The Guy Davenport Reader Read online

  — I don’t know, Kafka said. I don’t know.

  The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag

  ON THE GREAT TEN THOUSAND LI WALL, BEGUN IN THE WARS OF THE Spring and Autumn to keep the Mongols who had been camping nearer and nearer the Yan border from riding in hordes on their przhevalskis into the cobbled streets and ginger gardens of the Middle Flower Kingdom, Richard Nixon said:

  — I think you would have to conclude that this is a great wall.

  Invited by Marshal Yeh Chien-ying to inspect a guard tower on the ramparts, he said:

  — We will not climb to the top today.

  In the limousine returning to the Forbidden City, he said:

  — It is worth coming sixteen thousand miles to see the Wall.

  Of the tombs of the Ming emperors, he said:

  — It is worth coming to see these, too.

  — Chairman Mao says, Marshal Yeh ventured, that the past is past.

  The translator had trouble with the sentiment, which lost its pungency in English.

  — All over? Richard Nixon asked.

  — We have poem, Marshal Yeh said, which I recite.

  West wind keen,

  Up steep sky

  Wild geese cry

  For dawn moon.

  For cold dawn

  White with frost,

  When horse neigh,

  Bugle call.

  Boast not now

  This hard pass

  Was like iron

  Underfoot.

  At the top

  We see hills

  And beyond

  The red sun.

  Richard Nixon leaned with attention, grinning, to hear the translation from the interpreter, Comrade Tang Wen-Sheng, whose English had been learned in Brooklyn, where she spent her childhood.

  — That’s got to be a good poem, Richard Nixon said.

  — Poem by Chairman Mao, Comrade Tang offered.

  — He wrote that? Richard Nixon asked. Made it up?

  — At hard pass over Mountain Lu, Marshal Yeh said. Long March. February 1935.

  — My! But that’s interesting, Richard Nixon said. Really, really interesting.

  The limousine slid past high slanting grey walls of The Forbidden City on which posters as large as tennis courts bore writing Richard Nixon could not read. They proclaimed, poster after poster by which the long limousine moved, Make trouble, fail. Again make trouble, again fail. Imperialist reactionary make trouble and fail until own destruction. Thought of Chairman Mao.

  The limousine stopped at The Dragon Palace. Richard Nixon got out. Guards of the Heroic People’s Volunteer Army stood at attention. On a wall inside the courtyard four tall posters caught the eye of Richard Nixon.

  — That’s Marx, he said, pointing.

  — Marx, repeated Marshal Yeh.

  — And that’s Engels.

  — Engels.

  — And that’s Lenin and that’s Stalin.

  — Precisely, Marshal Yeh replied.

  Richard Nixon went back to the second poster, pointing to it with his gloved hand.

  — That’s Engels?

  — Engels, Marshal Yeh said with a worried, excessively polite look in his eyes.

  — We don’t see many pictures of Engels in America, Richard Nixon explained.

  That man old Toscanelli put up to sailing to the Japans and Cathay westward out from Portugal, the Genovese Colombo, they have been saying around the Uffizi, has come back across the Atlantic. Una pròva elegantissima! Benedetto Arithmetic would say. The Aristotelians will be scandalized, di quale se fanno beffa. The Platonists will fluff their skirts and freeze the air with their lifted noses. È una stella il mundo! But like the moon, forsooth, round as a melon, plump and green. O, he could see those caravelle butting salt and savage waves, the awful desert of water and desolation of the eye, until the unimaginable shorebirds of Cipongo wheeled around their sails and the red tiles and bamboo pèrgole of Mongol cities came into focus on capes and promontories. Inland, there were roads out to Samarkand, India, Persia, Hungary, Helvetia, and thus back to Tuscany.

  He had completed the world journey of the Magi, it occurred to Leonardo as he moved the bucket of grasses which Salai had brought him from Fiesole. They had come from the East, astrologers, and Colombo’s sails in these days of signs wherein every moving thing must declare itself for God or Islam would have worn the cross which the philosophers of the Medes did not wait to learn would be forever until the end of time the hieroglyph of the baby before whom they laid their gifts in the dark stable. The world was knit by prophecy, by light.

