The Death of Picasso

by Guy Davenport

  As Auden noted, as if in Kafka is treated as is. To bring is to bear on Kafka’s as if will only annihilate them both.

  FIFTY CHILDREN IN TWO ROWS

  We cannot read “The Hunter Gracchus” without being reminded of all the refugee ships loaded to the gunwales with Jews trying to escape the even more packed cattle cars to Auschwitz, turned away from harbor after harbor.

  One of the arrangers of some of these ships was Ada Sereni, an Italian Jewish noblewoman whose family can be traced back to Rome in the first century. In September of 1947 she was involved in secret flights of Jewish children from Italy to Palestine. A twin-engine plane flown by two Americans was to land at night outside Salerno. Ada Sereni and the twenty-year-old Motti Fein (later to command the Israeli Air force in the Six-Day War) were waiting with fifty children to be taken to a kibbutz. As the plane approached, the fifty were placed in two rows of twenty-five each, holding candles as landing lights in a Sicilian meadow. The operation took only a few minutes and was successful. The children were in orange groves the next morning. “An der Stubentür klopfte er an, gleichzeitig nahm er den Zylinderhut in seine schwarzbehandschuhte Rechte. Gleich wurde geöffnet, wohl fünfzig kleine Knaben bildeten ein Spaller in langen Flurgang und verbeugten sich.” (He knocked at the door, meanwhile removing his top hat with his black-gloved right hand. As soon as it was opened, fifty little boys stood in formation along the hallway and bowed.)

  The SS wore black gloves.

  DEATH SHIPS

  Kafka does not decode. He is not referring us to Wagner’s Flying Dutchman or the myth of the Wandering Jew, or to the pharaonic death ships that had harbors built for them in the empty desert, or to the treasure ships in which Viking lords were laid in all their finery, or to the Polynesian death ships that glided from island to island collecting the dead, or to American Indian canoe burials, or to Coleridge’s Ancient mariner, or to any of the ghost ships of legend and folktale. There is a ghostly hunter in the Black Forest. Kafka’s ability to write “The Hunter Gracchus” is evidence of what Broch meant when he said that Kafka is the inventor of a new mythology.

  SIND SIE TOT?

  At Auschwitz it was difficult to tell the living from the dead.

  RAVEN AND BLACKBIRD

  Poe’s mind was round, fat, and white; Kafka’s cubical, lean, and transparent.

  RIVA

  When Max Brod and Kafka visited Riva in September of 1909 it was an Austrian town where eight thousand Italians lived. It sits on the northwest end of Lake Garda. Baedeker’s Northern Italy for 1909 calls it “charming” and says that “the water is generally azure blue.”

  AION

  Time in Kafka is dream time, Zenonian and interminable. The bridegroom will never get to his wedding in the country, the charges against Joseph K. will never be known, the death ship of the Hunter Gracchus will never find its bearings.

  CIRCADIAN RHYTHM

  The opening of “The Hunter Gracchus” is a picture of urban infinity. There is always another throw of the dice. Another newspaper is being printed while today’s is being read; a jug of water must soon be refilled; the fruit seller is engaged in “the eternal exchange of money and goods” (Heraclitus on the shore shaping the sea, the sea shaping the shore); the men in the café will be there again tomorrow; the sleeping patron is in one cycle of his circadian rhythm. Play, reading, housekeeping, business, rest: it is against these ordinary peaceful things that Kafka puts the long duration of Gracchus’s thousand years of wandering, a cosmic infinity.

  A KIND OF PARADOX

  Reality is the most effective mask of reality. Our fondest wish, attained, ceases to be our fondest wish. Success is the greatest of disappointments. The spirit is most alive when it is lost. Anxiety was Kafka’s composure, as despair was Kierkegaard’s happiness. Kafka said impatience is our greatest fault. The man at the gate of the Law waited there all of his life.

  THE HUNTER

  Nimrod is the biblical archetype, “a mighty hunter before the “Lord” (Genesis 10:9), but the Targum, as Milton knew, records the tradition that he hunted men (“sinful hunting of the sons of men”) as well as animals. Kafka was a vegetarian.

