The Jules Verne Steam Balloon

by Guy Davenport

  He has one afternoon visited both the widow of Wagner and Nietzsche’s sister. He was often stopped on the way by villagers anxious to admire him. They know that he has a sweet tooth for macaroons and present him with platters of them. He jokes that he will lose his figure, he who is so spare and lean. Nevertheless, he accepts and chews a macaroon, and old women clasp their hands and press them to their cheeks. He is especially fond of children. His eyes light up at the sight of a little blond girl with blue eyes.

  With Wagner’s widow he discussed the Ring, with Nietzsche’s sister the political question of the Jews. He asks to see the philosopher’s writing table, his primitive typewriter, his duelling sword from student days, his Italian cape. He is shown the philosopher’s teacup, and with a congenial deference he explains that he does not drink tea or coffee, or smoke, or imbibe alcohol except for the occasional stoup of beer in the company of fellow Party members.

  His life is austere. It is said by some that in a beautiful actress he has a bosom friend whose gay laughter and pleasant ways beguile him from the cares of the State after a day of reviewing Bavarian labor battalions, of meeting with diplomats, generals, and architects, of inspecting armaments, model communities, and barracks.

  He knows everything. His study of Bolshevism, state finance, defense, racial purity, destiny, the German soul, music, city planning, military history, and nutrition has been profound.

  He speaks German only. We all find it charming that the only alien word he knows is the English word gentleman. He respects learning in others. Not since Frederick the Great have we had so intellectual a leader. He admires Mussolini his gift of languages, his literary talent, his organizational genius, his classical flair for triumphal parades and ancient Roman dignity.

  His sense of humor is delicious. Once, out driving in his Mercedes, wearing an aviator cap to keep his hair in place, he exceeded the speed limit by a few miles only and was haled to the shoulder by a motorcycle policeman.

  —Follow me, the policeman said, to the Magistrate’s in the next township, where you will catch it.

  —Follow him, he instructed his chauffeur corporal.

  The policeman, you see, did not recognize who was in the Mercedes, because of the aviator cap, but the guard at the Magistrate’s saw who was entering the building, and gave a salute, and the Magistrate gave a salute, and everyone froze.

  —I have been arrested for speeding, he said to the Magistrate, who opened his mouth like a fish, struck dumb. When capable of it, the Magistrate whispered a word that sounded like mistake.

  —Not a bit of it, he said. We were well over the limit, and whereas I was not heeding the speedometer, I will not blame my chauffeur corporal but take full responsibility myself, like a proper citizen. Germans are law-abiding folk, are we not?

  —Yes! all cried.

  —Sieg! he shouted.

  —Heil! they all replied.

  And he paid the fine. On the way back to his car he was stopped by a little girl with blond hair and blue eyes who gave him a macaroon from a saucer. He ate it, and picked her up and kissed her. Her mother and all the townspeople were watching in an ecstasy. He waved to them as he drove away, back to Berlin and the pitiless responsibilities of his office.

  He is a connoisseur of the fine arts and has frequently astounded the professors of aesthetics. He is fond of paintings of weeping clowns, a subject he maintains that Rembrandt would excel in were Rembrandt with us today. He collects still lifes of beer steins and grapes with must on the cluster, conversation pieces depicting a family at table. He is not taken in by the cynical scrawls of inverts so fashionable during the postwar depression. He knows drawing when he sees it, and color, and proportion. It is a charming characteristic of his Viennese taste that he has a weakness for light opera and for films with a romantic theme.

  His speeches are electrifying. His command of minutiae keeps the engineers and tacticians on their toes. Manufacturers and bankers come away from his conferences gasping at his deep knowledge of their own businesses.

  At meals he is brilliant. He likes to entertain his guests with history and philosophy, which he can make clear and fascinating to even the most untrained mind. And yet he can talk about mountain scenery like a poet, about actors and orchestra conductors, the design of a carpet, the ingredients of a salad dressing.

  He is a vegetarian, eschewing the cruelty of slaughter. His plans for retirement are to return to painting, to leave a few good scenes to the museums of the State as a legacy. It is ironic, is it not, that his soul is essentially Bohemian, artistic, and dreamy. He says that he would have been happy leading a simple life in a garret, seeing his fellow artists in the cafés, brooding endlessly on the mysteries of light and shadow. And yet this mind was the one destiny chose to see the truth of history in clearest perspective, and he did not flinch from Duty when She came with clarion and banner at the moment when Germany took her place foremost among the nations. Germany above all.

