The Guy Davenport Reader Read online

  THE GUY DAVENPORT READER

  ALSO BY GUY DAVENPORT

  COMMENTARY

  THE INTELLIGENCE OF LOUIS AGASSIZ

  THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE IMAGINATION

  EVERY FORCE EVOLVES A FORM

  A BALTHUS NOTEBOOK

  CHARLES BURCHFIELD’S SEASONS

  CITIES ON HILLS: EZRA POUND'S CANTOS

  THE DRAWINGS OF PAUL CADMUS

  THE ILIAD: A STUDY GUIDE

  THE ODYSSEY: A STUDY GUIDE

  THE HUNTER GRACCHUS

  FICTION

  TATLIN!

  DA VINCI’S BICYCLE

  ECLOGUES

  APPLES AND PEARS

  THE JULES VERNE STEAM BALLOON

  THE DRUMMER OF THE ELEVENTH NORTH

  DEVONSHIRE FUSILIERS

  A TABLE OF GREEN FIELDS

  THE CARDIFF TEAM

  THE DEATH OF PICASSO

  TWELVE STORIES

  POETRY

  FLOWERS AND LEAVES

  THASOS AND OHIO

  TRANSLATIONS

  CARMINA ARCHILOCHI

  SAPPHO: SONGS AND FRAGMENTS

  HERAKLEITOS AND DIOGENES

  THE MIMES OF HERONDAS

  MAXIMS OF THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS

  THE LOGIA OF YESHUA (WITH BENJAMIN URRUTIA)

  SEVEN GREEKS

  The

  GUY DAVENPORT

  READER

  Edited and with an Afterword by Erik Reece

  COUNTERPOINT

  BERKELEY

  Copyright © Estate of Guy Davenport 2013

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Davenport, Guy.

  [Works. Selections]

  A Guy Davenport reader / Guy Davenport ; edited by Erik Reece.

  pagescm

  ISBN 978-1-61902-252-2

  I. Reece, Erik, editor of compilation. II. Title.

  PS3554.A86A6 2013

  818′.5409—dc23

  2013014418

  Cover design by Jeff Clark

  Interior design by VJBScribe

  COUNTERPOINT

  1919 Fifth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  We gratefully acknowledge the original publishers of the pieces herein: “The Aeroplanes at Brescia,” “Robot,” and “Herakleitos,” Tatlin!, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974; “The Richard Nixon Freischatz Rag,” The Hawaii Review, 1975; “A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg,” The Georgia Review, 1977; “The Death of Picasso,” The Kenyon Review, 1980; “Bronze Leaves and Red,” Trois Caprices, Pace Trust of Louisville, KY, 1981; “A Gingham Dress,” The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers, North Point Press, 1990; “Jonah,” Nadja Press, 1986; “Gunnar and Nikolai,” “And,” and “The Concord Sonata,” A Table of Green Fields, New Directions, 1993; “Belinda’s World Tour,” The Santa Monica Review, 1990; “August Blue,” Antaeus, 1990; “Boys Smell Like Oranges” and “Veranda Hung with Wisteria,” The Cardiff Team, New Directions, 1996; “The Geography of the Imagination,” The Geography of the Imagination, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1981; “The Symbol of the Archaic,” Perspective and The Georgia Review, 1974; “Finding,” Antteus, 1978; “Ralph Eugene Meatyard,” Aperture, 1974; “Hobbitry,” The New York Times, 1979; “The Hunter Gracchus,” The New Criterion, 1996; “On Reading,” Antaeus, 1987; “Spinoza’s Tulips”, Perspective; “A Letter to the Masterbuilder,” AIA: Journal of the American Institute of Architects, 1987; “What Are Revolutions?” The Hunter Gracchus, Counterpoint, Berkeley, 1996; “The Medusa,” A Geography of Poets, Bantam Books, New York, 1979; “The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard,” Poetry, 1967; translations of Archilochos and Sappho, Archilochos Sappho Alkman, University of California Press, 1980; translations from Anakreon, Conjunctions, 1984; translation of Herakleitos and Diogenes, Herakleitos and Diogenes, Grey Fox Press, San Francisco, 1979; translations of the first Duino Elegies, Apples and Pears, North Point Press, Berkeley, 1984; “Journal I,” Antaeus; “Journal II,” Taking Note: From Poets’ Notebooks/The Seneca Review.

