his friends. So when I write I am disorganized by my daimon’s daimon, but kept in order by my daimon himself” (Davenport 1996b, 318–19). (The “lout” is presumably Ausonius’s charge, Emperor Valentinian’s son Gratian.) A professor of rhetoric at Bordeaux, Ausonius experimented in a great range of forms, from the unmythologized nature poetry of Mosella to highly arbitrary texts that anticipate Khlebnikov and Stein. In his nuptial cento the poet can be racy even by the standards of Roman taste and, in Bissula, which celebrates his love for a young manumitted Teutonic slave, he can challenge custom. Davenport condenses and adapts the droll eighth poem of Ausonius’s The Professors of Bordeaux as “A Professor at Bordeaux” (see Davenport 1986, 57), while “Wo es war, soll ich werden” includes passages translated from Mosella and Bisulla, highly relevant intertexts in a novella that celebrates both the beauty of landscape and love for a young social inferior. All these literary and character traits have relevant echoes in Davenport: [Ausonius] was half pagan, less than half Christian. He read everything, quoted everybody, and sported an erudition that clearly had for its message that although he lived at a great remove from Rome, Alexandria, and Athens, nevertheless we Bordelais are right up with everything. We read books. We have a university. We have traveled. We are witty and well-mannered. (Davenport 1987, 41) Insofar as an image of the author surfaces in his fiction, it does so in the guise of such Poundian personae.7 Rather than writing an account of his own travels in the Peloponnese, Davenport appropriates and revises another’s, so that “The Antiquities of Elis” is an adaptation of passages from the sixth book of Pausanias’s Description of Greece. The result is a Introduction

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kind of Portrait of the Artist as an Ancient Greek. In only the second story he published since college,8 Davenport makes Pausanias one of antiquity’s moderns, just as he makes of himself something like the reverse. Pausanias is an observant, informed, and self-effacing expositor who walks in the footsteps of several prominent characters in Davenport’s fiction, including Pythagoras, Diogenes, and Pyrrhon.9 He may gently rebuke the superstition of a yokel but will not violate the taboo against uttering Persephone’s name. He is as keen to visit a temple of Artemis as the tomb of the arch-Skeptic Pyrrhon. He is both the guidebook author recommending an inn and the anthropologist recognizing in an old man playing the bouzouki among winnowers an avatar of Orpheus. This combination of urbane skepticism and rustic piety, of quotidian particularity and mythological resonance, are equally Davenport’s.10 In Pausanias the equanimity of age tempers but does not dull an erotic eye—another trait shared with Davenport. Sanctuaries of Eros, the priapic displays of Aegean asses, the rhythms of the Artemisian mating dance, the gazes exchanged by youths, a statue of athletes “illustrating the balance and tension of comradely love” (Davenport 1979, 135): all command the traveler’s attention and arouse his admiration. This sensuality, proliferating in Davenport’s work in all media, coincides with an almost Jamesian ethic of restraint. Pausanias praises “the strange Greek harmonies . . . wherein the Hellenic adoration of the body is combined with the strictest and perhaps the purest of morals” (142). Decorum results not from Swiftian repugnance of the body or repressive masochism but from adherence to the classical ideal of encrateia (e g j kravteia) or self-mastery and its ethical corollary, sophrosyne (swfrosuvnh) or temperance. Although in “Apples and Pears” he opens his house to the anarchic erotic life of teenaged strays, Adriaan remains for the most part aloof from it. In “Mesoroposthonippidon” Diogenes prefers the pleasures of an unassailable autonomy to those of sexual dependence, the latter celebrated by the randy disciple who narrates the story. The friendship of the men is the only evidence of an accommodation of these Blakean contraries. The accommodation is, to be sure, often tangible in the style. The prose of “Antiquities of Elis” unites a sensual particularity and a serenely restrained style, and it is noteworthy that many of Davenport’s interpolations augment the sexual references in Pausanias’s book. A religious awe of sexuality worthy of D. H. Lawrence culminates in a description of the Temple of Hermes at Kyllene. In the Description of Greece Pausanias briefly xxii Introduction

notes it: “The statue of Hermes which the locals worship is male genitalia upright on a plinth” (bk. 6, chap. 26, 5). Davenport, who transposes the impersonal narration into the first person, writes: Inside, upright on a round millstone, is a blackened shaft topped by what appears at first to be a great acorn. Except for the dolmens of Sicily or perhaps the wild tall rocks of the Calabrian coast, I had never seen any stone so primeval in its import, nor so direct a symbol. It is, I should think, older than the idols of the Cyclades. —But, I said, it is nothing more than a stone phallos. —Yes, Pyttalos said, it is Hermes. (Davenport 1979, 147–48) It is left to our guide’s local guide, the irreverent but by no means irreligious Pyttalos, to state the bald equivalence. The image is a deity, the deity an image; no matter, it is the force, generation, that is being venerated. The primeval stone, the direct symbol: Davenport shies from neither. Many of his stories, paintings, and poems attest to it. Yet stone and symbol are carefully set within quotation marks. Direct statement is abjured. “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier,” published with “The Antiquities of Elis” in Da Vinci’s Bicycle, ends with Davenport’s full-page pen-and-ink image of an ancient Greek mask. From ancients like Pausanias to moderns like the Swiss novelist Robert Walser, the book abounds in personae through which Davenport speaks. Walser’s is perhaps the most surprising mask. The reinscription of the body so important to Davenport plays a small part in Walser. In his preface to Montaigne’s Travel Journal, Davenport notes that Montaigne’s preoccupation with his body locates “his journal in a time when the body was still part of personality. Later, it would disappear. Dickens’s characters, for instance, have no kidney stones because they have no kidneys. From Smollett to Ulysses, there is not a kidney in English literature” (Davenport 1987, 40). He remarks that “with the occlusion of the body there is an anaesthesia of sensibilities.” The sexually frank exposition in his fiction combats this occlusion, while Walser, who devotes one of his most characteristic apostrophes to the seeming weightlessness of ashes, yearns rather for the incorporeal.11 From stories about the pre-Socratics and poems about Hokusai to essays about the Shakers and paintings about Orpheus, Davenport extols intimations of an embodied order, while Walser distrusts ascriptions of pattern. In Davenport’s “A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Introduction

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Rosenberg,” Walser, who for several years lived in the Zürich of Dada, observes that “everything is incongruity if you study it well” (Davenport 1979, 163). Yet his is the only parallel Davenport acknowledged. Asked during an interview whether any of his characters were self-portraits, Davenport, by a typical indirection, replied: “Hugh Kenner has pointed out that my Walser is one” (Hoepffner 1995, 124). Davenport even borrowed the title of his essay “Micrographs” from the minuscule cipher Walser used during the last decade of his aborted career.12 What could the genial Davenport, a celebrated academic and writer, have had in common with the neglected penniless loner Walser, who occupied countless mansards until being sequestered in an Alpine sanatorium? Walser was a modest and idiosyncratic man, with genteel manners perfected during a stint as a butler. Davenport’s story affectionately depicts this. Modesty, idiosyncrasy, and beautiful manners indeed characterized Davenport as well, and when he told the same interviewer that he is “a minor prose stylist,” there was no derogation (Hoepffner 1995, 119). Walser made this his great ambition, contributing to the taxonomical reevaluation of “minor” and “major.” The quality of his voice, ironic without asperity, genial but slightly aloof, also has affinities with Davenport’s. Indeed, the meandering lyricism and comedy of “A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg” is so faithful to Walser’s style that mimicry can scarcely be dissociated from Davenport’s own manner.13 The peripatetic author of “The Walk” and digressive feuilletons, Walser narrates “A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg” in an appropriately desultory, but by no means disorderly, style while on the final stroll of his life. Like Walser’s “Kleist in Thun,” the story describes the end of a solitary and destitute German writer’s life, and like Walser’s “Balloon Journey” it begins in one. And just as Davenport’s title evokes the writer’s death (during a Christmas ramble Walser suffered a fatal heart attack on a field of snow on a slope of the Rosenberg), Walser describes in The Siblings Tanner (Geschwister Tanner) a dead man lying in the snow. (Like the Lascaux cave paintings in Davenport’s “Robot,” Walser was found by a group of youths and their dog [see Sauvat 1995, 156].) Davenport’s story portrays Walser as a species of landlocked castaway, merging with (indeed disappearing into) Robinson Crusoe when passages from Defoe’s novel are integrated directly into the text (Davenport 1979, 180–81). “I long to be a hermit,” Davenport wrote to Williams on January 30, 1966, while inundated with professorial duties. “Robinson Crusoe xxiv Introduction

is pure myth; no one has ever been so fortunate” (Davenport and Williams 2004, 60). Having rejected paid speaking engagements, he wrote to Williams exactly eleven months later, “My ambition is to be invisible” (84). In the preface to the correspondence he wrote thirty-eight years later, Davenport notes, “As the Frenchman said, ‘You disappear while arriving’ ” (9). Walser got tantalizingly—and also catastrophically—close to Crusoe’s mythic isolation, achieving an invisibility barred to the prodigiously productive, gregarious, and successful Davenport. Two other motives elucidate Davenport’s acknowledgment. One is circumspection, for the Walser parallel deflects attention from more apparent similarities to characters like Adriaan and Holger Sigurjonson (the Danish boarding school master in “Wo es war, soll ich werden”), authorial alter egos whose attitude to pederasty render them provocative vehicles for practices from which Davenport wished to disassociate himself personally.14 The other, somewhat related motive is self-censorship. In “A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg” Davenport’s Walser describes the renunciation of writing. Walser disdained as a betrayal of art the compromises, self-promotion, and commercial exigencies of the book trade. As periodical editors and book publishers lost interest in his work, Walser suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized. Eventually transferred against his will to a remote sanatorium, he abjured writing for all of his last twenty-four years. Davenport’s Walser vacillates between contempt for the publishing business and for his own genius. “And their books, these people who keep writing, who reads them? It is now a business like any other” (Davenport 1979, 185). Davenport certainly shared Walser’s reservations about the book trade. He exercised his freedom as an academic by refusing to ingratiate himself with large commercial publishers. He rarely consented to public appearances, book readings and signings, or interviews. His contract with North Point Press indeed stipulated freedom from all such promotion. These tactics permitted Davenport to pursue his literary experiments with scant interference and minimal concessions. It correspondingly denied him the prospect of a wider readership. Walser’s tactic, impossible to sustain, was the fertile isolation and aesthetic freedom of the “pencil-zone,” Bleistiftgebiet. The micrograph was a cipher requiring as much close application to write as to decode, yet it offered to German literature a fresh phase of modernism. It cost Walser his audience, livelihood, and psychic equilibrium. For Davenport, a cautionary fate. Introduction

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While Tatlin!, Davenport’s first collection of fiction, begins with the Soviet suppression of the Russian modernists, Da Vinci’s Bicycle, his second collection, ends with the voluntary self-censorship of a Swiss modernist who lost his commercial access to a readership. In an interview Davenport pointed out the antithesis: “ ‘Tatlin!’ is about a genius who was prevented from fulfilling himself because of a repressive political context. Walser is exactly the opposite. He gave up writing because he didn’t think there was anybody any more to be an audience for his writing” (Alpert 1976, 5).15 Davenport’s own remarks suggest a similar apprehension. “Each book,” Davenport confides in the postscript to Twelve Stories, “was meant to be the last. Da Vinci’s Bicycle ends with a farewell to writing” (Davenport 1997, 234). Through Walser’s valediction Davenport dictates his own farewell to writing. In themes no less than forms Davenport’s fiction concedes little either to moral puritanism or to aesthetic convention, but the misunderstandings generated by both must have weakened the resolve to publish. Tatlin! ends with a censoriously received novella describing Adriaan’s sexual involvement with a pair of teenagers. As though in retreat from such controversy, Davenport’s second collection, Da Vinci’s Bicycle, is a more reticent book. Having overcome his reservations and next published Eclogues, Davenport reprises Adriaan in “The Death of Picasso,” but it takes the philosopher’s young yet nevertheless mature male companion until the very end of the story to seduce him. The episode is not described. Yet like Da Vinci’s Bicycle, Eclogues also ends with the death of an alter ego. Although an overweight Italian family man, Tullio in “On Some Lines of Virgil” is a more obvious partial self-portrait than Walser or Pausanias. Tullio is a classically educated art historian specializing in modernism. Davenport was a renowned modernist scholar who wrote extensively on the fine arts and produced many classical Greek translations. The Bordeaux where Tullio teaches was the home of Davenport’s maternal ancestors. (His great-grandfather’s merchant ship the Etiwan sailed between Charleston and Bordeaux with a cargo of cotton and indigo.) And whereas Walser is anxious to elude what for him are mere illusions of order (he ends the story with a sentence worthy of Tristan Tzara: “But let us desist, lest quite by accident we be so unlucky as to put these things in order” [Davenport 1979, 185]), Tullio is a convinced and intrepid detector of analogies and large cultural patterns. “I want, he said, to write a history of the imagination in our time . . . The new modifies everything before, xxvi

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and even finds a tradition for the first time” (Davenport 1981, 221). The man Hugh Kenner also called “a geographer of the imagination” (Kenner 1989, 67) wrote a number of chapters of this history. Tullio may be married where the bachelor Davenport had a companion for almost forty years (the Bonnie Jean Cox to whom three of his books are dedicated), but this is not in conflict with a platonic fascination with boys. Pederasty confines itself to taking an unshockable delight in the teasing of the story’s sexually adventurous teens. Tullio’s understanding of their eroticism as an ethical and intellectual as well as a sensual need, his recognition of carnality as both a good for its own sake and as a bulwark against the distortions of metaphysical abstraction, guarantees their bond to him. In Flowers and Leaves Davenport claims this ideal for his own: Appetence, the eye’s hunger, roam In shapes, or give form to time, love And the intellect are the one honeycomb. (Davenport 1966, 39) Tullio is no less genial and gracious than cerebral, a platonic Silenus among the young satyrs of Davenport’s brilliant pastoral. His hedonism relishes equally the unconscious beauty of a young body and the sober wisdom of Cicero on aging. Davenport is never more convincing than when he describes what Tullio grasps, the interdependence of intellect and body—or, more accurately, their indivisibility. When Tullio suffers a fatal heart attack, on a Bordeaux sidewalk rather than a Swiss slope, the teenaged friends who find him recognize in his death not a contradiction of pastoral but its confirmation. Et in Arcadio ego, the young narrator remembers: death too is in Arcadia (see Davenport 1981, 238). The new modifies everything before, including pastoral, and even finds a tradition for the first time. Davenport was, if anything, a more urbane and certainly a more successful writer than Tullio. From the Rhodes scholarship and Harvard doctorate to being named Alumni Distinguished Professor by the University of Kentucky in 1983, Davenport’s academic career was highly distinguished. Despite turning down countless offers, he still managed to deliver keynote addresses at humanities conferences, and he gave prestigious lectures at North American universities. His first miscellany of essays, The Geography of the Imagination, was nominated for the American Introduction

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Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He published a study of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, and edited selections not only of O. Henry’s fiction but of Louis Agassiz’s scientific writings. “The eye that found Indian arrowheads on Sunday afternoons in South Carolina is by now the most astute eye in America,” Hugh Kenner wrote in an August 1981 Harper’s article on Davenport. “What can it not find!” (repr. in Kenner 1989, 68). Davenport was an exceptionally versatile critic, publishing influential essays, for example, on Charles Olson’s poetry, Charles Ives’s music, Neolithic art, contemporary photography, Eudora Welty’s fiction, Pavel Tchelitchew’s painting, and Homer’s translators. He contributed introductions to Montaigne’s journal, Joyce’s critical writings, Paul Cadmus’s drawings, Nabokov’s Don Quixote lectures, and Anne Carson’s poetry. He also produced guides to The Iliad and The Odyssey. His fine arts criticism makes up a substantial body: Objects on a Table and A Balthus Notebook are iconographic studies, and he wrote numerous essays and catalogue introductions. While reviewing regularly for the New Criterion, New York Times Book Review, Georgia Review, and other journals, he shared with Kenner the curious distinction of having written extensively for periodicals at opposite ideological poles: for over a decade he was a prolific contributing editor at the National Review, and in his final years wrote reviews regularly for Harper’s. Davenport was meanwhile an acclaimed translator, primarily of ancient Greek poetry. His Archilochos Sappho Alkman was nominated for the 1981 American Book Award, while Seven Greeks was awarded the 1996 PEN Translation Prize, as well as the Translation Award of the Academy of American Poets. With Benjamin Urrutia he translated a collection of Jesus’s sayings, The Logia of Yeshua. Much of Thasos and Ohio collects his translations of Greek, Latin, French, and German poetry. These hundreds of separate publications, paintings, and illustrations are all in addition to the eight volumes of fiction, and two of verse, that Davenport published from the mid-1960s. Two new stories appeared in the collection he published in the last year of his life, The Death of Picasso. The excellence and range of this work led to many prizes, including an award for fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and made him a most deserving recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. My study concerns itself primarily with the fiction that is the basis of his lasting fame. Because he was one of the foremost contemporary American writers of short fiction, and among its most brilliantly experimental, and because the work combines technical complexity with sophisxxviii

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ticated, often obscure historical subject matter, a large-scale study of the fiction is overdue. Any initial study of a fiction both so innovative and so frequently dependent on remote archival material must provide close readings. Neither a biocritical nor a chronological study, my book examines Davenport’s fiction under a range of specific guises.16 These include the use of collage and pastoral, the treatment of such subjects as youth sexuality, the archaic, and the utopian, and the issue of Davenport’s relationship to postmodernism. A typical Davenport story integrates the very elements my chapters isolate. “Concert Champêtre in D Minor,” for instance, is a utopian idyll, organized in discontinuous, allusive sections, and concerns bright teens who initiate an uncouth reprobate into their intellectual and erotic fellowship. A critical approach that involves separation into discrete elements thus introduces inevitable distortions, but it permits a detailed focus on the nature and implications of a highly diverse and complex range of writings. Archaic

Davenport’s stories may appear, in their arresting range of forms, merely idiosyncratic inventions, but as the products of an Emersonian original they have an abundance of scrupulously manipulated precedents, acting at times almost as palimpsests, especially in those many situated in antiquity. My first chapter examines examples of these stories from the perspective of the archaic. For Davenport the archaic is a privileged zone of first things clearly defined yet, because remote, scarcely perceptible. Remoteness is an artist’s asset, however, for it licenses invention. In these stories Davenport respects the archeological evidence, but this is usually scant and unreliable. As he notes in the essay “The Critic as Artist,” almost every detail of Plutarch’s “Life of Camillus,” on which “The Juno of the Veii” is based, is now questioned or rejected; Camillus himself may be a Roman figment. The Greek historian was summoning the past in a way not fundamentally different from that of the American creative writer. Plutarch’s biography and Davenport’s story are two versions of the same rumor, drawing incompatible morals from imperial legend. Remoteness, however, proves more apparent than real. Past is present in Davenport, preserved in papyrus coils of Bronze Age poetry as much as in molecular coils of DNA. (He painted celebrations of both.) His eulogy to Lorine Niedecker adapts an Alcman lyric, dovetailing the seasons of sixth-century b.c. Laconia with those of rural Wisconsin, and insinuating Introduction

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a classical source for Niedecker’s precise, witty, and concentrated style.17 Davenport was a student of arresting consonances and imbrications, and he devised collage structures faithful to them. He liked to remind readers of their proximity to the distant and strange: “Given the kinship of the ancient lyre, or barbitos, to the autoharp Sappho’s cunningly woven assonances and consonances probably sounded like Mother Maybelle Carter” (Davenport 2004b, xiv). In Flowers and Leaves a recitation from “the Loeb Lyra” Graeca becomes an education in love, transforming an awkward young man into the godlike ephebe Sappho lusts after in the faVinetaVi moi fragment, and transforming his lover into the lyric poet herself (for his translation of “He seems to be a god, that man,” see Davenport 1980, 84; 1986, 35; 1995, 74). Receptiveness to ancient verse transports the pair to Tempe: This lover, that lover, and that grove in Thessaly. The sun, that seems to love, to love them well, warms them. Go back, the summer whispered, Go back. Athlete, olive, girl. It must be there. (Davenport 1966, 23) The lovers merge, and merge simultaneously with their deathless avatars out of myth and Mytilenian song. At a time when human beings have been individuated in terms of sexual preference, Davenport’s work retrieves from antiquity a nonessentialized attitude to sexuality and an acceptance of its diverse expressions. But it is not merely that antiquity affords an approved cultural precedent for a liberal conception of sexuality. The archaic mind is for Davenport primitive to the very distinction isolating eros from other modes of cognition. His work depicts an archaic that is not mere retrospection but prospective, an exemplary unity of intellectual, creative, and sexual drives. The youths in Davenport are intelligent in large part because, like primitives, they have been permitted to learn from their bodies and with their bodies. Their intellects emerge with the impetus of, rather than in conflict with or suspicion toward, their desiring bodies. So the archaic is in Davenport diachronic along a historical trajectory but synchronic along a psychological, moral, and intellectual one. Modern “primitives,” be they the West African Dogons of “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier” or the French soccer players of “Boys Smell like Oranges,” exhibit something of the same unity. For the moderns in Davenport’s fiction, the xxx Introduction

archaic is both a carefully deliberated model of conduct and the unconscious basis of all that distinguishes and justifies that conduct. Collage

Davenport’s method of finding his contemporary subjects (including even himself) in historical periods shows how innovation may arise from close attention to the past. “We are as much informed of a writer’s genius by what he selects as by what he originates,” Emerson asserts in “Quotation and Originality” (Emerson 1875, 193–94). In Davenport’s fiction the two modes converge. This is most evident in the proliferating use of collage, to a discussion of which I devote the second chapter. Encouraged by William Carlos Williams’s maverick defiance of the proprieties separating verse from prose, Davenport treats the story in a kindred way. In narratives inspired as much by modernist painting and poetry as by fiction, he juxtaposes a variety of discontinuous and discrete writings as well as images—appropriate, given his assent to Charles Olson’s proposition that contemporary reality reveals itself in precisely these two modes. In addition to examining pictorial influences, the chapter underscores Ezra Pound’s abiding influence on Davenport. He began paying visits to Pound in the 1950s, while the poet was still an inmate at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, and joined those circulating the petition that contributed to the poet’s release from this hospital for the criminally insane. (Davenport related to me how Robert Frost, whose career Pound had successfully promoted in England when no American firm would publish him, greeted the young petitioner at the door with the rebuff, “A person on business from Porlock!”) Later he helped Pound move into his Rapallo home, and for the poet’s eightieth birthday in 1965 Davenport published Canto 110. Inspired by Pound’s interpretation of Ernest Fenollosa’s ideas in “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” Davenport frequently experimented in ideogrammatic form, the asyndetic arrangement of separable elements within an integral field. In the “Circumspectus” to Wo es war, soll ich werden Davenport writes, “I can claim the effort, at least, of making prose ideograms in emulation of Pound’s poetic ones. An ideogram gathers components into a molecular structure that has charm rather than demonstrable sense” (Davenport 2004, 2). By contrast with many passages of The Cantos, however, a Davenport ideogram makes a Introduction

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good deal of sense, indeed just as does a molecule, retaining its integrity even as it fuses with others to form a coherent compound. His ideograms are not an overturned Poundian mailbag of bafflingly oblique associations but an architecture of clearly defined masses in relation. Davenport’s discrete paragraphs are stanzas, and a stanza, he likes to remind us, is an Italian “room.” And the walls of a Davenport stanza are weight bearing, supporting a whole vaulting and entablature of demonstrable sense. Idiogrammatic form yields a narrative logic of parataxis rather than subordination. The collage text “The Bowmen of Shu,” for instance, takes its title from one of Pound’s Cathay re-creations of classical Chinese poetry, its paratactic structure from The Cantos, and its subject from Pound’s London artistic circle. It shares its theme of abortive cultural transformation (the story recounts the death in World War I of Henri GaudierBrzeska) with Pound’s epic. Other stories examined in the chapter are collagist elegies to the war-blighted revolution of modernism (“Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier”), and the final blow delivered to it by World War II (“Boys Smell like Oranges” and “Robot”). The stories celebrate and perpetuate an attitude to inheritance articulated in the Philosophical Investigations: “The problems are solved not through the contribution of new knowledge, rather through the arrangement of things long familiar” (Wittgenstein 1984b, 299).18 And it is the essence of his work that Davenport should view his avant-garde forms as simple variations on the most venerable formulas: “My method of serial collage is not all that different from Homer’s inserting family histories, myths, and long lists of ships into descriptions of battles” (Davenport 2004, 2). Pastoral

Modernism rescued pastoral from the meretricious idealism and precious retrogressions of the later nineteenth century. Picasso’s cylinderlimbed Mediterranean youths holding panpipes supersede the winged zephyrs and pale pink naiads of Maurice Denis’s Story of Psyche. Picasso correcting Puvis de Chavannes with a real horse, Boy in brown study, protecting The hard emotion, o’ qVeo~ ejn tw/` paidVi, From “the ideal.” (Davenport 1966, 45) xxxii

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Davenport and his cohorts recuperate a pastoral that is neither decorative and sentimental nor ironic and self-mocking. This is particularly evident in American painting. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, while Davenport was publishing his first pastoral fictions, painters such as Milet Andrejevic, Lennart Anderson (both like Davenport born in the 1920s), Thomas Cornell, and James Lecky were producing series of pastoral landscapes. Andrejevic paints Olmsteadian city parks as Poussin Arcadias in which contemporary joggers, young families, and folkies wander. “The gestures, faces and activities could occur in any American park, and the mood is entirely familiar,” writes Charles Jencks of Andrejevic’s urban idylls. “What is strange is the heightened, expectant atmosphere—the idea behind Central Park—as if myth might break into everyday life and challenge it” (Jencks 1987, 161). The pastoral of “On Some Lines of Virgil” is by no means a rare instance, as my third chapter shows. Davenport returned to pastoral throughout his career, from the book-length poem Flowers and Leaves and translations of Alcman’s “Hymn to Artemis of the Strict Observance” to such paintings as The Bathers (see color plate in Reece 1996, 86) and stories like “The Meadow” and “The Lavender Fields of Apta Julia.” Pastoral defies temporality both thematically and formally, manipulations of chronology paralleling the psychology of erotic idyll. Pastoral illusion meanwhile grants moral freedom and aesthetic autonomy, insulating Davenport’s exuberant images of adolescent sexuality from the charge of pruriency. The illusion enhances the hardy idealism of his teenaged swains yet contains it securely within the locus amoenus of elaborate literary contrivance. Not less relevant is the implication in Davenport that all literature aspires to the condition of pastoral. “Literature will and must always be in the pastoral mode, in order to be identified as literature,” writes Charles Lock. “The reason for the attraction and the endurance of pastoral may now emerge as the licensing of conventions for their own sake. Pastoral is the literary mode in which conventions have least to be resisted, and are least to be resisted” (Lock 2003, 100). Davenport cherishes a similar conception of the mode. “The word idyll comes from the Greek for image,” he writes in an uncollected essay on the photography of Bernard Faucon and Anthony Goicolea. “Because the pastoral poems of Theocritus and Virgil describe an ideal, imaginary time, a Golden Age of simple agricultural and erotic primitiveness, idyllic came to mean not ‘a poem that’s a picture’ but any image of ideal simplicity. Any image is, in the base sense of what’s Introduction

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seen, idyllic” (Davenport 2002b, 964–65). Davenport’s fiction attempts to restore this synonymity between aesthetic object and pastoral ideal. His is very much an art of formalist “literariness” and “poeticity,” words being valued not as ciphers of representation but for their role in the language field itself. The Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky appears in “Tatlin!” while at the end of “The Dawn in Erewhon” (the concluding narrative of Tatlin! ) Adriaan is reading Wittgenstein’s Zettel, one note of which declares, “Don’t forget that a poem, even if composed in the language of information, is not used in the language game of information” (Wittgenstein 1984c, 304).19 In a literary period dominated by topical realism, pastoral exceeds and undercuts the codes of mimetic verisimilitude. Utopia

This makes pastoral conducive to utopian invention. My fourth and fifth chapters consider respectively the historical and optative utopias that proliferate in Davenport’s fiction. The latter kind are frequently Scandinavian idylls of adolescent fellowship fostered by the integration of intellectual, erotic, and ethical drives. Several of his collections culminate in such stories of privately realized utopian aspiration. All are preceded by documentary fictions of thwarted utopias. It is noteworthy that, despite their length, Davenport published none of his extended Fourierist fictions independently, with the exception of an earlier, longer version of “Wo es war, soll ich werden” published in a deluxe limited edition within weeks of his death. The image of utopia offered in these novellas is a valid, indeed salutary response to historical realities, and a speculative contribution to the resolution of its debacles, but utopia cannot furnish a plausible lasting sanctuary from the dilemmas so convincingly evoked in Davenport’s other fictions. Hence the great dependence of the utopian novellas on the historical stories that precede them. The novellas gain immensely from the tension of this conjunction to lend pathos and pungency to their fantasies. In several of Davenport’s archival recountings of utopian aspiration Kafka is the wary observer. In “The Messengers” he joins socialists, nudists, and evangelical Christians at a natural therapy sanatorium, but skepticism and despair combine to isolate him. In “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” Kafka witnesses the 1909 air show where the utopian prospect of technology is on display, his exhilaration at romantic feats of pioneering aviation xxxiv

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clashing with premonitions of banalized mass transportation and airborne terror. In “Tatlin!” meanwhile, the eponymous protagonist attempts to fuse constructivist aesthetic and Bolshevik ideology in the earliest phase of the Soviet state, only to see Communism turn on the very avant-garde it had sponsored. Tatlin builds the prototype of an “air bicycle” designed to put pollution-free flight at the disposal of the proletariat, its development coinciding with the Stalinist terror that would deprive him of patronage. Ezra Pound, the projector of a paradiso terrestre who welcomes Mussolini to his Rapallo home in “C. Musonius Rufus,” is the bitter and obstinate pensioner of “Ithaka,” maintaining in Rapallo a gnomic silence. Fascination with political schemes of utopia combines with a libertarian repugnance of universalist social organization. In a Harper’s review of Laird M. Easton’s The Red Count: The Life and Times of Harry Kessler, Davenport exalts the idealism of the dynamic German aesthete, but discerns affinities between Kessler and his Nazi enemies: “His vision was of ‘the state as a work of art’ like ancient Sparta, liberal and progressive (Kessler was gay, and kept an entourage of soldiers and jockeys), a socialist utopia of peaceful, industrious, sensual, art-loving Germans—also, ironically, the ideal of Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels” (Davenport 2002d, 65). “Bronze Leaves and Red” presents this predicament chillingly, for the story’s rhetorical force depends on a gradual awareness that this encomium to a social visionary is a Nazi lackey’s idealization of the Führer. Utopian thinking since the nineteenth century has largely been a response to industrialization, and whereas pastoral once reacted against the strictures of inherited morality, since the Industrial Revolution much of pastoral has reacted against emerging technology. The founding moment of Erewhonian society in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, to which Davenport frequently refers, is when the machine is banished as a predatory pseudoorganism whose Darwinian evolutionary advantage jeopardizes its host species. In Davenport’s fiction, technology introduces a kind of second Copernican revolution in which the human is redefined within the very categories technology itself validates. The binary operations of digital technology, which in Jean Baudrillard’s jeremiads and Don DeLillo’s satires (e.g., White Noise) supersede the human, have in Davenport deprived us of a vantage outside of technology from which to conceive of an exclusively human sphere. Davenport’s fiction depicts the informal growth of small utopian communities which have minimized their dependence on machinery. RenunIntroduction

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ciation results, however, not from obedience to some sabbatarian proscription but from absorption in bountiful interests. Bicycles, books, paints, notebooks, and tents eclipse cars, computers, television, and electronic arcades. The refreshing retrenchment in older forms of sociability which the stories celebrate is simply an extension of that once practiced by the author. Correspondence with Davenport was by mail rather than by Internet, his garage contained not a car but a cool de Stijl studio, and the focus of the den was a fireplace rather than a screen. In the Paris Review interview Davenport denied a particular interest in utopias: “I don’t think it’s there, in the abstract. My interest is in Fourier, who I think was one of the great analytical sociologists of all time” (Sullivan 2002, 78). In stories, essays, paintings, and poems he returns to the thought, life, and legacy of Charles Fourier, who applied principles of Newtonian mechanics to human psychology. The citizens of his New Harmony would be governed on the principle of attraction, which he proclaimed to be the universal law and the only reliable basis for social organization. All manias and desires, corrupting in the repressive regimes of traditional civilization, would be in the New Harmony instruments of a benign Providence, and so harnessed constructively. The polar fluctuations which permitted Davenport to write for William F. Buckley and Lewis H. Lapham are inherent in an admiration for Fourier. Fourier’s system combines an antiauthoritarian morality with an almost totalitarian model of social organization. Unlimited personal choice is paradoxically exercised within a system of maximalized state intervention. Private enterprise is practiced within a vast collectivist economy. Organicist principles, reflected in Fourier’s language as well as in his social schemes, fuse with a mechanistic psychology and political philosophy. The conflict between unchecked private liberty and the limiting force of the impersonal societal will is one of the unstated threats to the fellowships that Davenport’s characters initiate, and is a key productive contradiction in his fiction. He shares with Fourier the yearning to harmonize private freedoms with public order. However, only his young characters successfully impose a frictionless social cohesion on the anarchic vitality of their erotic lives. Their disciplined, freethinking elders either subdue their passions, channel them into monogamous arrangements, or, like Diogenes in “Mesoroposthonippidon,” relocate pleasure in the very denial of it. A few are invited by youths to venture into their domain of bucolic sexual license. xxxvi Introduction

Sexuality

That invitation marks the most controversial area of his fiction. Here Davenport defied a culture of moral panics to make bold imaginative forays into youth sexuality, a subject to which I devote my sixth chapter. Several of his longest stories are idylls of uninhibited and happy sexual maturation. Here a fallacious stratification of sexual identities is gently yet firmly resisted. The characters range across sexual boundaries confident of their porousness. The youths explore their own natures as avidly and intelligently as they do the nature of a flower, a historical event, or a painting. They give each other instruction, pleasure, and affection in many ways, including sexual ways. “I think the awakening of sexuality is coterminous with the awakening of all sensibility,” Davenport said in his Paris Review interview. “What distresses me is the tendency of some readers, and reviewers, to get hung up on my descriptions of the body, and to see nothing else. But liberals, who copy their morals from proscriptive psychology and are spooked by any sexuality that isn’t Ken and Barbie in the back seat of a car, are undeterred by truth and verbal skill” (Sullivan 2002, 86). In “The Owl of Minerva” the sexuality of the young is one facet of a large, lively receptiveness.20 The penultimate story published in Davenport’s lifetime concerns a boarding school geology instructor, Magnus, who unofficially adopted an orphan, and who, after a colleague’s insinuations of impropriety, embarked with the youth on an extended period of travel. The orphan, Mikkel, is now an officer in the Geodesic Survey of the Danish army, a husband and father, and he has just dispatched Magnus, now professor of geology at the Niels Bohr Institute, to Greenland to locate a new-fallen meteor. The story recounts Mikkel’s visit to his old school, where he thanks the retired schoolmaster for the forbearance that had permitted his admission. After an interpolated passage from the apocryphal Gospel of James, which describes an interval of temporal cessation, the story describes a hike undertaken by Mikkel’s teenaged son Adam with his pal Sholto. They discover a dilapidated cabin, clean it up, and pass a night of erotic camaraderie. Mikkel’s old school, like Adam’s new cabin, is an abiding utopian space carved out of a temporary refuge. The retired headmaster (another partial self-portrait, to whom Davenport lent an arthritic knee) was responsible for guaranteeing the liberal idealism of his school, but the eu-topia is obviIntroduction

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ously no ou-topia, because it is threatened from within by repressive social mores. The school could not secure permanent sanctuary for Magnus and Mikkel, who became fugitives. Adam and Sholto make a haven in the woods, but beyond the sylvan lakeside is not Arcadia but the police, who as Sholto notes will descend if the pair prolong their stay. For now, at least, the boys have a respite from duration: there is day and night, but freedom from time. The freedom to describe that liberty is in peril, however. In his essay on their photography, Davenport praises Bernard Faucon and Anthony Goicolea for the shrewd candor of their depictions of youths and for the “precise artificiality” of their methods of presenting them. (Faucon relies on sets, manikins, and oil pigment infusions, while Goicolea uses a computer to digitally manipulate his own image in contrived settings.) “Both Faucon and Goicolea have clarified psychological transparencies that were hitherto left opaque or indistinct. They are intelligently, sensitively discreet where [Robert] Mapplethorpe is aggressively obscene or Sally Mann unapologetically forthright” (Davenport 2002b, 967). The artificiality is as important as the clarity to Davenport. What he admires in the photographers (his stories “The Lavender Fields of Apta Julia” and “Colin Maillard” are inspired by Faucon’s The Lavender Field and Colinmaillard ) he achieves in the best of his own idylls, which are depictions not simply of youths but of youths’ fostering fantasies of themselves. “It is this interior fable that he [Faucon] is, against all probability of success, successfully photographing” (985). It is this interior fable that Davenport successfully wrote. What startles in Davenport’s treatment of youth sexuality is not its prurience but its care in granting a natural place to sexual curiosity among an expansive range of fine enthusiasms. The crisis of the teenaged siblings Sander and Grietje in “Apples and Pears” is not their incest but the isolation, poverty, and ignorance resulting from the neglect of their welfare. When the philosopher Adriaan extends refuge to them in his small Amsterdam commune, it is not to reform their sexual conduct but to integrate it into a larger web of cares and concerns. Adriaan fosters in them intrinsic qualities that, in their abhorrence of a sexual taboo, others cannot discern. The crisis in “O Gadjo Niglo” derives not from the love affair between a gifted and compassionate young tutor and his precocious teenaged ward, but from the tutor’s misapprehension of its harmfulness. “The ancient Greeks recognized the ambiguous allegiances of adolescence and accommodated them in tensely idealistic and erotic affairs all the more poignant xxxviii Introduction

for being brief,” Davenport writes in the introduction to Seven Greeks, adding: Amabit sapiens Lucius Apuleius says in his Apologia; cupient caeteri. The educated love; others breed. Apuleius is one of the last authors to understand clearly the old love of adult and adolescent, soldier and recruit, teacher and pupil. “It is not lust but the beauty of innocence that captures lovers,” though Sappho knew nothing of the Platonism that colors Apuleius. (Davenport 1995, 8–9) Such representations of youth sexuality are far from welcome in contemporary America. When in Harmful to Minors Judith Levine extolled educators to guide minors to an informed, joyful sexuality, decrying the pathologizing of children’s sexuality, the concealment of knowledge of it, and the taboos against intergenerational sex, the manuscript’s commercial publisher lost its nerve, and when the University of Minnesota Press published it, members of the state legislature threatened to revoke the press’s funding. “Americans,” Davenport writes in his Harper’s review of Harmful to Minors, “are world-famous for their continent-wide hysterias about anarchists in immigrant neighborhoods, Communists in the State Department and classrooms, pornographers on the Internet, gays in the military and in Boy Scout troops, and pederasts in the clergy” (Davenport 2002d, 66). He hails Levine for “leading with her chin against a formidable army of upholders of biological ignorance and as transparent a taboo as any known to anthropology” (66). Davenport too led with his chin, but it took a toll. In reprinting all but “The Dawn in Erewhon,” “Apples and Pears,” and “Wo es war, soll ich werden” in Twelve Stories, he consigned his three longest and most ambitious narratives of early sexuality to oblivion. (The 321-page collection gathers all Davenport has salvaged from the almost 700 pages of fiction contained in Tatlin!, Apples and Pears, and The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers.) Thus he appeared to be responding to the persistence and vehemence of moral panics. “Another age, beyond our endof-the-century comstockery and Liberal puritanism, may find these works interesting, aber freilich nicht wahrscheinlich” (Davenport 1997, 235), he laments in the postscript to the collection.21 In his Paris Review interview, Davenport was asked whether the supIntroduction

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pression of these novellas constituted an act of self-censorship. “It is,” he answered, but qualified the remark. “It is also a critical decision. The books are available, in tall stacks in remainder houses. I can always change my mind; better still, I can rewrite” (Sullivan 2002, 72). The qualification may appear disingenuous but, as my chapter on the utopian fiction contends, his reservations about “the three shapeless novellas I’ve chosen not to keep in print” (73) could be justified not simply as an expedient but on aesthetic grounds. They are his most flawed texts, although to be sure they are among his most intriguing. An impression of self-censorship persisted, however, especially as, after the appearance of Twelve Stories in 1997, Davenport did not publish a story for five years. “The Owl of Minerva” can be seen to “rewrite” the novellas in important ways: it observes many of the classical conventions of realistic third-person retrospective narration, it avoids graphic depictions of sexuality, and is cautious on the subject of intergenerational sex. While Sholto and Adam merely horse around in the cabin (exchanging many more words than caresses), the early tie of Magnus and Mikkel seems to have been chaste. This is corroborated by the story’s sequel, “The Playing Field,” in which watch and ward share a bed with no less propriety than tenderness. And while both stories might imply a chastening pressure on Davenport’s imagination, yet alongside them reappears “Wo es war, soll ich werden” in his final collection, The Death of Picasso. Davenport also permitted the editors of Finial Press to restore this novella to its original manuscript state for a magnificent limited edition which appeared shortly before his death. In the “Circumspectus” to that edition he declares the liberty of literary invention. “The imaginary world projected by fiction balances between the plausible and a scandalous freedom,” he writes, and summons Love’s Labours Lost as exemplary. “It is Shakespeare’s most beautiful play, a tapestry in green and silver, intricately verbal, bawdy, and lyrical. Except for its biology, it nowhere coincides with reality of any sort” (Davenport 2004, 3). In a Harper’s review of The Death of Picasso, Wyatt Mason praises Davenport for “finding new ways to dramatize one, suggestive question: What if we were free? In their language and form, their intelligence and art, his stories remain some of our most eloquent, individual, and lasting answers to that inexhaustible question” (Mason 2004, 92). The reappearances of “Wo es war, soll ich werden” confirm that Davenport strove to the end of xl Introduction

his life to exercise the freedom to write, rewrite, and republish his tentative answers. Postmodernism

In “Narrative Tone and Form,” Davenport identifies in twentiethcentury literature “a movement from assuming the world to be transparent, and available to lucid thoughts and language, to assuming (having to assume, the artists involved would say) that the world is opaque” (Davenport 1981b, 311). This suggests a continuity between modernism and subsequent movements in the arts. I am arguing that Davenport sees modernism both as an abortive renaissance and as a resource available for fresh uses. His adaptation of modernist forms is not a curatorial recreation of exhausted methods but a highly distinctive example of one tendency in postwar American literature, usually denoted as postmodernism. My concluding chapter situates his work within debates concerning postmodernism. The superficial affinities are many. Davenport’s stories are eclectic in subject matter and form, hybrid, documentary, playful, and highly contrived. Many are as intertextual as “The Antiquities of Elis.” His story on the cruelty of capital punishment, “John Charles Tapner,” is derived from an anecdote in Victor Hugo’s Choses vues, while “Home” brazenly reproduces verbatim, as Pierre Menard reproduces Don Quixote in Jorge Luis Borges’s story, an eight-page excerpt from Robinson Crusoe, inserted without alteration into The Cardiff Team to augment the collection’s theme of homemaking. The stories flout traditional assumptions regarding language, representation, and authorship. Many of the stories conform to what Linda Hutcheon calls historiographical metafictions, highly self-conscious postmodern texts in which history is seen to rest on problematic linguistic, narrative, and ideological assumptions. Davenport’s texts are indeed “resolutely fictive and yet undeniably historical” (Hutcheon 1988, 142), presenting, as she characterizes such work, not a loss of belief in reality as such but in unimpeded linguistic access to it. Thus President Nixon’s visit to China becomes, in “The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag,” a parable of misunderstanding on the historical as well as psychological level. The leaders are obtuse, petty, and vicious, Nixon’s sense of history is egocentric, Mao’s is mythologizing, and the meeting is filtered through the distorting exigencies of the media. Introduction

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Hutcheon wishes to redeem postmodernist historicity from materialist criticism that its modes of indeterminacy are merely coextensive with a global capitalism intent on obfuscation of its ends and subversion of faith in effective political resistance. (For a stimulating instance of this non sequitur, see Eagleton 1996, 134.) Davenport’s work certainly presents history not as fugitive data but as a Wittgensteinian discourse neither prior to others nor enjoying privileged access to some pure referential event. In his Paris Review interview Davenport said, “I think ultimately, as Joyce felt, that we know nothing, and that what we call culture is a wonderful fiction, and that we live inside this fiction, and as long as it’s articulate we’re successful. And we add to it, or subtract from it, but we really don’t know anything else” (Sullivan 2002, 82). The historical referent in Davenport is obscure but not entirely inaccessible. The Ionian philosopher of “Herakleitos” may be a scarcely recoverable legend but he is denoted diachronically and realistically, a sustained and convincing literary impersonation consistent with what little is known of his namesake. In contrast to Robert Coover, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and Ishmael Reed, in whose novels meaning is not in the events but in the systems—frequently inimical—which confirm them as history, Davenport rarely focuses on the workings of institutional order. The supervenient order most perceptible in Davenport is nature itself, the harmonic order fusing Whitman’s blade of grass to Bohr’s quarks. “The Dawn in Erewhon” incorporates passages from Bernardus Silvestris’s medieval allegory of macro- and microcosmological unity, the Cosmographia. It is the unity the young Jesus detects in the very shape of the aleph in “August Blue.” “With Heraclitus he understood that being is all of one substance, one origin, and one fate,” Davenport says of Jesus in the introduction to his cotranslation of Jesus’s sayings (Davenport and Urrutia 1996, xx). My chapter locates Davenport in an early and distinct phase of American postmodernism, the signal figures of which have been poets inspired by Pound and his circle, preeminently Charles Olson and Louis Zukofsky (to whose memory Da Vinci’s Bicycle is dedicated). Of his own generation these have included Jonathan Williams and Ronald Johnson, both close friends of Davenport’s. While rejecting the universalist criteria and political ideologies of many modernists, these artists maintain continuity with them by seeking out large sustaining structures immanent in nature, apparent in history, and available to some degree to language. They retain a modernist interest in primitive cosmologies, nonrepresentational art, collage technique, and natural history. With the free, demotic, relaxlii

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tivistic postmodernism of the 1980s and beyond these artists have little in common. Nor have they aligned themselves with the nominalism of the language poets. “The great good hope of a narrative is that it end in a harmony,” Davenport continued to hold throughout his life, long after postmodern artists had repudiated such hope (Davenport 2004, 4). The Zukofsky admired as a precursor of language poetry Davenport would not recognize. “The precision of his mind demanded a heterogenous and improbable imagery,” he writes in a tribute published in Paideuma. “Surmounting difficulties was his daimon. When enough people become familiar with ‘A’ so that it can be discussed, the first wonder will be to show how so many subjects got built into such unlikely patterns, and what a harmony they all make” (Davenport 1978, 398; 1981b, 110).22 I would characterize Davenport and his literary kin in terms of just these architectonics, and thus in relation to a branch of postmodernism sufficiently contrary to its prevailing sense to ramify into an independent movement. This is also a political partisanship. Perry Anderson notes that, in contrast to the members of the succeeding generation, the early postmodernists were predominantly antileftists (see Anderson 1998, 45–46). In his entry in Contemporary Authors, Davenport described his politics as “Democrat and conservative” (A. J. Johnson 1987, 112). The contributing editor to the National Review and contributor to the New Criterion used the term “liberal” with disdain to describe legislative infringements on private morality. Suspicious of the sixties counterculture, Davenport’s politics conformed most closely to a Rawlsian version of libertarianism, in which advocacy of individual autonomy, far from sanctioning narcissistic or nihilistic withdrawal of the self, forms the very basis of a justice-seeking liberal democracy. He told Williams in a September 14, 1968, letter that he would abstain from voting in the presidential election: “I don’t want to encourage ANY of them” (Davenport and Williams 2004, 135).23 In a Harper’s review he chastises “all strategies,” both liberal and conservative, “of others to lead our lives for us” (Davenport 2002e, 72). In the 1996 election he voted for Ralph Nader (see Davenport and Laughlin 2007, 235). Dissatisfaction with the prevailing nomenclature of postwar art is now common and has prompted overdue attempts at a more accurate taxonomy. Charles Altieri delineates sharply between early and late phases of postmodernism (see Altieri 1998, esp. chap. 1). Marjorie Perloff reconceptualizes the relationship between modernism and some of its contemporary exponents (e.g., Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein) under the rubric of “twenty-first-century modernism.” She contends that the radical aims Introduction

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of early modernism were deferred rather than destroyed by the two world wars, and were perpetuated in the “new American poetry” collected in Donald Allen’s 1960 anthology (see Perloff 2002, 2–3). As my chapter argues, the rubric “twenty-first-century modernism,” a synonym for neomodernism, implies less creative reengagement than retrenchment, even anachronism, applied to writers who betray no nostalgia and who have a more complex and extensive relationship to modernism than she describes (her focus is on Stein, Duchamp, Khlebnikov, and early Eliot). Perloff ’s coinage acknowledges the explanatory shortcomings of postmodernism, a term she scrupulously avoids. As my chapter argues, the shift in its meaning since the 1980s makes “postmodern” incompatible with the kinds of avant-garde literature Perloff promotes, Donald Allen collected as The New American Poetry, and Davenport wrote. Indeed, just as Allen was revising the anthology in 1982 under the title “The Postmoderns,” the term was deviating from its application to poetry indebted to Pound, Williams, and such followers as Olson and Zukofsky. Until then it had made sense for Charles Jencks to subtitle his survey, Post-Modernism, “The New Classicism in Art and Architecture.” For the works to which Jenks’s subtitle is most applicable, the term is now misleading. The work of such artists, and of Davenport especially, more precisely conforms to what I propose to call metamodernism.24 As the relevant meanings of the Greek preposition meta; imply, metamodernism denotes an aesthetic after yet by means of and in common with modernism. The metamodernists succeed rather than revive or repudiate a modernism the vitality of whose legacy they understand to depend on renewal rather than veneration. My chapter contends that Davenport’s work is exemplary of this vigorous reengagement with, and development beyond, modernism. In his Paris Review interview Davenport was asked whether he was a “metamodernist,” and replied: “If postmodernism means, let’s break everything off and start over in a new direction, then I am a ‘metamodernist.’ But can’t I just be a plain modernist? I mean, aren’t I old enough?” (Sullivan 2002, 84–85). Not in his own sound terms. He shows in his essays and depicts in his fiction how the primary impetus of modernism was forestalled in the First World War. When asked earlier in the same interview whether his work as a whole “can be read as an elegy for a twentieth century that might have been, but never was,” he answered: “You can say that, yes. It’s very possible. The First World War killed off and stopped in its tracks one of the most incredible literary generations that the world has ever seen” (66–67). Like most of his so-called postxliv

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modern coevals, including Robert Kelly, Gary Snyder, and Denise Levertov, Davenport was born more than a decade after the Great War. If the First World War arrested modernism, how could artists working during the Vietnam War profitably revive it? More than mere replenishment was in order, as these writers understood. So in his own terms Davenport was simply not old enough to be a modernist in any sense that would not insinuate diminishment. He remained too much an Emersonian original for the rote reiterations of the epicene. One of the first poems Davenport published, in the April 1948 issue of the Archive, was “Exact Observations of Several Phenomena,” and it is just that: its poet bicycles by a deftly particularized Anderson of “the obscene bluejay bird / Squalling mawsome, witless things” at its “heedless” junkyard mate, railway crossings (“The P & N besliding by”), billiard halls, and “hybrid” middle-class houses toward his Franklin Street home (he lent its name to Pascal’s chum in his sequence of Danish boarding school stories), where he reads Gide and his father reads a crime novel (repr. in Davenport 1963, 19–20).25 Exactitude remained the idol of his worship, and it never deserted his art. His first commercially published work, “Poem: For Lu Chi’s Wen Fu (302 a.d.)” (appearing in the winter 1956 issue of the Hudson Review), replies to the Chinese poet’s verse essay ( fu) with a “hierogram” of corresponding precision: Words, you’ve said, must bring the proper colors, And there he is, the waeps, wespe, Old Hesper Bee, Drinking upside down, the gutta with a core of fire, Crispy silence while he sips, pulsing with his thirst. A bandit’s soot upon his cheeks, dusk rover, Lord he is and plunderer, too, of plum blossoms, Precise carpenter, named for the west star Hesperos, Rocket and Dame Violet’s cousin in vespery things. Watch the weaver, Lu Chi, at the dripping faucet. There’s a dragon still by crystal, dusk by glare, Spiralled vigor tense but fixed in meditation, Your prescribed control for writers at their writing. (Repr. in Davenport 1986, 24) A precise art that impacts no less than radiates, that attends as closely to nature as to the words that would name it, and that weds erudite sense to Introduction

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passionate sensation, is the credo to which Davenport remained as constant as had Lu Chi—indeed, he remained constant to it in much the same way, by alertness to the precepts not only overt in art but implicit in nature.26 And here as elsewhere in Davenport the lesson is inflected by Zukofsky’s teaching: in his tribute he praises in Zukofsky what his own art exhibits, the ability to “switch the ridiculous and the sublime so fast that we are taught their happy interchangeability in a beautifully poised sensibility” (Davenport 1978, 396; 1981b, 109). A beautifully poised sensibility was what Davenport’s associates encountered, both in person and by letter. (He was an epistolary prodigy who punctiliously maintained a colossal correspondence almost as dazzling as anything he published. To within days of his death he was still sending a weekly letter home to his sister.) He had wide sympathies and a dynamic solicitude. The gift greater than his talent was his modesty. “Animated genre paintings, my scribbles,” he wrote to his publisher James Laughlin in a letter on July 29, 1995 (Davenport and Laughlin 2007, 206). The disarming combination of easy genteel decorum and absence of all pretension would have earned him Jane Austen’s tribute. The wise innocence he admired in Homer was very much his own. He politely interrupted conversations by his fire to feed the possum at his back porch, and he built a small-scale replica of his own Rietveld worktable for the stray cat he adopted. He dedicated The Jules Verne Steam Balloon to the memory of a cat, “my friend Humphry.” In a November 2002 Harper’s review he recalled seeing the isolated rats of B. F. Skinner’s Harvard lab: They had never snuggled against their mothers or another rat. When the room was momentarily empty, I took a rat out of its cage, cuddled it, and may even have kissed it. The rat seemed overjoyed, eagerly sniffing graduate student sweat and grime. Hearing footsteps, I returned it to its solitary confinement. When my sins and kindnesses are weighed by Osiris, I hope to see a white rat on the scales. (Davenport 2002f, 72) He donated part of his estate to fund animal shelters, and he donated his body to science. He preferred to a gravestone the memorial of a dedicated sweet gum tree in the Appalachian section of the University of Kentucky Arboretum. In the closest thing to a self-portrait he was willing to attempt (and characteristically abandoned), he painted himself in youthful middle age xlvi

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gazing directly in three-quarter profile within a polychrome meshwork of citations, staves, and ideograms, flanked by a horsehair-helmeted hoplite and an archaic athlete, and among homages to Leo Frobenius, Blaise Cendrars, and Sister Rosetta Tharp. Below the fragment of an Italian obituary for Francis Picabia are two complete phrases. The first is a Pythagorean saw that glosses the synthetic logic of the portrait, “I am also others.” The second is an ancient Egyptian maxim, in Boris de Rachewiltz’s Italian version: “Il paradiso per un uomo è la sua buona natura.” Davenport put the adage into English (see Davenport 1983b, 17) as he put it into his life and work: “A man’s paradise is his good nature.”

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Guy Davenport

Black ink may be the oldest literary convention. (letter to James Laughlin, March 10, 1996)

1. The Invention of the Archaic Complementarity

“It has the spiritual clarity of beginnings,” remarks Pausanias of one of “The Antiquities of Elis” (Davenport 1979, 134). The ancient Greek traveler, whose Description of Greece is the first European travelogue, finds this clarity in an old Peloponnesian gymnasium; Davenport finds it in figures like Pausanias. And both find clarity in scraps from the fertile midden of antiquity. “The beginnings of things are established among us as a God,” writes Plato. “She is our savior” (Laws 6.775d–e). Pausanias was no mere antiquarian; in recording the historic sites of Greek worship, he wanted to preserve knowledge of the vanishing basis of a living religious tradition. Davenport similarly wishes to perpetuate an inheritance for stimulus, direction, and the reverence that Marianne Moore exhibits when she pays her respects to the defenders of Greece “At Marathon”: “There are things one must not / leave undone, such as coming from Brooklyn / in one’s old age to salute the army / at Marathon. What are years?” (Davenport 1986, 25). By adaptation of an ancient text, Davenport makes Pausanias a contemporary: cosmopolitan, eclectic, leisured, engrossed in particulars and their antedecents. Davenport’s most original modern characters are meanwhile Pausanias’s contemporaries. His imaginary Dutch philosopher Adriaan, who lectures, as did Davenport, on the archaic dimension of modern thought and art, is a Heraclitean aspiring to primitive unity, “the moment sophia, eros, and poesia were one” (Davenport 1974, 200). 3

Davenport peoples his stories with such sensibilities, including modern Stone Age societies, the ancient Greeks, and the young. A child prodigy leads his own teacher out of a sterile asceticism in “Wo es war, soll ich werden”; a group of teens discovers the Lascaux caves in “Robot,” while the caves’ Neolithic murals teach theology to a Catholic priest; the preSocratic philosophy of “Herakleitos” 1 both anticipates the revolution of modern physics and suggests, in the face of it, not nihilism but a mode of reverence. Herakleitos deposits the text of his radically modern philosophy in an ancient temple, revealing to his baffled disciple that between the Ephesian’s doctrines and Ephesian belief no conflict exists. Two and a half millennia later Wittgenstein, who like Herakleitos appears in Tatlin!, dedicated his Philosophical Remarks “to the glory of God” (Wittgenstein 1984, 7).2 These partial annexations of ancient onto modern, of prerationalist intuition onto modern science, are for Davenport revelatory conjunctions. “Herakleitos had seen the complementarity of all things wrestling each other like athletes red with dust, had seen all things except time lapse into their opposites without any loss of energy or matter, dancing from shape to shape” (Davenport 1974, 104–5; 1997, 103). Herakleitos is one of Davenport’s typically up-to-date ancients. In the eponymous story the pre-Socratic philosopher intuits principles of subatomic physics and Neils Bohr’s notion of complementarity. Since the behavior of an electron can only be understood by descriptions of it in both wave and particle form, Bohr concluded that quantum mechanics required physicists to accept a cosmos of permanent contradiction, which no single explanatory model might express whole. It could be accounted for only by diverse means assembled into a system of complementary patterns sufficiently flexible to integrate apparently incongruent concepts. Davenport’s painting Gensidighed hails complementarity in Bohr’s original Danish: a Mondrian-like abstract integrating an ancient Greek coin within a grid (see full-color reprint in Reece 1996, 93). This is a characteristic convergence of ancient and modern. Davenport’s treatment of antiquity is organized on principles of consonance, correspondence, and complementarity. Latent parallels haunt his characterizations, Poe becoming Orpheus, Herakleitos becoming Buckminster Fuller.3 This, however, is achieved without eliding the force of contingency, historicity, and hazard. Contradiction is neither suspended nor resolved: the Herakleitos of Davenport’s story and the Sokrates of “The Daimon of Sokrates” are the profoundly religious fathers of Western rationalism; the Cynic philosopher Diogenes of “Mesoroposthonippidon” is an exuberantly in4

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verted sensualist, a life-affirming negator; the Pythagorean Archytas of “The Wooden Dove of Archytas” is a mystic materialist; the consummately pagan members of the Theban Band in “The Daimon of Sokrates” are model Christians before Christ. All lapse into their opposites without loss of energy, “dancing from shape to shape.” This is an energy Davenport decants into his fiction from the ancient amphoras themselves. Brice Matthieussent notes in his introduction to the French translation of Da Vinci’s Bicycle that the pre-Socratic Greece of nascent philosophy and the grand foundational myths is for Guy Davenport a fundamental anchoring ground: the oppositions still collaborated there, order and chance did not exclude each other, motion and transformation were at the core of life, the logos preserved its divine mystery. (Matthieussent 1991, 9) 4 Davenport is, however, careful to historicize the prestige of the primitive. “The archaic is one of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century,” he asserts in “The Symbol of the Archaic” (Davenport 1981b, 21). A fascination with the embryonic phase of civilization, inherited from nineteenth-century archeology, paleontology, and paleography, extended among the modernists into an immensely fruitful self-identification with the archaic. Davenport contends that social displacement, alienation, and technology inspired in the modernists a corrective return to intuitive, immediate, and harmonizing modes of thought. “What has been most modern in our time was what was most archaic” (Davenport 1981b, 28). Ancient culture remains for him “the great archeological midden of history” (21), and the modernists its most resourceful archeologists. The common objection that the modernist avant-garde indulged in a post-Romantic, self-mythologizing appropriation of archaic cultures receives no consideration in Davenport’s criticism. Rather, he deplores that “the search [for the archaic] is for the moment now over in the arts, and our poets are gypsies camping in ruins once again” (28). Davenport delivered this verdict in a conference keynote address in 1974, the year he published his first volume of fiction, Tatlin! The search was again on. Davenport’s manipulations of antiquity could not, however, be confused with modernist practices. In a gentle Dublin advertising canvasser James Joyce found not only an avatar of Odysseus but an ironic modern deflation of Homeric myth; his wife meanwhile may be Penelope, but she The Invention of the Archaic 5

is also Calypso. In Ulysses, as more radically in Finnegans Wake, myth supplies a standard and a cipher. Davenport, by contrast, usually situates his retellings at a moment prior to their transformation into myth. Saint Paul is a curious itinerant preacher among misunderstanding provincial Hellenes in “The Trees at Lystra”; Herakleitos is a weird Ephesian conjurer of inexplicable riddles; Kafka is a dumbfounded tourist in “The Aeroplanes at Brescia.” An epiphany during the translation of an Etruscan votive statue to Rome, in “The Juno of the Veii,” is not a miracle out of Plutarch but a legionarius’s sardonic anecdote. “Pound and his generation sought to work through history,” Donald Byrd notes in an essay on Tatlin! “They wanted dream, archetype, transcendence, to appear in time and space—a Beatrice they could bed with. Davenport does not strain his own immediate reality with such a heavy demand” (Byrd 1976, 74). The modernists found myth in the quotidian; Davenport finds the quotidian in myth. This is not a conceptual change but a change of aspect. Nor should Davenport’s manipulations of antiquity be confused with postmodernist practices. His fictions offer neither debunking revisions of the archive, such as Krista Wolf’s Cold War feminist retelling of the Trojan War, Kassandra, nor gravely ironic historical juxtapositions, such as Geoffrey Hill’s fusion of eighth- and twentieth-century England, Mercian Hymns. Unlike Seamus Heaney in North, who links Iron Age exhumations to Irish sectarian violence, Davenport does not delve in history to retrieve elucidating tropes for specific contemporary conflicts. Despite his admiration for Basil Bunting, “Northumbrian master / of number and pitch” (Davenport 1986, 67), Davenport eschews the method of Briggflatts, where classical myth and legend gloss the artist’s own life.5 And though in 1966 he published in the National Review an enthusiastic review of Mary Renault’s The Mask of Apollo, he refuses the melodrama of historical romance.6 In the euphoric tetrameter couplets of “The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard,” Davenport celebrates the “harvest of such grace / from counterfolded time and space” (Davenport 1986, 11). Although synchrony abounds in his work, it does not arrogate authority to myth or a mythologized past. Particularity rather than allegory or romance prevails. Latitude is reserved for the large spaces left by archival lacunae, and indeed he is especially attracted to subjects, like Heraclitus, who are shaping yet fugitive cultural influences.7 Hugh Kenner relates a telling anecdote: “‘Mr. Davenport, are you making this all up, or is it true?’ So, after class, a student; to whom Mr. Davenport replies, ‘Who’s to say?’ Who indeed? Whether or 6

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not truth is created, insight is creative” (Kenner 1976, 30). The archaic may be one of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century, but invention is in Davenport discovery. His method is perhaps closest to David Jones’s. Davenport’s texts are of a piece with the Welsh poet and artist’s recuperative collages of obliquely rhyming images. Davenport’s essay “Stanley Spencer and David Jones” ends: “With inevitable regularity history liquefies and needs rechanneling, while religions petrify, paralyzing their spirit in pedantry. The guardians of both must constantly keep history from meaninglessness and religion from the death of its symbols. David Jones’s guardianship of both is great and beautiful” (Davenport 1996b, 126). Pythagoras

In an essay on Pound, Davenport writes that “to know the past we descend, like Odysseus, into the House of Hades and give the blood of our attention (as translators, historians, poets) so that the dead may speak” (Davenport 1981b, 56). The image echoes William Carlos Williams’s in Paterson: “loaning blood / to the past, amazed” (Williams 1992, 101). Davenport’s first claim to attention was the blood of a living vernacular he gave to the poets of dead ones, from Third Dynasty Egyptian maxims and the Greek New Comedy to anonymous Byzantine epigrams and Latin squibs. Two of his earliest books were complete translations of Archilochus and Sappho, and he later translated, inter alia, the sayings of Heraclitus and Diogenes, the hymns of Alcman, and the mimes of Herondas. With informal and literary qualifications rather than professional credentials, Davenport could translate according to the principle of inventive rediscovery he later applied to storytelling. All but fugitive since late antiquity, many of the texts of his ancient Greek sages, singers, and satirists were modern exhumations, yet as fresh as the day of their unearthing. Burial had also been gestation. Hence the imagists could get their impetus as much from the Bronze Age poets as from the pre-Raphaelites. For Davenport they still had plenty to teach about being modern. “My starting point was the poems and not the Greek language,” Davenport writes in the preface to Sappho: Poems and Fragments, “my knowledge of which is functional rather than philological. I have followed no strict theory. My intention everywhere has been to suggest the tone of Sappho’s words” (repr. in Davenport 1980, 14; 1995, 13). The “outer limit” is “transposing meaning from Greek to English,” because the very porousness of The Invention of the Archaic 7

the original manuscripts (not one poem is preserved intact) has encouraged discordant rhapsodies of inference and emendation. Davenport compares these translations to the flagrantly art nouveau “restoration” counterfeited at Knossos by Arthur Evans, “the Stalin of archaeology” (12; 11). The Greek texts survive primarily in papyrus shreds and in ancient grammarians’ quotations of passages, phrases, and single words. Davenport’s translations pioneer, in the wake of Pound, the scrupulous acknowledgment of this vexing provenance. Indicating papyrological lacunae according to the editorial convention of closed square brackets, he transcribes the damaged state of the papyrus as well as the poem written on it. He thus translates the material proper of the poem rather than conjures plausible conjectures. The gaps are of course the work not of the poet but of neglect, yet the result remains poetry—decidedly modern poetry, as in Sappho’s fragment 154: [ loves [

] ]. (Davenport 1980, 122; 1995, 107)

The notation of manuscript corruption yields at once a single (and characteristic) word of Sappho’s, a holograph of ravaging time, and an avantgarde concrete poem. Indeed, in 1967 Davenport contributed “The OneWord Fragments of Alkman” to the concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Poor.Old.Tired.Horse.8 Despite these proofs of chaste editorial restraint, Davenport might yet be accused by classicists of pursuing fidelity of “tone” into egregious extrapolation. His translations are far from literal, and the tone may not always coincide with the Greek poet’s. Davenport thus renders one of Archilochus’s best-known poems, preserved in Plutarch’s Spartan Institutions, to gloss an anecdote on the poet’s expulsion from Sparta: Some Saian mountaineer Struts today with my shield. I threw it down by a bush and ran When the fighting got hot. Life seemed somehow more precious. It was a beautiful shield. I know where I can buy another Exactly like it, just as round. (Davenport 1980, 38; 1995, 39) 8

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To the Thasos and Ohio reprinting Davenport reattaches from the original publication in Poetry (101, no. 6 [March 1963]: 404) a wryly moralizing title for the poem: “Prudence” (Davenport 1986, 21).9 He certainly conveys the off hand idiomatic swiftness and swing of the mercenary poet, blustering even in disgrace. If that Lacedaemonian mother of the adage told her soldier boy to come home with his shield or on it, Davenport’s version of the riposte makes the plainer Archilochus’s disdain of Spartan courage as the inverted cowardice of bovine collective obedience. But Archilochus said it more plainly, and more effectively still. A transliteration of the Greek original reads: Some Saian is gloating over the shield, blameless thing, I unwillingly left back behind a bush. But I saved myself. What’s that shield to me? Let it go. I’ll get myself another no worse.10 Davenport interposes, for clarity and effect, the skirmish Archilochus need only imply, and the base hillbilly status of the Thracian adversary. Davenport has a soldier in a pinch balance a “beautiful” weapon against “precious” life, but again the Greek is quicker and wholly unsentimental. The shield is simply an innocent reluctantly sacrificed to necessity (with a note of mockery in so describing a weapon). And Archilochus is more pungent, haughty in his repudiation of what was, after all, the spearman’s second most valuable armament. Davenport’s soldier is also a consumer, of all things, where the warrior may still be trying to retrieve a higher dignity: in Davenport the soldier knows a good store, but Archilochus is tellingly more vague, insinuating even a boast—he can get a shield, after all, in the same place the Saian enemy got his, on the battlefield. So with only a few more English words than the Greek, Davenport has managed to import a good deal more into the poem by Archilochus: an explicit (and explicitly furious) battle, a mere yokel for undeserving beneficiary, a life archly estimated as even finer than the weapon which, it scarcely needs reminding, is supposed to be protecting it, and the prospect of a compensatory shopping expedition. These are questionable additions to the tone, as to the sense, of the poem, revealing that for Davenport classical translation is not pious scholarly restoration but exploratory venture into the possibilities thus presented for contemporary English poetry and prose. His are inventions of, and not only from, the archaic. In translating Davenport gives the blood of his attention to the anThe Invention of the Archaic 9

cients, yet his richest transfusions occur in fiction. In “Robot” and “The Daimon of Sokrates” Davenport provides both the descent into Hades and the knowledge recovered there. In both stories youths explore holy caves, a scholar-priest elucidates them, and military conquest translates the caves’ meanings into political terms.11 “The Daimon of Sokrates” (published in Eclogues) presents a utopian community thriving in the teeth of despotism, and struggling to determine its responsibility for tangible political reforms in the wider society. Published seven years after the American withdrawal from Vietnam by a writer who served in the army during the Korean War and who during the Kennedy administration’s military escalation in Southeast Asia taught at a Quaker college, it concerns the conflict between civic duty and pacifist conviction. The story recounts, primarily from Plutarch’s accounts in the Moralia and Parallel Lives, the conspiracy that liberated Thebes from a three-year Spartan occupation in 379 b.c. and restored its democracy. As the leading member of the Theban Band, Epameinondas is urged to fight for the liberation of his city. As a sort of Boeotian Quaker who has renounced sex, wealth, and violence, he experiences the clash between citizen and ascetic. Ties of kinship and nationality undermine his membership in a philosophico-religious community. Unlike Tatlin and his constructivist cohorts in “Tatlin!” Epameinondas cannot be enlisted to fulfill the aims of political revolution, despite his approval of its ideals and its tactics. His mate Pelopidas and his younger brother Kaphisias, who narrates the story (as he does Plutarch’s “On the Daemon of Socrates”), participate without him. Following closely the structure of Plutarch’s conte philosophique, the revolutionary adventure is interspliced with a lengthy discussion concerning the nature of Socrates’ daimon. Purified souls of the dead who endeavor to guide mortals, daimons are in Davenport’s stories figures of the regenerative archaic. “Socrates’ daimon was an inheritance from the Pythagoreans,” Davenport explains in “Keeping Time.” “All our daimons are personifications of the past, which is the ground beneath our feet. The more diligent the writer, the deeper into the past he can reach” (Davenport 1996b, 318 and 319). As in “Robot,” an intimate group of young men, based on historical figures, joins a conspiracy to overthrow a foreign despot and reestablish the republican regime. As in “Robot” too, the substance of the discussion is religious: was the rationalist Socrates in truth ruled by pious obedience 10

