The Guy Davenport Reader

by Guy Davenport

  And then I saw that the moth was inside the light bulb.

  Because, I said when asked why I am here, the world was in defiance of its own laws.

  At the foot of Herr Rufzeichen’s grand stairs stood a cast-iron Siegfried braced with a boar-sticker and buckler outsinging a surge of Wagnerian wind that tilted his horns, butted his beard, and froze his knees. Did he have to be dusted? Thoroughly, thoroughly. Beyond him, in steep gloom, rose the stairs in a curve of crimson and oak.

  On a stepladder, flipping the face of iron Siegfried with a turkey duster, I, remembering that if you stare through a window into a snowfall the room will rise and the snow stand still, as when down front close to a theater curtain, the audience sinks grandly, to trumpets, discovering below a red Tannhäuser kneeling beside an embroidered Venus singing Zu viel, Zu viel, O dass ich nun erwachte! saw Count Rufzeichen gliding from the library with his nose in a book and Claribel the cook backing toward him, the mock orange in her arms. The precision with which they would collide was inevitable and perverse.

  — Zu viel! I cried.

  Rammed from behind, Claribel screamed, heaved the mock orange upward, and sat.

  I tottered, embraced Siegfried, and lost the ladder under my dancing toes.

  The mock orange fell upside down on Count Rufzeichen, filling his lap with earth and roots. It was as if an allegory of Horticulture, with Donor, had fallen out of a picture onto the museum floor.

  The ladder completed its fall across Rufzeichen’s shins, inciting him into a jumping-jack flip over Claribel, transferring the mock orange’s empty bucket from his head to hers, which made her screams now sound hollow, as if from the depths of a well.

  Gliding over the firelit carpet with velvet steps, placing the tureen before my lord, who touches his napkin to his moustache, I can savor again the condition of my well-being, along with the aroma of leek and broth that steams up when I remove the lid with a gesture worthy of the dancers of Bali, namely that Rufzeichen has put me back together, suave foot, accurate hand, impeccable diction.

  Genius is time.

  There was, I knew, and remembered with fondness, a professor at the Sorbonne who electrocuted himself while lecturing, or electrocuted himself so nearly that he found that he was suddenly in a corner just under the ceiling, light as a Chagall bridegroom full of champagne. And yet he could see himself still lecturing below, calmly, giving no indication that an ox’s weight of lightning had crashed through his body.

  Then he realized that his feet, shod and gaitered, were on opposite sills. His torso was in orbit around the lamp. His left arm was in the cloakroom nervously fingering a galosh, his right caressed a periodic table of the elements. His rich, musically modulated voice lectured on about ohms and circuits, resistance and watts.

  It was my own parable. I had searched for wisdom about the slump of my soul and the sootiness of my spirit in the accounts of vastations by the American Jameses, father and son, who suffered terrible New England moments when all significance drained from the world, when the immediate fortune of life was despair, disease, death. In utter futility shone the sun, man squandered the little time he had alive, a sweet Tuesday here, a golden autumn Sunday there, grubbing for money to pay the butcher, the landlord, and the tailor. The butcher slaughtered innocent animals who were incapable of sin and folly, of ambition or lies, so that one could, by way of a cook enslaved for a pittance and a wife enslaved for naught, gnaw its flesh and after a period of indigestion and indolence from overfeeding, squat over a chamberpot and drop turds and piss for a servant to carry, holding his nose, to the lime pit.

  I had thought my despair was Kierkegaard’s sickness unto death that pleasure cloys and pain corrodes. But, no, it was rather the Sorbonne professor’s shock. One came to pieces. One used the very words. You had to pull yourself together again.

  Feeding the pages of three novels into the fire in Berlin, standing in the rain at my father’s grave, writing my thousandth feuilleton, climbing the dark stairs to any of the forty rooms I’ve rented: no one movement of foot or heart muscle was the hobbler, no one man’s evasion the estranger.

  — Another pig’s foot, your lordship?

  — And a little more suet, thank you kindly, Robert.

