The Guy Davenport Reader

by Guy Davenport

  Dear Lizaveta: We have sailed to Tahiti in a clipper ship. This island is all pink and green, and the people are brown and lazy. The women are very beautiful, with long black hair and pretty black eyes. The children scamper up palm trees like monkeys and wear not a stitch of clothes. We have met a Frenchman name of Gauguin, who paints pictures of the Tahitians, and another Frenchman named Pierre Loti, who wears a fez and reads the European newspapers in the café all day and says that Tahiti is Romantic. What Rudolf and I say is that it’s very hot and decidedly uncivilized. Have I said that Rudolf is of the royal family? He’s a good sport, but he has his limits. There are no streets here! Romantically, Belinda.

  Well! dear Lizaveta, San Francisco! Oh my! There are streets here, all uphill, and with gold prospectors and their donkeys on them. There are saloons with swinging doors, and Flora Dora girls dancing inside. Everybody plays Oh Suzanna! on their banjos (everybody has one) and everywhere you see Choctaws in blankets and cowboys with six-shooters and Chinese and Mexicans and Esquimaux and Mormons. All the houses are of wood, with fancy carved trimmings, and the gentry sit on their front porches and read political newspapers. Anybody in America can run for any public office whatever, so that the mayor of San Francisco is a Jewish tailor and his councilmen are a Red Indian, a Japanese gardener, a British earl, a Samoan cook, and a woman Presbyterian preacher. We have met a Scotsman name of Robert Louis Stevenson, who took us to see an Italian opera. Yours ever, Belinda.

  Dear Lizaveta: I’m writing this in a stagecoach crossing the Wild West. We have seen many Indian villages of teepees, and thousands of buffalo. It took hours to get down one side of the Grand Canyon, across its floor (the river is shallow and we rolled right across, splashing) and up the other side. The Indians wear colorful blankets and have a feather stuck in their hair. Earlier today we saw the United States Cavalry riding along with the American flag. They were singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and were all very handsome. It will make me seasick to write more, as we’re going as fast as a train. Dizzily, Belinda.

  Dear Lizaveta: We have been to Chicago, which is on one of the Great Lakes, and crossed the Mississippi, which is so wide you can’t see across it, only paddle-steamers in the middle, loaded with bales of cotton. We have seen utopias of Quakers and Shakers and Mennonites, who live just as they want to in this free country. There is no king, only a Congress which sits in Washington and couldn’t care less what the people do. I have seen on of these Congressmen. He was fat (three chins, I assure you) and offered Rudolf and me a dollar each if we would vote for him. When we said we were from Prague, he said he hoped we’d start a war, as war is good for business. On to New York! In haste, your loving Belinda.

  Dear Lizaveta: How things turn out! Rudolf and I are married! Oh yes, at Niagara Falls, where you stand in line, couple after couple, and get married by a Protestant minister, a rabbi, or a priest, take your choice. Then you get in a barrel (what fun!) and ride over the falls — you bounce and bounce at the bottom — and rent a honeymoon cabin, of which there are hundreds around the falls, each with a happy husband and wife billing and cooing. I know from your parents that my sister in the department store has come to live with you and be your doll. Rudolf and I are going to the Argentine. You must come visit our ranch. I will remember you forever. Mrs. Rudolph Hapsburg und Porzelan (your Belinda).

  Gunnar and Nikolai

  1

  And, yes, the sailboat on a tack for Tisvilde under a tall blue sky piled high with summer clouds was, oh my, slotting through the Baltic at a speed which the calm day and rigged mainsail and jib could in no wise account for.

  At the tiller, it was soon easy to see, sat a boy named Nikolai, fetching and trim. He took a beeline for the beach, into the rocky sand of which he crunched his prow, to the amazement of a hundred staring sunbathers.

  Deftly lowering his sails with nonchalant ease, he folded them into smaller and smaller triangles, until they were no bigger than handkerchiefs. Then, with a snap here and a snap there, as if he were closing the sections of a folding ruler, whistling a melody by Luigi Boccherini as he worked, he collapsed the boat, mast, rigging, hull, keel, rudder and all, into a handful of sticks and cords. These he doubled over again and again, tucked them in with a napkin’s worth of sails, and stuffed the lot into the zippered pocket of his windbreaker. His chart and compass he shoved into the pocket of his smitch of white pants. He rolled and squared his shoulders.

