The Death of Picasso

by Guy Davenport

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

  THE CHAIR

  The Rebbe from Belz is taking his evening walk at Marienbad. Behind him, at a respectful distance, walks a courtier carrying a chair by its hind legs. This is for the Rebbe to sit on, should he want to sit.

  The square seat of this upraised chair, its oval back upholstered with a sturdy cloth embroidered in a rich design of flowers and leaves, its carved, chastely bowed legs, and the tasteful scrollwork of its walnut frame, give it a French air. Like all furniture out of context it seems distressed in its displacement. It belongs in the company of capacious Russian teacups and deep saucers, string quartets by Schumann, polite conversations, and books with gilt leather bindings.

  One of the Rebbe’s disciples, a lanky young man with long sidelocks beautifully curled and oiled, hastens from the Hotel National. He has a bottle cradled in his arms. He is taking it to a mineral spring to have it filled. The Rebbe wants soda water. He hums as he walks, this disciple, the lively tune Uforatzto, a happy march that expresses his joy in being sent for a bottle of soda water for the Rebbe.

  The Rebbe’s carriage with its tasseled red velvet window curtains comes for him at half past seven every evening, when the shadows have gone blue. He drives to the forest. His court walks behind. One of them carries his silver cane, another an open umbrella, out to his side. It is not for him, but for the Rebbe, should it rain. Another carries a shawl folded on a cushion, in case the Rebbe feels a chill. And one carries the wellbred chair.

  It is, by the common reckoning, the year 1916. The armies of the gentiles are slaughtering each other all over the world.

  Somewhere along the leafy road the Rebbe will stop the carriage and get out. His court will assemble behind him. He is going to observe, and meditate upon, the beauty of nature, which, created by the Master of the Universe and Lord of All, is full of instruction.

  On this particular July evening a fellow guest at the Hotel National has asked and been given permission to walk in the Rebbe’s following. He is a young lawyer in the insurance business in Prague, Herr Doktor Franz Kafka. Like all the rest, he must keep his distance, and always be behind the Rebbe. Should the Rebbe suddenly turn and face them, they must quickly run around so as to be behind him. And back around again should he turn again.

  The Rebbe, a man of great learning, is neither short nor tall, neither fat nor thin. Wide in the hips, he yet moves with a liquid grace, like a seal in water. He will overflow the slender chair if with a vague ripple of fingers he commands it to be placed so that he can sit on it. Then his followers will range themselves behind him, the secretary leaning a little to catch his every word, the shawl bearer at the ready, should the Rebbe raise his hands toward his shoulders. The secretary takes down what he says in a ledger. These remarks will be studied, later. They will question him about them. The Rebbe means great things by remarks which seem at first to be casual. He asks questions which are traps for their ignorance. The entourage does not always read his gestures correctly. If he has to put into words what he means by an open hand, or raised eyes, or an abrupt halt, he will add a reprimand. Hasidim is it you call yourselves? he will say. Or is it oafs maybe? For brains I’m thinking it’s noodles you have.

  If he asks for the soda water, they’ve had it. The one chosen to fetch it had gone to the Rudolph Spring. It was the opinion of everyone he asked that it was further along this road, that road, another road. And it never was. He’d passed it, or it was another three minutes just around to the left. Around to the right. The Rudolph Spring, the Rudolph Spring, could that be its name? Some answers as to its whereabouts were in foreign languages and a waste of time. Some, sad to say, paid no attention at all to the frantic disciple of the Rebbe from Belz, hard to believe, but true. Moreover, it began to rain. Finally, a man told the disciple that all the mineral springs close at seven. How could a spring be closed? he asked, running off in the direction pointed out. The Rudolph Spring was indeed closed, as he could see long before he got there. The green latticed doors were shut, and a sign reading CLOSED hung on them. Oi veh! He rattled the doors, and knocked, and shouted that the Rebbe from Belz had sent him for soda water. All they had to do was fill his bottle and take his money, the work of a moment. All of life, it occurred to him, is one disappointment after another, and he was about to weep when a stroller suggested that he make haste and run to the Ambrosius Spring, which closed a little later than the others. This he did. The Ambrosius was open, by the mercy of God. There were women inside washing glasses. But when he asked them to fill his bottle, the women said that they were through with their work for the day. They should stay open for everybody who can’t remember the long hours they were there filling bottles yet? Is the Rebbe from Belz different already? He should learn better how business is conducted in Marienbad.

