The Guy Davenport Reader

by Guy Davenport

  The candle is lit: hope. Sealing wax: for letters to Theo. Matches, pipe, wine.

  The letter is from Theo. It is addressed Poste Restante because Theo knew that Vincent had been turned out of his house. The postman, whose portrait Vincent had done, would know where he was. That is the postman’s mark, the numeral 67 in a broken circle. The R in an octagon means that it is a registered letter: it contained a fifty-franc note.

  There are two postage stamps on the letter, one green, one blue. The green one is a twenty-centime stamp of the kind issued between 1877 and 1900. The numeral 20 is in red. The only other French stamp with which Vincent’s block of color might be identified is a straw-colored twenty-five centime one with the numeral 25 in yellow. Since the other stamp on the letter, however, is definitely the fifteen-centime of the same issue and is the only other blue stamp in use at the time, the post office in Paris would have affixed a forty-centime stamp to the letter rather than a fifteen and a twenty-five. There was no thirty-five centime denomination.

  So unless the bureau had run short of the forty-centime denomination and unless petty exactitude is a new thing in French post offices, the stamps are the blue fifteen centimes, and green twenty-centime issues current at the time.

  The design on both, which Vincent made no attempt to indicate, was an ornate one: numeral in an upright tablet before a globe to the left on which stood an allegorical female figure with bay in her hair and bearing an olive branch. To the right, Mercurius in winged hat and sandals, and with the caduceus.

  A harmony in gold and green.

  15 GERMINAL

  The Vincent Onions is the center of a triptych I think I have discovered. Vincent’s chair, with pipe, is the right-hand piece, Gauguin’s empty chair, the left-hand.

  Sun burned through the fog quite early, and we rowed around the island in a wide loop, Sander stark naked. I had better sense: he was splotched with strawberry stains under the remnant of last year’s tan, goose bumps all over. He stuck it out, though, rowing with a will. In a blanket before a fire the rest of the morning.

  16 GERMINAL

  Warmer, and with an earlier lifting of fog. Even so, Sander turned out in jeans and sweater, sneezing. Vrijdagheid als kameraadschap maar dubbelzinnig genoeg: men moet een gegeven knaap niet in het hart zien. Caesar and Pompey look very much alike, especially Pompey. Sint Hieronymus with lion, breath like bee balm. Grocery lists, supplies. Reading Simenon: the perfect page for the fireside. Maigret is comfortable in a constant discomfort, wrapped in his coat, cosseted by food and his pipe.

  In the post that old Hans had for us: Manfredo’s Progetto e Utopia, with a note to say it will for the most play into my hands but has vulnerabilities (he means Marxist rhetoric) that I will go for with, as he says, my Dutch housekeeping mind. And Michel’s Cosmologie de Giordano Bruno. Sander remarks that Italian looks like Latin respelled by an English tourist. Letters from Petrus and Sylvie, wondrous dull. Clerical humor, but it’s worth knowing that Bergson went around calling the American pragmatist William Jones.

  17 GERMINAL

  Schubert’s second quartet on the radio, fine against the mewing of gulls and the somber wash of the sea. A Soviet trawler in the channel.

  Worked all day, off and on, at the iconographica. Neumann on Greek gesture, Marcel Jousse, Birdwhistell. Painter feels the body of the sitter as he works, two mimeses. Open hand in David, beauty of legs in Goya. Watch contours and see what else they bound other than the image we see: thus Freud found the scavenger bird. Philosophical rigor of moralists: Goya, Daumier, van Gogh. It has taken a century for drama to catch up with the painters. A line through Molière, Callot, Jarry, Ionesco. Themes refine, become subtle and articulate from age to age: children who will become artists brood in window seats on art they absorb into the deep grain of their sensibilities: Mr. Punch and Pinocchio in the lap of Klee become metaphysical puppets in a series of caprichos to Mozart rather than the Spanish guitar.

  Sander maps the island with compass and sighting sticks, reinventing geography and surveying.

  18 GERMINAL

  We hear on the radio that Picasso is dead. He was ninety-two.