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to a supernatural agent? The group is made up of Pythagorean refugees from southern Italy and members of the Theban Band, ascetics committed like the New England transcendentalists to the cultivation of self-reliance and the appreciation of cosmic concords. The lame priest Simmias discloses the secrets of a grotto and relates to the conspirators how the youth Timarkhos explored the Boeotian cave of Trophonios. The supplicant learns in the cave from what Davenport (but not Plutarch) identifies as a daimon that the daimon is that rational essence of the soul undefiled by the flesh. Borrowing from Plato’s Phaedrus and Timaeus, Simmias concludes: “Thus, as the daimon explained to Timarkhos, the world is one animal, one vast but unified liveliness in the mind of god . . . The world is daimon and matter, soul and flesh, seeking a just proportion the one with the other, seeking beauty of measured motion” (Davenport 1981, 73). Every force evolves a form. Compiled out of passages from Plutarch’s Moralia and Parallel Lives as well as from Xenophon’s Hellenica and Diodorus Siculus, “The Daimon of Sokrates” is a kind of contemporary prose cento. A species of collage in which the seams are concealed rather than underscored, the cento’s principle of organization is imbrication, not juxtaposition. Ausonius, the Roman rhetorician Davenport identifies as his own daimon in “Keeping Time,” composed one, a nuptial hymn for the Emperor Valentinian concocted out of a racy chain of citations from Virgil. Pound’s Canto 13, constructed from Confucian citations, is a rare modern instance, analyzed by Davenport in Cities on Hills (Davenport 1983, 183–85). The cento is conducive to complementarity. It is the genre of integrity preserved in mutation. It thus furnishes a literary complement to the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis. “Orpheus had become Pythagoras, and Pythagoras had begun philosophy,” Adriaan asserts in “The Dawn in Erewhon” (Davenport 1974, 192). Eric Temple Bell notes that “the Pythagorean belief in the transmigration of souls and the depressing creed that this life is a punishment for the sins of some previous existence and a possible purification for life in a better world to come are unadulterated Orphism. It might almost be said that if we strip an ancient science of its rational trappings we invariably find a more ancient myth” (Bell 1946, 73). This is precisely what Davenport finds. The Pythagorean refugees who in “The Daimon of Sokrates” join their confederates at Thebes constitute a utopian fellowship, forging out of music, geometry, athletics, and philosophy a mystical dietetics. The Pythagoreans espoused mystical doctrines of number and of the transmigration The Invention of the Archaic 11

of souls. Their communities combined the daily religious observances of a monastery with the broad intellectual studies of a learned society. The members lived communally and practiced ritual poverty, observed a Deuteronomy of taboos, and took vows of silence, chastity, and charity. Initiates endured fierce lessons in moderation balanced by the cultivation of intense personal loyalties, Pythagoras having defined a friend as another self and argued that friendship manifested the essence of celestial harmony. Certain numbers were characterized as “amicable.” Pythagorean leaders became enlightened autocrats governing several city-states in Magna Graecia, and the parent academy at Croton, where statecraft was also studied, became a training ground for subversives plotting to undermine despotisms. Combining faith in the mathematical coherence of the cosmos with the potential coherence of the soul, the Pythagoreans are for Davenport highly congenial. The Pythagoreans founded a protohumanism in which education redeems the individual and secures the welfare of the state. Pythagoras proclaimed the gospel of purgation of evil by true knowledge. Liberation from the penitential cycles of rebirth came through a purifying pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Equally compelling is the Pythagorean insistence that a rational account of nature is possible, mathematics in particular revealing the properties of a self-consistent cosmos. In the story the teacher Lysis sums up their doctrine: “The bones of things, he said, are numbers” (Davenport 1981, 47). Numbers existed independently of the mind; the postulates of mathematics were necessary truths inherent in nature rather than conventions agreed upon by mathematicians. The Pythagoreans believed that “number underlies all physical objects and is the beginning of everything,” S. Sambursky notes. “The fundamental quality of numbers, by virtue of which they combine the opposites of substance and form, is harmony” (Sambursky 1963, 28 and 29). In the purity of its abstractions, number replaced the Greek pantheon as the Pythagorean idol. “To the modern Pythagorean,” Bell asserts, “mathematical truth is the same partial projection of the absolute Truth that it was for Plato” (Bell 1946, 248). The Pythagoreans, in particular as embodied by the leaders of the Theban Band, are in Davenport an ideal and a limit: the eponymous philosopher of “C. Musonius Rufus” extols “the Pythagorean poetry of things” (Davenport 1979, 16–17); Pythagoras’s demonstration of the evenpatterned properties of the gnomen is evoked in “The Dawn in Erewhon” 12

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(Davenport 1981, 208–10); Pythagoras’s disciple Archytas achieves a scientific wonder in “The Wooden Dove of Archytas.” Identified in several ancient sources as one of the authors of the Orphic poems, Pythagoras is both shaman and scientist. A contemporary of Gautama, the Buddha, he immigrated to southern Italy where, according to the pre-Platonic sources, he preached an ascetic regimen, number symbolism, and spiritual doctrines. A later tradition ascribes to him the invention of mathematics. As “The Daimon of Sokrates” recounts, however, the Pythagoreans endured something of the ignominy of the Russian abstractionists in “Tatlin!” and the persecutions of Musonius. Like Tatlin, Pythagoras was willing to hazard the political promotion of his ideas, and in Croton he succeeded in installing himself as philosopher-king. A democratic faction of Croton, ironically similar to those plotting counterrevolution against the Spartans in Davenport’s story, overthrew this dictatorship of virtue, but what followed was more ominous: what Walter Burkert calls “a kind of pogrom” (Burkert 1985, 304), during which their southern Italian schools were torched and many adherents, possibly including the founder himself, were massacred. Theanor, a Croton refugee who arrives in Thebes to offer a munificent legacy to Epameinondas and his comrades (it is gratefully declined), describes the atrocities: —After the cruel revolution which broke up and scattered the Pythagorean cities, and after Kylon, our common enemy, had surrounded the last surviving Pythagorean school, the one at Metapontion, and set fire to it, burning our master alive and all his disciples except the striplings Philolaos and Lysis, who boldly leapt through the flames, we were so many exiles and outlaws where but months before we had been counselors and arkhons, teachers and soldiers. My father leaned forward with grief. He could never quite grasp the horrible thoroughness of the persecution of the Pythagoreans in Italy. —Burned alive! (Davenport 1981, 61) Lysis eventually reaches Thebes, where he becomes the godfather and tutor of Epameinondas and Kaphisias. Such narrow escapes secure the resurgence of Pythagorean science, religion, and social practice. Walter Burkert traces the school’s influence through the Cynics, Stoics, Essenes, and early Christians (see Burkert 1985, 304). Davenport’s fiction traces the same pollination, including stoThe Invention of the Archaic 13

ries about the Cynic Diogenes, the Stoic Musonius, the Essene-like Jesus, and the early Christian Paul. In an essay on Da Vinci’s Bicycle, Nancy Blake finds its stories united by adherence to the school: “What Leonardo, Stein, Picasso, and Wilbur Wright have in common, beside their ‘genius,’ is, of course, that they were all, whether they knew it or not, Pythagorean materialists. Davenport’s text celebrates force and light as the matter they so unbelievably are” (Blake 1986, 150). The Pythagorean wonder at the harmonies of geometry and mathematics possesses many of Davenport’s characters, such as the youths of “Boys Smell like Oranges,” “The Cardiff Team,” and “The River.” In “Meleager” the sexual dalliance of the teens Sven and Mikkel (presumably the Sven of “The River” and the Mikkel of “Gunnar and Nikolai”) parallels a series of geometrical formulae culled from the 1771 first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Do what I do, his signing hands had said. Mikkel nodded that he understood. When one line falls perpendicularly on another, as AB on CD, then the angles are right; and describing a circle on the center B, since the angles ABC and ABD are equal, their measures must be so too, id est, the arcs AC AD must be equal. (Davenport 1993, 88) Davenport’s ecstatic treatment contrasts starkly with the mirthlessly comic and melancholy juxtaposition of geometry and erotic life in John Updike’s story “Problems.” In antiquity Davenport finds a space for the frank exposition of diverse erotic practices. His ancients show a tolerance for, and range of expressions of, a nonessentialized sexuality. David Halperin, like Davenport a classicist and comparatist who has worked on pastoral, stresses this aspect of classical societies: It never occurred to the ancients to ascribe a person’s sexual tastes to some positive, structural, or constitutive sexual feature of his or her personality . . . Most premodern and non-Western cultures, despite an awareness of the range of possible variations in human sexual behavior, refuse to individuate human beings at the level of sexual preference and assume, instead, that we all share the same fundamental set of sexual appetites, the same “sexuality.” For most of the world’s inhabitants, in other words, “sexuality” is no more a “fact of life” than “dieticity.” Far 14

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from being a necessary or intrinsic constituent of human life, “sexuality” seems indeed to be a uniquely modern, Western, even bourgeois production. (Halperin 1993, 424) This account agrees with Davenport’s presentation of ancient sexuality, including pederasty. “Greek pederasty (“desiring boys”),” he writes in an introduction to Burton Raffel’s translation of classical Greek verse, is probably a survival of Neolithic ethics, when men were away hunting. Sons but never daughters went along on the hunt. The love affairs that occurred in camps between horny uncles and beautiful nephews became an acceptable paradigm (Zeus had his Ganymede, and Hera kles his Hylas) for sergeants and recruits in the army, coaches and athletes, teachers and pupils. Being the beloved was dicey, however, as passivity in sex was effeminate. (Davenport 2004b, xvi) Where Davenport’s account differs from Halperin’s is that, like Halperin’s precursor Michel Foucault, it locates in antiquity not only sexual liberality but as well the sources of a moralized Christian regimen of sexuality. For the Epameinondas of “The Daimon of Sokrates,” number magic complements a puritan ascesis rather than an erotic transport. To the Spartan overlords he is a harmless crank “from a strange Pythagorean family that practiced ritual poverty and was by doctrine pacifist and hermitish. Epameinondas was under a vow of chastity, he spent his time at numbers” (Davenport 1981, 50). He limits his dalliances with his agonized “other self” to wrestling and flirtation: “Pelopidas in his lascivious tantrums would plead with Epameinondas to be friendlier,” but as their sport increases in erotic intensity Epameinondas flees to the river, “swimming upstream” like Sven and Rasmus. “He would swim to exhaustion while Pelopidas and I sat with the one old khlamys around us, fascinated by this pigheaded stubbornness against a little pleasure . . . This chastity remained his peculiar contempt for our morality” (64–65). Despite the graphic sexuality of some of his stories, Davenport once again here traces a moralized chastity not to the early Christian opponents of Hellenistic culture but to that culture itself, where an ethics of moderation, fidelity, and even monogamy emerges as early as the sixth-century Pythagoreans. Davenport depicts not a transition from classical to Christian but rather a complementarity of forces active in both. The Invention of the Archaic 15

Herakleitos

“Pythagoras discovered the harmonies of angles, Herakleitos the inexorable Scarlatti-flow of incidence,” Adriaan tells his students in “The Dawn in Erewhon” (Davenport 1974, 209), and Davenport likes to pair these philosophers.12 Herakleitos tells his Arcadian disciple Knaps in Davenport’s story “Herakleitos” (first published in Tatlin! and reprinted in Twelve Stories) that Pythagoras “found lovely harmonies, dazzling harmonies of number, ratios, intervals, rhymes” (Davenport 1974, 110; 1997, 116).13 The Ionian philosopher is ideally suited to respect such an apprehension of universal order. In “Herakleitos” the universe is a logos, an order partially accessible to human reason. In an essay Davenport defines Heraclitus’s concept as “what nature, desire, design, and God are saying” (Davenport 1981b, 378). Although the Pythagorean music of the spheres is inaudible, an intricate system of harmonic advantages is manifested throughout nature. “The unseen design of things is more harmonious than the seen,” asserts a Heraclitus fragment rendered by Davenport in his translation Herakleitos and Diogenes (Davenport 1979b, 30; 1995, 169). Another observes that joints “cooperate through opposition, and make a harmony of separate forces. Wholeness arises from distinct particulars; distinct particulars occur in wholeness” (30; 169). This is for Heraclitus the system of the cosmos, as it is the method of much of Davenport’s work in all media. Pattern may elude perception, but is available to attention—to the close scrutiny of particulars that would convince Thoreau in Walden of transcendent signatures visible in creation (a conviction that enters into Davenport’s “Concord Sonata”). The story thus traces the embryonic principles of the transcendentalists. Knaps, who has arrived from mainland Greece to record the Ionian philosopher’s dicta, is lectured about “seeing, discerning, grasping the hidden principle of things” (Davenport 1974, 109; 1997, 115). Herakleitos intuits the universe as a plenum. This recommends the thinker to Davenport. “There is no nothing,” he writes in a November 12, 2002, letter. “There couldn’t be.” His young characters grasp this as clearly as the Ionian philosopher. In “The Owl of Minerva” the teen Adam asserts the view of his geologist uncle that science will be able to tell us only that “there’s no nothing, that the whole fucking clockworks is stuff, with the intervals between things a different kind of stuff that we poor ignoramuses call nothing” (Davenport 2003, 19). Herakleitos is a bachelor, runs no school, keeps to a regimen of exercise, 16

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dance, and prayer, and, in contrast to Adriaan in “The Death of Picasso,” betrays no sexual interest in his acolyte.14 He is also portrayed as shrewdly disdainful of politics. According to Plutarch’s “On Loquacity” 17, Heraclitus was asked to give an opinion on concord before the reorganized Ephesian assembly, now under Persian rule. This of course echoes the political predicament of Thebes in “The Daimon of Sokrates.” Davenport retells the incident: He had come to the rostrum with a cup into which he poured wine from a skin. He then broke in herbs, stirred the mixture, and drank it. Smacking his lips with satisfaction, he scanned the faces of the assembly and stepped down. —What did that mean? the Satrap had whispered to his secretary. There had been broad smiles among the Ephesians, all of whom protested that they had no idea what the philosopher could have meant by so enigmatic a gesture. He speaks in riddles, when, of course, he speaks at all. A taciturn Greek! (Davenport 1974, 120; 1997, 113) Davenport omits both the purported subject of this gesture and the moral Plutarch draws from it, that civic peace depends on the citizens’ moderation. Davenport instead implies in Herakleitos a Diogenes-like mischievousness that undermines both the Persian overlords and their Ephesian subjects. Is concord being exalted, or complacence ridiculed? More important, Herakleitos’s oracular gesture avoids any appearance either of patriotism or collusion. Like Epameinondas, Herakleitos refuses to be mobilized by a prevailing ideological camp. Even the book Knaps has arrived to help Herakleitos produce is not a public gesture. Davenport follows the legend preserved by Diogenes Laertes (see Lives 9.6) that the philosopher deposited it in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. In the story’s concluding episode, the modern freethinking Knaps is guided back into a prephilosophical age of religious awe. Science yields to faith, and Knaps discovers that Herakleitos is no debunking modern rationalist, any more than his slave Selena is a mere housekeeper: “When they were buying the cult animals, a smith had called Selena priestess, and the world was now a dream” (Davenport 1974, 124; 1997, 118). The “horned moon written in ashes on her forehead” indicates, as does her name (“moon”), that she is a priestess of Artemis. One of Herakleitos’s first questions to Knaps had been regarding the worship of Artemis in his native Arcadia. When Knaps dismissed the goddess’s local devotees as The Invention of the Archaic 17

“country people who shout at the full of her moon,” Herakleitos’s silence implied disapproval both of the Arcadian peasants and of Knaps (114; 107). The philosopher is in reality closer in spirit to those rustics than to the scientists. (A similar privileging of the pious rustic over the urbane rationalist structures the conjoined double narrative of “The Wooden Dove of Archytas.”) Each member of the household now makes a votive offering to Artemis, the manuscript included: “—And here, just as I promised, Herakleitos said in a firm loud voice, is my book, O Mother of Lions, laying the scrolls before her black basalt feet” (119; 125). Like the Socrates who retains an unquestioning obedience to the inscrutable injunctions of his private angel in “The Daimon of Sokrates,” Herakleitos retains an enabling connection to the archaic energies which, in retrospect, the early Greek thinkers had seemed to be the first to disparage as mere custom, superstition, and prejudice. In “The Dawn in Erewhon” Adriaan comments on this incident: “When Herakleitos finished his book on nature and the mind, he put it on the altar of the Artemis of Ephesos, for whatever nature is, we know it first through her knowing eyes, her knowing hands” (Davenport 1974, 174). Herakleitos thus enters the Orphic cortege of Tatlin! Tatlin, the pioneering aviators of “The Aeroplanes of Brescia,” the Abbé Breuil in “Robot,” the Poe of “1830,” Adriaan and Fourier in “The Dawn in Erewhon,” all journey to recover an archaic principle of spontaneous interplay between mind and body, psyche and eros, organic and mechanical creation. Diogenes

Diogenes Laertes stresses Heraclitus’s reputation for patrician disdain and misanthropy (see Heraclitus 1987, 165–66), thus inviting comparison with the Cynic Diogenes, who is sketched in another of Laertes’ capsule biographies. Juvenal compares them in the tenth of his Satires. Davenport also links the two, both by collecting their aphorisms in Herakleitos and Diogenes, and by writing similarly structured stories about them. A resident alien in Athens, Diogenes exploits his disenfranchisement to assert his distance not only from Athenian public life but from politics altogether. Like Herakleitos before the assembly, Diogenes is (as his mentor Socrates called himself at his trial) an idiotes, a plain-dealing freethinker cheerfully guarding the integrity of his own mind. Both renounce ideological engagement and take refuge in their reputations as cranks and warlocks. 18

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Their austerity involves no puritanical censure of the material world. Herakleitos savors prawns, the salacious verses of “the Lydian songs,” and plays the barbitos with a smile. Like Tullio in “On Some Lines of Virgil,” he combines reserve with relish, so at the palaestra he “smelled with delight the seaware odor of dusty Knaps whose nudity smeared with oil and talc shone like mountain copper” (Davenport 1974, 118; 1997, 112). The philosophers possess the exuberant physicality of Thomas Merton, whom Davenport met at the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani near Lexington, Kentucky, a visit described in the memoir “Tom and Gene” (see Davenport 1996b, 37) and in a section of the story “Fifty-seven Views of Fujiyama”: Who knows, he said, that Saint Anthony didn’t take the streetcar into Alexandria? There hasn’t been a desert father in centuries and centuries, and there’s considerable confusion as to the rules of the game. He indicated a field to our left, beyond the woods of white oak and sweet gum where we were walking, a field of white stubble. That’s where I asked Joan Baez to take off her shoes and stockings so that I could see a woman’s feet again. She was so lovely against the spring wheat. (Davenport 1984, 30; 1997, 173) Davenport recalls of Merton “an afternoon when he turned into Heraclitus” (Davenport 1996b, 45). Herakleitos and Merton are chaste, not sterile, and neither despises the flesh. Despite his scorn of lust, the Diogenes of Davenport’s story “Mesoroposthonippidon” practices a similarly vibrant ascesis. The Cynic is an inverted sensualist who gleefully tells his hedonistic disciple Nippaki, the story’s narrator, “you have not learned the pleasure of despising pleasure” (Davenport 1981, 115).15 “Opposites cooperate,” Heraclitus declares in Davenport’s Blakean translation of a fragment. “The beautifulest harmonies come from opposition” (Davenport 1979b, 28; 1995, 168). Opposites do indeed cooperate in “Mesoroposthonippidon.” The debauched, thieving “painter of jugs” in the Keramika district of Athens and the cantankerous mendicant philosopher are not such incongruous allies, for they share a mischievously exaggerated contempt for cant and unexamined custom. Diogenes’ passion is for witty debunking, comic inversion, and the saving claims of nature over civilization.16 Sensual, idiosyncratic, and gifted, Nippaki, whose full name provides the story with its Rabelaisian title (“pony-penis-sized”) is a fit acolyte of the philosopher who regrets that “we are not as hardy, free, The Invention of the Archaic 19

or accomplished as animals” (40; 172). He is as keen as Diogenes to flout public morality wherever it conflicts with his rapacious appetite for experience: “We are here, generated by lovers, to love, as many things as we can perhaps, one thing perhaps which is our care alone. I pitch my conks for the many and the diverse” (Davenport 1981, 113). Diogenes pitches his conks for the few and the similar: “monotony is also precision” (Davenport 1981, 110). It is an instance of reverse symmetry yielding unexpected congruities, the happenstance harmonies of complementarity. There are many such in the story. In “The Concord Sonata” Davenport claims that “Thoreau was most himself when he was Diogenes” (Davenport 1993, 83), and in “Mesoroposthonippidon” Diogenes is most himself when he is Thoreau.17 Both are unforgiving interrogators of their respective societies’ moral contradictions (at times on the same subject, such as slavery) and are microutopians who try to establish within society, indeed for its instruction and use, a paradigmatic private Arcadia. A philosopher who illustrates his doctrines with approving reference to the conduct of beasts cannot wholly reproach lust, whatever his devotion to the Heraclitean principle of reason. Davenport’s pastiche arranges Diogenes’ axioms in contexts that lend a giddy irreverence to the Cynic’s more vehement strictures against sexual license. He frequents the lowerclass palaestra where Nippaki, like him not an Athenian citizen, gathers with other Cynics, coming to cadge our nuts and honey, to twit us and yap at us and enjoy himself to the brim. —Grace from the gods, I hailed, O dogs of the dogherd! —Nippy you rascal, he shouted. If you’ve come out so strabalokomatos and in so negligible a garment to charm a man, it’s deplorable, if for a woman, it’s unfair. —For my friends, I said, batting aside the intimate prod of the dog’s cold nose. —Worse and worse! Reason or a halter! (Davenport 1981, 114–15) 18 Diogenes is no prude, even if, as Nippaki notes, “the warmth of his heart seems never to have spread to his balls” (Davenport 1981, 115). While maintaining the opposition of celibate and sensualist, Davenport once again depicts them in vital cooperation. Davenport has similarly affirmed the unexpected affinities between the utopian schemes of Fourier and the Shakers (see “Shaker Light” in Davenport 1996b, 57). In 20

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“The Trees at Lystra” (a story included with “Mesoroposthonippidon” in Eclogues), Paul boasts to his potential Christian converts, “My school of rhetoric goes back in its origins to Diogenes . . . who had a rough and sturdy virtue I can still admire” (Davenport 1981, 9). Davenport defends Diogenes from the charge of misanthropy and puritanism. Even the contemporary philosopher Pyrrhon, whose radical skepticism Davenport outlines in the vignette “Pyrrhon of Elis” (“His great teaching was that we should resist reality with all our might, denying it in our actions where possible, with words, where not” [Davenport 1987, 25]), expresses no disapproval for eros, even while the story contrasts Pyrrhon with the rich diversity of a classical society the philosopher could not be convinced had any reality at all. Davenport highlights the non-Euclidean complementarity between license and restraint. Shortly after the publication of Sappho: Poems and Fragments, Davenport wrote in a February 19, 1966, letter to Jonathan Williams: The classix are getting lop-sided in their attention to salty amatoriness; we need to get back to the great Artemis piety, to the Williams/Johnson/Tolkien sense of trees and crops (or is that another mask of Romance?). Ovid has the randiness there, all right (Pan with hard on, girls pretty as a sapling getting reamed by Herakles’ forearm-long, sheep’sheart-headed dick), yet it is integrated with the groves, the country gods (the god Mildew, right out of Blake!), the old Etruscan painted gods, all so much a relief from the Harvard Apollos and Radcliffe Athene Minervas that the prissy academicians keep bringing on. (Davenport and Williams 2004, 68) Like other pairs in Eclogues, including Adriaan and Sander in “The Death of Picasso” and Tullio and Jolivet in “On Some Lines of Virgil,” the Cynic and the vase painter of “Mesoroposthonippidon” are constructive Blakean contraries. Opposition is true friendship. The ecumenical Almighty who proclaims “The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard,” where Gabriel’s shofar and Bohr’s quarks are equally agents and glories of the Lord, rhetorically asks: Did not my Herakleitos say Under the noon Cycladic sky All is other and all is one? (Davenport 1986, 14) The Invention of the Archaic 21

Archytas

The complementarity of phenomena metamorphosing seamlessly into their contraries also governs Davenport’s story “The Wooden Dove of Archytas.” 19 He again finds both primary energies and an inspired model of the disciple-mentor relationship in an obscure ancient legend. The Pythagorean Archytas was governor of Taras (modern Taranto on Italy’s heel), a geometrician, and the author of treatises on applied mathematics, harmony, and possibly mechanics, of which only two pages, preserved by Porphyry, survive.20 Plato, on whose behalf he interceded with the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius, is his most illustrious pupil.21 Antiquity ascribed to him the invention of mathematical instruments, the pulley, and the screw. He thus occupies a place in the Davenport series that includes da Vinci (in “The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag”), Tatlin, and the mathematician Sylvester (in “August Blue”). Regarding precision as a moral trait, mathematics as an ideal means of deducing whole from part, and number as the quintessential proof of universal order, Archytas is well qualified for Davenportian treatment. A surviving fragment anticipates the argument of Davenport’s essay “Finding” by appealing to disinterested and disciplined foraging. Whereas in Ode 1.28 Horace uses Archytas to moralize grimly on mortality, Davenport balances admiration for his technical virtuosity with concern over the threat such ingenuity poses to distinctions between organic and inorganic matter.22 Archtyas’s pupil Aristopolites (“Trip”) witnesses an early episode in the transition from religious faith in a transcendent universal order to scientific faith in it. During a public demonstration Archytas launches into steam-propelled flight a mechanized wooden bird. Archytas teaches the new physics that in Davenport’s fiction is really the very old physics: “The universe runs by strict laws which are at the mercy of chance” (Davenport 1979, 38). Davenport interlaces the ancient anecdote with one from the modern American South, in which the native Anne Breadcrust requests from neighboring Negro field hands a matchbox to serve as a coffin for her ringdove.23 In “Ernst Machs Max Ernst” Davenport asserts the “inner consistency of all dialects of the logos” (Davenport 1981b, 379). “The Wooden Dove of Archytas” impartially depicts the iteration of two disparate “dialects,” the fusion of which constitutes another instance of complementarity. The indigent Southerners, however, command more sympathy and respect. 22

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Preoccupied with his mechanism, Archytas betrays scant regard for religious observances, while Breadcrust shares with the field hands an animistic piety. The latter join in the burial because, as the matriarch Hanna says, “There will be a power . . . and Scripture teaches that a dove is a bird close to the Lord” (Davenport 1979, 43). The redemptive iconography of the dove reverberates in Davenport’s work, from the illustrations to his translation of Sappho (the dove is Aphrodite’s bird) and Thoreau’s gnomic parable of the search for a turtledove reiterated in “Badger,” to “Jonah,” a retelling of the biblical legend of a prophet whose name means ringdove. In “The Ringdove Sign” a theology student links the dove to belief in daimons. The ingenious Greek scientist harnesses matter where the illiterate American outcast would harness spirit. Neither dove has life, but one is a gadget arousing cupidity (the citizens of Taras foresee a marketable commodity) while the other is a beautiful and iconically rich creature arousing reverence. The Taras crowd enjoys a diverting spectacle, while the aboriginals achieve a vision of the ringdove’s resurrection: She going! Jack said with his eyes closed. —Tell her, Anne said, Rabbit danced tonight. Tell her we dream. Tommy looked up, Silk Deer looked up. The rattler ceased. —We kick the door, Dovey! Anne cried. We kick the door! —She gone, Jack Frost said. (Davenport 1979, 44) The wooden dove can only plummet while the ringdove, like the Holy Spirit which takes its form, mounts forever. In “Every Force Evolves a Form” Davenport notes that “the history of birds taken to be daimons traverses religions, folklore, and literature . . . , modulations in a long tradition, a dance of forms to a perennial spiritual force” (Davenport 1987, 155; 2003, 90). His story both contributes a “modulation” to this tradition and offers an ironic commentary on it, for the Pythagorean Archytas ignores the daimonic properties that Pythagoreans ascribed to birds. Like Poe’s raven and Yeats’s Byzantine bird, Archytas’s dove is an automaton programmed to perform a single function.24 (By contrast, the Robot of Davenport’s story “Robot” turns out to be not an automaton but the canine mascot that inadvertently stumbles into the Lascaux caves.) The story’s natives meanwhile need no reminders of the bird’s significance, for they already eloquently exhibit this perception. They embody The Invention of the Archaic 23

not primitive but rather primary energies that a technological positivism cannot relinquish with impunity. In “The Indian and His Image,” Davenport claims that “the Indian is but one example of a people free of the myth of maniacally reiterated examples of convenient gimmickry which we mistake for progress” (Davenport 1981b, 358).25 Although a secular who writes scornfully of the prejudices of his Baptist education, Davenport is as anxious as Hanna, Anne, and Jack to discern manifestations of numinous force. In “II Timothy” Davenport argues that, under the sign of the dove, the Second Coming has in a sense already occurred: “Christ’s return was the diff usion of his spirit through all mankind: the descent of the dove” (Davenport 1996b, 70). The ascent of the mechanical dove of Archytas can only be a dizzying burlesque of that diff usion. In “Ernst Machs Max Ernst” Davenport asserts that “the logos hides in technology in our time” (Davenport 1981b, 378). As the pioneering aviator Blériot flies over the grandstand in “The Aeroplanes at Brescia,” “women cowered and waved their handkerchiefs. Officers threw him salutes” (Davenport 1974, 68; 1997, 73; 2003, 126). As the steam-driven projectile soars above the spectators at Taras, “we all cried with delight” (Davenport 1979, 45).26 “The Wooden Dove of Archytas” presents a classical antecedent of the modern technological logos, while in Anne Breadcrust’s rite it presents a modern avatar of the primitive logos. Out of the combination of Archytas and poor Southerners, Davenport’s story suggests both clash and complementarity, disparate iterations of a dance of forms to a perennial spiritual force.

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What’s going on in the “ideograms” is that the story goes right on, transposed for the moment into different imagery. (letter to James Laughlin, October 10, 1992)

2. The Prose Ideogram Assemblage

“I trust the image; my business is to get it onto the page,” Davenport writes in “Ernst Machs Max Ernst.” “A page, which I think of as a picture, is essentially a texture of images . . . The text of a story is therefore a continuous graph, kin to the imagist poem, to a collage (Ernst, Willi Baumeister, El Lissitzky), a page of Pound, a Brakhage film” (Davenport 1981b, 374–75). He asserts that “the writer assembles, finds, shapes. There is nothing to be gained by displacing the authentic” (383). From his mid-1960s work, including his translation of Sappho, study guides to Homer, and long poem Flowers and Leaves, to the short fiction of the 1970s and beyond, Davenport incorporated images into his texts as the most conspicuous means of undermining the platonic regularity of linear typography. Experience as a printer, illustrator, artist, and art critic fostered in Davenport a paramount appreciation for the materiality of writing—“the art,” he states in a note to his correspondence with Jonathan Williams, “of arranging words on a page” (Davenport and Williams 2004, 10). His letters too were visually expressive, carefully and variously laid out as well as frequently illustrated. In a beautiful handwritten letter to Williams from December 30, 1966, he insisted on the priority for him of sight: “I never forget anything I see; it’s words that fade from my mind. I was never meant to have do with words” (facsimile page, 84). Until he could find a way to write a more visually eclectic and expressive prose, he would feel this dissatisfaction. 25

Davenport’s letters of this period to Williams attest to literary stagnation. “I must find new subjects and a new and better style,” he wrote on February 7, 1966, after completing Flowers and Leaves (Davenport and Williams 2004, 63). Glossing Cydonia Florentia for him four days later, he wrote: “My last poem in the Victorian manner. Must learn more before I can write anything else” (65). When in the late 1960s he adapted from the visual arts the concept of assemblage to enhance the pictorial dimension of fiction, Davenport’s mature prose style was born. As a professor, he later explained in an interview, “the mind gets in the habit of finding cross-references among subjects. This is the best way in the world to make my assemblages, as I call them. I don’t think I’ve ever written a story. If Henry James wrote stories, if Dostoevski wrote stories, I don’t write stories” (Alpert 1976, 3). Assemblage is a mode of recontextualization rather than echo. It exploits unexpected affinities and chance sonorities rather than mobilizing and assimilating a tradition. In The Pound Era, which includes an acknowledgment to Davenport, Hugh Kenner suggests that assemblage has to do less with influence than with “homeomorphism, the domain of topology, systems of identical interconnectedness” (Kenner 1971, 169).1 “All forms upon the others pun,” the Spinozan monism of Flowers and Leaves declares (Davenport 1966, 42). In an essay on Davenport, Peter Quartermain notes of assemblage that its raw materials are often associationally powerful, almost always ready made, and identifiable (nails, dolls’ eyes, photographs, dried flowers, old wood). That is to say, they retain much of their previous history (their contextual residue); it is also to say, in the words of one critic, that (compared to collage) “its ultimate configurations are so often less predetermined.” The interpolation of nonart material, indeed the exclusive use of such material, provides what art historians have come to call a “frame,” by means of which no attempt is made to represent anything, but the actuality of “the world” is permitted to erupt within the environment of the work, and the boundaries between objects, categories, and activities dissolve. (Quartermain 1992, 180–81) 2 Although Davenport’s assemblages contain a stricter selection of materials and convey a more overt metonymic sense of order than do those of such artists as Robert Rauschenberg, still the analogy holds. Quartermain identifies Davenport’s innovative use of assemblage as his most important “contribution to the art of fiction” (Quartermain 1992, 181). Marjorie Per26

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loff makes a yet larger claim. In The Dance of the Intellect she identifies Davenport’s “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier” along with Beckett’s later prose texts as portentous instances of “free prose,” in which attributes of free verse and associative prose converge. She stresses the foregrounded patterns of sound, the often primitive syntax, the repetitive vocabulary, and the suspension of causal chains in Davenport’s “hybrid mode”: “Pieces, texts, lyrics of fiction, associative monologues, collage, bricolage, assemblage, free prose—perhaps the name is less important than the recognition that we are living in a world of new literary organisms” (Perloff 1985, 151). Gaudier-Brzeska

Davenport appropriately employs the principles of the Poundian ideogram in an assemblage whose subject was one of Pound’s most gifted protégés, the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Divided into discrete and discontinuous titled paragraphs as well as into pen-and-ink “quotations” (as he calls his textual illustrations),3 “The Bowmen of Shu” resembles Davenport’s story about Gaudier-Brzeska’s contemporary Tatlin. Although the French expatriate never received the official patronage that the Russian briefly enjoyed, Gaudier-Brzeska like Tatlin became an exemplary modernist casualty of the age’s destructive politics. Sharing the fate of his acquaintance T. E. Hulme (the subject of Davenport’s text “Lo Splendore della Luce a Bologna”), Gaudier died on the Western Front. In “The Pound Vortex” Davenport contends that World War I blighted “a renaissance as brilliant as any in history” (Davenport 1981b, 166). Virginia Woolf dated the twentieth century from a day in 1909; Davenport ends it in 1915, the year of Gaudier-Brzeska’s death: “It is now clear that he died with the century. What we call the twentieth century ended in 1915” (166). Like “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier” (see below), “The Bowmen of Shu” is a rich meditation on squandered cultural advance. Both assemblages are, however, encomiastic and prospective rather than elegiac and nostalgic. While mourning forfeited legacies, Davenport seeks in both texts to recover and adapt dormant energies generated by the texts’ early twentieth-century subjects. The texts are celebrations of possibility, explicitly in their subject matter, implicitly in their structure. Published first in 1983 in Blast 3 (a compendium in honor of Wyndham Lewis),4 “The Bowmen of Shu” borrows its subject from one of the most notable contributors to Lewis’s avant-garde journal, and its logic from letters Gaudier-Brzeska sent from the front shortly before his death to The Prose Ideogram

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John Cournos 5 and to Dorothy Shakespear’s mother, the latter quoted in Davenport’s primary source, Pound’s memoir Gaudier-Brzeska: “E . . . has sent me the Chinese poems. I like them very much. I keep the book in my pocket, indeed I use them to put courage in my fellows. I speak now of the ‘Bowmen’ and the ‘North Gate’ which are so appropriate to our case” (Pound 1974, 68). Cathay, Pound’s versions of classical Chinese verse transliterated from Ernest Fenollosa’s Japanese translations, belongs to the renaissance of the archaic. Davenport’s story reproduces the modernist sensitivity to historical recurrence.6 Its opening segues without transition between a December 1914 letter to Cournos from the front, omniscient descriptions of the trenches at Nuilly St. Vaast, and passages from Pound’s version of Rihaku’s “The Bowmen of Shu.” Gaudier himself makes the parallel: “Like the chinese bowmen in Ezra’s poem we had rather eat fern shoots than go back now” (Davenport 1984, 3; 1997, 140). Accentuating this sense of atemporality is the nonlinear progression of the story. Though it begins and ends by recording dates, the titled paragraphs of “The Bowmen of Shu” are organized solely by thematic juxtaposition and complementarity. Some are documentary, like quotations from Rodin’s notebooks, Blast, Cathay, or the letter of condolence from the captain of Gaudier’s infantry company. Others are re-creations of the Kensington milieu, descriptions of the artist’s Polish lover, summaries of vorticist doctrine, glimpses of Rimbaud dying and of Brancusi embarking for Paris, and of Gaudier as a child and in his London atelier. The story’s ligature is the trenches, where Gaudier-Brzeska spent his last six months and from where he wrote letters and a report for Blast. The stress thus falls as much on the monstrous cataclysm to which Gaudier-Brzeska eagerly contributed his chauvinism and bloodlust as on the aesthetic movement to which he contributed his genius. Davenport places vorticism in the context of treacherous historical vortices. Gaudier-Brzeska recovers and harnesses the primitive, but yet more primitive forces are at work in modern Europe, and it is that culture’s loss that the artist chose to align himself with both. Gaudier-Brzeska reports the observation of his trenchmate, the young anthropologist De Launay, who sees a pattern to this hell: We are the generation to understand the world, the accelerations of the turn of vortices, how their energy spent itself, all the way back to the Paleolithic (he tells me about Cartailhac and Teilhard and Breuil). But our knowledge, which must come from contemplation and careful 28

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inspection, has collided with a storm, a vortex of stupidity and idiocy. (Davenport 1984, 4; 1997, 140) The artist who revived monumental stone sculpture by reduction in masses and planes is now swept into the atavism of trench warfare. Gaudier-Brzeska exalted instinct over reason. “The modern sculptor is a man who works with instinct as his inspiring force,” he wrote in The Egoist a year before his death. “His work is emotional . . . —What he feels he does so intensely and his work is nothing more nor less that the abstraction of this intense feeling.” Such sculpture, he concluded, “is continuing the tradition of the barbaric peoples of the earth (for whom we have sympathy and admiration)” (quoted in Pound 1974, 37). Davenport too reduces the narrative of Gaudier-Brzeska to the verbal equivalents of masses and planes. The ellipses exalt instinct, for the connections between parts are as much the work of intuition as of reason. In “The Symbol of the Archaic” Davenport commemorates this modernist ambition: “The impulse to recover beginnings and primal energies grew out of a feeling that man in his alienation was drifting tragically away from what he had first made as poetry and design and as an understanding of the world” (Davenport 1981b, 28). Gaudier embodies a modernism which interprets contemporary life by means of the archaic inheritance. In “The Bowmen of Shu” Davenport deplores the irony that so vital and regenerative an impulse could be diverted into the apocalyptic fiasco of trench combat. In his Blast report from the front, Gaudier-Brzeska declared, “I HAVE BEEN FIGHTING FOR TWO MONTHS and I can now gauge the intensity of life” (Pound 1974, 64), a remark for which Davenport reserves a separate (uncapitalized) paragraph (Davenport 1984, 9; 1997, 145). The article, however, goes on with a martial fervor worthy of Marinetti: “THIS WAR IS A GREAT REMEDY . . . IT TAKES AWAY FROM THE MASSES NUMBERS UPON NUMBERS OF UNIMPORTANT UNITS” (Pound 1974, 27). The penultimate paragraph of “The Bowmen of Shu” quotes the Blast memorial to Gaudier-Brzeska, “Mort pour la patrie,” but omits its celebration of his military feats and adds the mensural eloquence of “4 Octobre 1891–5 Juin 1915” (Davenport 1984, 20; 1997, 158). “It is part of the war waste,” Pound lamented in his memoir (Pound 1974, 17), as he did later in “Mauberley.” For modernism World War I proved a terminus, and “The Bowmen of Shu” presents an Orpheus who does not survive the descent into Hades’ trenches. What is salvaged from such loss is the grandeur of Gaudier-Brzeska’s The Prose Ideogram

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accomplishment, which Davenport’s visual quotations celebrate (again like “Tatlin!”), and the value of his instigation, from which the story draws impetus. In the story that follows “The Bowmen of Shu” in Apples and Pears, “Fifty-seven Views of Fujiyama,” Gaudier-Brzeska is included among the modernists who preserved “tonalities with lost coordinates” (Davenport 1984, 29–30; 1997, 172).7 “The Bowmen of Shu” pursues, in Gaudier-Brzeska’s spirit, the lost coordinates, concocting a Poundian medley of syncretic image rhymes, accretions of isolated elements within an integral field. Like most of Davenport’s fiction, the story is as thematically cohesive as it is narratively disjunctive. It descends through strata of parallel lives, with Gaudier a Rimbaud moderne, a medieval cathedral mason, a fourthcentury b.c. Chinese warrior, a Dordogne cave painter. The enemy arrows of Bunno become the German artillery, the Chinese frontier of Rihaku becomes the Western Front. Davenport quotes Gaudier’s manifesto (see Pound 1974, 20): “The Paleolithic Vortex resulted in the decoration of the Dordogne caverns” (Davenport 1984, 4; 1997, 140). A subsequent paragraph describes the Magdalenian cave paintings at Font de Gaume in the Val Dordogne; a late paragraph, subtitled with the address of Gaudier’s London studio, “RAILWAY ARCH 25,” and describing the Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound (reproduced in 1984, 9; and 1997, 147, where it is blown up into a full-page image), begins: “His Font de Gaume . . . ” (18; 156). The zeal to depict less a stationary subject than its energy,8 the affinity with primitive artists, the archaic themes and treatment, invite comparison with another mercurial young French genius, also attracted to warfare, who by the time of his death at 36 in 1891 had not written verse for some seventeen years. Davenport seizes on a coincidence, the sculptor’s birth in the year of Rimbaud’s death, to project the artists’ consonance, by describing Gaudier’s birth in a paragraph directly preceding one concerned with the poet’s death.9 That proximity is eloquently reinforced in the story’s two closing paragraphs. The first cites Gaudier-Brzeska’s epitaph, the second his fellowship with Rimbaud in posterity: THE RED STONE DANCER Nos fesses ne sont pas les leurs. Il faut être absolument moderne. (Davenport 1984, 20; 1997, 158) “Quoted” in a small hatchwork pen-and-ink illustration in Apples and Pears and in a full-page enlargement in Twelve Stories, Gaudier-Brzeska’s 30

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varnished sandstone sculpture Red Stone Dancer is a kinetic image of a squat dancer’s energy. Here is the appreciation of masses in relation, and the defining of these masses in planes, that the artist characterized as sculptural ability (see Pound 1974, 20. Davenport’s story quotes these Blast aphorisms). By locating instigations in the distant past, Gaudier-Brzeska became, as Rimbaud urged in Une saison en enfer, “absolument moderne” (Rimbaud 1984, 152). His vorticist experiments “awakened my sense of form,” Pound averred. “All this is new life, it gives a new aroma, a new keenness for keeping awake” (Pound 1974, 126). Davenport’s story both honors this legacy and involves itself, formally and stylistically as well as thematically, in its perpetuation. Marjorie Perloff draws attention to the ideogrammatic design of Pound’s memoir (see Perloff 1985, chap. 2), but it is left to Davenport to achieve a genuinely ideogrammatic hybrid of prose fiction, documentary, poem, and illustrated text. Lascaux

The predominant mode in Davenport is the bucolic ideogrammatic collage. Biographical fictions like “The Bowmen of Shu” and “Tatlin!” turn out to be illustrated formalist montages. With a nod to Pound and to filmmaker Stan Brakhage, Davenport calls his compositional principle architectonic.10 “The architectonics of a narrative are emphasized and given a role to play in dramatic effect when novelists become Cubists,” he writes in “Narrative Tone and Form”; “that is, when they see the possibilities of making a hieroglyph, a coherent symbol, an ideogram of the total work. A symbol comes into being when an artist sees that it is the only way to get all the meaning in. Genius always proceeds by faith” (Davenport 1981b, 312). While preserving the regular lineation of the conventional prose page, Davenport substitutes a radial scheme for cognitive linearity. The architectonic text “differs from other narrative in that the meaning shapes into a web, or globe, rather than along a line” (Davenport 1981b, 318). In architectonic form meaning is generated as much in the interstices between images, citations, and passages of dialogue as in the content of these elements. “It is the conjunction, not the elements, that creates a new light,” Davenport says in an essay on Ronald Johnson (1981b, 194). This is the Poundian aesthetic which Charles Olson attempted to translate into practical pedagogical terms as rector of Black Mountain College, a school orThe Prose Ideogram

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ganized, as Olson explained in a 1952 letter, on the “principle that the real existence of knowledge lies between things & is not confined to labeled areas” (quoted in Duberman 1972, 341). For Davenport, what Olson called projective verse “insisted that the world is interesting enough in itself to be reflected in a poem without rhetorical cosmetics, an arbitrary tune for melodramatic coloring, or stage directions from the literary kit and caboodle” (Davenport 1981b, 192).11 One of Davenport’s earliest and most celebrated stories (an O. Henry Award winner), “Robot” combines the techniques of architectonic form with adherence to linear narrative.12 It was his first story to incorporate visual images. Like many of his stories, “Robot” imagines the particulars of an obscure event, the 1940 discovery of the Paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux. Of the discovery “no accounts agree,” Davenport notes in “Ernst Machs Max Ernst” (Davenport 1981b, 376). “Robot” is a boys’ adventure yarn about buried treasure, a guided tour of the Magdalenian caves, an illustrated lecture on the sources of modernism, an idyll, and a meditation on aggression. An atmosphere of romance dispels the illusion of documentary fact. Juxtapositions multiply in “Robot”: Magdalenian and Vichy, primitive and modernist, animal and human, bucolic and bellicose, youth and age, teacher and pupil, myth and history, abstinence and promiscuity. A group of Montignac youths lose their mascot down a hole while hunting rabbits in the Dordogne countryside. Attempting to retrieve the dog Robot, the youths discover the largest and most richly painted of all Paleolithic caves. With his one good eye the paleologist Abbé Breuil soon attests to the authenticity of their discovery. He discusses at length the provenance and the import of the paintings with the boys before swearing them to secrecy, as does a Resistance member when later a scheme is hatched to conceal arms in the cave. The play of juxtapositions extends to an interplay between image and text. Davenport’s versions of Aurignacian horses, aurochs, and reindeer are not reproductions but mediations made strange by recontextualization. “When language emerges, the verb to draw is the same as to write,” Davenport notes in “Primitive Eyes.” “We can see, and to some extent read, the drawings of primitive man” (Davenport 1981b, 64). Davenport’s fiction asks to be read in a similar way. Visual imagery is not subordinated to writing but integrated with it. Like the verbal evocations of the Lascaux murals, wartime France, Dordogne geography, and adolescent male bonds, the drawings in “Robot” are faithful to the limited available 32

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evidence, yet are intended not for a faux-Lascaux simulacrum but for the unavoidable and suggestive distances of the printed page. In Davenport erotic attention discloses the world. Alan Williamson argues that in Tatlin! “true creativity in science or art owes more to the outward exploratoriness of early childhood—formal and tactile all at once —than it does to the inwardness, of mood or systematic belief, of the postadolescent psyche” (Williamson 1975, 88). “Robot” presents six youths in the unsupervised splendor of a southern French summer. As Abbé Breuil explains to them, some of the most impressive Paleolithic caves were, like Lascaux, discovered by youths. One father had been exploring a cave for years, looking for celts and flints: “He had never once looked at the ceiling, if you can imagine. One day his little daughter came along with him, and walked in and looked up, first thing. Papa, she said, los toros, los toros!” (Davenport 1974, 98; 1997, 103). The child is mysteriously allied to the animals (a dog found the caves at Altamira), undifferentiating and instinctive where the adult is focused and deliberate. A correspondence is drawn between the youths and the awe which inspired the murals they discover. At Le Tuc d’Audoubert, Breuil explains, three brothers found clay sculptures of bison about to copulate, and near them the heel prints of children: “The animals were shaped by the light of the torch, who knows with what sacred dread, and children danced on their heels, and the cave was closed forever” (92; 96). Youthful ardor, awe, and art converge here, as in so many of Davenport’s stories. The rivalries, raciness, and clannishness of youth are presented unabashedly. At each stage the secret of the cave is jealously guarded. “Let no one in the cave,” Breuil orders Ravidat, at seventeen the band’s senior member. The Catalan Resistance member Ramón later swears them to secrecy regarding the intended stash of arms in the shaft. Secrets and oaths reinforce the cohesion of the band, augmented by self-interest, idealism, and developing sexual self-awareness. Ramón underscores this by having the boys swear allegiance according to biblical protocol, “one hand on your balls, one on your heart” (94; 99). By this point the youths are already at ease groping their genitals around each other. Ravidat wears Coencas’s briefs, and after teasing each other about the size of their penises two of the younger boys ask Ravidat to display his own. He is interrupted by the sound of the dog crashing into the cave, thus echoing its sexual connotations. Breuil will draw attention to the hunter mural (which Davenport illustrates), its bird-headed ithyphallic stick man beside a javelin and a gored bison whose “spilling entrails are an ideogram of the vagina. The The Prose Ideogram

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bison is life under the guise of death” (97; 102). He conjectures that “in the painter’s vocabulary of symbols to die by the spear and to receive the male are cognate female verbs. The hieroglyphs of these cave painters for wound and vulva are probably the same” (97; 102). The primitive analogy between sacrificial violence and renewal is presented in “Robot” as a tragic legacy reiterated in contemporary history. Guernica has been bombed by some of the same Heinkel III B bimotors that now, three years later, fly over the Dordogne, audible to Ravidat in his bed. A Catalan expatriate in France like Ramón, Picasso exhibited at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair a massive memorial to the bombing’s victims. As Davenport notes in an essay, the iconography of Guernica is indebted to the cave paintings at Altamira, located near Guernica.13 “The painting I see is as old as Lascaux,” Breuil tells the youths (Davenport 1974, 100; 1997, 105). While Ramón’s antifascist engagement aligns him with his artistic compatriot, he is the unavoidably sinister agent of military reprisal, intimidating the youths with threats and unlike them using his masculinity belligerently. “This is a matter of cojónes,” he says of the arms stockpile (Davenport 1974, 93; 1997, 98), not of art: “Foutre les tableaux!” (94; 99). A story that begins with a band of affable teens maintaining a merry vigil over a prehistoric gallery ends with Resistance members delivering a consignment of arms to a chthonic arsenal. The former are protecting invaluable paintings, the latter invaluable freedoms, but where art is not honored liberty may not be respected. Barbarism shadows almost every episode in the story, from the youths mimicking German tanks and dive bombers to the grim continuity underscored in one of its closing images: “The first boxes of ammunition were placed in the Shaft of the Hunter and the Bison late in October, when the moon was dark” (103; 108). The sticklike bird-headed hunter is a “minor animal” among the meticulously realized animals of Lascaux, and for him death and regeneration are, as Breuil proposes, “cognate” terms: “The hunter with arms outstretched before the wounded bison is embracing the idea of death, which to him is the continuity of life” (97; 102). The carbines, grenades, flares, and .45s of the Resistance are cognate with the stick man’s javelin, and cognate too is the belief in violence as a safeguard of life. The story, however, traces throughout not only perpetuations but terminations. The tarpans, aurochs, and cave bears of the Magdalenian epoch are extinct species. “Robot,” the title of which plays on the merging 34

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of machine and organism that is a prominent theme of Tatlin!, concludes with the conjunction of two isomorphic images of violence. They are preceded by Breuil’s account of the discovery in Somaliland that Neanderthals were not abject primitives but skillful artists. The first discrete paragraph describes the stockpiling of arms, which “rose in neat stacks to the black shins of the prancing horses” (103; 109), a melancholy inversion of the story’s opening, a drawing of a Lascaux horse and a description of it “prancing as if to a fanfare by Charpentier” (71; 75). The closing discrete paragraph, of almost identical length (thus forming a kind of prose couplet), returns to a Neanderthal hunters’ cave explored years before by Breuil, on the Swiss Drachenberg. Here the hunters placed the skulls of cave bears “all looking outward with their eye sockets, formidable I assure you,” as Breuil earlier had remembered (89; 94). Now, in the story’s final image, light “fell upon them dimly in the depth of their cave in the cliff, lighting all but the sockets of their eyes” (103; 109). Though the Neanderthal was capable not only of these crude ursine totems but of the Somaliland drawings, it is the menacing skulls that gaze eyeless out of the story’s conclusion. The arsenal is embedded between contrary manifestations of early man: the primitive worshiper of cave bear totems and the oxen-domesticating pictorial realists of Somaliland. The story does not attempt to reconcile these conflicting yet equipoised images of the Neanderthal, nor to reconcile either of them to the Lascaux arsenal. Their taut balance is Davenport’s image of human creativity bound inextricably to a capacity for self-slaughter. Dogon

Davenport has experimented in other, more radical forms of collage. “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier” 14 juxtaposes the modern Stone Age Dogon of West Africa with Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas in Paris, the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, Fourier’s utopian New Harmony, da Vinci’s bicycle, pollinating bees, an encounter with Samuel Beckett, and so on, as well as collaged pen-and-ink images of, among others, Jacob Epstein’s Marble Doves, Edgar Allan Poe, a classical vase, and Lascaux reindeer. Superficially a congeries of heterogeneous paragraphs and images arbitrarily ordered, the text is in fact meticulously structured to correspond to the intricate concords of Dogon cosmology. The Dogon universe contains, but is not tyrannized by, random forces. The Prose Ideogram

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Indeed, within contingency the Dogon detect an elaborate system of correspondences, indices of larger and redemptive forces. This adeptness at reading into phenomena multiple levels of highly coordinated sense inspires the structure of Davenport’s text. Its rectangular paragraph blocks produce the effect of a grid, coinciding with the grid on which the Dogon map out the cosmos. “I may be a Dogon,” Davenport told Erik Reece. “They can represent anything four ways—from total abstraction to realistic portrayal” (Reece 1996, 46). The Dogon are exemplary foragers who find what nature hides, and the theme of “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier” is this faculty. Davenport explains in “Ernst Machs Max Ernst” that the text “isolates this theme of foraging and proceeds like an Ernst collage to involve seven themes, or involucra, which when opened disclose the theme of foraging in several senses” (Davenport 1981b, 379–80). He praises the “Dogon sense that man is a forager trying to find God’s complete plan of the universe” (379). In doing so the tribe honors their impish god of contingency Ogo, who is portrayed in the story as a kind of Dogon Hermes, Native American Raven, or voodoo loa. A perpetual searcher, Ogo disrupts the demiurge Amma’s oppressively uniform scheme of creation. Amma is compelled to patch up the world as best he can after Ogo’s mischief, but the world is now immitigably stamped by Ogo’s insatiable appetite for discovery and disruption. Out of this radiates the story’s iterations of inquisitive and gamey intelligence. As in the three “Tombeau” poems of Mallarmé to which Davenport’s title alludes, homage is paid to those who “searched out the harmonies, the affinities, the kinship of the orders of nature” (Davenport 1979, 68). The anthropologist Marcel Griaule seeks among the Dogon the particulars of primitive cosmogony,15 Gertrude Stein searches out the new in her car, Wilbur Wright maneuvers his Flyer, da Vinci designs the prototype of the bicycle, photographer Henri Lartigue hunts for images to freeze the Belle Époque, Dogon shepherds journey to mystic caves, Fourier endeavors to found a utopia based on the integration rather than repression or deflection of human passions, and Davenport himself searches out Fourier’s Montmartre grave. He also meets Samuel Beckett, who tells him of Joyce, a blind metaphysician linked in the story to the Dogon priest Ogotemmêli. Like Ogo all these “must search forever” for “the system and the harmonies” (Davenport 1979, 65), Fourier and Ogotemmêli with perhaps 36

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the most astute and comprehensive intuition. For Heraclitus this is the logos, for Christians the word made flesh, for the biochemist DNA, for the Dogon bummo: “It is written in every crabgrass seed, it is written in the okra, in the spider’s eye, in the stars” (85). Ogotemmêli explains: “The unshown things will be revealed to us slowly at first, and dimly, as in a mist at dawn, an awakening and a coming, but suddenly and swiftly at the last, like a loud stormwind and rain” (106). “It is the creating hand of God that has knit from one thread the grasshopper and the lightning, a horse and a dandelion,” Paul preaches in “The Trees at Lystra.” “To make a grasshopper is one thing, to make it alive is another, to make it a world to live in is another, and to fit it into the community of all living things is yet another. Let us praise forever the maker of living things!” (Davenport 1981, 10–11) 16 Like the other stories in Da Vinci’s Bicycle, “Au Tombeau” shifts between a jubilant awareness of necessary and unassailable cosmic order and an anguished recognition of the obtuseness that impedes perception of it. The book’s foragers are correspondingly either neglected or misunderstood. From its title (the 1493 sketch of a bicycle by da Vinci’s twelve-yearold apprentice Salai was only discovered in the 1970s) and dedication (to the memory of Louis Zukofsky) to most of its protagonists (Stein, Archytas, C. Musonius Rufus, Fourier, Pound, and Robert Walser), the book strives to redeem forfeited legacies. The nineteenth-century confidence in progress is lacerated in the trenches of the Great War. The modernist renaissance of the archaic is presented as a stillbirth: “Mistaking the wild synclitic headlong for propinquity to an ideal, we let the fire die in the engine” (Davenport 1979, 60). The story begins with a picture and a description of Stein shorn and cocksure at the wheel of her Model T, returning from a visit to Picasso. While her literary experiments go unregarded or scorned, her whirligig conveyance thrives and is now an eater of cities and thus of our inherited unit of civilization. The ingenuity and courage of the early aviators is destined soon to accelerate military destruction (within five years of flying across the English Channel, Blériot will be building such fighter biplanes as the photographer Lartigue flies “over the trenches of the Marne” [88]). Da Vinci’s bicycle will go unrealized for almost half a millennium while his genius is diverted into military innovations for his princely patrons. The last phalansteries established by Fourier’s American disciples have been bulldozed. Joyce’s great disciple Beckett, who meets Davenport in a The Prose Ideogram

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Parisian café redolent of modernist associations, is less a harbinger than a terminus, a Leopardi-quoting pessimist “declaring that the world is nasty” (98). The Stone Age holdouts the Dogon verge on extinction, their ethos destined for the libraries of their usurpers. In “Finding” Davenport describes the Sunday afternoons of his youth spent combing the upper Savannah valley for Indian arrowheads with his “foraging family” (Davenport 1981b, 361). Such a childhood inculcated disinterested curiosity, for arrowheads were sought without larger aims. “I learned from a whole childhood of looking in fields how the purpose of things ought perhaps to remain invisible, no more than half known. People who know exactly what they are doing seem to me to miss the vital part of any doing” (366). In Davenport’s fiction diverse elements are arranged both for their own sake as well as for the sake of their place in the Heraclitean concord. While the seemingly chaotic “Au Tombeau” proves to be a meticulous conjunction of unexpectedly corresponding elements, it yet retains some of the enigmatic happenstance of those Savannah valley pastures. “For it is Ogo’s gift that he built accident into the world’s structure” (Davenport 1979, 97). Lance Olsen suggests that the story “is a translation of the childhood need to forage into the adult world” (Olsen 1986, 155), but for Davenport such a primary drive is crucial to maturation and adulthood. Olsen notes that the reader “finds himself metamorphosed into a detective attempting to solve a mystery through the logical assembling and interpretation of palpable evidence” (Olsen 1986, 155). Ideogram

The evidence is laid out like elements in a Poundian ideogram, “ply over ply” (Pound 1995, 15). “For Pound,” writes Laszlo Géfin, “the setting side by side, without copulas, of verbal pictures will perforce establish relationships between the units juxtaposed. Such juxtapositions he called images. The image is the basic form of ideogrammic composition; it is not simply a visual impression but a union of particulars transposed onto the conceptual plane” (Géfin 1982, xii). In Paterson William Carlos Williams describes this union as a mass of detail to interrelate on a new ground, difficultly; an assonance, a homologue 38

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Triple piled pulling the disparate together to clarify and compress. (Williams 1995, 19) In his study of The Cantos Davenport, who met Williams and reviewed Paterson,17 defines the Poundian ideogram as “a grammar of images, emblems, and symbols, rather than a grammar of logical sequence . . . An idea unifies, dominates, and controls the particulars that make the ideogram” (Davenport 1983, 28 and 30). He insists on the method’s intelligibility: “The components of an ideogram cohere as particles in a magnetic field, independent of each other but not of the pattern in which they figure. The ellipse, which we feel to be the absence of predication, is the invisible line of attraction between particle and particle” (74). Much of Davenport’s criticism is an erudite defense of work that adapts ideogrammatic method, from the poetry of Jonathan Williams, Ronald Johnson, and Paul Metcalf to the photography of Ralph Meatyard and the cinema of Brakhage. In “For Cousin Jonathan” 18 he calls Williams “a worker of harmonies” who instills sharper perception: Let him then be praised among the makers who find and shape and shaping find and catch us all surprised. (Davenport 1986, 66) It is as anything but a method of arbitrary diff usion that Davenport celebrates the Poundian ideogram. It is a system of tacit, unacknowledged accords. “The seeming inarticulateness of Olson’s ‘The Kingfishers’ is not a failure to communicate, but a declining to articulate images and events which can be left in free collision,” he argues in “Olson” (Davenport 1981b, 99). Having successfully attempted it himself, Davenport praises as well ideogrammatic forays in the essay form: “Stan goes at any subject by as many approaches as the terrain allows,” Davenport writes in an uncollected essay. Brakhage’s lectures cannot be introduced except with the invitation to follow his mind with a diligent faith: he is going to climb this mountain by wrapping it with his footprints; he will come down again when he is halfway up, climb another mountain by way of digression, and The Prose Ideogram

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then go back up the first one. He shows us that to be interested in anything we must be interested in everything. This kind of mind is not an American tradition. (Davenport 1977, 208–9) That kind of mind is supremely a Renaissance tradition, and hence Davenport’s adulation of da Vinci. The art historian Martin Kemp notes a “continuous quality” in da Vinci’s thinking that Davenport celebrates in his own depiction of the artist in Da Vinci’s Bicycle: “He never looked at anything without thinking of something else. Everything existed in a continuity of cause and effect, under the command of Necessity, which, far from causing uniformity among created things, resulted in the most wondrous variety of forms” (Kemp 2004, 89). Pound’s and Williams’s influence in establishing an American version of this kind of thinking is obvious, yet T. S. Eliot’s experiments in ideogrammatic method are also germane to Davenport, who shares with the poet an avant-garde aesthetic and, in a few respects, conservative convictions. Echoes of Four Quartets are particularly audible in “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier.” 19 Both focus but do not depend on a specific place (Little Gidding and the London of the Blitz, Fourier’s grave and a village in sub-Saharan Africa); juxtapose without transitions distant ages; adapt inherited structures (the terze rima inflections of Eliot’s fire watch, Davenport’s use of Dogon cosmological structure); and cite a range of sources (sometimes the same one, for example, Mallarmé’s “Au Tombeau d’Edgar Poe” and Heraclitus). And both of these impersonal texts include a pilgrimage to a grave site (Ferrar’s and Fourier’s).20 Both writers endeavor to integrate the particular into the general without violence to the former, and wish to imply complementarity among seemingly isolated elements. In contrast to Pound and Olson, Davenport is careful to establish an overtly overarching order that renders the text intelligible. This is much closer to Eliot, and indeed like Eliot’s, Davenport’s practice is predicated on a Coleridgean aesthetic faith in the conversion of series into whole.21 Though not even a critic of Davenport’s discernment can always convincingly urge (as in parts of Cities on Hills) the cogency of a specific Pound canto, a temptation he altogether forgoes in discussing Olson’s Maximus, his own texts (and the apparent obscurity of “Au Tombeau” is an exception) almost always possess a thematic and structural coherence no less perceptible than that obtaining in The Waste Land. The parallels to Eliot are of course limited, and the contrasts just as telling. Although both writers place themselves within the text, Davenport is 40

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much more careful not to dominate it intellectually or morally. The chief difference between them is, of course, the transcendental locus for unity in Eliot. Order for Davenport remains immanent in nature, without the kind of metaphysical guarantees implied by Eliot’s sacramental language. Davenport’s assemblages are meticulously arranged to insinuate possibilities of patterned energy rather than to proclaim their source and nature. The ability to fashion a Coleridgean “whole” is the mastery celebrated in “Au Tombeau,” which the Dogon, da Vinci, and the wasp evince, but the story is not itself the crystallization of this ability. It is rather Fourier who is presented as an exemplary instance of such a crystallization. Davenport describes Fourier’s dilapidated grave and imagines the body’s decomposition (“the fluid tongue is now trash” [Davenport 1979, 68]) to underscore the dereliction of the philosopher’s ideas.22 Though Fourier’s ideas are as neglected as his plot, Davenport, who called him “the greatest mind of the 19th century” (Alpert 1976, 6), proceeds to insist on Fourier’s value: All of nature is series and pivot, like Pythagoras’ numbers, like the transmutations of light. Give me a sparrow, he said, a leaf, a fish, a wasp, an ox, and I will show you the harmony of its place in its chord, the phrase, the movement, the concerto, the all. (Davenport 1979, 71) Fourier shares with Linnaeus, Swedenborg, and later the transcendentalists the confidence that the diversity of living forms can be arranged according to an idealist morphology, what Goethe called the open secret of empirically verifiable Urphänomene, archetypes disclosing nature’s core principles. For Davenport this was primitive intuition before it became modern science, hence the predominance in “Au Tombeau” of Dogon metaphysics, manifest in the content of Ogotemmêli’s utterances and apparent in the text’s form. “There are two hundred and sixty-six things out of which Amma made the world,” Ogotemmêli tells Griaule (Davenport 1979, 81), each dividing schematically into geometrically strict divisions mapped out on a 266-cell grid. The seemingly random accumulation of the text’s gridlike paragraphs, all but two of which are isomorphic, fulfills Dogon computations: 255 paragraphs plus eleven full-page visual collages. There are two hundred and sixty-six things out of which Davenport made the text. Thus an appearance of whimsically imposed pattern proves on inspecThe Prose Ideogram

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tion to be dictated by the core content of the text. Like the syllabic statuary of Marianne Moore’s idiosyncratic yet strictly patterned stanzas, Davenport’s strictly patterned prose stanzas are arbitrary but far from gratuitous. (He employs this structure again in the later texts “On Some Lines of Virgil,” “Fifty-seven Views of Fujiyama,” and the second part of “Apples and Pears.”) As in Moore, the formal order testifies to confidence in vaster harmonies, and constitutes a reaction as stern as T. S. Eliot’s to proclamations of anarchic aesthetic liberty.23 In an interview Davenport objected to the use of the word “constraints” to describe this style: Constraints is not exactly the word. A style has its rules. I have used isometric paragraphs as a formal device exactly like the paragraph itself. Prose narrative has units (the chapter, areas of dialogue). Architecture may be behind much of this—“stanza” means “room.” Each of my texts has its own architecture, as it has its own narrative rhythm. By “constraint” you mean rules, order, formal devices. (Hoepffner 1995, 122) As originally published in the Georgia Review, “Au Tombeau” was divided into thirty-three sections of varying length, its paragraphs indented and also of varying length. For its publication in Da Vinci’s Bicycle, Davenport made extensive revisions, regularizing the length of all but two sections, and imposing a uniform rectangular shape on all but one of the paragraphs. (The shift from typescript to print involved Ogo-like disruptions to this uniformity.) The sections no longer separate independent material, while disparate matter sometimes converges in the same paragraph: You must understand, Beckett said, that Joyce came to see that the fall of a leaf is as grievous as the fall of man. I am blind, Ogotemmêli said, opening a blue paper of tobacco with his delicately long wrinkled fingers, his head aloof and listening. (Davenport 1979, 98) The willful conjunction of paragraphs that were separated in the Georgia Review version yields fortuitous parallels of the kind found in a Joseph Cornell box or a Picasso collage. The blind, long-fingered smoker Joyce (illustrated by Davenport from a Gisèle Freund photo [Davenport 1979, 78]) is placed, like Fourier, da Vinci, and Stein earlier in the text, in structural proximity to imply affinity to the Dogon metaphysician. Peter Quartermain notes a link to cubism: 42

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One text merges with another in no identifiably causative way, for the uniformity of surface renders the perception of cause—which in more conventional work is heralded by the conventions of paragraph and chapter divisions—irrelevant even if possible. It is a visual flattening of surface, and it renders that surface opaque, and thus the writing draws attention to itself as writing, as medium, in a manner directly analogous to that of Cubism. (Quartermain 1992, 179–80) Causal connection and narrative continuity are jettisoned, not in favor of an aleatory play of signification, but in order to intimate by combinational logic kinships and correspondences between eras, ideas, and forces. The concluding five paragraphs of “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier” derive from Stein, the victory procession up the Champs Elysées described in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Stein and Toklas “were admirably placed and saw perfectly” (Davenport 1979, 106). The concluding, irregular paragraph reads: “The French carry their flags best of all, Pershing and his officer carrying the flag behind him were perhaps the most perfectly spaced” (106). Stein savors not only objects but intervals and lines in this fourth procession through “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier.” Davenport witnesses the contrastingly modest Giscard d’Estaing presidential inaugural on the same avenue: “There was no La Marseillaise, no parade. Hatless he strode along alone” (71). On the eve of visiting Fourier’s grave, Davenport is struck by another contrast, that of an imaginary procession of New Harmony citizens in Fourier’s utopia. This one occupies twenty-two paragraphs (“There are twenty-two families of things,” Ogotemmêli explains [83]) along the same route as the military parade and the inaugural, but this is a brigade without national or political affiliations, one in which even the Police of the Gardens and Corporals of Fine Tone march unarmed. Stein witnesses by contrast a rigid martial procession that, in Davenport’s text, fails to stay in sync. Whereas the Fourier procession celebrates a Pythagorean faith in measure, the text’s ending is not “perfectly spaced”: the concluding section contains not nine but only two paragraphs, and the final paragraph is not isometric. The story thus embodies the characteristic tension in Davenport’s fiction between a Rilkean yearning for fostering containment and a fear of bridling, sterile regimentation. The tension is inherent in Fourier’s utopian program. A radically antirepressive individualist polity is founded on a subtly coercive system of hierarchies, a paradoxical “calculus” of the passions as elaborate as the dietary regimen of Leviticus or the labor regimen The Prose Ideogram