  His shyness has endeared him to many. Once, when he was a rising politician, he came to the notice of a lady in society who invited him to an evening at her mansion. He came in formal wear, perhaps as a surprise to some of his detractors. He kept his hands folded modestly in his lap, having to refuse the liquors and nicotine periodically offered him by liveried butlers moving among the revellers. Aside from some meaningless chitchat with various socialites, he said nothing all evening until the party was breaking up, when he took a stand near the door and gave a beautiful oration against Jewishness, communism, atheism, lies in the press, and flagrant immorality in entertainment and the arts. The tone of frivolity which had prevailed throughout the festivities was, you can be sure, suddenly sobered. Thoughtful expressions took command of faces which moments before had been heedless and silly. It was a magnificent performance.

  There are many accounts of the skeptical going to the Leader’s study groups for a lark and of being converted and coming away new men.

  He is never at a loss. When he mounted the podium to eulogize Hindenburg at that great man’s funeral, he opened his folder to discover that some careless clerk had put in it not his well-chosen words but what seemed to be a financial report from the Gauleiter of Weimar. He spoke ex tempore and none of the thousands before him were the wiser.

  He can hold his salute for hours when he reviews the army.

  He is in perfect health and never sees a doctor except to talk about the health of his people. He and the doctor usually have a good laugh. The German people are so healthy, who needs a doctor?

  He is a man of exemplary tolerance. When a deputy once asked if French art was to be brought in line with National Socialist ideals, the reply was:

  —Far be it from me to dictate the taste of so witty and accomplished a people!

  He thinks the Paris Opéra the most beautiful building in the world. He likes the advanced design of transoceanic steamships and of airplanes. On his table at the Chancellory he likes to have a vase of chrysanthemums resplendent in golden light through the window.

  Our minds resonate with his opinions. Spain under Franco will save the Catholic west as it did in the time of Phillip II. You can detect the stalwartness of the Russian peasant by his bread. Psychoanalysis is Jewish filth impudently trying to pass for science. The Italians are romantic and flamboyant. The German spirit has best been expressed by Wagner. Responsibility and alertness characterize the German, treachery and hypocrisy the Jew, dullness and vapidity the Russian intelligentsia, sloth and mindlessness the American, hauteur and shallowness the English, ignorance and venality the Pole.

  Dr. Goebbels hangs on his every word. Goering loves him like a brother. His faithful staff rejoices in his presence.

  It is not true that his square moustache is copied from Chaplin, or that the Party rallies derive from the chants and cheers of American football games. The Leader’s hobbies are weekends in the mountains, phonograph records, automobiling, home movies, and designing neoclassical buildings. While he listens with every attenti
on to his ministers at conferences, his hand draws triumphal arches on his notepad. He has an ear for the mighty line of Goethe. He is fond of dogs.

  Spengler remarks that it is a German trait to be aware of an historical moment while it is happening. Just so. Were words ever so true? There is an electric excitement to the air this October, a sweetness everywhere all about. We are, as always, a scholarly sober people with our dumplings and beer and good fat black blood puddings, our string ensembles, which even in the humblest villages can do memorable evenings of Brahms and Beethoven, our incomparable schools and universities, our youth so strong, healthy, and beautiful. And all is purpose, purpose, a purpose perhaps greater than any ever undertaken since the world began.

  And somewhere in this resplendent autumn, along roads glowing with the bronze and red foliage through which they wind, there is the Leader, driven by his proud chauffeur corporal. He loves Germany and knows that Germany loves him. He stops to chat with children, farmers, doting grandmothers, blushing maidens whom he enjoins to bear stout sons for the Fatherland.

  Perhaps he has stopped to look in on Frau Elsbeth Förster-Nietzsche, whose passion for all things Teutonic is almost as fervent as his. They sit under the autumn trees in the fine air, with a plate of macaroons and a bottle of Selterswasser. The distinguished sister touches a handkerchief to an eye, remembering Fritz. The Leader sits with his legs comfortably crossed, a pose he permits himself only in the company of his equals and friends. Ordinarily he is shy around women (an astute writer has said that the transcendent idea of Germany is his wife), but with Nietzsche’s sister he is at ease.