  White tile, thermometers, blood-pressure charts, urine specimens, and spasms in the radiator pipes; what color and tone there had been at Rufzeichen’s! The carpet, a late Jugendstil pattern of compact circles in lenticular overply, rusty orange, Austrian brown, and the blue of Wermacht lapels, had dash, and the furniture was Mackintosh, smartly modern in its severity while recalling the heaviest tradition of knightly chairs and ladylike settles, sideboards as large as wains and a desk at which the Kaiser could plan a dress parade. My eye appreciated the dull books around him, china shepherdesses, views of Florence and Rome, a sepia reproduction of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, crossed cavalry sabers, a teakwood dragon in a rage, candlesticks held aloft by fat babies tiptoe on the noses of dolphins, a loud clock.

  An iron elk stood in a dim recess beyond double doors in the far wall.

  And then, pigeon-toed and watching the ground before him as if backtracking for something lost, there was the new patient, Fomich, as his wife or sister called him. The first time I saw him I did not like his silly smile. The mad smile in their own way, as puppets step, with a jerk rather than civilized deliberation. The smile of Fomich was that of the imp, of the red goblin in the corner of Füssli’s Titania und Bottom. Smirk and scowl together it was.

  It was the outward concession of inner reserve, two proud men meeting, each believing the other to be of higher rank.

  — Kak tsiganye! he complained to his sister or wife.

  And then I saw the muscles bunched in his shoulders that had strained the threads of the armscye apart, the heft of his chest, the improbably narrowness of his hips. Hero, with wing, grounded.

  They took a walk together every morning and afternoon, solicitous woman and elfin man. Sometimes he would stop, put his heels together, flex his knees, and pass his hands in a sweep from one hip to the other.

  One day, to my disbelieving gaze, he jumped over a rose bush without so much as a running start. Faces appeared at windows to watch.

  He jumped back over the rose bush, his eyes sleepy and sad.

  It was like striding over a sea of gelatin, that bell-stroke swing of our nacelle through the rack of the upper air on elastic wicker, wind thrumming the frapping with the elation of Schumann strings allegro molto vivace.

  We talked by cupping hands and shouting into each other’s ears. Benjamin Franklin, Cassirer said, had wanted a balloon for moving about the streets of Philadelphia, rooftop high above the Quakers and Indians. He was to have hitched it to horses, a godlike man indeed.

  — Ach, les Montgolfier, Joseph and Etienne! In those days they thought smoke was a gas, as right as they were wrong, as with all knowledge. A transparent blue October day they bundled the physicist Pilâtre de Rozier into the basket of their hot-air balloon and cheered him aloft over the Bois de Boulogne. There, anchored twenty-five meters above the Jardin de la Muette, he looked down on autumn and Lilliputians flapping handkerchiefs. He fed the stove that kept him up there a truss of straw, scanned the horizon with a telescope, took a barometric reading.

  — The next month he and the Marquis d’Arlandes went up without a tether, floated across Paris for half an hour, and came down at La Butte-aux-Cailles, where wind had carried them. Peasants were waiting to kill the balloon with scythes and shovels.

  History is a dream that strays into innocent sleep.

  And everything is an incongruity if you study it well. When, wind plucking my nose and fetching the moment back, I was sent on an errand one day by Herr Benjamenta to buy pen nibs from the stationer and three pounds of Brussels sprouts from the greengrocer, the latter to energize us for writing a round and legible hand with the former, the morning being summery and fine, what should I see straightway, so wonderful is the world, but the handle of a sweep’s b
room tipping the hat of a stout and grizzly old party into the bucket of a passing house painter, where it bobbed and lolled in a creamy distemper, while, as if miracles hadn’t grown scarce in our time, a grackle with determined eye swooped down and snatched off the same old party’s curly red wig, taking it over a roof before the street could frame a single sentence of articulate consternation.

  — His hat is in the bucket, a little girl said to her nurse.

  — Yes, said the nurse, there it goes.

  — That grackle, said a bearded gentleman, took off his wig.

  The nurse acknowledged the gentleman’s remark by blushing. The little girl did him a curtsy. I stood as in a dream.

  The old party, meanwhile, stopped dumbfounded, his hands to his naked head, where a fringe of reddish hair enwreathed his occipital salience. It pleased me that he had not chosen so red a wig without cause.