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of a Victorian textile mill. “Au Tombeau” structurally emulates Fourier’s taxonomical rigor, but sets these against the spontaneous and the accidental, those forces appreciated by Fourier and classified by Ogotemmêli under the dominion of Ogo. The puckish god disrupts the painstaking symmetries of Davenport’s text by botching the last section and final paragraph. Grid

While its isomorphic nine-paragraph units ally “Au Tombeau” with the Dogon demiurge Amma, its composite structure allies it with Ogo, the two deities functioning like the Urizen and Los of Blake’s cosmology. Like this text, Davenport’s 1980 acrylic canvas Fourier Series of 36 Essences (see color plate in Reece 1996, 88) weds Dogon and Fourierist taxonomies. The “essences” occupy 36 windows on a square grid evocative of the Dogon ritual reenactment of creation on the 266-compartmented grid. A “series” meanwhile is the mode of organization, manifest in nature no less than in culture, of a Fourierist phalanx.24 Each series is a meticulous stratification, applying to play as well as to work, of diverse groups (made up of between seven and nine individuals, and differing in affluence, age, and intelligence) on the basis of some shared passion. Davenport’s 36 windows are as eclectic as Fourier’s groups, merging familiar icons with private images, including the flags of France and Sweden, an ancient Athenian drachma, meadow flowers, a serene West African mask, a pivoting nude female torso, children’s contented faces, seabed shells, a house number, a sliced pear, a classical Greek papyrus, Brancusi’s The Kiss, and a Mondrian abstract. The spiritual austerity of Mondrian’s pigmented grid is embedded among a Whitmanesque catalog of the regenerative abundance of natural and cultural orders. In his monograph on Davenport’s paintings and drawings, Erik Reece asserts that Davenport, like Ruskin and Mondrian, does equate the image of the soul with pure geometry. However, more significant, he is an American in the tradition of Whitman, who always located the soul in the world, in its objects. Thus Davenport maintains a critical conversation between the abstract and the particular . . . “A grid is good for you,” Davenport advises with no trace of irony, “you” meaning the painter as much as the viewer. (Reece 1996, 107) 44

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Using no tape, Davenport painstakingly prepared grids on his canvases, the proportions measured out with a yardstick, the color applied with his smallest brush in a process which Reece likens to a “near-meditative ‘spiritual exercise’” (Reece 1996, 107). Only in his abstracts, however, does the grid predominate; in most of his work (e.g., the 1990 acrylic Hommage à Brancusi [see reproduction in Reece 1996, 95]) it provides a geometrical complement to the varied forms laid beside or upon it. The geometric regularity of Fourier Series of 36 Essences is, as elsewhere in Davenport, offset by the riddling diversity of the framed images, their play of correspondences remaining in vibrant fluctuation. Amma inscribes the grid, but Ogo paints the squares. The painting celebrates plenitude, the signal embodiment of which is undifferentiated sexual attention. The grid, Rosalind Krauss contends, supplied modernists with an image of aesthetic autonomy, disinterestedness, and originality. “The grid facilitated this sense of being born into the newly evacuated space of an aesthetic purity and freedom” (Krauss 1984, 19). She proposes that contemporary adaptations of the grid affirm the paradoxical interrelationship between organicist notions of originality and reproduction. The modernist discourse of originality represses the copy, while the postmodernist discourse of repetition stresses it. Krauss’s analysis deftly characterizes the postmodern turn in the plastic arts, but does not apply to artists such as Davenport, whose responses to modernism are far from confrontational. In contrast to Krauss and the postmodernist artists she discusses, the grid for him is not confined to mechanical systems of reproduction but remains an organic matrix. Hence the importance in Davenport’s “Fiftyseven Views of Fujiyama” of the Fibonacci ratios, where mathematical series coincides with organic spiral. Hence too the Almighty’s invocation of Thomas Browne in “The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard”: Now, said He, shall I bake my bread. I put my hands within and meet Quincunx of seed and hands and feet. (Davenport 1986, 13) Grain, body, and eucharist are all lozenges of one fabric, a union natural, artificial, and mystical in just the sense celebrated in Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus. And in its form as well, for Davenport ventilates his texts with extraneous matter in the expansive yet monist spirit of Browne: “We follow herein the example of old and new plantations, wherein noble The Prose Ideogram

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spirits contented not themselves with trees, but by the attendance of aviaries, fish-ponds, and all variety of animals, they made their gardens the epitome of the earth, and some resemblance of the secular shows of old” (Browne 1896, 77–78). Davenport’s inspiration is not simply de Stijl but D’Arcy Thompson, the Scottish scientist and classicist whose On Growth and Form (1917) offered a deistic interpretation of biology founded on mathematics. (Thompson’s American literary devotees have also included Muriel Rukeyser and Gary Snyder.) Thompson employs grid structures to demonstrate embryonic morphological principles manifest in culture as well as nature. The grids are not static quadrilateral frames, but mutating orbs testifying to the critical property of asymmetry.25 Both in his meshwork paintings and his interstitial prose, Davenport upsets the restrictive symmetry of his grids. These adapt rather than renounce the organicist metaphors of modernism. The composite structure of Davenport’s reticulated works rescues them from the sterility of an oppressive schematization. Beautiful instances of diversity and incongruity overlay a fretwork which situates asymmetries within a larger formal coherence. In his introduction to a catalog of Simon Dinnerstein’s paintings and drawings, Davenport stresses Dinnerstein’s development in relevant terms: “I see this love of symmetry in early Dinnersteins as an emotional geometry imposing order not only on the visual but on the moral as well. This severe symmetry gradually gives way to explorations of asymmetry as Dinnerstein’s meditations became richly sensual and intimate” (Davenport 1999, 2). In “The Antiquities of Elis” Davenport locates this quality in Hellenism. “The Greeks, who have such an eye for symmetry, like to dispose their buildings at odd angles, to show that geometry may please but not tyrannize” (Davenport 1979, 133). Play

Assemblage is a sophisticated modern technique as primary as a kindergarten pastime. The conjunction of childhood, the primitive, and the modern occurs in many of Davenport’s stories, often under the auspices of play. “Boys Smell like Oranges” is exemplary.26 One of its main characters is the missionary and ethnologist Maurice Leenhardt, who like Abbé Breuil in “Robot” and Ogotemmêli in “Au Tombeau” is a broadminded cleric learned in primitive lore. All three stories take place largely in France and derive in part from works of French social science. Daven46

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port’s main source for “Boys Smell like Oranges” is the Carnets posthumes (1949) of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who is Leenhardt’s interlocutor as they take their daily constitutional together through the Bois de Boulogne (Davenport 1996, 167). Whereas “Robot” is an adventure story and “Au Tombeau” a nonnarrative composite text, “Boys Smell like Oranges” is structured as a colloquy—indeed as a pair of colloquies, for Davenport intersplices the conversation of the elderly intellectuals with that of two young athletes who, like their predecessors in Henri Rousseau’s painting Les Footballeurs (reproduced on the cover of Davenport’s Twelve Stories), have been playing soccer in the Paris park. Spatial contiguity organizes the story. Though the parties never meet and only the space of the park relates them, their conversations complement one another. As Leenhardt and Lévy-Bruhl exchange ideas on the character of primitive thought, the youths Robinet and Peyrony illustrate and complicate it in ways the aging intellectuals can scarcely conceive. Twenty years younger than Lévy-Bruhl (who like Robert Walser in Davenport’s “A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg” will die shortly after the stroll described in the story), the sixtyyear-old Leenhardt takes the dominant role occupied by Robinet, who at age twenty-four is nine years older than Peyrony, the captain of a junior soccer team. The story balances the philosophers’ discussion of the primitive with the primitives’ discussion of philosophy. A missionary among the aboriginal Kanaka of New Caledonia, Leenhardt affirms the conceptual sophistication of this seemingly superstitious and ignorant people, suggesting that the mythic is not prior to but parallel with the logical. Like the Dogon, the Kanaka are attentive to “form, symmetry, a coherence of pattern” (Davenport 1996, 32; 2003, 99). The Kanaka appreciate how mythoi construct our world. “Everything, mon cher Lucien, is a fiction we have supplied to complement nature,” Leenhardt concludes (29; 97). Meanwhile the soccer players discuss tactics, the elder quick to extrapolate moral character from sports conduct. A Hemingway code, drawn not from Death in the Afternoon but from Henry de Montherlant’s Les Olympiques,27 is offered as a kind of redemptive primitiveness, underscored by Peyrony’s habit of eating grass, twigs, and leaves.28 “It is as if the primitive mind thought with things rather than concepts and words” (26; 95), Leenhardt speculates in Davenport’s story, furnishing an analogy to Peyrony’s mind, for the youth’s concept of liberty (and of vigilance in its defense), which the The Prose Ideogram

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war will soon test, is expressed in terms of his leg: “La liberté de cette jambe . . . —A leg that snaps into action and takes you with it is a good leg” (26; 95). A belief in the supernatural among the Kanaka develops into a Pythagorean materialism. Cheated for years by colonial traders, they revere Leenhardt’s lessons in basic arithmetic: “That five from eight was always three gave them assurance that in me there was sound doctrine somewhere. Of the multiplication table they made a hymn and sang it in church” (1996, 24; 2003, 93). Pythagorean number worship appears in many of Davenport’s stories, especially in The Cardiff Team, the title story of which ends when a group of friends imitate the New Caledonians by making a hymn out of integers multiplied by five. As its title, borrowed from a painting by Robert Delaunay, and many of its incidents (including swimming, wrestling, and soccer) reflect, The Cardiff Team is concerned with sport and, more generally, with the status of play. Delaunay’s 1913 painting, which illustrates the original New Directions dust jacket of Davenport’s book, is the subject of an iconographic study drafted in the title story by Penny, who praises sports as a refuge from distinctions of class, language, race, and religion: “So here’s a team of coal miners’ sons playing football with the French rich, poor, and middle class together. Their team’s jerseys make them brothers in an equality hitherto unknown in the world . . . So one of the things Delaunay is painting is a new kind of equality, fraternity, and decidedly liberty” (Davenport 1996, 92–93). The story describes isolated individuals creating a community through play, converting individual losses into a collective gain.29 Penny is the single mother of the precociously gifted twelve-yearold Walt, whose closest friends are the motherless rich prig Cyril, and the fatherless girl Bee. Penny’s lover, the university student Marc, is like them kinless in the city. Play both rescues them from dislocation and consolidates their ties, for their group identity is established by a willingness to play along with Walt’s imaginary companion Sam. Marc is willing “to play big brother” to Sam (108), while Bee even dresses herself up as Sam. She later transforms Sam into a girl. All the tribe’s activities are pursued as play, from Marc teaching Cyril and Walt to translate Horace’s “Intermissa, Venus” ode, to writing his own poem. Bee’s mother Daisy is a painter completing a large canvas while Penny completes her monograph. All swim daily at the local gym and all play at sex, including the twelve-year-olds, who experiment sexually alone and with each other. “It’s you I adore,” Penny tells her son. “Marc is for 48

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fun” (Davenport 1996, 145). This is no belittlement: “Friendship, or love, has its good will built into it, that’s its nature. Marc and I have a hundred ways of being friendly, going to bed with him being one of them” (145). As in Fourier, whose ideas animate Penny’s phalanstery, no perception of perversion exists among the confederates. Play fosters friendship, and friendship a community of creative and independent members. “Maman’s reading, and underlining in, a book by a Dutchman, Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, about games and sports” (Davenport 1996, 146). So Walt tells Cyril, and indeed Davenport’s presentation of play accords with Huizinga’s. (The historian’s Amsterdam home is visited by Adriaan in “The Dawn in Erewhon.”) In Huizinga’s influential formulation, civilization “arises in and as play, and never leaves it” (Huizinga 1955, 173). Language, myth, and ritual proceed sub specie ludi, and what does not recede from play “crystallizes as knowledge” (46). Huizinga argues that in play “man’s consciousness that he is embedded in a sacred order of things finds its first, highest, and holiest expression” (17). According to Huizinga, play is nonteleological, amoral, arbitrary, consensual, binding, and fixed. “It is an activity which proceeds within certain limits of time and space, in a visible order, according to rules freely accepted, and outside the sphere of necessity or material utility. The play-mood is one of rapture and enthusiasm, and is sacred or festive in accordance with the occasion” (132). Poetry, he notes, functions correspondingly, emerging from play and indeed generating the terms of society: “Life in archaic society is itself metrical and strophical in structure” (127). “Au Tombeau” presents the Dogon, and Leenhardt the Kanaka, as inhabiting just such a society. The autonomy of the imagination and its products is safeguarded by the appeal to play: “Poiesis, in fact, is a play function. It proceeds within the play-ground of the mind, in a world of its own which the mind creates for it” (119). The playing field, like the empty canvas or page, is an independent precinct, a grid, a unit of civilization. As Rousseau’s Les Footballeurs reminds one, the playground is a cleared meadow. Meadows accordingly proliferate in The Cardiff Team. In such a ludic sphere the primitive, the prepubescent, and the poet hold sway, a triad prevalent in Davenport’s utopian fictions (e.g., Sander, Wolfje, and Adriaan in “Apples and Pears”). As Huizinga’s preface underlines, Homo Ludens was written under the immediate threat of military occupation, and its polemic is implicitly directed against totalitarianism. Composed while Wittgenstein was formulating the theory of language games, Homo Ludens like the Philosophical Investigations appeals to the concept of play in part to discredit the essenThe Prose Ideogram

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tializing fictions which underpin fascism. The Nazis had of course recently attempted with the Berlin Olympic Games to make play serve explicitly ideological aims. “Boys Smell like Oranges” takes place while Huizinga is hurriedly drafting Homo Ludens in advance of the German invasion of Holland. Thus, while the story’s spatial setting is the idyllic precinct of the Bois de Boulogne, the temporal setting is the terminus of European peace. (The events of “Robot” transpire only a few years later.) The autumn day is marred by rain and the story ends in a foreboding description of night. Lévy-Bruhl will soon die, the Occupation looms, and soccer is about to be superseded by soldiering. As Davenport notes in another Cardiff Team story, “The Table,” the French soccer idol Calixte Delmas “was an angel of grace at a time when the angel of death was hammering his black sword at the forge” (Davenport 1996, 41). Young athletes like Peyrony are destined to defend France in vain from the German advance. Defeated in the match, Peyrony’s teammates slump “like tired soldiers making bivouac” (22). The story fluctuates between old men reflecting on the worldconstituting play of the Kanaka and young men reflecting on the moral lessons of play. One lesson is the possession of freedom within perimeters. Far from excluding constraint, autonomous play depends wholly on it. As Wittgenstein is anxious to show, language itself imposes limitation, to which Davenport’s stylistic choices (such as the use of isometric paragraphs) testify by formal analogy. Play affords exhilarating opportunities for liberty within fostering constraint. The youths find a community through sport, the Kanaka through play, the elderly social scientists through intellectual exchange. The story takes play at the moment when, as Homo Ludens warns, “the play-element in culture” is being usurped by its burlesque totalitarian replica. Huizinga urges that “we ought to see civilization returning to the great archaic forms of recreation where ritual, style, and dignity are in perfect unison” (Huizinga 1955, 206). This call for a renaissance of the archaic, as Davenport underscores in “The Symbol of the Archaic,” is a hallmark of the modernism to which the Dutch historian contributed. Davenport strives to recuperate that legacy and expand the range of possibilities it affords. Abbé Breuil, Ogotemmêli, and Leenhardt aspire to the perfect unison Huizinga extols. Watching the resting athletes rise and shake hands, Leenhardt describes night in New Caledonia as beginning “when one cannot see the boundaries of the sacred places and there is no blame for not knowing that your foot is on the grass of the sanctuaries” (Davenport 1996, 33; 2003, 99). Similarly, the 50

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two old men are unaware of the sanctuary, just vacated by the footballeurs, onto which they have also stepped. Force evolves form in Davenport, furnishing the organizing principle of his diverse fiction and validating his novel stylistic choices. But force is an impersonal, awesome, and terrible property, to be venerated and appeased rather than loved. Play is a voluntary, limited, and contingent expression of force. There may be losers but there should not be victims. Play operates in Davenport’s work as the genial human embodiment of aloof inhuman force. For Davenport, play is force under the auspices of emancipatory containment. In contrast to the linear, continuous, and temporal conventions of traditional fiction, Davenport’s texts are modeled on the multidimensioned, discontinuous, and spatial principles of the playing field. His texts may be overtly structured, labyrinthine “involucra,” but they are nonetheless impish concoctions, organized to assimilate accident and inspiration, and distinguished by every kind of verbal extravagance and teasing high jinks. They are the domain of Ogo no less than Amma.

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Whoever, whatever, the god is, in this collection of récits he is constantly present as the god Eros, born of Chaos, and older than all the others. I take it that the Greeks, shapers of our civilization (the Romans merely added sobriety and high seriousness) were neither idiots nor sentimental fools when they believed in Eros. His games were in Arkadia. (letter to James Laughlin, October 24, 1992)

3. “By Pan”: Eclogues Pastoral

Guy Davenport was no mere dabbler in pastoral. Suspicious of much technology, he owned neither a television set nor a car. He converted his garage into a tidy, spacious de Stijl study, its airy gray rectangle lit by asymmetrical windows framed in Mondrian pigments. At a Rietveld desk he built himself he drafted his fiction in pen and ink. Typing was reserved for another self-made Rietveld desk in the study inside the house (he poses there on the Eclogues dust jacket). Davenport thus produced his many pastorals in the conquered citadel of his adversary.1 He did not use a computer. The painstakingly cross-hatched illustrations were drawn with a raven’s quill. He was not merely intrigued by the aesthetic properties of pastoral but committed to its moral idealism. And committed, above all, to nature. Davenport’s first book, The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz, was a glossed selection of the writings of the SwissAmerican naturalist, and he wrote enthusiastically on such authors as William Bartram and Charles Darwin.2 The titles of his stories routinely denote their carefully delineated rural settings; for example, “The River,” “The Meadow,” “Concert Champêtre in D Major,” and “The Lavender Fields of Apta Julia.” “The Concord Sonata” concerns Thoreau’s search for New England Urphänomene. One of his collections is named (after the notorious crux in Shakespeare) A Table of Green Fields, and another, Eclogues. One of his poetic sequences, “Cydonia Florentia,” takes its title from the flowering quince. Davenport’s literary (as well as visual) collages 52

include a profusion of naturalist citations, from Parkinson’s Renaissance A Garden of Pleasant Flowers to Gilbert White’s Selborne and Sereno Watson’s contributions to the United States Geological Survey. By their insertion into the narratives, the artifice of pastoral nature finds its corollary in the disinterested particularity of natural science. Davenport, however, takes care to historicize both nature and the pastoral mode. Thus his citations are chosen for their historical resonance. An admirer, like Charles Olson, of the geographer Carl Sauer, Davenport insists on the historical dimension of landscape.3 For Davenport, nature and culture are a unity that rewards close attention with the disclosure of latent orders, social possibility, and even, if more obliquely, providential signs. Pastoral holds many advantages for Davenport: it is a highly stylized classical form, it has consistently been regarded as a minor one, and it frustrates definition. It is also out of fashion. Since Aristotle’s Poetics precedes it, pastoral could develop with a measure of freedom which continues to make its status fruitfully ambiguous. In the letter to Con Grande attributed to the poet, Dante (who in the Purgatory identifies Virgil as the “cantor de’ buccolici carmi” [canto 22, l.57; Dante 1972, 507]) lists bucolic among the narrative genres. In De Arte Poetica (1527) Marcelo Vida is the first to identify pastoral as a “genus,” ranking it the lowest of genres, a subordination it has retained. (This is the hierarchy Sidney follows in the Defence of Poetry.) A “minor” form may, however, insinuate itself into consequential matters. One of its earliest English theorists, George Puttenham, asserts that the mode conceals great matters in small. William Empson adapts this view in Some Versions of Pastoral to contend that pastoral is a “process of putting the complex into the simple” (Empson 1950, 140). In The Machine in the Garden, which like Empson’s book had a great influence on how the form was understood during Davenport’s years as a student and young academic, Leo Marx argues that pastoral has a special application to the development of the United States. Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia repudiated agrarian economic criteria in favor of a pastoral standard of collective moral excellence, while even the Jacksonian model preserved the pastoral image, the frontier democrat becoming a Virgilian shepherd (see Marx 1964, 130). Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer anticipated Walden by literalizing the pastoral ideal of a simple, self-sufficient life, adjusting classical convention to agree with the georgic American idiom. Rapid industrialization prompted both a pastoral reaction and, paradoxically, a faith that, rather “By Pan” 53

than being in conflict with Arcadia, the machine would supply a means to its realization. According to Leo Marx, pastoral supplies no lesson more urgent than its defunct legacy, which underscores the disparity between symbols of a bucolic promise and American institutions. The resolution of our pastoral fables are unsatisfactory because the old symbol of reconciliation is obsolete. But the inability of our writers to create a surrogate for the ideal of the middle landscape can hardly be accounted artistic failure. By incorporating in their work the root conflict of our culture, they have clarified our situation. They have served us well. To change the situation we require new symbols of possibility. (Marx, 364–65) A decade after the publication of Marx’s book, Davenport began publishing his own bucolic fictions of that “middle landscape” where rural and industrial societies converge without injury to pastoral possibility. Davenport does not relinquish the inherited symbols of pastoral order so much as restore their vitality and suggest their relevance. American pastorals, Lawrence Buell notes, are typically “counterinstitutional” yet interfuse reformism with accommodation (see Buell 1995, 50–52). This is even true at a time when pastoral takes its impetus less from classical convention than from ecological engagement. Davenport’s work is certainly oppositional, but he never confuses the literary treatment of nature with environmental advocacy. His attitude is closest to Ruskin’s, for whom exterior nature was a profoundly salutary influence on inner human nature, and whose environmentalism was best conveyed not in diatribes but in meticulous pictorial and literary attention to particulars. Nature forms in Davenport the living membrane between world and consciousness, dissolving the very separation of outer and inner. “The Fox,” his earliest published poem (it first appeared in the Duke University Archive in December 1947), is the equal of D. H. Lawrence’s identically titled novella in its vivid union of animal and human, a trick acquired from folk songs and oral tales (a folk ballad furnishes the poem’s epigraph): The drooping heads of dozing matron hens And the valiant plumes of sultanheaded cock He drank with pleasing, sinister eye 54

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And gaping wide his gunnysack with craft He stole away Belinda, Cora, Anne, and Sue. (Davenport 1963, 21) Addressed to “Elf my brother, gold in that dark tree,” the first section of “Cydonia Florentia” is unabashed pantheism (Davenport 1966b, 1), reinforced by echoes of Sappho’s pantheistic hymn to Aphrodite, “Come out of Crete” (translated by Davenport): 4 Come from the oak-elder older than wizards, From hemlock come, that breathes the brown bear’s breath, Come from apple, white sycamore, and beech, From that Finland of firs and cedar, Gingko, larch, and trees that have no death. (Davenport 1966b, 1) Davenport shares with ecofeminists like Adrienne Rich a conviction that concern for the social world necessarily involves concern for the natural world, but alien to his work is the instrumentality to which they often reduce art. His work thus avoids the contradiction of their didacticism: the trawling of the work of art for its use value (be it exchange or discursive value) ironically reverberates with the very paternalism that ecofeminism identifies with the oppression of peoples and exploitation of nature. Definitions of pastoral are notoriously vague, especially when the term is now applied as readily to nature writing in general as to bucolic verse specifically. Lawrence Buell calls this the “ecocentric repossession of pastoral,” and notes that “its center of energy has begun to shift from representation of nature as a theater for human events to representation in the sense of advocacy of nature as a presence for its own sake” (Buell 1995, 52). Davenport’s work, especially his experimentation with collage, is unique for combining erudite fidelity to classical literary convention with a scientist’s fidelity to nature independent of its human uses. For Hegel pastoral is a mode of thought and generic elasticity its leading trait. Empson places it among the “primary modes,” as too does Paul Alpers, but neither defines mode. Alpers proposes that the essence of pastoral, what he calls (following Kenneth Burke) its “representative anecdote,” is the lives of shepherds, but he makes of the shepherd a universal type. Noting this lack of precision, Charles Lock suggests that “we can entertain the notion that pastoral has no special qualities at all” (Lock 2003, 93). Davenport’s work suggests that pastoral may best be described less as a congeries of conventions than as a disposition. “By Pan” 55

Pastoral offers a disposition toward often greatly varied material, arranging discrepant events, situations, and characters in a distinctive way. Characteristic is the union of nature and artifice, the integration of the complex into the simple, and the reconciliation of cultural refinement with the remote and uncouth past. Primary is a postlapsarian disposition, ethical and reformist, toward the prelapsarian. Hence the highly cultured praise of the primitive, the idealization of autarchic modes of social organization, and the appeal to erotic license. Behind this lies the conviction that evil is privative. “Evil is always basically disregard, carelessness, numbness,” sage Kaatje says in “Apples and Pears” (Davenport 1984, 286– 87). Hence the commitment to historical reversal and recovery of a just and joyous Arcadia.5 No form of art invests more in nature for its effects, yet pastoral thrives on artifice. Emerging not in remote Sicilian pastures but in the highly cultivated Alexandrian cosmopolis, pastoral is staged in a region of aesthetic illusion where artificiality of language, manners, and presentation is advertised and celebrated rather than concealed. In the classical eclogue, unlettered herdsmen embodying rustic simplicity employ fine diction, elaborate locutions, and intricate measures to sing the themes of polite society. “To say that shepherds’ lives is the representative anecdote of pastoral,” Alpers explains, “means that pastoral works are representations of shepherds, who are felt to be representative of some other or of all other men. But since all the terms in this definition are subject to modification or reinterpretation, pastoral is historically diversified and transformed” (Alpers 1982, 456). Davenport’s pastorals are an instance of this transformation, for the youths prominent in his fiction smoothly substitute for Theocritus’s shepherds. Empson stresses the affinity between child and swain, observing that pastoral is the mode in which children are characterized as separate and distinct, “in the right relation to Nature.” Pastoral, he argues, depends on the feeling that “no way of building up character, no intellectual system, can bring out all that is inherent in the human spirit, and therefore that there is more in the child than any man has been able to keep” (Empson 1950, 260–61). Most of the youths in Davenport’s fiction are as intellectually precocious as they are physically beautiful, and while child prodigies are perhaps less an anomaly than highly artful swineherd poets (Caedmon being a rare and dubious exception), they make up a deliberately implausible majority in his stories. This is reinforced not only by the almost complete liberty they enjoy, but by the emotional maturity with 56

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which they pursue new experience. Jolivet, the teenaged narrator of “On Some Lines of Virgil,” can discuss still life with an art historian, Magdalenian culture with his uncle, Wittgenstein with his mother, the Aeneid with his girlfriend (a Proust-reading paleoethnobiology student), and masturbation with the uncouth teen with whom his girlfriend also romps. Artificiality is maintained throughout Eclogues, from the clash of Ovidian and Pauline mythologies in “The Trees at Lystra,” the Plutarchian mimicry of “The Daimon of Sokrates,” and the heterogeneous matter from a scholar’s notebook which makes up “The Death of Picasso” to the virtuoso fusion of Theocritus’s fifth idyll and Whitman’s Civil War service in “Idyll,” the grouped isometric paragraphs of “On Some Lines of Virgil,” the prose elegy on the Cynic Diogenes in “Mesoroposthonippidon,” and the two collaborations with collagist Roy Behrens, “Christ Preaching at the Henley Regatta” and “Lo Splendore della Luce a Bologna.” Artificiality is reinforced by alien settings. Like that of Virgil, Davenport’s Arcadia belongs as much to fantasy as to geography. Virgil was inspired not by the arid Peloponnesian region he did not live to see but by Homer’s description of Arcadian shepherds piping on their syrinxes, by the inhabitants’ reputation for austere virtue, and a musicality mythologically associated with the presence of Pan.6 Davenport’s impetus is the more liberal sexual laws and customs of classical antiquity and contemporary continental Europe. The stories of Eclogues take place in New Testament Galatia, classical Thebes and Athens, Theocritan Sicily, and contemporary Holland and France, and each is mediated through some textual or visual antecedent. The stories set in a historically particularized, contemporary, and yet culturally remote Europe are in a sense more mythopoeic than those set in antiquity. Davenport thus disqualifies contemporary America from the realization of the pastoral hope, and he preserves the element of distance and exoticism characteristic of classical pastoral. The Bordeaux of “On Some Lines of Virgil,” for instance, is an adolescent’s urban Eden, where Ausonius wrote Latin eclogues, the mayor wrote essaies, and Goya and Rosa Bonheur painted. Many of Davenport’s texts are political, but his bucolic stories usually suspend political reference. There are no governors in Arcadia (Virgil’s first eclogue is an exception), and ideology is primarily manifested in the yearning to evade it. Like Thoreau, Davenport believes that they are best who are least governed, and he populates his idylls with self-reliant citizens who, as Emerson urges in “Politics,” realize their autonomous potential beyond the constraints of coercive force through shared values of trust, respect, and consideration: “By Pan” 57

There is not, among the most religious and instructed men of the most religious and civil nations, a reliance on the moral sentiment and a sufficient belief in the unity of things, to persuade them that society can be maintained without artificial restraints, as well as the solar system; or that the private citizen might be reasonable and a good neighbor, without the hint of a jail or a confiscation. (Emerson 1992, 388) Davenport’s pastoral landscapes are situated along a lush margin of moral and aesthetic freedom. The stories of Eclogues instance the very autonomy they depict, being utopian spaces of personal, social, and artistic play. Harold E. Tolliver notes in pastoral “the contrast between reality and the poem itself, as a fictional construction—as its own kind of transforming locality capable of reshaping nature in art” (Tolliver 1971, 11–12). David Halperin asserts that it is “the mental faculty responsible for fostering the growth of illusions (in particular, illusions of meaning or harmony) that generates the true themes of pastoral” (Halperin 1983, 69). Thus pastoral underscores the friction between the empirical and the ideal inherent in art. In restating Philip Sidney’s claim that nature’s world “is brazen, poets only deliver a golden” (Sidney 1973, 24), Emerson again anticipates Davenport: “To the poet the world is virgin soil; all is practicable; the men are ready for virtue, it is always time to do right. He is the true recommencer, or Adam in the garden again” (quoted in Frothingham 1959, 237). Eclogue

“And from Virgil,” a character in “On Some Lines of Virgil” says, “Cezanne conceived the ambition to paint one perfect landscape with pastoral figures, an eclogue” (Davenport 1981, 232). Davenport conceives the same ambition. From its title to its young Bordeaux swains, Eclogues epitomizes Davenport’s resuscitation of pastoral convention. Here is an index of his separation from the literary postmodernism with which his work has been unsatisfactorily associated. Pastoral stages an unfettered withdrawal from the social world and from economic conditions into an idealized and selfsufficient nature, where autonomous human subjects prior to both language and history conduct their amours in a realm of sentimental or aesthetic illusion and where artificial speech combines with naive treatment of character to foster a sense of meaning and harmony. This scenario is anathema to postmodernists, but Davenport embraces such possibility. His excursions into the pastoral, however, reflect not reactionary nostalgia 58

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for an imaginary golden age but a radical utopian hope, one that is filtered through the program of Charles Fourier, according to whom “true happiness consists in satisfying all one’s passions” (Fourier 1996, 86). If, as in the Auburn of Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village,” there is idealization of an inaccessible rural past, there is also, as in Goldsmith, a pronounced progressive overtone. Davenport’s work confirms Terry Gifford’s observation that “behind the negative critique within the pastoral there is a positive ideal, and behind the idealization of the pastoral there is an implicit future” (Gifford 1999, 36). The title of Davenport’s book announces its fusion of classical and contemporary, for Eclogues is in one sense purely descriptive. The Greek eΔklogVh, derived from a verb denoting “to choose for oneself,” is simply an “extract” or “selection,” as of the eight stories chosen here. Pound’s Cantos, its title also denoting a collection, is an especially relevant analogy. The title is also a genre designation, suggesting less a theme than a disposition toward its themes, like the key designations in the titles of musical compositions. The title in addition alludes, like many other contemporary texts, to another title, Virgil’s Eclogues (one, however, imposed not by the poet but by posterity). Thus what might appear to be a postmodern is really a classical conception, and Davenport delights in presenting to orphan novelty its venerable ancestry. Behind Virgil’s Latin Eclogues are Theocritus’s Greek Idylls. Much of Eclogues functions by such correspondences. “The Daimon of Sokrates” retells Plutarch’s “On the Daemon of Socrates,” the surrealist collage “Christ Preaching at the Henley Regatta” invokes Stanley Spencer’s painting Christ Preaching at the Cookham Regatta, and “On Some Lines of Virgil” translates the title of Montaigne’s essay “Sur des vers de Virgile.” Highly literary and adaptable, founded on a complexity it artfully conceals, resolving profound social conflicts, celebrating nature, childhood, the body, and the primitive, pastoral has obvious appeal for a writer like Davenport, and all the stories of Eclogues show a pastoral disposition. In “The Trees at Lystra” a classical myth provides a rural community with a means to interpret the evangelism of the pastors Paul and Barnabas. In “The Death of Picasso” a Dutch philosopher and his ward share a rugged idyll on a small North Sea island. “The Daimon of Sokrates” is what Coleridge in the subtitle to his “Fire, Famine, and Slaughter” called a war eclogue. Like it, “Mesoroposthonippidon” celebrates the austerity of hard primitives. “Christ Preaching at the Henley Regatta,” whose title character employed pastoral analogies and styled himself a shepherd, is “By Pan” 59

set during a riparian idyll. “Lo Splendore della Luce a Bologna” revisits the heroic stage of modernism when T. E. Hulme can still foresee a classical revival. “Idyll” translates and expands Theocritus’s fifth idyll. “On Some Lines of Virgil” is what Swift called a town eclogue; here a band of Bordeaux youths on summer vacation experiment in freedoms moral, intellectual, and physical. Nowhere

A Davenport pastoral—and it is tempting to subsume all of his fiction under this rubric—is a hymn to possibility. Charges of implausibility scarcely apply, for implausibility is a necessary trait of the mode. A Sicilian neatherd singing to a goatherd, as in “Idyll,” would probably not make unexplained allusions to Praxiteles, and vacationing schoolkids, like those in “On Some Lines of Virgil,” might not listen so intently to an erudite lecture on Cicero’s discovery of Archimedes’ tomb. Davenport’s prose style frequently, as here, underscores its own literariness, its kinship to classical texts like the Idylls. Combined with an emphasis on play and aesthetic autonomy, this marks the extent of Davenport’s proximity to postmodernism. Eclogues might be viewed as revealing to postmodernism its ties to pastoral. The form conflates genres, collapses mimetic hierarchies, and is self-consciously literary. Juxtaposing elements of realism and fantasy, pastoral is morally and aesthetically transgressive. What the postmodern refuses is pastoral’s idealization. Artifice serves in Davenport not the postmodern belief in the arbitrary and nonmimetic status of language but a trust in the redemptive properties of speech and the priority of the imagination. Identity here may be in process, but it is not necessarily unstable or an essentializing fiction. Nature retains its revelatory capacity, for pastoral treats divinity as immanent in nature. Neither fallen nor indifferent, nature serves as refuge and preceptor. In contrast to weatherless Homer, poets like Theocritus and Virgil make the variety of the natural world inseparable from possibility in the human world. Davenport retains this faith, using citations from natural history as hermeneutic ciphers placed not in subordination but in apposition to the main matter of the stories. Davenport places pastoral in the service of utopian aspiration. In “The Death of Picasso,” which is set on a small North Sea island as remote and enchanted as the Arcadias of Virgil or Jacopo Sannazaro, the Dutch philosopher Adrian van Hovendaal registers his property as Snegren, re60

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versing in Dutch what Butler reverses in Erewhon, the word “nowhere”: “so remote and lilliputatachtig an island being precisely that, nowhere” (Davenport 1981, 15; 2003, 56).7 “Nowhere” of course translates Thomas More’s coinage, utopia. Like Montaigne, who also extolled paradises regained, More experienced the age of exploration’s revival of pastoral. The first and most famous of modern book-length pastorals, Sannazaro’s Arcadia, was published in the decade following Columbus’s first voyage to America, and it was in America that Puritan settlers sought to establish a Christian Arcadia. In the lay sermon he delivered en route, “A Model of Christian Charity,” Governor John Winthrop spoke of the “city on a hill” to be realized by the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Later Mother Ann Lee, like Winthrop, would lead a Christian sect from England to establish in America an arcadian settlement. (Two of Davenport’s books borrow their titles from these utopians: Cities on Hills is a study of Pound’s Cantos, while Every Force Evolves a Form is a selection of essays.) Davenport lived just north of the Kentucky Shaker settlement at Pleasant Hill. On Snegren Hovendaal hopes to help rehabilitate the adolescent reprobate Sander by involving him in the construction of a cabin. Against all odds Sander submits to the Thoreauvian regimen, shingling the roof, building a Rietveld table, surveying the island, swimming, jogging, playing the flute, sweeping the floor, drafting phyllotaxic diagrams, and observing an excruciating two-month vow of chastity. “Innocence is regenerative,” Hovendaal comments (Davenport 1981, 25; 2003, 65). Accounted by George Steiner as “among the few masterpieces of homosexual sensibility after Proust” (Steiner 1981, 202), “The Death of Picasso” is constructed out of the entries in Hovendaal’s island notebook, which he notably dates according to the French Revolutionary calendar (in use during Fourier’s time). Interspread with remarks on Picasso and Fourier, recollections of Greece, and the education of savages are reports on the weather, Sander’s behavior, and the progress of Hovendaal’s book on still life painting (which anticipates Davenport’s Objects on a Table).8 Contraries are set into Blakean play: Van Gogh and Gauguin, Holland and Spain, civilized and primitive culture, austerity and prodigality, youth and age, intellect and passion, teaching and learning. The meanings emerge from their fruitful friction. Hovendaal’s response to Sander is no less open-minded than Sander’s to Hovendaal’s regimen. Refusing to be shocked by Sander’s louche escapades, he hopes to rechannel the youth’s vitality and to learn from it “By Pan” 61

himself. Reflecting on the French educator Jean Itard’s De l’education d’un homme sauvage, Hovendaal notes, Itard failed with Victor (assuming that Victor was not an idiot, which no evidence indicates) because he was trying to teach him manners. He should have allowed himself to be taught by Victor, as the cat teaches us the rules of companionship, as Griaule learned from the Dogon. Teacher as student, an inside-out idea. Useful where applicable. (Davenport 1981, 23; 2003, 63) Sander suggests to Hovendaal a state primitive to distinctions between reason and passion. The philosopher can idealize their convergence, but like many of the chaste, cerebral protagonists of Davenport’s fiction he is usually too reticent to enact it.9 One stormy night Sander vanishes to break his “chaste fast” (Davenport 1981, 31; 2003, 69) through masturbation. Wracked by grief and gale, he returns the next morning with a cold. As in D. H. Lawrence’s story “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter,” the educated man (in Lawrence a doctor) dries and tends the invalid unaware of his own feelings, while the invalid divines them. In both stories the nurses have to be told of their own passion by their patients. Whereas Lawrence’s accent is on the turbulent and necessarily overmastering force of passion, Davenport’s is on its serene joy.10 As the young woman in Lawrence’s story urges the other to fulfill their romantic destiny, so does Sander (who like the woman is recuperating from a desperate act). Hovendaal hesitates as much as does Lawrence’s doctor: “But I love you just so, liefje Sander, charmingly naked and goodnatured. You keep my imagination alive” (33; 71). An ellipsis in the journal signals the philosopher’s capitulation, soon followed by an eight-day hiatus in entries. “The journal becomes most engaging when he is unable to write,” notes Fred Goellner-Cortwright. “Of the historian’s final relation to his adolescent charge there is nothing at all: the once methodical entries are interrupted when his thoughts, feelings, and actions reel uncontrolled, beyond his ability to define them in words” (GoellnerCortwright 1982, 152). The story concludes with an entry recording the couple’s attempt to describe each other’s odor and, as the scientific corollary to sexual rapture, another recording John Tyndall’s discovery of why the sky appears blue. 62

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Theocritus

Pastoral affords, yet limits, the union of youth and older man. Hovendaal’s work on still life is buoyed by pastoral. He tells Sander, “You’ve helped me write my book, you have beguiled all our time here into a kind of ancient ambiance, Damon the old shepherd I, Mopsus the young shepherd you” (33; 71). A similar Theocritan pair appear in “Idyll.” 11 This story translates the bridgeable binaries of “The Death of Picasso” into more stubborn antinomies. Its theme is stated structurally: a translation and elaboration of Theocritus’s fifth idyll, in which Komatas and Lakon compete in an impromptu singing match, segues into an episode from Walt Whitman’s Civil War service as an orderly. The shepherds’ contest ends in reconciliation, Davenport deviating from his source by having the victor relinquish his prize; a battalion’s brief respite in the Civil War ends in another call to arms. Bucolic Sicily meets bellicose America, myth meets history, ancient meets modern, the oaten flute meets a regimental fife. Imaginary poets indite while a real poet dresses wounds. In “Idyll” Davenport produces a war eclogue, but like his story “Bronze Leaves and Red,” a Nazi propagandist’s mawkish portrait of Hitler as a Spartan hero, “Idyll” applies pressure to pastoral convention. “Idyll” is not unusual among Davenport’s work in being constructed out of a translation. “Wo es war, soll ich werden” incorporates passages from Ausonius’s Mosella and Bissula, “The Cardiff Team” translates a passage from Francis Ponge’s “Le pré,” “Christ Preaching at the Henley Regatta” quotes Mallarmé’s “La vierge,” and “Mesoroposthonippidon” embeds translations of Diogenes’ maxims. Like the version of a text by Magritte in “Les Exploits de Nat Pinkerton de Jour en Jour” and of Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North in “Fifty-seven Views of Fujiyama,” “Idyll” contains a complete, though adapted, translation. In Theocritus’s fifth idyll the goatherd Komatas and the young shepherd Lakon trade pungent insults and elegant alternate couplets on love and bounty. Davenport surrounds his translation with a prose narrative that qualifies but does not rupture the arcadian illusion of Theocritus’s verse. After the competition Komatas and Lakon leap into the Crathis River, out of which emerge not the herdsmen but two Union soldiers, who return to their tent just as Whitman arrives to dress the wounds of their gravely wounded comrade. The verse is a close translation of Theocritus’s sexually frank idyll (in the proem to The Shepherd’s Week John Gay praised its coarseness). The “By Pan” 63

squalid comic realism of the prose deflates the bucolic ideal but also redeems it from preciousness. The eroticized pupil-teacher relation celebrated in “The Death of Picasso” is here subverted, for the shepherds are rancorous rivals. The music teacher is an abusive braggart who resents his former pupil’s ingratitude, while the contemptuous pupil feels exploited: “Let’s hope, Crosspatch, that when your time comes you get buried deeper than you rammed me” (Davenport 1981, 138–39). The prose details the indigence, servitude, and violence of herdsmen whose proud independence, tender feeling, and ample leisure make up the mode’s clichés. Trading insults and wagering livestock they do not own on a song-match, the two sing of love until Komatas is awarded victory by a shepherd judge. Whereas in Theocritus’s poem he exults, in Davenport Komatas abruptly seeks to make amends. He invites the youth for a swim: —I couldn’t take your lamb. You’d get your butt beat for it anyway. —You want to duck me. —Wouldn’t think of it. —By Pan? —By Pan. Lakon dropped his wrap and ran high kneed and splashing into the pool, backing goats in all directions, where Komatas caught him and ducked him. They ran to dry themselves and sat, winded, in the last of the sun, gossiping, plaiting grass, laughing. (Davenport 1981, 143–44) At this apex of pastoral release the story shifts, abruptly yet seamlessly, from Sicily to the outskirts of Fredericksburg. This last paragraph syncretically describes both the herdsmen and a pair of Union soldiers leaving the water. Antique pastoral evaporates behind the fraught camaraderie of the Civil War camp. In this section Hellenistic idyll preserves its literal sense (eijduvllion, a “little picture,” hence a short descriptive poem) while taking on its vernacular sense of a placid rural interval, as wounded infantry recuperate in a field hospital. As in the Hellenistic convention, dialogue here predominates. The wound dresser is not the bucolic Whitman of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, but the taxed yet vigorous orderly of Specimen Days and Drum-Taps. He appears in the story as he appeared on his Civil War rounds, in a cameo, a respected but anonymous nurse efficiently yet intimately concerned with innumerable urgent tasks.12 Like the Calamus poems of Leaves of Grass, Davenport’s “Idyll” is an 64

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ode to erotic camaraderie. In a Harper’s review article reprinted in The Death of Picasso, Davenport underscores this facet of the poet: “No boys, no Leaves of Grass.” That Whitman was aesthetically and erotically pleased by young males is no longer disputed. Academic snoops looking for “the real Whitman” beyond the poetry have been thwarted at every turn. The word “homosexual” was coined, illiterately, by a German psychologist and introduced into English the year Whitman died. Whitman’s word would have been “pathic.” He repeatedly insisted to British enthusiasts for pederasty (John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, the “college” of boy-fanciers at Bolton, others) that he was thoroughly heterosexual and polyphiloprogenitive. That males should be democratically “adhesive” and “amative” was a dimension of his vision of the new civilization he longed for America to have. (Davenport 2001, 80; 2003, 198) Like Northrop Frye (see Frye 1971, 101–2), Davenport places Whitman, who objected to literary tradition, squarely within it. Soon Whitman would revive the pastoral elegy in “When Lilacs Last in the Doorway Bloomed.” The juxtaposition of classical Sybaris and Civil War Virginia identifies Whitman as heir to the pastoral tradition in an unidyllic age, just as in Flowers and Leaves Davenport urges contemporaries to act again as Whitman’s heirs: Old Walt and Eakins for our pastoral, And a young born living who hold aware Clear eyes that not to laurel galls shift shape Before the startled eyes, or of a sudden end All longing, but love so ancient clarity All inconsonance can a twelvemonth mend. (Davenport 1966, 49) The story’s meanings emerge from the combinational logic of its form as much as from its content. The paratactical arrangement of the episodes fuses the harmonic accents of Theocritus’s Sicily with the martial ictus of Whitman’s warring America. The fife that Lakon had lost at the beginning of the story is in a sense retrieved two millennia later by the cadet who at the end of the story pipes in the vanguard of the advancing Confederate regiment. The herdsmen resolve their enmity through song and play “By Pan” 65

while soldiers prepare for combat to the strains of “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” As in John Murrell’s play Democracy, in which recuperating Union soldiers enjoy an idyll with Whitman by a pond, the wounded comrade is dying and the war confirms the brevity of all arcadian respites. “Idyll” bears superficial affinities to postmodernism as Charles Jencks surveyed it in What Is Post-Modernism?: hybrid, complex, eclectic, participatory, symbolic, and historical. Here too is the compounding of texts out of other texts. However, for Davenport intertextuality affirms writing as the locus of cultural meaning, and for all their hybridity Davenport’s texts, in contrast to a Robert Rauschenberg collage or a Kathy Acker novel, employ a selective and coherent body of images drawn not from electronic media but from print culture. The pastoral mode, for instance, is not exploited for irony. Although often made up of teasingly detachable elements, the stories form these into harmonic clusters that limit the plurality of readings they release. This is the conservative tendency apparent beneath Davenport’s avant-garde techniques and liberal treatment of mores. Paul

Davenport ventured to combine pastoral with its generic antonym, historiography. In “The Trees at Lystra” the apostles Paul and Barnabas are mistaken in a Galatian village for disguised divinities, an episode recorded in Acts of the Apostles 14:6–20. A canonical persecution of Paul (see 2 Timothy 3:11) becomes a country boy’s recollection of mythical misattribution, for the villagers convince themselves that the itinerant preachers are Zeus and Hermes, disguised as wayfarers as when they visited the humble cottage of Baucis and Philemon, the myth recounted in book 8 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. (Ovid’s text was first translated into English in 1632 by Sandys, administrator of arcadian Virginia, where the Civil War section of “Idyll” takes place.) Paul is a pastor, his conduct modeled on the messianic shepherd who identified his fate with that of the sacrificial lamb. Ovid’s version of the myth of Baucis and Philemon is a classical instance of the Hebrew myth of the three angels whom Abraham and Sarah host in their tent on the plains of Mamre (see Genesis 18) and the Christian myth of a God who moved unrecognized among his creatures. The myth is also the paradigmatic instance of the domestic idyll, its magnanimous elderly couple, presented from Ovid to Faust as blessed embodiments of spiritualized poverty. 66

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“The Trees at Lystra” maps the congruencies of the classical and the Christian ethos. Paul claims to have studied at an academy founded by Diogenes and to admire the Cynic’s moral regimen. The young narrator’s father meanwhile finds little novelty in Paul’s gospel: “Let us praise forever the maker of living things!” Paul admonishes; “—We do, Pappa said. We always have” (Davenport 1981, 11). The grandmother seizes on the grander correspondence, identifying the preachers as Olympians when Paul heals a lame Lystran. As in “Idyll,” however, the affinities find no purchase, and the stress falls not on the hospitality of the preachers’ hosts but on their hostility—ironically fulfilling, of course, the very myth the villagers had wanted to avoid repeating. Worshiped and offered sacrifices, Paul must beg first for understanding and then for mercy: We are but men, and lowly men at that. We are preachers of the word of the rabbi Yeshua ben Yosef, the very son of God Almighty. —Jews? the priest asked, rising from his knees. (Davenport 1981, 11) The preachers are lucky to escape the wrath of a community that venerates the god of guest-friendship and reveres the hospitality of their ancestors Baucis and Philemon. Hebrews reads like Paul’s wry comment on the incident: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (Hebrews 13:1–2). Like its modernist antecedents, the story integrates the mythic into the pedestrian, but whereas the modernist often imposes the mythic on the quotidian, Davenport imposes the quotidian on the mythic.13 The myth is not extrinsic and esoteric (even Stephen Dedalus, so keen to discern precursors, never once in Ulysses invokes Telemachus) but intrinsic and exoteric; it is not applied to the material by the learned author but invoked by the unlettered village characters: “—All over again, she said to me. No mistake about the sign . . . Old Thunderer and the Tree Elf! That’s who they are” (Davenport 1981, 5). The story is in part about the intersection of two mythologies, classical and Christian, Ovidian and Pauline, and how they order an experience that neither can really contain, with the risks to civility when they fail to do so. The irony, meanwhile, is not psychological but historical. The Lystrans drive out the preachers in the confidence that they will face no further Christian incursions. “We did not mention the travellers,” the narrator recalls of the aftermath (12). And yet, although not mentioned, it was in Lystra that Paul recruited the important convert Titus. “By Pan” 67

Montaigne

Eclogues culminates like many of Davenport’s collections of fiction in a pastoral romance. Like these, “On Some Lines of Virgil” borrows its title from a well-known work (here Montaigne’s “Sur des vers de Virgile”) and its length from Hellenistic romance. The novella yokes Epicurean to Stoic, youth to age, infirmity to health, profligacy to chastity, and order to impulse. In realistic fiction such contrasts issue either in comic squalor, as in Joyce’s “An Encounter” and Nabokov’s Lolita, or in tragic squalor, as in Svevo’s As a Man Grows Older and Mann’s Death in Venice.14 In Davenport’s pastorals these contrasts issue in romantic concord. (He liked to call “The Death of Picasso” Death in Venice with a happy ending.) In his laudatory New Yorker essay on Davenport, George Steiner describes the story as “one of the most hilarious, tenderly risqué accounts of sexual awakening in all modern literature” (Steiner 1981, 199). Pastoral has from its inception extolled sexual freedom and variety. Tasso in the drama Aminta and Diderot in the dialogue Supplément au voyage de Bougainville make pleas for free love. Renato Poggioli notes that artists “have frequently used the pastoral dispensation to justify the claims of homosexual love” (Poggioli 1975, 14). In Corydon Gide uses the pastoral to celebrate homosexual attachment. The American Genteel poets frequently couched homoerotic desire in pastoral terms, as in Bayard Taylor’s Theocritan “Hylas” and Richard Henry Stoddard’s “Arcadian Idyl.” George Santayana, whose flirtation with a British officer is the subject of Davenport’s story “Dinner at the Bank of England,” was a particularly reticent instance of this same tendency to spiritualize homoerotic desire as a superior, because unconsummated, form of love. Most important, pastoral not only permits the depiction of proscribed forms of eroticism but provides an unembarrassed endorsement of “mere” pleasure. The canon of modern realism, which is dominated by punishing anatomies of romantic disillusion, affords few models, while the happy endings typical of many popular genres repel by the almost invariably meretricious, trivial, and formulaic expressions they take. As Angela Carter adapts the conventions of the fairy tale to idealize erotic attachment, so too Davenport looks to so-called minor genres to avoid the antiromantic bias of realism. In “The Tiger’s Bride” Carter’s Beauty becomes a beast who lovingly licks her feral partner; in “On Some Lines of Virgil” teenagers share each others’ loves and introduce siblings into their cheerful orgies. Stephen Sturgeon notes that, like Montaigne’s essay, “Davenport’s 68

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story examines the necessary connection between sensuality and sensibility” (Sturgeon 2006, 314). Interiority, so important in modern realism, plays only a small part in Davenport’s fiction, where the accent is on fellowship, affinity, and exchange. In an essay he offers a Blakean diatribe on “that phantom, ‘the self,’” which “should be unwelcome for what it is, a guest-invited guest. The self, in any case, is a vacuum: nothing until it is filled. Continuity of perception, Mach said, is all we can call mind” (Davenport 1981b, 383).15 For Davenport identity is in-process and manifold, shaped by one’s associates. The narrator of “On Some Lines of Virgil” praises his girlfriend: “I would never have met the Jolivet I am with Jonquille had she not created him . . . A friend is the friend a friend finds and brings out in another” (Davenport 1981, 187–88). In such fiction, finding and making, as collective activities, substitute for the introspection of psychological realism. Withdrawing into the countryside (the same outskirts of Bordeaux where “Robot” takes place—these kids too have a canine mascot, Picasso), Davenport’s petit horde enters the locus amoenus of classical eclogue, an ideal landscape inhabited by innocent voluptuaries ruled by tender feeling. In a Freudian vein, W. H. Auden notes that the biblical Arcadia of Eden is the realm of the “polymorphous-perverse sexuality of childhood” (Auden 1968, 411). This is the childhood Davenport depicts in his bucolic fiction. Few sexual distinctions operate here. Consent, underpinned by sincerity and respect, is the chief requisite. The omnisexual anarchist Michel plays Pan, tutoring Jolivet and his younger brother Victor in masturbation, seducing Jolivet, and being seduced by Jonquille. “Since control and aggression, elements that prevent healthy sexual expression, have been removed from this little but highly structured society, Davenport’s fictions become rituals of regenerative innocence,” notes Patrick Meanor (Meanor 1993, 682). Sex is a realm of exuberant fantasy, romance a destructive delusion. Jonquille’s wisdom is in promoting the former while discouraging the latter. “Love is a comedy, decidedly,” Davenport wrote in a May 5, 1966, letter to Jonathan Williams, whose relationship with Ronald Johnson was ending; “all attempts to make it a romance have bogged down, from Guiraut de Bornelh to Marilyn Monroe. The garden is the thing, the context and the peace” (Davenport and Williams 2004, 75). “Picasso takes up the classical just when it was most anaemic, academic, and bleached of its eroticism,” van Hovendaal observes in “The Death of Picasso,” and Eclogues perpetuates this modernist legacy (Davenport 1981, “By Pan” 69

30). The affinity between Theocritan pastoralism and hedonism is emphatic here, and the pleasure principle prevails free both from romantic illusion and from Judeo-Christian censure by the example of Fourier, in whose utopian conception God rules by attraction rather than constraint, harnessing desire to fulfill benign providence. This has affinities with Montaigne’s reflections on sexuality in “Sur des vers de Virgile,” which the erudite Jolivet and Jonquille read, Latin quotations and all. Montaigne’s essay equates love with sexual appetite without derogation, and urges an acceptance of the sexual autonomy both of the young and of mature women. As in Davenport’s novella, the essay strives to bridge the contraries it underscores. The sober sense of Montaigne’s French prose is punctuated by numerous quotations from Latin erotic verse, which is praised for its lack of equivocation. Like Montaigne (for a translation of whose travel diary Davenport wrote the introduction), the story’s expatriate art history professor Tullio combines epicure and stoic.16 Both writers are aging, overweight, and afflicted, and share liberal views of sex. When the omnisexual Michel tries to upset Tullio’s equanimity by making a lubricious display before him just as Jolivet’s mother Henriette enters her house, Tullio is no more flummoxed than the mother. “It’s my fault entirely, dear Henriette, Tullio said. I was admiring Michel’s body in a philosophical way and he volunteered to display it in a full state of nature. So quit looking miserable, Michel, Maman said” (Davenport 1981, 216). Unlike van Hovendaal, Tullio is neither invited into a liaison nor betrays any wish to be. Michel may share his Christian name with Montaigne, but Tullio, who like Montaigne is ailing, shares his name with Marcus Tullius Cicero, who in “De senectute” views his aging body as a spur to reformation and ruminations on mortality. Tullio, who delivers a lecture on his Roman namesake, adopts Cicero’s stoic restraint. Regarded by Jolivet as the spiritual “instigator” of the band’s revels, Tullio remains, for all his tacit encouragement, an aloof figure. He clearly concurs when in “Sur des vers de Virgile” Montaigne suggests that sensual beauty is forfeited at middle age. Confronted by the scantily clad Jolivet, Victor, and Michel, Tullio expresses the detached appreciation that Montaigne recommends over the temptation to initiate a sexual relationship: “I was just saying, he addressed Michel as if he were his oldest friend, how fetching Jolivet and Victor are in their merest cache-sexes, wholly Mediterranean, soavamente seducente . . . It’s a privilege to see more of it than is afforded by the figleaves in the Italian museums” (Davenport 1981, 214–15). 70

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By contrast, the legless beggar Marc Aurel, whose name of course affiliates him with Stoicism, and who like Tullio banishes despair by accepting necessity, is admitted into Jolivet’s band despite his poverty, ignorance, and disability, because of his spirited youth. Heartbreak, disenfranchisement, and mortality figure prominently in pastoral, despite its idealizations, as its mythic origins emphasize. The Sicilian shepherd Daphnis, blinded by the nymph he had rejected, invented pastoral poetry to lament his misfortune. According to Theocritus’s first idyll, Aphrodite took vengeance on Daphnis’s chastity by making him pursue an unreciprocated passion, which drove Daphnis to suicide. Counterbalancing its own idealizations, “On Some Lines of Virgil” places the hale, affluent Jolivet beside the lame pauper Marc Aurel; the jovial oversexed Michel beside the taciturn Trombone, Marc’s companion; Jolivet’s emancipated, cerebral mother beside Tullio’s uneducated Italian housewife; and the vibrant, liberal Tullio beside Jolivet’s uncle Jacques, a sullen reactionary who secludes himself in an apartment in the old city walls. Davenport situates youth beside age, vigor before frailty, and license before renunciation. Davenport follows Fourier in creating “pivot” figures between such antithetical groups. Both are women in “On Some Lines of Virgil,” Jonquille and Jolivet’s mother. Such a tripartite division foments jealousy, a common theme in classical pastoral. Peers taunt Jolivet with the rumor that his mother beds Michel, with whom his beloved Jonquille admits pursuing a flirtation. She soon confesses it to dejected Jolivet: “I had, she said, this intuition that you wanted us to. Oh sure, I said, what else? Try not to feel it that way, Joli. It won’t happen again, word of honor . . . I did everything, my fault from beginning to end. He was all for galloping away and blushed like a crossing signal” (Davenport 1981, 229). The pair quickly reconcile, and eventually Jolivet’s proprietorial scruple is sacrificed to an acceptance of sexual autonomy. Indeed, her intuition does not mislead her. It is an education to which the men in Davenport’s fiction are routinely submitted. Most of the women in Davenport resist the tender coercions of monogamy. They often guide their vestigially possessive male lovers into Davenport’s nouveau monde amoureux, where as in Fourier tribal loyalty supplants monogamous ties. A notoriously astute critic of marriage who called for equality between the sexes, Fourier predicted that the New Harmony would eventually render the institution obsolete. Beyond Fourier, other precursors of characters like Jonquille (as well as Kaatje in “The Dawn in Erewhon” and Mariana in “The Bicycle Rider”) are found in “By Pan” 71

Blake, such as Oothoon in “Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” who prophesies the end of sexual possessiveness and the triumph of omnisexual free love. The enlightened attitude to possessiveness inculcated in their lovers by women like Jonquille is anticipated by Montaigne’s censure, in “Sur des vers de Virgile,” of jealousy, which he regards as a symptom of sexual inequality. Like Fourier after him, Montaigne disparages the cult of female chastity and characterizes humans as inescapably polygamous. In Davenport’s idylls a higher fidelity than sexual constancy prevails. “Romance, Jonquille says, is a bore. Love, passion, all that rhetoric, hot air. Of course we love each other, she says, but I’d rather know that I can trust you than float on pink clouds when you call on the phone” (Davenport 1981, 184). Jealousy can be overcome in Arcadia, but not mortality. “Though there can be no suffering or grief, there can be death” in Arcadian “dream Edens,” notes W. H. Auden in “Dingley Dell and the Fleet” (Auden 1968, 411). In Theocritus’s first idyll, the originator of pastoral poetry dies of a broken heart; his death is later mourned in Virgil’s fifth eclogue. King George III had no difficulty, according to Joshua Reynolds, in grasping the import of et in Arcadio ego, inscribed on a gravestone in his double portrait of Mrs. Bouverie and Mrs. Crew: “Ay, ay, death is even in Arcadia” (see Panofsky 1969, 25). As Erwin Panofksy argues, the Latin tag was often understood as a memento mori until Romanticism effaced the transitory from it. (When Goethe made “Auch in Arkadien war ich” the epigraph to his Italian Journey, he was thinking not of death in Italy but of himself very much alive there.) It is to the tradition of the visual arts, as so often, rather than to literature, that Davenport (who clearly knew Panofsky’s essay) turns for his image of Arcadia. “On Some Lines of Virgil” ends with the sudden death of Tullio. In a story replete with tombs and caves, death is an insistent presence. The story (and Eclogues itself) ends with Jolivet recalling Tullio’s remark the previous day while he watched Victor performing chin-ups: Quello sfacciatello Ganimede! he had said happily as the two slender legs swung towards him, no break in the up and down of chinning, and as the pain beat on his heart, did he beg for mercy, or did his wonderful imagination see that anche colui che era in Arcadia was with him? (Davenport 1981, 238) 72

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Along with Victor’s “impudent Ganymede,” death too was in Tullio’s Arcadia, and probably no surprise to him. Despite its diverse contents and the freedom of its protagonists, “On Some Lines of Virgil” is rigorously organized. Like Montaigne’s essay the story is a patchwork of quotations, observations, and anecdotes regarding sexuality, but like a classical pastoral the story observes strict conventions. Jolivet’s narrative is a reshaped recension of an old summer notebook, from which he fashions a prose stanzaic measure as invariable as the songs of Damon and Alphesiboeus in Virgil’s eighth eclogue. Each of its 75 sections is divided into five paragraphs of equal length. The isometric paragraphs rule over the anarchic idyll they contain. The form, enforcing constraints on its emancipatory narrative, testifies to the passage from youth to maturity. The story’s thematic interplay between stoic and epicure is thus played out at the level of form. “Discipline is not the restraint but the use of energy,” Epameinondas and his fellow Pythagoreans explain in “The Daimon of Sokrates” (Davenport 1981, 63). A Hellenistic pastoral poem is translated in “On Some Lines of Virgil” and then described, as Marianne Moore defined poetry, as an imaginary garden with real toads in it: There are not real boys in the poem, but porcelain figures in a neoclassical tradition, like Virgil’s and Theokritos’ shepherds and girls. They are imaginary. The wine, however, and honey is there. (Davenport 1981, 236–37) The wine and honey are indeed there in Davenport, but the neoclassical porcelain with which he populates his pastorals underscores his concern to avoid realist conventions by means of an overt formal and thematic artifice. Harold E. Tolliver argues that the contemporary writer uses the pastoral tradition “primarily as a device for gaining perspective on the nature of the imagination itself” (Tolliver 1971, 14). Although this is too restrictive as applied to a body of work whose idealism exceeds the merely aesthetic, Davenport’s bucolics do depend on a recognition of their status as fantasy. This allows him to explore controversial themes like youth sexuality, but also confines the texts outside the norms such fiction would challenge. Before an orgy with Marc and Michel, Jolivet says to his brother, “You must remember none of this happened, understand?” (Davenport 1981, 217). The “By Pan” 73

challenge is put squarely to both Victor and the reader. Art becomes a zone of willful infringement, a place of pure possibility. Davenport’s eclogues are utopias of erotic and intellectual prodigality where youth and nature are restored. He recovers some of the force that Schiller extolled when in On Naive and Sentimental Poetry he views pastoral not as a retreat into faerie but as a summons to bring civilization into conformity with larger principles of harmony. Far from necessarily reflecting reactionary nostalgia, pastoral may provide a position from which to challenge entrenched attitudes. The cycle implicit in pastoral’s “discourse of retreat,” Terry Gifford argues, is, or should be, constructive reengagement with “the court, the city, the political world. In the best pastoral literature, the writer will have taken the reader on a journey to be changed and charged upon return for more informed action in the present” (Gifford 1999, 80). As it is in Davenport, but with the proviso that the forms reengagement might take remain tacit or open. He refuses to harvest pastoral for nostrums against unsound environmental attitudes. Such nostrums would only efface that distinction between art and advocacy that is unbreachable to Davenport and would dissipate an entail his work invites us to preserve. Whereas postmodernism interrogates notions of truth from the perspective of Sprachkritik (the “linguistic turn” in philosophy and literary theory), in Davenport’s pastorals a theologically underwritten logos gestures toward truth. George Steiner laments in Grammars of Creation that the limitlessness of scientific progress has replaced the infinite that characterized the God of Aquinas and Descartes. Steiner’s high praise of Davenport comes as no surprise, for in Davenport the concept of the Heraclitean logos abides. Gifford terms “postpastoral” that contemporary version which, inter alia, involves awe, affirmation of the creative-destructive balance of life, recognition of the unity of human and external nature, a belief in the intricate imbrication of nature and culture, and the assumption that exploitative environmental practices are congruent with oppressive social practices (see Gifford 1995, 121ff.). Davenport’s pastorals largely fall under this rubric, but where such works usually avoid Arcadian tropes as embarrassing archaisms (e.g., the poems of Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill) his texts revel in them, their finesse eluding any taint of the precious. Pastoral must reconcile the urbane to the rustic, a balance of sophistication and naivete too delicate for most contemporary writers. Gifford laments in a 74

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later book that, between postpastoral and the merely sentimental variety, no place now appears reserved for the performance of such an operation: One is left asking whether modern texts that might have performed a classical pastoral function in the past, Charles Frazier’s impressive first novel Cold Mountain (1996), A. R. Ammons’s Selected Poems (1986), or Rebecca Solnit’s travel book about the Nevada Test Site and Yosemite National Park, Savage Dreams (1994), are, in fact, postpastoral in their rejection of Arcadia in favour of a more knowing, even, in the latter case, adversarial sense of “environment” rather than “nature,” or “the countryside,” or “landscape.” (Gifford 1999, 173–74) Evidently Gifford has not read Davenport, whose eclogues neither demonize the forsaken idiom of pastoral nor attach hectoring, self-conscious, or ironic tones it. Perhaps more than any other art form, pastoral makes nothing happen, but it makes nothing happen in so many ways. Obliquely rather than dogmatically, it may suggest imaginative mechanisms by which to generate a futurity beyond the domain of triumphalist global commodification. Fredric Jameson laments that in postmodernism faith in social agency is eradicated. The future, he regrets, becomes “something that no longer seems particularly meaningful in a postmodernity in which the very experience of the future as such has come to seem enfeebled, if not deficient” (Jameson 1998, 72). At the end of his memoir Errata George Steiner tries to resist such despair: “I am unable, even at the worst hours, to abdicate from the belief that the two validating wonders of mortal existence are love and the invention of the future tense” (Steiner 1997, 170–71). Their convergence occurs in Eclogues, its stories ruled by love and saturated with futurity. Davenport’s pastorals are deployed against a prevailing materialism as rebuke and admonishment. As Whitman rises out of Theocritan Sicily to dress Civil War wounds in “Idyll,” so the eclogue emerges out of the escapist artifice of Arcadia to tend to present urgencies as well as to imagine a redemptive chance. Davenport’s Arcadia is finally not the reactionary simulacrum of a fantasized and invalidated golden age but a Fourierist projection, an opening imaginative bid on utopia.