  Indifferent to the astonished bathers, one of whom was having some species of fit, and to jumping and hooting children begging him to do it again, he strode with all the aplomb of his twelve years up the beach and across the road into the dark cool of the Troll Wood.

  Søren Kierkegaard, most melancholy of Danes, used to walk here, a gnome among gnomes. An eagle in a spruce gazed at Nikolai with golden feral eyes, in acknowledgment of which he put both hands against a mountain pine, the tree friendly to spruce. Without one near, it would not grow. The eagle rolled a hunch into its shoulders, and Nikolai hugged the mountain pine.

  A glance at the interplanetary mariner’s chronometer on his left wrist alerted him to his appointment somewhere near Gray Brothers. So, with meadows and farms flickering past, he ran fifty kilometres in three seconds, slowing to a walk along Strøget.

  A shoal of skateboarders flowed around him from the back as he passed a Peruvian gourd band, three games of chess that had been going on since the fourteenth century, and four fresh babies in a pram, each with a cone of ice cream.

  The address was in an alley, once a very old street. The number was repeated on a wooden gate, which opened onto the place, one of the places, he’d been looking for all of his life.

  Another was a cabin in Norway, deep in spruce and mountain pine near a steep fjord, where he could live like Robinson Crusoe, exactly as he pleased. A room of his very own, in Gray Brothers, free to come and go, to have friends in to spend the night and share hamburgers and polsers in the middle of the floor. A coffee plantation in Kenya. A lighthouse on a rock in the Orkneys, gulls blown past his windows, bleak dawns over a black sea, secure by a neat fire.

  But this was just as good, a courtyard with a tree and rows and beds of flowers, a sculptor’s studio with a pitched glass roof.

  Along a pomp of dahlias in a line, rust mustard brick and yellow, he walked with a steady casualness to the blue door. A wicker basket beside it, for the mail. A stone jug with sweet williams. His mother was keen on botany, so he knew the names of flowers, weeds, and trees. And maybe an angel with nothing better to do would see him through this.

  A card fixed to the door with a drawing pin: Gunnar Rung, the name Mama had said. He was about to push the doorbell when the door opened, wrecking his cool.

  — Hello, he said in as deep a voice as he could manage, I’m Nikolai Bjerg.

  The man who opened the door was tall, in jeans with a true fit and an Icelandic sweater, and was much younger than Nikolai had expected. His eyes were as friendly as those of a large dog.

  — You’re on time, he said. Gunnar Rung here. Come in and let’s see you.

  Books, drawings on the walls, tables, an unfamiliar kind of furniture. And beyond, through wide double doors slid open, under a glass roof, a tall block of squared rock that must have been hauled in from an alley in back. Nikolai looked at as much as he could, all of it wonderfully strange and likable, with quick glances at Gunnar, who was goodlooking and had wads of rich brown curls, almost not Danish, and hands as big as a sailor’s.

  — It’s an Ariel I have a commission for, Gunnar said walking around Nikolai, looking at him through framing hands. Your mother thought you might do, and would like posing. Have you ever posed before? It’s not easy, and can be tedious and boring. There’s also a King Matt I’m to do, a boy who’s king of an unimaginable Poland, and you might also be him. We’ll have to see how you and I get along. What about some coffee? Do you drink it?

  — Sometimes. I mean, yes.

  Coffee! Gunnar was treating him like a grown-up,
so don’t trash it.

  — You can undress while I’m putting the coffee on. Won’t take a minute.

  — Everything? Nikolai asked, instantly regretting the question, unbuckling a scout’s belt of green webbing, offering his charmingest and toothiest smile.

  — That’s the way the stone is to be, without a stitch.

  Eyebrows bravely up, Nikolai backed out of his short denim pants and knelt to untie his gym shoes. Briefs and thick white socks he pulled off together. Then his jersey over his head.

  — Two sugars? There’s real cream. You’ll get over blushing. Good knees, good toes.

  — Sorry. Didn’t think I’d blush. The statue will be the same size as me? Hey! Good coffee, you know.

  — Life size, oh yes. Keep turning around. Raise your free hand and stretch. Do you think you can keep to a schedule for posing?

  — Sure. Why not? I really didn’t think I’d go shy. Being naked’s fun. My grandma and grandpa, Mama’s mama and daddy, are Kropotkinites, and I’m boss in my own pants. My folks are as broad-minded green as they come, no barbed wire anywhere, good Danish liberals, to the point of being fussy. You know what I mean?

