Apples and Pears

by Guy Davenport

  Briefkaart from Paris, Bombois’ Le Forain. Geliefd Adriaan! We’re dossing down with Danes and Finns at a student camp in Vincennes but seeing everything in Paris, Sander saying he needs to see a bunch of things before the final big effort on the show. Blériot’s Antoinette: a kite by Mondriaan. A hug, and another from Sander. Grietje.

  Hinault’s knee had come to pieces somewhere in the south and Zoetemelk, the papers said, was sure to win. He had come in second for three years previous, and had once pedaled all day with a fever so high the doctors when they got to him wondered how he could be alive. He had shot under the Merlin Plage banner the day before, as I’d seen on TV at the hotel, with his hands clasped victoriously over his head and with a smile that belongs to athletes alone, happy innocent triumph. Winded, bone-tired, gasping, yet he smiled in a glory of well-being. He looks like Vermeer.

  The Renaissance, Picasso said to Jaime Sabartes, invented the size of noses. Since then, he added, reality has gone to the devil. Bovendien, no sculpture has surpassed the primitive. He asked Sabartès if he’d seen the caverns, seen the precision of the lines? The Assyrians had kept something of that purity, that clarity of expression. And Sabartès’ dutiful ¿por qué? To which Picasso’s to think you stop. And having stopped, to reflect, we lost the faculty to see what’s before our eyes.

  Had renewed the amenity of a Parisian breakfast that summer on the terras of the Brasserie Balzac, with Le Figaro and the mail from Amsterdam. Keirinckx had written that I must see the Horace Vernet at the Beaux Arts and that he and Margareta might run down for a few days. And there was that hopeloos geval of a scribble from Sander, on graph paper. Achtenswaardig Adriaan! By doing what you said, memorizing everything, I’m getting through like the bright boy you say I am beneath the squalor and you’re right it grows on you that way even English and Latin, treat all information like the multiplication table until it’s weightlessly portable and recoverable as if by instinct. I’ll bet the cabin is fine on an afternoon like this, yellow leaves on the canals here already, and mist in the trees. I look at things I know you like to look at, paths weeds spadgers flowers in windows treetops doors. Look, there’s something to tell you that I don’t know I should yet but if not now, when? You’ve met Zuster that one time we went out for sandwiches you remember, trim built girl with long hair down to her butt who you said might be my twin (she says by the way that you only play at being the fatsoenlijk man, that she can see the mischief of a willing spirit in your eyes, she’s spooky that way). I’m onto moths, splendid creatures, what names they have, The Intermediate Cucullia, and all silvery sooty flecked with mica dotted and zigzagged over and with World War I airplane shapes, even Zuster, about whom much under your hat, likes them, The Nappy Pinion, The Hitched Mimestra, each almost like another but so wonderfully subtly different, The Lost Sallow, The Brown Woodling, not as you and Dokter Tomas know, that poor man with his bijzonder rattle about sex, the first time, but the first time with all our wits about us, in, to speak with awful inaccuracy, cold blood, and is it ever wonderful, The Heterodox Wainscot, The Wanton Pinion, something to do with narrow corduroy trousers bought in England, with the 10 cm zipper, put on barefoot, keurig nauwsluitend, The Variable Dart, my big peepee tilts the fly of those corduroys and ridges out across the thigh to the public’s universal satisfaction, and mine, even Dokter Tomas would take notice, my continuous tan from the island, and beetje French underpants, or perhaps just my wickedly charming self. Anyway, friend Adriaan, there we are. Revolting, isn’t it? Betovering is her word, that with all her giving it slick and deep to Jan Piet and Klaas she’s always from a kleuter on, finger wiggly in her panties, been fascinated by groot broeder and his exciting ways, imagined natch as being quadruple the nasty reality, and even by groot broeder as reformed redeemed turned inside out right way around and renovated by your philosophical handiwork which you say was but that summer and sun and sea and having by main force to exist with a man who reads six books at once and looks up hard English words in a Greek dictionary and made me realize for the first time that I’m a human being with a life all my own to shape for myself or have it shaped for me against my will. I mean to tell you how it started, to deprave you, and even, to deprave you further, wish I were on Snegren Island right now, darting free and brown like my moths, The Wandering Dryobota, The Smudged Sallow, not only for your friendship and talk, but because if you’re doing something you absolutely ontegenzeglijk volstrekt must quit ja? neen? it helps not to be in the same room with it all. I really am studying, the Seychelles coconuts, ginger and cloves, last uninhabited island, spiced air you can smell at sea miles away. And drawing, not only the moths but real pictures, of Zuster and the cat downstairs and the furniture. I’m going to start drawing at the zoo. If I can do the wolf, the handsomest fellow in the whole world, I may throw up everything and be a starving artist, mad about lines and color, thumping Zuster into an early grave (as she says) with unbelievable pleasure morning afternoon and night. Kop op, kerel! A ferocious tight hug, Sander. Forwarded from old Duit’s Ships Stores and PK on the Point. God in hemel.