  MOTION

  Gracchus explains to the mayor of Riva that he is always in motion, despite his lying as still as a corpse. On the great stair “infinitely wide and spacious” that leads to “the other world” he clambers up and down, sideways to the left, sideways to the right, “always in motion.” He says that he is a hunter turned into a butterfly. There is a gate (presumably heaven) toward which he flutters, but when he gets near he wakes to find himself back on his bier in the cabin of his ship, “still stranded forlornly in some earthly sea or other.” The motion is in his mind (his psyche, Greek for “butterfly” as well as for “soul”). These imaginings (or dreams) are a mockery of his former nimbleness as a hunter. The butterfly is one of the most dramatic of metamorphic creatures, its transformations seemingly more divergent than any other. A caterpillar does not die; it becomes a wholly different being.

  Gracchus when he tripped and fell in the Black Forest was glad to die; he sang joyfully his first night on the death ship. “I slipped into my winding sheet like a girl into her marriage dress. I lay and waited. Then came the mishap.”

  The mistake that caused Gracchus’s long wandering happened after his death. Behind every enigma in Kafka there is another.

  “The Hunter Gracchus” can be placed among Kafka’s parables. Are we, the living, already dead? How are we to know if we are on course or lost? We talk about loss of life in accidents and war as if we possessed life rather than life us. Is it that we are never wholly alive, if life is an engagement with the world as far as our talents go? Or does Kafka mean that we can exist but not be?

  It is worthwhile, for perspective’s sake, to keep the lively Kafka in mind, the delightful friend and traveling companion, the witty ironist, his fascinations with the Yiddish folk theater, with a wide scope of reading, his overlapping and giddy love affairs. He undoubtedly was “as lonely as Franz Kafka” (a remark made, surely, with a wicked smile).

  And some genius of a critic will one day show us how comic a writer Kafka is, how a sense of the ridiculous very kin to that of Sterne and Beckett informs all of his work. Like Kierkegaard, he saw the absurdity of life as the most meaningful clue to its elusive vitality. His humor authenticates his seriousness. “Only Maimonides may say there is no God; he’s entitled.”

  * For nicceismo in Böcklin and de Chirico, see Alberto Savinio’s “Arnold Böcklin” in Operatic Lives (1942, translated by John Shepley, 1988) and de Chirico’s Memoirs (1962, translated by Margaret Crosland, 1971). Savinio is de Chirico’s brother.

  EVERY FORCE EVOLVES A FORM

  “Jesus said: Split a stick. I will be inside.”

  —The Gospel of Thomas [77]

  “Split the Lark, and you’ll find the Music,

  Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled.”

  —Emily Dickinson

  1835

  A robin entered a Westmorland cottage in which a child lay ill with a fever and an old woman, senile, sat by the fire. The robin was greeted as a daimon, an elemental spirit, whose presence was understood to be a good omen. Of this event Wordsworth, who was sixty-four, made a poem, “The Redbreast.”

  1845

  A raven entered the room of a man in grief and drove him to madness by replying “Nevermore” to all questions put to it, as the man, aware that the bird was in effect an automaton, a bird capable of vocal mimicry but with a vocabulary of one word only, persisted in treating the raven as if it were supernatural and capable of answering questions about the fate of the soul after death.

  1855

  An osprey, swooping and crying with a “barbaric yawp” (both words referring to sound, speech that is not Greek and seems to be bar bar over and over, yawp, a word as old as English poetry itself for the strident or hoarse call of a bird) seemed to Walt Whitman to be a daimon upbraiding him for his “gab and loitering.” Whit
man replied (at the end of the first section of Leaves of Grass, in later editions the fifty-second and closing part of “Song of Myself”) that he was indeed very like the osprey, “not a bit tamed,” sounding his “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” And like the hawk he speaks with the authority of nature. We must make of his message what we will. “If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”

  You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

  But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

  And filter and fibre your blood.

  Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

  Missing me one place search another,

  I stop somewhere waiting for you.

  Thereafter in Leaves of Grass birds are understood to be daimons. Poe’s man in grief was sure that the raven was a prophet, but whether “bird or devil” “Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore”) he did not know. Whitman was remembering this line when in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” he asked if the mocking-bird, the daimon of that poem, be “Demon or bird.”