  A mischievously knowing smile from Gunnar.

  — Park your cup, there, and stand on your toes, arms over your head.

  Legs out more, each side. We can’t do a Thorvaldsen nor yet an Eric Gill. I’m what they call a neoclassicist, a realist, and out of it. What’s being boss in your own pants mean?

  — A licensed devil, according to Mama. Liberal points for what boys do anyway, says Papa. Who’s King Matt?

  — Another character in a book, by a Polish doctor. Actually the work will be of a boy carrying Matt’s flag. At an awful moment. I’ll tell you all about it while we’re working. You can read the book.

  Eyes askew, Nikolai ran his tongue across the plump tilt of his upper lip. While we’re working.

  — You have kids? I guess they’re too little to pose.

  — No, and no wife, either, just Samantha, whom you’ll meet. Arms out. Twist around to the right. You’re going to do, you know? You’re Ariel, all right.

  2

  Nikolai sat on his clothes piled in a chair. Coffee break.

  — Why was Ariel naked?

  — He was a spirit of the air. Like an angel.

  Nikolai thought about this, guppying his coffee and sprucing the fit of his foreskin.

  — Angels wear lots of clothes. Bible clothes. Steen and Stoffer are neat today, did you see? I’ll bet this Ariel you’re copying me for had pure thoughts and never a hard on, right? There was a Steen and Stoffer where Steen sees monkeys in the zoo jacking off and he says O gross! and his mom and pop are suddenly interested in showing him the cockatoos and toucans. Parents.

  — What a face, Gunnar said, running his fingers over his cast of Bourdelle’s study of Herakles. The model was Doyen-Parigot, military bloke. Physical fitness enthusiast. Used to arrive on his horse at Bourdelle’s in full soldierly fig.

  — Looks like an opposum, wouldn’t you say?

  Punktum punktum,

  komma, streg!

  Sadan tegnes

  Nikolaj!

  Arme, ben,

  og mave stor.

  Sadan kom han

  til vor jord.

  — Killed at Verdun. You make Edith glance heavenward when you twitch your piddler. Christian Brother from the Faeroes she is, you know. Though I once had a girl model who played with herself as liberally as you, and as unconcerned for convention, and Edith rather took to leaning around the door to see, in passing.

  — What’s Verdun? You know Mikkel, the redhead kid, my pal, with terminal freckles and chipmunk teeth? His dad is all for his doing it every day. Says it keeps him happy.

  — Verdun was a terrible battle in the First World War. Is Mikkel’s daddy Ulf Tidselfnug? Break’s over: back at it.

  — Do you know him? He prints books. It’s fun to go to Mikkel’s, where, if we stay in his room, we can do anything we want to, and Mikkel’s always answering the door in nothing but a T-shirt and wrunkled socks. His mom says that if he turns himself into an idiot how would you notice?

  — O pure innocent Danish youth!

  Questioning eyes.

  — Teasing the model, Samantha said, is Gunnar’s way of relating. You’ll get used to it. Besides, you can tease him back. Gunnar’s jealous, anyway.

  TREE HOUSE

  — How old is this Gunnar?

  — He’s had a rabbit, a Belgian hare I think it is, in a show, and a naked girl holding one leg by the ankle in another. He did those at the Academy, and then he was in Paris for a year. He was seventeen when he went to the Academy, that’s four years, and Paris was just a couple of years back, so he’s like twenty-four, yuss? Outsized whacker in his jeans.

  — The bint’s there all the time?

  — Oh no, very busy girl, Samantha. She comes and goes. Spends the night a lot, too, I think.

  4

  — Brancusi’s Torso of a Boy, there. My Ariel is to be as pure as that, but with all of you there, representational, as the cirtics say, thugs, the lot of them.

  Nikolai tugged his foreskin into a snugger fit.

  — It leks, and it doesn’t, you know?

  — The thighs make it a boy, and the hips the same girth as the chest. But further than that, in style, you can’t go. Gaudier, here, had the genius of the age. Killed in the First World War, only 24. That’s his bust of the poet Pound, and that’s his Red Dancer.

  — Real brainy is what I’m getting a reputation for, even at home. Would Brancusi have used a model, some French soccer player? He could at least have put in a navel. I’ll have my pecker and toms, won’t I, as Ariel?

