Zakkaiah sat on his stool, hard. He stuck the fingers of his left hand into his beard. His right hand held three figs.
— But the fun of the line between the yuds, Yeshua went on, is that it’s a fence only if you look at it that way. It is really a road, and like all roads it goes both ways. You have to know which way you’re going. Look at the anemones that make the fields red all of a sudden after the first rain of the wet season. The grand dresses at Solomon’s court were not such a sight, and they were made with looms and needles, whereas the master of the universe made the anemones overnight, with a word. You can get near the line with much labor, or you can cross it with a step.
— I told you Yeshua’s meshuggeh, Daniel whispered to Yaakov.
— Why don’t you eat your figs, O Teacher? Yeshua asked. I have more.
2
On a blustery late afternoon in March 1842, Professor James Joseph Sylvester of the University of Virginia was walking along a brick path across the lawn in front of Jefferson’s Rotunda. He had been brought from London to teach mathematics only the November before, and still wondered at these neoclassical buildings set in an American forest, and at the utilitarian rowhouse dormitories, at the black slaves who dressed the students and carried their books to class. He taught arithmetic and algebra from Lacroix’s serviceable manual, trigonometry, geometry, the calculus differential and integral. Next term he was offering a course from Poisson’s Mechanics and Laplace’s Mécanique céleste.
He was a member of the Royal Society. At age twenty-seven he had distinguished himself with so brilliant a series of mathematical papers that he had been invited to come to Virginia. Jefferson’s plan was to bring the best minds of Europe to dwell in his academic village, as he liked to call it. And now Jefferson was dead, leaving his faculty of European geologists, chemists, linguists, historians, and mathematicians to carry on his work of civilizing Virginia and her sister states.
Professor Sylvester’s problem was one he had never before met. His students, all healthy, strapping young men from the richest of families, were illiterate. They knew nothing. He could scarcely understand a word they said. They came late to class, if at all, accompanied by their slaves. They talked with each other while Professor Sylvester lectured. The strangest thing about them was that they did not want to learn. Take Ballard. He was from Louisiana, some great plantation with hundreds of slaves. He was a handsome lad, beautifully dressed. Yet if called upon, he would say:
— I could answer that, Fesser, if I wanted to, but frankly I’m not minded to do so.
— Is this not insolence, Mr. Ballard?
— If you were a gentleman, Fesser, you’d know how to talk to one, now wouldn’t you?
A roar of laughter.
He had gone to the faculty. They told him that the students had reduced Jefferson to tears, that they had shot three professors already, that he had best deal with them as patiently as he knew how. There was no support to be expected from Charlottesville, which was of the opinion that the faculty was composed of atheists, Catholics, Jews, Jesuits. A Hungarian professor had had to leave town in the dark of night.
They dueled, and fought with Bowie knives. They drank themselves into insensibility. They came to class drunk. When Sylvester tried to find out why this was allowed, he was reminded that the students were aristocrats.
— Mr. Ballard, will you rehearse Euclid’s proofs for the Pythagorean theorem of the right triangle?
— Suck my dick.
He had had to ask what the words meant, and blushed. On the advice of a fellow professor he had bought a sword cane. One never knew. He was paid handsomely, but what worried him was that the papers he had been writing were harder and harder to finish. He was famous for averaging a mathematical paper a month. He knew that he had the reputation among his peers of having the most fertile genius of his generation. He was a Mozart of mathematics. He was finding it embarrassing to keep up his correspondence with the few men in Germany, France, and England who understood his work. These barbarian louts with their slaves and dueling pistols were making him sterile, and that tore at his soul more than their childish disrespect and leaden ignorance.
Why were they here, at a university, at least a university in name and intent? The French professor was slowly losing his mind, as none of his students had learned two words together of French. They gambled all night, knifed each other at dawn, drank until they puked.
And on this March afternoon Professor Sylvester found himself approaching the brothers Weeks, Bill and Al, or Mr. William and Mr. Alfred Weeks, gentlemen, as he must address them in class. They wore yellow and green frock coats, with flowery weskits. They were smoking long black cigars, and carried their top hats in their hands.
— You ain’t a-going to speak to us, Jewboy?
Thus William, the elder of the brothers.
— Sir! said Sylvester.
— Yes, Fesser Jew Cockney, said Alfred. If you’re going to teach rithmatic and that damn calc’lus shit to gentlemen, you ought to take off your hat to them when you meet us on the lawn, oughtn’t he, Bill?
— Sir! said Sylvester.
— May be, said William Weeks, that if we pulled the fesser’s Jew hat down over his Jew chin, he’d remember next time to speak to gentlemen.