  19 GERMINAL

  Sander in Padvinder boondoggle and Bike skridtbind rings the island double time. At the outcrop on the promontory he must scuttle up and spring down. The rest of his circumference is shore, shale, pebble, sand, his pace lyric and sweet. Ah! he gasps at the end of it, down on elbows and knees, panting like a dog. Ah is an undictionaried word implying joy, rich fatigue, accomplishment, fulfillment. How many such words are missing from the lexicon: the gasp after quenched thirst, the moo at finding food good, bleats and drones of sexual delirium, clucks, smacks, whistles, mungencies, whoops, burbles.

  I ask why the boondoggle, out of waggish curiosity. I get a gape and stare and something like a bark. Patches of the young mind remain animal and inarticulate, not to be inspected by sophistication, such as a grave study of toes, heroic stretches on waking, the choice of clothes, the pleased mischief, lips pursed, eyebrows raised, of padding about in the torn and laundry-battered blue shirt only, tumescens lascive mentula praeputio demiretracto.

  Een herinnering: Bruno at Sounion. August. Columns of the Poseidonos Tempel sublime and Ciceronian, purest blue the sky, indigo charged with lilac the sea, a brightness over all, light as clean as rain, every texture, stone, cicada, thorn, shards, pebbles, exact and clear. Vile Germans leaving as we arrived, laughing over some rudeness to a family of kind Americans. Two ironic French adolescents, boy and girl, playing at being amused by their own boredom. They shambled away. Another batch arriving, we could see, at the awful restaurant down the hill, adjusting cameras and sunglasses for the climb. Bruno set the reading on our camera and handed it to me. Pulled his jersey, then, over his head, schadelijk, bent and unlaced his sneakers, peeled off his socks, stepped out of his jeans, doffed his briefs, unbuckled his wristwatch. There are tourists coming, I said. One, he said, arms folded and legs spread. Two: at easy attention by a pillar. Three: sitting, elbows on knees, a frank and engaging look into the lens. Om godswil! I cried. O antiek wellustigheid. he sang back. Four: profile, hands against a column. Er vlug mee zijn! Golden smile, glans roused and uncupped, left hand toying with pubic clump, right fist on hip. People, Japanese and British, Toyota executives and bottlers of marmalade, rounded the corner of the temple. Bruno into jeans as an eel under a rock, into shirt, buttoning up cool as you please as the first foreign eyes found him. Into socks and sneakers as they passed. British lady stared at his briefs lying on brown stone in brilliant light, their crop dented, convex, feral, male. Reached them over, slapped them against his thigh, and stuffed them in his pocket. And what in the name of God was all that? Grieks, he said.

  20 GERMINAL

  His 75 years of meditation on a still life: this is like a sonnet cycle, the progression of Montaigne’s essays, Rembrandt’s and Van Gogh’s self-portraits. A natural rhythm, as all the variations of fish and leaf make a coherent harmony. A fish is a leaf.

  Wine, bread, table: his Catholic childhood. Perhaps his Catholic life. Lute, guitar, mandolin: the Spanish ear, which abides life as a terrible dream made tolerable by music.

  Spain and Holland. Felipe’s expulsion of farmers and bankers, whom he saw with fanatic eyes as Muslims and Jews, shifted the counting houses to Holland. Spain dreamed on in its pageant of men dressed in black and women in shawls, surrounded by agonies they kept as symbols to validate, as ritual, the cruelty they claimed as their piety: the lynching of ecstatics, heretics, and humanists, the slaughtering of bulls, the sending of navies and armies against all other cultures of the Mediterranean.

  Silver to the east, pepper to the west, silver and pepper, wool and cloves, gold and wheat, cannon and Titians. And on this theme the old man ended, with a vision of sworded gallants idiotic in the cruelty of their pride, women as a separate species, available by property deeds, a blade through a gut, a trunk of coins, a point of honor precluding reason or forgiveness.

&
nbsp; His study of Velazquez parallels the researches of Braudel; his intuition of a deeper past rivals the century’s classical studies, the prehistorians, the anthropologists.

  21 GERMINAL

  Een herinnering: Paris 1947. A glimpse, a mere passing sight of Picasso inside the Deux Magots, before a bottle of Perrier at a table, his hair combed across his bald head in a last desperate coiffure, already grey. But there he was. Bruno has seen Max Ernst walking his poodle on the Avenue Foch.

  Sander begins a notebook of our island’s natural history, climbs trees to include our neighbor islands in his map, exercises like an acrobat. How smoothly he is beginning to forget I dare not guess.