  Meadow grass from Fiesole, icosahedra, cogs, gears, plaster, maps, lutes, brushes, an adze, magic squares, pigments, a Roman head Brunelleschi and Donatello brought him from their excavations, the skeleton of a bird: how beautifully the Tuscan light gave him his things again every morning, even if the kite had been in his sleep.

  Moments, hour, days. Had man done anything at all?

  The old woman had brought the wine and the bread, the onions. He and Toscanelli, Pythagoreans, ate no meat.

  The machine stood against the worktable, the due rote, unaccountably outrageous in design. Saccapane the smith was making the chain that would span the two rote dentate. You turned the pedals with your feet, which turned the big cog wheel, which pulled the chain forward, cog by cog, causing the smaller wheel to turn the hind rota, thereby propelling the whole machine forward. As long as the machine was in motion, the rider would balance beautifully. The forward motion stole away any tendency to fall right or left, as the flow of a river discouraged a boat from wandering.

  If only he knew the languages! He could name his machines as Archimède would have named them, in the ancient words. He called his flying machine the bird, l’uccello. Benedetto said that the Greeks would have called it an ornitottero, the wings of a bird.

  Light with extravagance and precision, mirror of itself atomo per atomo from its dash against the abruptness of matter to the jelly of the eye, swarmed from high windows onto the two-wheeled balancing machine. The rider would grasp horns set on the fork in which the front wheel was fixed and thus guide himself with nervous and accurate meticulousness. Suddenly he saw the Sforze going into battle on it, a phalanx of these due rote bearing lancers at full tilt. Avanti O Coraggiosi, O! the trumpet called, tambureggiandi le bacchette delli tamburi di battaglia.

  The scamp Salai was up and about.

  — Maestro! he piped. You’ve made it!

  Leonardo picked up the brown boy Salai, shouldered him like a sack of flour, and danced the long gliding steps of a sarabande.

  — Si, Cupidello mio, tutto senonchè manca la catena.

  — And then I can make it go, ride it like a pony?

  — Like the wind, like Ezekiel’s angel, like the horses of Ancona.

  Salai squirmed free and knelt before the strange machine, touching the pedals, the wicker spokes, the saddle, the toothed wheels around which the chain would fit, i vinci.

  — Como leone!

  He turned to the basked of flowering grasses, reaching for his silver pencil. Bracts and umbrels fine as a spider’s legs! And in the thin green veins ran hairs of water, and down the hairs of water ran light, down into the dark, into the root. Light from the farthest stars flowed through these long leaves. He had seen the prints of leaves from the time of the flood in mountain rocks, and had seen there shells from the sea.

  — Maestro, Salai said, when will the chain be ready?

  — Chain? Leonardo asked. What chain?

  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, and when a May fly lights on a green arc of grass the splendor of that conjunction is no less than San Gabriele touching down upon the great Dome at Byzantium, closing the crushed silver and spun glass of his four wings around the golden shaft of his height.

  — The chain, Salai said, the chain!

  Did man know anything at all?
/>   Before flying to China Richard Nixon ordered a thousand targets in Laos and Cambodia bombed by squadrons of B-52s. He sent a hundred and twenty-five squadrons of bombers to silence the long-range field guns of North Viet Nam along the border of the DMZ. Richard Nixon was pleased with the bombing, knowing that Chairman Mao would be impressed by such power. Dr. Kissinger had recommended the one thousand, one hundred and twenty-five squadrons of bombers to Richard Nixon as something that would impress Chairman Mao. The bombs were falling thick as hail in a summer storm when Richard Nixon set foot on China, grinning. A band played The March of the Volunteers. Premier Chou En-lai did not walk forward. Richard Nixon had to walk to where Premier Chou stood grinning. They shook hands.

  — We came by way of Guam, Richard Nixon said. It is better that way.

  — You have a good trip? Premier Chou asked.

  — You should know, Richard Nixon said. You are such a traveler.

  Richard Nixon rode in a limousine to Taio Yu Tai, outside The Forbidden City. As soon as he got to his room, the telephone rang.

  — Who would be calling me in China? he asked.

  Dr. Kissinger answered the telephone.

  — Yes? he said.