  Who will write the history of despair?

  Dr. Kafka waits at the steps of the Hotel National for the Rebbe and his following. In Prague Dr. Kafka was famous among his friends for the oxlike patience with which he waited. Once, waiting in the street outside a small Parisian theatre Dr. Kafka and a donkey had made friends. He was waiting to buy a ticket to Carmen, the donkey was waiting to go on in Act II. They both had big ears, Dr. Kafka and the donkey. They were both patient by nature, both shy. Waiting is an act of great purity. Something is being accomplished, in a regular and steady way, by doing nothing at all.

  First the Rebbe arrived, and then the carriage. So the Rebbe had to wait a little, too. He had a long beard, beautifully white, and very long sidelocks. These are symbols of sound doctrine and piety. The longer your locks, it is said, the greater respect you get from the Rebbe. All boys with long sidelocks he called handsome and smart. One of his eyes, blind, was as blank as if it had been of glass. One side of his mouth was paralyzed, so that at his most solemn he seemed to be smiling ironically, with a witty and forgiving understanding of the world. His silk kaftan was worn open, held in place by a broad oriental belt. His hat was tall, and of fur. His stockings and knee britches were white, like his beard.

  The Rebbe, walking at a plump pace, savors nature in the woods. So Chinese dukes must walk of an evening, stopping to smell an hibiscus, casually reciting a couplet that sounds like notes on a zither, about another hibiscus centuries before, an hibiscus in a classical poem which had made the poet think of a noble woman, a jade owl, and a warrior’s ghost on the frontiers maintained against the barbarian hordes.

  One of the Rebbe’s legs is gimp, perhaps only sore from sitting all day at the Torah. When he gets down from his carriage he has a good cough. Then he sets out, looking. When he stops, the entourage stops, and Dr. Kafka behind them. If he turns, they swing with him, like a school of fish behind their pilot. He points out things, such as details of buildings in the woods, which they all strain to see. Is that a tile roof? he asks. They consult. Yes, one says, we think you are right, O Rebbe. It is a tile roof. Where does that path go? No one knows. What kind of tree is that? One thinks that it is a pine, another a fir, another a spruce.

  They come to the Zander Institute high on a stone embankment and with a garden in front of it, and an iron fence around it. The Rebbe is interested in the Institute, and in its garden. What kind of garden, he asks, is it? One of the entourage, whose name Dr. Kafka catches as Schlesinger, runs up to the fence, elbows out, head thrown back. He really does not look at the garden, but turns as soon as he has reached its gate, and runs down again, knees high, feet plopping. It is, he says breathlessly, the garden of the Zander Institute. Just so, says the Rebbe. Is it a private garden? They consult in whispers. Yes, says their spokesman, it is a private garden. The Rebbe stares at the garden, rocking on his heels. It is, he says, an attractive garden, and the secretary takes this remark down in his ledger.

  Their walk brings them to the New Bath House. The Rebbe has someone read the name of it. He strolls behind it, and finds a ditch into which the water from the bathhouse drains. He traces the pipes with his silver cane. The
water must come from there, he says, pointing high, and run down to here, and then into here. They all follow his gestures, nodding. They try to make sense of pipes which connect with other pipes. The New Bath House is in a modern style of architecture, and obviously looks strange to the Rebbe. He notices that the ground floor has its windows in the arches of an arcade. At the top of each arch is an animal’s head in painted porcelain. What, he asks, is the meaning of that? No one knows. It is, one ventures, a custom. Why? asks the Rebbe. It is the opinion that the animal heads are a whim of the designer, and have no meaning. Mere ornament. This makes the Rebbe say, Ah! He walks from window to window along the arcade, giving each his full attention. He comes around to the front of the building. Looking up at the golden lettering in an Art Nouveau alphabet, he reads again New Bath House. Why, he asks, is it so named? Because, someone says, it is a new bathhouse. The Rebbe pays no attention to this remark. It is, he says instead, a handsome, a fine, an admirable building. Good lines it has, and well-pondered proportions. The secretary writes this down. Look! he cries. When the rain falls on the roof, it flows into the gutter along the edge there, do you see, and then into the pipes that come down the corners of the building, and then into this stone gutter all around, from which it goes to the same ditch in back where all the pipes are from the baths. They walk around the building, discovering the complete system of the drainpipes. The Rebbe is delighted, he rubs his hands together. He makes one of the entourage repeat the plan of the pipes, as if he were examining him. He gets it right, with some correction along the way, and the Rebbe gives him a kind of blessing with his hands. Wonderful! he says. These pipes are wonderful.