Sylvester drew his sword from his cane with one graceful movement, and with another drove it into Alfred Weeks’s chest.
Alfred screamed.
William ran.
Alfred fell backward, groaning:
— O Jesus! I have met my fatal doom!
Professor Sylvester coolly sheathed his sword, tapped it on the brick walk to assure that it was firmly fitted in his cane, turned on his heel, and walked away. He went to his rooms, packed a single suitcase, and walked to the posthouse to wait for a stage to Washington. This he boarded, when it came.
Alfred Weeks writhed on the brick walk, crying like a baby, calling for instant revenge. William came back with a doctor, who was mystified.
— Have you been bit by a m’skeeter, son? They ain’t no wound. There’s a little tear in your weskit, as I can see, and a kind of scratch here on your chest, like a pinprick.
— You mean I ain’t killed dead?
Sylvester retrenched in New York City, where he practiced law. The mathematical papers began to be written again. He was called to the Johns Hopkins University, where he founded the first school of mathematics in the United States, where he arranged for the first woman to enter an American graduate school, where he argued with Charles Sanders Peirce, and where he introduced the Hebrew letters shin and teth into mathematical annotation.
Years later, the great Georg Cantor, remembering Sylvester, introduced the letter alef as a symbol of the transfinite.
3
As we descended westward, we saw the fen country on our right, almost all covered with water like a sea, the Michaelmas rains having been very great that year, they had sent down great floods of water from the upland countries, and those fens being, as may be very properly said, the sink of no less than thirteen counties; that is to say, that all the water, or most part of the water of thirteen counties falls into them.
The people of that place, which if they be born there they call the Breedlings, sometimes row from one spot to another, and sometimes wade.
In these fens are abundance of those admirable pieces of art called duckoys; that is to say, places so adapted for the harbor and shelter of wild fowl, and then furnished with decoy ducks, who are taught to allure and entice their kind to the places they belong to. It is incredible what quantities of wild fowl of all sorts they take in these duckoys every week during the season, duck, mallard, teal, and widgeon.
As these fens are covered with water, so I observed too that they generally at this latter part of the year appear also covered with fogs, so that when the downs and higher grounds of the adjacent country were gilded by the beams of the sun, the Isle of Ely looked as if wrapped up in blankets, and nothing to be seen, but now and then, t
he lanthorn or cupola of Ely Minster.
4
Now the bike that was idling down the sheepwalk to the cove as sweet as the hum of a bee was a Brough, we saw, Willy and I. The rider of it lifted his goggles, which had stenciled a mask of clean flesh on the dust and ruddle of his face. A long face with shy blue eyes it was, and his light hair was blown back. He wore a Royal Air Force uniform and was, like we judged, a private.
Willy asked if he was lost or had come on purpose, after naming the bike a Brough and the uniform RAF, showing that he knew both by sight.
— Right and right, the motorcyclist said.
He spoke Oxford.
— I’m here on purpose if I’ve found Tuke the painter’s, though I shan’t disturb him if he’s busy. I wrote him last week.
— Aye, the penny postal, I remembered. He was interested in it.
— Name’s Ross, the cyclist said.
— Sainsbury here, Willy said. My mate’s Georgie Fouracre.
We all nodded, fashionable-like.
— Mr. Tuke, I said, is down yonder, in the cove, with Leo Marshall, painting of him in and out of a dory. If your postal named today, he’ll be expecting you. We get the odd visitor from London, time to time, and some from up north and the continent.
So we rolled the motorbike down to Mr. Tuke and Leo. The canvas was on the easel, the dory on the strand, and Leo was drawing off worsted stockings, brown as a nut all over.
For all of his having the lines of a Dane, this airman Ross was uncommonly short. The crinkle of Mr. Tuke’s eyes showed how pleased he was. His blue beret and moustache, his French blouse and sailor’s breeks made one kind of contrast with the tight drab uniform Ross seemed to be bound in, with no give at all anywhere, and horse-blanket tough, and Leo’s want of a stitch made another.
Ross was interested in the picture on the easel, which was the one that got named Morning Splendour, two of us in a dory and me on the strand as naked as the day I came into the world. It hangs in Baden-Powell House, in London, bought by the Boy Scouts. The color harmonies are the same as those of the more famous August Blue that’s in the Tate.
This visit of Ross’s was a summer morning in 1922. And a nice little watercolor came of it, of Ross undressing for a swim. Except that it isn’t Ross.
What was it about him? He was at ease with us, as many are not, but he wasn’t at ease with himself. Tuke got on with his painting. He posed Leo with a leg up on the dory.
— And your hand on your knee, just so. Turn a bit so that the light runs gold down your chest and left thigh.