  — Excellency Kissinger? a voice asked. You are there?

  — We are here, Dr. Kissinger said.

  — His Excellency the President Nixon is there?

  — Right here, said Dr. Kissinger, taking off his shoes.

  — Would His Excellency Nixon come to telephone?

  — Sure, said Dr. Kissinger. For you, Dick.

  Richard Nixon took the telephone, put it to his ear, and looked at the ceiling, where scarlet dragons swam through clouds of pearl.

  — Nixon here, he said.

  — Excellency President Nixon there?

  — Right here, Richard Nixon said. To who have I the honor of addressing?

  — Now you speak with Comrade Secretary Wang.

  A new voice came on the line. It said:

  — Chairman Mao invite you, now, come to visit him.

  — Right now? Richard Nixon asked. We’ve just got off the plane. We came by way of Guam.

  — Now, said the telephone. You come visit. Yes?

  — OK, Richard Nixon said. Will do. You coming to pick us up?

  The line had gone dead.

  — Son of a bitch, Richard Nixon said.

  Dr. Kissinger rocked on his heels and grinned from ear to ear.

  Roses, buttons, thimbles, lace. The grass grows up to the stones, the road. There are flowers in the grass and flowers on her dress. And buttons down her dress, and lace on the collar and cuffs and hem. And buttons on her shoes. In the Luxembourg she wears a shawl from Segovia and Pablo says she looks like a Spanish woman of the old school, when women were severe and well bred and kind, and I say that she looks like an officer in the Union Army. We sing The Trail of the Lonesome Pine which she plays on the piano, throwing in snatches of Marching through Georgia and Alexander’s Ragtime Band. She has Pumpelly’s nose, the hands of a Spanish saint.

  In France she wears a yellow hat, in Italy a Panama. Alice, I say, Assisi, the grass of Assisi, and the leaves Sassetta. We walk comfortably over the stones, hearing the bells ring for the nuns and the girls in their school. It is so quiet, she says, being herself quiet to say that it is quiet. Spain is a still life, I say, only Italy is landscape. The birds there, she says. St. Francis, I say. The birds suffer their suffering each in a lifetime, forgetting it as they endure. We remember suffering from years and years ago. Do not talk of old things, she says. There is no time anymore, only now. Not, say I, if you can hear as I can the bugles and see the scarlet flags.

  And I could, I can, I always can. The officers sit in their saddles and the guidons with their Victorian numbers and faded reds move to the head of the column. It is an old way with men, it happened at Austerlitz and Sevastopol. The generals are high on their horses, listening to the band, to the shouts of the sergeants. It is glory. When Leo moved out, we trotted around the room like horses, and Basket went around with us. I was the general and Alice was the officer and Basket was the horse, and altogether we were Napoleon. We were pickaninnies cakewalking before the elders on a Saturday in Alabama, we were Barnum and Bailey and the Great Rat of Sumatra going a progress to Chantilly to see the lace and the cream.

  It is quiet, she says, and I say Alice, look at the flowers. Yes, she says. Yes, I say. Is it not grand to say yes back and forth when we mean something else and she went behind the bush and loosened her stays and camisole and shamelessly stepped out of the frilly heap they made around her buttoned shoes and I said yes, here where St. Francis walked, Alice, you do realize, don’t you, that the reason we came to Assisi is that you are from San Francisco and this is the hometown of St. Francis and she says I am wrapping my underthings in my shawl, do you think anyone will notice?

  Red tile, moss, pigeons. We drink wine under the trees, though it is too hot to drink wine. Well, I say, we are here. Yes, she says, we are here, and her eyes jiggle and her smile is that of a handsome officer who has been called to headquarters and seen General Grant and is pleased to please, well bred that he is.

  This is not Fouquet’s, I say. Certainly not Fouquet’s, she says. I touch her foot with my foot, she touches my foot with her foot. The crickets sing around us, fine as Stravinsky. If Spain is a still life, what is Italy? They came here, I said, the grand old poets, because the women have such eyes. Surely not to see the cats, Alice says. No, I say, not for the cats. Henry James came here for the tone. William might come here and never see the tone. William if he came would take in the proportions, and would not look at the cats. A princess and a cart go by, Henry sees the princess and William sees the wheel of the cart how it is in such fine proportions to the tongue and the body.