  1877

  In the fields around St. Beuno’s College in North Wales a thirty-three-year-old Jesuit named Gerard Manley Hopkins observed a kestrel, or windhover, riding the air. Remembering the hawk that fixed a lyric vision in Walt Whitman’s heart (Whitman’s mind, he wrote later, was “like my own”), he took the moment to be a revelation of Whitman’s spirit “somewhere waiting for you.” That his prophetic words would stir the heart of an English poet to see Christ as a raptor of souls would have pleased Whitman. We can also assume that he would have admired the younger poet’s obvious rivalry in the art of fitting words to images and rhythms to emotions. Minion is Whitmanesque. “Dapple dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding/ Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding/ High there” bests Whitman’s “The spotted hawk swoops by,” the “last scud of day hold[ing] back” for it. Whitman’s osprey is seen with the last of the day’s sun on it, its height enabling it to be still sunlit while Whitman at ground level is in the “shadow’d wilds” of dusk. Hopkin’s windhover is seen catching the first of the sun before dawn has reached the Welsh fields beneath it.

  ROBIN

  The robin in Wordsworth is a herald of inspiration after a fallow time, of recovery from an illness, and of heaven itself. In Book VII of The Prelude, a renewal of poetic power is announced by

  A choir of red-breasts gathered somewhere near

  My threshold,—minstrels from the distant woods

  Sent in on Winter’s service, to announce,

  With preparation artful and benign,

  That the rough lord had left the surly North.…

  The robin in “The Redbreast” has similarly come into the cottage by the oncoming of winter.

  Driven in by Autumn’s sharpening air

  From half-stripped woods and pastures bare,

  Brisk Robin seeks a kindlier home.…

  Note Robin: a proper name. Birds assigned names, as well as animals, constitute a series which Lévi-Strauss discusses in The Savage Mind, in a chapter titled “The Individual as Species.” In French the fox is Reynard, the swan Godard, the sparrow Pierrot, and so on. Erithacus rubecula is already Robin Redbreast in Middle English, by which time it was established throughout Europe as one of the Little Birds of Christ’s Passion (with much folklore about how its breast was reddened by Christ’s blood, hell fire, and the like). It is obvious that Wordsworth hears its name as if it were analogous to Harold Bluetooth, rather than to Jack Daw, Jim Crow, or John Dory. Hence its ruddy breast is “a natural shield/ Charged with a blazon on the field.” This alignment with chivalric insignia is important, as Wordsworth is articulating a tradition whereby the robin can be thoroughly of the matter of Britain: it has an elf in it (Chaucer, Jonson); it is a kind of Red Cross Knight; it is equally Christian and pagan (Spenser), while being principally the bird daimon that we can trace to European prehistory, and which became the chief symbol of poetic inspiration for the Romantics (Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Poe, Whitman).

  PARROT OWL RAVEN

  Poe’s imagery resolves into three styles, each constituting a dialect with its own grammar and poetic purpose. His own names for these styles were the Arabesque, the Grotesque, and the Classic. In the early stages of planning “The Raven” he considered a parrot and an owl. A parrot would have required that the poem’s dominant style be Arabesque; an owl, Classic. As it is, he managed to have the parrot’s echoic mimicry implicit in the repetition of nevermore (which is not an echo, unless the bird is trying to say “Night’s Plutonian shore”); and the owl was translated into its divine equivalent, the bust of Pallas on which the raven perches.

  ONE CALVINIST CROW

  Poe’s raven is an automaton, a machine programmed to say a single word. If a man, half mad with grief, takes it for an oracle and asks it questions, he can see his error or he can persist in projecting onto the raven his desperate hope that he has the use of an oracle. Thus the raven, asked its name, answers, “Nevermore.” The grief-stricken man observes bitterly and hysterically that not even his loneliness will be alleviated by the bird named Nevermore, for it, too, like his friends and hopes, will abandon him “on the morrow.” To this the raven replies “Nevermore.” It is here that the man realizes that the raven’s vocabulary consists of one word. Madness, however, has its own logic. The bird, for instance, may have been sent by God to help him forget his grief, and if sent by God, may therefore have theological wisdom. So he asks it if there is balm in Gilead. Meaning? “Will I be comforted in my loss by faith? Will I be united with Lenore in Heaven? Is there a Heaven? Is there life after death? Is Lenore with God? Does God exist? The question is Jeremiah’s, at 8:22, “Is there no balm in Gilead?” Jeremiah was asking, by way of rhetorical flourish, if Newcastle has no coal. Poe transformed the meaning to: is there really a Newcastle, and is there coal there? To which Nevermore replies, “Nevermore.” The next question is blunter: will he ever be reunited with Lenore? “Nevermore.” The speaker orders the raven out of his house, and the raven refuses ever to leave. And never is also when the speaker’s soul will be disentangled from the raven’s shadow; his despair is permanent.