  They feel that his spirit is with them and quote to each other the mighty aphorisms that Frau Förster-Nietzsche compiled in Der Wille zur Macht. They know the work off by heart. It is said by privileged witnesses that their voices make a kind of music. Noble minds, noble words, noble hearts! But this idyll for a poet, this conversation piece of historical subject for a painter, does not remain wholly on the level of the sublime. As with all civilized people, they exchange pleasantries, and the Leader’s charming laughter is like those jolly phrases from German folk dances and rustic songs that Beethoven in his joy could not suppress from even his most serious compositions.

  Might we not, in imparting the essence of the Leader’s character to children and students, do well to preserve for them the magic of this autumn afternoon, the high seriousness of the talk under trees so lyrically beautiful, and the very human playfulness of the Leader as he is beguiled by Nietzsche’s sister into having another macaroon?

  The Bicycle Rider

  1

  They could see through the grime of the barnloft windows, Anders and Kim, how far the field of sunflowers they’d walked across stretched down to where the sawgrass begins back of the beach, sunflowers higher than their heads, bitter green and dusty to smell. They could see yellow finches working the panniers, butterflies dipping and fluttering, the glitter and lilac blue of the sea where they’d been horsing around on the sand. They’d filed along the narrow path like Mohawks, Kim brown lean and naked except for the skimpy neat pouch, cinched by string around his hips and down the cleft of his butt, in which his sprouting peter and spongy scrotum made a snippy jut, Anders behind him, a head taller and with a livider tan, his bathing slip a pellucid Danish blue. Jellyfish bit me once, Kim said, his hair like maize silk flopping in a spin as he smiled over his shoulder, and did it ever sting but I didn’t cry, brave me, and once I cut my toe on a shell, and got sunburned once real pitiful. Glowed in the dark. They were pals in a Greek goatherd-and-shepherd poem, idyllisk. Boldly sneaky, Anders, but with Kim you didn’t sneak very far. His blue eyes saw all.

  2

  Macadam road through pines, early morning, a red fox slinking through grass bent with dew, rabbit into bramble. Happiness is a sensual tonality of being, Hugo Tvemunding, assistant classics master at NFS Grundtvig, wrote in his journal after his run. Le bonheur was the better word. Lyksalighed had northern sharpnesses of light and dark. Luck has nothing to do with happiness, which comes from rhythms, order, clarity. A card from Papa in the mail, and Der Eisbrecher. Greek torso, Apollo, third century. I do hope, dear Hugo, that you’re getting this hurt of the unfortunate young man you call the Bicycle Rider behind you. Hurts that cry out to Heaven do not go unheard. The hollyhocks are more beautiful than ever. Come see them, why don’t you?

  3

  Pastor Tvemunding, who was reading H. G. Wells’s The Passionate Friends in his garden time about with a detective Penguin by Michael Gilbert, after leafing through the Church Times, said to his cat Bobine Pellicule, Well, old girl, the letter from Hugo (yes, he’s coming to scritch you under the chin) with its question about an aorist in the gospel of Markus made you yawn, though you found the bit about latching onto a young lady of great interest, jo? We remember others, do we not? Do we not, indeed.

  4

  I didn’t think, Kim said, you’d even notice that I exist, much less make friends. The barn had a grand smell of oats cows chickenfeed old wood and time. They could hear only their steps up the steep ladder to the loft, the nattering of finches in the sunflowers, the white noise of wind and sea. Chinks of blue, Kim’s eyes, after he’d said that the yellow light paced along the smooth wide floor in rectangles was beautiful and that the silence was sweet and the barn snug and private. O jo! Anders said, cozy secret bright, stepping from window to window. Our place, all our own. Kim turned on a heel, stomped, and took off his cache-sexe, hanging it around his neck. His penis cantered out over a round and compact scrotum, its longish foreskin pursed at the tip. He scrunched his eyes, feeling naughty and in love. Anders, mouth dry, swallowing hard, shoved down his bathing slip, snapped it inside out, and hung it on a peg. Earlybird sharp, eyes rounding, Kim whistled to admire Anders’s lifting penis nudging its glans free. Ih du store! Skin yours back, Anders said. It’s a thumper for twelve. You think? Kim asked.