  For Bonnie Jean Cox

  CONTENTS

  Editor’s Note

  STORIES

  Robot

  The Aeroplanes at Brescia

  The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag

  A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg

  The Death of Picasso

  Bronze Leaves and Red

  A Gingham Dress

  Jonah

  And

  Belinda’s World Tour

  Gunnar and Nikolai

  The Concord Sonata

  August Blue

  Boys Smell Like Oranges

  Veranda Hung with Wisteria

  ESSAYS

  The Geography of the Imagination

  The Symbol of the Archaic

  Finding

  Ralph Eugene Meatyard

  Hobbitry

  The Hunter Gracchus

  On Reading

  Spinoza’s Tulips

  A Letter to the Masterbuilder

  What Are Revolutions?

  POEMS

  The Medusa

  The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard

  POETRY IN TRANSLATION

  Sappho

  Anakreon

  Archilochos

  Duino Elegy I

  LOGIA IN TRANSLATION

  Herakleitos

  Diogenes

  JOURNALS

  Journal I

  Journal II

  Afterword: Remembering Guy Davenport

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  GUY DAVENPORT WAS, I WOULD ARGUE, THE FINEST PROSE STYLIST and most protean craftsman of his generation. He drew at once upon the most archaic and the most modern of influences to create lush experiments that often defy classification. And woven throughout that body of work is a radical and coherent philosophy of desire, design, and human happiness. Yet in some ways, Guy Davenport’s reputation preceded him at the expense of the work upon which that reputation was built. That is to say, Davenport’s writing was often thought to be so densely experimental and allusive, so disarmingly erudite that many readers never gave it, or themselves, a chance. And while Davenport could certainly be difficult — both in his work and in his life — he was much more than that. He was, for one thing, a wildly comic writer, and for another, a moving eulogist. He was a humanist and a moralist who believed that literature could encourage the best in a culture and stave off the worst.

  Guy Davenport published many collections of stories, essays, translations, and poetry, but never has his writing in all of these genres been brought together until now. That is one reason for The Guy Davenport Reader. Another reason is to make an argument for the extraordinary range and even, yes, the accessibility of this remarkable writer. A final reason is to keep Davenport’s name and his work in front of the reading public seven years after his death from lung cancer. To pass over the experiments and insights, the beauty and acumen that lay at the heart of Guy Davenport’s writing is to miss a great deal.

  Davenport’s translation of a Heraclitean fragment reads: “The most beautiful order of the world is still a random gathering of things insignificant in themselves.” He saw something of this ancient advice in cubist painting and collage, as well as in Ezra Pound’s insistence on “ideogrammic” composition, whereby disparate elements are held together by an integrated, unseen field of force. As
a result, Davenport’s own short stories were highly influenced by this modernist impulse to assemble elements that one would not otherwise think belong together. Those experiments are on display here (“The Concord Sonata,” “Gunnar and Nikolai”), but so are more traditional narratives, biblical updates, an epistolary story, and Davenport’s constant reworkings and reweavings of history.

  In his essays, Guy ranged from a rigorous scholar (“The Symbol of the Archaic,” “The Hunter Gracchus”) to a cultural critic (“A Letter to the Masterbuilder,” “What Are Revolutions?”) to an avuncular raconteur (“Finding,” “Ralph Eugene Meatyard”) and the ten essays presented here demonstrate the ease and eloquence with which he made those moves.

  Davenport had been reading Greek since his days at Oxford in the ’40s, and his translations are at once trustworthy and made familiar to modern ears through his own idiomatic lens (such as when he hears Sappho say, “You make me hot”). Davenport’s translation of Rilke’s “First Duino Elegy” is like no other in English, primarily because he filtered it first through the Dutch of his fictional philosopher Adrian von Hovendaal.