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The breakthrough came when I realized that I mustn’t write about anything from my own experience, or anybody I’ve known, but to work with pure imagination, and to work with that hiatus between the mind and the world in which the pragmatic always fails and the imagination has to take over. (letter to James Laughlin, October 24, 1992)

4. To Write Paradise Utopia

Utopia gets itself into several of Davenport’s book titles. Da Vinci’s Bicycle invokes an inventor’s unrealized dream, The Jules Verne Steam Balloon evokes the fantasist of mechanical paradises, and Cities on Hills cites the Puritan summons to establish in New England a model Christian community. Objects on a Table concerns that genre of painting in which the utopian and the quotidian converge, still life. Every Force Evolves a Form is a Shaker maxim. Tatlin! is named after an artist who advanced the program of the Bolshevik revolution. Fourierists, the Theban Band, the early millennarian Christians, the Shakers, Fascists, constructivists, Communists: utopians proliferate in Davenport. His work is distinguished by an unabashed idealism, which he locates in childhood and projects onto small utopian sodalities. He retains the optimism which European critics identify as a specifically American trait of his fiction. Laurence Zachar for instance argues that [against European skepticism] America sets this tradition of optimism: the Puritans saw there an organizing mystical force, and the American renaissance enlarged the scope of their idealism. In Davenport one recovers this faith in a global order, reflected in the microcosm which is precisely his work, melting pot of intertexts and genres. (Zachar 1994, 62–63) 1 76

From Puritan colonization onward, America has spawned or fostered a great diversity of utopian programs, of which those of the Shakers, the Fourierists, and Thoreau prevail in Davenport. And theirs were not mere Cockaigne diversions: the Shakers’ sense of design, Fourier’s of pleasure, and Thoreau’s of ecology have helped to shape the oppositional element in contemporary American culture. Yet at the same time utopia has rarely been so suspect. Prospero’s wand must be broken again and again, regardless of the good it may conjure. Despotic regimes of the Left and Right discredited faith in utopia and increased fear of dystopia. Science fiction frequently concocts a future ruled by an all-invasive technology that effaces the distinction between organism and machine in order to establish a wholly automated order. Films like Dark City and the Matrix series envision the wholesale subordination of nature to the simulacra of artificial intelligence. The narrator of William Gibson’s story “The Gernsback Continuum” submerges himself “in hard evidence of the human near-dystopia we live in. ‘But it could be worse, huh?’ ‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘or even worse, it could be perfect’” (Gibson 1998, 519). The beast slouching to Bethlehem to be born was a utopian. The twentieth-century ideologues of terrestrial paradise left monstrous legacies. Visionary projectors stand accused of being Grand Inquisitors offering peace and happiness at the cost of freedom. Nicolas Berdyaev argues, for instance, that “utopia is always totalitarian, and totalitarianism, in the conditions of our world, is always utopian” (Berdyaev 1957, 191). To believe in utopia one must have a kind of faith that history has repudiated. “Utopia is a bad word today not because we despair of being able to achieve it but because we fear it,” Robert C. Elliot writes in The Shape of Utopia. “Utopia itself (in a special sense of the term) has become the enemy” (Elliot 1970, 87 and 89). He notes that in literature “the theme of utopia no longer engages the imagination” (89). Four years later Tatlin! appeared, inaugurating an engagement with the theme that persisted in every subsequent collection Davenport published. He wrote to me on September 7, 1999, “I think Erik Reece is right when he says that my fiction is about a parallel universe.” Tatlin

The title story of Tatlin! describes the political mobilization of the Russian avant-garde in the service of the Bolshevik revolution. Its members To Write Paradise

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sought to efface the borders between art and utility, leisure class and proletariat, museum and atelier, private and public. Cubo-futurism, rayonism, suprematism, and constructivism became the official art of the early revolutionary era. Chagall, Rodchenko, Malevich, Larionov, and Tatlin assumed responsibility for art academies, museums, and galleries, where they had the opportunity to realize avant-garde ambitions on a national scale. “Within this chain of galleries,” writes Camilla Gray in the pioneering study that was Davenport’s principal source, “Russia became the first country in the world to exhibit abstract art officially and on such a wide scale” (Gray 1962, 230). Futurist plays were staged, agitprop trains and boats were painted and launched around the country, proto-Bauhaus industrial designs manufactured. The New Economic Policy of 1921 was a blow to what its ideological opponents disparaged as a leftist dictatorship of the arts, while the ascendancy of Stalin (like Hitler a conservative amateur artist) and the proclamation of the doctrine of socialist realism extinguished the avant-garde. Davenport’s story is a documentary fiction of this utopian moment, focusing on one of its most enigmatic participants. Many of Vladimir Tatlin’s most important collage reliefs have disappeared, his greatest engineering projects were never undertaken, and many of his industrial designs, such as fuel-efficient stoves and functional worker’s garments, were not manufactured. “The subjects I chose for the stories in Tatlin! are all in the position of being, as fact, almost not there,” Davenport explains in “Ernst Machs Max Ernst.” “The story ‘Tatlin!’ is built out of a mere handful of doubtful certainties. There is no biography of the man, his work is hidden or destroyed. All my information was at least thirdhand” (Davenport 1981b, 376). Tatlin is thus an exemplary victim of the orchestrated forgetting which in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera identifies as a strategy of totalitarianism. The story both retrieves from totalitarian amnesia an architect of modernism, and, because the sources are tantalizingly scant, permits imaginative license and literary treatment. The artist is both a suggestive historical figure and a vacant site for utopian meditation. Employing formalist techniques of thematic recurrence over linear chronology, Cubist collage, Eisensteinian montage, and Poundian juxtaposition, Davenport produces the literary equivalent of filmmaker Stan Brakhage’s narrative method, “where an architectonic arrangement of images has replaced narrative and documentation” (Davenport 1981b, 375). 78

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He praises Brakhage for a style “that brings cinema close to poetry” (375). Davenport’s style brings prose fiction close to poetry. Formalist techniques are overt in “Tatlin!,” an episode of which (the 1905 Revolution) is written as a homage to the Odessa Steps sequence of Eisenstein’s Potemkin, and a character of which is Viktor Shklovsky. Like constructivism, formalism would eventually be outlawed in the Soviet Union, and thus the story’s structure reveals its political loyalties. In an essay on Osip Mandelstam, “The Man Without Contemporaries,” Davenport describes formalist narrative, “its components arranged according to a sense of kinship amongst its subjects rather than according to chronology.” Such a matrix provides “the flexibility to move backward and forward along a plot line which we can reconstruct in our imagination” (Davenport 1981b, 302). This is the matrix of “Tatlin!,” the first episode of which takes place at a Moscow exhibition in 1932, the year formalism was proscribed. Graphed chronologically, the story echoes the zigzag diagonals of Russian avant-garde canvases: the story shifts from the exhibition to the massacre before the Winter Palace during the abortive 1905 Revolution, then to young Tatlin’s idyllic summer holiday with the family of Mikhail Larionov. Only at this point does the story become chronological, before offering a lengthy digression on the pioneering Russian astrophysicist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, presented as a 1927 lecture by Tatlin, now director of the Ceramic Faculty at Moscow’s Higher Technical Institute. The story then proceeds episodically through the 1920s before returning to the period of the Stalin terror and an epilogue in which Tatlin, now a recluse living in the bell tower of a Moscow monastery, learns from Shklovsky of the death of “the old roach,” Mandelstam’s epithet for Stalin (Davenport 1974, 48; 1997, 49). Plot, psychological development, and purely personal concerns are eschewed. Davenport prefers to situate Tatlin’s experiments within the context of the emancipatory currents of Marxist-Leninist ideology and modernist aesthetic. Formalist defamiliarization retained its attraction among the postwar American avant-garde, including Charles Olson, although he ascribed familiarity less to habit than to the subordination of experience to hierarchies of comparison and likeness: “A thing, any thing, impinges on us by a more important fact, its self-existence, without reference to any other thing, in short, the very character of it which calls our attention to it, which wants us to know more about it, its particularity” (Olson 1966, 56). Such particularity can be perceived by dislodging a thing from its To Write Paradise

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series. Juxtaposition, unconventional vocabulary, disruptions to sequence, conspicuous style, and riddling description contribute to defamiliarization; Davenport uses all such techniques. Tatlin does not simply wear the recent invention of a jumpsuit with zipper, but “a worker’s one-piece suit which opens and closes with two rows of metal teeth which lock together when he slides a bobbin along them” (Davenport 1974, 1; 1997, 1). Russian quotations from futurist poets like Khlebnikov and mathematical formulas for escape velocity increase estrangement, as do abrupt temporal shifts. Tatlin’s model for the Monument to the Third International and his glider are described rather than illustrated, enhancing their peculiarity. “Tatlin!” not only defamiliarizes the over-familiar (the Russian Revolution, Stalin, the modernist avant-garde) but familiarizes the unfamiliar, for Tatlin and constructivism would draw a blank among many readers (especially the story’s first ones). Thus the story achieves defamiliarization by its very subject matter. A celebrated practitioner of formalist method, and one of Stalin’s most lamented victims, was Osip Mandelstam, to whom “Tatlin!” alludes, and on whose prose experiments Davenport draws. “I do not fear seams or the yellowness of glue,” Mandelstam writes in “The Egyptian Stamp,” and Davenport seems to borrow formalist bravado from this credo. “I am not afraid of incoherence and gaps” (Mandelstam 1993, 149). In the introduction to his translation of Mandelstam’s The Noise of Time, Davenport’s high school classmate and lifelong friend Clarence Brown describes “The Egyptian Stamp” as a commedia erudita which “transmits the inner experience of the death of Russian culture” (Brown 1993, 61).2 “Tatlin!,” which uses montage to reproduce the vivid surrealistic effects of Mandelstam’s prose, transmits the outer experience of the death of Russian culture, for which the fate of Mandelstam is exemplary. Brown calls Mandelstam’s a “saturation technique”; enriched imagery, emphatic aural effects, elaborate phrasing, incongruous metaphor, mosaic pattern, lapidary compression, and narrative discontinuity defamiliarize the events in Petersburg during the Kerensky summer (Davenport’s story describes this same period). “Most paragraphs give the distinct impression of a new start, a fresh adventure, something written in another key,” Brown notes (Brown 1993, 55). Davenport aspired to the same effect. “Every sentence is written by itself; there are very few consecutive sentences in my work,” Davenport explained in an interview. “This has been commented upon. People feel the non-sequence” (Alpert 1976, 5). Davenport followed Mandelstam in valuing the hermeneutic opportunities created by lacunae 80

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and ellipses. “What I prize in the doughnut is the hole,” Mandelstam declares in “Fourth Prose.” “You can gobble up the doughnut, but the hole will still be there . . . Real work is Brussels lace, the main thing in it is what holds the pattern up: air, punctures, truancy” (Mandelstam 1993, 189). The temporal disjunctions of “Tatlin!” combine with other structural dislocations to suggest something akin to Mandelstam’s Brussels lace pattern. Davenport’s three full-page illustrations of Tatlin’s lost reliefs (attested only by grainy black-and-white photos) underscore the riddling originality of the story’s elusive subject. In Davenport’s “We Often Think of Lenin at the Clothespin Factory,” an unnamed woman resembling Mandelstam’s widow Nadezhda explains, with an excusable degree of nostalgic idealization, the squandered artistic legacy of modernism to a priggish Soviet soldier too efficiently indoctrinated to have the least appreciation of the loss.3 A decasyllabic dialogue resembling classical mime (Davenport translated The Mimes of Herondas),4 the story links Mandelstam to the archaic Greek poet Theognis, the exiled victim of a revolution, and to the Swiss writer Robert Walser, self-exiled to silence in a sanatorium: A poet. After a while he gave up And lived in a lunatic asylum. Our poets all went into prisons. (Davenport 1987, 36; 2003, 207) Tatlin’s fate is closer to Walser’s than to Mandelstam’s, for both mavericks were consigned not to labor camps but to neglect. In the story’s opening chapter Tatlin is still sufficiently fervent to overlook the ubiquitous propaganda posters of Lenin and to urge constructivist doctrine on spectators: “You must not think of my glider as a utilitarian object, nor as a work of art. My glider is for the people. It is a socialist artefact, both art and utility” (Davenport 1974, 6; 1997, 6). The next chapter juxtaposes this museum terminus of avant-garde revolution, symbolized by the flightless glider, to the revolutionary dawn of the failed 1905 Revolution; from an interior crowd of spectators to an exterior crowd of protesters; from exposition to demonstration; from air bicycle to firearms. Eight images of Lenin at the exhibition are described, reinforced by Davenport’s three identical full-page pen-and-ink versions of a resolute Lenin modeled on a Soviet postcard. The brooding silence of the portrait is reinforced when, viewing Tatlin’s model of the Monument to the Third International at the Eighth ConTo Write Paradise

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gress of the Soviets in 1920, Lenin remains unmoved while Tatlin and Shklovsky explain the tower. They call it an “image of the revolution” and “the master fusion . . . of the new technology and the revolutionary sensibility. Lenin said nothing at all” (Davenport 1974, 45; 1997, 46). With Lenin’s death the dwindling state patronage of constructivism and other forms of abstract art suffers a fatal setback. Whereas Lenin’s gaze is interspliced with images of or by Tatlin, indicating a degree of early Soviet support for the avant-garde, a remote and idealized portrait of Stalin, his stiff jacket decorated with military insignia, provides the final three illustrations of the story. “The man himself has become the symbol,” Paul Cohen writes in his essay on the story’s visual dimension. “We have passed from portrait to icon. The petrification of the revolutionary ideal is complete” (Cohen 1985, 69). Davenport’s drawings of Tatlin, one based on a photo, another on the early self-portrait The Sailor, take many more liberties in order, as Cohen remarks, to “humanize the image, giving it an air of casualness and honesty” (67). The story’s visual elements thus complement Tatlin’s vexed remark to Shklovsky: “It was Khlebnikov’s revolution, our revolution. Then it was Lenin’s, then Stalin’s” (Davenport 1974, 48; 1997, 51). While Tatlin abandoned portraiture as reactionary, the Soviet regime embraced its propagandistic potential, realized in the iconic realism of the portrait Davenport borrows from a poster sold at Stalin’s funeral. The constructivists propound a utopian fusion of avant-garde art, utopian ideology, and modern technology. Tatlin is dedicated to the union of artistic forms and utilitarian purposes, which the Monument to the Third International was designed to embody. A spiral a hundred meters higher than the Eiffel Tower containing a revolving cube, cylinder, and cone, the monument was intended to house party officials, lecture halls, gymnasiums, and cinemas, and to broadcast hourly bulletins as well as project slogans against the clouds and images onto Red Square. “Tatlin specified that no room of the cube was to be a museum or library. All must be kept kinetic, fluid, and revolutionary . . . It was at once a building, a sculpture, a painting, a poem, a book, a moving picture, a construct” (42–43; 42–43). The monument’s tilted spiral implies flight and revolutionary aspiration, but at its exhibition “Lenin said nothing at all.” Tatlin’s project was never constructed. This fusion of nature and technology is for Davenport a heroic but tragically naive endeavor to harness the machine to achieve egalitarian aims. Tatlin can be compared to R. Buckminster Fuller.5 “The most stren82

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uous prophet of the machine was R. Buckminster Fuller, who said that in the machine we have utopia (that’s the Greek for Erewhon, which is ‘nowhere’ spelled backwards) in our hands,” Davenport writes in “What Are Revolutions?” We will not need to work. All of our time will be leisure. And then what do we do? Why! said Fuller, we devote all our time to the delights of the mind. If he had not been a New England transcendentalist, he would have added the delights of the body. Well, what if we lost the delights of the mind and the body when we constructed a wholly automatic technology? (Davenport 1996b, 243) Davenport concludes this is precisely the result: “We are decidedly not moving toward Fuller’s utopia; we are moving toward a disaster that we can’t even imagine” (Davenport 1996b, 244). The Tatlin who designed the monument is similarly unaware of the disaster about to break, suggested in the story by the reiterated images of an iconic Stalin. The glider is for Davenport the most breathtaking distillation of Tatlin’s utopian ambition to wed the organic and the mechanical in the service of egalitarian ideology. Tatlin counters the predominance of motorized aircraft in a mechanical design intended to exploit organic models and processes. “Nature is more clever than mechanics,” Tatlin asserted (quoted in Rakitin 1992, 35). He experimented extensively with insects to develop the Letatlin glider, which, as Camilla Gray notes, “looks like a great insect itself, so closely has the organic structure been interpreted” (Gray 1962, 183). She quotes Tatlin’s statement in the catalog to the 1932 exhibition, where Davenport’s story opens: “My machine is built on the principle of life, organic forms . . . Work on the formation of materials is art” (183). The organic aspect of the glider, a featherless wood ossature impelled by foot-pedals and the arms’ manipulation of the wings, is reinforced by its punning name, Letatlin. An ingenious yet overlooked mechanical wooden bird, the Letatlin is the modern realization of the wooden dove of Archytas (described in Davenport’s later story), whose revolutionary harnessing of steam power would not be exploited for two millennia. The glider is no more unfeasible than da Vinci’s bicycle. Vasilii Rakitin, who distinguishes the Russian avant-garde from the Marxism-Leninism it briefly and unsatisfactorily served (Tatlin, for instance, never joined the Communist Party), views Tatlin as a realist: To Write Paradise

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Tatlin’s designs are those of a Robinson Crusoe who finds himself on an uninhabited island. And in this sense—given the actual conditions in Russia at the beginning of the 1920s—he was more of a realist than were the Moscow Constructivists creating lovely designs disengaged from real life. This was no utopia, not fantasies of the unrealizable, but the fashion of the day, full of life and energy—had life been normal. Tatlin’s designs are the designs of a hunter wintering in the taiga and not counting on any help from anywhere. (Rakitin 1992, 34) The “ironic” Tatlin conveys indirectly a disillusioned awareness of the futility of his innovation. To the Soviet press, “Pereat mundi, he says, fiat iustitia [may the world perish, but let there be justice]” (Davenport 1974, 6; 1997, 7). The story’s first words—the section title “Moscow 1932”—indicate that the exhibition is occurring on the eve of the most depraved phase of the Stalinist terror. Despite thirty years of toil, Tatlin’s glider was never launched. By reinforcing visually the rhyme on their names (a portrait of Tatlin is followed by three of Lenin and finally three of Stalin), Davenport undercores how tragically Tatlin is victimized by the revolution he anticipated and supported. Pound

Avant-garde excursions into politics recur in Davenport, who as a disciple of Ezra Pound was directly confronted with the dangers. Davenport was as inspired by Pound’s utopian ambition as he was repulsed by the ideology through which the poet sought to realize it. “I have tried to write Paradise,” Pound explains in a late fragment of The Cantos (Pound 1995, 822). Neither in Cities on Hills, his pioneering exegesis of A Draft of XXX Cantos, nor in his subsequent essays on Pound, nor in “Ithaka,” his memoir of a 1963 visit to Rapallo, does Davenport examine the poet’s Fascist beliefs in detail, despite numerous allusions to Fascism in his work. Davenport does, however, depict Pound’s relationship to Mussolini in a section of the story “C. Musonius Rufus,” published with “Ithaka” in Da Vinci’s Bicycle.6 Musonius is an even more obscure figure than Tatlin. In “The Dawn in Erewhon” van Hovendaal lectures on the Roman Stoic, “whose red beard and honest old eyes they began to see, a philosopher with a pickaxe and in chains, a man corresponding from his cell in Rome with the curious Apollonius of Tyana, teaching the young Epictetus a doctrine that was 84

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more sainthood than a practical course. Adriaan had described Nero, and drawn the parallels which no other age could understand so well” (Davenport 1974, 176). “C. Musonius Rufus” draws out these parallels. Like many of Davenport’s stories, “C. Musonius Rufus” conjoins several isolated narratives. Condemned by Nero to a chain gang digging a canal through the isthmus of Corinth, Musonius describes his persecution for having taught gender equality, the evils of Roman taxation, the barbarism and vice of Roman gentry, and the fictitiousness of official Roman history. He resembles another banished opponent of arbitrary power depicted in Da Vinci’s Bicycle, Victor Hugo, who in “John Charles Tapner” tours a Jersey prison to gather evidence in his campaign against capital punishment. The second narrator of “C. Musonius Rufus” is the Roman emperor Balbinus, who from an afterlife that is half-Beckettian inertia and half-Swedenborgian vastation recounts from a funerary urn his brief rule and the experience of eternity. The third narrator describes from a skeptical omniscience Mussolini’s motorcade through Rapallo. All three narrative strands thus include Italian autocrats and three forms of iconoclasm: the Stoicism of Musonius, the irreverence of Balbinus, and the Fascism of Pound. The Rapallo interlude manipulates the consonance Pound perceived between Musonius and himself. In the Pisan Cantos Pound invokes the philosopher with a pun on his first name Gaius: “Honor to the tough guy, Musonius” (Pound 1995, 458). In his obituary “Ezra Pound 1885–1972,” Davenport mentions the affinity his later story would amplify: Art is a matter of models; life is a matter of models. In St. Elizabeths he remembered C. Musonius Rufus, condemned first to a waterless Aegean island by Nero (he survived by discovering a spring for himself and his fellow prisoners) and finally to swinging a pickaxe in the chain gang that dug the canal across the isthmus of Corinth. (Davenport 1981b, 171) Davenport’s story describes these very incidents of Musonius’s captivity. Like the other lean, stalwart, and resourceful early philosophers who populate Davenport’s fiction (the story immediately precedes “The Wooden Dove of Archytas” in Da Vinci’s Bicycle), Musonius is an acerbic debunker of power. Among his pupils are cobblers, slave women, catamites, poets, and the poor. His teaching is practical: “To teach men what is in their power to control and what isn’t, so that they may cultivate their character To Write Paradise

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and make a garden of their soul” (Davenport 1979, 27). Banished by Nero for his part in the conspiracy of Piso (65 a.d.) and later recalled, Gaius Musonius Rufus (Davenport conceals the pun on his own first name) is cast among criminals and madmen. Like Archytas, he is ingenious and self-possessed; like Diogenes in “Mesoroposthonippidon” and Pyrrhon in “Pyrrhon of Elis,” he is contemptuous and indefatigable; like Herakleitos in Tatlin! he is sensitive to larger harmonies; like Sokrates, the Pythagorean refugees, and the members of the Theban Band in “The Daimon of Sokrates,” he is as ascetic as he is magnanimous. And like Tatlin, Musonius is an obscure historical figure silenced by tyranny (a few lecture notes recorded by a student make up his extant works). A charismatic and original thinker incarcerated among the deranged for denouncing the regime, Musonius indeed proves an attractive precursor both to a persecuted poet and to his defenders. “A sane man condemned to live among the insane,” Davenport writes of Pound. “Only a man with deep resources could have survived that ordeal” (Davenport 1981b, 171). “C. Musonius Rufus” is not, however, a whitewash of Pound. On the contrary, it summons the analogy at the poet’s expense, and like “Ithaka” and the dwarfed and depleted Pound of Davenport’s 1963 portrait, it deprives the poet not of dignity but of sympathy. In an essay on Da Vinci’s Bicycle, Robert A. Morace notes that “Ithaka” is “the only work in the collection in which the imagination fails to redeem the world or a character in it . . . ‘Ithaka’ presents little chance of any imaginative redemption because it contains so little imaginative reconstruction of historical reality; historical reality is reflected, not remade” (Morace 1980, 78). In his monograph on Davenport’s art Erik Reece describes the portrait of Pound: “His face is at once now truly tragic, and yet no longer a mask. It is the expression of fully felt pain, guilt, and naked unknowing. The one visible eye is an empty, dark void. This is a portrait of a man irreconcilably alone in the world” (Reece 1996, 51; full-color reproduction, 73). Davenport’s Pound is a fool, not a madman; an artistic genius, not a political visionary. The Rapallo episode is inserted between Musonius’s successful efforts to find a spring on a convict island, whereby he also finds his mature identity: “Discovery is always more than what you meant to find . . . I looked for water and found C. Musonius Rufus” (Davenport 1979, 32). Pound, meanwhile, is by implication in that saddest of his personae, the apologist for Fascism who imagines the realization of a seamless fusion of culture and power. The Fascists lining the Rapallo streets are contrary but parallel 86

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utopians to the Bolsheviks of “Tatlin!,” their slogans the inversion of the Marxist axioms which Tatlin would project from his monument. At sunset Mussolini visits his American apologist: —Why do you write poetry? he asked. —To put my ideas in order, Ezra Pound said. —Will you read us one of your poems? Ezra Pound read two pages from his Cantos. —Ma quest’, said Mussolini, è divertente! (Davenport 1979, 35) And to Pound this frivolous response was the vindication both of The Cantos and of his ideology: “MA QUESTO,” said the Boss, “è divertente!” Catching the point before the aesthetes had got there; (Pound 1995, 202) Thus Davenport quotes Pound quoting Mussolini in Canto 41, written a few years before World War II. The private setting reinforces the intimacy of what in fact was not a personal visit but a 1933 interview in Rome, Pound’s one meeting with Mussolini.7 Although Pound invoked Musonius to describe his appalling plight in the cage of Pisa’s detention camp and at the prison hospital in Washington, Davenport, who visited him at St. Elizabeths, places the poet in his contented Italian heyday, thus undermining any flattering associations between the poet and the Roman philosopher. The motorcade is presented not from Pound’s point of view but through “the sad eyes of Max Beerbohm” (Davenport 1979, 34), a much more wary expatriate resident of Rapallo. Davenport stresses not the terrible fate reserved for Pound by the American army, judiciary, and government, but his foolhardy collusion with a noxious regime. The American prosecution is not excused, but neither is Pound’s thinking. “C. Musonius Rufus” employs vorticist devices that honor the earlier experiments of the poet.8 In an interview Davenport explained: So we have three vectors—I was about to say three-ply but it’s not three plies, it’s three vectors—and they all cross somewhere in what seems to me that tragic encounter between Pound and Mussolini where I’m To Write Paradise

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certain Mussolini had no notion who Pound was, and made his statement that Pound honored so much, “ma quest’ è divertente!”—“But how amusing!” It’s the kind of compliment no artist deserves. Because men in authority don’t know what art is. (Alpert 1976, 7) The third vector in Davenport’s vortex is the emperor Balbinus, whose distinction is the ephemeral span of his rule: he was murdered at the beginning of his reign. Balbinus is the botched Roman commander fatally tempted to assume absolute power, and is thus cast into a Swedenborgian purgatory of childlike innocence where the imperial wraith merges with plants and animals before realizing himself as a dryad. Thus the claim to divinity asserted by emperors like Nero is comically debunked, for Balbinus’s lone imperial privilege in Avernus is “the necessary power to care for” some particular thing. It is his small triumph ultimately to care for the venerable oak in which he abides.9 Genies (the consiliarii) console him: “Accident, they said, is design” (Davenport 1979, 23).10 The Balbinus “vector” thus mocks power and undermines the megalomania of Nero and Mussolini. Forced to recognize the misguidedness of his worldly ambitions, Balbinus anticipates the fate of Pound upon his return from incarceration to Rapallo. Although dismayed to discover the disregard of the gods and the desolation of his earthly career, Balbinus savors one form of perpetuity: “Whatever I have for an eye it is never closed. Lids are flesh. The eye was spirit all along” (Davenport 1979, 12). “Ithaka” begins with Pound’s alert eyes: “There was, as Ezra Pound remarked, a mouse in the tree” (114). The story concludes by linking sight to silence: “—Addio! he used to say. Now, anguish in his eyes, he said nothing at all” (120). In Fascist Rapallo only the dismayed Beerbohm has “eyes”; Pound’s eyes, otherwise so sharp, are unmentioned. It is Musonius, not Pound, who sees—hence the pun on “see” in the initial in the story’s title. Pound’s eyes already resemble the gazeless black slits of Davenport’s painting. Kafka

Tatlin and Pound flounder in the attempt to unite aesthete and citizen. Franz Kafka, the sharp-eyed protagonist of four stories by Davenport, refuses the blandishments of both salon and assembly. He is a wary anatomist of power. In contrast to Tatlin and Pound, Kafka maintains an outsider status. Yet utopian yearning fascinates him. In “The Chair” 88

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Kafka joins for one evening the entourage of the leader of the Hasidim, but for all his interest Kafka cannot help but view the adherents as comically obsequious devotees of a vacant charismatic. In “The Messengers” Davenport describes Kafka’s sojourn at a natural therapy sanatorium, where, although therapists and patients urge their visions of redemption on him, deliverance is not in sight. When an evangelical Christian lectures Kafka on the biblical prophets and asserts that the spa’s regimen coincides with religious awakening, Kafka replies (in words closely translated from the original entry), “There is no prospect of grace for me” (Davenport 1996, 5–6). In “Belinda’s World Tour” Kafka is concerned to transform a mishap into an idyll, but it is strictly a literary refuge.11 Davenport rewrites a cycle of lost letters that Kafka purportedly addressed to a small girl in the guise of the doll she had lost.12 He explains to the disconsolate girl that “while you were not looking, she met a little boy her own age, perhaps a doll, perhaps a little boy, I couldn’t quite tell, who invited her to go with him around the world. But he was leaving immediately” (Davenport 1993, 15; 2003, 100). The doll Belinda sends the girl postcards from a world transformed into buoyant children’s fancies: they visit Hans Christian Andersen in Copenhagen, Paul Gauguin in Tahiti, and Robert Louis Stevenson in San Franscisco before the couple weds at Niagara Falls and settles on an Argentine ranch. The America they tour is still the paradise Europeans had once aspired to establish there: “We have seen utopias of Quakers and Shakers and Mennonites, who live just as they want to in this free country. There is no king, only a Congress which sits in Washington and couldn’t care less what the people do” (20; 104). The Kafka of Davenport’s stories is gentle yet aloof, and immune to the charisma of authority, be it embodied in a medical director (Dr. Schlaf in “The Messengers”), a mystical rabbi in “The Chair,” or the pioneering pilots of “The Aeroplanes at Brescia,” which immediately follows “Tatlin!” in Tatlin! 13 The flying machines over Brescia, like the remarks of the Rabbi of Belz and the curious signals he receives in “The Messengers,” are puzzles that induce Kafka to wonder how meanings attach to things. Images of flight predominate in Tatlin!, which ends with Neil Armstrong stepping onto “the dust of the moon” (Davenport 1974, 261). The rockets Tsiolkovsky theorizes in “Tatlin!” appear as Apollo spacecraft in “The Dawn in Erewhon;” the poultry in the philosopher’s yard in “Herakleitos” reappear in Tatlin’s filthy monastery tower, while his glider yields to the early airplanes of “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” and the Stuka bombers To Write Paradise

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of “Robot.” Such imagery is marshaled to illustrate the modern ontological crisis regarding the status of the human. Accelerated developments in computer technology and biochemistry have encouraged a renegotiation of the distinction between the organic and the mechanical. The Enlightenment conviction of an autonomous human subject, to which modern liberal democracies ascribe their legitimacy, has meanwhile been undermined as much by geneticists and Silicon Valley engineers as by Marxist sociology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, structuralist anthropology, and poststructuralist theory. In Tatlin! Davenport responds to these scientific debates and their implications. Whereas Tatlin’s glider never soars, the early planes of “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” successfully compete and become the prototypes for the fighter planes of World War I. Otto Brod tells his brother Max and their holiday companion Franz Kafka, “The next Wiedergeburt [i.e., Renaissance] will come from the engineers” (Davenport 1974, 53; 1997, 55; 2003, 114). The 1909 air show they attend is an exhibition of the utopian promise of technology: “This was the age of the bird man and of the magician of the machine” (64; 67; 123). Both “Tatlin!” and “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” celebrate the ingenuity, courage, and splendor of flight, both stories allude to Daedalus, and the names of both their protagonists conceal flight (“Franz Kafka, jackdaw” [Davenport 1974, 57; 1997, 60; 2003, 117]). And both saturate the exhilarating pioneering moment in the serum of disillusioned historical hindsight. Tatlin’s glider never lifts off, while the antic daredevil contraptions of Wright, Blériot, and Curtiss will rapidly mutate into banal passenger carriers and weapons delivery systems. Here is that oscillation between the romance and disenchantment of early flight that John Dos Passos sustains in the “Campers at Kitty Hawk” section of The Big Money. Faithful to Kafka’s wry account of the September 1909 air show (one of his earliest publications, appearing in the Prague newspaper Bohemia on September 28, 1909),14 Davenport’s third-person retelling is rapt, playful, and naive, inspired by the photography of Jacques-Henri Lartigue, whom Davenport evokes in “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier,” in which Wright and Blériot also appear. Lartigue photographed airplanes when he was scarcely older than manned flight itself.15 Like a Lartigue velodrome, Davenport’s description of the air show mingles boyish delight both in the new machines and in the Belle Époque they would help supplant. Amid all this glamor Kafka is estranged twofold, by Italy and by aviation, but this lends a giddy innocence rather than paralyzing angst to his 90

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reflections. Though Davenport makes no mention of the fact, Max Brod is using the excursion to Brescia from Riva at the other end of the Lago di Garda to stimulate Kafka’s flagging writing: Kafka’s article was inspired by an informal literary competition with Brod to keep journals and from them to draft and submit articles on the air show to a Prague newspaper. The stratagem succeeded. Not only did Kafka soon begin to write his first distinctive stories, but he perpetuated the diary he began in Brescia (see Brod 1963, 103–6). In late 1916 Kafka would set in Riva his story of the living dead, “The Hunter Gracchus,” several details of which Davenport incorporates into “The Aeroplanes at Brescia.” Over the lake, for instance, Kafka sees a premonition of Gracchus: “A sailboat passed, an ancient bearded hunter at the tiller” (57; 60; 117). In his biography Brod described Kafka as an enthusiast for technology: “with patience and inexhaustible curiosity” Kafka took an interest in “everything new, topical, mechanical, as for example, in the beginnings of film” (Brod 1963, 102–3). The brothers Brod are no different. To Kafka they are “modern men, wholly of the new age” (Davenport 1974, 56; 1997, 58; 2003, 116). Otto is familiar with contemporary physics while Max yearns for a Zionist utopia: “Max dreamed of a Jewish state, irrigated, green, electrical, wise” (57; 59; 117). Their imaginary Amerika anticipates the genial pastiche of Kafka’s later book of that name.16 Over the narrative, however, hovers Kafka’s premonition of retribution: “This new thought was naked and innocent; the world would wound it in time” (57; 59; 117). “All of Kafka,” Davenport notes in “The Hunter Gracchus,” “is about history that had not yet happened” (Davenport 1996b, 9; 2003, 79). Kafka notices at the air show “a crane of a man” with an intense gaze, gripping a seemingly pained wrist, whom a reporter eventually identifies as Ludwig Wittgenstein.17 An unattested spectator among the approximately fifty thousand who attended the air show, Wittgenstein was then studying aeronautics at the University of Manchester. In 1911 he would patent a design for an improved propeller (see Monk 1991, 28–35). In Davenport’s story Wittgenstein, however, conveys an anguished prescience regarding the false technological utopia ushered in by the aviators. Wittgenstein and Kafka join the bachelor notemakers so prevalent in the work of the bachelor notemaker Davenport. Secular Habsburg Jews on the fringes of domineering families, both men were highly ambivalent about publishing and, following premature deaths from disease, left a large body of unpublished writings containing much of their most celebrated work. The calculated obscurity of their contemporary reputations To Write Paradise

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is in the starkest inverse ratio to their posthumous fame. The prose of each writer combines exacting clarity, compression, and detachment with the most riddling content. The world’s opacity is for each a given, and language a limited and treacherous means to penetrate it. “The world was to him an absolute puzzle, a great lump of opaque pig-iron,” Davenport says in “Wittgenstein.” “Can we think about the lump? What is thought?” (Davenport 1981b, 332). In “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” the Italian town becomes Kafka’s microcosm of the same puzzle. At Brescia Kafka and Wittgenstein are witnesses to epochal events the repercussions of which they can sense but not yet articulate. Kafka would later write a parable of mechanized brutality, “In the Penal Colony.” Wittgenstein would remain skeptical about many aspects of modern technology, especially regarding the possibility of machine intelligence. In “The Dawn in Erewhon” (published with “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” in Tatlin! ), van Hovendaal recalls discussing with Allan Turing the mathematician’s debates with Wittgenstein. The philosopher had challenged Turing’s technological optimism. Davenport depicts Turing as a slightly daft innocent, more foolish than the youthful cyclist he drew in pen and ink to illustrate Hugh Kenner’s The Counterfeiters (see Kenner 1973, illustration 7). His fate (prosecuted under the same law used to convict Oscar Wilde) meanwhile makes him the tragic foil to van Hovendaal (as well as a reminder of the grounds for Wittgenstein’s reticence about his own homosexuality). Turing proves no more rewarding on the subject of artificial intelligence than on Wittgenstein: Did Turing foresee a serious cybernetic problem with the advanced computers, something along the lines of the popular jokes? —Quite! Were the computers in any way analogous to even the simplest brain? —Quite. Most certainly. But weren’t computers merely models of the processes of thought, and of very few of these? —Quite! (Davenport 1974, 228) Told that both his shoelaces are untied, Turing slowly understands, but then ties only one while explaining that “the philosopher chap” was “quite mad, don’t you know!” (Davenport 1974, 228). So speaks “the one man Wittgenstein thought might understand him” (228). 92

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Wittgenstein appears in “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” as an engineer scrupulously observing an early phase in the conflict later restated in reference to artificial intelligence. Having opposed Cartesian mind-body metaphysics, Wittgenstein mounted one of the most strenuous challenges to the materialist and computationalist doctrines which displaced it. He resembled a reactionary specieist who contends in favor of the intrinsic uniqueness of man. The philosopher consequently plays an iconic corrective role in Tatlin!, which is a book both fascinated and repelled by autokinetic contraptions and centaurlike unions of man and machine. “The point of view I take is the point of view of Diogenes,” Davenport said in the Paris Review interview, “which is that when a man owns a lion, a lion owns a man. The thing about technology is that it owns us” (Sullivan 2002, 65). Marjorie Perloff argues in Wittgenstein’s Ladder that Davenport’s story is a parable about the avant-garde art of Mitteleuropa in the pre–World War I years, an art in love with the technology that was soon to destroy it. The air show, for that matter, takes place on what was soon to be Fascist ground and hence off-limits for both Wittgenstein and Kafka. No doubt it is ironies like these that have made the figure of Wittgenstein so appealing to writers such as Davenport. (Perloff 1996, 6) Further, both men are meditating the themes which, within a few years, will lead them to write books no less epochal than Blériot’s and Curtiss’s airplanes, equally modern but cautionary and anxious where the aviators are audacious and euphoric. The story fluctuates between festive exuberance and an undertone of nameless dread. Davenport gets flight into almost every sentence, from Kafka’s “flaring coat” and “a circle of pigeons” to an Austrian flag “with its black, two-headed eagle” that “rippled” (Davenport 1974, 52; 1997, 54; 2003, 113). Kafka meanwhile both converses cheerfully on the quality of Italian light and broods on a castle seen en route to Lago di Garda from Prague: “the schloss at Meran that had disturbed him not only for being vacant and blind in its casements but also because of the suspicion that it would inevitably return in his most anxious dreams” (52; 54; 113). The story implies that das Schloss, where years later Ezra Pound would reside following his release from a Kafkaesque thirteen-year Prozess, will furnish inspiration for The Castle.18 To Write Paradise

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In the ballooning dolls of “Belinda’s World Tour” Davenport restates in benign form one of the principal themes of “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” (and of Tatlin! generally), the evaporating distinction between human being and machine. Kafka is appropriately reminded of Pinocchio. The title of Davenport’s book-length poem Flowers and Leaves, while punning in the fashion of Whitman and William Morris on the textual connotations of the botanical terms, also conceals just such a yoking of organism and automaton toward utopian ends. As he indicated to bibliographer Joan Crane, the title, beyond evoking the bucolic element of the poem, also quotes Charles Babbage, “whose computer (the Analytical Engine which he and Augusta [Lovelace, Byron’s daughter] built of brass and walnut, now in the South Kensington Museum) was to ‘weave algebra as the Jacquard looms weave flowers and leaves’” (Crane 1996, 115).19 In his 1912 “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,” Filippo Marinetti, whom Kafka fancies he sees at the air show, exclaims that the perspective from the cockpit renders obsolete our inherited modes of expression. In the airplane Marinetti divines l’ immaginazione senza fili: a “wireless imagination” freely broadcasting the irreverent signals of “emancipated words” (parole in libertà), syntax freed of predication and punctuation, metaphor freed of first terms, discourse freed of the ego. The dissolving distinction between organism and mechanism futurism hails is a principle theme of Tatlin! but is treated with foreboding, particularly in “The Aeroplanes at Brescia.” Like the Letatlin glider, Blériot’s Antoinette 25 CV is described in organic terms as a “yellow dragonfly of waxed wood, stretched canvas, and wires” (Davenport 1974, 64; 1997, 67; 2003, 123), but this is scant comfort to Kafka: It was not after all a machine for the grave Leonardo, his white beard streaming over his shoulder, his mind on Pythagoras and on teaching Cesare Borgia to fly. It was rather the very contraption for Pinocchio to extend the scope of his mischief. A random wizard would have built it, an old Dottore Civeta of an artificer who had not been heard from by his friends since graduation from Bologna. He would have built it as Gepetto carved Pinocchio, because the image was latent in the material, and would not have known what to do with it, being too arthritic to try it himself. The fox and the cat would have stolen it, being incapable of not stealing it, and enticed Pinocchio into it, to see what trouble would come of it. (Davenport 1974, 68; 1997, 71; 2003, 126) 94

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Pinocchio is a machine that wants to become a human being; Blériot is a human being who, like the Futurists, wants to become, or at least merge with, a machine. Tatlin fails in this ambition, the more pragmatic Blériot (who like Curtiss became a prosperous airplane manufacturer) succeeds. The implications are for Davenport not reassuring. Automation will rapidly replace romantic human daring and versatility with the monotonous custodial precision of the technician. In “What Are Revolutions?” Davenport admonishes Americans to rethink their relationship to modern technology, the bête noire of which is not the plane but the automobile: The strangest revolution of our century is this perverse and invisible evolution of the human body into the automobile . . . When we wake up from our myths we will discover that we Americans do not live in Jefferson’s republic but in a technological tyranny the like of which has yet to be described by political scientists, who have slept through it all. (Davenport 1996b, 239) Davenport’s Kafka can brave a smile at the Pinocchio capers of modernity and admire its genius, but he cannot join the constructivists and the futurists to affirm its utopian promise. In a story about flight in countless guises, Kafka remains earthbound. He never enjoys what de Certeau calls “the exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive” that elevation delivers: “this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more” (de Certeau 1984, 92).20 Davenport does not satisfy this lust: the aviators’ perspective is withheld. Kafka and the reader leave Brescia by the packed train that carried him there from Salò. Boarding, he stares at a plane and Max asks him why he has tears in his eyes. The reply ends the story: “I don’t know, Kafka said. I don’t know” (Davenport 1974, 70; 1997, 74; 2003, 128). Kafka’s article does not mention tears (Davenport borrows them from Proust’s account of first seeing an airplane), but the tears seem to mingle both wonder and apprehension at the applications of this flying Golem. A few years later, while Blériot manufactured fighter biplanes and Wittgenstein drafted the Tractatus in a trench, Kafka set in Riva his Coleridgean fable of death-in-life, “The Hunter Gracchus.” “Kafka,” Davenport writes in a Harper’s review of Michael Hoffmann’s translation of Amerika, “was an innovator, a pioneer into the sensibility required for a century of machines, fanatical politics, and one war after another” (Davenport 2002e, 86).21 To Write Paradise

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Naturheilkunde

In Davenport’s fiction Kafka acts as an authorial alter ego, intrigued by idealistic projects in which he is constitutionally averse to enlist himself. In “The Messengers” Davenport again traces with comic pathos Kafka’s incongruous interest in utopian schemes. Derived from July 1912 entries in a travel diary, the story relates Kafka’s stay at a Naturheilkunde (natural therapy) sanatorium at Jungborn in the Harz Mountains. He tries to observe the nudist spa’s regimen of sunbathing and avoidance of fruit, modern clothing, moonlight, and pessimism. The patients await “an awakening of the soul from doubt and sloth” (Davenport 1996, 5–6; 2003, 108), but Kafka keeps his bathing trunks on. He is inundated with signs and wonders: the sanatorium physician promises secular redemption through heliotherapy; a Christian tries to convert him; a pair of Swedish youths flirt with him; young women play a practical joke; in a dream two teams of nudists trade enigmatic insults and brawl; a lar or household god appears in his cabin. “Everyone, Kafka smiled, seems to have a message for me” (4; 107). The point of departure is an entry in Kafka’s so-called “Blue Notebook,” which Davenport paraphrases in the story and quotes in his essay “The Hunter Gracchus”: “They were given the choice of becoming kings or the king’s messengers. As is the way with children, they all wanted to be messengers. That is why there are only messengers, racing through the world and, since there are no kings, calling out to each other the messages that have now become meaningless” (Davenport 1996b, 7; 2003, 77). Davenport calls this a “perfect image” and notes: “All messages in Kafka are incoherent, misleading, enigmatic” (7; 77). The messages of Davenport’s story are correspondingly incoherent, misleading, enigmatic. The lar is no more helpful than the troll in Davenport’s earlier story “Mr. Churchyard and the Troll,” who rewards Kierkegaard’s leap of faith by singing a nonsensical jig in a voice having “something of the bee in it” (Davenport 1993, 101; 2003, 175). The lar (named Beeswax) proves a disappointing medium of supernatural truth, disclosing little beyond an answer to Kafka’s question about what the crickets are singing: “Some are saying yes and some are saying no. Their language has only those two words” (Davenport 1996, 10; 2003, 112). The most uncanny message Kafka receives is a dream Davenport derives from the July 15, 1912, entry in the Jungborn diary. In it two naked groups begin to brawl after exchanging the seeming insult “Lustron and Kastron!” (Davenport 1996, 6; 2003, 109). His Kafka puzzles over its message: 96

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Latin endings rather than Greek would make the words into castrum, a castle, and lustrum, a cleansing. Pollux, pollutum, a defiling. Clean and filthy: antitheses. When antithetical particles in the atomic theory collide, they annihilate each other. (7; 109) The opposed meanings of the dream extend to include Kafka’s contradictory character, the coming annihilation of the European Jews, and conflicting sexual impulses. “Dirty and clean, tref and kosher, motivated Kafka’s dream,” Davenport explains in “The Hunter Gracchus.” “The insult was that one group of nudists were both. Kafka was a nudist who wore bathing drawers, a nonobservant Jew, a Czech who wrote in German, a man who was habitually engaged to be married and died a bachelor” (Davenport 1996b, 12; 2003, 81). Though the cabin is the most congenial “home” he has occupied (and home predominates as a theme in The Cardiff Team, which collection this story opens), Kafka is ill at ease among the enigmatic signs. Surrounded by naked heliotherapeuts, he detects in the gentlest sunlight an inferno: Light in a copse of small trees, softened by leaves, could not be suspected of having come from the raging furnace of the sun. And why is the hospitality of the one inhabited planet so consistently inadequate? The terror of God and his angels has grown remote over the years, but like the sun it is still there, raging. (Davenport 1996, 9; 2003, 111) In his diary Kafka dubs the handsome Swedish nudists Castor and Pollux, “whose names,” Davenport’s essay notes, “strangely mean Clean and Dirty (our chaste and polluted )” (Davenport 1996b, 12; 2003, 81). In the story, Kafka compares them to incognito angels: “It was a strategy of the sacred to appear in disguise, like Tobias’s angel, a prosperous kinsman” (Davenport 1996, 5; 2003, 108). They “smiled as sweetly as angels” (6; 109). Davenport gives them the names Jeremias and Barnabas, the latter an important character in The Castle, where he identifies himself to K. as a messenger and has a reassuring angelic aura. Davenport omits the flirtatious exchanges the diary recounts but emphasizes the sexual attraction of “the Swedish godlings”: 22 “Their long foreskins puckered at the tip. Their pubic hair was a tawny orange. Their rumps were dimpled just back of the hip, as if to indicate that their long legs were well socketed. They were as comely, slender, and graceful as deer” (Davenport 1996, 5; 2003, 108). For all his attraction—or rather because of it—Kafka links the pair to the To Write Paradise

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dream, and what follows in Davenport’s story is a nightmare of biblical conflagration and a meditation on Sodom: The angels who came were two. The message they brought is unrecorded. They only said that they preferred to spend the night in the street. They were antithetical beings annihilating a city. Like longlegged Jeremias and Barnabas they had perhaps forgotten the message they had so carefully memorized, or lost it on the way, having set out like children . . . (10; 111) The liberal mores of German Freikörperkultur, which the Swedish nudists and other adherents of Naturheilkunde follow, will soon be eradicated, its adherents—especially its gay ones—persecuted, by those most monstrous of utopians, the Nazis, killers of Kafka’s own family. With a subtle appreciation of the comic genius that inflected Kafka’s despair, Davenport locates in Kafka’s sexual ambivalence a peculiarly damaging, because unstated, handicap. “The Chair” recounts Kafka’s fascination with a much more traditional utopian ideal, that of mystical Judaism. The story retraces a mid-July 1916 letter to Max Brod from Marienbad, recounting an evening passed among the followers of the Hasidim leader, the Rabbi of Belz.23 Davenport omits the epistolary frame, and makes no allusion to Kafka’s reengagement to Felice Bauer, who had just left Marienbad.24 Instead he stresses Kafka’s isolation and detachment. Combining sincere interest with comic irony, the nonobservant Jew views the Hasidim as a servile fellowship, its members frantic to satisfy the rabbi’s whims and to interpret the rabbi’s every utterence as an oracle. The rabbi’s remarks are portentously delivered, and painstakingly recorded, banalities. These remarks will be studied, later. They will question him about them. The Rebbe means great things by remarks which seem at first to be casual. He asks questions which are traps for their ignorance. The entourage does not always read his gestures correctly. If he has put into words what he means by an open hand, or raised eyes, or an abrupt halt, he will add a reprimand. (Davenport 1984, 56; 1997, 160; 2003, 130) As the original letter to Brod confirms, Kafka remained dubious about the import of his remarks. “I think the deeper meaning is that there is none and in my opinion this is quite enough.” He characterized the Rabbi of 98

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Belz’s “inconsequential comments” as “perhaps somewhat more childish and more joyous” than those of the itinerant royalty he otherwise resembled (Kafka 1971, 122). In the essay “The Hunter Gracchus,” Davenport notes that “like Kierkegaard he [Kafka] saw the absurdity of life as the most meaningful clue to its elusive vitality” (Davenport 1996b, 18; 2003, 85). In the comical rabbi’s procession in “The Chair” valuable clues to that vitality are gathered. The childish and joyous attributes Kafka described to Brod in his letter are isolated for admiration in the story when the rabbi enters an orchard. “O the goodness of the Master of the Universe, he says, to have created apples and pears” (Davenport 1984, 59; 1997, 164; 2003, 132). “The Chair” was first published in book form in Apples and Pears, where the fruits’ twinned iconography of loss and redemption, discord and harmony, controls an elaborate network of symbols.25 In the orchard Kafka is arrested by the incongruity of the rabbi’s hoisted chair among trees, “for its pattern of flowers and leaves looks tawdry and artificial and seriously out of place against the green and rustling leaves of apple and pear trees” (59; 164; 132). Kafka suppresses his aperçu, which indeed does not appear in his original letter but is Davenport’s interpolation. “Instead, he prays” (59; 164; 133). The story concludes with Kafka’s prayer, recorded in a July 20, 1916, diary entry, and freely adapted by Davenport. Kafka begs God for mercy, apologizes for squandering his talent, and appeals for salvation: “Don’t thrust me among the lost” (Kafka 1986, 370).26 The story ends: It is absurd, I know, for one insignificant creature to cry that it is alive, and does not want to be hurled into the dark along with the lost. It is the life in me that speaks, not me, though I speak with it, selfishly, in its ridiculous longing to stay alive, and partake of its presumptuous joy of being. (59; 164; 133) The last phrase is Davenport’s interpolation, and in a sense introduces the next and title story of Apples and Pears, in which Adriaan van Hovendaal and his cohorts partake of the self’s presumptuous joy of being beyond those social, historical, and religious constraints which fetter Kafka. For Davenport’s Tatlin, Pound, Musonius, the early aviators, Wittgenstein, and Kafka, everything might have been otherwise. For Davenport’s imaginary utopians, everything might yet be so.

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no where now here no where now here Ronald Johnson, Ark, 69

I once squared the circle in a dream. (letter to James Laughlin, October 24, 1992)

5. Everything Could Be Otherwise Erewhon

After the thwarted political, technological, and aesthetic utopias that Tatlin! and Apples and Pears describe, their culminating narratives imagine a sustained contemporary bid for Eden. In both “The Dawn in Erewhon” and “Apples and Pears,” Adriaan van Hovendaal faces the crisis of modernity that the preceding archival narratives evoke and overcomes it.1 The books are dialectical constructions of documentary and dream. Bernard Hoepffner writes: One could divide Davenport’s works into two parts, those which are retrospective, involving historical characters, the “necessary fictions” which reconstruct a time completed with the aid of such traces as it has left, and those set in the present-future, a utopia established on an open education which would leave nature to act in its own way that it might cease to take vengeance on mankind. But such a division functions only on the surface, for the needs of analysis; if the author had wanted these two parts to be understood as two distinct elements, why has he taken a malicious pleasure in overlapping the one upon the other in his narratives? (Hoepffner 1998, 86) 2 In Davenport the conjunction of history and utopia contextualizes and limits the latter. While the historical stories do not require the utopian ones, the utopian stories which conclude several of his collections depend 100

on the historical ones that precede them. He thus situates limitless possibility within historical limitation. The utopian stories are imaginative responses to the unrealized aspirations described in the archival ones, optative constructions with which to affront the present. In the Blakean terms Davenport readily employed, especially in the mid-1960s when he first began to write the van Hovendaal “sketchbooks,” his projectors are inhabitants not of prudent Ulro but of Golgonooza.3 He explained to Jonathan Williams in an April 25, 1965, letter: Golgonooza is the imagination, the combined efforts of the poets and prophets to make a replica of the lost city of Jerusalem. It is being built beyond the lakes of Udan Adan, the molecular world, in the state of Entuthon Benython, or within the cosmic limit of the flesh. Very ancient idea of Father Blake’s: that human creation is a replica of a reality within the heart (up in the stars, said the Mesopotamian folk). Throughout the Good Book we hear of the real Jerusalem available to the prophetic heart, and of the ersatz Jerusalem here on earth, strumpet and faithless. (Davenport and Williams 2004, 103) 4 In “The Dawn in Erewhon”(published in Tatlin! ) Hovendaal reverses within his small sphere the most inimical consequences of the Industrial Revolution on the ersatz Jerusalem. He has neither a driver’s license nor a television set; he sleeps on an army cot, swims in the North Sea, and constructs his own furniture. Yet for all his Pythagorean abhorrence of moral and intellectual disorder, he possesses an Epicurean respect for pleasure. A cerebral and deliberate man, he disparages the mind and exalts the primitive and the spontaneous. This solitary and reserved academic is equally a sensualist who permits the invasion of anarchic profligates into his tidy contemplative life. With them he manages to reconcile order to license and inhabit the isthmus of a not-nearly middle state of utopian fellowship. An imaginary self-portrait? The poet Ronald Johnson, who dedicated the third part of his triptych Ark to Davenport, does not hesitate to identify Adriaan with his creator: “Tatlin! is the newest book of the Gardener/Philosopher van Hovendaal. Time and space are considered with all their rhymes and forms as a slipknot” (Johnson 1976, 44). Van Hovendaal rhymes with Davenport rather than reproduces him. Erewhon is of course the utopian polity of Samuel Butler’s eponymous satire, while the rest of the title alludes to Charles Doughty’s epic The Dawn in Britain. Wyndham Lewis, not Davenport, made the conjunction Everything Could Be Otherwise

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in his painting The Dawn in Erewhon. From Butler Davenport borrows his theme of an antitechnological revolution, from Doughty an artificial diction, and from Lewis a vorticist arrangement of materials. In Cities on Hills Davenport argues that in vorticism “the artist’s material is the turn of events, and . . . the standpoint of the artist is at the unmoving center of the vortex of things, within the eye of the cyclone, calm and speculative while all else whirls” (Davenport 1983, 93). Adriaan in a sense assumes this posture from within a story itself constructed along vorticist vectors. The idea around which revolve the subjects of “The Dawn in Erewhon,” as of Tatlin! in general, is stated by Davenport in “Ernst Machs Max Ernst”: “the logos hides in technology in our time” (Davenport 1981b, 378). He describes Tatlin! as posing the question, “is matter alive or dead?” (380). Atomic physics affirms that all matter is alive in an Ovidian cosmos of perpetual metamorphosis. So what defines a human being as distinct from the machines that serve, confound, and complete us? The contention in Erewhon concerns whether machines constitute an evolving espèce manquée that would usurp the human species. “Someday we shall understand again the cooperation of being with nonbeing,” Adriaan jots in what he calls his Erewhonisch Schetsboek (Davenport 1974, 200). Tatlin’s glider, Blériot’s airplane, even the Lascaux pigments and the book Herakleitos offers to Artemis, are attempts to achieve and harness such cooperation. Adriaan alone among the modern characters of Tatlin! appears to succeed, but only by an arduous and risky recovery of a living archaic principle. Although a Dutch intellectual as at home in classical as in modern continental culture, Hovendaal is really an isolate, self-reliant maverick out of American romance. Much of the satire in Butler’s Erewhon functions by comic reversal and exaggeration. The account of civil war waged over the status of machinery, which Butler wrote first and published in various forms before incorporation into the book, was initially a reductio ad absurdum of The Origin of Species. Davenport, however, understands Butler to have combined a Darwinian joke with a prophetic warning of the hazards of technology. “But who can say that the vapour engine has not a kind of consciousness?” asks the author of the prophetic “Book of the Machines” in Erewhon. “Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who can draw the line? Who can draw any line? Is not everything interwoven with everything? Is not machinery linked with animal life in an infinite variety of ways?” (Butler 1927, 224). Butler asked these questions while Charles Babbage was constructing his brass and walnut prototype of the computer. Now computer 102

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scientists are trying to simulate natural selection to “evolve” adaptive algorithms, while other scientists are growing nerve cells on microchips. Davenport agrees that machines develop like menacingly accelerated organisms, altering human character and destiny. After a devastating civil war Erewhon eliminates all technologies less than 271 years old. “And they were free,” Davenport writes in “What Are Revolutions?” “When we Americans wake up, we will see that we are an Erewhon that did not have a revolution that killed the machines” (Davenport 1996b, 241). As Adriaan enters into fellowship with the prelapsarian youths Bruno and Kaatje, the narrative interpolates incidents from the philosopher’s past, excerpts from his notebook, and passages from his retelling of Erewhon, “Higgs Reizen in Erewhonland.” These rewrite Butler to introduce Fourierist motifs and to stress the predations of technology. Erewhon remains an awry eugenic despotism, but the body is here still understood to contain a soul, its movement and occasions restored to organic beauty and strength by its rescue from subordination to the machine. The philosopher Mondhoek (his name incorporating one of the novella’s numerous lunar allusions) explains to Higgs the contrast with Erewhon’s former subjection: “We had no life to speak of. Our machines did our living for us” (Davenport 1974, 156). Thus the civil war to eradicate machinery. Cars are now exhibited at the museum. Mocked in Butler but redeemed here, the Erewhonian professors explain that “the essence of being an Erewhonian is to believe in the reversibility of history” (Davenport 1974, 222). Neither Davenport nor Adriaan can become Erewhonians in this sense. “Technology is our glory,” Davenport concedes in “What Are Revolutions?” “We cannot, we do not want to turn back” (Davenport 1996b, 243). Time, however, can be collapsed or layered, and the archaic restored, as the modernist experiments in syncretic forms suggest. “All time is still one history,” Adriaan insists (Davenport 1974, 232). The informing historical epoch of “The Dawn in Erewhon” is the archaic. Adriaan writes on the pre-Socratics, translates Homer, and experiences his sexual emancipation while in Greece. “Thought is forever archaic,” he writes in a notebook (185). “Philosophy is archaic thought,” he teaches (149). Orpheus

Davenport draws character from myth. “Like, the constant analogy” (Davenport 1974, 257). Adriaan becomes an Orpheus, “who could speak to Everything Could Be Otherwise

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things” and who is “the first vision of the philosopher” (185). Linked to the worship of Dionysus, and a source for the Pythagorean sodality, the cult of Orpheus conjoins reverence for the tangible goodness of the world with the need to organize into speculative groups and investigate the world sub specie aeternitatis. In Davenport’s elaborate schemes of imagery, Orpheus is an allomorph, mutating into Dionysus, into the primordial manifestation of civilization, and into Pythagoras and Poe, just as Eurydice becomes Kaatje via Persephone. “The man who finds what is easiest lost is the age’s poet, the Orphic Noah who understands what to save, the searcher for that elusive girlish spirit which is the time’s Persephone” (258). Robert L. Caserio notes the parallel to Davenport’s own aims: “Mr. Davenport himself earnestly searches out what is easiest lost, to send it forward, preserved and renewed” (Caserio 1976, 61). The protagonists of Tatlin! are all Orphic avatars, sharing a genius for divining ancient springs. Often the movement in Tatlin! is a descent or entry: Abbé Brueil descending into a cave to retrieve a Eurydice of Magdalenian art, Herakleitos entering an ancient temple to make a votive offering of his own doctrines, Poe entering a dark mansion out of the HadesPetersburg of Mandelstam’s “We Shall Die in Transparent Petropolis,” “where Prosperina rules over us” and “every hour is the anniversary of our death” (Mandelstam 1991, 26). In “II Timothy” Davenport describes the “essentially religious” theme of “1830” as “Poe’s spiritual discovery that he was an Orpheus in the nineteenth century” (Davenport 1996b, 71). Even Kafka descends from Prague to Riva and further south to Brescia. In fugal countertheme, the Daedalian artificers Tatlin and Blériot would ascend to effect the same retrieval. Donald Byrd notes of Davenport’s Orpheus that “his descent is an attempt to recover the lost cultural past without which public life is a frightening and futile trial,” and that the stories preceding “The Dawn in Erewhon” in Tatlin! “record case after case of Orphic coitus interruptus” (Byrd 1976, 74). The triumph of the early aviators at Brescia proves a Pyrrhic victory, the machines belonging finally to the king of the underworld. The Stukas drone over the Vézère of “Robot,” at the end of which the Lascaux caves are converted into a Resistance arsenal. Orpheus’s descent is an attempt to recover the abducted Persephone, and in “The Dawn in Erewhon” Kaatje is the first detailed appearance in Davenport of such a figure. In “The Symbol of the Archaic,” written around the time of the novella’s composition, Persephone is an archetype persist104

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ing in Poe’s Ligeia, Carroll’s Alice, Pater’s Gioconda, Proust’s Odette, and Joyce’s Anna Livia: “In an age when the human spirit is depressed and constrained, this symbol of the soul is a depiction of Persephone or Eurydice in Hades. In a euphoric or confident time, she is above-ground: a Beatrice, an Aphrodite” (Davenport 1981b, 25). As in most of Persephone’s recurrences in Davenport, Kaatje is a sketchy, unconvincing figure, whose most important role seems to be in bringing the men together. The story introduces so few details of Kaatje’s background that the oblique mythic attribution lacks explanatory force. No Pluto seizes her, no Orpheus descends to redeem her from a Dutch Dis. Indeed, Kaatje collects Adriaan at a swimming pool (an artificial paradise soon after substituted for shores). Still a teen when they meet in 1953, she disturbs his spartan regimen with a frank and vital sexuality that restores the body’s primacy in Adriaan’s aetiolated intellectual nature. (Like Poe in “1830” he initially conceals his identity, claiming only to be a gardener—the meaning of the Dutch hovendaal.) Adriaan even at times seems to borrow the persona of Pluto (Davenport 1974, 183–84), acting the part of an elderly lord over his vibrant young consort, like the aged husband in Eudora Welty’s “Livvie,” whose young wife, like Kaatje, becomes involved with a young man.5 In “The Dawn in Erewhon” the young man is Bruno, a student of Adriaan’s. Overcoming his jealousy and confusion, Adriaan enters into a ménage à trois with Bruno and Kaatje, achieving an “Arkadisch” resolution of his complex sexuality (187).6 Although Adriaan is an intellectual Orpheus retrieving from oblivion an archival Eurydice, Kaatje retrieves the body without which the archaic is merely a pedantic legacy. Perhaps more accurately, Davenport himself is the Orpheus who recovers the latent cultural and organic energies manifested by these two. For Davenport, Orpheus “is one archaic ghost we have revived and put to work, bringing us out of the sterile dark” (quoted in Reece 1996, 46). Adriaan meanwhile remains an elusive figure, little of whose life is related in any of the four stories in which he appears. He perceives and writes more than he acts, possesses a rich library rather than a rich personal history, and his few relationships are primarily erotic. Eros, however, is linked here, as elsewhere in Davenport, to intellect. “ ‘The Dawn in Erewhon’ envisages, if not a restoration of this primal unity of being, at least a harmonious relationship of intellect and instinct in which body is not bruised to pleasure soul,” writes Hugh Witemeyer. “I know of no story which bears out so fully as this one does Rémy de Gourmont’s suggesEverything Could Be Otherwise

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tion, quoted with zest by Pound, that there may be ‘a certain correlation between complete and profound copulation and the development of the brain’” (Witemeyer 1976, 60). “The Dawn in Erewhon” (and with it Tatlin! ) ends with Neil Armstrong stepping onto the lunar surface. The Pythagoreans, as Davenport explains in “Ernst Machs Max Ernst,” located Hades on the moon—one reason why the satellite appears so frequently in the book. Now a machine-hurled Orpheus has reached his sterile Eurydice there. The demythologization of Selené is complete, or rather converted into a new myth of technological ascendancy. Adriaan, however, is looking in the other direction, toward antiquity and communities liberated from a disabling dependence on machines. In Orpheus Preaching to the Animals (reproduced in Reece 1996, plate 11), one of his largest and most ambitious paintings, Davenport depicts the singer, accompanied by Eurydice, hailing the animals, including a young adult male. The canvas is a shimmering meshwork of intersecting lines, overlapping colors, and arresting conjunctions: word and image, abstraction and figuration, wave and cube, animal and human being, prehistory and present (a Magdalenian overlay of beasts beside men sporting modern haircuts), earth and water (a fish swims above a bounding hare), plant and animal, myth and the everyday (Orpheus is both a giant and a contemporary youth). Part merges into whole, frequencies into forms, tonal variations into pattern. The techniques of Picasso’s monochromatic Guernica have been adapted to the bright pigments of Mondrian and to the schematic organicism of Klee’s Streifenbilder (strip-pictures). The cursive quotation across it meanwhile echoes the slogans on constructivist and cubist canvases. From Guernica Davenport has removed the tragic, as Mondrian scrupulously omitted it from his works to reveal universal harmonies. The simultaneity of organic forms emerging one from the other (the youth’s penis is also the tongue of his dog, which shares a leg with a cougar) proclaims universal complementarity and the Spinozan deus sive natura, nature divinized and the divine naturalized, in an intuitive vision of the individual reconciled to the universal. The music of Orpheus’s utterance reverberates across the canvas in polychromatic waves to declare the interdependence of all life. Reece comments: “It looks more for the rhymes, the ‘harmonies’ between disparate objects and modes of representation, than for a linear logic” (Reece 1996, 46). Orpheus Preaching to the Animals thus answers the question posed in Rilke’s third “Sonnet to Orpheus,” how a mortal, of divided heart, can 106

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follow the god “through his slender lyre” toward being, associated with a Eurydicean Mädchen: “Song is being. For the god an easy thing. / But when are we?” (Rilke 1966, 137).7 We are when we proceed through the body, through reintegration with nature, through an intuited prerational vision of totality. Orpheus raises a hearkening right hand, directing the human animal toward the most archaic element in Davenport’s painting, the almost Cycladic Eurydice beside the god. She appears to support an infant in her lap. She is the force the youth must summon, the spirit who in Rilke “slept the world” and bestowed “every wonder that struck myself”; she is a vitality still unreclaimed from death (136).8 Fourier

Adriaan finds in Fourier the most cherished avatar of Orpheus. Along the fifty-five-inch top of Davenport’s acrylic canvas runs the phrase, “Hommage à Fourier,” reinforced by a quotation from his epitaph: “La série distribue les harmonies. Les attractions sont proportionelles aux destinées.” (In “Apples and Pears,” the sequel to “The Dawn in Erewhon,” this is translated as: “The series distributes the harmonies. The attractions are proportionate to our destinies” [Davenport 1984, 200].) 9 For Davenport, Fourier’s work is a Eurydice languishing in a Hades of neglect. A trunk of his unpublished writings is quite literally drawn out of the “sterile dark” into the light of publication at the end of “The Dawn in Erewhon”: “The French had discovered boxes and boxes of Fourier’s papers. At last the world could read the only philosopher of happiness” (260). Davenport’s description of Fourier’s grave in the uncollected poem “37, avenue Samson, Cimitière Montmartre” fluctuates between the sense of a squandered and a merely dormant utopian legacy: Nigh mad Nijinski’s wanton bones, Slant among these cornered stones, In dust of roses, buttons, cloth, Promised kingdom of rust and moth, Circle and parabola stand, Ellipse and hyperbola and, Splendid within that tetragraph, The old accountant’s epitaph, Who spat on silver to inspire The keepers of the sacred fire: Everything Could Be Otherwise

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Eyes in their loving generate Character, attraction, fate. Wayfarer, you have come upon Charles Fourier, the merchant’s son, Who is asleep, asleep. Deny If you dare that the good can die. (Davenport 1985, broadside) In “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier” Davenport again stresses the corpse’s decay (“Bones, buttons, dust of flesh . . . a dust of flowers sifted through his ribs. The fluid tongue is now trash”), while placing Fourier in a vital series of logothetic contemporaries, such as Linnaeus, Buffon, Cuvier, and Swedenborg: “All searched out the harmonies, the affinities, the kinship of the orders of nature” (Davenport 1979, 68). Fourier’s reawakened spirit presides over Davenport’s longest text, “Apples and Pears,” in which Adriaan integrates the philosophy into the social life of his ersatz Amsterdam commune.10 Fourier was a primitive with advanced views on sexuality, women, economics, and ecology. The New Harmony he drafted is an intricate autarchic utopia, where unity free of uniformity prevails. Despite the institutionalized abstinence of the former and the institutionalized promiscuity of the latter, Davenport in “Shaker Light” finds parallels between Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, and Fourier: They both saw that mankind must return to the tribe or extended family and that it was to exist on a farm. Everyone lived in one enormous dormitory. Everyone shared all work; everyone agreed, though with constant revisions and refinements, to a disciplined way of life that would be most harmonious to them, and lead to the greatest happiness. But when, of an evening, the Shakers danced or had “a union” (a conversational party), Fourier’s Harmonians had an orgy of eating, dancing, and sexual high jinks, all planned by a Philosopher of the Passions. (Davenport 1996b, 57) Such high jinks are, however, the aim and essence of Fourier’s system, and a primary source of its appeal to Davenport. Fourier’s quasi-socialist order is governed by the associative—sociétaire—principle, of which sexual association is the epitome. Pleasure is instrumental. In Fourier’s theodicy, God attaches the highest importance to it, using our petty vices as instruments not to plague us but to secure for us the benefits of a benign 108

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Providence. In The Theory of the Four Movements, published in 1808 while Napoleon’s armies occupied Rome and Spain, Fourier proclaims the universal law of passionate attraction, which proceeds from God. With a deistic conviction, to which Newton’s science had seemingly lent credence, that the cosmos is a divinely ordained harmony, Fourier declared “the unity of system” from which to seek the divine social code: “This implies the use of attraction, which is the known agent of God, the mainspring of the social harmonies of the universe, from those of the stars to those of the insects” (Fourier 1971, 210). Fourier’s New Harmony is consequently organized into elaborate groups united by shared preferences and appetites, constantly intermixed over the course of days that are divided into numerous commitments and amusements. It is a highly ritualized society, with a sacred calendar, feast days, and elaborate processions. Living in huge phalansteries, its members participate in a limited number of capitalistic enterprises, for social unity here does not exclude “graduated inequality” (Fourier 1971, 235–36). Although primarily agricultural, the society makes discriminating use of machinery to simplify tasks (unlike later socialists and communists, Fourier did not idealize labor). Gender equality is the precondition for any social advance, Fourier being as radical a proponent of women’s rights as his contemporary Mary Wollstonecraft. A “social minimum” is a legislated right, Fourier placing the right to work above the right to liberty, which he viewed as illusory in the absence of economic autonomy. Children are educated by apprenticeship and emulation, their teachers older children. They earn money independently and practice a variety of occupations until their particular genius is recognized and fostered. Fourier’s utopia is organized into séries passionelles of affiliates animated by some nuance or variety of a generic enthusiasm (e.g., botany: each of twelve groups, made up of seven to nine members, cultivate different species of flowers). Discord, rivalry, and intrigue are encouraged as indispensable conditions of social vitality. Each group member belongs to a range of intermeshed groups, for, to prevent monotony, occupations are restricted to two hours. Pleasure is treated as the divinely sanctioned source of all order in the New Harmony. The arts, gastronomy, and sex are indulged and intensified in Fourier’s utopia. “Sensual pleasure [volupté] is the only weapon God can use to control us and bring us to carry out his designs; he rules the universe by attraction and not by constraint, so his creatures’ enjoyment occupies the most important place in God’s calculations” (Fourier 1996, 159). No desires are consequently irredeemably abhorrent—only in civilization Everything Could Be Otherwise