  14 MESSIDOR

  Coffee on Sander’s rock, in his denim jacket with stinkdier armscyes against the chill and his slip micro, with explicit musk in the pod, for the fun of it. Terns preening beyond rainbows in sea spray. Waves bobble in a swiveling bounce before they flood against the rocks to shatter and foam.

  Falanx Samuel Butler, Groep Vliegers Tulpveld, Wervelwind Ned Ludd. Hordes on zebras, Bandes on Shetland ponies. Panisks the one, Vestals the other. The Hordes ride naked except for blue neckerchiefs the chromatic complement of their yellow pennant, the same mushroomcap haircuts for both sexes. The Vestals in white tunics and cloth Mongol boots have long hair embroidered sweatband bound. The series flows from rambunctious to shy, from impatience to placidity, with the attractions distributed thus: forward scouts practiced in kissing, wiggly embraces, grubby foreplay through a half dozen precocious and whiffety orgasms as yet vagrom enough to surge from nape to coccyx in boys, from nipples to clitoris in girls, or chime from scalp to toes and fingers in both. A wingtip of Spartan aversion to gender contrasts, but ardent in allelophily, paired anterotically in precipitately masculine or early feminine couples chaste by fits and starts. A wing of private souls jealous of their independence, ticklish, preoccupied, sexually lively, endogenously. At the center of the chord, varying wildly from day to day, we can place those hordlings whose plasticity shifts them from wing to wingtip to forward scout, so that a sergeant from the Grand Hordes in charge of their mascot attachments will have Nora in the forward scouts on the chart of harmonies for Monday, having seen her joined to Orlando kiss and finger in the quagga fodder, and in the forward wingtip on Tuesday, she and Olga having been observed wrapped around each other in bed, and on Wednesday listed in the forward wing of meditative selflovers passed out with pleasure. Beyond the pivot is the little Bande, two thirds tomboy vestals and one third boys comfortable in their company. The wing commander is a corporal of the Flower and Grammar Police who, when having to consult with her counterpart in the Hordes, never looks below his handsome dusty neck, frequently alluding to decency and civility. She and her Little Bears always precede the Hordes on treks and patrol, taking precedence over all other traffic except the Roitelet’s and Reinine’s courier. All ensigns must dip at their passing. The wingtip of the Bands are paired into close friends who together make fudge, visit the elderly, compile lists of wildflowers, write poetry, and give their ponies literary names. The rear guard consists of sweethearts who blush to hold hands, stammer, worship their Corporal in the Vestals but dare not speak to her and discuss endlessly what she said to them after she has said it and gone away. They are relieved to be at the farthest possible remove from the Hordes in an encampment or the barracks, and suffer from being just before them on patrol. Their only security is knowing that for a Hordesman to josh or rag the rear guard of the Bandes the punishment is to ride in the Band wingtip for a week.

  Empedokles feeling kin
to the world: I have already been a bush and a bird, a boy and a girl, a mute fish in the sea. And when animals, they became lions with lairs in the mountains, sleeping on the ground, and when trees, laurels. He mentions laurels again: abstain from Apollo’s leaves, from laurel.

  Catalogue for Sander’s show to be written, the essay that comes to the two contemporary problems of Fourierist harmonics, back-breeding of the machine to cooperative civility, Eros in rompers. What in the world does Fourier mean by bee? Social progress is always in spite of culture, which tolerates change, whether improvement or deterioration, with bad grace.