  When you talk, she says, I shiver all over, things flutter around inside. When you smile, I say, I bite into peaches and Casals plays Corelli and my soul is a finch in cherries. Let us talk and smile forever. This is forever, Alice says. It is so quiet. Look at the dust, I say. Would you walk in it barefoot? Another glass of wine, she says, and I will fly over the bell tower. Did you have a rosewood piano in San Francisco? I ask. With a bust of Liszt on it, she says, and a vase of marigolds.

  Look at these colors and you can see why Sassetta was Sassetta. Will we go to England again, she says, to sit in the cathedrals? Look at these hills and you will know why St. Francis was St. Francis.

  The roses, she says, are very old. They are the roses of Ovid, I say. They are the only roses that are red. If I knew the Latin for red I would say it, if the Latin for rose, I would say it, the Latin for the only red in the oldest rose, I would say it. Were I Ovid, I would give you a rose and say that it is given for your eyes. I would take it, she says. I am glad you would, I say, touching her foot with my foot. Sassetta’s rose, Pablo’s rose.

  Madame Matisse is a gentian, she says, touching my foot with her foot. Are all women flowers, all girls? Henri Rousseau was married to a sunflower, Cézanne to a pear tree.

  Alice, I say. Yes, General Grant, she says. Pickaninny, I say. Augustus Caesar, she says. Do you see those pines over there, the ones that look like William McKinley addressing the Republican Party? 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. But the pines, Alice, the pines. I see them, she says, they have had a hard life. Do you, I say, see the bronze fall of needles beneath them, and know the perfume of rosin and dust and old earth we would smell if we climbed there? The flutter has begun, she says. And now look at the rocks, the cubist rocks, down the hills from the pines, and the red tile of the roofs, and the chickens in the yard there, the baskets. 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.

  Mao sat in his red armchair looking benign and amused. Richard Nixon sank too far into his chair, his elbows as high as his ears. He beamed. He did not
see the stacks of journals, the shelves packed with books, the bundles of folders, the writing brushes in jars. He beamed at Mao and at Dr. Kissinger, whom Mao had called a modern Metternich. The reporters had written that down.

  The cluttered room was dark. What light there was came from tall windows which gave onto a courtyard as bleak as the playground of a grammar school. The translator said that Chairman Mao had asked about hegemony.

  — We’re for it, Richard Nixon said.

  — Your aides are very young, Chairman Mao said.

  — Are they? Richard Nixon asked.

  — We must learn from you on that point, Chairman Mao said. Our government is all of old men.

  Richard Nixon did not know what to say.

  — Old, Chairman Mao said, but here, still here.

  — The world is watching us, Richard Nixon said.

  — You mean Taiwan, Chairman Mao said.

  — No, Richard Nixon said, beaming, the world out there, the whole world. They are watching their TV sets.

  Chairman Mao grinned and leaned back in his comfortable armchair.

  — Ah so, he said, the world.

  A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg

  FOR A MAN WHO HAD SEEN A CANDLE SERENELY BURNING INSIDE a beaker filled with water, a fine spawn of bubbles streaming upward from its flame, who had been present in Zürich when Lenin with closed eyes and his thumbs hooked in the armholes of his waistcoat listened to the baritone Gusev singing on his knees Darg-omyzhsky’s In Church We Were Not Wed, who had conversed one melancholy afternoon with Manet’s Olympia speaking from a cheap print I’d thumbtacked to the wall between a depraved adolescent girl by Egon Schiele and an oval mezzotint of Novalis, and who, as I had, Robert Walser of Biel in the canton of Bern, seen Professor William James talk so long with his necktie in his soup that it functioned as a wick to soak his collar red and caused a woman at the next table to press her knuckles into her cheeks and scream, a voyage in a hot-air balloon at the mercy of the winds from the lignite-rich hills of Saxony Anhalt to the desolate sands of the Baltic could precipitate no new shiver from my paraphenomenal and kithless epistemology except the vastation of brooding on the sweep of inconcinnity displayed below me like a map and perhaps acrophobia.