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(a purely pejorative term in Fourier’s anti-Enlightenment nomenclature) do they become depraved. Aberrant sexual behaviors are potentially useful “manias” repressed in civilization, which converts such natural traits into potentially harmful perversions. Only abuse is perverse; manias are an attribute of greatness. “The societary order utilizes all these eccentricities and finds a use for every imaginable passion, God having created nothing that does not have a purpose” (292).11 Although his novellas revel in the erotic liberties of the New Harmony, Davenport’s enthusiasm for Fourier springs from larger affinities. Fourier’s system is antiliberal (yet reassuringly offensive to most conservative moralists), egalitarian (yet not homogeneous), and bucolic (yet not strictly antitechnological). Children and the elderly are fully integrated into society. The New Harmony is a meticulously ordered collectivity of autonomous individuals, a religious society without a clergy that celebrates the correspondences between sublunary concords and the harmonies of cosmic “attraction.” Fourier is not only the incisive social critic admired by Engels or the sexual revolutionary embraced during the 1960s, but the imaginative genius celebrated by André Breton, Roland Barthes, and Italo Calvino— a symbolist and fantasist delighting in the proliferation of the signifier. His Swedenborgian theory of universal analogy, according to which the cosmos is a unified system betraying everywhere webs of hidden correspondence, applies symbolic connotation to every object and act. Fourier’s writings combine obsessive calculation with visionary fantasy (e.g., doctrines of astral copulation and of the oceans transformed into limonade à cedre by the coagulation of the aurora borealis). Embedded in Le nouveau monde amoureux is an erotic novel, “Fakma, or The Whirlwind of Cnidos.” Calvino, who edited an Italian selection of Fourier’s writings, argues in “On Fourier II” that Fourier should be read neither as gospel nor handbook but “as a text of our ability to think and ‘see’ the freedom of all and sundry, to give meaning and stringency to limitless satisfaction of our desires” (Calvino 1986, 243). He calls the New Harmony above all “an aesthetic object,” and Fourier “the man who saw beauty as the promesse du bonheur, who thought of aesthetic meaning as a utopia with which to challenge the present” (235). In “On Fourier III” (first published the same year as Tatlin! ), Calvino praises “the almost unique case of an antirepressive morality based on exactitude, methodical rigor, and classification” (Calvino 1986, 254). Davenport is equally attracted to a scheme reconciling freedom with order and 110

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autonomy with collective discipline. Almost every aspect of the New Harmony is subject to calculation, to the point where its freedoms may seem illusory. It represents to Calvino “an alliance of Eros with cybernetics”: “Fourier worked for a lifetime in order to establish data that would bring about the happiness of the human race on punched cards” (232). Calvino thus follows Walter Benjamin in detecting in Fourier’s antiindustrial calculus of the passions paradoxical affinities to the rationale of the emerging Industrial Revolution it would oppose. “The phalanstery,” Benjamin writes in “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” “is to lead men back to conditions in which morality becomes superfluous. Its highly complicated organization appears as machinery. The meshing of the passions, the intricate cooperation of the passions mécanistes with the passion cabaliste, are primitive analogies to the machine in the material of psychology. This machinery made out of people produces a fool’s paradise, the primeval wish symbol that Fourier’s utopia filled with new life” (Benjamin 1974, 172).12 In “Apples and Pears,” Adriaan’s de Stijl townhouse becomes an unpartitioned phalanstery whose members people a nouveau monde amoureux under the professor’s avuncular gaze. Resemblances to machinery are diminished by the much less structured society of Florishuis, as the phalanx names the dwelling. Fourier eventually concluded that a prototypical phalanstery would best be operated by the young, a measure adopted in Adriaan’s commune. In “The Dawn in Erewhon,” Adriaan defends his ménage à trois with the youths Kaatje and Bruno by suggesting that they “keep the sacred flame,” the household god of antiquity around which Fourier proposed to organize the New Harmony. “It is very hard to rekindle once it is out, and we put it out too soon . . . The fire of the hearth. It would not burn, you remember, for the disloyal, the unbelieving, the spiritless. Without it, we grow cold, and a little mad” (Davenport 1974, 231–32). Adriaan tells a friend, —It was as an archeologist of the emotions that I dug through the Erewhonian wall. —To find what? —Nothing that I could bring back. (Davenport 1974, 232) So speaks a modern Orpheus thwarted in the attempt to revive an Erewhonian ideal, Fourier’s sacred flame, which Adriaan sees still burning in the young. In “The Death of Picasso” Adriaan learns from the teen Sander a means to reignite that flame. In “Apples and Pears” Adriaan brings it Everything Could Be Otherwise

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back from his island cabin to Amsterdam. “As Adriaan and his friends establish an ideal communal household of love and culture,” writes Jerome Klinkowitz, “so Davenport creates a fictive world in which the activities of making art and love combine in a natural philosophy for which belief need rarely be suspended. Guy Davenport’s world is one of nature and intelligence in ideal balance” (Klinkowitz 1986, 217). Like “The Dawn in Erewhon” and “The Death of Picasso,” “Apples and Pears” is structured as Adriaan’s notebook, which here includes an array of pen-and-ink images. Attempting to enact Fourier’s utopia at the level of form, the text is a composite harmonized as much by intuition as by ratiocination. The novel’s isolated paragraphs form a verbal phalanstery, brought into a tentative concord without relinquishment of their individual qualities. The reader of “Apples and Pears” is enlisted to join this aesthetic utopia by tracing lines of complementarity among its heterogeneous elements. The four-part narrative (corresponding to the “four movements” of Fourier’s cosmology) describes the establishment of the micro-phalanstery, the members of which work “to breed meanness out of human nature” against the background of the escalating nuclear arms race (Davenport 1984, 235). Here Sander, the nineteen-year-old reformed profligate who had proposed the commune, completes Fourier-inspired paintings for his first vernissage, couples with his sister Grietje (they are hoping to have children), and shares with her a rehabilitated stray, Wolfje, a teen whom the group adopts, teaching him to read and apprenticing him to Sander. Bruno’s pubescent children Saartje and Hansje (the latter possibly fathered by Adriaan) join their playmates, the siblings Jenny and Jan, to pose for Sander’s paintings as a Fourieriste petite horde. They experiment sexually in a variety of combinations, encouraged by the older members and tolerated by their liberal parents. A “Pythagorean Calvinist” (Davenport 1984, 254) who rescues teens from squalor and profligacy with financial support, encouragement, and affection, Adriaan hovers at the periphery, where he maintains an odd equanimity. Adriaan’s pleasure in the youths is voyeuristic only, extending little further than giving them sexual advice. He reluctantly accepts an invitation to address the Nederlands Student en Arbeiterverbond voor Pedofilie, but finds its chairman, Godfried Strodekker, dismayingly strident. Adriaan delivers a paper on Fourier, which is no ideal subject since the philosopher argued that children are a neuter sex and proposed to segregate youths under fifteen from the sexual life of the New Harmony. 112

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Adriaan denies himself sexual contact with minors, and he intervenes to prevent sexual intimacy across ages. The young man Joris is thus barred from joining in the sexual games of the pubescents Hans and Jan. “Joris broke our rule that he could play in our game but not us in his,” Jan says. “Hans, naturally, had to ask him [Adriaan] if being loved by Joris was right, and he said No.” Adriaan’s tactful explanation is that this is to protect not the boys but Joris: “Because it’s unfair to Joris, who can only want to play for keeps, whereas you two, enjoying a permissiveness that’s at best experimental and, shall we say, experiential, are simply playing” (Davenport 1984, 255–56). When two boys offer themselves to him at the Copenhagen “wolfden” of the Danish sexual radical Olaf, Adriaan “thanked them kindly, and pleaded other arrangements” (Davenport 1984, 263). Indeed, it is ultimately with Olaf that he becomes sexually involved, a consummation which revives Adriaan’s memory of a boyhood romance. The idyll suitably occurs at Adriaan’s island cabin, to which characters travel throughout the novel. Here earlier Sander and the novel’s Persephone figure Grietje had stripped the characteristically aloof and voyeuristic Adriaan and seduced him. In the curiously aloof conduct of his erotic life Adriaan resembles the protagonist of André Gide’s The Immoralist, a scholar who acquires a zest for life (and concomitant radicalism) through platonic contact with adolescent males. The newlywed Michel’s discovery of this attraction prompts no crises (his devout wife objects only to her husband’s atheism). As Leo Bersani notes, Michel’s elusive sexuality is “without psychic content; there are no complexes, no repressed conflicts, no developmental explanations, only the chaste promiscuity of a body repeatedly reaching out to find itself beyond itself” (Bersani 1995, 125). This is equally true of Adriaan, who has no more a homosexual psychology than does Michel. In both men an unlocatable sexuality coincides with a utopian militancy and a growing hostility to luxury and property. Living without televisions or cars in the unobstructed spaces of Florishuis, the group studies and romps, paints and writes, striving to reproduce in microcosm the strengths of Fourier’s blueprint for benign social order: Sweetbriar agrees, wryly, that no phalanstery anything like Fourier’s is possible without an Erewhonian revolution, canceling machines. To return movement to walking, horseback riding, and the true dance. To return music to the instrument and occasion. To return the casual Everything Could Be Otherwise

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to the deliberate, the planned, the expected. To return love to passion as it arises. To return work to communal duty, to the sense of usefulness. To have the beginning and end of everything kept in sight and in the discourse of the whole phalanstery. To take happiness from money and restore it to the harmony of work and its reward, ambition and its achievement. To put mind and hand in concert. To reorganize society after its disastrous dispersal by train, automobile, airplane. (Davenport 1984, 163) “Impossibly idealistic! Sweetbriar cries. But you’re right, you know” (Davenport 1984, 163). In Florishuis, as in Walt Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas” and in the New Harmony, sexual attraction is an instrument of social cohesion. Whitman proclaims “adhesiveness” as indispensable to the perpetuation of American democracy, a necessary counterbalance to its materialism and individualism. It is “the most substantial hope and safety of the future of these states” (Whitman 1883, 247). Fourier, who calls for a guaranteed sexual as well as social “minimum,” seeks to expand fidelity from the constraints of proprietorial assumptions into a collective bond. He idealizes two extremes, platonic love (“amorous nobility”) and omnigamy, whereby the beautiful achieve secular sainthood by offering themselves to the lonely. Virtue consists in the “multiplication of social bonds” (Fourier 1971, 371), achieved in part by means of sexual diversity. “If love is to be a source of generosity, we must base our speculations on the collective exercise of love” (375). Although Fourier excludes children from participation in the eclectic sexual vitality of the New Harmony, he promotes ralliement (amorous accord) between youth and age: Nature loves contrasts and readily links people of disparate ages. Furthermore, so many friendly relations are established in Harmony between people of widely divergent ages that it will become commonplace for a young lad to begin his amorous career with an elderly woman and for a young girl to begin with a mature man. Of course there is nothing predetermined about the matter since everyone’s choice will be free. (Fourier 1971, 365) Florishuis is equally permissive. Bisexual threesomes, gerontophilia, incest, and pedophilia (despite Adriaan’s reservations) are ventured. No treachery, 114

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possessiveness, or coercion is tolerated or occurs. Transitions are smooth and pleasurable, sexual roles fluid. Sander interrupts a conversation with Adriaan about Seurat to take Grietje’s place (she’s trying to read) in helping Wolfje learn to masturbate properly. Wolfje meanwhile continues to chat with Grietje, until the teen Jan arrives, with his parents’ permission, to spend the night with Wolfje. Adriaan is not altogether excluded, since he had earlier enjoyed a “tumble” with Grietje. The commune is a site not of specific sexual types but of diverse sexual practices. Roles are rehearsed and relinquished rather than hypostasized as the expression of a consistent sexual identity. The ascription of an essential sexual nature to individuals on the basis of their preference for a particular set of sexual practices is effaced. “I don’t believe, as I said,” Davenport wrote to Jonathan Williams on May 24, 1965, just as he was beginning to draft what would become “The Dawn in Erewhon,” “in institutionalized and programmed sex; that is, I attach no importance to name calling or label pinning. So no need to be edgy and scared around me” (Davenport and Williams 2004, 46). Florishuis offers just such sanctuary. Under the guidance of the classically educated Adriaan, who like Davenport translates erotic verse from the Greek Anthology, Florishuis borrows its attitudes primarily from classical antiquity. In an analysis consistent with Davenport’s depiction of the period, Michel Foucault argues that in ancient Greece the emphasis was not upon the codification of sexual conduct but on standards of moderation (see Foucault 1986, 45–47 and 91–92). Regardless of his encouragement of erotic experiment, Adriaan exercises self-restraint, that regimen of moderation practiced both by his fellow Dutch Calvinists and, more important, by his much-admired Pythagoreans, early Western exponents of moralized chastity and other forms of ascesis. This accords with the surprisingly old-fashioned attitude to sexuality expressed in the letter to Williams: Sex as a parlor game or sport in venery has never interested me; it is an extension of closeness into closer closeness . . . —My engagements with people are usually at that level: love, understanding, education. I’m not very good at it, but very few people are in the business and one has to try to make up for the general neglect. With growed ups I relax and ironize and learn, and in my eyes you are one of the masters from whom to learn. I say these things to indicate in shorthand that I am not lost in Liberal psychology and do not consider Freud, Marx, and Spock a norm of sanity. Clarity, energy, outwardness, selflessness, lovingkindEverything Could Be Otherwise

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ness—who will build a psychology on them? (Davenport and Williams 2004, 46; lacuna in text) Fourier came closest, and it is in this spirit that Davenport invokes him. The willingness to elude fixed identities (in “The Death of Picasso,” for instance, the teacher-pupil role is not merely reversed but capsized when the reprobate Sander guides the reformer Adriaan to the unacknowledged sources of his own teaching) does not align the inmates of Florishuis with tenets of postmodernism as formulated since the early 1980s. Fluidity of roles here expresses not adherence to the norms and expectations of commodification culture but deviation from it. In the postmodernism described by Zygmunt Bauman, for instance, the market has superseded the traditional community. Long-term obligations are abolished and a mercenary self-sufficiency extolled, which has encouraged an exhilarating (partly because precarious) freedom from fixed identities (see Bauman 1997, 13–24). Social engagement is now enacted by consumers rather than producers: “The arousing of new desires replaces normative regulation, publicity takes the place of coercion, and seduction makes redundant or invisible the pressures of necessity” (147–48). Ignorant of their place in the demographic, Davenport’s characters refuse the beguiling pressures to get their choices confirmed and validated by means of the market. They resist the security of the one fi xed form of identity now available, that of consumer. “EVERYTHING COULD BE OTHERWISE” declares the title of the novel’s closing paragraph, which quotes from Wittgenstein’s rejection of Kantian a priori concepts in the Tractatus.13 This “otherwise” is the topography of “Apples and Pears.” Davenport’s pastoral Holland conforms no closer than the New Harmony to a cartographer’s standard of reality. It is located rather in Wilde’s “The Soul of Man under Socialism”: “A map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when it lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail” (Wilde 1973, 34). Like Fourier’s utopia, Davenport’s is not confined to but realized in language. The sensuality of both is intensely oral. Alain Arias-Misson writes in an essay on Apples and Pears that, in contrast to the “flattening cinematic eye” of much contemporary fiction, Davenport’s language “owes its hypersensitive tactility and glow to the plumbline he has dropped into the primary medium of language: sound . . . Davenport appears to have 116

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recovered a third dimension of the world in the thickness of its phonetic material: la Parole retrouvée” (Arias-Misson 1986, 68 and 70). The phonetic density of Davenport’s language becomes “the sonorous equivalent of erotic acts. Paradoxically just as this vigorous and connubial language evokes the flesh, in the next moment it deflects the prurient attention back to its own phonetic weight, bounce and juiciness—a jouissance of language which substitutes for the erotic object” (69). In Postmodernist Fiction Brian McHale notes in Davenport a Nabokovian fusing of sexual and lexical excess: “Words compete for our attention with narrative contents that are, to say the least, arresting, and it is not clear which level wins out in the end. By selecting from unexpected stylistic registers, and by foregrounding lexical extravagance through purely formal patterning, Davenport induces a divided attention in the reader, forcing him or her to focus simultaneously on two centers of interest, foregrounded style and sexual content” (McHale 1987, 152). This coincides with Fourier’s own style. Roland Barthes notes in Fourier the prevalence of the rhetorical topos of the impossible (adunata or impossibilia), as when the ocean becomes lemonade, South America is raised, and Siberia becomes as hot as Provence. “The most insane (the most resistant) adunaton is not the one that upsets the law of ‘Nature,’ but the one that upsets the laws of language. Neologisms are Fourier’s impossibilia” (Barthes 1982, 377). Davenport delights in allied adunata: scrambled geographies and signifiers, arcane and dialect diction (e.g., thirp, snurp, quiddit), polyglot phrasing (“Wat kan dat schelen? Kaatje went on happily” [Davenport 1984, 112]), gargantuan sentences, catalogs and litanies, unattributed citations, omission of quotation marks, and isometric paragraphs (part 2 of “Apples and Pears” is made up exclusively of four-line paragraphs). This is in the service of rhapsodic particularity rather than (as McHale argues) a postmodernist assault on the stability of the signifier. “Objecthood, this substantiality of Davenport’s writing, is everywhere apparent, a fiction of nouns, while most contemporary writing is all verb, event as verb not noun, collecting no moss of existence, pure transiency,” Alain Arias-Misson notes (1986, 68). In a response included in a lexicon of rare words containing over a hundred entries culled from his books, Davenport writes: Each of my ravings has its own range of diction (I like to think). I like a texture suitable to my subject. In “The Dawn in Erewhon,” as elsewhere, I had to solve the problem of describing things and events for Everything Could Be Otherwise

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which the received concepts and words were unacceptable to me. Obviously I ran the risk of being “precious,” but then I don’t consider myself a writer. I don’t expect to be remembered as one, but as an experimenter who searched out some alternatives in style and subject matter. (Davenport 1984b, 272) Davenport detaches the events of “Apples and Pears” from the norms of realist fiction, using characteristic strategies: an alien setting, unusual diction, a discontinuous narrative cohering primarily at the level of analogy and correspondence, collage juxtapositions both visual and textual, pastoral tropes, and utopian content. Its basis is not verisimilitude but myth. Adriaan’s notebook entries are dated to Messidor, Thermidor, and Fructidor, the warm final months of the French Revolutionary calendar, while the organizing symbolism of the book’s title situates its events both within natural cycles and outside profane time. “The pear is a symbol of the Incarnation; the apple, malum (both evil and apple in Latin) is a symbol of the Redemption, the cherry of Heaven” (Davenport 1984, 97). So van Hovendaal, sounding much like his creator, who parses Pomona just so, in A Balthus Notebook and Objects on a Table (originally lectures delivered at the University of Toronto the year Apples and Pears appeared): “From the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, painters included apples and pears with madonna and child—apple symbolizing the fall, pear the redemption . . . Apple is bonded with pear throughout Greek erotic poetry” (Davenport 1998, 56).14 Davenport conceals a hint to the hypothetical status of his fantasy in a full-page illustration of Adriaan’s notebook. It lies open on a table, an archaic coin of Dionysus (a link to Orpheus) in its top corner. Among the page’s erotic drawings, quotations from Greek and Latin texts, and notations on physics, Adriaan notes: “It is a distinguishing peculiarity of the Erewhonians that when they profess themselves to be quite certain about any matter, and avow it as a base on which they are to build a system, they seldom quite believe in it” (Davenport 1984, 232). The caveat supplies a kind of cryptic retraction, not of the ideals “Apples and Pears” avows, but of their feasibility. Davenport’s bright, affectionate, and kind children flourish in the phalanstery because the phalanstery has transformed children. This is no derogation. Civilization (Fourier’s bane) has altered them even more, and not for the better. In “Apples and Pears” they have followed Huck Finn and lighted for the territory. Nothing within the 118

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phalanstery exploits or depraves virtues which, outside it, might expose the youths to harm. Such a depiction of sexuality of course exposed Davenport himself to criticism (he instructed North Point Press not to send him reviews), but Apples and Pears also elicited astute and enthusiastic responses. “None of it, of course, is believable; but we believe,” Bruce Bawer wrote in the New Criterion. “Davenport, magician that he is, makes us believe in (and even cherish) this bucolic never-never-land where everyone is innately good, no one does anyone harm, and love conquers all” (Bawer 1984, 12). “At a time in history,” his essay concludes, “when the criterion of excellence in American short fiction seems to be a sort of mindless, impersonal monotonousness, Guy Davenport’s inimitable adventures in the realms of philosophy, language, and literary form are to be treasured” (14). “Apples and Pears” continues to have admirers. In his entry on Davenport in Critical Survey of Short Fiction, Patrick Meanor claims: “Nothing that came before and nothing following this novella rivals its richness, diversity, and brilliance or demonstrates the enormous scope of his intellectual terrain” (Meanor 1993, 686). Davenport was, however, never satisfied with his most ambitious text, and like “The Dawn in Erewhon” he declined to reprint it. Already in a December 17, 1984, letter to Alison Rieke, whose dissertation on Zukofsky he had supervised, he wrote: “I keep fearing that it (the story “Apples and Pears”) is ultimately mushy: the ratio of acid to sugar is out of proportion. Yet Fourier’s Harmony is precisely a childish (Kindliche, naif) wallow, and I wrote the story to please his ghost.” On January 3, 1985, he wrote to her: I still can’t get “Apples and Pears” (the story) in focus. It was too long in the notebooks, and had too ambitious a scope. I ripped out some 40 pages in proof, and rewrote several sections at the last minute. The structure probably gets lost in the details. It is meant—O Lord—to provide particulars to Fourier’s great theory of harmony by attraction. In trying to demystify sex I doubtless mystify it all over again. Much Foucault in with Fourier, and a Dutch psychiatrist whose name is somewhere in the text. Fourier equates sex with food: it is necessary for life to continue, but it is also a constant overflow of itself. We could subsist on water and bread, just as we might never fuck except to make babies. In fact, we make sauces and sweets. Fourier’s diversities are our Everything Could Be Otherwise

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perversions. I don’t want to be a crank about all this. Fiction is fiction. All my characters are wholly out of my imagination. Or almost—I need to have seen them, at a distance, and once only. Although Davenport conceded self-censorship in declining to reprint stories which flout sexual taboos, in his Paris Review interview he expressed artistic dissatisfaction as well: “If I’d had an agent, or more rigorous editing, the three shapeless novellas that I’ve chosen not to keep in print might have been tightened, pruned, and made intelligible” (Sullivan 2002, 73). (He did later reprint the third novella, “Wo es war, soll ich werden,” in The Death of Picasso as well as publishing its original version in a limited edition.) In a February 1999 conversation with me Davenport neatly summarized the defect of “Apples and Pears,” saying that he had tried to build a suspension bridge out of bricks. Static and diff use on the surface, densely interwoven beneath, “Apples and Pears” shows too little and means too much. While affirming a monist faith dear to Davenport, Henry James’s preface to the New York edition of Roderick Hudson urges a principle of selection that “Apples and Pears” cannot afford to defy: Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so. He is in the perpetual predicament that the continuity of things is the whole matter, for him, of comedy and tragedy; that this continuity is never, by the space of an instant or an inch, broken, and that, to do anything at all, he has at once intensely to consult and intensely to ignore it. (James 1934, 5) Davenport states one half of the Jamesian equation when, in “Wo es war, soll ich werden,” he has his protagonist note that “if you really know anything, everything else comes into your subject” (Davenport 1990, 57). But this equally flouts the other half of the equation. It sanctions collage but also licenses diff usion. Davenport wryly admitted as much, as in his arresting remark in an October 10, 1984, letter to Rieke about “Apples and Pears”: “A whole page got lost in the typesetting: doesn’t make the least difference, as the text is notebook entries, and the lost page was two complete entries, a quotation in French about Fourier, and a postcard from Grietje, one of the more sporting girls of the piece.” How much more could have been deleted with impunity? 15 120

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Despite the prevalence of erotic interludes (indeed partly because of them), this robinsonade of an embryonic utopian cell is monotonous. The text restricts itself to two modes, philosophical rumination and sexual exposition. While the New Harmony is distinguished by Fourier’s recognition of discord as an inescapable human experience, which he ingeniously attempts to utilize, Florishuis remains, for all its vitality and beauty, an insipidly frictionless utopia. Incorrigible street kids, teenaged prostitutes, militant pedophiles, anarchists, and Leninists are all transformed by Adriaan’s mysteriously efficacious magnanimity and affection into docile, deferential, and cooperative custodians of Fourier’s “sacred flame.” Davenport’s slightly later story “The Bicycle Rider” is more convincing and rewarding partly because the little utopian cell it celebrates is threatened by the recidivism of one of its recruits, a drug-addicted prostitute whom his teacher must genuinely (and in vain) struggle to rescue from self-destructive hedonism. Although labor pervades the New Harmony (children being employed from the age of three), work scarcely interrupts the pageants, processions, and orgies of Florishuis. Adriaan is, as always, between semesters and wholly unencumbered by academic obligations. Sander paints while most of the youths are either students or, like Wolfje, home-schooled. The whole commune, including its North Sea retreat, is somehow subsidized by Adriaan’s university salary. “Apples and Pears” is a romance indifferent to the exigencies of an emerging utopian collective. Practical details might enhance interest more than the quotations from Anacreon and the Minor Prophets, catalogs of Fourier “gammes” (classes), descriptions of Nietzsche’s descent into madness, references to underwear, encyclopedia entries on donkeys, lists of pear varieties, accounts of recessiveness in genes, and so on. While such elements are by no means gratuitous, few afford much insight into why the characters congregate to pursue an experiment in communal life, and none explain how they succeed at it. Once again James’s acumen recommends itself, here in the preface to the New York edition of “The Aspern Papers”: “The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take” (James 1934, 162–63). The collagist arranging the parts of “Apples and Pears” is both historian and dramatist in James’s sense, accumulating a superfluity of documents and taking an excess of liberties. In the postscript to Twelve Stories Davenport identifies “Apples and Pears” as “a treatise in narrative on Charles Fourier” and as “an inventory, Everything Could Be Otherwise

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I thought, of everything I’d squirreled away in my notebooks” (Davenport 1997, 233).16 “Apples and Pears” is indeed a kind of treatise, however selective the treatment of Fourier’s theories, but the term betrays the novella’s laboriousness. The dependence of “Apples and Pears” on its author’s notebooks results in a resistance to narrative progression and an absorption in ancillary material. One consequence is that Adriaan remains a cipher, curiously impassive and transparent. The extradiegetic narrator finds too much of Adriaan’s character in Davenport’s journals rather than in the character’s experience. For all the pleasures triumphantly achieved at Florishuis, the novel makes a bid for utopia too unvaried, obscure, and stifling to be much of a temptation. The novella’s strength lies not in the gravity of its elaborate and learned symbolism but in its whimsical and sage good humor. By contrast with much postmodern literature, the subversiveness of Davenport’s fiction is founded not on parody but on a quixotic utopianism. The stories combine a libertarian hostility to prescriptive morality with a seemingly outdated belief in physical and moral beauty, in shared purpose and rewarding selfdiscipline. Davenport’s fiction establishes a continuity between liberal sexual conduct, psychological transformation, and reformist politics. Here order derives from principles of anarchism, devotion emerges from license, moderation from lack of constraint. A cheerful earnestness substitutes for irony and parody, which may prove a more formidable mode of opposition than these to the status quo. Dutch libertarians who revile both Soviet Communism and American capitalism, the inhabitants of Florishuis are antinuclear activists and critics of governmental infringements on individual rights. In some ways they attempt to revive the ideals of John Ruskin’s abortive Guild of St. George. “Friends of the Guild,” Davenport notes in a Harper’s review of Tim Hilton’s biography of Ruskin, “swept the pavement in front of the British Museum (in Ruskin’s pay), ran a London tea shop with the best tea, cream in daily from the country. Guild members wove linen in Yorkshire, translated Xenophon, copied details of French cathedrals, measured buildings in Venice, illustrated manuscripts, set type, collected crystals, milked cows, and taught drawing” (Davenport 2003, 40). These are the kinds of activities Davenport’s fictional utopians emulate, in texts that relocate subversion in the pastoral promise—that is, in an aesthetic promise—rather than in an explicit politics.

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I’m simply exploring some areas and moments of human affection, especially the awakening of affection not used up or run in the ground. (letter to James Laughlin, October 24, 1992)

6. “This Too Can Be Shown”: Sexuality Nouveau Monde Amoureux

“Shall I say it, provided that I don’t get throttled for it?” Montaigne asks in “Sur des vers de Virgile.” “It seems to me that love is not properly and naturally in its season except in the age next to infancy” (Montaigne 1962, 874).1 Urging that repression issues in ignorance and concupiscence, Montaigne recommends allowing youth “a taste of the quick” and freedom from the scrutiny and strictures of monitors. The youths of Davenport’s fiction scarcely need the advice. They enjoy the taste and are keen to teach it to their kind. Distinctions of age or sexual orientation are not drawn, consent alone determining sexual relations. Coercion is not used, force never applied. The radical premise is that the young are potentially mature enough to exercise such autonomy, monitored from a distance by loving, liberal parents. In “On Some Lines of Virgil,” Jolivet asks his girlfriend, “How far do we go?” Her reply repeats the call for free love in the first chorus of Tasso’s pastoral drama Aminta, “s’ei piace, ei lice” (Tasso 1962, 26): “That’s our affair, Jonquille said with authority. Shove the strawberries closer, she added. What pleases us, that’s what we’ll do” (Davenport 1981, 200). “I have no defense of my fictions,” Davenport wrote me in a September 7, 1999, letter. “I’m aware that I’m imagining a morality transcending practically all present cultures. Hence my interest in Fourier’s ‘calculus of the passions.’” Davenport’s stories locate a source of the radical innocence 123

of children in their embryonic sexuality. Few contemporary American writers have made so radical an inventory of the potential of childhood and youth. Adapting Fourier to Freud, Davenport employed diverse experimental means to rehearse, with arresting candor, the manifold vitality of early sexuality. Not since Randolph Bourne, who died in 1918, has an American writer so fervently and articulately insisted on childhood and youth as specific social classes of revolutionary potential. In his work the young are invited to view themselves as a subordinated social group, enriched by a tragic legacy which can instigate their enfranchisement. Davenport’s frank, learned, and lyrical stories disengage childhood sexuality from the commercial kitsch of much youth culture, from puritanical censure, the cynicism of camp, and the theoretical straitjackets of both social constructionism and biological determinism. They depict instead an Arcadian margin where children are granted an autonomy they are encouraged to maintain in a spirit of idealism. From these utopian fictions emerge various versions of youth sexuality: as a bucolic interval; as a core human experience; as an idyll the adult must endeavor to recover; as a means of interrogating ideologies; and as a stage of vitality primitive to the conceptualization of taboos. Davenport’s fiction belongs among diverse contemporary recuperations of a childhood and youth sexuality that successive post–World War II American governments and judiciaries, both federal and state, have sought to regulate, restrict, and pathologize. He is among those who would challenge the present American tendency to view minors as objects rather than subjects of sexual desire—a tendency which, as James R. Kincaid contends, has paradoxically enhanced the culture’s sexual fascination with them, a desire projected onto its monstrous double, the child molester. Although anthropology has long and consistently reported that sexual rehearsal play is typical of children throughout the world, American sex educators continue to treat its manifestation as a pathology.2 American sex law, much of it dating from the morality crusades of the late nineteenth century, is notoriously draconian, especially, as Gayle S. Rubin observes, in maintaining the boundary between childhood “innocence” and “adult” sexuality. Rather than recognizing the sexuality of the young, and attempting to provide for it in a caring and responsible manner, our culture denies and punishes erotic interest and activity by anyone under the local age of consent. The amount of law devoted to pro124

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tecting young people from premature exposure to sexuality is breathtaking. (Rubin 1993, 20) In Harmful to Minors, which Davenport praised in a Harper’s review, Judith Levine urges that “to be moral about children’s sexuality,” adults need to “not only guard their bodies and souls from harm, but to embrace the profound rewards of opening the boundaries of the self through intimacy and shared pleasure” (Levine 2002, 224). Rubin argues that “a democratic morality should judge sexual acts by the way partners treat one another, the level of mutual consideration, the presence or absence of coercion, and the quantity and quality of the pleasures they provide” (Rubin 1993, 15). This is the morality exhibited in Davenport’s idylls, which unsurprisingly take place in morally progressive European states such as France, Holland, Denmark, and Sweden. “I’m boss in my own pants,” the pubescent artist’s model Mikkel tells the young sculptor Gunnar in Davenport’s story “Gunnar and Nikolai” (Davenport 1993, 25; 2003, 142). The pubescent brothers Adam and Peter in “Concert Champêtre in D Minor,” unembarrassed foragers in nascent sexuality, decorate their bedroom with a Dutch poster repeating the same slogan: “BAAS IN EIGEN BROEKJE, depicting two naked blond handsome well-formed frank-eyed boys, one with an arm over the other’s shoulders, both prepubescent but with incipient hopeful microfuzz apparent. Their father said it was their assurance that somewhere somebody understood how things are” (Davenport 1996, 62–63). This kind of parent, who discreetly guides the sexual development of those under his or her care, is typical in Davenport. They suffer none of the bewilderment Levine sees in American parents: “It’s as if they cannot imagine that their kids seek sex for the same reasons they do: They like or love the person they are having it with. It gives them a sense of beauty, worthiness, happiness, or power. And it feels good” (Levine 2002, xxvi). Like Janusz Korczak in Poland and, earlier, Kate Douglas Wiggin in New England, Davenport affirmed the right to childhood, but extended the right into the sexual sphere. In contrast to such revisionist historians as Philippe Ariès, who argued that conceptually childhood scarcely existed prior to the Renaissance, and indeed did not become a discrete cultural category until the nineteenth century, Davenport reserved for childhood a space beyond social construction.3 Childhood was for him not a category but an authentic developmental phase that we are only beginning to dis“This Too Can Be Shown”

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cover. In A Balthus Notebook, childhood is identified as one of modernity’s great discoveries—excavations, his rhetoric suggests: The Enlightenment, removing encrustations of convention from human nature, discovered the durée of childhood as the most passionate and beautiful part of a lifetime. (In Plutarch’s Lives, no childhoods are recorded.) Rousseau, Blake, Joshua Reynolds, Gainsborough, Wordsworth. By the Belle Époque, children (in a pervasive, invisible revolution) had come into a world of their own for the first time in Western civilization since late antiquity, and we begin to have (in Proust, in Joyce) dramatic accounts of their world as never before. (Davenport 1989, 12) Davenport recommends Balthus in part for his controversial treatment of sexuality. The pubescent girl, he asserts, is the painter’s “symbol of spirit integral with matter” (Davenport 1989, 80). This does not make her any less sexual. “Balthus’s girls are sexy, charming, French adolescents painted with a fresh seeing of the human body, with humor, with wit, with clarity, and with an innocence that we can locate in adolescent idealism itself rather than in an obsession” (59). Davenport was too fervent an admirer of Blake and Wordsworth to relinquish entirely the metaphysical categories of innocence and idealism. For James Kincaid, neither term is helpful, and both child and pedophile are viewed as social constructions derived from the Victorian eroticizing of the child. “Innocence is not, as we said, detected but granted, not nurtured but enforced; it comes at the child as a denial of a whole host of capacities, an emptying out” (Kincaid 1992, 73). Although careful to avoid using terms like “innocence” in this coercive sense or to imply a state of incorruptible purity (“A South Carolinian,” he recalls in a Harper’s review, “I have seen knife fights between eleven-year-olds; they are not pretty” [Davenport 2004e, 88]), Davenport, by contrast, praises in Balthus “a stratification that zones off children from adults (reminiscent of Rousseau’s distinction between noble savagery and civilization) and assigns a native creativity and intelligence, along with a radical innocence, to children” (Davenport 1989, 9). Such a privileging of childhood is equally discernible in Davenport’s fiction. Kincaid rejects most stereotypes of childhood, as of pederasty. Among the “host of capacities” of children is the sexual. He argues that a sublimated erotic interest in children pervaded Victorian culture, and persists 126

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in the twentieth century, leading to the criminalization of “child-loving.” The “utopian and revolutionary” aim, as he calls it, of Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture, is to reposition sexual attitudes toward children, who are “being assaulted” by societal protections (Kincaid 1992, 10). His book advances “a form of sexual thinking that abandons fixed categories in favor of a scale of dynamic and relativistic measure of a shifting range of possibilities” (189). He recognizes, however, that “there are some categories whose fixity we are unwilling to regard as negotiable” (189). In contrast to Davenport, Kincaid is suspicious of efforts to reconceptualize child-loving as a potentially utopian “melting down” of gender and age differences and of the “oppositional terms” in which sexuality is understood (Kincaid 1992, 14–15). And although both view power as the primary threat to children and to the exercise of autonomy, Kincaid doubts that children’s sexuality can be realized outside the coercive forces of adult authority. Kincaid’s summary of Stevi Jackson’s utopian position, which consists in the faith that this is possible, suggests Davenport’s own view: If we then proceed to dissolve the association of sex with power we have made the problem itself seem both unnatural and insoluble. Noting all this does not, of course, naturalize pedophilia, much less justify it. But it does suggest that our resistance to child-love helps ensure the perpetuation of the activity. Child-love, in this figuring, is an attempt to fly free from power, to fly by the nets created by our way of catching meaning. (Kincaid 1992, 210) All of Davenport’s fiction about childhood sexuality takes place in the space cleared by Kincaid’s skeptical if. His narratives imagine the suspension of all coercive mechanisms in a ludic space that is bucolic and utopian. Davenport’s stories make the erotic emphasis that Fourier viewed as the necessary precondition for a utopian project. In Fourier’s nouveau monde amoureux no normative sexuality prevails. Monogamy is respected, fidelity praised, and omnigamy exalted, but none has priority or is viewed as more natural. Puberty meanwhile occupies a prominent place, for it is a transition, an escape from the classification which otherwise predominates here.4 Fourier “designed his Harmony to preserve the liveliness of the child into old age,” Davenport writes in an essay; “he saw no reason why it should drain away” (Davenport 1981b, 77). The fortunate in Davenport’s stories preserve this liveliness. In several “This Too Can Be Shown”

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linked stories in The Jules Verne Steam Balloon, the classics master Hugo heeds the call when Franklin, pubescent brother of his lover Mariana, plays Cupid between them. As does Adriaan, whose Freudian wound, associated with the loss of an adored childhood playmate, is healed once he becomes the custodian of an informal Fourierist sodality of uninhibited teenaged mavericks, who ground his deracinated metaphysics in the body. In “Wo es war, soll ich werden,” the teacher Holger is similarly delivered by Franklin’s pubescent mate, the prodigy Pascal. In “The River” Davenport charts the progress of eros from childhood to puberty.5 Narrated by the Danish boy Adam, the story is punctuated without commas or semicolons, conveying a childhood intelligence still overwhelmed by the experiences it verbalizes. He recounts a bucolic excursion with his agemate Christian and the adolescents Rasmus and Sven. The older pair wrestle, swim, repeat Pythagorean number lore, and invoke the ideals of classical Greek sexual license, but while Sven is unreservedly “pagan,” Rasmus yearns to achieve the puritan self-mastery of the fabled members of the Theban Band (described in Davenport’s “The Daimon of Sokrates”). It is into this austere code of passionate friendship that Rasmus intends to initiate the boys. Sven explains to them that, according to Rasmus, “friends should be brotherly like Epameinondas and Pelopidas and when they are together have only pure thoughts even when they’re wrestling or in the one sleeping bag breathing in each other’s ear unhampered by underwear or pajamas” (Davenport 1996, 51). Sven neither accepts the need for such restraint nor believes in its feasibility. In the story’s sequel, “Concert Champêtre in D Minor,” Rasmus explains his relationship with Sven to Adam and Christian: “He thinks sex is the important thing about us, and I think that love and trust are, and only when the two are in sync do I love him the way he wants to be loved. We have to swap selves to do it” (79). Seeking a compromise between hedonism and abstinence, Rasmus in “The River” seats the nude Adam and Christian facing one another, instructing them to gaze into each other’s eyes: Hug if you want to and kiss if you want to and it’s fine if your dicks rear up according to nature. I thought this up for Sven and me summer before last when we were on a trail in a larchwood in Norway. We looked into each other’s eyes for how long who knows for time stops. I figured it out. A long togetherness with a promise to each other to let the craving build and build and not give in. (Davenport 1996, 55) 128

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Neither chastity nor license is an absolute value. The pairing of ascetic with hedonist without denigration is typical in Davenport’s fiction, and the interest is not in the antithesis but in the complementarity. In Davenport’s Fourierist calculus of the passions, each has a cherished place; indeed, that place is often in intimate proximity to its seeming contrary. And of course both traits can appear in the same person. While Rasmus’s advice to Christian and Adam is tolerant but severe, Adam knows the weaknesses of their preceptor: “And it was only fair to say that they [Rasmus and Sven] do give in when they’re both out of their minds and Rasmus mopes the next day about lack of character and about Pythagoras’s noble soul” (Davenport 1996, 55). The story ends with Adam and Christian’s Pythagorean embrace, dissolved when their elders return from a swim in the river. Making allusions to the sexual customs of the Inuit of Greenland, colonized by the Danes, “The River” finds impetus for its treatment of prepubescent sexuality not only in the ancient Greeks but in modern aboriginals. For the sexual morality of such stories Davenport draws on the anthropology of the Dane Peter Freuchen, whose work on the Inuit challenges most Western sexual taboos. Attaching no shame to sex, Freuchen’s Inuit are polygamous, forming extramarital bonds without censure, and reserving opprobrium only for clandestine or dishonest unions. Most sexual practices are tolerated when not concealed. Pubescents in larger communities congregate at the Young People’s House to “sleep together just for the fun of it, with no obligation outside of that certain night. Nobody takes offence at this practice” (Freuchen 1961, 122). Children are meanwhile especially cherished (to strike them incurs dishonor) and are integrated into mature routines. This extends to sexual experimentation: “Toddlers of both sexes are encouraged to play together with a freedom that would outrage a mother in America, and the game of ‘playing house’ can—among Eskimo children—assume an awfully realistic appearance” (121). Females marry very young, usually much older males: “Eskimo girls marry so very young that a girl will often continue to play with the other children right up to the time of her first pregnancy. A boy, on the other hand, has to hunt well for many seasons before he has accumulated enough property to establish a home” (121). In Davenport’s stories the young are equally independent and sexually active members of a permissive society. The boxcar of “The Lavender Fields of Apta Julia” and the meadow of “The River” provide a refuge for sexual adventure resembling the igloo reserved for the trysts of Inuit “This Too Can Be Shown”

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youths. The devotion, magnanimity, and frankness generated in such conditions translates into an outraged response to the mature values of American culture. Several of Davenport’s stories situate the utopian possibilities of childhood autonomy in menaced proximity to the inherited culture, which is characterized in terms of cupidity, ignorance, hypocrisy, and violence. The utopian conception of childhood implicitly assails the ideologies which prevent its realization. This is, of course, itself an ideology, a transformative one derived from some of the precursors I sketch here. Davenport, however, shared with his most cherished precursors (including Fourier and, as will now be seen, Randolph Bourne and Janusz Korczak) the assumption that this utopian stratification of childhood conforms with transcendent laws of human nature. He followed Fourier in accepting the paradoxical need for normative frameworks within which to foster among children traits regarded as intrinsic. Though any utopia is a social construction, Fourier claims that within his New Harmony would be realized universal, trans-historical imperatives—hence the profusion in Fourier of organicist metaphors, many of which Davenport adopted. The aim was the restoration of human nature in an Arcadia regained rather than its reformation in a New Jerusalem. Bourne and Korczak

In his mobilizations of childhood and youth as a discrete and oppressed social class Davenport was preceded by the American literary radical Randoph Bourne, the subject of Davenport’s painting War Is the Health of the State. In Youth and Life Bourne, who like his German contemporary Walter Benjamin was a student movement leader, anticipates Vietnam era student radicalism by protesting the older generation’s coercion of the young: “They kill his soul, and then use the carcass as a barricade against the advancing hosts of light. They train him to protect and conserve their own outworn institutions when he should be the first, by reason of his clear insight and freedom from crusted prejudice, to attack them” (Bourne 1967, 253). In youth preserved from the depredations of puritanical conformity Bourne locates the germ of radical social reform. Scoffing at the notion of the wisdom of age, he argues that the young “have all the really valuable experience” (Bourne 1967, 12). Morality is acquired not through prudence and sober precept but through “moral adventure,” audacity, and suscepti130

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bility. The coercive logic behind the exaltation of the child’s “innocence” is exposed and vilified. Education should consist not in moral instruction but in the stimulation of an uninhibited curiosity. “If his mind and body are active, he will be a ‘good’ child, in the best sense of the word” (70). The largest channel of self-discovery is reached not by obedience to adult admonition but by emulation of friends. Sexual desire complements other forms of curiosity, and thus Davenport’s fiction realizes the erotic implications of Bourne’s belief that the virtues of childhood are not in “the moral realm” where adults strive to confine them but issue instead from curiosity about the material world. Davenport would not hesitate to identify such ardor with eros. “It is the kinetics of desire that creates the euphoria of loving and of learning, of being alive,” Davenport observes in his review of Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet (Davenport 1996b, 140). “We want to nibble our beloved’s ear, to master the Pythagorean theorem; what we are really doing is defying entropy and moving into the mind’s capacity for synergy . . . A sense of wonder lost since childhood returns” (141). The pubescent and adolescent characters of “The River” and “Concert Champêtre” make love and solve mathematical equations interchangeably. The erotic experimentation obliquely advocated by Bourne is boldly acknowledged in such stories. Here youths operate in a theater of moral adventure, guided by the exhilarating sensation of a new responsibility for one another, outside the realms of both adult and commercial youth culture. Davenport’s story “Gunnar and Nikolai” in a sense fuses Bourne’s emancipatory program for youth with Janusz Korczak’s attempt to establish a childhood utopia among the inmates of his Jewish orphanage in pre–World War II Poland.6 The young Danish sculptor Gunnar (who appears in the original version of “Wo es war, soll ich werden”) hires a pubescent model to pose for an Ariel and a King Matt, the latter the hero of Korczak’s children’s novel King Matt the First. In Korczak’s novel, the child king, who yearns to become the king of all children, endeavors to make a social class of children and to reform the world by establishing trust and cooperation between elders and minors. Defeated militarily by treacherous neighboring monarchs, Matt is poisoned with sleeping gas and later marched past ridiculing gawkers to his execution. Only the commuting of the sentence distinguishes Matt’s fate from that of Korczak and the inmates of the Warsaw orphanage he directed. The pediatrician, educator, and writer, who like Bourne is the subject of one of Davenport’s portraits, chose to accompany his 192 Jewish wards to “This Too Can Be Shown”

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Treblinka, where they were murdered with carbon monoxide.7 (See Lifton 1988 and Perlis 1983.) The model, who has switched identities with his friend in order to earn money posing for Gunnar, tells his pal Nikolai in their tree house, “There was a day when the Germans took all the kids and Korczak and a woman named Stefa to die at Treblinka, and they all marched through the streets to the cattle cars. I’m to be the boy that carried their flag, the flag of their republic, the orphanage” (Davenport 1993, 29; 2003, 145). Korczak’s orphans participated in the administration, rule, supervision, and responsibilities of the orphanage. Inspired by the pedagogical philosophy of Pestalozzi, Korczak sought to accelerate maturation by instilling an early sense of personal responsibility and by exposing children to the challenges of real experience. In his tract, “The Child’s Right to Respect,” he urged more autonomy for children and assailed the puritanism that idealizes the “pure” child at the expense of chastising the sexuality of the “bad” one. Korczak detected in moral codes an imposition on the nature of children. “The teacher’s job is to let him live, to let him win the right to be a child,” he urged (Korczak 1992, 184). “Gunnar and Nikolai” ends with Mikkel’s confession of his ruse, received by an astonished Gunnar without recrimination. They pass the evening getting to know each other on this firmer footing. When Gunnar’s lover phones the next morning, Mikkel congratulates her on being pregnant and Gunnar explains that he and Mikkel are in bed together: Oh yes, you know what boys are like. Disgraceful, yes, and frowned on by psychologists and the police, but lots of fun. The clergy are of two minds about it, I believe. Actually, he went to sleep while we were talking about how friendly it was sharing a bed. (Davenport 1993, 60; 2003, 168) “None of last night happened, you know?” Mikkel adds (61; 168). Freud

The nonexistence of the boarding school where “Wo es war, soll ich werden” takes place is the novella’s most salient element, as the teacher Holger reminds the pupil Pascal: “There is decidedly no such place as N.F.S. Grundtvig. Never was” (Davenport 1990, 108; 2003, 336).8 There 132

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decidedly was, of course, a Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, the poet, philologist, theologian, and statesman who established Denmark’s Folk Schools, a class-blind cooperative whose students are largely responsible for their mutual education. Regarding the schools as critical to the formation of modern liberal and literate Denmark (see Davenport 2004, 2), Davenport models his fictional one upon them. Yet the school also operates like a Fourierist phalanstery, where every pupil has realized his or her genius by puberty. Pascal has already had a scientific article accepted by a prestigious academic journal and has been offered a university post on its basis; the Icelander Holger is pursuing advanced botanical research on arctic mosses and fossil flowers. He realizes himself, however, through contact with the school’s twelve-year-old prodigy. The characters resemble the members of a série passionelle, sharing some variety of a generic enthusiasm. Every penchant has its use in such a series, in which even rivalry, intrigue, and other forms of discord can be accommodated. As also in Fourier’s scheme, education comes by way of experience much more than by lectures; elective kinships are privileged over family ties, and evil is not inherent but emerging out of specific and correctable social conditions. Friction rather than sin besets the characters, and is not demonized as an insurmountable obstacle to happiness. This utopian romance (as William Morris called News from Nowhere) indeed begins with two school fights, the origin of which is the dissolution of a pubescent ménage à trois. The passionate friendship of Pascal and the day student Franklin, seemingly strengthened by the admission into their fellowship of Alexandra, is soon ruptured when Franklin and Alexandra exclude Pascal. He finds solace in his adored Holger. “Wo es war, soll ich werden” is Henry James’s “The Pupil” with a happy ending. Like his colleague the classics master and theologian Hugo Tvemunding (protagonist of the narrative sequence comprising much of The Jules Verne Steam Balloon), Holger is an authorial alter ego warmer than Adriaan. They follow Davenport in being primitive Christians in the spirit of their school’s namesake. In the “Circumspectus” to the limited edition of Wo es war, soll ich werden, Davenport calls Grundtvig “a revolutionary Christian, teaching that loving-kindness and reciprocity were more important than dogma or ritual. Denmark is caught between the warm charisma of N.F.S. Grundtvig and the intellectually rigorous existentialism of Søren Kierkegaard” (Davenport 2004, 2). Denmark and Davenport both. Holger borrows liberally from his creator: this lapsed Protestant from “This Too Can Be Shown”

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a small town now teaching in the provinces works from notebooks on a self-made Rietveld worktable, lectures on Fibonacci, da Vinci, D’Arcy, Thompson, Klee, and Carl Sauer, and like Davenport escaped a brief, unhappy marriage. Although initially a reticent Nick Adams sort who camps alone and practices an austere cult of precision, the repressed Lutheran Holger is encouraged by Hugo to recover dormant virtues through his attachment to Pascal. In the reminders of childhood sexual stirrings, Holger detects a buried vein of his identity—hence the novella’s title. In the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud claims as the intention of psychoanalysis “to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the superego, to expand its field of perception and to extend its organization, so that it can appropriate new pieces of the id. Where id was, should ego come to be” (Freud 1998, 81).9 Wo Es war, soll Ich werden. Davenport retains the axiom but, following Lacan, reads through the specialized terminology to the opacity of the original German. Hugo tells Holger, You were interested in Freud’s enigmatic statement that where it was, there must I begin to be. The oyster makes a pearl around an irritant grain of sand. Nature compensates. A tree blown over will put out a bracing root to draw itself upright again. Deaf Beethoven composed music more glorious than when he could hear. Stutterers write beautifully. That is, one source of strength seems to be weakness. —Surely not, Holger said. That sounds like the suspect theory that genius is disease: Mann’s paradox. It’s romantic science, if science at all. —No no, Hugo said. Freud meant that a wound, healing, can command the organism’s whole attention, and thus becomes the beginning of a larger health. (Davenport 1990, 61; 2003, 298) Holger eventually surmises that in his life the es of Freud’s formula was a childhood sexual encounter with a blind Icelandic folksinger resembling Walt Whitman, but Hugo conjectures that the source is an earlier and intensely vivid memory, of his penis being dried or fondled after a bath in his infancy. Childhood becomes an idyll that maturation must recover if the adult is to thrive. Holger rescues Pascal from heartbreak, while Pascal rescues Holger from a strain of puritanism that Randolph Bourne viewed as the chief menace to the virtues of the “experimental life” (Bourne 1967, 134

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245; see also Bourne 1920, 185) practiced so audaciously by Pascal’s clique at N.F.S. Grundtvig. Pascal’s overtures and Hugo’s growing receptiveness culminate in a camping trip that affirms their intimacy. In a school of ménages à trois, of young couples and pubescent homoerotic fellowships, the clique does not oppose their association. Like Davenport’s other older lovers, Holger observes strict propriety and instigates nothing. Pascal first brings him flowers and, playing Alcibiades to his Socrates, later slips into his sleeping bag. An ellipsis implies that Pascal receives a warmer welcome. The original version of the novella, which was provisionally planned for a 1987 limited edition with Red Ozier Press,10 but which finally appeared only a few weeks prior to Davenport’s death in a stunning limited edition of a hundred copies, fills in the ellipsis and adds further incidents to the account of the hiking excursion. Such explicitness likely had discouraged Davenport from commercial publication, and the decision to publish it in 1990 in The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers thus coincided with substantial revision. Davenport removed almost a quarter of the original text, by no means simply to bring the novella into closer conformity with canons of propriety. He spliced in a new arrangement the account of an eruption on Mount Vesuvius (sections 19 and 23); he altered the title of the Kierkegaard volume Holger is reading (from Philosophiske Smuler to Philosophiske Piecer); he canceled section 50 of the original, hundred-part version (it would have followed what became section 47 of the eighty-nine-part 1) and replaced it with a Shandyesque visual joke: the caption LONG WHITE TOWELS introduces a long white blank half page; he also canceled the cameo appearance of Meg, delivering flowers to the bedridden Holger; and he omitted its one-phrase section DOVE: “One silver B-flat coo” (Davenport 2004c, unpaginated, section 27), which rhymes with the last line of the previous section, Hugo’s suggestion that Holger take Pascal camping: “—Just the two of you” (Davenport 1990, 59).11 Many of the deletions nevertheless reduce the erotic content of what remains Davenport’s most provocative published work. The original section 53 has the school’s harmless homme sauvage Jos recounting to Holger his part in Meg’s racy teenage ménage à trois and his session of mutual fellatio alone with its third member, fellow student Rutger (omitted from what became section 48). The other adolescent ménage à trois, formed when Franklin and Alexandra welcome Pascal, is the subject of sections “This Too Can Be Shown”

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that originally followed what became sections 77 and 86 (86 and 97 of the original version). These liaisons prosper not because they include adults but because adults sanction them. The most extensive deletions detail the sexual relationship of Holger and Pascal. Incidents only alluded to in the published version, such as their trip to Italy, are in the original described. (How did the boy obtain parental permission for a vacation alone with his teacher? Davenport wants the reader to imagine Pascal’s divorced Italian mother not only condoning it but inviting them to her empty Tyrrhenian beach house.) Such passages may well be omitted as superfluous or unconvincing, but the circumstance in which they become lovers, and the crisis that precedes it, merit retention. These events, which in the original version extend the hiking excursion into its second day and third morning, add a relevant twenty-nine-page section to what in the published version is the single section of part 3. Pascal’s uninvited shift into Holger’s sleeping bag at the end of section 75 is followed in the published version by a quotation in Danish from Ephesians 6:12 (glossed in Davenport’s essay “II Timothy”) and an exchange between Holger and Jos on the roots of modern Danish tolerance (sections 76 and 77). The expurgated section confirms that the two campers had shared Holger’s sleeping bag chastely. Now they make breakfast, defecate among the ferns, and then Pascal gently begins to make an overture that Holger fails to answer. Pascal is devastated by the perceived rebuff, and the utterly bewildered Holger reacts by all but smothering him in his arms. Holger virtually goes into shock, suffering a cataleptic blankout. After he slowly revives, Pascal explains the affront: —From the time you asked me if I could come along here, right up until my snit this morning, I was as happy as I’ve ever been. I felt grown-up, arrived somewhere. I felt a new world I was being welcomed into. I felt good about it all. You’ll get your peter played with and sucked, Franklin said, and when he said it we were jacking off and feeling good, and were jacking each other, even. Franklin said lucky you, and I gave you a kiss when I came over, remember? I’m explaining this all backwards, and probably wrong. Yesterday was so good, and I got in the sleeping bag with you, and that was beautiful, and you had a hard-on this morning, like a human being, and we took a shit together, as Franklin and Hugo would, collapsing distances, like you said. And 136

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then when I was wonderfully horny, mucking around with my peter, collapsing more distance, you said it sounded like fun, as if you grew up in Iceland without once even looking at your Lutheran Evangelical Reformed dick, just like all other stupid grown-ups and bullies. Shitty, Franklin would say. I wholly agree. Baby’s playing with his weewee, oh me, oh my! What collapsed was my imaginary world. Clunk. Holger felt tears brimming in his eyes. —When you said we were friends, I took that to mean that I had quit being your charming boy, and was Pascal, your friend. (Davenport 2004c, unpaginated, section 80) The angelic appearance of the teenage Scouts Gunnar and Olaf heals the rupture. The straying pair (who appear in subsequent stories) request the sexual use of the tent while Holger and Pascal are off exploring the island. They return at day’s end to a heap of firewood gathered by the grateful Scouts and masturbate each other. Consent determines an affair governed everywhere by the boy’s instigations alone. Masturbatory sex secures mutuality and reciprocation, free of the passive-active connotations of sodomy. Pascal rejoices in their love: —I mean, there’s now somebody in the big world of bullies who cares whether I have a penis, and even wants it to feel good. —And who cares that you have a bright mind, keen ears, sharp eyesight, beautiful toes, and one of the great imaginations of the century. (Davenport 2004c, unpaginated, section 80) The erotic dimension is for them not transcendence but augment. Thus routines are not to be disturbed: “Nothing was changed, they agreed, only something added” (section 80). Yet, as Davenport notes in the “Circumspectus,” Pascal is too young to gauge repercussions: “Pascal’s forever [the novella’s closing vow] is in character. The part of the brain, however, that deals with consequences is rudimentary until after adolescence. I imagine him having a brilliant career in college, marrying, and begetting the standard three offspring of the modern Danish family, sons named Franklin and Holger, a daughter named Mariana” (Davenport 2004, 5). If the adolescent mind poorly reckons consequences, readers may not be convinced that, simply because he would never knowingly harm the youth, Holger should accept Pascal’s sexual advances. “This Too Can Be Shown”

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In the original version Pascal is emphatically presented as no less an emotional than an intellectual prodigy. He shows more sexual maturity than the repressed Holger, who must depend on the boy for lessons in restoring body and mind to a wholeness. Yet Pascal seems a tenuous projection of authorial fantasy, as unconvincing in his way as the Holger whose conversation often sounds like recitations from notebook entries. (This is surely a symptom of Davenport’s method of composition from his own notebooks.) That Pascal should prove implausibly immaculate and perspicuous comes as a surprise, for the closest surrogate for the author is surely this lonely child prodigy who yearns for social ties as profound as his intellectual and artistic enthusiasms. Pascal’s family is sympathetic but uninvolved, while most peers seem intimidated or repulsed by his precocity. The intellect which gains for him heightened access to the sensual particulars of the world inhibits intimately shared communion with it. Pressed into service to defend pederasty, he must be made both incorruptibly naive and supernaturally mature. The utopia becomes mere fantasy, as when at the Italian beach house the pair recalls the unlikely broadmindedness of Pascal’s mother: —Your mother said when I asked her if I could take you along this summer that if I didn’t you would never speak to her again. And she said that whatever our relationship it had already changed you from a far too clever child into a confident and maturing teenager. Whatever you’re doing, she said in her bright voice, keep doing it. —But she knew, Pascal said, because I told her. And I kept to the word friends. I told her that I thought lovers sounded silly. Pukey, I may have said. She was trying to find out, of course, if my dick was involved, and how, so I explained that it was, wonderfully, and that the initiative was mine. Told her, oh ever so seriously, that you’re a very proper and moral Icelander with exemplary self-control, who loves me. Also, that you’re goodlooking and kind. And that you and I can talk geography and botany for hours without a single lascivious thought, to cheer her up. And then she said that she wasn’t about to tell me what to do with my penis. Fair enough. —And, God knows, extraordinary enough. If she had asked me when she came to visit if our friendship is carnal, I was going to say that it is. I don’t know what I was going to say next. But lying to her would somehow be like lying to you. 138

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—She didn’t ask? —She didn’t have to, did she? (Davenport 2004c, unpaginated, section 83) More than “extraordinary enough,” this reads like evasion of the conflicts the pair court in having the courage to make their relationship public. “The imaginary world projected by fiction balances between the plausible and a scandalous freedom,” Davenport writes in the “Circumspectus,” and invokes the instance of Love’s Labours Lost: It is Shakespeare’s most beautiful play, a tapestry in green and silver, intricately verbal, bawdy, and lyrical. Except for its biology, it nowhere coincides with reality of any sort. Georg Brandes was astonished by the women in this play. They are as witty and sensual as the men. They are on the same level, socially and intellectually. In Shakespeare’s imagination all lovers are aristocrats, ennobled by generosity, attentive and wide-awake with desire. (Davenport 2004, 3 and 4) In Wo es war, soll ich werden the youths constitute the equivalent of Shakespeare’s emancipated women, and lovers again form a nobility. This is the novella’s obliquely didactic dimension, rendering it more conscientious than imaginative. The novella suffers not from the lack of morality for which Davenport’s fiction has been rebuked but from an excess of it. The “scandalous freedom” Davenport exercises to depict the toppling of sexual taboo he exercises yet more to exalt the pristine moral fitness of his Danish iconoclasts, and this righteous conversion of vividly individuated protagonists into mere paragons above all tips the balance of plausibility.12 Paradise Lost

In contrast to “Wo es war, soll ich werden,” and greatly to its advantage as a convincing fiction, “O Gadjo Niglo” concerns the failure to maintain the delicate mutuality that Holger and Pascal enjoy.13 The story is unique among Davenport’s fictions for destroying the illusions its characters project. As in Kincaid’s analysis, power relations mar even the most tenderly reciprocal of attachments. While “Wo es war, soll ich werden” is set in a contemporary liberal utopia where enemies reconcile and prejudices gain “This Too Can Be Shown”

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no foothold, “O Gadjo Niglo” is set in a nineteenth-century Lutheran Sweden of sexual and racial stereotypes from which the protagonists cannot fully escape. The most explicit and provocative of his stories, it is also one of the most “classical”: a first-person retrospective narration in the vein of psychological realism, related chronologically and without Davenport’s characteristic bricolage of decontextualized citations or Steinian section titles. Its one structural idiosyncrasy, the omission of commas, colons, and semicolons, is rendered inconspicuous by Davenport’s beautifully pitched and rhythmic prose. As in “The River,” the sparsely punctuated prose reveals the artless spontaneity of its gifted but bewildered young narrator. Whereas “The River” describes only the initiation and splendor of adolescent homosexual ardor, “O Gadjo Niglo” pursues as well its checkered progress. The pubescent narrator Jens, being raised in his grandmother’s country house and privately educated, befriends the abused Tarpy, the bastard child of a vicious miller. Jens belongs among Davenport’s cast of precociously intelligent youths, independent, curious, and a budding naturalist. Tarpy belongs among the writer’s hommes sauvages: lusty and uncouth, but also alert, candid, and secretly gentle. They make an exchange of their distinctive qualities. Jens resolves to educate the wild child: I would teach him botany and algebra. I would write Pa and tell him that Tarpy the miller’s bastard son is not an idiot as people say. That I have given him a bath and some of my clothes and am teaching him subjects. After I teach him to read and write. That he is really clever and deserves better than to live with old Sollander who is an ignorant man and beats him without cause. (Davenport 1993, 111) Disapproving of the relationship, Sollander commits Tarpy to an institution, precipitating Jens’s breakdown just as a young tutor arrives. Here begins the story’s second conversion narrative. Like many of the mentors in Davenport’s fiction, Florent is liberal, cerebral, spartan, and hale. He takes the youth nude bathing, teaches him geology and physical exercise, and arranges a camping trip. This trip first crowns Jens’s recovery, then shatters it. Jens is a young teen, Florent appears to be an ephebe: “Though he was not yet a man . . . he was no longer a boy” (Davenport 1993, 120). Florent’s custodial role nevertheless underscores the gap between them. Like the guardian in Henry James’s Watch and Ward who falls in love 140

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with his young charge, this hierarchy does not prevent him from taking the youth as a lover. Their tent, like Holger and Pascal’s, becomes a sanctuary and conduit to a proscription-free parallel world. Through several strategies Davenport indicates the inaccessibility, yet teasing proximity, of this idyllic territory. On the one hand this is a Thoreauvian excursion requiring only camping gear and made entirely on foot. On the other hand, the story takes place near a remote Swedish coast more than a century ago. The intellectual sophistication of Jens further disrupts the realistic illusion. (He decorates his room with a picture of von Humboldt and Boupland in the Amazon, studies Agassiz, petroglyphs, reads Canot’s Natural Philosophy, and can identify plants by their Linnaean binominals.) All of these elements are characteristic of Davenport’s pastorals. Unusual here, however, are the anguished scruples of the older companion and the failure to maintain the passionate tie. Florent fears—rightly, as events confirm—that the attachment is risky. From mutual masturbation the pair graduate to fellatio: He said he thought we had gone too far. Was it wrong? It was wrong in that a game we played for the lust of the flesh might become a bond which we could only break along with our hearts. You have already had your heart broken. With Tarpy. He would have to go away in less than a month. I said I thought I understood. I wasn’t sure. He mentioned the world. Its disapproval. And added that for the moment the world around us was but rain. Lovely rain. Cozy rain. (Davenport 1993, 130) The rain becomes an index of the futility of efforts to maintain the illusion of a “game” and of their seclusion from the “world.” Later, following their rift, the punishing hike back is only exacerbated by the steady rain. Their bliss in exploring the countryside and each other overrules such reservations. Although Florent invokes Patroclus and Achilles, and Jens the ideal of bon ton, the tutor is not altogether deceived: “Florent said that I could have fooled him. He thought we were two randy boys who had found it convenient to invent the pagan world again for their particular use and delight” (Davenport 1993, 152). The melancholy paradox of the story is that both are equally correct. Fourier, The Iliad, classical pastoral—these are summoned both as ideals and expedients. Eventually Jens thinks he detects Tarpy in a Gypsy caravan. Florent, “This Too Can Be Shown”

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however, is unconvinced, and moreover fears the Gypsies. When Florent tries physically to restrain him from running after Tarpy, “I hit him as hard as I could with the sharp of my elbow against the mouth” (Davenport 1993, 138). As Jens risks his safety to reunite with Tarpy, Florent learns how faint has been his own influence, and how limited their fellowship. Separated by age and the power relations that age enforces, Florent and Jens have no secure basis for an attachment. Disenchantment and remorse follow. Jens faces a parallel reversal. Tarpy, who speaks Romany, wears Gypsy dress, and is in the company of two friends, refuses to recognize him. An old man tries to console Jens. Gadjo! he laughed. You have known our golden-haired niglo? 14 He is now a rom. Forgive him he cannot to you come back . . . The gadji beat him and starved him. We are better people. He has now mother and father. Like you he has a brother. He raised his hand. And there was Florent. (Davenport 1993, 142) It is Florent’s despair that he forfeited the dignity and safety of a strictly fraternal tie. Despite darkness, rain, and cold, Florent resumes the marred hike, tramping ahead silently. The arduous trek becomes a miserable expiatory pilgrimage. After three such days they agree to return home. “We were tired of each other’s company” (Davenport 1993, 144). The day after their return Florent abruptly departs, but not before Jens catches up with him, waiting alone for the coach. He turned when I was near and about to call his name. He walked up to me expressionless and hugged me as tight as he ever had. Forgive me he said so quietly at my ear that I had to think what he had said. Forgive you? (Davenport 1993, 145) Unlike Tarpy, Florent here acknowledges Jens. His expression impassive while he embraces Jens passionately, Florent embodies the conflicts of their tie. And while Jens must have felt himself chastised during the bitter sequel to their intimacy, he now learns that he is not the object of Florent’s animosity, but Florent himself, who blames himself for having promoted intimacy. He is the only such character in Davenport, forced to confront the negative repercussions of pederasty and lacerated by guilt so tortured as to compound his victim’s dismay. 142

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But is Jens a victim? The youth does not understand the appeal for forgiveness, and the story suggests that Florent is guilty not of sexual misconduct but of misplaced conscience. Florent appears first jealous, then sullen, and finally disloyal. He retreats into the very Lutheran morality that their affection had taught them to defy, and in so doing increases rather than mitigates the injury to Jens. Florent imagines that his own passion for Jens is corrupting, but Jens’s narrative belies this. The transgression consists in his abrupt withdrawal of affection. At the end of the story Jens has lost Tarpy, the grandmother who raised him has died, and Florent has returned to the university. “I saw him once afterwards at the university but we did not speak” (Davenport 1993, 145). The contrast with Tarpy is poignant: the lonely, abused orphan is now the adopted son of a warm extended family. Jens is meanwhile one of Davenport’s most desolate protagonists. Jens’s office is to withhold reproach and resign himself to loss. “Forgive him he cannot to you come back,” the Gypsy elder had told him. “Forgive me,” Florent had begged. As its candor, equanimity, and absence of reproof testify, Jens’s story extends forgiveness, but the youth’s ardor, trust, generosity, and loyalty, which (as often occurs in Davenport) a companion might have fostered and directed toward high moral and intellectual ends, is instead confined to such luckless renunciations. For all the sanction it gives to a freely exercised sexuality beyond the utilitarian strictures of ethical categories, Davenport’s work retains an overt ethics, as both “O Gadjo Niglo” and “Wo es war, soll ich werden” illustrate. In his fiction a moral dividend is paid to those whose intellectual growth coincides with sexual exploration. This view accords with Walt Whitman’s belief in the redemptive character of “camaraderie” or “adhesiveness,” which in “Democratic Vistas” the poet presented as both necessary to the maintenance of American freedoms and as the means to suppress the materialism and individualism he believed jeopardized these. In Davenport the exercise of sexual curiosity is both a splendor to be cherished for its own sake and a signal expression of a wider receptiveness. It is a mode of knowledge inevitably and of ethical knowledge properly. Davenport’s work is consequently surprisingly conservative, placing sexuality back into the sphere of the normative, indeed finding in it a mode of secular redemption conforming again to Fourierist precept, whereby the universal law of “passionate attraction” is not merely a private good but a social ideal coinciding finally with the structural principle of the cosmos (see Fourier 1971, 228–32). The micro-phalanstery that Adriaan supervises “This Too Can Be Shown”

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in “Apples and Pears” is intended “to breed meanness out of human nature” (Davenport 1984, 235). The sodality certainly breeds it out of its own, finding a mode of permissiveness inseparable from mutual respect and collective responsibility. Davenport is close to the Balthus he admired because “he is never vulgar, never paints in the vernacular” (Davenport 1989, 85). Praising, in his preface to The Drawings of Paul Cadmus, the candor and freedom from taboo of the artist’s nudes, Davenport notes, “Practically all of Cadmus has an air of saying, ‘This, too, can be shown’” (Davenport 1996b, 295). Davenport’s fiction hazards the censure of puritanism both liberal and conservative in order to say that childhood sexuality too can be shown. While American sex educators have been reduced, since feminist sexual conservatives and the religious right made common cause during the Reagan presidency, to defining sex as a “risk behavior,” preaching abstinence and omitting reference to pleasure, Davenport’s youths flourish in environments where the exploration and expression of their sexuality is neither denied nor suppressed. In his stories, protection of the interests of minors proceeds in concert with respect for their choices, including their erotic choices. Judith Levine asserts that sex is not harmful to children. It is a vehicle to self-knowledge, love, healing, creativity, adventure, and intense feelings of aliveness. There are many ways even the smallest children can partake of it. Our own moral obligation to the next generation is to make a world in which every child can partake safely, a world in which the needs and desires of every child—for accomplishment, connection, meaning, and pleasure—can be marvelously fulfilled. (Levine 2002, 225) The idealism of this apostrophe marks a continuity with Davenport’s fiction. In the guise of pastoral utopias, many of Davenport’s frankest stories simply imagine the fulfillment of such impulses.