  5

  This golden flower of Peru, or sunflower, being of many sorts, both higher and lower, with one stalk, without branches, or with many branches, with a black or with a white seed, yet not differing in form of flowers or leaves one from another, but in size only, rises up at the first like a pompion with two leaves, and after two, or four, more leaves are come forth, it rises up into a tall stalk, bearing leaves at several distances on all sides, one above another to the very top, being sometimes seven, eight, or ten foot high with leaves which standing out from the stalk are very large, broad below and pointed at the end, round hard rough, of a sad green, and bending downwards: at the top of the stalk stands one great large and broad flower bowing down its head to the sun, and breaking forth from a great head made of scaly green leaves like a great single marigold having a border of many long yellow leaves, set about a great round yellow thrum in the middle, which are very like short heads of flowers, under every one of which is a seed larger than any seed of the thistles, yet somewhat like, and lesser and rounder than any gourd seed, set in so close and curious a manner that when the seed is taken out, the head with its hollow cells seems very like a honeycomb.

  6

  Rutger, he said, and Rutger he was. Anders invented for his bunched brown curls an adoring mommy, pederast of a barber, and Narcissus complex. We’re stuck with each other, Johannes Calvin having laid it on us in his pep talk that getting along with your roommate is character itself. You don’t look pukey. Rutger here, and you’re? Anders. He wore American jeans, perfect fit, an English plaid cotton shirt, rotten sneakers, germless white wool socks, a French undershirt with skinny straps, and a smidgin of briefs, Hom style micro, with the little triple-flame trademark on the left below the spandex waistband. Out of these he flopped an outsized dick. Lucky you, said Anders. It serves, said Rutger, and stays in tone by coming without let or cease, spurt spout splat. Scrounging in a canvas bag of silver scissors, combs, shampoo, nail clippers, dental floss, toothbrush, orange sticks, he located a green tube of Panalog from which he squeezed gunk that he smeared on his glans.
Vaginitis, he explained. From his girl Meg, the second time the sweet slut had given it to him. You’ve never caught it? An infection that itches like fire and parches the foreskin. He was going to get laid around four, and give it back to Meg, and she back to him. Crazy.

  7

  Nu vel, Anders said, we’d got into our sammenslynget when, with sandpipers nittering and pecking and the edge of the sea was sliding the plies of its border back and forth, and that’s all the universe was doing in our part of it, except that the sky was being bright summer blue over our heads, and I sweetened my gaze at you and wriggled my toes, you said, you little rascal, Keep looking at me like that and my peter will stand bolt upright and whimper, and I kept looking at you like that, and here’s your peter, herre Jemini! rose-petal pink, standing bolt upright. So why are you blushing? Robin eggs in gelatin, Kim’s balls to Anders’s feel. For answer Kim curled his fingers around Anders’s rigid haft, squeezing gently, tentatively. It’s beautiful, he said. So’s yours, Anders said. Do you come yet? I think so, Kim said. I’m not nearly as brave as I want you to think I am. Why do you like me? Because, Anders said, there’s a poem by Rimbaud that begins Aussitôt que I’idée du Déluge se fut rassise, un lièvre s’arrêta dans les sainfoins et les clochettes mouvantes, et dit sa prière à l’arc-en-ciel à trovers la toile de I’araignée. And the dove came back with an olive branch in its foot.

  8

  Here, said Mariana, I’ve brought you a rose. And I’ve brought you a weed, Franklin said. Thought it was a flower, but Sissy says it’s a weed. Girls are like that, Hugo said, hard to please and never satisfied. Hejsa! I’ll put them together in the one vase here, to show that I like them both.

  9

  Franklin standing under Hugo’s metre-square photograph of Emile-Antoine Bourdelle’s Héraklès archer (1910) in a thin silver frame was like all the children in the world in museums, their innocence and alert attention virginal before a Mondriaan, a broken Hera, a case of paleolithic axes, a Cubist harmony. A convincing Greek, Hugo said, the cunning of Odysseus, or of a mountain lion, in that muzzle. I think he looks like a possum, Franklin said. What’s he shooting? Monsters, said Hugo. All terrible things.