  I have tried to capture in this compendium the breadth of Davenport’s oeuvre by including stories and essays from his first collections, Tatlin! and The Geography of the Imagination respectively, and his last collections: The Cardiff Team and The Hunter Gracchus.

  Also gathered here are two poems — the irresistible “Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard” and a fine imitation of Marianne Moore, “The Medusa” — as well as selections from the handwritten journals he kept throughout his life.

  There is, of course, never any guarantee that what is best in a culture will survive. But thanks to the visionary American publisher Jack Shoemaker, The Guy Davenport Reader is one attempt to make it so.

  —Erik Reece, 2012

  STORIES

  Robot

  DOWN THERE THE OCHRE HORSE WITH BLACK MANE, BLACK FETLOCKS, black tail, was prancing as if to a fanfare of Charpentier, though it would have been the music of shinbone fife and a drum that tickled her ears across the tall grass and chestnut forests along the Vézère.

  Coencas, tousled haired, naked, and yawning, held Robot in his arms, dodging with lifted chin his wet nose and generous tongue. The campfire under its spit of forked sticks, its ashes ringed by rocks, looked abandoned in the woodslight at morning. The crickets had begun again, and a single nightingale trilled through their wild chirr on the slopes beyond the trees.

  The old priest was coming from Brive to look at the horses, the reindeer, and the red oxen. He knows more about them, Monsieur Laval had told them, than any man in Europe. More, d’ailleurs, than any man in the world.

  Ravidat was awake, propped on his elbows in his sleeping bag. In one of the pup tents Agnel and Estreguil lay curled like cats. A leaf stuck to Estreguil’s pink cheek. He had slept in a sweater, socks, and hat. Agnel’s knees were near his chin.

  Queroy and Marsal were asleep in the other tent under Ravidat’s canvas jacket.

  Since Thursday they had lived with the tarpans of the Dordogne in their eyes.

  — Friday the thirteenth, Coencas said. C’était par bonheur, la bonne chance.

  — We felt them on Thursday, Ravidat said, as when you know somebody’s in the house without seeing or hearing them. They knew we were there.

  — Scare me, Estreguil said, so I can scare Agnel.

  Ravidat stretched kneeling, his open blue shirt that had bunched around his shoulders in sleep tumbling down his arched back like a crumpled piece of the September sky above them. He stood, naked but for his shirt, fell forward into ten brisk push-ups while Robot barked in his face, then rolled onto his back and pedalled his long legs spattered with leafshadow in the sharp morning air.

  — Ravidat, Marsal said gloomily from his tent, is having a fit.

  — Show me, Estreguil said.

  — Et alors, mes troglodytes, Coencas hailed the tents, help me get a fire going.

  Estreguil crawled out in silly haste. Agnel rolled behind him. Robot studied them anxiously, looking for signs of a game.

  Ravidat had pointed on Thursday toward the slope across the Vézère.

  — He is over there! he called through cupped hands.

  The others were catching up. Coencas had whittled a staff and was whacking thistle and goldenrod with it. Marsal put two fingers in his mouth and whistled like a locomotive.

  Ravidat was watching the shaken sedge across the river where Robot nosed his way. He was seventeen, long of jaw, summer brown. His eyes were glossy black discs set in elm-leaf outlines of boyish lashes. His new canvas jacket smelled of pipeclay and gunpowder. His corduroy trousers were speckled with beggar’s lice and stick-tights. Over his shoulder he carried his uncle Hector’s old octagon-barreled breechloader.

  The Vézère was low, for the summer had been dry, and the reeds along its bank were thick with dragonflies and quivering gnats.

  Through a stand of scrub oak and plum bushes as yellow as butter the others filed toward him, Marsal with the other rabbit gun, Queroy with the sleeves of his sweater tied around his neck, Coencas in short blue pants, ribbed socks, a scab on one knee, brown cowlick over an eye, Estreguil sharp-nosed under a gray fedora, and little Agnel, who carried a frog.

  The hum of an airplane had stopped them.

  — Robot is over there on the slope, Ravidat said.

  — A Messerschmidt, Coencas said. The Heinkels are much shriller.

  — See my frog.

  — When your hands are all warts where he’s peed on you, Queroy said, we’ll see your frog.