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My only theory about writing is that words have to mean something. (letter to James Laughlin, December 4, 1992)

7. Postmodern to Metamodern Meta

“A witty Frenchman has said that I am a writer who disappears while arriving,” Davenport writes in the postscript to Twelve Stories. “I would like to misunderstand him that I come too late as a Modernist and too early for the dissonances that go by the name of Postmodernism” (Davenport 1997, 236).1 He is regardless frequently identified as a postmodernist writer.2 Born in 1927, he comes no more “too early” than Charles Olson, Lorine Niedecker, Donald Barthelme, Denise Levertov, or Frank O’Hara, all of whom were born before him. In 1974 Davenport published “Scholia and Conjectures for Olson’s ‘The Kingfishers’ ” in the leading journal of postmodernism, boundary 2 (1974: 250–62), and for another decade he employed the word “postmodernism” to describe work with which he was in sympathy. Donald M. Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry 1945–1960 “is the critical act that ushered in the Post-Modernist era,” Davenport notes in a 1985 lecture (published as “The Scholar as Critic,” Davenport 1987, 94). He explains that from its impetus “I decided to offer a course in Post-Modernist literature” (95). In 1995 he told an interviewer, “I gave the first courses ever, anywhere, in Olson, Zukofsky, and Johnson” (Kravis 1995, 123). He published laudatory essays on all three. In the afterword to RADI OS, he calls Ronald Johnson’s poem (composed out of artful erasures of much of the first four books of Paradise Lost) “a signal act of the postmodernist period 145

(The Age of Olson the books will get around to naming it)” (Davenport 1981b, 196). It is an age in which Davenport aligned himself. His first book, Flowers and Leaves, was published in 1966 by Jargon Books, which six years earlier had published Olson’s The Maximus Poems. Davenport included Jonathan Williams (publisher of Jargon) among Creeley, Duncan, Robert Kelly, and Johnson as Olson’s distinguished progeny (see Davenport 1981b, 180–89), while in an uncollected essay on Kelly he provided a fuller genealogy: “Tribe of Ezra, sons of Olson, shaggy nephews of Doc Williams—they have been like the Mongol hordes camping in the ruins” (Davenport 1974b, 163). A unifying trait of these writers is that they come too late as modernists and too early for the dissonances that go by the name of postmodernism. Davenport was not alone in using the postmodernist rubric without censure in the 1970s and early 1980s. In Enlarging the Temple, Charles Altieri identifies the new American poetry as postmodern, its poets epitomizing a poetics of presence, whereby the moment of perception restores harmony and promotes ethical and psychological renewal. Theirs is an “immanentist vision of the role of poetry. Here poetic creation is conceived more as the discovery and the disclosure of numinous relationships within nature than as the creation of containing and structuring forms” (Altieri 1979, 17). The characterization remains sound but no longer coincides with what is loosely understood as postmodernism, in which notions of presence, immanence, and numinousness are regarded as wholly provisional language games masquerading as essences. It is an index of the term’s semantic shift that from the mid-1980s on Davenport no longer identified himself or his “tribe” as postmodernists. Postmodernist thinking in the years since the publication of Altieri’s pioneering study has largely repudiated his categories. The poetics of presence now gets viewed as a modernist fata morgana. Meaning is instead social and contingent, identity unstable and socially constructed, the autonomous liberal subject an essentializing fiction; language constitutes rather than represents reality, and knowledge is acknowledged as such only within a specific discursive formation. Charles Olson, who put “postmodernism” into circulation, died in 1970, when the term still denoted, at least in literature, the range of tendencies outlined in Enlarging the Temple. Almost any reigning postmodernist criteria would now exclude many of the writers Altieri and Davenport once identified as such, even though 146

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anthologists of postmodern poetry continue to include them, at damage to what little clarity the term might retain.3 Altieri acknowledges the semantic transformation that the ascendancy of poststructuralism completed. In an article incorporated with revisions as the first chapter of Postmodernisms Now, Altieri urges the recovery of that “early postmodernism,” still fruitfully aligned with “basic modernist imperatives.” These include resistance to empiricism, exploration of particulars inseparable from local contexts, and refusal to privilege social practices. For what he calls the “early” postmodernists, “instability is not sufficient reason for renouncing idealization entirely in favor of the satiric mode that comes far too easily within twentieth-century life. Postmodern art articulates one domain where it makes sense to bring modernist intensity to the postmodern thematics of thriving on contradiction” (Altieri 1996, 788; revised 1998, 49). By stressing the continuities between modernism and certain currents in post–World War II American poetry, Altieri underscores how distorting a term like postmodernism is to denote these currents, and by validating such art he also suggests the particular value of Davenport’s work, for here was that rare American prose writer who neither renounced idealization nor embraced satire. The great range of his writing provides an antidote to the excesses of postmodernism as it has subsequently been understood. Davenport recovered modes almost wholly relinquished by postmodernists, such as pastoral and the utopian, and invested them with some of the characteristics Altieri wishes to see honored. By the late 1970s Davenport began to express reservations about postmodernism. In the 1978 essay “Post-Modern and After” he disparages postmodernist fiction: If, indeed, this is the revolution in narrative that it claims to be, it is a pedantic, self-conscious, self-congratulatory revolution, with every symptom of having come out of a textbook rather than, as my freshmen say, out of “real life.” The term “Post-Modern” is curiously ad hoc, as if a line had to be drawn somewhere, no matter how arbitrary. The line was drawn with increasing futility for some years; modernity refused to be outdated. James Thrall Soby wrote a book called After Picasso in 1935; Picasso outlived ten of the fourteen artists therein studied, and outpainted them all. (Davenport 1978b, 232) Postmodern to Metamodern

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By the mid-1990s Davenport could draw the “arbitrary” line quite firmly for purposes of censure. An irate entry under the heading POSTMODERNISM in “Micrographs” reads: The bomb, you see, has already dropped. Nobody noticed. The young, born dead, could move, breathe through their mouths, and watch the soaps and commercials on TV, having a good time. The bomb has dropped. All the pigs are trotters up, all the trees charcoal. Never wanting a change, only more of the same but better, we were of no mind to notice. It takes attention to notice things. Attention takes brains. (Davenport 1996b, 303) This postmodernism is postapocalyptic. Convenience, evaporating distractions, and nervous oscillation conceal the anesthetizing of sensibility, a profound lethargy, and the destruction of the environment. Davenport’s jeremiad agrees with Jean Baudrillard’s account of postmodernism as a game with the vestiges of what has been destroyed. Davenport, however, views as a moral failing, which members of society might correct, what Baudrillard views as an ineradicable condition which dictates all responses, including illusions of a moral agency that might alter the condition. Davenport and his cohorts refuse resignation. Their work invites readers to treat as renegotiable what postmodernists often treat as an immitigable state. The temptation among critics alert to Davenport’s divergence from postmodernism has been to resort to the backhanded compliment of making a modernist of him. Alan Williamson identifies Davenport as “a lateborn Modernist,” describing Tatlin! as “at once a hymn of praise to Modernism and an attempt to practice its aesthetics” (Williamson 1975, 87). Davenport’s book of stories is praised for a style “which, like many of the concerns, seems more of the ’20s than of the ’70s. It is grand and consciously beautiful; it is Cubist and Futurist, rendering intuitive dimensions sharply visible; passion and deliberation hold its rhythms taut” (89). Lance Olsen calls Davenport “the last modernist,” one who still “dreams the dream of cultural development and inherent rationality that once animated Western society. His fictions share the modernist belief in a transcendent signified of fragments shored against the ruins, in the omnipotence of language, in the archaic” (Olsen 1986, 149). Davenport was, however, no belated modernist, not merely because he was not an imitator, or because he had close contacts with artists as varied as filmmaker Stan Brakhage and painter Paul Cadmus, but because 148

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such a term misrepresents the bifurcating development of the term “postmodernism,” that protean neologism which describes no specific coterie or movement but is rather a constellation of affiliated tendencies. The term’s application has changed substantially since Charles Olson began to use it in the late 1940s. Until the late 1970s postmodernism in American poetry could still imply a commitment to many aspects of the modernist aesthetic and to specific figures, most prominently Pound and Williams. Davenport may be readily situated among many artists of this commitment. In a recent book Marjorie Perloff, avoiding the term “postmodernism,” argues that contemporary poetry variously indebted to modernist precedent constitutes a “twenty-first-century modernism.” She contends in Twenty-First-Century Modernism that the “new American poetry” collected in Donald Allen’s 1960 anthology “was less a revolution than restoration: a carrying-on, in a somewhat diluted form, of the avant-garde project that had been at the very heart of early modernism” (Perloff 2002, 2–3). Does then Perloff offer a taxonomy in which to insert Davenport in a revived modernism? Certainly her modernist loci—early Eliot, the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, the nongeneric texts of Gertrude Stein, and the sound poems of Velimir Khlebnikov—are equally relevant to Davenport (both Stein and Khlebnikov appear in his fiction), although such a genealogy, restricted largely to highly idiosyncratic mavericks, is not sufficiently inclusive. A stronger objection intrudes, however. Surveying poetry by Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, and Steve McCaffery, in whose work “language, sound, rhythm, and visual layout are, in Pound’s terms, ‘charged with meaning,’ ” Perloff concludes that “ours may well be the moment when the lessons of early modernism are fully being learned” (200). As Davenport’s work and that of some of his coevals (e.g., Johnson’s ARK ) attest, that moment has long since arrived. Her own examples, writers mostly in their fifties, confirm that this twenty-firstcentury modernism was launched more than a generation ago. Perloff ’s formula also suggests reiteration rather than renovation. This, of course, puts it at cross-purposes with the very modernism it would reinvigorate. The events of the last century surely have created ruptures that no devotion to modernist aesthetic practices could span with impunity, yet her formula implies just such an elision. The kind of more nuanced and periodized account of postmodernism and modernism that Perloff provides is necessary, but her nomenclature, virtually a synonym for neomodernism, is unsatisfactory for writers better viewed as metamodernists. The English prefix “meta-” relevantly denotes Postmodern to Metamodern

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derivation, resemblance, succession, and change. The Greek preposition from which it derives has an especially pertinent range of meanings: with the accusative, meta; means “after” or “next”; with the dative, “among,” “besides,” or “over and above”; with the genitive, “by means of” or “in common with.” The metamodernists develop an aesthetic after yet by means of modernism. Where “post-” suggests severance or repudiation, “meta-” denotes both change and the continuity apparent in the metamodernists’ efforts to succeed the modernists.4 The metamodernists seek with the help of modernism to proceed beyond it. They will “make it new” in part by renewing elements from writers, many of whom in the late 1940s were still neglected (Williams, Moore, Doolittle), ridiculed (Stein), reviled (Joyce), or persecuted (Pound). The metamodernists are also literally “among” the poets they follow, for proximity characterizes their relationship to them. Many of these writers made direct contact with prominent modernist writers, and several wrote important criticism on them, including Duncan’s work on H.D. and Davenport’s on Pound. “Meta-” also implies a self-conscious but not slavish sense of descent. The open field compositions of the metamodernists are not simply indebted to the assemblages of writers like Pound, Moore, and Williams, but reconceptualize their methods and subject matter. Metamodernism is by no means a retrogressive search for contemporaneity in the past or, worse, a merely curatorial reverence. Metamodernism is a departure as well as a perpetuation. The metamoderns scorn the reactionary politics of various prominent modernists. The transcendent categories underlying modernist transpositions of myth are also jettisoned, as is the neoRomantic belief in the modifying faculty of the imagination. History for the metamodernists is not subordinate to myth but is a web of narratives scored not, as in myth, upon collective consciousness but upon the individual body. Nature is more conspicuous and less susceptible to the imposition of narrowly human meanings. The liberal sexual morality of modernism is greatly extended to include much less socially sanctioned practices. The sense of derivation from modernism thus surpasses homage, toward reengagement with modernist methods to address subject matter beyond the range or interest of the modernists themselves. Persephone

In Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale invokes Davenport’s fiction to illustrate a range of postmodernist devices, but McHale’s is no longer the 150

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postmodernism of Enlarging the Temple. Poststructuralist theory now determines the term’s application. Davenport’s texts are viewed as autonomous yet rule-governed model kits for the production of possible worlds. McHale argues for Davenport’s prominence as a postmodernist writer in what has become the prevailing sense of the term. Autotelic, discontinuous, participatory, hybrid, intertextual, contingent, aleatory, self-reflexive, parodic, archival: such familiar terms may be applied to much of Davenport’s fiction and poetry, as well as to his painting and on occasion to his essay style. (See McHale 1987, 44–50, 85–89, 152, 159, 189–90, and 194.) Postmodernist art does not reproduce the world but produces a ludic space open to incongruity, discontinuity, and inconsistency. In this anarchic space of plural worlds, oscillations between noncontiguous ontological realms is the norm. McHale adopts from Michel Foucault the concept of heterotopias, which, in The Order of Things, Foucault speculates undermine confidence in language, destroying both syntax and the larger agreement between word and thing. McHale argues that Davenport’s “The Invention of Photography in Toledo” illustrates the juxtaposition, superimposition, and misattribution characteristic of the postmodernist heterotopia.5 He notes how in this story “similarity or identity at the level of the linguistic signifier has been allowed to derange and remodel geographic space” (McHale 1987, 50–51). Swan Creek flows through its downtown into the blue Maumee, which flows into Lake Erie. It bore the name of Port Lawrence until Marcus Fulvius Nobilor erected the fasces and the eagles of the SPQR in 193. Originally a part of Michigan until Andrew Johnson gave his nod to Ohio’s claim, the fierce violet of its stormy skies inspired El Greco to paint his famous view of the city. It was in Toledo that the Visigoths joined the Church and made Spain Catholic. And in 1897 Samuel L. (Golden Rule) Jones was elected mayor on the Independent ticket. Its incredible sunsets began to appear in late Roman eclogues. (Davenport 1979, 122) Each fact in this guidebook parody is accurate, yet describes a Nabokovian Anti-Terra of historical and geographical transpositions. Borders are not crossed but ludically transcended, as in the oneiric yet clear and plausible topographies of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.6 Textual plurality and autonomy reign, a carnival of problematized reference and archival pastiche. The decenPostmodern to Metamodern

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tered play, however, is neither gratuitous nor autotelic, but one means of exploring larger issues of reference. The story concerns mythmaking and how photography, far from being a medium of demystification, creates its own myths.7 Opening with a factual exposition of the earliest photographic technology, the story describes Joseph Niepce’s first photograph as “pure de Chirico” (Davenport 1979, 124). “Foco Betún y Espliego, the historian of photography,” the story claims, lacks the evidence to sort out competing claims on its originator. The absurdity of his name is the first clue to the story’s destabilization of reference. Just as an uncoded photo may develop into a coded work of surrealism, so may an objective essay develop into comic fiction. The encyclopedist narrator describes as fact an imaginary photo of Lenin in Zürich that inadvertently includes “James and Nora Joyce haggling with a taxi driver about the fare” (123). The photographic image promises a verifiable referent. This has made it indispensable to the mythologizers of power. “Skepticism has no power whatever over the veracity of a photograph. It is a fact and is accepted by all minds as evidence. The Soviets have gone through all their photographs of the revolution and erased Trotsky. They have put Stalin at Lenin’s side even when he was a hundred miles away eating borshch” (123). Roland Barthes contrasts the photograph’s ample mechanical analogue to reality (the only structure of information “exclusively constituted and occupied by a ‘denoted’ message, one which totally exhausts its mode of existence”) with drawing, “a structure that is already connoted, fashioned with a coded signification in view” (Barthes 1977, 18 and 19). Davenport suggests a similar contrast by reproducing iconic photographs in pen and ink, including Edward S. Curtis’s photo of a Mohave girl, Nadar’s of Rossini, and one of a ten-year-old Van Gogh. These full-page drawings are interpolated without caption into the story, and lend a nonmechanically reproduced aura to what Walter Benjamin contends is an auraless medium. Espliego finally pursues his positivist chimera to the shores of Loch Ness, intent on photographing the monster. Isolation, alien customs, and local hostility compound his ordeal and confound his judgment. Success is reported with scrupulous historical restraint: On a spring day in 1913 the monster, Nessiteras rhombopteryx, a plesiosaurus with lots of teeth, saw Betún as clearly as his Jurassic vision allowed, an insect with five feet, black wings, and one large eye that 152

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caught the sun with a fierce flash. As a detail of the Out There, Betún held little interest, and until he came into the Here he would not eat him. (Davenport 1979, 129–30) By comic inversion the photographer becomes the freak mythical beast while the monster’s silver nitrate veracity earns it the zoological legitimacy of a binomial. The narrator, our historian of photography, argues that “real life is all that photography has” (Davenport 1979, 123), but his own gallery of Soviet effacements, Joycean cameos, and teratological curios testifies to the dazzling dodginess of the denotative referent. The photographic image compounds our difficulties of access to the ever-vanishing real, our own human equivalent of Nessy’s nebulous Out There. Espliego lectures that “for the first time in the history of art the accidental became the controlling iconography of a representation of the world” (123). The story introduces accident at the level of the homonym: the Spanish and American Toledo. The story concludes with another accident: Betún’s photograph of the Loch Ness monster “was printed in La Prensa upside down and in the London Times with a transposed caption identifying it as the Archduke Franz Ferdinand arriving in Sarajevo for a visit of state” (130). Context too supplies a code for uncoded images, and here comically confounds photographic access to the real. Instead of an authenticating image of a monster, the Times inadvertently verifies the monstrous premonition of the Great War. This textual juxtaposition of noncontiguous spaces, McHale argues, creates a postmodern zone. He cites Davenport’s story “The Haile Selassie Funeral Train,” which describes an awry rail itinerary from Normandy to Spain, Dalmatia, Odessa, Liguria, Atlanta (Georgia), and back to northern France.8 “The spaces it [the train] traverses, simply by the fact of having traversed them, and in that order, constitutes a zone” (McHale 1987, 45). While Haile Selassie stares from his bier at a double star, Apollinaire smokes and Joyce talks about Orphic myth. From Eurydice and Freya to Anna Livia Plurabelle and the Giovanezza hailed by parading Fascist youths, avatars of Persephone appear throughout the text: “Outside Barcelona, as in a dream, we saw La Belle Jardinière herself, with her doves and wasps, her sure signs in full view among the flowers: her bennu tall on its blue legs, her crown of butterflies, her buckle of red jasper, her lovely hair. She was busy beside a sycamore, pulling water out in threads” (Davenport 1979, 111). She is the incessantly metamorphosing principle of Postmodern to Metamodern

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the earth’s (as well as language’s) regenerative vitality and a symbol of its wisest stewardship. In Davenport’s funereal phantasmagoria, Persephone is contrasted with the destructive animus expressed in human history, the benign permutations of natural forces placed beside malign human ones. In the background are Irish nationalists, Italian Fascists, Triestine irredentists, federales of the Guardia Civil, and Kuomintang officers. The atrocities of the Great War, from which Apollinaire has returned with a fatal injury, are recalled: “They burned the library at Louvain. What in the name of God could humanity be if man is an example of it?” (112). With its self-reflexive and problematic reference, carnival liminality, simultaneity, play, and autonomy, such a plotless heterotopic pastiche exhibits a range of typically postmodern textual strategies. The narrative has affinities with John Ashbery’s poem “The Skaters,” where the text’s momentum sends it free from all material constraints toward an extramundane zone where fragmentary allusions, gaps, and free-playing signifiers can be provisionally cohered, if at all, by the reader alone. Yet Davenport does not finally revel in the displacements and freedoms of Ashbery’s disembodied signifiers. He shares his textual zone less with Ashbery or, say, Pynchon (the longest section of whose Gravity’s Rainbow is entitled “In the Zone”) than with Max Ernst, the Blaise Cendrars of La prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France, and with Apollinaire, whose “Zone” is the source of postmodernist heterotopias. Joyce and Apollinaire appear in “The Haile Selassie Funeral Train” as custodial spirits of the repudiated modernist sublime, where autonomous textual play is still wedded to the Kantian claim that, far from being diminished by the truth-telling authority of modern science, literature is exalted by its very freedom from obligations to referential truth; art remains a unique means of striving after absolutes. Louis Zukofsky’s 1950 “A Statement for Poetry” reconciles science to poetry in terms relevant to Davenport’s allied aesthetic: “A scientist may envy its bottomless perception of relations which, for all its intricacies, keeps a world of things tangible and whole” (Zukofsky 1981, 19). Even in so dense a surrealist collage as “The Haile Selassie Funeral Train,” nature (Persephone) functions as the guarantor of a coherent and partially intelligible order from which human meanings, however contingent and contradictory, are ultimately inseparable. Like Christ appearing, if perhaps only in the title, of “Christ Preaching at the Henley Regatta,” Persephone flits about the text as a symbol of nature and a token of faith in language. The vexing multiplicity of the 154

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text’s surrealistic style does not portend an enervating postmodernist dissonance of empty or self-reflexive signifiers. Davenport has Joyce utter perplexed wonder: Of creation he said we had no idea because of the fineness of the stitch. The ear of a flea, scales on the wings of a moth, peripheral nerves of the sea hare, great God! Beside the anatomy of a grasshopper Chartres is a kind of mudpie and all the grand pictures in their frames in the Louvre the tracks of a hen. (Davenport 1979, 110) Davenport does not reduce imaginative worlds to autonomous and arbitrary textual operations, but finds in patterned linguistic energies propitious parallels with natural energies—“Poetry, A Natural Thing,” in Robert Duncan’s formulation (Duncan 1960, 50). Davenport’s preferred image of the artist is as forager. In “Towards an Open Universe” Duncan extols a poetics governed by “the conviction that the order man may contrive or impose upon the things about him or upon his own language is trivial beside the divine order or natural order he may discover in them” (Duncan 1973, 218). Altieri argues that the new American poets do not transform nature into intelligible human structures but rather discover such structures. This immanence manifests itself in the particular, which is not raised to a higher order of symbolic meaning. Words lead not to an ideal verbal order but toward sources of natural and psychic energy. The poet here reveals rather than creates meaning. “La poésie ne s’impose plus, elle s’expose,” Paul Celan’s 1969 aphorism declares (Celan 1983, 34). By such exposure art admits the world and enters into an isomorphic relationship with it. In adapting collage techniques and identifying childhood and the primitive as privileged states, Duncan and Davenport are joined by Gary Snyder. Many of the works of all three employ syncretic structures, what Snyder calls the “mythological present,” where mind and body are a unity and the alienation caused by technology and consumer culture is combated by an exacting and imaginative commitment to manual practices and an exuberant sensuality.9 This faith in absorption in present particulars coincides with a nonconformist idealism. Both Snyder’s and Davenport’s works look beyond the stem and nuclear family toward elective sodalities, and view the contemporary artist as fundamentally a forager in the detritus of defunct social and intellectual institutions. Their utopianism honors the examples of modern-age primitive, Paleolithic, and classical Postmodern to Metamodern

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Oriental cultures. Tending toward a highly nominalized language, their work shares a conviction, steeped in Thoreau and D’Arcy Thompson, regarding “the empirically observable interconnectedness of nature” (Snyder 1973, 405). Organic design in such poetry is always finally benign and takes precedence over cultural orders.10 While both appeal to the corrective example of Whitman, Snyder’s passage to India passes not only through transcendentalism and Zen but through the Beats, Haight-Ashbury, peyote, and LSD, or at least did so during the 1960s, while Davenport passes it through Holland, Scandinavia, and France. Davenport’s brand of libertarianism vehemently rejects 1960s counterculture, as reflected in the story “The Bicycle Rider,” whose title character falls prey to drugs and Beat lore. “Fifty-seven Views of Fujiyama” reverently evokes Zen Buddhist practices but, unlike The Dharma Bums (whose protagonist Japhy Ryder is of course Jack Kerouac’s fictional sketch of Snyder), the story incorporates these contrapuntally rather than integrating them directly into the plot. Whereas the dharma bums struggle to transcend the constraints of 1950s American culture with the aid of a Zen regimen, Davenport runs parallel narratives through the story to respect the separateness of the cultures. Thoreau

If “The Invention of Photography in Toledo” is a story masquerading as an essay, “The Concord Sonata” is an essay masquerading as a story.11 Divided into twenty discrete sections (some titled), the piece is a meditation on an oracular paragraph in Walden, which no intelligence can understand: I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers whom I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves. (Davenport 1993, 77; 2003, 48) 12 Davenport juxtaposes Thoreau’s passage, as well as glimpses of him (in jail, under an umbrella in a snowstorm, talking to a mouse), with passages from Thoreau’s journals and naturalist writings, as well as with a range of other citations. Like the Charles Ives sonata from which he takes his 156

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title (officially the “Second Pianoforte Sonata: Concord, Massachusetts 1840–1860,” the composition’s closing part is “Thoreau”), Davenport assembles his composition out of collage elements. “Collage is retrospective in content, modern in its design,” Davenport writes in the essay “Charles Ives.” “Kept up, it will recapitulate and summarize the history of its own being” (Davenport 1981b, 277). The text suggests a postmodernist pedigree. Generically idiosyncratic, it seems to generate its own rules, an open text made up of discontinuous graftings. However, despite its structural and thematic dissonances, “The Concord Sonata” coheres in quite unpostmodern ways. Its central gesture, as often in Davenport, is foraging, and its central theme the orders of nature disclosed to the determined forager. Thoreau is its epitome, while the text itself urges a heuristic reception. So John Burroughs is quoted on Thoreau’s transcendentalism, whereby nature betrays clues of an elusive “fine effluence” which “he was always reaching after, and often grasping or inhaling” (Davenport 1993, 77; 2003, 48). So Stanley Cavell is quoted on Thoreau’s spiritual appetence: “It is no set of desired things he has lost, but a connection with things, the track of desire itself” (77; 49). Connection is what Davenport’s text would have its reader sense. “The Concord Sonata” is a miniature A Week on the Concord and the Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau’s excursus through common places and commonplace books. “Some, poor in spirit, record plaintively only what has happened to them; but others how they have happened to the universe, and the judgment which they have awarded to circumstances,” Thoreau writes, and he praises Goethe’s Italian Journey for this unselfconscious fidelity to particulars: “A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry” (Thoreau 1985, 266). And the most revelatory. Goethe describes seeking in Italy specimens of syncretic analogy that would reveal the essence of organic forms and the relationships among them. This is the Neoplatonic science of morphology practiced in Walden, written while Thoreau was collecting specimens for Goethe’s adherent, Louis Agassiz. Living by principle and a Kantian deference to the integrity of his own mind,13 Davenport’s Thoreau is a moral as well as a scientific or metaphysical searcher: “If we act by design, by principle, we need designers. Designers need to search. Thoreau discovered that the dove is fiercer than a lion when he sat in the Concord jail, like Diogenes” (85; 54). In a passage quoted from “The Dispersion of Seeds,” 14 Thoreau recalls “breaking through a thick oak wood” to a printless swamp, and Davenport’s placement of the passage near the story’s close reinforces the sense of a more Postmodern to Metamodern

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portentous discovery: “Great blueberries, as big as old-fashioned bullets, alternated, or were closely intermingled, with the crimson hollyberries and black chokeberries, in singular contrast yet harmony” (86; 54). Contrasts absorbed into a larger harmony is what “The Concord Sonata” asks readers to perceive. It is what Davenport wants us to hear in Ives, to whose memory he dedicated Flowers and Leaves.15 It is what Meng Tze wants Duke Hsuan of Qi to hear when in the text’s longest section he recites an ancient ode lamenting the loss of order: “Order is harmony. It is / innovation in tradition” (82; 52). This is the Meng Tze, or Mencius, to whom the foraging scholar Davenport traces the origins of Thoreau’s enigmatic passage. At Walden, as Davenport notes, Thoreau worked not only on Walden but on A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, in which Mencius is quoted: “If one loses a fowl or a dog, he knows well how to seek them again; if one loses the sentiments of the heart, he does not know how to seek them again. The duties of all practical philosophy consists only in seeking after the sentiments of the heart which we have lost; that is all” (79; 50). “The Concord Sonata” thus recapitulates in its form the theme of a restless inquiry, of finding as an absolute value. In a note to the story concerning the translation of Mencius that Thoreau consulted, Davenport glosses the lost “sentiments of the heart” we must retrieve as “inborn nature” (Davenport 1993, 149; not reprinted in The Death of Picasso). The clues are in those “fine effluences” Thoreau sought in nature, in the transcendent order sought in the ancient Chinese ode, in Meng Tze’s remarks on benevolence to the duke, and in our own nature. Mozart

Knowledge of these things depends on the kind of cultural transmission “The Concord Sonata” exhibits and extols: We lose not our innocence or our youth or opportunity but our nature itself, atom by atom, helplessly, unless we are kept in possession of it by the spirit of a culture passed down the generations as tradition, the great hearsay of the past. (Davenport 1993, 83; 2003, 53) An inborn and transcendent nature, a salutary cultural tradition: for postmodernism these are obsolete, indeed reactionary terms, not regenerative values. Essentialist and elitist, Davenport looks in this context like a super158

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annuated modernist. His Poundian incorporation of classical Oriental literature (as in “The Bowmen of Shu” and, most extensively, in “Fifty-seven Views of Fujiyama”), his Ivesian use of collage, and his appeal to the explanatory metadiscourse of a grand récit suggest that Davenport is indeed Lance Olsen’s “last modernist.” However, as the interrelated sequence of Danish idylls which Davenport braids through The Jules Verne Steam Balloon (1987) demonstrates, Davenport adheres to a metamodernism that proceeds beyond modernism as much as it repudiates postmodernism. The stories take place primarily at the rural Danish boarding school where the later novella “Wo es war, soll ich werden” is also set. In “The Bicycle Rider,” the teacher and doctoral candidate Hugo attempts unsuccessfully to rescue a teenaged prostitute from the nihilistic lure of drugs and louche encounters. In the title story Hugo writes his theological dissertation on the traces of belief in daimons in the Gospels while he is himself subject to visions of such guardian spirits. In the concluding story, “The Ringdove Sign,” Pascal and Franklin (the pubescent pupils of “Wo es war, soll ich werden”) become intimate friends, and join Hugo, his lover Mariana, and his father (a liberal Lutheran pastor) at the family cabin, where the three young daimons reappear before Hugo, and finally before Pascal.16 All three stories are divided into discrete numbered or titled paragraphs, laid out in asyndetic relation, characteristic of Davenport’s prose variations on Pound’s ideogrammatic method.17 Intersticed between elliptical, linear narrative episodes are diverse archival citations, ranging from free prose translations of Rilke and Wittgenstein and Latin passages from patristic literature to quotations from John Clare and natural history. The section titles meanwhile frequently resemble those of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, such as place names bearing no immediate relation to the story, botanical nomenclature, historical allusions, and aphorisms. The briefest reads: DOVE By wholeness of being. (Davenport 1987b, 110; 2003, 229) This condenses Davenport’s entire matter. Hugo tells Mariana that in ancient tradition the daimon took the form of “a dove. More than any other folktale, Yeshua mentions the sign of Jonas. That is, the sign of the dove” (140; 370). The wooden dove of the Pythagorean Archytas, Thoreau’s elusive turtledove, the dove descending over Jesus on the Jordan, Jonah (“His Postmodern to Metamodern

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staff was of olive, and his name was Dove” [Davenport 187b,122]), and “The Ringdove Sign” all gesture toward it. By wholeness of being, redemption. The wholeness is a Blakean union of sensual “delight” and “spiritual sensation” (Blake 1979, 449), and the dove a present saturated with historical, natural, and religious correspondences. Davenport’s method of montage might appear to accord with postmodern strategies, such as Jacques Derrida’s notion of the graft: By virtue of its essential iterability, a written syntagm can always be detached from the chain in which it is inserted or given without causing it to lose all possibility of functioning, if not all possibility of “communicating,” precisely. One can perhaps come to recognize other possibilities in it by inscribing it or grafting it onto other chains. No context can entirely enclose it. (Derrida 1988, 9) Davenport’s citations have this quality of opening up latent possibilities while preserving particularity, but for Davenport this opens up realms of possibility rather than reveals the instability of language. Among the “grafts” from natural history in “The Ringdove Sign” is one from a botanical guide: HYACINTHUS INDICUS MINOR The root of this Iacinth is knobbed, like the root of arum or Wakerobin, from whence spring many leaves, lying upon the ground and compassing one another at the bottom, being long and narrow and hollow-guttered at the end, which is small and pointed, no less woolly or full of threads than Hyacinthus Indicus Major. From the middle of these leaves the stalk rises long and slender, three or four foot long, so that without it be propped up, it will bend down and lie upon the ground. (Davenport 1987b, 132; 2003, 364) The taxonomy is neutral and detailed, yet historical. An antique text underscores difference and temporality. It provides not only new and distinct information, but a distinctly new voice in the text. Embedded between Hugo’s description of Pascal to his lover Mariana, the passage also indirectly glosses the character of the pubescent prodigy, who is bright, beautiful, and, with a head in a sense too big for his body, in need of propping. The mythological referent meanwhile reinforces both Pascal’s beauty 160

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and the threat to it. Later, just before Pascal and Franklin arrive at Hugo’s cabin escorted by Hugo’s father, Hyacinth appears in a brief paragraph: ANEMONE Wheat figured in gold on the steel blade of his sword, in sudden windflowers that came with the rain, clad in white linen, Hyakinthos. (Davenport 1987b, 144; 2003, 373) Both flower and youth, Hyacinth is the victim of his own desirability. The poet Thamyris became the first person to court a member of his own sex when he fell in love with Hyacinth, but Apollo schemed to reduce this rival to a deaf mute. Zephyrus’s jealousy was even more violent, leading him to kill Hyacinth with a discus thrown by Apollo himself. Pederasty and sexual rivalry will recur in Pascal’s life when, in “Wo es war, soll ich werden,” he becomes like Hyacinth the lover of an older man and enmeshed in a jealous ménage à trois with Franklin and his girlfriend Alexandra. How he eludes Hyacinth’s fate is the novella’s plot. Hyacinth’s white linen apparel is no less important. Hugo is drafting a theological dissertation on the palimpsestlike traces of belief in daimons in the New Testament. “Angels wear white linen: that’s standard,” Hugo explains to Mariana (Davenport 1987b, 139; 2003, 370). An ancient Mediterranean belief in angelic daimons revealing themselves to the inspired has, in Hugo’s view, insinuated itself into the Gospels. By indirectly linking Pascal to Hyacinth, Davenport links the boy to the daimons. At the end of The Jules Verne Steam Balloon, Pascal will glimpse three of them hovering near Hugo’s cabin in a steam balloon. The messengers first appear in the second and title story of the sequence. Under the repeated rubric of ANEMONE, Hugo discusses the Big Bang hypothesis with his father, a Lutheran pastor. “The only thing the physicists can reach back to is a great force present in all matter and space. Well then, Papa said, scattering leaves with his stick, there’s God. As they see Him . . . If matter was not stuff before creation, then God can be a pattern of energy rather than an oxygen breather and processor of carbohydrates” (Davenport 1987b, 109; 2003, 228). God is immanent in force and occasional in Jesus and the three elfin daimons of The Jules Verne Steam Balloon. Light is the ideal expression of deity in Davenport. In “Jonah,” Davenport’s retelling of the biblical story, the reluctant prophet, like the youths Postmodern to Metamodern

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in the nacelle of the steam balloon, is a daimon embarked to deliver a message he scarcely grasps.18 Though he tries to elude God’s command to warn Nineveh of its destruction, Jonah on the merchant ship sees God’s presence in the “glow on the tip of the mast. That fitful misty light was like the voice in the garden” (Davenport 1987b, 124). That light is finally a benign and palpable constant. At the cabin where “The Ringdove Sign” takes place, characters repeatedly remark on the quality of the light: “Here’s that light again. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before” (Davenport 1987b, 128; 2003, 361). That light—here, Saint Elmo’s fire—is an attribute of the steam balloon’s daimonic trio, Quark, Buckeye, and Tumble. Later Hugo’s father asks, Hugo, what are you looking at? The light, he said. He was looking at Quark in a French sailor’s suit, standing behind his father. He gave Hugo a wink, which meant: Nobody but you can see me. He mouthed light frequency. (Davenport 1987b, 147; 2003, 376) The three had appeared to Hugo first during the idyllic conclusion of “The Jules Verne Steam Balloon.” Mariana is here helping her brother Franklin write a letter to Papa Tvemunding while the student Tom poses for Hugo, who is repainting the botched portrait of the “bicycle rider,” with whose death by overdose the previous story, “The Bicycle Rider,” had ended. Hugo is struggling to overcome his failure to reform the drug addict. Through the skylight the balloon appears: “Tumble was at the skylight, Quark looking over his shoulder. Why do you keep looking up? Mariana asked. The light, Hugo said. It’s what I paint by” (Davenport 1987b, 120; 2003, 238). Their appearance thus coincides with an epiphany realized in the form of Hugo’s altered painting. Hugo partakes of that spiritual “light of which we are free to partake.” “The demon of selfishness has to be cast out before the daimon, that grand presence ‘moving from the source of being’ (Tatlin!, p. 251), can get hold of the artist,” Joseph Schöpp notes in an essay on The Jules Verne Steam Balloon. “Both ‘the accurate light’ outside and a strong, almost Shakerish belief in the inner light conspire to generate the true work of art” (Schöpp 1988, 120). Buckeye tries to explain the source of light to Hugo: “Under all’s a fire so fine it is and isn’t in and out of time, a pulse of is, a pulse of isn’t . . . Over all’s the nothing that’s something because of the curving tides of the is and isn’t” (Davenport 1987b, 120–21; 2003, 238). The ballooning daimons, writes Schöpp, are “Davenport’s harbingers of light 162

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and personify the creative spirit” (Schöpp 1988, 136). Like Tatlin’s glider, Archytas’s wooden dove, Blériot’s pioneer plane, and the balloon Walser rides at the beginning of “A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg,” the Jules Verne steam balloon is a fanciful utopian contraption, half gadget and half spirit, an anachronism ahead of its time.19 The Belle Époque balloon and its pubescent pilots are adapted from Ingmar Bergman’s concert film of The Magic Flute. Allusions to Mozart proliferate in “The Jules Verne Steam Balloon,” whose opening caption is KING OF PRUSSIA I IN D MAJOR K.575, Mozart’s string quartet for the imperial cellist Friedrich Wilhelm II.20 Theme music, as it were, to the story. The Swedish title of Bergman’s 1975 film, Trollflöjten, provides the caption to a paragraph describing Franklin dancing to Mozart’s pied piper, while a third quotes directly from Emanuel Schikaneder and Karl Ludwig Giesecke’s libretto: ZUM ZIELE FÜHRT DICH DIESE BAHN (Davenport 1987b, 113; 2003, 232). In Mozart’s singspiel, the three sprites indicate to Tamino the route both to wisdom and to his beloved Pamina: “This path leads you to the goal.” Bergman’s film version of the opera is especially resonant because of its fascination with the children both on and off the stage. The overture is filmed entirely through the facial expressions of the audience, especially those of the children. The libretto of The Magic Flute does not indicate in whose service the Three Boys are bound. In Davenport’s story Quark can only explain to Hugo that they obey the voices of invisible consiliarii. “Where are we when we aren’t here? I wonder if we know. It is left to us to rig out our expeditions. We got the balloon out of a book of pictures, and we get our clothes where we can, and our food, as when we’re inside a system we have to live in its structure” (Davenport 1987b, 148; 2003, 377). Their knowledge is as limited as their competence: “We don’t remember all our assignments. And once they’re done, it wasn’t us, somehow, who did them, you know? Actually, Tumble said, they keep things from us, practically everything I sometimes think” (148; 377). Like the troll who converses with Kierkegaard in “Mr. Churchyard and the Troll” and the lar in Kafka’s cabin in “The Messengers,” these dryads (whose names contain arboreal connotations) create more mischief and misunderstanding than clarity. Yet Davenport finds both comedy and the suggestion of Pythagorean pattern beyond the confusion. The dryads are helpless to elucidate the supernatural mysteries they embody. Quark finally can offer to Hugo only a general reassurance: “Be silent, be bold, be of great heart: that’s the message” (Davenport 1987b, Postmodern to Metamodern

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148; 2003, 377). Tumble had told him much the same in “The Jules Verne Steam Balloon”: “Here’s the message: Road auspicious. Though young, act like a man. Be steadfast, patient, and silent.” About what, “we are not free to say” (112; 231). Zum Ziele führt dich diese Bahn. Strolling naked through the woods in the morning, Hugo is finally invited into the balloon, where as a result of a misunderstanding Quark reports the destruction of Pompeii as though it were news to Hugo. In conversation with me Davenport characterized the belief in daimons and their supernatural kind as “sustaining fictions” (February 23, 2000). They sustain many of his own. He shares this interest even with writers temperamentally at odds with him. In Mumbo Jumbo, a comic bricolage like much of Davenport’s fiction, Ishmael Reed introduces loas, voodoo daimons whom the Haitian priest Papa LaBas summons to defend African-American society from the dominant white culture’s adulterations, while Old Robin casts voodoo spells in Flight to Canada to ward off evil. In Reed faith in such daimons corresponds to a commitment to the sustaining traditions of African-American culture. (Osiris plays in Reed the role of Orpheus in Davenport.) In both authors, daimons function as literary tropes for that wholeness of being which Davenport symbolizes in the ringdove sign and which coincides with the harmony identified in The Jules Verne Steam Balloon with cosmoscreating force itself. Whatever its faith in universal orders capable of subordinating all cultural multiplicity, modernism rarely invokes the supernatural, while postmodernism exploits the supernatural to vent its antirationalist and antimimetic bias. In that earlier postwar interval which I am characterizing as metamodern, however, something of what Blake calls “spiritual sensation” persists. While the modernist imposition of transcendent categories is resisted, metamodernism retains confidence in the heuristic validity of myth. Davenport’s daimons symbolize universal forces active in a numinous present. The elect in his fiction are those to whom such visions are vouchsafed. In the closing, fiftieth paragraph of “The Ringdove Sign” (“The Bicycle Rider” contains a hundred numbered paragraphs, while the book itself is 150 pages long), Pascal spots the ascending balloon, from which Hugo, unbeknownst to him, has just descended. In its—and the book’s—final sentence, Pascal calls out to Franklin, Mariana, and Hugo’s father, “Hurry, or you’ll miss it” (Davenport 1987b, 150; 2003, 379). For all their virtues, they probably will miss it. Earlier the daimons conjecture that the consiliarii are interested not in Hugo or his clan but in the prodigy who will be the main character of the se164

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quel “Wo es war, soll ich werden”: “Maybe it’s all for Pascal, Buckeye said. He’s the deep one” (148; 377). Blake spotted an angel above the elms of his Felpham house. Davenport’s characters commune with kindred messengers. Jesus

“Blake was a congenial Christian and like Kierkegaard and Bunyan had that gift of analogy and integrating vision that makes a prophet a prophet,” Davenport writes in “II Timothy” (Davenport 1996b, 65). That gift also makes a writer a writer in Davenport, but analogy and integration have been relinquished by postmodernists to incongruity and disintegration. The fusing of popular and elite elements, of topical realism and bucolic idyll, of supernatural and quotidian narrative, as well as the use of many antimimetic devices, are as present in The Jules Verne Steam Balloon as in much postmodernist fiction—but equally, and more important, as in The Magic Flute. A Mozartian reverence is the prevailing mood of these stories, as of metamodernism generally. “Christ Preaching at the Henley Regatta” is exemplary.21 Brian McHale again claims it for postmodernism, citing it as a “residual version” of carnival (McHale 1987, 174). Like Davenport’s comic poem in Chaucerian meter, “The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard,” the story’s title is adapted from a Stanley Spencer painting, the uncompleted Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta. (A third painting, Swan Upping at Cookham, illustrates the cover of The Hunter Gracchus.) In the story, Spencer forages for “inward grace” and dog excrement (in an essay Davenport notes his “connoisseurship of the malodorous” [Davenport 1996b, 115]) at the regatta while Mallarmé recites Davenport’s translation of “Le vierge, le vivace, et le bel aujourd’hui,” 22 a member of Parliament exposes himself before falling dead, and personalities out of fiction and history (like Lord Peter Wimsey and C. S. Lewis) mingle. The language of the story is correspondingly rapturous and eclectic. “What gnathion and gullet to the Finns!” (Davenport 1981, 101; 2003, 190). The prose conceals iambic measures and internal rhyme: “Afternoon’s long shadowfall across the grass and the garden wall” (102; 191). Joycean syntax and locutions also dispel the prosaic: “By Stanley Spencer tall oarsmen in shorts and singlets bear their boat above their windblent vandal hair” (97; 188). Not a story but an oneiric verbal cortege, “Christ Preaching at the Henley Regatta” borrows its idiom from what in “Stanley Spencer and David Jones” Davenport calls the painter’s “intimate, convivial, sacralPostmodern to Metamodern

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ized pictorial space” (Davenport 1996b, 123). The “Christ Preaching” of both Spencer and Davenport is compressed, exact, and yet hallucinatory, achieving “a cancelation of emotional distance” (122). Davenport praises Spencer’s “total fusion of sacred and profane,” his images of a guiltless utopian zone of Lacanian fetishes, and the social critique implicit in his erotic paintings (114ff.). Davenport’s story incorporates these elements, which indeed suff use his fiction. What is distinctive, however, is its visual discourse and the spontaneous scheme of the story’s construction. Accompanying each page of text is, on the left side, a collage by Roy R. Behrens. The eight collages, superimposed over a stable grid and a rower, invoke the stop-time photography pioneered in Zoopraxia: Man and Animals in Motion by Eadweard Muybridge.23 A direct collaboration, Behrens’s collages respond to Davenport’s text, a process reversed in another story collected in Eclogues, “Lo Splendore della Luce a Bologna.” Inspired by surrealist collage practices (such as Max Ernst’s Une Semaine de Bonté), “Christ Preaching at the Henley Regatta” is a split text, its visual discourse operating parallel with, rather than in subordination to, the verbal discourse. The grafting of a celebrated figurative painting onto a plural and autonomous narrative space, the incorporation of visual collage alongside a verbal one, the autotelic play and heterotopic reference would seem to align “Christ Preaching at the Henley Regatta” with postmodernist textual practices. Davenport does not preach but only shows, saturating the carnival atmosphere of the Spencerian regatta and situating the story in that oscillation between indeterminacy and immanence that Ihab Hassan identifies as a prevailing postmodernist trait (Hassan 1998, 593). Most of Davenport’s devices, however, were already current during the modernist period, when Spencer painted Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta. Like many of Spencer’s paintings, it registers immanence, in modernist terms, as the sublime teased out of the quotidian. The painting gestures toward an absolute to which the art is striving to be adequate. “It is God as flesh that Spencer depicted with his most dramatic awe and reverence,” the Spencer essay notes, “Christ in the streets of Cookham, among children, animals, bricks, flowers” (Davenport 1996b, 122). Comparing him to Fourier, Mother Ann Lee, and Blake’s disciple Samuel Palmer, Davenport wonders if Spencer were not “a visionary among the heavenon-earth designers,” even if a “disillusioned” one (121–22). For Spencer the natural beauty of the world “was the primary fact”; man meanwhile “is part of nature, God’s creation” (121–22). The essay compares Spencer to David Jones, who struggles “to be one of those who depict the spirit in 166

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search for form, order, truth, God” (125). A spirit questing to discern in nature a benignly ordering divinity—is this Spencer’s and Jones’s conception of the artist yet not Davenport’s? “Christ Preaching at the Henley Regatta” complements Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta. Davenport insists on the continuities inherent in Spencer’s and Jones’s novelties: “Their seeming eccentricities and radical innovations soon turn out to be solidly within the deepest traditions of British and European poetry and painting” (126). This is no less true of Davenport’s own eccentricities and radical innovations. Christ is visible in Spencer’s painting. Is Christ present in Davenport’s story, rather than simply in his (borrowed) title? The story’s repeated attention to the light (as in The Jules Verne Steam Balloon) and to the swans both on the river and in the Mallarmé poem all intimate divine presence.24 Following the Dutch theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, Davenport makes a sharp distinction between the wry itinerant rabbi Jesus, a “chrysalis,” and the Christ “he became after the first Easter,” identified by Christians as the Messiah (Davenport and Urrutia 1996, xx). In collaboration with Benjamin Urrutia, Davenport translated Jesus’s biblical and apocryphal aphorisms, the title of which, The Logia of Yeshua, acknowledges a preference for the Jewish chrysalis over the Christian butterfly.25 “With Heraclitus he understood that Being is all of one substance, one origin, and one fate. We are all the prodigal children of one father,” Davenport argues in his introduction to the translation, characterizing Jesus more as a Pythagorean sage than as a member of the Trinity (xx).26 The young Yeshua is the subject of the first of the four-part story “August Blue,” where he disputes not in the temple but in the yeshiva, offering a homily on the Hebrew alphabet.27 In the second part, America’s first Jewish professor, the mathematician James Joseph Sylvester, makes a narrow escape from the racism, violence, and ignorance of the antebellum University of Virginia; in the third are juxtaposed descriptions by Pepys and Defoe of the Isle of Ely (where, a note inaccurately indicates, Wittgenstein is buried); in the fourth, T. E. Lawrence poses for Henry Scott Tuke at a Cornish cove. From its title on, derived from Tuke’s August Blue (reproduced on the dust jacket of A Table of Green Fields, in which the story is collected), postmodernist principles seem to abound in the story. A patchwork of periods, styles of writing, and citations, “August Blue” is an intertextual “open” text, archival and participatory, disjunctive and polyphonic. In the ontological clash of historical and imaginary characters, Davenport Postmodern to Metamodern

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includes the obscure (Sylvester), the concealed (Wittgenstein), the elusive (Lawrence), and the mythic (Jesus). He omits connectives between the four sections, which are layed out paratactically. Yet little seems to organize the quartet into an integral field. When on the way to school his classmates hunger for the figs ripening behind a wall, Yeshua magically produces them. While they chew figs in class, the teacher hurries through an account of the alphabet, to Yeshua’s dismay. “But Teacher, Yeshua said, we have not learned what is to be known about alef, and here we are hastening on to beth” (Davenport 1993, 3). He then conjures figs for the teacher, whose speechlessness permits Yeshua to explain, with Zukofskian zeal, that “the alef is a picture of the whole world”: 28 In the alef there’s a yud up here, and a yud down there, with a line between. As with all boundaries, this line both joins and separates. The yud above is the Creator of the universe, of the earth, the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars. The yud below is us, the people. The line between is the Torah, the prophets, the law. It is the eye for seeing what we can of the Creator. He is evident in his work, the world. (Davenport 1993, 3–4) Yeshua is not so much a Christ as a healer and parabolist who affirms elective kinships and a material world anchored in spirit. “These good things belong down here, but they come from up there. That’s why there’s a line between the top yud and the bottom yud” (Davenport 1993, 4). In “II Timothy” Davenport identifies the “dialogue between Jesus and Paul” as his main subject. In Jesus’s community of faith, goodwill was to replace legality . . . The bond would be love, respect, loyalty, a kinship for which the metaphor would be that we are all children of one father . . . Jesus strove to reconcile man with himself: to make a unity of the divided self and to make a unity of the brotherhood of man. Paul, striving to bring man and God together in a philosophical unity that he called faith, redemption, salvation, worship, inadvertently divided us all over again. Christ’s return was the diff usion of his spirit through all mankind: the descent of the dove. Paul relocated this in historical time and made Christianity a preparation for the fullest life, rather than the fullest life itself. (Davenport 1996b, 69–70) 168

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The Yeshua of “August Blue” practices the fullest life, savoring the figs no less than the orthographic symbolism of the alphabet. He is however a wonder-worker, a rare instance in Davenport’s fiction (e.g., “The Ringdove Sign”) of the supernatural. First published like “August Blue” in 1990, “II Timothy” omits the Incarnation and Resurrection, but the story admits the miraculous.29 This is not the fantastic, defined phenomenologically by Tzvetan Todorov as the hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations (see Todorov 1977, 155–56 and 179). The appearance of the figs is not uncanny but marvelous. The story becomes “an epic amplification” making “Jesus’ life a myth,” as Davenport describes the strategy of the Gospels (Davenport 1996b, 68). Like Foucault’s presentation of heterotopias, however, the transgression of mimesis may operate in Davenport’s story as another postmodern violation of representational modes. “August Blue” would thus appear to be a story in part about the epic amplification, rather than a version of this myth. The story’s succeeding sections seem to press further in the direction of postmodernism. What does an expatriate British mathematician in Virginia share with Jesus, or either of them with the British burial ground of an Austrian philosopher, other than their race and pedagogical vocation? The fourth and longest section, on Lawrence, lacks even these elements. Sylvester’s mathematics lectures are sabotaged by the racial slurs of his illiterate, drunken students, debauched plantation scions who loaf and duel, fancying themselves the heroes of Sir Walter Scott romances. Only the sword concealed in his cane prevents the “Fesser Jew Cockney” (Davenport 1993, 7) from being assaulted by two such ruffians, but Sylvester is forced to retrench in New York City, practicing law until his mathematical papers earn him a position at Johns Hopkins University, “where he founded the first school of mathematics in the United States, where he arranged for the first woman to enter an American graduate program, where he argued with Charles Sanders Peirce, and where he introduced the Hebrew letters shin and teth into mathematical annotation” (8). Peirce and Judaism provide the only obvious links to part 3, which grafts descriptions by Defoe and Pepys of the Cambridgeshire fens where Davenport’s note inaccurately places Wittgenstein’s grave. The brief section describes both the efficacy of decoys in the fens and their blanketing by the frequent fogs. Part 4 seems linked to part 3 only by its British setting. An adolescent recounts the 1922 visit of “Aircraftsman Ross” to Tuke, sketching youths at a cove. “A nice little watercolor came of it, of Postmodern to Metamodern

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Ross undressing for a swim. Except that it isn’t Ross” (Davenport 1993, 10). T. E. Lawrence chats with the members of Tuke’s circle, agrees to pose, deflects questions regarding his identity, goes swimming and buff-naked meets the unflappable vicar. Here, as seemingly in “Christ Preaching at the Henley Regatta,” might not Davenport be reducing an imaginative world to an autotelic textual operation? However tenuous its relation to the preceding parts may appear, this concluding section concatenates the heterogeneous material of “August Blue.” In the preface to a catalogue of Will McBride’s photography, Davenport notes that “Tuke was working in the last age of innocence before Freudian taxonomies could trivialize his lyric sense of health and comradeship into a subject for psychiatric Comstockery” (Davenport 1999b, 5). Lawrence is gently invited to reveal himself, but “there is that residuum of privacy at our center which we do despair of exposing to the world’s mercy” (Davenport 1993, 12). By removing his Royal Air Force uniform, the man can pose not as Aircraftsman Ross 352087 or as Lawrence of Arabia but as the T. E. Lawrence whom Tuke knows him to be. In “The Dawn in Erewhon” Adriaan recalls “the stupidity of reticence in an anguish of pretense” that sexual fulfilment with his adolescent agemate Piet thankfully ended (Davenport 1974, 145). Lawrence has no such resources. “I was born an imposter,” he confides (Davenport 1993, 13). Even his naked person proves a camouflage, so that at story’s end the vicar can ask, “Were you, Ross, in this late, and one hopes, last terrible war? But of course you weren’t: you’re too young” (14). While Lawrence can boast self-deprecatingly of his invisibility, he has traveled to meet Tuke (on the Bough motorcycle on which he will soon die) precisely from a sense of identification with this artist of homosocial idyll. “We’re a kind of comitatus here, Tuke said. Friends, all. The vicar, who likes to visit at tea, usually when the boys are still half undressed, has his doubts about the propriety of it all” (Davenport 1993, 11). Tuke has encouraged the vicar to admire Housman and Whitman, but “he brought back the Edward Carpenter we lent him” (11). Carpenter’s ideal of a passionate yet decorous elite homosexual subculture is clearly Tuke’s inspiration. It is Lawrence’s ideal as well. Removing his clothes, he says, “When I first saw your painting, Tuke, I recognized a fellow spirit, and life is not so long that we can afford to put off meeting one’s kin” (12). The constellating fragments of “August Blue” cohere into a meeting of kin. The realization of secret affinity is both hidden in the story’s structure and stated as its theme. Yeshua preaches the totality of being discern170

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ible in the Hebrew alef; that totality is inherent in the Euclidean proofs of Pythagorean theorems on which Sylvester lectures (Davenport 1993, 6), inherent equally in the sensual harmonies of Tuke’s painting. As in Pythagorean and Gnostic lore, such a logos is perceptible only to close scrutiny. “Nature loves to hide,” Davenport renders Heraclitus’s maxim in his translation of the pre-Socratic’s fragments, glossing it: “Becoming is a secret process” (Davenport 1979b, 14; 1995, 159).30 Davenport’s textual strategies reproduce, in parallel series, this fugitive yet accessible Heraclitean nature. Jesus is thus hidden both in an anecdote from an apocryphal Gospel of Thomas (“apocryphal” meaning “concealed,” “cryptic”) and in Yeshua, Christ’s almost unrecognizable “real” name; Sylvester is hidden in Virginian obscurity, the students and residents of Charlottesville not merely ignorant of the mathematician’s renown but hostile to him; Wittgenstein, for years regarded in many circles as a crank, spending much of his life in seclusion, is hidden in the structure of the story, which describes a foggy landscape concealing the philosopher’s burial place; and Colonel Lawrence is hidden in “Private Ross” as well as in a little-known Tuke watercolor. Jesus, Wittgenstein, and Lawrence have remained, despite their fame, enigmatic figures, while Sylvester is largely unknown outside the field of mathematics. Cryptic and overt correspondences proliferate in “August Blue.” All four are bachelors, the sexual lives of Wittgenstein and Lawrence were secretive and apparently anguished, and Jesus, Wittgenstein, and Sylvester are Jews. Concealment extends to Sylvester’s sword cane and the Cambridgeshire fog that blankets Ely Minster. Three kinds of schools are described: a yeshiva in Roman Jerusalem, a mathematics class at the University of Virginia, and an open-air atelier. (Wittgenstein was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.) More important is the Hebrew alphabet studied by Yeshua’s class and adopted into numerical notation by Sylvester and such later mathematicians as Georg Cantor, who, “remembering Sylvester, introduced the letter alef as a symbol of the transfinite” (Davenport 1993, 8). Yeshua had urged his classmates to discern in the shape of the alef a symbol of a benignly ordered cosmos, the diagonal between the two yuds a fence, a road, an eye. A mathematician later makes of it a related symbol. Yeshua had seen in it both cosmic unity and the means to perceive it; Cantor sees in it a figure of the mathematical sublime, the transfinite, a number exceeding all finite numbers.31 The aleph as transfinite and as unlimited spatial succession is a limit concept bordering on the ineffable. Hidden under the Cambridgeshire Postmodern to Metamodern

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fogs and the ellipses of Davenport lies Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus, by attempting to set limits on the perceived officiousness of language, concludes where “August Blue” begins, in mysticism. “There is to be sure the unexpressible. This shows itself, it is the mystic” (Wittgenstein 1963, 115).32 “August Blue” obliquely evokes Wittgenstein as the highly systematic delineator, finally, of the zone of valid mystical presentiment. “Not how the world is, is the mystic, but that it is. The feeling of the world as limited whole is the mystic” (114).33 The elliptical structure and enigmatic substance of Davenport’s story convey precisely this mystic sense of the world as “limited whole.” The figs, the aleph, and the transfinite all point toward it.34 It was Wittgenstein who in his Cambridge lectures deplored, as an instance of the bewitchment of reason by language, “the misuse of the word infinite, which is not the name of a numeral” (Wittgenstein 1980, 107). In The Blue and Brown Notebooks based on those lectures he contends that “our idea that its meaning is ‘transcendent’ rests on a misunderstanding” (Wittgenstein 1960, 95). The aleph of Cantor’s transfinite—literally “over the border,” “across the line,” “through the boundary”—attempts to signal this mathematically, denoting paradoxically the intervals within an infinite magnitude. It offers a finite means of conceptualizing the infinite without injury to the fact that the infinite does not represent a number. “August Blue” concerns the experience of boundaries and the trespassing of them sub specie aeternitatis. Part 3 describes a marshland, a fluid border across which the local inhabitants “sometimes row . . . and sometimes wade” (Davenport 1993, 8). In the alef Yeshua sees the boundary between creator and creation, the line yoking together (a root meaning of the word alef ) what it divides, becoming scripture, an eye, and a fence which orients and reveals: “But the fun of the line between the yuds, Yeshua went on, is that it’s a fence only if you look at it that way. It is really a road, and like all roads it goes both ways. You have to know which way you’re going” (3). The story begins with inaccessible figs ripening behind a red wall, but Yeshua miraculously leapfrogs the barrier. By conjuring the fruit of the fenced tree, Yeshua signals the need to leap boundaries: “You can get near the line with much labor, or you can cross it with a step” (4). “Yeshua’s meshuggeh,” a classmate says: crazy, full of tricks. The Hebrew root also means “to transgress” or “to make to wonder,” and Yeshua’s defiance of barriers is both transgression and miracle. “Is it the blessed Hillel your father has taught you?” Zakkaiah asks his pupil, and though Yeshua 172

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claims not to know it, the Hillel is what Davenport in a sense rewrites— an ecstatic prayer of gratitude for creation. Davenport erects typographical borders—the discrete numbered sections of the story, which are to be leapfrogged and joined just as Yeshua’s schoolmates “leapfrogged in the narrowest streets” (Davenport 1993, 1). The misty fens efface the Cambridgeshire county boundaries. Racial, color, and gender boundaries prevail at the University of Virginia, but Sylvester eventually leapfrogs them by introducing Hebrew characters into mathematical notation and female students into graduate studies. Lawrence once startled Wyndham Lewis, he tells Tuke, by leaping onto his property: “I dropped over his garden wall one evening . . . A childish trick on my part, but it amused him immensely” (10). Discretion is thus a boundary also. One of Tuke’s young models tests it by prying into Private Ross’s privacy. “There goes Leo again, Tuke said, drawing the thinnest possible line between good manners and intelligent curiosity” (13). Beyond Tuke’s Arcadian cove, where barriers of dress, class, and age are effaced and Lawrence can lower some of his own, societal barriers still prevail. Behind the naked youths on the water in Tuke’s August Blue seven battleships anchor. At the end of “August Blue” the career soldier Ross reminds the vicar that he indeed fought in the Great War, “and it is not the last” (14). Davenport situates the story on the border between Eden and the postlapsarian world. Lawrence would die on the motorcycle which carried him to Tuke’s cove; Sylvester was almost destroyed by his treatment at the University of Virginia; the fen mists conceal Ely Minster; and on entering Jerusalem Jesus would curse an unripened fig tree, which at once withered away, illustrating a stern injunction to have faith in God (see Matthew 21:18–22 and Mark 12:20–26). At the same time, however, Jesus invokes a fig tree in parables of redemption and divine forbearance (see Luke 13:6–9). Meanwhile the forbidden fruits of the venerable fig tree in “August Blue” “were fatter and sweeter than any others in the world, except, of course, those in the Garden of Eden” (Davenport 1993, 1). The sensual beauty of the figs is a providential bounty. Fig leaves connote both the promise of the Second Coming (see Mark 13:26–29) and the fall into an embarrassed self-consciousness, when Eden’s discharged custodians conceal their genitals with them. As in Genesis, the condition of happiness is an unselfconscious nakedness. The transfinite Eden is crossed in the story’s closing section, Tuke’s Wordsworthian spot of time. The Jehovah Postmodern to Metamodern

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of Genesis is surely as naked as the creature made in his image, while in Eden the nakedness of Adam and Eve reinforces their childlike natures. The youths modeling for Tuke are thus briefly restored to Eden, as too is Lawrence and Tuke himself, when the party goes for a swim. The story takes place while Tuke is painting three surviving works: the watercolor portrait of Lawrence, a nude owned by Paul Cadmus, and Morning Splendour, which the Boy Scouts purchased and display in BadenPowell House in London.35 The narrator, Georgie Fouracre, describes the latter painting as “two of us in a dory and me on the strand as naked as the day I came into the world” (Davenport 1993, 10). Linking McBride’s photography to Tuke’s painting in the preface to the McBride catalog, Davenport locates cultural confusion regarding nudity in the Judaic and Greek cultural legacies: “The one gave us an absolute taboo against nudity; the other gave us the nude as an ideal of beauty. These two donations have been colliding for over two thousand years” (Davenport 1999b, 5). The collision remains most audible in the United States, where the expatriate McBride’s photographs are not exhibited. For nudity to be criminalized it must first be eroticized. To be eroticized it must be identified as a visual experience that flusters wives and daughters and makes men and boys drool. For McBride the naked body is erotic and much else besides: he finds bodies and settings that are plausible grounds for an erotic reading. But it is the vulnerability of adolescence that overrides the erotic and gives the image its significance. (Davenport 1999b, 5) That vulnerability, cherished and protected, “August Blue” evokes. Three youths, a painter, and a soldier are, however briefly, restored to “a state of nature,” at ease with each other as with the easy vicar. The eyes that see clearly but which do not see nakedness see with Adam’s childlike prelapsarian eyes. “Naked as the day,” these characters may inhabit the Edenic transfinite. Striving for Eden would only prevent its attainment. One can only praise. Davenport dances before the altar and utters his hillel, his praise of creation.36 Of his Pentecostal paintings, such as The Cookham Resurrection, Spencer says, “In the Pentecost I like and want the notion of the leaven of Christ’s teaching to make its way through all circumstances and happenings of life . . . giving to everything its special meaning and import” (quoted in Pople 1991, 508). Davenport’s fiction is in Spencer’s sense Pentecostal. 174

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Yeshua offering figs, Sylvester defending himself from a student, Lawrence posing for Tuke, may all be so much apocrypha, but they are less postmodern discourses than supreme fictions. Like Wallace Stevens, Davenport is willing “To be stripped of every fiction except one, / The fiction of an Absolute” (Stevens 1982, 404). Fredric Jameson contends that the Hegelian prognosis of art’s supersession by philosophy was challenged by modernism, an art aspiring “to take philosophy’s place after the end of the old one, and to usurp all of philosophy’s claims to the Absolute, to being the ‘highest mode in which truth manages to come into being’” (Jameson 1998, 83). Modernism revives the category of the sublime: “Modernism aspires to the Sublime as to its very essence, which we may call transaesthetic, insofar as it lays a claim to the Absolute, that is, it believes that in order to be art at all, art must be something beyond art” (83). Jameson locates the emergence of postmodernism in “the end of the Sublime, the dissolution of art’s vocation to reach the Absolute” (84); in postmodern art occurs “the return of Beauty and the decorative, in the place of the older modern Sublime.” 37 He laments the perceived “abandonment by art of the quest for the Absolute or of truth claims and its redefinition as a source of sheer pleasure and gratification (rather than, as in the modern, jouissance)” (86). Metamodernism does not share in the postmodernist repudiation of the modernist sublime, where autonomous textual play is still wedded to the Kantian claim that, far from being diminished by the truth-telling authority of modern science, literature enjoys a unique freedom from obligations to referential truth in order to grasp absolutes. “August Blue” points toward an ineffable absolute to which its language and web of citations, like that of its modernist forebears, are striving to be adequate. In the postscript to Twelve Stories, Davenport describes writing in terms contrary to postmodernist aesthetics: “A congeries of essences must find a form, and the form must be coherent and harmonious” (Davenport 1997, 236). Essence, form, coherence, and harmony would scarcely describe, say, Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations, Paul Auster’s City of Glass, or Lyn Hejinian’s My Life. Davenport is, on the contrary, closer to Levertov, who in a statement writes, “I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist” (Levertov 1960, 412). In his introduction to Simon Dinnerstein: Paintings and Drawings, Davenport calls art “an intelligible world inside a largely unintelligible one” (Davenport 1999, 3). The discontinuities and gaps of Davenport’s asyndetic narratives imply sublime recesses of extralinguistic meaning. Rather than calling into quesPostmodern to Metamodern

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tion aesthetic and even linguistic access to truth, such a strategy aspires to at least limited access to it. Kenneth Haynes suggests that Davenport approximates “Joyce’s faith in an inner coherence of symbols not underwritten by the nature of the world but which nonetheless make the world articulate” (Haynes 2006, 308). Where the postmodernist orders material as language games, an order which cannot be separated from the linguistic constructs that articulate it, Davenport seeks out representations of stable, if not necessarily guaranteed, patterns of an ideal order. Da Vinci

The transposition of diverse, unrelated events is not unique to “August Blue.” Many of Davenport’s texts braid stories around a core narrative thread. In “The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag,” the first American state visit to Communist China is interpolated with da Vinci’s attempt to construct a bicycle and with Gertrude Stein’s tour of Assisi with Alice B. Toklas.38 Connectives between the three narratives are omitted, and clues to their affinity scant. In his Florentine workshop da Vinci sketches grasses and concocts a proto-bicycle while reflecting on the rumor that Columbus has returned from Cathay. Nixon meanwhile has just arrived for an epochal rapprochement. The grandeur of the event is, however, trivialized both by the ruthlessness of contemporary power politics and a mutual incomprehension born of imaginative atrophy. Davenport equates evil with deficient powers of perception. His irresistible example is the president, who is a breathtakingly banal American tourist. Nixon admires the sights exclusively in platitudes: “I think you would have to conclude that this is a great wall” (Davenport 1979, 1). A poem is recited: —That’s got to be a good poem, Richard Nixon said. —Poem by Chairman Mao, Comrade Teng offered. —He wrote that? Richard Nixon asked. Made it up? —A hard pass over Mountain Lu, Marshal Yeh said. Long March. February 1935. —My! but that’s interesting, Richard Nixon said. Really, really interesting. (Davenport 1979, 2) Da Vinci, on the other hand, richly (and falsely) imagines the stages of Columbus’s apparent journey to Cathay, while Stein and Toklas compete 176