  — The man is distracted, explained the nurse to her charge. See how he rolls his eyes and chews his moustache.

  — Yes, said the little girl. This is something I can tell to Ermintrude. She will be beside herself with jealousy.

  Whereupon, weeping with such feeling that both cheeks shone like glass, the old party hugged himself so furiously that his coat split down the back. The sound of this was that of a dry limb cracked by wind from a tree, and he went limber as if unstrung.

  The left half of his coat slid, sleeve and all, onto the sidewalk, followed by the right half, sleeve and all.

  The collar, I considered, drawing closer, should have held the two halves together, but no, upon inspection, I saw that it was a coat, Moravian or Sephardic, of the kind that has no collar.

  A scarf, which even now, as the old party was running back and forth imploring God and the gendarmerie to witness that he was a victim of some untoward fracture of natural law, snagged on the spike of an area railing and whipped away with an elastic flounce, never to be seen on this earth by its owner again.

  They waywardness of accidents, I mused, can go only so far until it collides with the laws of probability or the collapse of its martyr.

  The old party sat down on the sidewalk and wept into his hands. The gentleman with the beard came to his aid, prefacing his remarks by saying kindly that he had seen all that had happened. Here the old party gasped, alluded to his heart, and fell backward.

  — I do believe, said the nurse, that he is having some sort of fit.

  — Zu hilfe! Zu hilfe! cried the bearded gentleman.

  — I will do an imitation of this, said the little girl, rolling back her eyes and grabbing her throat, that will make Ermintrude hate herself for a week.

  — Remember that you are in public, said the nurse.

  — So is he, said the little girl.

  — And it is ill-bred in both of you, said the nurse, to make a spectacle on a city street.

  A crowd gathered, from which a slender man in dark glasses, explaining that his uncle was a pharmacist in Lichtenstein, advised that the old party’s waistcoat be undone. Deftly the gentleman undid fourteen buttons, disclosing trousers that came up to the armpits in the manner of the English. The flies of these were undone as far as the navel, fourteen more buttons, and indeed the old party groaned and breathed more freely, it seemed.

  — Polizei! screamed the nurse.

  The laces of his boots should be untied, the Lichtenstein pharmacist’s nephew said, and the suspenders of his stockings loosened, for circulation’s sake.

  — I will, said the bearded gentleman, take his watch, wallet, tie pin, and ring for safekeeping, lest they tempt someone here in the crowd.

  — My watch! squealed the old party, kicking with such indignation that both boots leapt off his feet. A dog got one and made off with the agility of a weasel. The other bounced into the gutter, where it lay forlorn and strange in the brief moment before a policeman arriving on the trot shot it along the curbing to drop into a drain. We could all hear it bumping on its way through gurgling water to the river Aar.

  — Let us see if his name is written inside his shirt, said the policeman, lifting the old party by the armpits and taking off his waistcoat.

  — What is this? he exclaimed, peeling a mustard plaster from the old party’s back.

  — That, said the pharmacist’s nephew, is probably the cause of his fit. It is a poultice of asafoetida, mustard, and kerosene such as country doctors prescribe for pulmonary and liver complaints. It is too strong, as you can smell, and has induced an apoplexy. Take off his shirt and undervest to air his back.

  Struggling to arrange the old party, the bearded gentleman inadvertently stood on both his loose stocking suspenders, anchoring them, so that as the body was dragged backward the better to extract the long shirt tail from inside the seat of the trousers, the elastic suspenders stretched their limit, snapped, flipped, and catapulted themselves and stockings together off the old party’s feet, one flying into my face. And, O, how I was gratified to have joined the event with something of my own, and I sneezed, casting stocking and suspender into the shopping basket of a cook who, later and at home, dropped them into her stove, making a hex. The other was got from the air by a dog who had envied his fellow the previous shoe.

  At this moment, crazy with fury and mindless with disbelief, the old party fought his way up to choke the policeman, losing trousers and drawers as he stood.

  — Attack the law, will you! the policeman said.

  — Where am I? the old party cried. Who am I? What has happened?