  Who will write the history of affection?

  They come to an apple orchard, which the Rebbe admires, and to a pear orchard, which he also admires. O the goodness of the Master of the Universe, he says, to have created apples and pears.

  The chair held aloft by its bearer, Dr. Kafka notices, has now defined what art is as distinct from nature, for its pattern of flowers and leaves looks tawdry and artificial and seriously out of place against the green and rustling leaves of apple and pear trees. He is tempted to put this into words, as a casual remark which one of the entourage just might pass on to the Rebbe, but he reconsiders how whimsical and perhaps mad it would sound. Besides, no word must be spoken except at the command of the Rebbe.

  Instead, he prays. Have mercy on me, O God. I am sinful in every corner of my being. The gifts thou has given me are not contemptible. My talent is a small one, and even that I have wasted. It is precisely when a work is about to mature, to fulfill its promise, that we mortals realize that we have thrown our time away, have squandered our energies. It is absurd, I know, for one insignificant creature to cry that it is alive, and does not want to be hurled into the dark along with the lost. It is the life in me that speaks, not me, though I speak with it, selfishly, in its ridiculous longing to stay alive, and partake of its presumptuous joy in being.

  WIDE AS THE WATERS BE

  Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and

  the Revolution It Inspired, by Benson Bobrick.

  Benson Bobrick (an accomplished independent scholar and the author of a history of stuttering, among other books) begins this admirably clear and abundantly informative history of the Bible in English by telling us that the first question you were asked when you had fallen into the hands of the Inquisition was, Do you know any part of Scripture in your own language? If your answer was yes, there were no further questions: the stake is through that door. As the flames crawled upward, a cross was held before your eyes, to inspire last-second repentance, while angelic choirboys sang the dread “Dies Irae.” William Tyndale, the translator who, more than anyone, gave us the King James Version of the Bible, was burned at the stake on October 6, 1536, though legend has it that he was strangled before the kindling was lit.

  Tyndale’s translation, the first into English from the original Hebrew and Greek, was the basis for the Authorized Version of 1611 that is still the Bible for most English-speaking Christians today and was the official Bible of the Church of England for 350 years. The task of the fifty-four translators chosen by King James lay mostly in tidying up Tyndale’s work, the beauty and power of which they accepted as what the Bible in English ought to be. “Suffer the children to come unto me,” Tyndale wrote. The committee added “little.” (Bobrick gives us an appendix of comparative passages, like Dr. Johnson in his preface to the dictionary.) It was not until the 1960s that a New English Bible was introduced, making room for contemporary idiom and the evidence of more ancient Greek manuscripts (though there had been various revisions, called “Revised Standard Versions,” from Victorian times onward, to bring up to date Tudor locutions that had changed their meaning in spoken English: “prevent,” for instance, meant to precede or to anticipate; and “let” meant its opposite, to hinder).

  English is not so much a language as a family of languages. Once the tongue of Bronze Age tribes called Angles and Saxons, it early began to swap words and phrases with the Vikings, who were also colonizing the British Isles. The Saxon fought with an “edge,” the Dane with a “sword.” “Edge” became merely a detail of “sword.” The evolutionary tactic was always to keep both words. In 1066, Normans invaded, and the same process went on: the “pig” in the sty became “pork” on the table; “cow” became “beef.” It is as if English were an impressionable husband who had a Danish wife and talked like her; and then a French wife and talked like her. And when the King James translators took up their task, English had begun to add two rich vocabularies from Latin and Greek. Anglo-Saxon “dog” sported the Latin adjective “canine,” and people who snarled like dogs were cynics (a Greek word).