  New map of the islands and channels from the Maritime Survey. Flute aslant against it, duck feather paperclipped onto the edge, and the photo of Sander without a stitch standing on the big rock gingerbread brown against a sea as blue as Henri Rousseau would have painted it.

  Balthus’ Passage du Commerce St.-Andre is an alley that runs from the Place de l’Odéon to the rue St.-Andre des Arts. His painting looks into the Passage from the rue d’Ancienne Comédie. The dwellings left and right in the painting are now a Watlings pub and a former restaurant undergoing repairs. Balthus’ background building (Marat’s newspaper office in its day) is just as he has painted it, except that its windows are boarded up. The golden key is still there, and the lettering: 8 LITHOGRAPHIE TYPOGRAPHIE REGISTRES. I remember the alley well from after the war, and may have rubbed elbows with Balthus himself all unknowing. His masterpiece, surely, not only for the tone of Parisian street life but for its touching so much in the French imagination: it is Balzac, Simenon, Maupassant. His figures are Picasso’s saltimbanques reseen through a Rilkean sensibility. And it says nothing, and is as voiceless as all great painting is voiceless. The automobiles parked in the alley, illegally, seemed a desecration, for the site is still very much the painting, uneaten by time.

  Simenon. Went to the rue Mouffetard, the setting of his Le Petit Saint. The market, the shops, the quiet banter of the people. As with Balthus, the artist has caught the full drench of reality. Walked up and down the narrow street twice, looking, taking it in. A house where Verlaine lived. Because Simenon saw such humanity here, such love and genius, I needed somehow to come touch it, with my eyes. I’ll never distrust him again, if ever I have. Imagination is a seeing of the real. I savor the street while remembering the Amsterdam evening when I read it, cozy in a room with rain plashing against the windows, a blanket over my knees, imagining a composite, essential Parisian street. Here the mother pushed her barrow. Here lay the cabbages, the red fish, the striped melons of the paintings. For years I have admired Balthus’ painting of the Passage du Commerce without realizing that I knew the site of it well, but in another context, from another subset of Parisian memories. I think I may well have been on the rue Mouffetard, years ago: I remember the court, with trees, but it was by night and I was young, and Simenon had not written his novel about it.

  Graffiti. Mort à la Chah. Mort à Kominy. La chasse c’est la guerre permise aux tristes cons en temps de la paix.

  A walk in the Pare Monceau: Proust could still be filmed here. Joop Zoetemelk was still ahead. Tried discussing this with a bartender, who gave a great French shrug, and said that he could not possibly win. Wrote Sander, to let him know I was in Paris and not on Snegren. And bought Montherlant’s Essais. He and I share an oogvermaak. Epicureans, both, both of different descents from the master. His garden was La Bagatelle, soccer fields, the running track, mine a hermit’s island in the North Sea, a lecture room in Amsterdam, my apartment. His love of energy was the duke of the manor’s for the hale infantryman. The modern world was a sustained insult to him, except for those who had not become a part of it, the young. Unnourishing fare, one’s heart. How he would have liked the Olympics now on TV from Moscow. Poor old man: the pistol to his blind face.