  — The Stukas were so low we could hear them before we could see them, Coencas said. When a car stalled, or got hit, the people in the cars behind it would jump out and roll it in the ditch.

  — They wouldn’t roll my car in the ditch, Queroy said.

  — They would, if you got kicked in the balls, like one man I saw. There were fights all the time. But when the Stukas came over the road, going down it with their machineguns rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, everybody took to the fields, or woods if there were any. Afterwards, there were burning cars to get off the road.

  Agnel watched Coencas’s face with worried eyes.

  — They are over there, Coencas said, pointing northwest.

  Queroy spread his arms like a Stuka and ran in circles.

  — Queroy is a Nazi, Estreguil said.

  Estreguil was all dirty gold and inexplicably strange to look at. His hair was the brown of syrup, with eddies of rust spiralling in and out of the whorls of bright brass. His eyes were honey, his face apricot and wild pale rose over the cheeks. He had been to Paris, however, and had seen real Germans on the streets, had heard them pound on their drums. Coencas had only seen the bombers. Agnel didn’t know what he had seen.

  — You might have to live forever in Montignac, Marsal said. The Germans may never let you go back home.

  — I’m glad, Queroy said.

  — Merde alors, Ravidat said. Then he shouted across the river:

  — Bouge pas, Robot!

  — He’s going up onto the hectares of the Rochefoucauld, Marsal said.

  — We can cross down at the meadow ford, Ravidat said, leading the way. Marsal and Coencas joined him, and the three little boys came in a cluster behind, Agnel’s frog puffing its throat and swimming with a free hind leg. Estreguil’s large gray fedora was a gift from Madame Marsal, Jacques’s mother.

  Robot had met them halfway up the slope, splashing his tail from side to side. His feet were still too big and he still fell when he wheeled. He squeaked when he barked and he squatted to pee, like his mother, which he did with a laugh, lolling tongue, and idiot eyes. He had never in his life seen a rabbit.

  He thrashed his tail while Ravidat tickled him behind the ears.

  — Find us a rabbit, old boy, Ravidat said. Find us a rabbit.

  Robot let out his tongue in an ecstasy and rolled his tail.

  — When the Nazi tanks turn, Coencas was explainin
g, they don’t do it like an auto. It comes, bram! bram! bram! to a corner. If it’s turning right, the right tread stops, clunk! and the left keeps the same speed, spinning it right around.

  He swung his left leg out.

  — And when it’s facing the street it’s turning into, the right tread starts again. Sparks fly out of the cobbles. Keen.

  Queroy turned like a tank, spraying leaves.

  — Are the rabbits just anywhere around here? Estreguil asked. Are they hiding?

  They entered the oak forest at the top of the hill. The silence inside made them aware of the cricket whirr in the fields they had left, and the cheep of finches in the tall September grass. They could no longer hear the drone of the airplane. Caterpillars had tented over the oleanders.

  The hills of the Dordogne are worn down to easy slopes, and outcroppings with limestone facings slice across the barrows of the hills.

  — C’est bien ajusté le slip Kangourou? Coencas slapped Ravidat on the behind.

  — Va à ravir, Ravidat laughed. Et marche aussi comme un coq en pâte.

  — Capiteux, non?

  Ravidat leaned his gun carefully against an alder, unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned his fly, lowered his trousers, and raised his shirt tail. He was wearing a pair of Coencas’s underpants cut like swimming briefs, trim, succinct, and minimal.

  — They’re the new style from Paris, Ravidat explained. They are called Kangourous.

  — Because you jump in them! Agnel squealed.

  — Because your queue sticks out of the pouch when you want it, Estreguil said. Idiot!

  — Has your peter got bigger still? Queroy asked. His was as yet a little boy’s, his testicles no bigger than a fig.

  Marsal, like Coencas, was old enough to have his aureole of amber hair, but Ravidat was already a man, full bushed in black.

  — Let us see, Queroy said.

  They looked at the rose heft of its glans with professional curiosity, the twin testicles plump and tight, Marsal and Queroy with envy, Coencas more complacently, though he felt his mouth going dry. Ravidat admired himself with animal pride.