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in accumulating the most apposite analogies both for what they see in Assisi and what they feel for each other. Except as ironic foils to the plodding and vicious contemporary leaders, the Italian episodes seem gratuitous vignettes, as baffling as the geography of Donald Barthelme’s “Panama” (Davenport was an admirer of his fiction) or the zany conjunctions of John Ashbery.39 Leonardo trying to invent the bicycle, Gertrude and Alice flirting, Nixon and Mao chatting at trite cross-purposes: is an appetite for latent correspondences not being subjected to the postmodernist’s genial mockery? Surely the reader is being invited to abandon the motivated signs of modernism and acquire postmodernist equanimity before the immitigable aporias of what is. Da Vinci lacks a bike chain to complete his prototype: “tutto senonchè manca la catena” (Davenport 1979, 4): got everything but the chain. A postmodernist would not supply the catena for “The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag.” Perhaps this accounts for the success of the story, a 1976 O. Henry Award winner which was also included in an anthology of the best of the O. Henry Award–winning stories of the decade; in translation the story was published in the French poststructuralist journal of record, Tel quel.40 Assemblages like Davenport’s story are described by Allan Thiher in his book on postmodernist language theory and fiction as “aleatory textual collisions that proclaim meaning to be the fortuitous organization of the random” (Thiher 1984, 168). Davenport’s assemblage, however, is no more randomly organized than the ragtime music to which its exuberant title refers. The crisscrossing of broken melodic lines over a syncopated cakewalk rhythm characteristic of ragtime obviously supplies the story’s structural principle, and contributes something to its theme of concatenations natural and cultural, inherent and imposed. An index of human vitality is the ability to detect them. In all three braids of the story connections are being insinuated. The most prominent is organized with reference to China, but the Nixon administration no less than Mao is motivated solely by geopolitical expedience. The only connections the president understands are crudely Machiavellian. The corollary of his myopia is moral depravity: Before flying to China Richard Nixon ordered a thousand targets in Laos and Cambodia bombed by squadrons of B-52s . . . Richard Nixon was pleased with the bombing, knowing that Chairman Mao would be impressed by such power . . . The bombs were falling thick as hail Postmodern to Metamodern

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in a summer storm when Richard Nixon set foot in China, grinning. (Davenport 1979, 5) Da Vinci’s connections are by contrast exhilarating intuitions founded on profound and sympathetic observation. Grasping the link between the light of stars and the growth of plants, he uses his art to testify to a harmonic view of nature: “He drew with his left hand a silver eddy of grass. It was grace that he drew, perfection, frail leaves through which moved the whole power of God” (Davenport 1979, 5). Stein is similarly adept at correspondences. She has brought Alice to Assisi because it is the hometown of the saint in whose honor Alice’s hometown is named. She urges Alice to take in the details and pursue their associations. Alice scarcely needs prompting: “I see all that, she says. And having seen it, Alice? I ask. It is there to see, she says. That is the answer, I say. It is also the question” (9). The concatenations are equally “there to see” between the parts of “The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag.” The pairing of same-sex couples extends from Gertrude and Alice to da Vinci and his apprentice Salai Jacopo dei Capriotti, whose recently discovered drawing “of a bicycle drawn or perhaps built by Leonardo” Davenport reveals was the story’s inspiration (Davenport 1979, xi; Davenport’s version of the drawing is reproduced on the cover of the 1997 New Directions reprint of Da Vinci’s Bicycle). Nixon and Kissinger tragicomically complete the pattern, intimates collaborating from mercenary motives that numb sensibility. The story links Columbus’s voyage to China with Nixon’s, and Nixon in Vietnam to McKinley in the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico: Alice tells Gertrude, “You mustn’t mention McKinley to Pablo, she says, he thinks he has trod on the honor of Spain. He has, I say, that is the American way” (8). Nixon’s bombings in Southeast Asia thus follow a historical pattern, as does, equally disconcertingly, the military application of da Vinci’s abortive inventions, for the ornitottero he fails to launch is the ancestor of Nixon’s all too efficient B-52s. Like Twain’s Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s court, da Vinci anticipates the military advantages of the bicycle: “Suddenly he saw the Sforze going into battle on it, a phalanx of these due rote [two wheels] bearing lancers at full tilt” (4). In a 1966 essay on Stan Brakhage Davenport states that “every eye is pattern-bound in what it sees at all, and beyond that severe limitation is unskilled, stupid of movement, dull, blind in a very real sense . . . The eye’s intelligence must be learned” (Davenport 1966d, 158). In Nixon Davenport presents a sobering instance of knowledge without perception. Devoid of 178

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historical perspective and imagination, Nixon focuses on television, the very medium which deranges both. Mao’s unembarrassed insularity is equally dismaying and a reminder of the consequences of China’s forestalled integration into the wider world, thwarted by Columbus’s failure. “—The world is watching us, Richard Nixon said.—You mean Taiwan, Chairman Mao said” (Davenport 1979, 9). The world of Davenport’s story is larger than Mao’s and richer than Nixon’s; the story’s concatenations provide neither a postmodern patchwork of ironies nor a merely meretricious aestheticizing of otherwise isolated particulars. “It is there to see” (9). To aestheticize is, etymologically, to perceive, and perception carries ethical implication for Davenport, as it had for his mentor (and dedicatee of Da Vinci’s Bicycle) Zukofsky, whose argument in Bottom: On Shakespeare is that “Shakespeare’s text throughout favors the clear physical eye against the erring brain” (Zukofsky 1981, 167). “See?” is the portentous opening question of “Wo es war, soll ich werden” (Davenport 1990, 36; 2003, 279). Da Vinci gave priority to the eye. Mao cannot see beyond Taiwan, and Nixon cannot see at all. Davenport undercuts the pretensions of a superpower summit almost solely by implying patterns, and almost solely by pattern he implies that, like Stein’s textual experiments and da Vinci’s experiments with velocity, the value of Nixon’s diplomatic experiment will likely be grasped and properly appreciated only by posterity. The chain da Vinci lacks is forthcoming, just as the perplexingly autonomous parts of “The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag” can be seen to concatenate. In the Glasgow Lectures he delivered in 1985 at Washington and Lee University (published as “The Scholar as Critic” and “The Critic as Artist”; see Davenport 1987, 84–111), Davenport argues that the arts have responded to the technological collapsing of space and time, and to the corruption of language caused by such technology, with an insistence on form and linguistic pattern. “It is precisely this sense of field, or family, that makes modern literature different . . . Writing has had to insist over and over that it is, as always, words in a pattern. This pattern has always fitted, in hundreds of different ways, the pattern of the world” (111). Language may stand in isometric relation to the world. Nor are such patterns a Pynchonesque realm of conspiratorial design, where, behind the incoherence and contingency of social discourse, real meanings, invariably inimical, are covertly expressed. Davenport acknowledges no such cryptic and insidious law. Da Vinci is in the story and in the book’s title because the artist’s eye discerns a Pythagorean geometry at work from the smallest human contrivances to the most awesome universal forces, and finds fitting analoPostmodern to Metamodern

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gies for their imperceptible cooperation. He is there because of an almost prereligious faith in necessity as the governing principle of this harmonic sufficiency. “Note echo harmonies in DA V[inci] and DAV[enport] (a bicycle),” Davenport noted to bibliographer Joan Crane of the book’s title (Crane 1996, 28). Despite its title, its Cooveresque characterization of a contemporary president, and its publication in Tel quel, “The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag” betrays scant allegiance to the tenets of postmodernism. Again John Ashbery, Davenport’s exact contemporary, furnishes a useful contrast. The works of both are indebted to painting, surrealism, and Gertrude Stein, both include experiments with collage and the prankish Dadaist blague, and they retain the avant-garde vision of the artist not so much as creator as detector of poetry in fortuitous accidents. David Lehman notes Ashbery’s fascination with “the general principle of Roussel—that any artificial stimulus to writing is valid and that poetry may as easily result from a complicated linguistic exercise as from any other means” (Lehman 1998, 148). Davenport finds much the same incentive in the Roman poet Ausonius. Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which like “The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag” is inspired by an Italian Renaissance image, is a watershed postmodernist volume published while Davenport was writing Da Vinci’s Bicycle. “No Way of Knowing,” Ashbery entitles one of its poems, and it is a verdict on art as well. Here “no common vantage point” exists and perception is confined to contingent “witnessings” of a world always alive with its own Rigid binary system of inducing truths From starved knowledge of them. It has worked And will go on working. All attempts to influence The workings are parallelism, undulating, writhing Sometimes but kept to the domain of metaphor. (Ashbery 1976, 56) In Davenport parallelism is not confined to the realm of metaphor; rather, it provides evidence of natural accords which language is equipped to convey. In an essay on Robert Kelly, he notes how meanings “are laid into the poem several different ways at once, like the multiple systems at work in a living leaf.” Criticism should endeavor to show “how Kelly can run such power through so many fragile things and keep them from flying into atoms” (Davenport 1976b, 165). Davenport has no doubt that this can be shown. What he here calls “power” and treats metaphorically as folia180

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tion is in “The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag” concatenation, forces that evolve a form, a more than merely momentary stay against confusion. Basho

This is true even of so seemingly diff use a text as his “Fifty-seven Views of Fujiyama.” 41 Its interstitial prose blocks alternate between the rambling travel notes of the Japanese poet Basho and a fragmentary mass of notations and anecdotes loosely organized around the theme of travel. Yet in this text Davenport again braids an Oriental strand into a heterogeneous narrative that seeks out the hidden harmonies of a Heraclitean universe. While Ronald Johnson erased much of the first four books of a seventeenth-century masterpiece to make RADI OS, Davenport (who wrote the afterword to this sous rature rewriting of Paradise Lost) expands upon another seventeenth-century masterpiece to make his text.42 He adapts, sometimes freely, a complete translation of Basho’s best-known travel book, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku-No-Hosomichi), interpolating between it a typically diverse range of loosely affiliated stories, vignettes, and quotations. These include recollections of visits to prominent artists and intellectuals, unsourced citations from natural history (e.g., Sereno Watson and Gilbert White), descriptions of Charles Ives and Shelley, and a mathematical formula. In the two most extensive braided narratives, Davenport’s unnamed narrator, who functions more as the text’s arranger than its author, hikes with a young woman along the Vermont Trail, and travels with a male companion from Venice to Athens. In an essay Davenport describes the four narratives of Apples and Pears, in which the story first appeared, as concerning religious striving; with Fourier, Kafka, and Gaudier-Brzeska, Basho is “another spiritual forager” (Davenport 1996b, 72). Like Basho, Davenport’s contemporary narrator reveals a long historical consciousness but discloses almost no personal identity. Psychological backgrounds are eschewed in favor of religious, political, social, and mythological ones. Integration into experience rather than enhanced selfconsciousness is the shared aim. Davenport’s narrator aspires to become invisible, a medium for the voices he releases into his text. Most characters, including the narrator and his traveling companions, go nameless; the names of others, like Shelley and Merton, are withheld. There is celebration neither of personal difference nor of collective identity. Nor is there the postmodern privileging of multiple identities. Davenport’s narPostmodern to Metamodern

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rator aligns himself with specific roles defined by camaraderie, receptiveness, courtesy, and trust. Davenport is content to compound perplexity, making of his own story a narrow road to the deep north, where the reader suffers versions of the disorientation and strain of the text’s characters. The alternations between Basho’s narrative and Davenport’s are disjunctive and unexplained— indeed, Basho’s text is only identified once as the direct source of half the story. The title has little apparent bearing on a story in which Mount Fuji is mentioned but once. The reference is not geographical but pictorial: Hokusai’s renowned set of colored landscape prints, Forty-six Views of Fujiyama, issued between 1823 and 1830. The numerical difference results from the fact that the story consists of 57 discrete paragraphs (29 of which translate Basho). Hokusai’s art accords with Basho’s own principles: Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in so doing, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the subject and do not learn. Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one—when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. (quoted in Yuasa 1966, 33) Impersonality, particularity fused to an indirect symbolism, expressive economy, and reverence for creation unite Basho’s poems and Hokusai’s prints.43 These qualities recommend themselves to Davenport’s kindred art. And there is other kin. In extolling the much-traveled Jonathan Williams in the poem “For Cousin Jonathan,” Davenport affiliates him with Basho, “worker of harmonies” (Davenport 1986, 66). Davenport does not merely translate Basho, but builds structural and thematic concords out of the 1691 travel diary enmeshed in his text. The story adapts several of Basho’s most distinctive devices. On the analogy of the strict syllabic compression of haiku, Davenport imposes uniform length on all of the text’s fifty-seven paragraphs, thus once more pushing prose to the frontiers of closed-form verse. In a February 20, 2001, letter to me, Davenport explained how he composed the story’s isometric paragraphs: “To type the ¶’s in ‘57 Views’ I used an undersheet with a rectangle in very black ink, and kept within it (and filled it). Nothing on God’s earth would convince North Point [the publisher of Apples and Pears] to 182

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shave a few ems off the margins. I even offered to rewrite spill-overs and lengthen paras that came out short.” In fusing verse to prose Davenport follows Basho, for The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a masterpiece of haibun, which integrates prose and verse. Davenport includes in his paragraphs translations from the Greek Anthology (these accompany passages concerning a Greek excursion), as well as a paraphrase of Shelley’s verse epistle to Maria Gisborne.44 The linking is seamless. Davenport’s prose is frequently, yet always inconspicuously, poetic, as when a description of an old pear tree breaks into an alliterative anapestic canter: “still as frisky and crisp as a girl” (Davenport 1984, 23; 1997, 166). The two New England hikers push through “Winslow Homer glades and dapple and tones that rose as if horn-heralded across sunny fields and greendark woods and tonalities now lost except in the stubborn masks of their autochtony” (29; 172). Like Basho’s haikus, Davenport’s paragraphs are minutely particularized neutral descriptions, yet laden with suggestive import, resonant with “tonalities with lost coordinates” (30; 172). Although it gives the impression of a whimsical medley of tenuously related material, “Fifty-seven Views” is in fact structured as a renka, the long chain of linked verse at which Basho excelled. Several are included in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and preserved in Davenport’s story, as when Basho visits the poet Tokyu: “We made three books of linked haiku beginning with this poem” (32; 175). A seventh-century genre to which the origin of haiku has been traced, the renka can link dozens of separate poems—fifty-seven would not be an extravagant number. Composed collaboratively, poets alternate to weave a varied sequence out of suggestive, often oblique, thematic or verbal associations. A visual equivalent is Hokusai’s Forty-six Views of Fujiyama, in which Mount Fuji organizes the heterogeneous matter of the prints. Davenport collaborates with Basho to produce an American prose renka, linking The Narrow Road to the Deep North to the other material through isometric images of travel. Transitions are facilitated, as in Basho, by complementarity of incident, color, object, or atmosphere, as well as by wider agreement, such as sensitivity to the nuances of silence and time. Davenport’s paragraphs are generated by the itinerant associations Basho’s text induces.45 The links operate in subtle ways. Both Basho and the contemporary narrator travel with a companion, both travel to holy sites (the Zenshoji Temple, the Temple at Sounion) and historical ones (the thousandyear-old inscribed stone of Tsubo-no-ishibumi, the Roman agora at AthPostmodern to Metamodern

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ens), and both narrators seek out sacred and profane authorities: Basho meets the poet Tokyu of Sukagawa and the Zen master Buccho, among other artists and priests, while the contemporary narrator meets Pound at Rapallo (a meeting also recalled in Davenport’s memoir “Ithaka”) and Thomas Merton at the Gethsemani monastery in Kentucky (a meeting recalled also in the memoir “Tom and Gene”).46 The accidents of travel are permitted to influence its structure. Such happenstance is cohered by the routines and patterns of the route, which organizes the experiences it makes possible. Thus process acquires as much importance as product. Basho’s narrow roads, the Vermont Trail, and the Adriatic ferry route organize the experiences they make possible. The generative relationship between contingent and constant forces becomes a chief interest of Davenport’s story, as it is of Basho’s poetry. Davenport embraces the cognate Heraclitean paradox of a mutability founded on an immutable logos: The universe is harmonic, or it wouldn’t work. Heraclitus announced almost three thousand years ago that the harmony of the universe, that is, of everything, is hidden. The duty of philosophy is to find that harmony. Lévi-Strauss demonstrates in his study of the primitive mind that all of culture is a symbolic effort to act in harmony with the universe, its gods, demons, and weather. By extension, what we call art is this same quest, whether conducted by Rembrandt or Beethoven, Einstein or Emily Post. (Davenport 1987, 108) Basho aspires in his verse to wed the ryuko to the kyo, variety to essence, the mutable to the immutable. According to translator Nobuyuki Yuasa, in Basho’s book “unity is invisible on the surface, but it is the hidden vital force that shapes the work into a meaningful whole” (Yuasa 1966, 38). Basho asserts that a permanent element ( fueki) attaches itself to all poetry. Hokusai’s Forty-six Views of Fujiyama again supplies a pictorial equivalent. Basho’s fueki suggests the Heraclitean logos that Davenport detects in the confused mass of mundane particulars. Hence the story’s allusion to the Fibonacci progressions, whereby the plethora of sunflower petals assumes a mathematical pattern as strict and vital as the fugal progressions of a Bach partita. It is what the travelers in Athens find when they relish the conjunction of a snail and the broken marble ornament that echoes the volutes on its shell, and it is what the hikers find on the Vermont Trail: “We trod these hills because we loved them and because we loved each 184

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other, and because in them we might feel that consonance of hazard and intent which was the way Ives heard and Cézanne saw” (Davenport 1984, 28; 1997, 170). Consonance of hazard and intent is what the story attempts not merely to represent but to enact, a consonance issuing not only from culture but from nature itself, which Davenport invests with an almost Agassiz-like “intelligence” or agency. This is the consonance that Shelley discerns in the Leghorn study of his friend, the engineer Henry Revely. Davenport transforms Shelley’s 1820 verse epistle to Revely’s mother, Maria Gisborne, a poetic still life, into a prose one in order to praise “the harmonic disarray” of the engineer’s worktable (Davenport 1984, 36; 1997, 179). Shelley writes that Revely’s diverse objects “lie heaped in their harmonious disarray / Of figures—disentangle them who may” (Shelley 1951, 410). In his study of still life, Objects on a Table, Davenport glosses the poem, and asks: “Is there a better expression for the kind of still life Shelley is describing than ‘harmonious disarray’?” (Davenport 1998, 98. He makes this phrase the subtitle of the book: “Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature.”) Is there a better one for the still lifes Davenport is describing? “Fifty-seven Views” is a harmonious disarray of incidents, aperçus, taxonomies, and narratives. Freely rendering The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Davenport has Basho’s disciple Sora “dedicating himself to the sacredness of perception” (Davenport 1984, 27; 1997, 169). “The eye was spirit all along,” observes Balbinus from beyond the tomb in Davenport’s “C. Musonius Rufus” (Davenport 1979, 12). The disarray of the world constitutes mere details of a larger harmony. Attention to such details discloses the cosmos. This is one lesson of Agassiz. “Dissonance chiming with order, strict physical law in its dance with hazard” (Davenport 1984, 31; 1997, 174). The excursions of Basho and his contemporary followers in “Fifty-seven Views” enact the interaction of mundane contingency and cosmic concord, with the bias firmly on the latter (dissonance chimes, hazard dances—the coherent actions in a sense belie the incoherent forces). No one here is embarked on an obsessive quest romance, or is a self-tormented wanderer. They are peregrines rather than pilgrims. They have not instrumentalized the itinerant impulse. Basho thinks he might like to see the full moon rising over Matsushima; the hikers simply want to make “a journey with no purpose but to be in the wilderness” (27; 166). The Narrow Road to the Deep North ends after only the first six months of a journey that continued another year and a half, when Basho returned to Edo (Tokyo) in 1691. The hikers’ story ends in the Postmodern to Metamodern

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midst of their trip, as does that of the Americans traveling in Greece. A telos is abjured, lending to the story no finality or consummation. “Journey is place, / end beginning,” Davenport writes in the uncollected elegy to Fourier, “37, avenue Samson, Cimitière Montmartre” (Davenport 1985, broadside). The convergence of Whitman and Eliot, of my beginning in my end and the song of the open road, is equally characteristic of “Fiftyseven Views.” Although Basho scales several peaks and the hiker recalls once climbing Mount Chocorua, there is no Petrarchan Mont Ventoux, Wordsworthian Mont Blanc, or Thoreauvian Mount Ktaadn to scale here, no such wide vistas to punctuate a story which refuses the detachment and disembodiment of panoramic perspective. Fujiyama remains, as in Hokusai, in the distance. The characters walk aimlessly under trees rather than above clouds, encountering both hazards (harsh weather, illness, discomfort) and harmonies (natural, social, spiritual). Here is a contrast to Anne Carson, whose Glass, Irony and God Davenport introduces (Carson 1995, vii–x), and whose Eros the Bittersweet he favorably reviewed (see Davenport 1996b, 135–43). Her “Kinds of Waters” describes the pilgrimage along the camino to Santiago de Compostela in a similarly fractive and genre-renegotiating style. Carson quotes extensively from Japanese poetry, including The Narrow Road to the Deep North. “Pilgrims were people who figured things out as they walked,” she notes (Carson 1995, 129), identifying penance as the motive for her own pilgrimage: “Penance began to look more interesting. Since ancient times pilgrimages have been conducted from place to place, in the belief that a question can travel into an answer as water into thirst” (122). “Fifty-seven Views” meanwhile omits personal conflicts and interiority. For Davenport, this would impose the self between experience and its objects, thus marring the whole impetus for travel and, in Basho’s view, for art. The withdrawal from self-immersion is signaled by the story’s multiplicity of voices. Here is sensitivity to things rather than sensitivity to one’s self. Translation is one of its embodiments, and of course Davenport’s text abounds in such acts of oblique self-encounter in alien words. Like Hokusai’s prints and Basho’s book, “Fifty-seven Views” lingers over particulars (ryuko) both for their own sake and for the sake of the essences (kyo) they conceal. Essences remain, however, latent in the text as in the world, rather than imposed upon experience by the Coleridgean powers of modifying imagination. Such an “immanentist” aesthetic is the hallmark of the metamodernism that Davenport embodies. In his mono186

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graph on Davenport’s painting, Erik Reece rightly compares Davenport’s composite art not to Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns but to Joseph Cornell: “The image may be accidental, but it cannot be arbitrary. A work by Davenport or Cornell can be read as a carefully plotted poem, a Heraclitean balance of hidden harmonies and contrapuntal rhymes” (Reece 1996, 127). He contrasts Davenport with the postmodernist artist David Salle, who likewise employs quotation and recontextualization, but in order to destabilize meaning and mount a cultural critique: Whereas Salle’s imagery is deliberately disjunctive, Davenport aims for a harmonious constellation of fragments. Indeed, Davenport could not be called “postmodern” at all, if we mean the usual bill of goods: irony, incongruity, chaos, cultural critique/consumer revelry. Davenport’s composites are purist, Barthean texts, plural but not ironic, fragments but not in disorder. (Reece 1996, 129) Thus, despite its rule-generating, discontinuous, participatory, hybrid, open, archival, and grafted style, “Fifty-seven Views” is by no means a postmodern text. The transitions in “Fifty-seven Views of Fujiyama” from Basho’s narrow road to contemporary excursions are, to be sure, frequently registered as a decline: Merton, unapologetically sensual, refuses to observe the strictures of a Catholic ascetic regimen; brusque and taciturn, Ezra Pound walks ahead of his guests through a storm-damaged olive orchard, communicating only through his companion Olga Rudge; the sodden and tentless hikers lose the trail, he hallucinating, she turning her ankle, their romantic plans thwarted; the ferry passengers en route to Greece are deprived of a berth and reproached by the abrasive captain. Davenport’s narrator aspires to Basho’s piety, equanimity, and integration, but this contemporary American is more frustrated, more isolated, and more harried than the seventeenth-century poet, inhabiting a larger, more diffuse, and less intelligible world. The reader meanwhile may be excused for feeling that the single coherent feature of the story is the curious formal continuity of its isometric paragraphs. However, the story favors pattern over profusion and repays attention to its thematic and formal continuities. Basho’s example of a placid, devout, and sensitive attachment to the open road is not a squandered but a persisting and cherished possibility, a viable incentive to Davenport’s characters. Rather than lamenting some perceived lapse from an ordering origin, Postmodern to Metamodern

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Davenport celebrates the capacity to discern harmony beneath hazard. An American avatar is near at hand, for Emerson cautioned in “Experience” that chance should not be the idol of our worship: “That is to stay too long at the spark, which glitters truly at one point, but the universe is warm with the latency of the same fire . . . Underneath the inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection” (Emerson 1992, 319). The emphasis on the steady Pythagorean flame beneath the spark places Davenport at odds with postmodernist thinking since the early 1980s, and links him, as I have argued, with the metamodernist strategies of writers like Olson, Zukofsky, Duncan, Levertov, Snyder, Kelly, Metcalf, Williams, and Johnson. He shares their faith in immanent orders and their commitment to find original formal means to articulate them, and he concomitantly assumes with them an isomorphic relationship between nature and culture that language is sufficient to map. In an essay on Eudora Welty (to whom he dedicated Archilochos Sappho Alkman), Davenport asserts that the artist “shows the world as if meaning were inherent in its particulars. We dress biological imperative in culture and ritual; the artist finds design in accident and rhythm in casualness. That every event is unique and every instance distinct from all others rarely interests the artist, for whom event is pattern and essence melodic” (Davenport 1981b, 269). This is as close as Davenport comes to sharing in the postmodern repudiation of totalized orders. The essay, however, concludes without qualification: Art is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world. Ancient intuition went foraging after consistency. Religion, science, and art are alike rooted in the faith that the world is of a piece, that something is common to all its diversity, and that if we knew enough we could see and give a name to its harmony. (Davenport 1981b, 270) Davenport knew enough to see and give names to this harmony.

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Notes Introduction

1. “Du musst Neues sagen und doch lauter Altes.” Undated 1941 journal entry by Wittgenstein, published in Vermischte Bemerkungen. (The English edition of this work appeared as Culture and Value.) 2. One of Davenport’s first articles was the May 1948 profile, “Claire Leighton, American Artist” (Archive 61, no. 7: 10–13, 21). 3. “L’étude de l’oeuvre davenportienne sous l’angle des hybridations génériques met donc bien en lumière la cohérence profonde d’une production qui paraissait pourtant chaos en surface . . . L’étonnant chez Davenport est la façon dont ce matériau qui paraît l’incarnation même du chaos—hermétique, énigmatique, obscur, avec son trop-plein de références—se révèle en fait être construit, ordonné, structuré. Plus l’on s’y plonge, et plus l’on distingue de cohésion dans le texte” (Zachar 1994, 62). 4. Joan Crane’s Guy Davenport: A Descriptive Bibliography reproduces two pages from Davenport’s meticulous notebooks (Crane 1996, viii and 2). Other excerpts have been published as “Pages from a Notebook” (Davenport 1976, 18–22) and as “Journal I” and “Journal II” (Davenport 1996b, 213–22 and 228–34). The notebooks are now held at the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. 5. The excerpts from Davenport’s notebook, published as “Pages from a Notebook” with this interview in the same issue of Vort (9, 3:3), confirms his account of this method. 6. “It’s the Renaissance of sense after the long dry years of surrealism and omphalopsychosis, and all so beautiful,” Davenport wrote to Jonathan Williams on July 25, 1966, upon reading Ronald Johnson’s The Book of the Green Man (Davenport and Williams 2004, 83). 7. Davenport owned a copy of the original London first edition of Pound’s Personae, which was later much expanded and revised under the same title. 8. “The Antiquities of Elis” first appeared in Hudson Review 24, no. 1 (spring 1971): 94–110. 9. Pythagoras is described in “The Daimon of Sokrates” while Diogenes is the subject of “Mesoroposthonippidon” (both from Eclogues). The arch-Skeptic Pyrrhon is the subject of Davenport’s later story “Pyrrhon of Elis” (from The Jules Verne Steam Balloon), a rewriting of Diogenes Laertes’ “Life of Pyrrhon.” 10. Both Pausanias and Davenport share this trait with Herakleitos, who at the end of the eponymous story makes a votive offering of his philosophical manuscript to the goddess at the Ephesian Temple of Artemis. 189

11. “His ideal,” writes W. G. Sebald in an appreciation of Walser, “was the overcoming of gravity [Sein Ideal war die Überwindung der Gravitation]” (Sebald 1998, 141). 12. These Mikrogramme of Walser’s largely contain fragments of abandoned stories. The cipher eluded transcription until the 1960s. Compounding the difficulty, Walser wrote in columns on used paper. An enlarged facsimile page illustrates the dust jacket of the expatriate British poet Christopher Middleton’s translation of Walser’s Selected Stories. Davenport’s friend since Oxford days, Middleton borrowed the title of Davenport’s story for the dust jacket of his translation of Walser’s Selected Stories. (The dust jacket also includes a blurb by Davenport.) In his postscript Middleton recommends Davenport’s story as “a brilliant, imaginative reconstruction of Robert Walser, as a spirit touching fi ngertips with Erik Satie” (Walser 1982, 194). 13. “A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg” first appeared in Hudson Review 31, no. 3 (spring 1977): 5–41. 14. A surprise fiftieth birthday festivity for Holger hosted by his old pupils is the subject of the last story Davenport published, the “Cadenza” to the limited edition manuscript draft of Wo es war, soll ich werden. He is presented with a lifetime loan of Paul Klee’s Fruit on a Blue Ground, the school choir sings Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze” to a Grundtvigian harmonium, and the kitchen staff serve coffee and pastries. “—God is having to run the universe by a handcrank, Pastor Tvemunding said, as the love that usually propels it is all gathered in this room. I felt it as we came in the door. Let the heathen rage while Mariana brings me some coffee” (Davenport 2004d, 3). 15. The same contrast is made in Davenport’s “We Often Think of Lenin in the Clothespin Factory.” In Davenport’s decasyllabic mime Osip Mandelstam’s widow Nadezhda compares the fate of her illustrious Russian contemporaries with Walser: Walser, you see, Was his own butler. He could do voices. A poet. After a while, he gave up And lived in a lunatic asylum. Our poets all went to prison. (Davenport 1987, 36) 16. Davenport reviewed a number of literary biographies, but in the last one he published, on Edwin Williamson’s Borges: A Life, he questions the genre: “Perhaps we should not read biographies of writers we admire. Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce could not have written Ulysses, much less Finnegans Wake. Lives of Shelley, Byron, and Scott leave me wondering who wrote their books” (Davenport 2004e, 90).

190

Notes to Pages xxiii–xxix

17. Compare “For Lorine Niedecker,” contributed to Jonathan Williams’s memorial volume Epitaphs for Lorine and reprinted in Thasos and Ohio, to Davenport’s translation of Alcman in Archilochos Sappho Alkman (and reprinted in Seven Greeks). Alcman’s original, extant in a quotation from Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae, may be transliterated: And seasons he made three, summer and winter and autumn third and fourth the spring, when all blooms and no one has enough to eat. (Athenaeus glosses the poem as evidence of Alcman’s voracity; see Edmonds 1922, 122–23.) Except for the omission of a divine agent, Davenport’s version is quite close: There are three seasons: summer and winter, And autumn is the third, And spring is the fourth, When everything flowers And nobody has enough To eat. (Davenport 1980, 155; 1995, 133) Davenport’s eulogy ventilates the poem to capture the understated exactitude of Niedecker’s rural Midwestern imagery, and to suggest, at the moment of the poet’s death, the poignant vibrancy of youth: Three seasons: summer green with grain, flowers by the door. Autumn. Moon rises red, cobwebs in the grass, patience in a star. Winter. Hard light from the windows meets the firelight on the hearth. And a fourth, so brief,

Note to Page xxx 191

white and wild, when trees and girls go mad. (Davenport 1986, 65) 18. “Die Probleme werden gelöst, nicht durch Beibringen neuer Erfahrung, sondern durch Zusammenstellung des längst Bekannten” (Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen 1, no. 109). 19. “Vergiss nicht, dass ein Gedicht, wenn auch in der Sprache der Mitteilung abgefasst, nicht im Sprachspiel der Mitteilung verwendet wird” (Wittgenstein, Zettel, no. 160). 20. “The Owl of Minerva” appeared in Georgia Review 56, no. 2 (summer 2002): 573–93 before being collected in The Death of Picasso. 21. The German phrase quotes from the preface to the Philosophical Investigations, in which Wittgenstein admits his reluctance to publish. The book may shine a light in a few minds, “but this is certainly unlikely” (Wittgenstein 1984b, 233). The link to Wittgenstein reinforces the proximity of Davenport to his Wittgensteinian alter ego Adriaan, who in the same paragraph of the postscript is identified as the “author” of The Blue and Brown Baltic Notebooks. 22. “Scripta Zukofskii Elogia” was reprinted as section 2 of “Zukofsky” in The Geography of the Imagination (Davenport 1981b, 107–11). 23. “Aha, so you’ve been put upon by the Liberals?” Davenport writes in a May 5, 1967, letter to Williams headed “Happy Birthday Karl Marx.” “I began years ago turning them out of my doors. Had to, to have some peace at Haverford, and even at Harvard. Brakhage has to stand them off with barbed wire and a machine-gun. Sensitivity is simply the enfranchisement to mooch. But perhaps I’m being unkind; there are people and there are people” (Davenport and Williams 2004, 105). 24. The term “metamodernism” was suggested to me by Brian Jones. 25. “Exact Observations” recalls the title, as its arch, Laforgue-inflected lines recall some of the content, of T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations. 26. The undated original draft reveals that what became “Poem: For Lu Chi’s Wen Fu (302 a.d.)” was simply a verse description of a wasp, combining entomology and etymology to celebrate the insect’s expert rapacity. In a column at the top right corner of the page listing relevant cognates and derivatives, Davenport accentuates the erotic associations that the published poem understates: vespiary / vespid / vespa / wasp / waeps / waesp / vesper ⫽ Venus / western / Hesperos.” The much-scored draft reads in part: Upside-down at his copper well The rover lord for his guzzle hangs. His black and narrow face

192 Notes to Pages xxxii–xlvi

Is a bandit’s soot with a kerchiefed nose Against the Queen Anne’s Lace. Dirkless, he wags his ruby tail And sips the gutta with fire at its core. Fennel and pods of seed Strake his guarded poise for a savage place And shade his dainty greed. Vespa he owns as his oldtime name, Kin to the hush of thin fading light And kin and fellow too To the crookback smith and his star Alight in the western blue. (unpublished holograph)

Chapter 1

1. In stories about well-known classical Greek figures, Davenport transliterates their personal names more closely to the original spelling, such as “Herakleitos” (for Heraclitus), “Epameinondas” (for Epaminondas), and “Sokrates” (for Socrates). In other works, such as “Mr. Churchyard and the Troll,” names are put into a kind of cipher (here Davenport simply translates Kierkegaard’s name), or are simply omitted (as is Poe’s from “1830”). In the story “August Blue” and the collection of maxims The Logia of Yeshua, Davenport uses the Aramaic Yeshua both to defamiliarize and to historicize Jesus. 2. “Ich möchte sagen, ‘dieses Buch sei der Ehre Gottes geschrieben,’ aber das wäre heute eine Schurkerei, d.h. es würde nicht verstanden werden” (“I’d like to say that ‘this book was written to the glory of God,’ but today that would be a dirty trick, that is, it would not be understood”) (Wittgenstein, Philosophische Bemerkungen). 3. Ronald Johnson notes the parallel between Herakleitos and Fuller in “The Italics Are Guy Davenport’s” (Johnson 1976, 43). 4. “La Grèce présocratique, celle de la philosophie naissante et des grands mythes fondateurs, est pour Guy Davenport un lieu d’ancrage essentiel: les contraires y collaboraient encore, l’ordre et le hasard ne s’excluaient pas, le mouvement et la métamorphose étaient au coeur de la vie, le logos conservait son divin mystère” (Matthieussent 1991, 9). 5. Davenport’s “For Basil Bunting” is an encomium which brilliantly echoes Bunting’s impacted consonants, off-rhymes, and internal rhymes. 6. As the review shows, however, Davenport obviously found ample inspira-

Notes to Pages 4–6 193

tion in Renault’s novels: “Mary Renault’s genius is her ability to read the dryest and most unappreciated of history books (e.g., Diodorus Siculus, whose last really enthusiastic reader was Milton) and find in them the neglected gold out of which she makes her novels . . . What’s so interesting is Mrs. Renault’s rare ability to see how so many things normally known discretely can be combined in a wholly believable context . . . To imagine the past without assuming a posture of dignified seriousness may be, after all, a woman’s gift. The invention of a marble Greece was concocted by men when women were not expected to know history and were laughed at when they did. There is both justice and irony in Mrs. Renault’s giving us a Greece with its heroes intact but far more visible for existing in a world that is as human as the one we know” (Davenport 1966c, 1228). Diodorus Siculus is a source for Davenport’s “The Daimon of Sokrates.” 7. Heraclitus’s sayings are preserved only in the quotations or paraphrases of much later writers, including Plutarch. Davenport’s primary source for “Herakleitos” is Diogenes Laertes’ dubious short life (another of Laertes’ short lives inspires Davenport’s “Pyrrhon of Elis”). 8. “The One-Word Fragments of Alkman” was reprinted in Poor.Old.Tired. Horse: Nos. 1 thru 25 1961–1976, ed. Ian Hamilton Finlay (New York: AMS, 1970). 9. The title was also retained in the Arion publication of “Carmina Archilochi” (2, no. 2 [September 1963]: 29–53). All titles were dropped from Davenport’s Carmina Archilochi: The Fragments of Archilochos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964). 10. I translate from David A. Campbell’s Greek Lyric Poetry, new ed. (Bristol: Bristol Classic Press, 1982), 2. 11. Davenport has written essays on Pound’s and on Eudora Welty’s use of the Persephone myth. See “Persephone’s Ezra” (Davenport 1981b, 141–64) and “That Faire Field of Enna” (Davenport 1981b, 250–71). Like The Cantos, Davenport begins his story “Robot” with a descent to the underworld. 12. This is despite Heraclitus’s criticisms of Pythagoras in several fragments. See, for instance, fragments 81a and 129 in T. M. Robinson’s edition of Heraclitus (Heraclitus 1987, 50 and 72). 13. The second sentence translates Heraclitus’s fragment 124, rendered identically by Davenport in his translation of the complete fragments (see Davenport 1995, 162; and Davenport 1979b, 18). The elliptical, perhaps corrupt fragment has been rendered more pessimistically by T. M. Robinson: “The most beautiful order (in the universe?) (or: ‘the (this?) most beautiful universe’), [says Heraclitus,] is a heap of sweepings, piled up at random” (Heraclitus 1987, 71). 14. Davenport’s 1974 painting Herakleitos and Knaps emphasizes the disciple’s beauty, for Knaps sits nude at a modern kitchen table across from his robed and partially abstracted mentor. Erik Reece suggests that the painting is a double self-portrait (Reece 1996, 67; full-color reprint, 84).

194 Notes to Pages 6–17

15. “Learn the pleasure of despising pleasure,” Davenport translates Diogenes in his edition of the sayings (Davenport 1979b, 59; 1995, 184). 16. “I’ve seen Plato’s cups and table, but not his cupness and tableness.” “‘Sell me to that man,’ Diogenes had said at the slave market, ‘he needs a master.’” “I learned from the mice how to get along: no rent, no taxes, no grocery bill” (Davenport 1979b, 57, 35, 41; 1995, 183, 16, 173). 17. In “Thoreau and the Dispersion of Seeds,” Davenport describes Thoreau as a “a philosopher in the mode of the Greek Cynics and the Roman Stoics” (Davenport 1996b, 163). 18. For Davenport’s translations of the original fragments, see Davenport 1979b, 57 and 46; 1995, 183 and 176. 19. “The Wooden Dove of Archytas” first appeared in Parenthèse 1, no. 1 (spring 1975): 41–47, and was reprinted in Da Vinci’s Bicycle. 20. See Diels 1983, 78–81. 21. Archytas is said to have given Plato a copy of Philolaus’s bible of Pythagorean lore, a book no longer extant on which Plato draws in the Timaeus. 22. In Horace’s ode a dead man washes up near Archytas’s tomb and, like Davenport’s narrator, the speaker evokes the philosopher. Combining two narratives, Davenport’s story is structurally akin to the ode, which Horace’s editors conjecture combines two poems. The characters in Davenport’s later story “The Cardiff Team” translate Horace’s Ode 4.1. 23. In his essay “The Indian and His Image,” Davenport reveals a basis for the story’s natives in childhood memory: “I was aware that two Indians, Anne Breadcrust and Jack Frost, used to live on the edge of the old homestead, the social inferiors of even the black fieldhands” (Davenport 1981b, 357). 24. One of Davenport’s caricatures for Hugh Kenner’s The Counterfeiters depicts Yeats beside a ridiculous mechanical bird, the caption reading: “Mr. W. B. Yeats’s Aspiration Toward Mechanical Birdhood Collides with the Present State of Vaucanson’s Duck” (Kenner 1973, illustration 1). 25. In this essay Davenport calls for the guarantee of all treaty rights signed with Native American tribes and for the restoration of the native nations within U.S. borders. 26. These sentences, recounting without histrionics or fanfare the human response to flight, recall the ending of Robert Walser’s “Balloon Journey” (as translated by Davenport’s friend Christopher Middleton): “The girl shrieks with fear. The men laugh” (Walser 1982, 16). In the first episode of “The Wooden Dove of Archytas” Davenport rewrites Walser’s “Balloon Journey,” which was published four years after Kafka’s “The Aeroplanes at Brescia.” (Both articles appeared in newspapers.) Kafka was Walser’s most celebrated admirer, comparing him in an October 8, 1917, journal entry to Dickens and mentioning him as an inspiration for his “geplannte Roman [planned novel]” (Kafka 1986, 391).

Notes to Pages 19–24 195

Chapter 2

1. Davenport is the only person in the acknowledgments to The Pound Era to whom Kenner attaches an epithet, polumetis, “rich in craft, wisdom, device,” applied by Homer to Odysseus (e.g., Odyssey 1.311). Kenner dedicates A Homemade World to Davenport, who also illustrated Kenner’s The Counterfeiters and The Stoic Comedians. Davenport favorably reviewed The Pound Era in National Review 24, no. 18 (May 12, 1972): 525–26 (reprinted in Davenport 1981b, 165–68). Davenport dedicates The Geography of the Imagination to Kenner, who praised the book in an August 1981 Harper’s review (repr. in Kenner 1989). Kenner has in addition written the introduction to Joan Crane’s Guy Davenport: A Descriptive Bibliography (ix–xi), as well as the essay “Ex Nihilo,” published in Vort 9, 3:3, pp. 30–31, and reprinted in Margins 30 (August-September 1974): 4–5. 2. Quartermain quotes from William C. Seitz’s The Art of Assemblage (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961), 25. 3. See, for instance, Davenport’s preface to Flowers and Leaves (Davenport 1966, 4). 4. Blast 3, ed. Seamus Cooney, co-ed. Bradford Morrow, Bernard Lafourcade, and Hugh Kenner (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1984), 77–95. Davenport published “The Bowmen of Shu” as a limited edition (New York: Grenfell, 1984). The story reappears in Twelve Stories. 5. With Laurence Scott, Davenport privately printed a limited edition of Gaudier-Brzeska’s letter to Cournos (Cambridge, Mass.: Adams House and Lowell House Printers, 1965). 6. In the essay “Stanley Spencer and David Jones,” Davenport praises David Jones’s In Parenthesis in part for this very quality (Davenport 1996b, 118). In the book’s preface Jones argues that the best account of the World War I waste land is Morte d’Arthur 4.13, which the text frequently invokes. 7. The order of the stories’ appearance in Apples and Pears is not preserved in Twelve Stories, in which the illustrations are also altered. Their borrowed titles, one from Rihaku’s poem, the other from Hokusai’s series of paintings, provide a kind of cultural rhyme. 8. Of the Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound Gaudier-Brzeska told his model, “It . . . will . . . not . . . look . . . like you. It will be the expression of certain emotions which I get from your character” (Pound 1974, 50). In Davenport’s story the artist tells Pound, “It will not look like you, you know. It will look like your energy” (Davenport 1984, 16; 1997, 156). 9. The version of “The Bowmen of Shu” reprinted in Twelve Stories omits the stylized version of Gaudier-Brzeska’s sketch profile of Pound that separates the two paragraphs in Apples and Pears. 10. Brakhage writes admiringly of Davenport. He describes the joy of having 196 Notes to Pages 26–31

“at last met such a man as Pound describes Rémy de Gourmont to have been . . . i.e., one whose intelligence was a way of feeling” (Brakhage 1974, 7). 11. In “Olson” Davenport shows how this technique succeeds in Olson’s “The Kingfishers” (Davenport 1981b, 80–99). 12. “Robot” was first published in Hudson Review 25, no. 3 (autumn 1972): 413–46, and then in Tatlin! It was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories of 1973 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story, ed. Martha Foley (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1973), 67–98; and in Prize Stories 1974: The O. Henry Awards, ed. William Abrahams (New York: Doubleday, 1974), 186–214. 13. In the essay “Guernica,” Davenport links Picasso’s painting to Paleolithic art: “The deepest allusion may be to the painted cave at Altamira (at Santander, a few miles from Guernica), and to other prehistoric caves with their bulls and horses. We know that Picasso visited Altamira while Henri Breuil was copying its images in the early years of the century. (Lascaux was not discovered until 1940, so that the dying horses cannot be an allusion to the disemboweled bison there, transfi xed by a spear, though the accuracy of Picasso’s evocation of Magdalenian cave art is inescapable)” (Davenport 1996b, 183). 14. “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier” first appeared in Georgia Review 29, no. 4 (winter 1975): 801–41 and then, with extensively revised text and variant illustrations, in Da Vinci’s Bicycle. 15. In the acknowledgments to Da Vinci’s Bicycle, Davenport cites as his main sources for the story Marcel Griaule’s Le Dieu d’Eau: entretiens avec Ogotemmêli (1948) and Griaule’s collaboration with Germaine Dieterlen, Le Renard pâle (1965). 16. The modernists constitute a more recent relevant instance. Hilda Doolittle concludes The Walls Do Not Fall with a tentative affirmation: “we know no rule / of procedure, / we are voyagers, discoverers / of the not-known” (Doolittle 1973, 59). Another poem written in London during the Blitz, Eliot’s Four Quartets, uses the trope of the voyager, and closes, “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time” (Eliot 1959, 48). Already in 1910 Yeats had confided to his journal an objection to politically engaged art in similar terms: “Literature discovers; it can never repeat” (Yeats 1972, 247). 17. Davenport reviewed Paterson in National Review 16, no. 20 (May 19, 1964): 415. 18. In his Independent obituary, Jonathan Williams explains the expression that gave Davenport his title for the poem: “Farewell to my one and only kissin’ cousin, Guy Mattison Davenport Jnr. Kissin’ cousins are a rare invention of the American South. They are allowed to ‘hug your neck’ at family gatherings, and possibly kiss your ear. Not very erotic stuff, but it seems important in order to proclaim the rest of the familial cousins as dung beetles, beyond all hope. The

Notes to Pages 32–39 197

‘Sensitives’ write 10,000 first novels a year about this kind of stuff in both South Carolina and Mississippi. The South fidgets and throbs.” 19. Davenport borrows a line from Four Quartets for the title of the last section of “Every Force Evolves a Form”: “Quick, said the bird, find them, find them” (Davenport 1987, 155; 2003, 90). 20. “If you came this way, / Taking the route you would be likely to take,” Eliot directs us toward the pilgrimage site (Eliot 1959, 41); “To get to Fourier’s grave you go along the avenue Rachel,” directs Davenport (1979, 85). 21. Compare Davenport’s method of composition (see his interview in Alpert 1976, 5, quoted in my introduction) to what Eliot told the Paris Review’s Donald Hall: “That’s one way in which my mind does seem to have worked throughout the years poetically—doing things separately and then seeing the possibility of fusing them together, altering them, and making a kind of whole of them” (quoted in Gardner 1978, 14). In the Biographia Literaria Coleridge claims that the poet “diff uses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination . . . [Imagination] forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole” (Coleridge 1983, 16 and 18). See also Coleridge’s March 7, 1815, letter to Joseph Cottle: “The common end of all narrative, nay, of all Poems is to convert a series into a whole” (Coleridge 1959, 956). 22. See also Davenport’s uncollected poem “37, avenue Samson, Cimitière Montmartre,” for a description of Fourier’s grave. 23. Moore is the subject of the celebratory essay “Marianne Moore” (Davenport 1981b, 114–22) and the poem “At Marathon,” and is also the inspiration, with Louis Agassiz, of the poem that follows “At Marathon” in Thasos and Ohio, “The Medusa” (Davenport 1986, 25–27). 24. The maxim engraved on Fourier’s tombstone, quoted in “Au Tombeau,” reads: “La série distribue les harmonies. Les attractions sont proportionelles aux destinées.” (“The series distributes the harmonies. The attractions are proportional to the destinies.”) The maxim is quoted three times in “Au Tombeau” (Davenport 1979, 61, 68, and 85). 25. Thompson was preceded by Louis Pasteur, who claimed in 1860 that life was a function of the asymmetry of the cosmos. Quarks and antiquarks, orbiting electrons, lopsided atoms, and the right-handed coils of molecules in DNA obey the same principle. The particle physicist Frank Close argues in Lucifer’s Legacy: The Meaning of Asymmetry that symmetry obstructs the emergence of anything useful and vital; the propensity for life inheres in the undercurrents of asymmetry in cosmic particles. 26. “Boys Smell like Oranges” was first published in The Cardiff Team and was reprinted in The Death of Picasso. 27. Davenport quotes a passage from Montherlant’s Les Olympiques in “The 198 Notes to Pages 40–47

Table” (Davenport 1996, 40). He also published favorable reviews of Montherlant’s Chaos and Night (National Review 16, no. 44 [January 26, 1965]: 66–70) and The Girls: A Tetralogy (National Review 21, no. 5 [February 11, 1969]: 130–32). 28. This links the athlete not only to prehistoric culture but to Davenport’s own childhood, when his nurse offered him clay: “Eating clay, or geophagy, is a prehistoric habit (it fills the stomach until you can bring down another aurochs) surviving only in West Africa and South Carolina,” Davenport writes in “The Anthropology of Table Manners” (Davenport 1981b, 346; 2003, 215). 29. Before publication in the book, an excerpt from “The Cardiff Team” appeared in Conjunctions 24 (1995): 127–49.

Chapter 3

1. Davenport execrated automobiles in essays throughout his career (see, for instance, “The Indian and his Image” [Davenport 1981b, 353–58], “Making It Uglier to the Airport” [Davenport 1987, 156–65], and “Letter to a Master Builder” [Davenport 1996b, 1444–53]). Almost all the stories in Tatlin! concern the menacing consequences of unchecked technology. Adolf Hitler (in the pseudo-idyllic “Bronze Leaves and Red”) is one of the few characters in Davenport depicted in a car. Gertrude Stein drives her Model T through Paris at the beginning of “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier,” an ironic emblem of the moderns’ collusion with the very technology that would stunt the growth of modernism. 2. See, for instance, “Louis Agassiz” in Davenport 1981b, 230–49; “Well Up on the Far Out” (New Criterion 15, no. 2 [October 1996]); and “Thoreau and the Dispersion of Seeds” and “Life, Chance, and Charles Darwin” in Davenport 1996b, 162–66 and 167–75. 3. Davenport’s iconography of French landscape art in Objects on a Table stresses the history of the roads that often organize impressionist canvases; an interpretation of one of Monet’s Giverny landscapes considers the history of marsh drainage which, in Davenport’s estimation, enters into the painting’s meaning (see Davenport 1998, 16–17). 4. The translation of Sappho’s poem begins: Come out of Crete And find me here, Come to your grove, Mellow apple trees And holy altar Where the sweet smoke Of libanum is in Your praise. (Davenport 1980, 79–80; 1986, 32; 1995, 70) Notes to Pages 47–55 199

Davenport’s version is a characteristic amplification, enhancing Sappho’s intimacy, glossing her imagery, and employing repetition to convey the musicality of the original. A prosaic transliteration would read: Hither to me from Crete to this holy temple, where your lovely apple grove is, and altars smoking with incense. No reading of the potsherd preserving the poem yields the translator’s ritual “praise,” a word resonating rather in other Davenport texts, for example, “The Trees at Lystra” and “August Blue.” 5. In Davenport’s case this conviction may be traced to the transcendentalists. In his 1838 address to the Harvard Divinity School, for instance, Emerson declared: “Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he. All things proceed out of this same spirit, which is differently named love, justice, temperance, in its different applications . . . All things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with it. Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength of nature” (Emerson 1992, 65). It was of course on Emerson’s property that Thoreau built his pastoral retreat, and the pond inspired one of Emerson’s idylls, the poem “Walden”: “What need I holier dew / Than Walden’s haunted wave, / Distilled from heaven’s alembic blue, / Steeped in each forest cave” (Emerson 1992, 736). 6. See Iliad 18.l.525ff., Thucydides 1.2–3, Herodotus 1.66, Polybius 4.19.13–21.6, and Pausanias 8.36.8. 7. “The Death of Picasso” was first published in Kenyon Review, new series, 2, no. 1 (winter 1980): 40–58. After appearing in Eclogues the story was reprinted in The Death of Picasso. 8. The story indeed has its visual corollary in Davenport’s 1977 Still Life with Pitcher (see color reproduction in Reece 1996). The painting combines rectilinear abstraction and realism, flattened surfaces and three-dimensional sculpting. Its kitchen table is equally an easel and a lectern, laid out with notebook as well as pitcher, coffeepot, freshly unwrapped bread loaf (Reece describes it as a nautilus shell), Cezannesque bowl of fruit, and blue underpants. 9. In “The Daimon of Sokrates” Epameinondas guards his own chastity little better: “He would stand myrrhinon to myrrhinon with Pelopidas, Aiai! There would be kheirourgia in the night until Epameinondas would drop nimbly out of our window and trot the meadows to the river” (Davenport 1981, 64). (Myrrhinon means “nose” and kheirourgia means “hand-work,” or masturbation.) 10. Relevant as well is Lawrence’s pastoral romance Lady Chatterley’s Lover, es-

200 Notes to Pages 56–62

pecially the quasi-Fourierist agrarian evangelism of Mellors and Connie’s yearning for the recovery of the body as a utopian principle. 11. “Idyll” first appeared in Sands (Dallas; annual; 1979): 77–88. It was collected in Eclogues. 12. Davenport’s kinship with Whitman is too close to sketch briefly. It extends well beyond “Idyll” and the three essays on Whitman he collected (“Whitman” in Davenport 1981b, 68–79; “Walt Whitman and Ronald Johnson” in Davenport 1996b, 249–61; and “Horace and Walt in Camden” in Davenport 2003, 195–201). Whitman’s views on sexuality, nature, and democracy informed Davenport’s own. He subscribed to Whitman’s ideal of republican “adhesiveness.” Whitman too was an enthusiast for Fourier’s utopian scheme. Even Whitman’s early fiction finds echoes in Davenport, for Whitman’s story “The Child’s Champion” begins in violence and ends with a man and youth comfortably in bed. In “Wo es war, soll ich werden” Holger, a schoolteacher holding progressive pedagogical views who becomes romantically involved with a pupil, resembles Whitman in the 1840s. A boy in “The Cardiff Team” bears the poet’s name. 13. Here is another point of affinity between Davenport and the poets of the New American Poetry, for this use of myth is characteristic, for example, of Charles Olson in The Maximus Poems, Gary Snyder in “The Hudsonian Curlew,” and Denise Levertov in “A Solitude.” 14. Davenport wrote the introduction to Nabokov’s Lectures on Don Quixote and reviewed several of his novels for the National Review, including The Defense (“Turn the Other Face,” 16, no. 44 [November 3, 1964]: 978–79), Despair (“Dazzlers and Astounders,” 18, no. 26 [June 28, 1966]: 636–38), and Ada (“A Story Strange and Weird,” 21, no. 27 [June 15, 1969]: 706–7). 15. Responding on February 19, 1966, to Jonathan Williams’s praise of his preface to Sappho: Poems and Fragments (Williams had singled out the sentence, “Sexual passion was as respectable a passion to [Sappho] as rapacious selfishness to an American”), Davenport writes: “The self is a whore, and it has reached its awfullest apotheosis in the USA and, I suppose, France. But to melt the self in our society, to give it second place, or even third, is as incomprehensible as a Mytilenian who kept her chiton pulled denyingly forever over her knees, her nut brown knees” (Davenport and Williams 2004, 66, 67–68). 16. Introduction to Montaigne’s Travel Journal, trans. Donald M. Frame (San Francisco: North Point, 1983); reprinted as “Montaigne” in Davenport 1987, 37–42.

Chapter 4

1. “L’Amérique oppose cette tradition de l’optimisme: les puritains y voient une force mystique organisatrice, la Renaissance américaine élargit l’éventail de

Notes to Pages 63–76 201

ses idéalismes. Chez Davenport se retrouve cette foi en un Ordre du Monde, reflété dans le microcosme qu’est son oeuvre propre, melting-pot d’intertextes et de genres” (Zachar 1994, 62–63). 2. Between 1943 and 1945 Davenport and Brown worked together on the editorial staff of their school newspaper, the Yellow Jacket, at Boys High School in Anderson, South Carolina. As a precocious occasional columnist for the local newspaper, the Independent, the teenaged Davenport contributed two articles on his classmate and collaborator (January 5, 1945, and September 8, 1946). 3. “We Often Think of Lenin at the Clothespin Factory” first appeared in Conjunctions 8 (winter 1985–86): 45–57. It has been reprinted in The Jules Verne Steam Balloon and in The Death of Picasso. Davenport reviews Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs (introduced by Brown) in “The Man without Contemporaries” (Davenport 1981b, 112–31). 4. The Mimes of Herondas (San Francisco: Grey Fox, 1981). Reprinted in Seven Greeks (New York: New Directions, 1995), 185–229 and 238–41. 5. Davenport owned a model of Fuller’s tensegrity polygon, built, he writes in a January 31, 2002, letter, “either by Hugh Kenner or Bucky himself: I forget which.” 6. “C. Musonius Rufus” was first published in Hudson Review 29, no. 1 (spring 1976): 19–44, and was reprinted in Da Vinci’s Bicycle. 7. In “The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag,” Davenport offers an American echo of Mussolini when Nixon responds to a poem of Mao’s: “That’s got to be a good poem” (Davenport 1979, 2). 8. Working from a vorticist design sketched out by Pound himself, Davenport produced a painting of Pound’s vortex. 9. Here too is a Pound vector. The poet whose first, unpublished volume of verse, Hilda’s Book, begins with “The Tree,” a variant of which opens Personae as “La Fraisne” (“Ash Tree”), returns at the end of The Cantos to the Ovidian image of a person become a tree. The lines from Canto 115 gloss Davenport’s story: When one’s friends hate each other how can there be peace in the world? Their asperities diverted me in my green time. A blown husk that is finished but the light sings eternal a pale flare over branches where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change. (Pound 1995, 814) This is the nature to which Balbinus is fortunate enough to return in “C. Musonius Rufus.” Mussolini’s “divertente” has metamorphosed into Pound’s “diverted”: amused, but also distracted and led astray. So Davenport places Balbinus

202

Notes to Pages 80–88

back into the tree as Ovid, Pound, and Davenport himself had put Baucis and Philemon there. “That a tree can be a person at all is startling,” Davenport notes of such poetry in “Persephone’s Ezra” (Davenport 1981b, 142). 10. These are Agatha’s very words to Henry at the end of T. S. Eliot’s The Family Reunion, themselves an echo of Pope’s Essay on Man. 11. “Belinda’s World Tour” first appeared in Santa Monica Review 3, no. 1 (fall 1990): 93–100, then in a limited edition (New York: Dim Gray Bar, 1991). It has been reprinted in A Table of Green Fields and The Death of Picasso. 12. The anecdote is derived from Ronald Hayman’s Kafka: A Biography, which Davenport reviewed in the Louisville (Kentucky) Courier-Journal (March 21, 1982). The biography may also have informed Davenport’s story “The Chair,” for Hayman ends his description of Kafka’s encounter with the Rabbi of Belz by quoting from the same July 1916 diary entry which, rewritten, closes Davenport’s story. (See Hayman 1981, 210.) 13. “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” was first published in Hudson Review 22, no. 4 (winter 1969–70): 567–85. It has been reprinted in Tatlin! and The Death of Picasso. 14. Kafka’s article stresses the comic wonder of the air show, a benign display of that absurdity which thereafter usually appears in malign form in his writings. 15. “Nowadays we find flying quite ordinary,” Lartigue told an interviewer. “But for me and for the young people of my time it was something fantastic, miraculous. All my beautiful dreams as a young boy happened in the air. I even convinced my tutor to take me to the aerodrome of Issy les Moulineaux, where the first pilots tried to take wing—instead of giving me spelling lessons” (quoted in Delpire 1976, 7). 16. One of Davenport’s earliest publications was a review of the Muirs’ translation of Kafka’s Amerika in the Duke University journal the Archive 61, no. 3 (November 1947): 18–19. More than a half century later he reviewed Michael Hoffmann’s translation of the novel in Harper’s 305, no. 1829 (October 2002): 85–86. 17. The gaze is retained in Davenport’s 1977 acrylic portrait of the philosopher as wary skeptic, eyebrows arched, lips sealed. The minimalist painting’s blue and brown color scheme chromatically alludes to Wittgenstein’s Cambridge lecture notes, assembled by several of his students in blue and brown notebooks (see reproduction in Reece 1996, 61). “The blue-&-brown color scheme is decidedly subconscious,” Davenport notes in a January 31, 2002, letter. 18. In “Ezra Pound’s Presence in Guy Davenport’s Tatlin!” Hugh Witemeyer notes that the reference in “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” to the Tyrolean Schloss Brunnenburg conceals a larger debt to Pound. “It is not simply that the placenames—Garda, Sirmione, Riva, Salò—recall whole passages in Pound’s work, early and late. It is that Davenport’s description of the Mediterranean atmo-

Notes to Pages 88–93 203

sphere is informed by Pound’s experience and vision—particularly as it concerns the quality of Italian light and the immediacy of past civilizations” (Witemeyer 1976, 58). 19. Davenport illustrates Babbage explaining the workings of the Analytical Engine to Buster Keaton in Hugh Kenner’s The Counterfeiters (Kenner 1973, illustration 6). 20. For a discussion of the instrumentalization of peregrine practices in modernity, see Lock 1999, 184–98. 21. In the same review Davenport welcomes Peter Demetz’s The Air Show at Brescia, 1909, as “an utterly charming little book. It’s period nostalgia laden with premonitions of Guynemer, Richthofen, and Eddie Rickenbacker in French airspace just a decade later” (Davenport 2002e, 86). 22. See, for instance, the July 11, 1912, entry in Kafka 1986, 490. 23. “The Chair” first appeared in Harper’s 269, no. 1612 (September 1984): 60–62. It was first collected in Apples and Pears, then in Twelve Stories and The Death of Picasso. 24. Neither Kafka’s July 1916 letter to Brod nor Davenport’s adaptation of it alludes to Felice, to whom Kafka had just become reengaged, yet their reconciliation was the decisive event of this period, during which he drafted the two fragments of “The Hunter Gracchus.” 25. In Objects on a Table, Davenport notes that Vincent van Gogh’s Still Life with Onions “is about loss and redemption, like all the still lifes of apples and pears, where apple is the fall, and pear the salvation of mankind” (Davenport 1998, 77). 26. “Shiebe mich nicht zu den Verlorenen” (Kafka 1986, 370).

Chapter 5

1. In an otherwise reliable note citing sources for some of the material in Tatlin! (see the verso of its title page), Davenport ascribes portions of “The Dawn in Erewhon” to the fictional van Hovendaal’s Het Erewonisch Schetsboek and Higgs Reizen in Erewhonland. 2. “On pourrait diviser l’oeuvre de Davenport en deux parties, d’un côté le regard vers le passé, les personnages historiques, les ‘fictions nécessaires’ qui reconstruisent un temps révolu à l’aide des traces que celui-ci a laissées, et de l’autre l’élaboration, dans un présent-futur, d’une utopie fondée sur une éducation libertaire qui laisserait la nature agir à sa guise afin qu’elle cesse de prendre sa revanche sur l’homme. Mais une telle division ne fonctionne qu’en surface, pour les besoins de l’analyse; si l’auteur avait voulu que ces deux parties soient comprise comme deux éléments distincts, pourquoi a-t-il pris un

204

Notes to Pages 94–100

malin plaisir à les imbriquer l’une dans l’autre dans ses recueils?” (Hoepffner 1998, 86). 3. Davenport mentions the text in a December, 15 1965, letter to Jonathan Williams: “I get ahead, but slowly, with the strange Erewonische Skizzenbuch, which nobody will ever print” (Davenport and Williams 2004, 59). The text gained impetus both from meeting Bonnie Jean Cox a few months earlier, and a short while later from obtaining, through Williams, a rare one-volume edition of Charles Doughty’s The Dawn in Britain. He read the edition ecstatically through the spring of 1966, and told his beneficiary, “You never did better by me (nay, not even publishing F&L [Flowers and Leaves]) than when you found that great pome and gave it to me” (78). 4. In the introduction to Jonathan Willliams’s Sharp Tools for Catullan Gardens, Davenport proposes a Golgonoozan genealogy for the poet: “I suspect that Jonathan Williams has walked before the Lord at the Prophet Blake’s elbow, where the world is shown to be either transparent or opaque, either Golgonooza built by poets or Ulro built by the prudent. Golgonooza: take off your britches and come in, the grass is good between the toes. Ulro: no poor people, free people, or different people allowed” (Davenport 1968, unpaginated. See also footnote to Davenport and Williams 2004, 102). 5. Davenport applies the Persephone myth to a range of Welty’s fiction in the essay “That Faire Field of Enna” (see Davenport 1981b, 250–71). Davenport dedicated his translation Archilochos Sappho Alkman to Welty, whom he first met in the mid-1960s. 6. In the second part of Faust Arcadia is reached, and Faust exclaims, “Arkadisch frei sei unser Glück! [May our fortune be as free as Arcadia!]” (Faust 2, 3.3; Goethe 1981, 271). 7. “Für den Gott ein Leichtes. / Wann aber sind wir?” (Rilke 1966, 137). 8. “Sie . . . schlief die Welt / . . . jedes Gefühl das mich selbst betraf” (Rilke 1966, 136). 9. The quotation, cited as well in “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier” (Davenport 1979, 61 and 68), is also embedded in the quotation from Zukofsky’s “A” that serves as the epigraph to Apples and Pears, a book dedicated to the memory of Fourier. The Fourier-Zukofsky conjunction in Davenport is rich: Da Vinci’s Bicycle, in which “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier” appears, is dedicated to the memory of Zukofsky. 10. Excerpts from “Apples and Pears” were first published in journals. “Joop Zoetemelk Gagne le Maillot Jaune: Het Erewhonisch Schetsboek: Messidor and Thermidor 1980” first appeared in Antaeus 40/41 (spring/winter 1981): 69–85; “Apples and Pears: Het Erewhonisch Sketsboek” appeared in Conjunctions 3 (autumn 1982): 12–60; and “Quagga” first appeared in Art Papers (July/August 1984): 10– 16. Revised for book publication, the complete text appeared in Apples and Pears.

Notes to Pages 101–8 205

11. This is the Fourier repugnant to Hollingsworth, the thwarted philanthropist of The Blithedale Romance, a novel inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s autumn 1841 sojourn at the Fourierist commune Brook Farm. (Established as a transcendentalist commune by the Reverend George Ripley, Brook Farm became a phalanx under the influence of the Fourierist Albert Brisbane. See Sams 1958, 51–60.) Coverdale wishes to introduce Fourier’s “beautiful peculiarities” to Blithedale, which differs from the New Harmony “as widely as the zenith from the nadir” (Hawthorne 1958, 76). Hollingsworth is mortified: “ ‘What more monstrous iniquity could the devil himself contrive than to choose the selfish principle,—the principle of all human wrong, the very blackness of man’s heart, the portion of ourselves we shudder at, and which it is the whole aim of spiritual discipline to eradicate,—to choose it as the master-workman of his system?’” (77). The sensuality so divisive to the society of Hawthorne’s blighted Blithedale is the adhesive mechanism of Fourier’s New Harmony, while the sexism that Zenobia excoriates and which contributes to her death is absent from it. 12. “Das phalanstère soll die Menschen zu Verhältnissen zurückführen, in denen die Sittlichkeit sich erübrigt. Seine höchst komplizierte Organisation erscheint als Maschinerie. Die Verzahnungen der passions, das verwickelte Zusammenwirken der passions mécanistes mit der passion cabaliste sind primitive Analogiebildungen zur Maschine im Material der Psychologie. Diese Maschinerie aus Menschen produziert das Schlaraffenland, das uralte Wunschsymbol, das Fouriers Utopie mit neuem Leben erfüllt hat” (Benjamin 1974, 172). 13. “Alles, was wir sehen, könnte auch anders sein [Everything we see could also be otherwise]” (Tractatus 5.634, Wittgenstein 1963, 91). 14. “Apple is both discord and harmony,” Davenport writes in A Balthus Notebook. “Pear is concord, sweetness, harvest beauty” (Davenport 1989, 62). In “Shaker Light” Davenport elaborates on this symbolism with reference to the apple tree and pear tree that grew intertwined for fifty years in his Lexington, Kentucky, neighborhood, in spring blossoming into “what I expect an angel to look like when I see one. But I shall not see these trees again. Some developer has bought the property and cut down the embracing apple and pear, in full bloom, with a power saw, the whining growl of which is surely the language of devils at their business, which is to cancel creation” (Davenport 1996b, 59). 15. Davenport redressed the textual omission in Joan Crane’s Guy Davenport: A Descriptive Bibliography, which publishes the fugitive passages under the entry for “Apples and Pears” in the first section of the bibliography’s second part (Crane 1996, 107–8). 16. In a February 1, 1985, letter to Alison Rieke, Davenport joked, “As I wrote Adriaan’s sketsboek in a set of my notebooks (three in all), along with other things, someday maybe someone will publish the sketsboek sketboek.”