  English lobster boats, a Swedish freighter. A morning walk after coffee by the fire, a landowner’s beating the bounds, Thoreau sifting the familiar to repossess it, Robinson Crusoe patroling his canebrake paths and desert beaches. In Sander’s lenient sweater with its human smell and his ballfondling jeans, voor de zinnelijkheid, des te erger. A letter from him, saved back from the batch I brought from the point for after my walk and putting the cabin shipshape. In pencil on a Hermes Herenmodes paper bag: Boezemvriend Adriaan but why bosom not chest or ritssluiting kameraad? Anyway, a hug and a kiss. You are going to bleat and wring your hands when you see the bill for the big canvases I’ve been recklessly charging to your account but there we are, if I’m to have museums and Exxon Nederland N.V. executives fighting for my pictures, eh? In one of the Fourier pieces I want you riding a bear in a flock of geese, Hansje on a quagga. How bold dare I be? If I do Grietje and me making zigzig (Gerhard’s beautiful photographs to work from, wait till you see, they’ll punch you in the zonnevlecht), will a big circle moon and plants from Mattioli and posterish wide shouldered, slim-waisted apples and girl-shouldered, big-hipped pears all suspended on a white ground according to the Moldulor be context enough to hold our handsome Sander (eyes scrunched closed with pleasure) 23 cm deep into Grietje arching her back and coming with a yell? She had squeezed off up to a dozen by hand before poor Gerhard arrived and was about to melt down when I took over and chimed and tongued along a couple more before shoving in, so the whole time I was humping her she was throbbing from one goosy orgasm to another, our Grietje’s talented that way, God zij gedankt, sucking my breath out, in between fits, and squealing when the scrunching touched the quick. Gerhard was stuttering and trembling at the end, grossed out and having second thoughts about skinny boys who jack off to electronic Bach. Grietje handed around hot chocolate which he slopped on his shirt, she in our Laplander sweater that comes to her pretty knees, but I left my pants off, as Gerhard is as you say Corintisch, with my thumper’s collar back around its neck, to make him spill more chocolate. And you, helaas! get a bill for all this. What fun. Will send prints: how long are you on the island shunning us? There’s one where I’m in past her bellybutton, her butt lifted by the push, nose crinkled, hair over my eyes, this for a lithograph, as the definition is fine. Max says I must draw and draw: he’s going to say not enough no matter how much. Says I don’t have my own eyes yet. My own hand, yes, though he says that’s a quirk of nature. But that I see naäperwijs. I’ll show him! A bear hug, Sander.

  15 MESSIDOR

  Time unbounded and limited time, says Epicurus, are equally pleasurable, if we take their measure with a sane mind. This is da Vinci’s an intense life is a long one. And Wittgenstein’s fullness of engagement in which time is of no matter. The elasticity is in the imagination, in attention, not in physical time. The mind must act as a second nature, continuous with but not necessarily subsequent to the first. Our cultivated nature is our wild nature disciplined and clearer, a transparency achieved in an opacity, keenness in a stupidity, flight in a wingless creature.

  At the Jardin d’Acclimatation (which Rosa Bonheur helped plan) where I like to see the barnyard animals and cats, there’s now a skateboarders’ concourse of sweeping and looping inclines, the English word SKATE painted on it in bold blue industrial sign lettering. A boy there taking off his jeans with the greatest insouciance, in the public path, to don short blue pants, which he had in the pocket of his jeans, and knee pads. And further on, poking his finger at the golden Hamburg rooster, a little boy in ratty dirty corduroy britches that just covered his pert behind. He was with his family, but stood, as it were, French-fashion, in his own independence. Simenon would have seen him with one set of eyes, Montherlant with another. I saw him on his quagga, galloping with the Horde.

  Alexander Floris (which is not, by the way, his name) is a painter who has given no interviews and has made no details of his life available to the press. He is nineteen and Dutch. His nude self-portrait in this show is the only image we have of him, a handsome young man of athletic build, with the trim body of a swimmer. He has painted himself sitting on a gymnasium locker room bench, his shed clothes beside him in a s
till life of folded jeans, soccer jersey, and modish French underpants, Danish running shoes and white socks in another still life beside his feet.

  The style in which all the paintings in this show are executed has been described by Max Keirinckx, whose student Floris has been for some two years, as that of a curvilinear Mondriaan who paints figures. We can improve upon that perception by observing that Floris has Mondriaan’s precision of space and line but has transposed Mondriaan’s Cartesian Jansenism into an Ionian idiom. The style derives from Hokusai and Hiroshige insofar as it restricts itself to black outline filled with flat color. We can recognize as well Keirinckx among the influences, particularly his brilliant experiments in the decade before 1960 with accurate contours and monochromatic areas of color. Keirinckx at this time was himself accommodating certain popular styles (that of Georges Barbier, of the posters of William Nicholson, the pretty archaizing of Carl Larsson) that kept leading him back, as they have led Alexander Floris, to the Greek vase painters and ultimately to Lascaux and Font de Gaume, where drawing and writing are as yet unseparated, thousands of years before highlights and shadow were allowed into the grammar of imagery. Keirinckx said of his sparely outlined and boldly colored figures that they are silhouettes with more information inside the contours. For Floris every object is first of all a shape in the visual field, and he takes it out with the vigor of the Lascaux painters, for whom a horse or cow or rhinoceros was a word to be spelled correctly and inscribed on the cave wall with the existential obviousness of the word help written in snow by stranded survivors of an airplane crash in the Alps.