  He was as naked as the minute he was born, minus, of course, an umbilical cord.

  — Scheisse und verdammt! It comes back to me that I am Brigade-general Schmalbeet. That’s who I am! General Schmalbeet!

  With this he gave the policeman a kick in the groin that doubled him over.

  Then he fell backward, an arc of urine following him down. Everyone backed away. When I peeped around the first corner I had turned, I saw the policeman wetting a pencil with his tongue while opening a notebook, and a dog dragging away the old party’s trousers, and another throwing his drawers into the air and barking.

  Manet’s Olympia, thumbtacked to the wall between a depraved adolescent girl by Egon Schiele and an oval mezzotint of Novalis, told me about the world’s first painting executed en plein air. This was the work of her creator’s Doppelgänger Monet, Manet with an omega.

  — I am confused already, said I. But talk on, for it adds purpose to my staring at you, at your complacent Parisian eyes, your dangling mule, your hand so decorously audacious.

  — Êtes-vous phallocrate?

  — L’homme est un miroir omnigénérique, tantôt plan, tantôt convexe, tantôt concave ou cylindrique, donnant à l’objet réfléchi des dimensions variées.

  — Vous êtes phallocrate.

  — Suis-je donc?

  — Ce ne fait rien.

  Her Ionic shoulders rose an ironic trifle. There was the wisp of a smile in the corners of her mouth, the merest hint of laughter in her eyes.

  — When, she said, in the pellucid green air of Fontainebleau, Claude Monet had posed his model and touched his brush to the world’s first plein air canvas, he was hit on the back of the head by a discus and knocked senseless.

  Her expression did not change as she made this statement.

  — A discus?

  — Un disque.

  — The discobolus, she continued, who presently appeared on the anxious trot to ask the bloody impressionist and the screaming Madame Monet if they had seen his quoit was a bassetted and spatted Englishman whose carp’s mouth and plaid knickerbockers sprang from the pages of Jerome K. Jerome.

  Count Rufzeichen, anglophile and sportsman, dressed so. It was his sedulous imitation of the English that had driven him to hire a butler, and thus I came to treat his soft carpets, never tiring of their luxurious silence, or of the rose fragrance of English tea, or of making Herr Rufzeichen shake his wattles.

  One way was to be deaf to his summons, letting the butler’s bell jangle in vain.
After awhile, the old apteryx would come puffing and snuffling along, looking into rooms. Finding me in the greenhouse, he would splay his fingers and shout.

  — What in the name of God are you doing?

  — Sir, I am observing nature, I would reply. I see, however, that in lending my attention to the limpidity of the air, the melodiousness of the cuckoo and the lowing of the horned cattle I have fallen into negligence.

  — Into sloth, said Herr Rufzeichen.

  — The cows made a kind of bass for the treble of the cuckoo.

  — Into impudence.

  — Your worship rang?

  — To little purpose, to no purpose, Monsieur Robert. Whatever I wanted you for before, it’s a liver attack I’m having at the moment.

  The Count trembled into a chair.

  — Would you wish a glass of Perrier, Sir?

  — Doppelkohlensaures Natron.

  The Count pulled a pocket handkerchief big as a map of Europe from his sleeve, wadded it with both hands, and wiped away the sweat that had beaded on his forehead.

  I held the soda on a silver salver under his nose. The draught drunk, hiccups set in. After the third hiccup, a belch baritone and froggy.

  Outside the asylum gates a brass band huffed and thumped with brazen sneezes, silver whiffets, thundering sonorities and a detonating drum, the descant hitched together by a fat woman in a Tyrolese hat and the Erlkönig’s longcoat that flocked upon her hips as she squeezed and pulled a Polish accordion as big as a sheep, dipping her knees on the saltarelli and rolling her eyes in a clown’s gloat.

  The man Fomich danced around his pleased sister, seesawing his shoulders in a backward monkeyshine of steps, and as he shot into the air right over his sister’s head, pausing there awhile as if all the clocks in the world had stopped, a lunatic shouted that Hitler is the seventh disaster in Nostradamus and invited all within hearing to join the Brotherhood of the Illuminati without further delay.