  Poe had met the situation before. In Richmond he had seen Maelzel’s machine that played chess, and saw through it (guessing, rightly, that it had a man concealed in it). In both the chess-playing machine and the univerbal raven Poe was looking at Presbyterian theology: all is predestined, or some human intermediary wants us to believe that it is. Worse, we are disposed by our helplessness in grief, despair, or bewilderment to cooperate with the idea of mechanized fate. After reason has acted, we can still find a residue of superstition. There is a part of our reason willing to believe that automata have minds. In that dark space Poe wrote. The ape in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is an automaton, as Roderick Usher is a zombie when he buries his sister alive. Calvin and Newton both gave us a machine for a world, a gear-work of inevitabilities.

  DARWINIAN MOCKING-BIRD

  Whitman’s reply to “The Raven” is “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” Again, an oracle is questioned. The answer (from bird and the sound of the sea together) is polyphonic, love and death together. Life and death are a Heraclitean rhythm, independent. Whitman returns to the Greek sense that love is deepest in its tragic awareness of the brevity of life, of youth, of beauty.

  TIME

  Time for Poe was the monotonous tick of the universe, the unstoppable tread of death, coming closer second by second (like walls closing in, the swing of a pendulum, the sealing up of a wall brick by brick, footsteps evenly mounting a stair). Whitman’s time was tidal, migratory, the arousal and satisfaction of desire. Hopkins knew that time was over at the moment it began, that it had no dimensions, that Christ on the cross cancelled all adverbs. There is no soon, no never. There is only the swoop of the hawk, the eyes that say follow me to the fisherman, the giddy ecstasy of I stop somewhere waiting for you.

  11 MAY
1888: WHITMAN IN CAMDEN, TALKING

  “Do I like Poe? At the start, for many years, not: but three or four years ago I got to reading him again, reading and liking, until at last—yes, now—I feel almost convinced that he is a star of considerable magnitude, if not a sun, in the literary firmament. Poe was morbid, shadowy, lugubrious—he seemed to suggest dark nights, horrors, spectralities—I could not originally stomach him at all. But today I see more of him than that—much more. If that was all there was to him he would have died long ago. I was a young man of about thirty, living in New York, when The Raven appeared—created its stir: everybody was excited about it—every reading body: somehow it did not enthuse me.” [Whitman had given “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” its final revision (it was written in 1859) the year before, and placed it at the heart of the new “Sea-Drift” section of the 1881 Leaves of Grass.]

  QUICK, SAID THE BIRD, FIND THEM, FIND THEM

  The history of birds taken to be daimons traverses religions, folklore, and literature, In Europe it begins with the drawing of a bird mounted on pole in Lascaux. In the New World we can trace it back to the Amerindian understanding of the meadowlark as a mediator between men and spirits of the air. Poe’s raven, Keats’ nightingale, Shelley’s skylark, Olson’s kingfisher, Whitman’s osprey, thrush, and mocking-bird, Hopkins’ windhover are but modulations in a long tradition, a dance of forms to a perennial spiritual force.

  BOYS SMELL LIKE ORANGES

  On a fine autumn afternoon in 1938 two elderly men met at the Porte Maillot, as was their habit, to walk together in the Bois de Boulogne, Professor Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who was eighty and strolled with an easy dignity, his hands behind his back except to accompany a remark with rounded gestures, and Pastor Maurice Leenhardt, missionary and ethnographer, who was sixty, tall and white-haired, his usual long stride curbed to match the amble of his slower friend.