206 Notes to Pages 110–22

Chapter 6

1. “Le diray-je, pourveu qu’on ne m’en prenne à la gorge? l’amour ne me semble proprement et naturellement en sa saison qu’en l’aage voisin de l’enfance” (Montaigne 1962, 874). 2. In Patterns of Sexual Behavior, for instance, which examined American society among almost two hundred others in the immediate post–World War II era, Clellan Ford and Frank Beach concluded that, given adult permission, “immature males and females engage in practically every type of sexual behavior found in grown men and women” (Ford and Beach 1951, 197). 3. See, for instance, Philippe Ariès’ Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldwick (New York: Knopf, 1962). 4. In Sade/Fourier/Loyola, Roland Barthes notes that “the art of employing Transition is the major art of Harmonian calculation . . . In Harmony, Transitions have a beneficent role; for example, they prevent monotony in love, despotism in politics” (Barthes 1983, 365). The quince is for Fourier the heraldic fruit for this transition, fluctuating between apple and pear. (One of Davenport’s paintings takes its title from Gertrude Stein: A Balance of Quinces. See Reece 1996, 74.) 5. “The River” was published in The Cardiff Team. 6. “Gunnar and Nikolai” first appeared in A Table of Green Fields and was reprinted in The Death of Picasso. 7. Davenport has painted Korczak as the grey, emaciated inmate of the Warsaw ghetto, his gentility encountering its monstrous contrary in a pendant where the lower black field designated “Treblinka” begins to overtake the blue one designating “Korczak” (see Reece 1996, 136–37). 8. First published in The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers, “Wo es war, soll ich werden” was reprinted with corrections in The Death of Picasso. A longer earlier draft also appeared in a limited edition (2004). 9. “Ihre Absicht ist ja, das Ich zu stärken, es vom Über-Ich unabhängiger zu machen, sein Wahrnehmungsfeld zu erweitern und seine Organisation auszubauen, so dass es sich neue Stücke des Es aneignen kann. Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” (Freud 1998, 81). 10. In 1985 Ken Botnick and Steve Miller of Red Ozier Press had published the original version of the novella’s counterpart (also divided into a hundred sections), “The Bicycle Rider,” in a beautiful Mondrian-inspired edition limited to 150 copies. Two years earlier the press had also published, in an edition of two hundred copies, Goldfinch Thistle Star, whose four poems (“Poem Begun by Ronald Johnson,” “Swans,” “Mallarmé,” and “Beyond Punt and Cush”) were later collected in Thasos and Ohio. 11. The deleted section echoes the one-line section in “The Ringdove Sign”: “DOVE: By wholeness of being” (Davenport 1987, 110). Notes to Pages 123–35 207

12. In private life the sedentary Davenport was much more cautionary on amatory matters. His letters urging Jonathan Williams and Ronald Johnson to reconcile with each other celebrate enduring adult homosexual unions at the expense of pederasty: “Your both being high-class poets adds a rightness to it, plus the evidence of the nine years, or whatever solid length of time it has been. My friend Harry (NY) chose a different route than you, and has been terribly unhappy over the years. Boys are selfish rascals, and the chasing of them has proved for H. to be a misery, whatever the spiritual frisson he’s derived from the chase. You are an Apollonian bloke, with an eye to order and sense the rewards of discretion. A good spat may have done you and Ronald precisely the good that you’ve needed—but I don’t know. Sex is a phantom and a delusion. Its dreams are never what reality produces” (Davenport and Williams 2004, 74–75). Davenport was himself an Apollonian bloke, with an eye to order and sense of the rewards of discretion. 13. “O Gadjo Niglo” first appeared in Conjunctions 4 (summer 1983): 38–50. A revised version appeared in A Table of Green Fields. 14. “Gadjo niglo” means “gentile hedgehog.”

Chapter 7

1. Davenport told me that the remark was made by Brice Matthieussent, author of the preface to the French translation of Da Vinci’s Bicycle, La bicyclette de Léonard, and editor of the series Voix Américaines, which published Bernard Hoepffner’s monograph Guy Davenport: L’utopie localisée. The expression is rephrased in Davenport’s note to his selected correspondence with Jonathan Williams: “As the Frenchman said, ‘You disappear while arriving’” (Davenport and Williams 2004, 9). 2. See, for instance, Philip Stevick’s survey of postmodern American literature in The Postmodern Moment, ed. Stanley Trachtenberg (Stevick 1985, 150). 3. Exceptions would include James Longenbach, who in Poetry After Modernism regards postmodernist poetry as a mere extension of modernist form, a definition elastic enough for him to include Elizabeth Bishop along with poets like Olson. Another exception is John M. Unsworth, who in “Practicing Postmodernism” argues that academic respectability sets postmodern writers apart from the modernists: “First-generation post-modernism differs from its predecessor in one crucial way, namely in being institutionalized” (Unsworth 1991, 55). 4. “They have told us / the road to the sea / and given / the language into our hands,” writes Levertov of Pound, Williams, and Doolittle in “September 1961” (Levertov 1967, 82). 5. “The Invention of Photography in Toledo” first appeared in Parenthèse 1, no. 3 (1975): 141–49. It was collected in Da Vinci’s Bicycle. 208 Notes to Pages 139–51

6. These examples are well-known to Davenport. In addition to collecting an essay on Calvino in The Hunter Gracchus, he reviewed Calvino’s Invisible Cities (Georgia Review 29, no. 2 [summer 1975]: 499–501), Edwin Williamson’s biography of Borges (“A Form of Incomprehension,” Harper’s 309, no. 1852 [September 2004]: 87–90), and a number of Nabokov’s books, including Ada (“A Story Strange and Weird,” National Review 21, no. 27 [June 15, 1969]: 706–7). He also wrote the foreword to Nabokov’s Lectures on Don Quixote (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), xiii–xix. 7. This is a view argued at about the time Davenport wrote the story by Roland Barthes in “The Photographic Image”: “This purely ‘denotative’ status of the photograph, the perfection and plenitude of its analogy, in short its ‘objectivity,’ has every chance of being mythical . . . The photographic paradox can then be seen as the co-existence of two messages, the one without a code (the photographic analogue), the other with a code (the ‘art,’ or the treatment, or the ‘writing,’ or the rhetoric, of the photograph)” (Barthes 1977, 19). 8. “The Haile Selassie Funeral Train” first appeared in Mulch 3, no. 3 (fall/ winter 1975): 40–46. It was reprinted in Da Vinci’s Bicycle. 9. In “Poetry and the Primitive” (reprinted in Donald Allen and Warren Tallman’s The Poetics of the New American Poetry), Snyder urges that life lived in the “mythological present,” both close to nature and outside Cartesian mind-body binaries, spares one from “living impotently in history” (Snyder 1973, 395). 10. See, for instance, Snyder’s “Vapor Trails” (Snyder 1959, 76) and Denise Levertov’s “The Tide” (Levertov 1967, 16). 11. “The Concord Sonata” was first published in A Table of Green Fields, and was reprinted in The Death of Picasso. 12. Thoreau’s utterance is quoted without citation several times in Davenport’s collage story “Badger,” published three years earlier in The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers. (The story is narrated by a hound.) Davenport’s hand-lettered quotation of the phrase illustrates the back cover of his selected correspondence with Jonathan Williams, A Garden Carried in a Pocket. 13. The phrase is borrowed from the first history of the transcendentalist movement, Octavius Frothingham’s 1876 Transcendentalism in New England. For Kant, he claimed, man’s “prime duty consisted in deference to the integrity of his own mind. The laws of his intellectual and moral nature were inviolable” (Frothingham 1959, 21). 14. Davenport reviewed Bradley P. Dean’s edition of Thoreau’s late nature writings, Faith in a Seed, which includes “The Dispersion of Seeds.” See “Thoreau and the Dispersion of Seeds” in The Hunter Gracchus (Davenport 1996b, 162–66). According to Davenport, Thoreau’s “ ‘faith in a seed’ is his constant wonder at nature’s abundant fecundity and its seeming intelligence in providing for survival. Seeds are wily and determined” (164). Notes to Pages 151–57 209

15. Some of the dissonances of Ives’s The Concord Sonata, Davenport reminds readers in “Charles Ives,” is “Thoreau speaking through a hymn played on his flute against the voice of his woods” (Davenport 1981b, 277). That flute turns up in Davenport’s own “Concord Sonata,” where it lures a mouse into the Walden cabin. 16. “The Bicycle Rider” first appeared as a limited edition in 1985 (New York: Red Ozier), and was revised for The Jules Verne Steam Balloon. “The Jules Verne Steam Balloon” was written for Facing Texts: Encounters between Contemporary Writers and Critics, ed. Heide Ziegler (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988): 109–27. “The Ringdove Sign” first appeared in Parnassus 14, no. 1 (1987): 240–63. All are reprinted in The Death of Picasso. The appearance there of “Wo es war, soll ich werden,” first published in 1990, between the second and third story implies an altered narrative chronology. 17. It served as well as Olson’s pedagogical method while rector of Black Mountain College. See Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (New York: Dutton, 1972), 339–41 and 378. 18. “Jonah” first appeared in 1986 as a limited edition (New York: Nadja), and then in The Jules Verne Steam Balloon. 19. Descending like the dove, shaped like a gourd, the Jules Verne steam balloon also suggests the principle images of “Jonah.” Buckeye makes the analogy: “Calabash! he said to Hugo, straked gourd pumpkin vine!” (Davenport 1987b, 120; 2003, 238). God destroys not Nineveh, but the miraculous gourd that had matured within an hour beside Jonah, seeming sign of the prophet’s triumph over the city God had sent him to condemn (127). Like Thoreau “in the survey service” and like him convinced that God is more evident “in His creation than in the scrolls of the law” (123), Jonah is ultimately reproved for fi nding “old Liveforever” in the beautiful fruit instead of in mercy toward the damned city. “Nineveh is my gourd” (127). 20. This is also an allusion to King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, where Davenport’s erstwhile girlfriend (they separated in 1964) Mary Ann Mott lived when he met her while teaching at Haverford College in the early 1960s. Her name bestowed on Hugo Tvemunding’s lover, she was also the model for the hiking companion in the Vermont Trail sections of “Fifty-seven Views of Fujiyama” (see Davenport and Williams 2004, 17). Davenport dedicated Sappho: Poems and Fragments to her. 21. “Christ Preaching at the Henley Regatta” first appeared in North American Review 264, no. 2 (summer 1979): 18–25, was collected in Eclogues, and was also reprinted in The Pushcart Prize VII: Best of the Small Presses, ed. Bill Henderson (Wainscott, N.Y.: Pushcart, 1982), 94–102. It reappears in The Death of Picasso. 22. The translation is published as “Swan” in Thasos and Ohio (Davenport 1986, 53) and, as “Mallarmé,” in the limited edition Goldfinch Thistle Star (1983). 23. In “Whitman,” Davenport recounts his chance discovery of an uncata210

Notes to Pages 158–66

loged copy of Zoopraxia in the library of Haverford College, to which Muybridge had bequeathed the double folio (Davenport 1981b, 73). 24. Davenport corroborates this reading. In a September 9, 2000, letter he writes, “Christ is the shepherd in ‘Christ Preaching.’ He is in the light. Note baptism at the end.” 25. In restoring Christ’s name Davenport is preceded by Louis Zukofsky, for example, in “A”-15: “to absolve the Jews of Yeshua’s (ah Jesu’s) / cross” (Zukofsky 1978, 369). 26. In a fragment published in “Micrographs,” Davenport has Yeshua quote Heraclitus (see Davenport 1996b, 302), while in the story “August Blue” the pupil Yeshua echoes a Heraclitean maxim: “It is really a road, and like all roads it goes both ways” (Davenport 1993, 4). (Davenport translates the maxim in Herakleitos and Diogenes as “The same road goes both up and down” [Davenport 1979b, 29; 1996, 169].) 27. “August Blue” first appeared in Antaeus 64/65 (spring/autumn 1990): 196– 207. It was collected in A Table of Green Fields. 28. In the essay “Poetry” Louis Zukofsky claims that “a case can be made out for the poet giving some of his life to the use of the words the and a: both of which are weighted with as much epos and historical destiny as one man can perhaps resolve” (Zukofsky 1981, 10). Davenport painted a punning homage entitled À Zukofsky (illustrated in Reece 1996, 100). 29. See note 27. “II Timothy” first appeared in Incarnation: Contemporary Writers on the New Testament, ed. Alfred Corn (New York: Viking, 1990). 30. Davenport makes Heraclitus’s phrase the subject of a 1968 ink and gouache painting, Nature Loves to Hide, which inscribes the maxim in Greek among the punning zoomorphic abstractions of the canvas (illustrated in Reece 1996, 126). 31. “What eternity is to time, the Aleph is to space,” Jorge Luis Borges remarks in an English commentary to his story “The Aleph.” “In eternity, all time—past, present, and future—coexist simultaneously. In the Aleph, the sum total of the spatial universe is to be found in a tiny shining sphere barely over an inch across” (Borges 1970, 263). Borges’s 1945 story (first appearing in English in 1970) imagines the Hebrew character not as a mathematical notation but as a spatial object embodying its symbolic value. 32. “Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches. Dies zeigt sich, es ist das Mystische” (Wittgenstein 1963, 115). Wittgenstein’s early theory of propositional logic distinguishes between what can be spoken and what can only be shown. A proposition cannot represent (darstellen) but only show (zeigen) or point toward (aufweisen) the logical form of reality. See Tractatus 4.12–4.1212 (Wittgenstein 1963, 42–43). 33. “Nicht wie die Welt ist, ist das Mystische, sondern dass sie ist,” the Tractatus asserts. “Das Gefühl der Welt als begrenztes Ganzes ist das Mystische” (Wittgenstein 1963, 114). 34. “And,” another text included in A Table of Green Fields, describes a mirNotes to Pages 167–72

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acle preserved on a corrupt papyrus fragment of a lost apocryphal gospel. Here too the accent is on puzzlement exacerbated by distance from events. “We catch some words. He is saying something about putting things in a dark and secret place. He says something about weighing things that are weightless” (Davenport 1993, 62; 2003, 176). Jesus then casts seeds into the river, which immediately sprout into trees. 35. In a September 9, 2000, letter Davenport claims he was “unaware” of either of the two Tuke portraits when he wrote “August Blue”: “I simply knew that TEL adored being painted (by Lewis, John, Kennington, and others) and made a good guess.” 36. “Instead of being appalled by Evolution,” Davenport writes in the foreword to Dorothy Sutton’s verse chapbook Startling Art: Darwin and Matisse, “Darwin’s first readers should have rejoiced that creation, far from being finished on the first Saturday, is still going on like a house afire, and will continue until time runs out” (Davenport 1999c, verso title page). 37. Jameson’s position is in contrast to Jean-François Lyotard, in whose formulation of the postmodern the sublime continues to operate (see Lyotard 1984, 81). 38. “The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag” originally appeared in Hawaii Review 5 (spring 1975): 56–64, and was reprinted in Da Vinci’s Bicycle. 39. See Davenport’s “Style as Protagonist in Donald Barthelme” in The Hunter Gracchus (Davenport 1996b, 103–11) and his review of Sixty Stories, “The Playful Wizardry of Donald Barthelme” (Washington Post Book World, October 25, 1981, p. 1). 40. See William Abrahams, ed., Prize Stories 1976: The O. Henry Awards (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 66–74; and William Abrahams, ed., Prize Stories of the Seventies: From the O. Henry Awards (New York: Doubleday, 1981), 249–57. The first French translation of “The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag,” by Philip Barnard, appeared in Tel quel 91 (spring 1982): 77–84, introduced by the translator. Philippe Jaworski later published a translation in bas de casse 7 (summer 1984): 36–43. It then appeared in Sophie Mayoux and Paul Rozenberg’s translation of La bicyclette de Léonard. 41. “Fifty-seven Views of Fujiyama” first appeared in Granta 4 (1981): 6–62, and in Hudson Review 36, no. 1 (spring 1983): 45–74. It was reprinted in Apples and Pears and then in Twelve Stories. 42. A revised version of Davenport’s afterword to RADI OS appears in the essay “Ronald Johnson” (Davenport 1981b, 190–204). 43. In Flowers and Leaves Hokusai is the ideal artist who finds his forms and his piety in minute observation of nature. Bowed double to The Mustard Seed Garden, Studied the cricket, Rihaku, the carp,

212 Notes to Pages 174–82

The Old Man Mad About Drawing, The cherry wood under his scarp Became “a little of the structure of nature,” Caught in the eyes with an unwobbling art. His hands, restless as mice, were taught By eighty to execute all nature by heart. (Davenport 1966, 44–45) 44. Davenport contributed translations to The Greek Anthology and Other Ancient Greek Epigrams, ed. Peter Jay (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973): three fragments by Archilochus (entries 1, 2 and 4), four anonymous epigrams of the Roman period (entries 742, 749, 756, and 757), four poems by Agathias Scholasticus (entries 823, 827, 828, and 830), and two anonymous Byzantine epigrams (entries 856 and 859). 45. “In a simple-minded sense,” Davenport wrote me in an April 15, 2000, letter, “‘57 Views’ is a reading of Basho to which has been added the kind of memories a reader might have occur: the daydreaming that reading stimulates. Reading, freeing us from ourselves, also finds events in our own minds. In our memory.” 46. For “Ithaka,” see Davenport 1979, 114–20; for “Tom and Gene,” see Davenport 1996b, 32–46.

Notes to Pages 183–84 213

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Index of Figures Davenport’s work may be seen as one massive, continuous, undifferentiated, and enormously intricate collage arbitrarily cut into familiar-looking shapes (poems, stories, essays, postcards, and the like), but with the whole numinous pattern constantly asserting itself, most acutely in its very termination, striking at the borders of the arbitrary frames and refusing to stop. The pattern as a whole is essentially defined by its “indexicality,” in which the meaning of an utterance— here, every utterance—varies and accrues with the varying context in which it is deployed, like the figures in a collage. Think of “today’s newspaper,” except that “today,” the exophoric referent-making sense of the term, has become, for the metamodernist, a kind of eschatological possibility of language—now-time in an apocryphal world. Davenport’s oeuvre, then, in the end, is itself a kind of huge ontological index; this book an index to that index, and its index an index to that. Thus the absence of any distinction between proper names and things. In the Edenic condition to which Davenport’s work aspires, all names are things and all things names, perfectly flat and indistinguishable, sung into being; each a figure—a figure of speech—in worldplay. To restrict and disfigure such play by imposing on it traditional elements of discursive index logic, besides becoming rapidly unmanageable, would result in textual autopsy instead of still life. Thus there are no subheadings, almost no cross-references, no imposition of discursive logic beyond the regretted alphabetization. The figures are “out of place,” but at least are shown, in their most radical form, along with a record of their configuration in the text, allowing the reader thereby to move with and through them, and their kinships and associations, to build a composite, almost spatial sense of whatever they may seek in (the book’s) Davenport. “A page, which I think of as a picture, is essentially a texture of images. . . . The text of a story is therefore a continuous graph, kin to the imagist poem, to a collage” (Davenport 1981b, 374–75). Take as a simple example the following kin: Analogy, Calculation, Complementarity, Congruence, Correspondence, Descartes, Design, Euclid, Geometry, Grid, Infinity, Linearity, Mathematics, Measure, Newton, Number, Obliquity, Parallel, Pythagoras, Series, Spatiality, Sylvester, Totality, Unity. All mathematical figures, but every one at play in some other deictic family as well, often in several. “Unity,” for example, has just as critical a role in Davenport’s social, political, philosophical, religious, and aesthetic configurations. Should they all be grouped (and why only them? and only there?) under “Math227

ematics,” leaving a reader to guess or scan for some arbitrary “main heading,” wading through a self-defeating morass of repetition, cross-reference, and conceptual anatomizing, over the course of a grossly distended index? Or should the reader just pick one, any one really, and do as Davenport himself does in his creation, pick up its trail in (con)text, tracing lines of kinship and nexuses of meaning organically, allowing the greatest free play in the sense and significance of each? Davenport noted that “the writer assembles, finds, shapes. There is nothing to be gained by displacing the authentic” (1981b, 383). A few notes on how to use the index of figures: Sectional citations (e.g., 34–43) have been eschewed wherever possible as false indices; each appearance of a figure should be seen more as a spatial nexus and “read around” for its (con)text. Figures are listed in what seemed their most practical and inclusive root form, allowing for the greatest gestural, nominal, and attributive play within the citations; thus, to take an extreme case, “Morphism” will lead to instances of “morphology,” “metamorphism” (with its verbal and adjectival forms), “polymorphous,” “isomorphism,” “allomorph,” “zoomorphic,” and so on. Simple opposites will usually be listed under only one of the pair (e.g., appearances of “discontinuity” will be listed under “continuity”), with some exceptions (“ascent” and “descent” are listed separately, for example). Brian Jones

Accident, xxvi, 38, 44, 51, 88, 153, 180, 184, 187 Acker, Kathy, 66, 175 Acts of the Apostles, xi, 66 Adhesion, 65, 114, 143, 201, 206 Agassiz, Louis, xxviii, 52, 141, 157, 185, 199 Alcman, xxix, xxxiii, 7, 191 Aleatory, 43, 151, 177 Allegory, xlii, 6 Allen, Donald, xliv, 145, 149, 209 Alpers, Paul, 55, 56 Alpert, Barry, xvii, xxvi, 26, 41, 80, 88, 198 Altieri, Charles, xliii, 146, 147, 151, 155 Amma, 36, 41, 44–45, 51 Analogy, xvii, xx, xxvi, 26, 34, 43, 47, 228

Index of Figures

50, 59, 86, 92, 103, 110, 118, 152, 157, 165, 177, 182, 206, 209 Anarchism, xxii, xxxvi, xxxix, 42, 69, 73, 101, 121, 122, 151 Andersen, Hans Christian, 89 Anderson, Lennart, xxxiii Anderson, Perry, xliii Andrejevic, Milet, xxxiii Antiquity, xxii, xxix, 3–15, 57, 106, 111, 115, 126 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 153 Apollo, 6, 21, 89, 161, 208 Apulius, Lucius, xxxix Arcadia, xxvii, xxxiii, xxxviii, 16–20, 52–75, 106, 111, 115, 126 Archaic, xxix–xxxi, xlvii, 3–24, 28, 37, 49, 102–5, 118, 148

Architectonic, xliii, 31–32, 78 Architecture, xxxii, xliv, 18, 42 Archivism, xxix, xxxiv, 6, 13, 100, 105, 151, 159, 167, 187 Archytas, xiii, 5, 13, 22–24, 37, 83, 86, 159, 163, 195 Arias-Misson, Alain, 116–17 Ariès, Philippe, 125, 207 Aristotle, 53 Articulation, xi, xxxii, xlii, 39, 92, 147, 176, 188 Ascent, 24, 104, 106, 164 Ascetic, 4, 10–19, 86, 115, 129, 187 Ashbery, John, 154, 177, 180 Assemblage, 26–27, 35, 41, 46, 150, 177, 196 Asyndetism, xii, xxxi, 159, 175 Athenaeus, 191 Auden, W. H., 69, 72, Ausonius, xxi, 11, 57, 63, 180 Austen, Jane, xlvi Auster, Paul, 175 Autarchy, 56, 108 Authority, xi, xxxvi, 6, 88, 123, 127, 154, 175, 184 Autonomy, xvii, xxii, xxxiii, xliii, 45, 49, 57, 70, 109, 123–32, 146, 151, 154, 166, 175, 179 Autotelic, 151, 152, 166, 170 Avant-garde, xi, xxxii, xxxv, xliv, 5, 27, 40, 66, 77–84, 93, 149, 180 Avatar, xx, xxii, xxx, 5, 24, 104, 107, 153, 188 Babbage, Charles, 94, 102, 204 Balbinus, 88, 185, 203–4 Balthus, 126, 144 Barthelme, Donald, 145, 177 Barthes, Roland, 110, 117, 152, 207, 209 Bartram, William, xiii, 52 Basho, xiii, 63, 181–87, 213, 273

Baudrillard, Jean, xxxv, 148 Bauman, Zygmunt, 116 Baumeister, Willi, 25 Bawer, Bruce, 119 Beach, Frank, 207 Beats, xvii, 156 Beckett, Samuel, 27, 35–37, 42, 85 Beerbohm, Max, 87, 88 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 184 Beginning, 3, 12, 29, 50, 114, 134, 186 Bell, Eric Temple, 11, 12 Benjamin, Walter, xxviii, 111, 130, 152, 167, 206 Berdyaev, Nicolas, 77 Bergman, Ingmar, 163 Bernstein, Charles, xliii, 35, 149 Bird, xlv, 22, 23, 33, 34, 83, 90, 195, 198 Blackburn, William, xix Blake, Nancy, 14 Blake, William, xxii, 19, 21, 44, 61, 69, 72, 101, 126, 160, 164–66, 205 Blériot, Louis, 24, 37, 90, 93, 104, 163 Bohr, Niels, xlii, 4, 21 Border, xvi, 78, 151, 171–73 Borges, Jorge Luis, xli, 151, 190, 209, 211 Botnick, Ken, 207 Boundary, xxxvii, 26, 50, 124, 125, 145, 168, 172, 173 Bourne, Randolph, 124, 130–35 Braiding, 176 Brakhage, Stan, 35, 31, 39–40, 79, 148, 178, 192, 196, 197 Brancusi, Constantine, 44, 45 Brandes, Georg, 139 Breton, André, 110 Breuil, Abbé, 18, 28, 32, 35, 46, 50 Bricolage, xii, 27, 140, 164 Broch, Hermann, xix–xx Brod, Max, 91, 98, 99, 204 Brown, Clarence, 80 Browne, Thomas, 45–46 Index of Figures

229

Buckley, William F., xxxvi Bucolic, xxxvi, 31, 32, 53–57, 63–73, 110, 119, 124, 127, 165 Buell, Lawrence, 54, 55 Burke, Kenneth, 55 Burkert, Walter, 13 Butler, Samuel, xvi, xxxv, 61, 101–3 Byrd, Donald, 6, 104 Byron, Lord (George Gordon), 190 C. Musonius Rufus, xx, xxxv, 37, 85, 86 Cadmus, Paul, xxviii, 144, 148, 174 Calculation, 43, 91, 109–11, 123, 129, 207 Calvino, Italo, 110–11, 151, 209 Camillus, xxix Cantor, Georg, 171, 172 Carpenter, Edward, 65, 170 Carroll, Lewis, 105 Carson, Anne, xxviii, 131, 186 Carter, Angela, 68 Carter, Maybelle, xxx Caserio, Robert L., 104 Category, xi, xxxv, 26, 125–27, 143, 146, 150, 164, 175 Cavell, Stanley, 157 Celan, v, 155 Cendrars, Blaise, xlvii, 154 Cento (collage), xxi, 11 Certeau, Michel de, xii, 95 Cézanne, Paul, 185 Chastity, xl, 12, 15, 19, 61, 62, 68, 71, 72, 97, 112, 115, 129, 136, 200 Childhood, 33, 38, 46, 59, 69, 76, 124–34, 144, 155, 195, 199, 207 Christianity, xxi, xxxiv, 5, 13–15, 21, 37, 61, 66, 70, 76, 89, 96, 128, 133, 165–68 Cicero, xxvii, 60, 70 Cipher, xxiv, xxv, xxxiv, 6, 60, 122, 190, 192 230 Index of Figures

Civil War, xix, 57, 63–66, 75, 102, 103 Civilization, xxxvi, 5, 19, 37, 49, 50, 65, 74, 104, 109, 110, 118, 126, 204 Clare, John, 159 Close, Frank, 198 Cocteau, Jean, xiv Cohen, Paul, 82 Coherence, xvi, xxxii, 31–47, 66, 80, 96, 118, 154, 157, 170, 175, 176, 184–87 Coleridge, S. T., 59, 198 Collage, xiv–xvii, xxix–xxxii, xliii, xliv, 11, 25–27, 31, 35–36, 41, 42, 52, 55, 57, 59, 66, 78, 118–21, 155–159, 166, 180, 209 Communism, xxxv, xxxix, 76, 83, 109, 122, 176 Community, xxxv, xxxviii, 10–12, 37, 48–50, 59, 67, 76, 106, 108, 111–21, 165, 168, 206, 210 Complementarity, xii, 3–4, 11, 15, 20–24, 28, 40, 45, 47, 82, 106, 112, 129, 131, 167, 183 Composition, xvii, xxxiv, 31, 38, 44, 46, 47, 59, 112, 138, 145, 150, 157, 182, 183, 187, 198 Compounding, xxxii, 66, 182 Concatenation, 170, 177–81 Concord, 11, 17, 35, 38, 68, 110, 112, 182, 185, 206 Congruence, 4, 67, 74 Connection, 18, 26, 29, 43, 69, 144, 156, 157, 168, 176–78 Connotation, 33, 94, 110, 137, 152, 163, 173 Consonance, xxx, 4, 30, 65, 85, 185, 193 Constraint, xiii, 42, 50, 57, 70, 73, 98, 105, 109, 114, 122, 154, 156 Construction, xv, xvi, xix, xx, 11, 21, 47, 58, 61, 63, 79, 82, 83, 100, 101, 102, 124–27, 146, 166, 176, 190

Constructivism, xv, xvi, xxxv, 10, 76–84, 95, 106 Continuity, xx, xli, xlii, 34, 40, 43, 69, 80, 120, 122, 144, 150, 151, 187 Convention, xi, xxvi, xxxiii, xl, 8, 12, 31, 43, 51, 53–55, 58, 63, 64, 68, 73, 80, 126 Coover, Robert, xlii, 180 Cornell, Joseph, 187 Cornell, Thomas, xxxiii Correspondence, 4, 33, 36, 43, 45, 59, 67, 110, 118, 160, 171, 177, 178 Cosmos, xlii, 3, 4, 12, 16, 35-36, 44, 56, 102, 109–12, 143, 164, 171, 185, 198 Cournos, John, xv, 28, 196 Cox, Bonnie Jean, xxvii, 9, 205 Crane, Joan, 94, 180, 189, 196, 206 Creativity, xvii, xix, xxx, xliv, 7, 33, 35, 49, 74, 126, 144, 163 Creeley, Robert, 146 Crèvecoeur, Hector St. John de, 53 Cubism, 31, 42, 43, 78, 106, 148 Curtis, Edward, 152 Cynic, 4, 13, 14, 18–21, 57, 67, 195 Daimon (informing spirit), xxi, xliii, 4, 5, 10–18, 23, 57, 59, 73, 86, 128, 159–62, 164, 189, 194, 200 Dante Alighieri, 53 Darwin, Charles, xxxv, 52, 102, 199, 212 de Stijl, xxxvi, 46, 52, 111 Débord, Guy, xii Defamiliarization, 79, 80, 93 Defoe, Daniel, xxiv, xli, 167, 169 Delaunay, Robert, 48 DeLillo, Don, xxxv Delmas, Calixte, 50 Demetz, Peter, 204 Democracy, xliii, 10, 13, 53, 65–66, 90, 114, 125, 143, 201

Denis, Maurice, xxxii Derrida, Jacques, 160 Descartes, René, 74 Descent, xvi, 7, 10, 24, 29, 30, 104–5, 121, 159, 164, 168, 194, 210 Design, xiv, 16, 29, 31, 77, 83, 88, 91, 156, 157, 188, 202 Desire, 16, 18, 70, 124, 131, 139, 157 Despotism, 10, 12, 77, 103, 207 Detection, xxvi, xlii, 36, 38, 97, 111, 126, 132, 134, 141, 177, 180, 184 Diachronism, xx, xxx, xlii Dickens, Charles, xxiii Diderot, Denis, 68 Diogenes, xx–xxii, xxxvi, 4, 7, 14, 16– 21, 57, 67, 86, 93, 157, 189, 194, 195 Discord, 8, 99, 121, 133, 197 Discreteness, xxix, xxxi, xxxii, 27, 35, 125, 130, 156, 159, 173, 182, 194, 208 Dissonance, 135, 146, 155, 157, 185, 210 Documentary, xxxiv, xli, 28, 31, 32, 78, 100 Dogon, xxx, 35–44, 47, 49, 62 Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.), 150, 197 Dos Passos, John, 90 Doughty, Charles, 101, 205 Dove, 22–24, 35, 83, 135, 153, 156–60, 163, 164, 168, 210 Drawing, xiv–xv, xxviii, 32, 35, 44, 46, 52, 66, 82, 118, 120, 122, 152, 178 Duchamp, Marcel, xliv, 149 Duke University, xviii Duncan, Robert, 160, 188 Eagleton, Terry, xlii Easton, Laird M., xxxv Eclogue, xi, 52–75, 151 Eden, 57, 69, 100, 173–174 Einstein, Albert, 184 Eliot, T. S., xliv, 40, 41, 149, 186, 197, 198

Index of Figures

231

Elliot, Robert C., 77 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, xiii, xxxi, 57, 58, 188, 200 Empson, William, 53, 56 Epstein, Jacob, 35 Erewhon, xxxv, 61, 100–3 Ernst, Max, 25, 154, 166 Eros, xxii, xxx, 3, 18, 21, 52, 105, 111, 128, 131, 186 Estaing, Giscard d’, 43 Eurydice, 104–7, 153 Evans, Arthur, 8 Exactness, xlv, 8, 38, 92, 110, 155, 166, 191 Excursion, xi–xiii, 58, 84, 91, 128, 135–36, 141, 157, 183, 185, 187 Faith, xlii, 12, 17, 22, 31, 39–43, 53, 60, 75–77, 96, 120, 127, 154, 155, 164, 168, 173, 176, 180, 188 Fantasy, 57, 60, 69, 73, 110, 118, 138 Fascism, 34, 50, 76, 84–88, 93, 153, 154 Faucon, Bernard, xiii, xxxiii, xxxviii Fellowship, xxix, xxxiv, xxxvi, 11, 69, 98, 101, 103, 133, 135, 142 Fenollosa, Ernest, xxxi, 28 Finlay, Ian Hamilton, 8, 194 Flight, 89–95 Foraging, xvii, 36–38, 125, 155, 157, 165, 181 Force, xi, xxiii, xxxvi, 4, 14, 24, 29, 51, 74, 76, 107, 123, 161, 164 Ford, Clellan, 207 Fort Bragg, xviii, xix Foucault, Michel, 15, 115, 119, 151, 169 Fourier, Charles, xvi, xxxvi, 107–23 passim Freedom, xxxvi–xli, 50, 53, 58, 60, 110, 123, 139, 154, 175 Freuchen, Peter, 129 Freud, Sigmund, 69, 115, 124, 128, 132, 134, 170, 207 232

Index of Figures

Frobenius, Leo, xlvii Frost, Robert, xxxi Frothingham, Octavius, 209 Frye, Northrop, 65 Fuller, F. Buckminster, xx, 4, 82, 83, 193, 202 Futurism, 78, 80, 94, 95, 148 Futurity, 75 Gaddis, William, xlii Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, xv, xxxii, 27–31, 181, 196 Gaugin, Paul, 61, 89 Géfin, Laszlo, 38 Geometry, 11, 14, 22, 41, 44, 45, 46, 120, 179 Gibson, William, 77 Gide, André, xlv, 68, 113 Gifford, Terry, 59, 74–75 Gisborne, Maria, 183, 185 Goellner-Cortwright, Fred, 62 Goethe, Wolfgang von, xx, 41, 72, 157, 205 Goicolea, Anthony, xxxiii, xxxviii Goldsmith, Oliver, 59 Gospel of James, xxxvii Gourmont, Rémy de, 105–6 Grafting, 157, 160, 166, 169, 187 Gray, Camilla, 78, 83 Griaule, Marcel, 36, 62, 197 Grid, 4, 36, 41, 44–46, 49, 166 Grundtvig, N. F. S., 133 Guilt, 86, 142, 143, 166 Hades, 7, 10, 29, 104, 105, 106, 107 Haibun, 183 Haiku, 183 Halperin, David, 14, 58 Harvard University, xviii Haverford College, xviii Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 206 Hayman, Ronald, 203

Haynes, Kenneth, 176 Heaney, Seamus, 6 Hedonism, xxvii, 19, 70, 121, 128, 129 Hegel, G. W. F., 55 Hejinian, Lyn, 149, 175 Heraclitus, xlii, 3, 6, 7, 16–18, 37, 38, 40, 74, 167, 171, 181–91, 194, 211 Hermes, xxii, xxiii, 36, 66 Hermetic, xv, xvi Hermit, xviii, xxiv, 15 Heterotopia, 151, 154, 166, 169 Hierarchy, 43, 53, 60, 79, 141 Hieroglyph, 31, 34 Hierogram, xlv Hill, Geoffrey, 6, 74 Historicism, xlii, xlv, 5, 53, 193 Historiography, xi, xli, 66 Hitler, Adolf, xxxv, 78, 199 Hoepffner, Bernard, xiv, xxiv, 100, 204–5, 208 Hoffmann, Michael, 95 Hokusai, xxiii, 182–84, 186, 196, 212–13 Home and Homemaking, xvii, xli, xlv, xlvi, 9, 97, 102, 121, 129, 178, 195 Homer, xiv, xxviii, xxxii, xlvi, 5, 35, 57, 60, 103, 141, 183, 196, 200 Homer, Winslow, 183 Horace, 48, 195 Howe, Susan, xliii, 149 Hughes, Ted, 74 Hugo, Victor, xiii, xli, 85 Huizinga, Johan, 49–50 Hulme, T. E., xiii, 27, 60 Hutcheon, Linda, xli, xlii Hybridity, xvi, xli, xlv, 27, 31, 66, 151, 187, 189 Hyman, Mac, xix Identity, xvi, xxi, 48, 60, 69, 86, 105, 115, 114, 134, 146, 151, 170, 181

Ideogram, vii, xxxi, xlvi, 25–51 passim, 159 Ideology, xxviii, xxxv, xli, xlii, 17, 18, 50, 57, 77–83, 124, 130 Idiosyncracy, xxiv, xxix, 19, 42, 140, 149, 157 Idiotes/idiot, 18, 62, 140 Imbrication, xii, xxx, 11, 74 Immanence, xlii, 41, 60, 146, 155, 161, 166, 186, 188 Impersonality, xvii, xxiii, xxxvi, 40, 51, 119, 182 Incongruity, xxiv, 4, 19, 46, 80, 96, 99, 151, 165, 187 Indirection, xix, xxiv, 84, 160, 161, 182 Infinity, 74, 102, 171–74 Innocence, xxxix, xlvi, 9, 61, 69, 88–90, 123–24, 131, 158, 170 Institution, xlii, 8, 54, 71, 79, 108, 115, 130, 140, 155, 208 Interiority, xxxviii, 69, 81, 186 Interstices, 31, 46, 159, 181 Intertextuality, xli, 66, 151, 167 Invention, 7 Irony, 29, 44, 66, 67, 98, 122, 187, 194 Isometry, 42, 43, 50, 57, 73, 117, 179, 182, 183, 187 Itard, Jean, 62 Ives, Charles, xvii, xxviii, 156, 181, 185, 210 Jackson, Stevi, 127 James, Henry, 26, 120, 121, 133, 140–41 Jameson, Fredric, 75, 175, 212 Jealousy, 33, 71, 72, 105, 143, 161 Jefferson, Thomas, 53 Jencks, Charles, xxxiii, xliv, 66 Jesus/Yeshua, xxiv, xlii, 14, 161, 165–73, 193, 212 Johns, Jasper, 187 Johnson, Ronald, xii, xlii, 21, 31, 39, 69, 100, 145, 181, 189, 193, 208 Index of Figures

233

Joyce, James, xxviii, xlii, 5, 36, 42, 68, 105, 126, 150–55, 165, 176, 190 Juvenal, 18 Juxtaposition, xxxi, 6, 11, 14, 28, 32, 35, 38, 60, 65, 78, 118, 151, 156 Kafka, Franz, xvi, xxxiv–xxxv, 88–99 passim Kant, Immanuel, 114, 154, 157, 175, 209 Keaton, Buster, 204 Kelly, Robert, xlv, 146, 180, 188 Kemp, Martin, 40 Kenner, Hugh, xiv, xv, xviii, xxiv, xxvii, xxviii, 6, 26, 92, 195, 196, 202 Kessler, Harry, xxxv Khlebnikov, Velimir, xxi, xliv, 80, 82, 149 Kierkegaard, Soren, 96, 135, 163, 165 Kincaid, James, 124–25, 126, 127, 139 Kinship, xxx, 10, 36, 43, 60, 79, 108, 133, 168, 201 Kissinger, Henry, xii, 178 Klee, Paul, 106, 134, 190 Klinkowitz, Jerome, 112 Korczak, Janusz, 125, 130–32, 207 Krauss, Rosalind, 45 Kundera, Milan, 78 Lacunae, 6, 8, 80 Laertes, Diogenes, 17, 18, 189, 194 Landscape, xviii, xxi, xxxiii, 53, 58, 69, 75, 171, 182, 199 Language, xxxv–xliii, 32, 41, 48–50, 56, 58, 60, 116–19, 145, 146–56, 172–80, 188, 206 Lapham, Lewis H., xxxvi Lartigue, Jacques-Henri, 90, 203 Lascaux, xi, xxiv, 4, 5, 23, 28, 30– 37, 57, 76, 102, 104, 106, 155, 197, 198 234

Index of Figures

Lawrence, D. H., xxii, 54, 62, 151, 167, 200–1 Lawrence, T. E., 167–81 Lecky, James, xxxiii Lee, Mother Ann, xi, 61, 108, 166 Leenhardt, Maurice, 46–48, 49, 50 Legacy, xxxvi, xliv, 13, 27, 31, 34, 37, 50, 54, 69, 77, 81, 105, 107, 124, 174 Lehman, David, 180 Leighton, Claire, xv, 189 Leonardo da Vinci, 22, 40–42, 83, 134, 176–81 Levertov, Denise, xlv, 145, 175, 188, 201, 208, 209 Levine, Judith, xxxix, 125, 144 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 47–48 Lévy-Strauss, Claude, 184 Lewis, Wyndham, 27, 101, 102, 165, 173 Libertarianism, xxxv, xliii, 122, 156 Liberty, xxxvi, xxxviii, xl, 34, 42, 47, 48, 50, 56, 82, 109, 110, 121 License, xxix, xxxiii, xxxvi, 20, 56, 71, 78, 101, 120, 122, 128 Lifton, Betty Jean, 132 Light, 14, 31, 33, 35, 41, 93, 97, 130, 161, 162, 167, 178, 191, 193, 202 Linearity, 35, 32, 51, 78, 106, 159 Linguistic, xii, xli, 74, 151, 155, 175–78 Lissitzky, El, 25 Lock, Charles, xxxiii, 55, 204 Logic, xxxii, xlvii, 27, 65, 106, 131, 211 Logos, 5, 16, 31, 24, 37, 74, 102, 171, 184 Longenbach, James, 208 Lovelace, Augusta, 94 Lowell, Robert, xvii Lu Chi, xlv–xlvi Ludic, 49, 127, 151 Lyotard, François, 212 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 36, 40, 63, 165, 167

Mandelstam, Osip, 79, 104, 190 Mann, Thomas, 68, 134 Mao Tse Tung, xli, 176, 177, 179, 202 Mapplethorpe, Robert, xxxviii Margin, 58, 124 Marinetti, Filippo, 94 Marx, Karl, 79, 83, 87, 90, 115, 192 Marx, Leo, 53–54 Mason, Wyatt, xl Materialism, xlii, 5, 14, 35, 48, 75, 93, 114, 143 Mathematics, 12, 22, 45, 80, 100, 131, 167–71, 181, 184, 211 Matthieussent, Brice, 4, 193, 208 McBride, Will, 170, 174 McCaffery, Steve, 149 McHale, Brian, 117, 150–51, 153, 165 Meanor, Patrick, 69, 119 Measure, 11, 14, 43, 45, 56, 73, 122, 127, 165 Meatyard, Ralph, xx, 39 Mechanism, xxxvi, 18, 23, 24, 45, 75, 76, 83, 90, 91, 94, 127, 152, 195, 206 Media, Artistic, xxii, 16 Media, Electric, xli, 66 Mediation, 5, 6, 32, 57, 159 Mencius (Meng Tze), xvii, 158 Merton College, Oxford, xviii Merton, Thomas, 19, 181, 184, 187 Metamodernism, xliv–xlv, 145–88 Metaphysics, xxvii, 36, 41, 93, 126, 128, 157 Metcalf, Paul, 188 Middleton, Christopher, 190 Miller, Steve, 207 Mimesis, xvii, xxxiv, 60, 164, 165, 169 Mondrian, Piet, 4, 44, 52, 106, 207 Monogamy, 15, 71, 127 Montage, 31, 78, 80, 160 Montaigne, Michel de, xii, xxiii, 59, 61, 68–72, 123, 201 Montherlant, Henry de, 47–48, 198–99

Morace, Robert A., 86 Morphism, xiii, xx, 22, 26, 35, 38, 41, 44, 46, 69, 102, 104, 153, 155, 157, 188, 211 Mott, Mary Ann, 210 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 158, 163, 165 Murrell, John, 66 Music, xxviii, 11, 16, 57, 59, 106, 113, 134, 163, 177, 188, 200 Mussolini, Benito, xxxv, 84–86, 202 Muybridge, Eadweard, 166 Mysticism, 5, 11, 36, 45, 76, 89, 98, 172 Nabokov, Vladimir, xx, xxviii, 68, 117, 151, 201, 209 Nader, Ralph, xliii Naturalism, 52, 53, 140, 156 Nazism, xxxv, 50, 63, 98 Neolithic, xvi, xxviii, 4, 15 New Harmony, xxxvi, 35, 43, 71, 108–21, 130, 206 Newton, Isaac, xxxvi, 109 Niedecker, Lorine, xxix, xxx, 145, 191 Niepce, Joseph, 152 Nixon, Richard, xii, xli, 22, 176–79, 202 Nominalism, xliii, 156 Notebooks, xvi, xxxvi, 28, 134, 138, 172, 189 Noun, 117 Number, 6, 11–16, 22, 29, 41, 48, 128, 159, 164, 171–73, 183 Numinous, 24, 146, 164 O. Henry, xviii, xxviii Objectivism, xix, 152, 209 Obliquity, xx, xxxii, 7, 53, 75, 105, 131, 139, 183, 186 Ogo, 36–51 Ogotemmêli, 36–51 O’Hara, Frank, 145 Index of Figures

235

Olsen, Lance, 38, 148 Olson, Charles, xxviii, xxxi, xlii, xliv, 31, 39, 53, 79, 146, 149, 197, 208, 210 Omnigamy, 114, 127 Opacity, xxxviii, xli, 43, 92, 134, 205 Organic, xxxvi, 18, 22, 45, 83, 90, 94, 103, 130, 156 Organism, xxxv, 27, 35, 77, 94, 103, 134 Orpheus, xxii, xxiii, 4, 11, 29, 103–7, 111, 118, 164 Ovid, 21, 66, 203 Pacifism, 10, 15 Palmer, Samuel, 166 Panofsky, Erwin, 72 Parable, xli, 23, 92, 93, 168, 173 Parallel, xii, xvii, xx, xxiv, 4, 14, 30, 42, 47, 77, 85, 141, 156, 166, 171, 180 Parataxis, xxxii, 65, 168 Parody, xx, 122, 151 Particularity, xxii, 53, 79, 117, 160, 182 Pasteur, Louis, 198 Pastiche, 20, 91, 151, 154 Pastoral, xxxii–xxxiv, 52–75 passim Pater, Walter, 105 Paul, xi, xii, 6, 14, 21, 37, 57, 59, 66, 136, 168 Pausanias, xii, xxi–xxvi, 3, 189 Pederasty, xxv, xxvii, xxxix, 15, 65, 126, 138, 142, 161, 208 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 169 Perlis, Yitzhak, 132 Perloff, Marjorie, ix, xliii, xliv, 26–27, 31, 93, 149 Persephone, xxii, 104, 105, 113, 150, 154, 194, 205 Phalanstery, 37, 49, 109, 111–19, 133, 143 Phoneticism, 117 Picasso, Pablo, xi, xxxii, 34, 37, 69, 147, 197 Pilgrimage, xii, 40, 142, 185, 186, 198 236

Index of Figures

Pinocchio, 94–95 Pivots and pivot figures, 41, 44, 71 Plato, xxvii, xxxix, 3, 11–13, 22, 35, 113, 195 Play, 43–49, 58, 60, 65, 154, 166, 175 Plutarch, xi, 6, 11, 17, 126, 194 Poe, Edgar Allan, xvi, xix, 4, 18, 23, 35, 40, 104, 105 Poggioli, Renato, 68 Politics, xxvi, xxxv, xlii, xliii, 10, 13, 17, 57, 74, 79, 84, 122, 150 Polygamy, 72, 129 Ponge, Francis, 63 Pople, Ken, 174 Porousness, xxxvii, 7 Porphyry, 22 Possibility, 27, 53, 54, 60, 74, 101, 160, 187, 198 Post, Emily, 184 Pound, Ezra, xiii, xv, xviii, xx, xxviii, xxxi–xxxii, xxxv, xlii, xliv, 84–88 passim Precision, xvii, xxxviii, xliii, xlv, 20, 22, 55, 60, 76 Presence, 55, 57, 72, 146, 162 Privacy, xxxiv, xxxvi, xliii, 20, 44, 58, 78, 87, 143, 170, 173, 208 Proportion, 11, 45, 107, 119 Proust, Marcel, 95, 105, 126 Providence, xxxvi, 53, 70, 109, 173 Puritanism, xxvi, xxxix, 15, 19, 21, 61, 76, 124, 128, 30–34, 144 Puttenham, George, 53 Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre-Cécile, xxxii Pynchon, Thomas, xlii, 154, 179 Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism, xii, xlvii, 13, 15, 41, 94, 129, 167, 171, 179, 188, 189 Quaker, 10, 89 Quartermain, Peter, 26, 42–43

Quotation, xiv, xxiii, 28, 30, 73, 106, 187 Quotidian, xxii, 6, 67, 76, 165, 166 Rachewiltz, Boris de, xvii, xlvii Rakitin, Vasilii, 83–84 Rauschenberg, Robert, 26, 66, 187 Reason and rationality, 4, 10–12, 16, 18, 20, 29, 58, 62, 107, 148, 164 Redemption, 12, 86, 89, 96, 99, 118, 143, 160, 168, 173, 204 Reece, Erik Anderson, xiv, 36, 44, 45, 77, 106, 187, 194, 200 Reed, Ishmael, xlii, 164 Reference, xlii, 26, 79, 151–54, 160, 166, 175 Rembrandt van Rijn, 184 Remoteness, xix, xxix, 56, 57, 60, 61, 82, 97, 141 Renault, Mary, 6, 193–94 Renka, 183 Renner, B., xix Representation, xli, xlii, 26, 36, 55, 106, 146, 153, 169, 172, 176, 211 Restraint, xxii, 8, 21, 58, 70, 73, 115, 128, 152 Reverence, 4, 23, 48, 104, 156, 165, 166, 182 Reynolds, Joshua, 72, 126 Rhyme, 7, 16, 30, 101, 106, 193 Ridiculousness, xlvi, 99, 195 Rieke, Alison, ix, 119–20, 206 Rietrveld, Gerrit, 52 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 43, 106–7, 159, 205 Rimbaud, Arthur, 28, 30, 31 Robinson Crusoe, xxiv–xxv, xli, 84, 121 Rousseau, Henri, 47, 49 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 126 Rubin, Gayle S., 124–25 Ruskin, John, 44, 54, 122

Salle, David, 187 Sambursky, S., 11 Sannazaro, Jacopo, 60, 61 Santayana, George, 68 Sappho, xiv, xxx, xxxix, 7, 8, 23, 55, 199, 200 Saturation, 80 Sauer, Carl, 53, 134 Schillebeeckx, Edward, 167 Schiller, Friedrich, 74 Schöpp, Joseph, 162 Science, xlvi, 4, 34, 41, 53, 109, 154, 175, 188 Scott, Laurence, xv, 196 Scott, Walter, 169, 190 Sebald, W. G., 190 Selassie, Haile, 153 Sensualism, 5, 19, 20, 101 Series, xxxii, xxxiii, 14, 40, 41, 44, 77, 80, 107, 171 Sexuality, xxii, xxix, xxxvi–xli, 14, 75, 103–22, 123–44 passim Shaker, xi, xxiii, 20, 61, 76, 89, 108, 162 Shakespeare, William, xl, 52, 139, 179 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 181, 183, 186 Shklovsky, Victor, xxxiv, 79, 82 Sidney, Philip, 53, 58 Signification, 43, 110, 117, 148, 151–55 Silvestris, Bernardus, xlii Sketchbooks, xvi, xvii, 101 Skinner, B. F., xlvi Smollett, Tobias, xxiii Snyder, Gary, xlv, 46, 155–56, 188, 201, 209 Soby, James Thrall, 147 Soul, xxi, 10, 11, 44, 96, 103, 105, 129, 130 Spatiality, 47, 50, 51, 171, 211 Spengler, Oswald, xx Spirit, 23, 56, 88, 105, 126, 168, 170 Stein, Gertrude, xxi, xliv, 14, 35–43, 149, 150, 176, 178, 180 Index of Figures

237

Steiner, George, 61, 68, 74, 75 Stevens, Wallace, 175 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 89 Stevick, Philip, 208 Stoddard, Richard Henry, 68 Stoic, xx, xxxv, 14, 37, 68, 70, 73, 84–86 Sturgeon, Steven, 68–69 Sublimation, 126 Sublimity, xii, xlvi, 154, 166, 171, 175, 212 Sullivan, John Jeremiah, xxxvi, xxxvii, xl, xlii, xliv, 120 Svevo, Italo, 68 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 41, 85, 88, 108, 110 Sylvester, Joseph, 22, 167, 168, 171, 173 Symonds, John Addington, 65 Synchronism, xxx, 6 Syncretism, xi, xx, 30, 64, 103, 155, 157 Tasso, Torquato, 68, 123 Tatlin, Vladimir, xv, xvi, xx, xxxv, 10, 13, 18, 22, 27, 77–88, 95, 99, 102, 104, 163 Taxonomy, xxiv, xliii, 44, 149, 160, 170, 185 Taylor, Bayard, 68 Tchelitchew, Pavel, xxviii Technique, xliii, 32, 46, 66, 78, 79, 80, 106, 155, 197 Technology, xii, xxxiv, 5, 24, 52, 77, 82, 90–95, 102, 152, 155, 179, 199 Tharp, Rosetta, xlvii Theocritus, xxxiii, 56–66, 71, 72 Thiher, Allan, 177 Thompson, D’Arcy, 46, 134, 156, 198 Thoreau, Henry David, xvii, xx, 16, 20, 23, 52, 57, 61, 77, 141, 156–58, 186, 195, 200, 209, 210 Todorov, Tzvetan, 169 Tolliver, Harold, 58, 73

238

Index of Figures

Totalitarianism, xix, xxxvi, 49, 77 Totality, 107, 170, 171, 188 Transcendence, xvii, 6, 16, 22, 41, 130, 137, 148, 150, 158, 164, 172 Transcendentalism, 11, 16, 41, 83, 156, 157, 200, 206, 209 Transfinite, 171–74 Transgression, 60, 143, 169, 172 Transparency, xxxviii, xxxix, xli, 104, 122, 205 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin, 79 Tuke, Henry Scott, xiii, 167–75 Turing, Allan, 92 Twain, Mark, 178 Uniformity, 36, 40–43, 108, 182 Unity, xvi, xxx, xlii, 3, 53, 58, 74, 105, 108, 155, 168, 171, 184, 198 Universality, xxxv, xlii, 16, 22, 55, 106, 109, 110, 120, 130, 164, 179 University of Kentucky, xiii, xviii, xxvii, xlvi Unsworth, John M., 208 Urrutia, Benjamin, xxviii, xlii, 167 Utopia, xxxiv–xxxvi, 60–62, 75–122 passim Van Gogh, Vincent, 61, 152 Van Hovendaal, Adriaan, xx, 60, 69, 84, 92, 99, 118, 204 Verb, 117 Victorianism, 26, 44, 126 Vida, Marcelo, 53 Virgil, xii, xx, xxxiii, 11, 53, 57, 60, 73 Vortex, 28–29, 87, 88, 102, 202 Walking, xii, xxii, xxiv, 19, 33, 113, 142, 177, 186, 187, 205 Walser, Robert, xxiii–xxvi, 37, 47, 81, 163, 190, 195 Warren, Robert Penn, xviii

Washington University, xviii Watson, Sereno, 181 Welty, Eudora, xxviii, 105, 188, 194, 205 White, Gilbert, 53, 181 Whitman, Walt, xlii, 44, 57, 63–66, 75, 94, 114, 134, 143, 156, 170, 186, 201 Wiggin, Kate Douglas, 125 Wilde, Oscar, 116 Williams, Jonathan, xv, xlii, 21, 39, 69, 146, 191, 197–98, 205, 208 (see Correspondence in Index of Works) Williams, William Carlos, xxxi, 7, 38–39 Williamson, Alan, 33, 148 Winthrop, John, 61 Witemeyer, Hugh, 105–6, 203–4 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xi, xvii, xx, xxxii, xxxiv, xlii, 4, 49, 91–95, 114, 167–72, 189, 192, 203

Wright, Wilbur and Orville, 14, 35, 36, 90 Wolf, Krista, 6 Wordsworth, William, 126 World War I/Great War, xxxii, xlv, 27, 29, 37, 90, 93, 153, 154, 173, 196 World War II, xxxii, 87, 124, 131, 147, 207 Writing, xii, xiv, xvii, xix, xxv, xxxi, 18, 35, 43, 117, 175, 179 Yeats, W. B., 23, 195, 197 Young, Cynthia, xv Yuasa, Nobuyuki, 182, 184 Zachar, Laurence, xvi, 76, 189, 201–2 Zen, 156, 184 Zeus, 15, 66 Zukofksy, Louis, xv, xvi, xlii, xliii, xliv, xlvi, 37, 119, 145, 154, 179, 188, 205, 211

Index of Figures

239

Index of Works by Guy Davenport

Art Works

À Zukofsky, 211 Abandoned self-portrait, xlvi–xlvii Balance of Quinces, A, 207 Fifty Drawings, xiv Fourier Series of 36 Essences, 44–45 Gensidighed, 4 Herakleitos and Knaps, 194 Hommage à Brancusi, 45 Illustrations to Kenner, The Counterfeiters, xiii–xiv, 92, 195, 196, 204 Illustrations to Kenner, The Stoic Comedians, xiii–xiv, 195, 196 Korczak, 131, 207 Nature Loves to Hide, 211 Orpheus Preaching to the Animals, 106–7 Portrait of Ezra Pound, 86 Still Life with Pitcher, 200 Vortex, 202 War Is the Health of the State, 130, 131 Wittgenstein, 203 Correspondence

Guy Davenport and James Laughlin, Selected Letters, xi, xliii, xlvi, 3, 52, 76, 100, 123, 145 Guy Davenport and Jonathan Williams, A Garden Carried in a Pocket: Letters 1964–1968, xv, xviii, xx, xxv, xliii, xlvi, 25, 26, 69, 101, 115, 189, 192, 201, 205, 208, 209, 210 Criticism

“Anthropology of Table Manners, The,” 199 “Art of Simon Dinnerstein, The,” 46, 175 Artists’ Sketchbooks: untitled essay, xiv Author’s Response in The Oxter English Dictionary, 117–18 Balthus Notebook, A, xvi, xxviii, 118, 126, 144, 206

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“Charles Ives,” 157, 210 “Circumspectus” to Wo es war, soll ich werden, xliii, 133, 137, 139 Cities on Hills, xxviii, 11, 39, 40, 61, 76, 84, 102 “Claire Leighton, American Artist,” 189 “Critic as Artist, The,” 179, 184 “Dazzlers and Astounders,” 201 “Drawings of Paul Cadmus, The,” 144 “Ernst Machs Max Ernst,” 16, 22, 24, 25, 36, 69, 78– 79, 102, 106 “Eros, His Intelligence,” 131, 186 Every Force Evolves a Form, xi, 61, 76 “Every Force Evolves a Form,” 23, 198 “Ezra Pound 1885–1972,” 85 “Finding,” xiii, 22, 38 “Foreword” to Sutton, Startling Art, 212 “Form of Incomprehension, A,” 126, 190, 209 Geography of the Imagination, The, xxvii, 192, 196 “Guernica,” 197 “History with Its Eyes Wide Open,” 193– 94 “Horace and Walt in Camden,” 65, 201 “House That Jack Built, The,” 7 Hunter Gracchus, The, 165, 209, 212 “Hunter Gracchus, The,” 91, 96, 97, 99 “II Timothy,” 24, 103, 165, 168– 69, 181, 211 “Illuminations of Bernard Faucon and Anthony Goicolea, The,” xxxiii–xxxiv, xxxviii “Indian and His Image, The,” 24, 195, 199 Introduction to Brakhage, Film Biographies, 40 Introduction to Carson, Glass, Irony and God, 186 Introduction to Montaigne’s Travel Journal, xiii, xxiii, 201 Introduction to Nabokov, Lectures on Don Quixote, xxviii, 201, 209 Introduction to O. Henry, Cabbages and Kings, xviii; Selected Stories, xviii Introduction to Raffel, Pure Pagan, 15 Introduction to Williams, Sharp Tools for Catullan Gardens, 205 “Jonathan Williams,” 146 “Journal I,” 189 “Journal II,” 189 “Keeping Time,” xx–xxi “Kelly in Time,” 146, 180 Key Pennant Study Guide to the Odyssey, xiii, xiv, xxviii, 25 “Letter to the Masterbuilder,” 199 “Life, Chance, and Charles Darwin,” 199

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Index of Works by Guy Davenport

“Louis Agassiz,” 199 “Making It Uglier to the Airport,” 199 “Man Without Contemporaries, The,” 79, 202 “Marianne Moore,” 198 “Micrographs,” xvi, xxiv, 148, 211 “Narrative Tone and Form,” xli, 31 “New Books” (Demetz, The Air Show at Brescia, 1909), 204; (Goon Park), xlvi; (Kafka, Amerika), 95, 203, 204 Objects on a Table, xxviii, 61, 76, 118, 185, 199, 200, 204 “Olson,” 32, 39, 145, 197 “Pages from a Notebook,” 189 “Persephone’s Ezra,” 194 “Playful Wizardry of Donald Barthelme, The,” 212 “Post-Modern and After,” 147 “Postscript” to Twelve Stories, 121–22, 145, 175 “Pound Vortex, The,” 27, 196 “Primitive Eyes,” 32 Review of Calvino, Invisible Cities, 209 Review of Kafka, Amerika, 203 Review of Williams, Paterson, 39, 197 “Ronald Johnson,” 31, 145–46, 212 “Ruskin,” 122 “Scholar as Critic, The,” 145, 179 “Scholia and Conjectures for Olson’s ‘The Kingfishers,’” 145 “Scripta Zukofskii Elogia,” xvi, xlvi, 192 “Shaker Light,” 20, 24, 108, 199, 206 “Stanley Spencer and David Jones,” 7, 165– 67, 196 “Story Strange and Weird, A,” 201, 209 “Style as Protagonist in Donald Barthelme,” 212 “Symbol of the Archaic, The,” 5, 29, 50, 103–4 “Tales of Transformation,” 199 “That Faire Field of Enna,” 188, 194, 205 “Thoreau and the Dispersion of Seeds,” 195, 199, 209 “Tough Characters, Solid Novels,” 199 “Turn the Other Face,” 201 “Two Essays on Brakhage and His Songs,” 178 “Walt Whitman and Ronald Johnson,” 201 “Ways of Being Human,” 170 “Well Up on the Far Out,” 199 “What Are Revolutions?” 95, 103 “Whitman,” 127, 201, 210–11

Index of Works by Guy Davenport

243

“Wittgenstein,” 92 “Zukofsky,” xvi, xlvi, 192 Editions

Intelligence of Louis Agassiz, The, xxviii, 52 O. Henry, Cabbages and Kings, xviii; Selected Stories, xviii Fiction

“Aeroplanes at Brescia, The,” xiii, xvi, xviii, xxxiv, 6, 24, 89– 95, 99, 103, 195, 203 “And,” 211–12 “Antiquities of Elis, The,” xii, xxi–xxiii, xli, 3, 46, 189 Apples and Pears, xiv, xxxix , 30, 99, 100, 116, 182, 196, 204, 205, 211 “Apples and Pears,” xxii, xxxviii, xxxix, 42, 49, 56, 99–100, 108–22, 205 “August Blue,” xiii, xix, xlii, 22, 167– 76, 193, 200, 211, 212 “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier,” xxx, xxxi, 27, 35–38, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 90, 108, 197, 198, 199, 205 “Badger,” xiii, 23, 209 “Belinda’s World Tour,” 89, 94, 203 “Bicycle Rider, The,” 71, 121, 159, 162, 164, 207, 210 “Bowmen of Shu, The,” xv, xxxi, 27–31, 159, 196 “Boys Smell Like Oranges,” xiii, xxx, xxxi, 14, 46–48, 50–51, 198 “Bronze Leaves and Red,” xxxv, 63, 199 “C. Musonius Rufus,” xx, 12, 84–88, 99, 185, 202 “Cadenza” (insert to Wo es war, soll ich werden), 190 Cardiff Team, The, xli, 97, 148, 198, 199, 207 “Cardiff Team, The,” 14, 48–50, 63, 195, 199, 201 “Chair, The,” xiii, 88–89, 98– 99, 203, 204 “Christ Preaching at the Henley Regatta,” 57, 59, 63, 154, 165– 67, 210, 211 “Colin Maillard,” xxxviii “Concert Champêtre in D Minor,” xxix, 52, 125, 128, 131 “Concord Sonata, The,” xiii, xvii, xx, 20, 52, 156–58, 159, 209, 210 Da Vinci’s Bicycle, xxiii, xxvi, xlii, 14, 37, 40, 42, 76, 84–86, 179, 195, 197, 202, 205, 208, 209, 212 “Daimon of Sokrates, The,” 4, 5, 10–15, 18, 57, 59, 73, 86, 128, 189, 194, 200 “Dawn in Erewhon, The,” xvi, xxvi, xxxix, xlii, 3, 12, 16, 49, 71, 84–85, 89, 92, 100–7, 111, 112, 117, 119, 170, 204, 205 Death of Picasso, The, xxviii, xl, 120, 158, 192, 198, 200, 202, 203, 204, 207, 209, 210

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Index of Works by Guy Davenport

“Death of Picasso, The,” xxvi, 17, 21, 57, 59, 60– 64, 68, 69, 111, 112, 116, 200, 202 “Dinner at the Bank of England,” 68 Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers, The, xxxix, 135, 207, 209 Eclogues, xxvi, 10, 21, 52, 57– 60, 68, 72, 75, 189, 200, 201, 210 “1830,” xvi, xix, 103, 104 “Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg, A,” xxiii–xxvi, 47, 163, 190 “Fifty-seven Views of Fujiyama,” xiii, 19, 30, 42, 45, 63, 159, 181–87 “Gingham Dress, A,” xix “Gunnar and Nikolai,” 14, 125, 131–32, 207 “Haile Selassie Funeral Train, The,” xii–xiii, 153–55, 209 “Herakleitos,” xvi, xx, xlii, 4, 6, 15–18, 86, 89, 103, 189, 194 “Home,” xli “Idyll,” xix, 57, 60, 63– 66, 75, 201 “Illuminations of Bernard Faucon and Anthony Goicolea, The,” xxxiii–xxxiv “Invention of Photography at Toledo, The,” xiii, 151–53, 156, 208 “John Charles Tapner,” xiii, xli, 85 “Jonah,” 23, 159– 60, 161– 62, 210 Jules Verne Steam Balloon, The, xlvi, 76, 128, 159, 161, 162, 164, 165, 167, 189, 202, 210 “Jules Verne Steam Balloon, The,” xlv, 159, 161, 162– 64, 210 “Juno of the Veii, The,” xi, xxix, 6 “Kitchen Chair, The,” xiii “Lavender Fields of Apta Julia, The,” xiii, xxxiii, xxxviii, 52, 129 “Les Exploits de Nat Pinkerton de Jour en Jour,” 63 “Lo Splendore Della Luce a Bologna,” xiii, 27, 57, 60, 166 “Meadow, The,” xxxiii, 52 “Meleager,” 14 “Mesoroposthonippidon,” xx, xxxv, 4, 18–21, 57, 59, 63, 86, 189 “Messengers, The,” xxxiv, 89, 96– 98, 163 “Mr. Churchyard and the Troll,” 96, 163, 193 “O Gadjo Niglo,” xi, xxxviii, 139–43, 208 “On Some Lines of Virgil,” xii, xxvi–xxvii, xxxiii, 19, 21, 42, 57, 58, 59, 60, 68–74, 123 “Owl of Minerva, The,” xxxvii–xl, 16, 192 “Playing Field, The,” xl “Pyrrhon of Elis,” xiii, 21–86, 189, 194 “Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag, The,” xii, xiii, xli, 22, 83, 176–81, 202, 212 “Ringdove Sign, The,” xlv, 23, 159– 65, 169, 207, 210 “River, The,” xi, 14, 52, 128–29, 131, 140, 207 “Robot,” xvi, xxiv, xxxi, 4, 10, 23, 32–35, 46, 47, 50, 69, 89– 90, 103, 194, 197 “Table, The,” 50, 198– 99

Index of Works by Guy Davenport

245

Table of Green Fields, A, 52, 133, 203, 207, 208, 209, 211–12 Tatlin! xvi, xxvi, xxxix, 5, 33, 76, 77, 86, 89– 90, 92, 93, 94, 100, 101–2, 103, 106, 110, 148, 162, 197, 203, 204 “Tatlin!” xv, xvi, xix–xx, xxvi, xxxiv, 13, 22, 27, 30, 31, 77–84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 99, 103, 163 “That Lonesome Road to Macon,” xviii “Trees at Lystra, The,” xi, xii, 6, 21, 37, 57, 59, 66– 67, 200 Twelve Stories, xxvi, xxxix, xl, 30, 47, 121–22, 145, 175, 196, 204, 212 “We Often Think of Lenin in the Clothespin Factory,” 81, 190, 202 Wo es war, soll ich werden (limited edition), xxxi, xxxii, xxxiv, xl, xliii, 120, 131, 133, 135–39, 190, 207 “Wo es war, soll ich werden,” xxv, xxxix, xl, xlv, 4, 63, 120, 128, 132–39, 143–44, 159, 161, 179, 201, 207, 210 “Wooden Dove of Archytas, The,” xiii, 5, 12, 22–24, 83, 85–86, 159, 163, 195 Memoirs

“Ithaka,” 84, 86, 88, 184, 213 “Tom and Gene,” 19, 184, 213 Poetry

“At Marathon,” 3, 198 “Beyond Punt and Cush,” 207 Cydonia Florentia, 26, 52, 55 “Exact Observations of Several Phenomena,” xlv, 192 Flowers and Leaves, xiv, xv, xvii, xxx–xxxiii, 25, 26, 65, 94, 146, 158, 212–13 “For Basil Bunting,” 193 “For Cousin Jonathan,” 39, 182 “For Lorine Niedecker,” xxix–xxx, 191– 92 “Fox, The,” 54–55 Goldfinch Thistle Star, 207, 210 “Mallarmé,” 165, 207, 210 “Medusa, The,” 198 “Poem Begun by Ronald Johnson,” 207 “Poem: For Lu Chi’s Wen Fu,” xlv–xlvi, 192– 93 “Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard, The,” 6, 21, 45, 165 “Swan,” 165, 207, 210 Thasos and Ohio, xxviii, 9, 207, 210 “37, avenue Samson, Cimitière Montmartre,” ix, 107–8, 186, 198

246 Index of Works by Guy Davenport

Translations

Archilochos Sappho Alkman, xxviii, 8– 9, 188, 191, 194, 205 Carmina Archilochi: The Fragments of Archilochos, 194 Greek Anthology and Other Ancient Greek Epigrams, The (contributor), 213 Herakleitos and Diogenes, 16, 18, 19, 171, 194, 195, 211 Logia of Yeshua, The (with Benjamin Urrutia), xxxiii, xlii, 167, 193 Maxims of the Ancient Egyptians, xvii, xviii, xlvii Mimes of Herondas, The, 81, 202, 204 “One-Word Fragments of Alkman, The,” 194 “Professor of Bordeaux, A,” xxi Sappho: Poems and Fragments, xv, 7– 9, 21, 23, 25, 199–200, 201, 210 7 Greeks, xxi, xxxviii–xxxix, 202

Index of Works by Guy Davenport

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About the Author

Andre Furlani is an associate professor of English literature at Concordia University in Montreal.

Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies

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