  22 GERMINAL

  We row over for newspapers and mail, a cold and blustery voyage, and wet. Water and wind are a havoc of power. We are colonists who can make an excursion back to Europe, shopping list in hand.

  A blind old Minotaur pulls his household goods along in a cart, washpot, skillet, quilts, mangle, bust of Lillie Langtry, framed lithograph of Napoleon, rotary eggbeater, bread board, Raspail’s Home Medical Practitioner, a felt hat from Milan, a map of Corsica, a sack of roasted chicory, the key to a barn, tongs, a reading lamp mounted on a porcelain parrot, bulbs of garlic, a tobacco tin containing fishhooks, brass centimes from the Occupation, buttons, a bullet, a feather from the tail of an owl.

  Sander says he discovers that shopping can be fun, and I try to penetrate his meaning. Is it that the ordinary becomes known only as the unusual? It is the convenient we are giving up, what he agreed to, with diffidence, when I offered him the stint on the island.

  23 GERMINAL

  O well, says Sander, O well. He organizes himself at various times of day by turning in circles, batting the air with his hands. An inventory of energies. He glances at the pages of this journal, briefly, as if to register that writing is a thing I do, like reading, walking. I keep thinking that he is a median between Bruno and Itard’s Victor, between urban sophistication and benign savagery. He has a penchant for botany and zoology. That is, those subjects caught his fancy. Spells badly. Found all the sociological courses meaningless and history is still so much hash.

  24 GERMINAL

  Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, De l’Education d’un homme sauvage, ou des premiers developpemens physiques et moraux du jeune sauvage de l’Aveyron, Vendémiaire an X.

  The pathos is one all teachers feel, all parents. Repeated now by the American psychologists training chimpanzees to sign with deaf-and-dumb hand language. Itard’s Victor had had his attention fixed by his own strategies for survival in a forest. So are all attentions fixed. His skills were animal and they were successful. Eat, scutter to safety, hide from enemies, sleep, forage. He was unfamiliar with fire, with warmth, and loved in Paris to roll naked in the snow.

  De Gaulle remarked, from under that nose, that we raise our own Vandals. What is the grief I feel when I admit the truth of that? I also deny it.

  25 GERMINAL

  The feeling again yesterday afternoon that the hour belonged to a previous, perhaps future, time, but was decidedly not now. I was looking out of the window, at afternoon light on bushes, in an elation of melancholy, savoring one truth and another without fear or anxiety, at peace with myself. Then this deliciously strange feeling that time is nothing, or is my friend rather than my enemy.

  Time, like the sea, is layered into nekton, plankton, and benthos.

  Long deep rhythms like the turning of the planets and the drift of the stars, the decay of matter, the old-turtle creep of continents around the globe. Evolution. Over which lie the adagio rhythms of history, the play of fire over burning sticks.

  Picasso at the last was gazing at the immediate pressures of Renaissance Spain on the France of Georges Pompidou: moth flicker of individual sensibilities around a flame of money, cherished proprieties, romance, a dreaming life with no notion of what it is to be awake, the sleep of reason. He felt the tension between the Netherlands and Madrid, north and south, prudence and passion. Titian and Rembrandt, and yet his heart was with those foragers who suffered the violence of making sense of these extremes, Van Gogh and Rimbaud, Rousseau le Douanier.

  His genius was satisfied with two forms only: still life and tableau. He stepped over the moment of Cézanne, Manet, Courbet like a giant negligently striding over a garden whose order and brilliance were none of his concern. All of his tenderness is like a Minotaur gazing at a cow. There was sweetness in the regard, submerged in a primal animality. He was like a grandee from the Spanish courts trying to behave himself among people with polished manners, books, philosophy, graciousness. He played their game, assumed French liberalism, pledged brotherhood with Marxist babblers, commanded charm enough to make friends with civilized people like Gertrude Stein and Cocteau, Apollinaire and Braque. Barcelona stood him in good stead.

  26 GERMINAL

  Roads, paths, and rivers in XIXth Century painting. And windows. Corridors was their theme, and corridors for the eye. Picasso sidestepped this brilliant understanding of the world, and returned to the theatrical, the Spanish room that is not properly a room but a cell, a dark place. The Spanish have no love for or understanding of roads. They are perilous in Quijote, bandit-ridden in Spanish history. Suspicious stay-at-homes, the Spanish. A public place is still vulgar, one’s dignity can be exposed to the affront of a stare. A morbid pride, which Goya saw as insanity.