  Tyndale and his revisers were keenly aware that an authentic, archaic English to which they ought always to defer was the bedrock of the language available to them. They used only 8,000 words, 90 percent of which are Anglo-Saxon-Danish. From this word hoard they could invent words for practically all of the Bible. The Old Testament is inordinately concerned with praeputii, for which Tyndale invented “foreskynne.” He combined a Norman and a Saxon word and gave us “beautyfull.”

  The very first English Bible was that of John Wycliffe (1328–84), from the Latin of Jerome, whose “Vulgate” translation from Hebrew and Greek was completed in 405. Wycliffe died before he could be tied to the stake. So the Church dug up his remains and burned his bones. (They got his disciple Jan Hus, however, and burned him as one infected by Wycliffe.) Wycliffe’s postmortem burning in 1428 took place on a bridge over the River Swift, a tributary of the Avon. Bobrick takes his title from an anonymous hymn (taken in turn from a paragraph in Thomas Fuller’s Church History of 1655):

  The Avon to the Severn runs,

  The Severn to the sea,

  And Wickliffe’s dust shall spread abroad,

  Wide as the waters be.

  Wycliffe’s Bible was dispersed by itinerant preachers called Lollards. They were first-wave Protestants, outlawed and persecuted (Sir John Oldcastle, the model for Falstaff, led a Lollard uprising against his friend Henry V in 1414, and was simultaneously hanged and burned for it). The Reformation bloomed from many such seeds, broadcast all over Western Europe. Erasmus published his Greek New Testament in 1516, a scholarly rectification of age-old copyists’ errors and variant readings, and one year later the German monk Martin Luther demanded that the Church quit selling time off from purgatory.

  The Reformation in full spate depended on printing. The first book to be printed with movable type, by Johannes Gutenberg, was the Bible, in Latin. The way was then open for Bibles in German, Danish, and English. Bobrick gives a lucid and orderly account of the many translations (so many they’re hard to keep straight), providing us a sense of how they were genetically born from one another: Miles Coverdale’s following hard on Tyndale’s (and completing Tyndale’s work on the Old Testament), a Geneva Bible (the one Shakespeare read), a “Bishop’s Bible,” on up to the
one commissioned by James I and achieved by a committee of Hebrew and Greek scholars at Oxford and Cambridge. These worthies were anonymous until 1958, when thirty-nine pages of their working notes were found in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Bobrick tells us as much as can be known about them at this late date.

  Their average age was fifty. They were all clergymen except for Sir Henry Savile. Revealed after 350 years from their self-effacing, “deliberately cultivated” anonymity, they are a wonderfully interesting group of very human beings, and Bobrick gives us charming portraits of them all. Here he is on Lancelot Andrewes, head of the committee that revised Tyndale’s translation of Genesis through 2 Kings (and the only reviser with a recognizable name, thanks to T.S. Eliot):

  [He was] an immensely learned man who, it was said, “might have been interpreter general at Babel … the world wanted … learning to know how learned he was.” The son of a master mariner, Andrewes had studied at the Merchant Taylors’ School under Richard Mulcaster, a classical and Hebrew scholar of note, and as “a great long lad of 16,” went up to Pembroke College, Cambridge on scholarship, where one of his companions was Edmund Spenser.… From a very tender age, Andrewes was “addicted to the study of good letters,” avoided “games of ordinary recreation” such as cards, dice, chess, or croquet, and preferred long solitary walks in the company of earnest students like himself.

  Bobrick’s description of the long-lost notes offers a glimpse of scholars who were working to forge, in a very real sense, the language that we call our own. “[I]t is intriguing to see what might have been,” Bobrick writes. Indeed. Anyone who has been to a Christian wedding in the last twenty years is roughly familiar with the King James version of I Corinthians 13:11: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child.” The notes record that the scholar John Bois, a former child prodigy who was reading the Old Testament in Hebrew by the age of six, offered the following variant: “I understood, I cared as a child, I had a child’s mind, I imagined as a child, I was affected as a child.”