  — Shakespeare would insist. He liked well-designed boys and approved of nature.

  — I’ll bet. Did Brancusi?

  — Brancusi’s private life is unknown. I think he simply worked, sawing and polishing and chiselling. He did his own cooking. There was a white dog named Polar.

  — What would an Ariel by him have looked like?

  5

  Commandant Nikolai Doyen-Parigot rode his white charger Washington among Peugeots and Citroëns to Antoine Bourdelle’s studio. Tying Washington to a parking meter, he strode inside. Bourdelle was in his smock. A boy was mixing modelling clay in a tub. Amidst life-size casts of Greek statues Nikolai Doyen-Parigot took off his uniform, handing it piece by piece, epauletted coat and sword and spurred boots and snowy white shirt and suspenders and wool socks slightly redolent of horse and long underwear, to a respectful but blushing concierge.

  Herakles with the head of Apollo.

  Thick curly hair matted his chest. His dick was as big as his charger’s, and his balls were like two oranges in a cloth sack. His wife went around in a happy daze because of them, as did several lucky young actresses and dancers. Restocking the regiment for the next generation he called it.

  He took the long bow that Bourdelle handed him and assumed the pose of Herakles killing the Stymphalian birds.

  Later he would play soccer, and wrestle with Calixte Delmas. He would march his regiment up and down the street behind a military band.

  — What are Stymphalian birds, Gunnar?

  — Something Greek. Quit wiggling your head. One of the labors of Herakles.

  — Sculpture should be a verb not a noun. The David is Jack the Giant Killer, handy with strings, so that he can play the harp and have his dark fate in hair, but in his eyes he is the friend of Jonathan, that sweet rascal from crabstock, as Grundtvig said. Where Rodin kept going wrong was in sculpting not only nouns but abstract nouns.

  Nikolai!

  — Jo!

  — Imagine you can walk on the wind just under the speed of light. There’s a magic cunning in your fingers and toes. Fatigue is as unknown to you as to a bee. You have been commanded by the magus Prospero to dart all over an enchanted island to do things impossible for others but easy for you. You have just been given your instructions. The rewa
rd of your compliance is freedom. You’re about to nip off.

  Listening to Prospero, elbows back, chin over shoulder, eyes and mouth wide open, a jump into action, wheeling on toes, and a collision with Samantha who had walked into the studio. A laughing, staggering hug.

  — Ariel digging off to execute Prospero’s orders.

  — Do it again. This time I’ll be ready for the hug.

  TREE HOUSE

  The Korczak group will be this Polish doctor who had an orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto way back when the shitty Germans were burning up all the Jews and there was a day when the Germans took all the kids and Korczak and a woman named Stefa to die at Treblinka, and they all marched through the streets to the cattle cars. I’m to be the boy that carried their flag, the flag of their republic, the orphanage. Gunnar wants you and me to be two pals in the group, arms around each other’s shoulders. You’ll like Gunnar. He’s real. For balls he has a brace of Grade A large goose eggs and a gooseneck of a cock, which his girl Samantha pretends she doesn’t go goofy over, I mean all the time he isn’t fucking her into fits. She’s real, too, and gives me a hard time. Winks at me when I’m posing, and hugs me when we’re having a break and stretch. She writes poems and draws posters, and swears badges about Women’s Lib. Knows the names of all the butterflies. On his big bulletin board in the studio Gunnar has this list of things Korczak talked to the orphans about every Saturday, or had them swot up, by way of learning about things, famous people like Gregor Mendel and Fabre the bug man, and good and evil, and doing one’s duty, and the environment, and how to deal with loneliness, and what sex is, and Samantha has me writing what she calls my responses and ideas, also Gunnar has to write them too, and these go on the bulletin board.

  THE YELLOW OF TIME

  In his Roman garden Bertel Thorvaldsen sat reading Anacreon. A basket of Balkan melons, squash, and runner beans sat under the cool of the fig tree, delivered by a girl out of Shakespeare, soon to be carried into the kitchen by Serafina the cook. He had drunk a gourd of well water brought in a stone jug from the country. It tasted of gourd and stone, and of the depths of the earth. Johan Thomas Lundbye’s landscape of a Danish meadow hung in his sitting room. There were letters from Copenhagen, Paris, Edinburgh. On his cabinet of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine coins stood branches of oleander in a yellow jug.