  How lovely Paris must have seemed to the young Picasso, with its guileless Max Jacob, laughing Apollinaire, rich Americans who were affable, friendly, and intelligent: Miss Stein, Miss Toklas, the sisters Cone, John Quinn, people who knew nothing of the dark anguish of the Spanish mind.

  Sander making a list, with characteristics, of our birds. We cannot identify the half of them.

  Hò siokómos skaphiókouros orchîdionon monózonos.

  Corelli sarabandes, good talk by the fire, the wind in a huffle after sunset making a humpenscrump of the waves and trees.

  27 GERMINAL

  De dageraad met rooskleurige vingeren. Coffee, journal in a seat on the rocks, warm enough for shorts and visnet jersey. Fine iodine kelpy green smell of the sea. No fog at all, a sharp sight of all the islands around us. Yachts. The life! crowed Sander naked.

  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 a companionship, as Griaule learned from the Dogon.

  Teacher as student, an inside-out idea. Useful where applicable.

  Art is bad when it is poor in news, dull, and has no rich uncle to boast of. Culture abhors a plenum and has its finest moments hunting on a lean day.

  Philosophy is the husband of art: the civility they beget is not a hostage to fortune but our fortune itself.

  Nature has no destiny for us: our boat is upon her ocean and in her winds, but she has expended as much ingenuity designing the flea as she has expended on us, and is perfectly indifferent to Hooke’s conversation at Garroway’s Coffee House. We, however, perish the instant we take our eyes off nature.

  28 GERMINAL

  One of the things Hooke said at Garroway’s was that he suspected insects of being the husbands of flowers. Fourier was capable of believing that as fact.

  Schets: Quaggas at noon under mimosa green and gold, graceful and grey like mules by Gaudier-Brzeska, with boughts of silver silk, stripeless zebras, gazelles with heft.

  Does Fourier’s uncluttered imagination belong to philosophy or art? I see him surviving in the verve and color of Roger de la Fresnaye, Delaunay, Lurçat. Was he a philosopher at all? Braque is the better epistemologist.

  Something of a serious talk with Sander. I tell him that he can go back to Amsterdam anytime he wants, but to Dokter Tomas. The terms and happenstance of the custody, which is entirely informal and fortuitous.

  I suggest that we are on a voyage, the island our ship, that we are Crusoe and Friday, tw
o characters out of Rousseau living civilizedly as savages.

  29 GERMINAL

  We learn on the radio that Picasso was painting a picture when he died.

  Water and land. When they found the first dinosaur track in America, a three-toed footprint in old red sandstone, the predikant (top hat, frock coat, buttoned leggings) said it was the voetspoor of Noah’s raven. Grey troubled waters everywhere, and the raven’s cry the only sound over their tumult.

  A red cry. And next the dove, olive sprig, and ground. The rivers went back to their beds, the sky to its blue, a rainbow spanning the shining mud. Out onto which ventured goose and gander, hen and cock, quagga, mastodon, dik-dik, ostrich, tarpan, opossum, elk, baboon.

  Sander notes that already we have our schapewei around the island, our movements preferring a path. I have not mentioned routine except to insist that beds be made, dishes and cookware washed, the lime turned and renewed in the outhouse, clothes hung up, and so on. Surprised that he likes sweeping a floor.

  30 GERMINAL

  Vreemheid en tovermiddel! A shore of gulls, quarreling and milling in a clutter of white. Quark! they squawk in Joyce, giving physicists a name for a hypothetical particle that has the hypothetical quality charm. Clustered and clinging to the nucleus of an atom, they congregate as hadrons, or if paired with an antiquark, a kaon, which is perhaps a charmed meson, or disintegration of light into matter, a process in which some quarks display strangeness, some display charm, with so ready an affinity that kaons and mesons exchange the one quality for the other as a firefly flicks off and on. It is thought that strange quarks prefer to couple with charmed quarks, electric bees quick for the rich of the nectar.

  Tributes to Picasso on the radio: Malraux, Pompidou, Miró, Chagall, some functionary of the Spanish government in exile. He was not, it turns out, painting when he died. He had dined as usual, with Jacqueline and some friends, excused himself to go to his studio, painted a last canvas, presumably one of the courtcard cavaliers or duennas, and went to bed. He died in his sleep. Eighty-five years of drawing, painting, sculpting!