He explained to Ross how he made quick watercolor studies, light being fugitive.
— There’s nothing here, you know, but color. Light on a boy’s back can be as mercurial as light on the sea.
Ross, it turned out as they talked, knew a lot about painters. He said that Augustus John is a crack draftsman but that of light and air he knows nothing.
Tuke smiled, and then he laughed, with his head back.
— These modernists. Ah, yes.
— And Wyndham Lewis paints a world that has neither air nor light.
— Do you know Lewis?
— I’ve met him. I dropped over his garden wall one evening. He was drawing in a back room. I introduced myself. It gave him quite a start. A childish trick on my part, but it amused him immensely. He fancies eccentricity.
He mentioned Eric Kennington, Rothenstein, Lamb. At one point Tuke gave him a very hard stare.
When Willy and I undressed, horsing around, as was our way, Ross paced as he talked with Tuke, holding his left wrist and wrenching it, as if he were screwing it off and on. He talked about Mantegna’s bathing soldiers, which we had a print of in the studio, and a bathing place called Parson’s Pleasure at Oxford. He was like a professor with a subject. One thing reminded him of another, and he thought out loud about it.
— Oh yes, well, Eakins in America. No one can get near him, Tuke said.
— Things return, Ross said. Here in the autumn of time you are recovering a spring which we have forgotten in our culture, a spring we know about in Greece and in the late Middle Ages.
Did Tuke know a man named Huizinga? A Dutchman.
— Meredith, Tuke said, has a lovely scene of boys bathing, in Feverel.
It was Leo, stretching between poses, who asked Ross why, if he was as educated as he sounded, he wasn’t an officer.
— Cowardice, probably, Ross said.
— Leo didn’t mean that in an untoward way, did you, Leo?
— Lord, no.
The sea had taken on a wonderful green brightness, a shuffling of silver, and the sky was glorious in its blue. Willy had swum out, dog-paddling. Tuke had removed his scarf. I was beginning to ponder what this visit of the little soldier Ross was all about. Tuke seemed to know things about him that we didn’t, and to be keeping a secret. A confidence, perhaps I should say.
Willy did a devil dance on the sand, to get warm.
— We’ve often turned fair blue with cold for Mr. Tuke, he said.
In many of the pictures where we all appear to be toasty brown in fine sunlight we were actually freezing our ballocks off.
— Will you pose, Aircraftsman Ross? Tuke said abruptly. I covet your profile.
— I wonder, Ross said with a smile that was also a frown.
— We’re a kind of comitatus here, Tuke said. Friends, all. The vicar, who likes to visit at tea, usually when the boys are still half undressed, has his doubts about the propriety of it all.
— Eats his doubts in muffins, Leo said, and drowns ‘em in tea.
— He reads Housman, and Whitman.
— But brought back the Edward Carpenter we lent him without a word to say about it.
I liked the mischief in Ross’s eyes as he listened to all this.
— We are hypocritical dogs, we English.
— Decent, Leo said, patting his tranklements.
— A naked English lad is as decent as a calf, Willy said. Though the best painting I’ve posed for is fully clothed with Mary Baskins in the apple orchard.
— For which, Tuke said, I hope to be remembered, if at all, that and August Blue.
— It is insufferably egotistical, Ross said, unbuttoning his tunic, to assume that one cannot possibly be understood by another, or for that matter by people at large, but there is that residuum of privacy at our center which we do despair of exposing to the world’s mercy.
Tuke thought that over carefully, very interested, you could tell by the cock of his head.
— True, he said. We aren’t quite ready to admit that we are all alike, all human. And in our sameness we are wonderfully different.
His tunic open on an Aertex vest, Ross sat to unwind his leggings and to pull off his glossy hobnailed boots.
— I’m wondering, he said, what I’ve come here to find. I’m forever, I think, looking for one thing or another. When I first saw your painting, Tuke, I recognized a fellow spirit, and life is not so long that we can afford to put off meeting one’s kin.
He shed his trousers, which had a complexity of buttons and flaps. Naked as Willy, Leo, and I, he seemed little more than a boy with a shock of hair and shy blue eyes. There was something wrong with his balls, as if they hadn’t come down properly, or were stunted.
— Sit on the sand, Tuke said. I can do a crayon study fairly quickly.
— The sun feels good.
— Have you been drawn by any of these artists you’ve talked about?
— John. He did me in pencil. Kennington, pastel.
— Would it be a liberty, Leo said, as I had wanted to say, to pry into how a private in the RAF is so up on painters, sitting for them and all?
— There goes Leo again, Tuke said, drawing the thinnest possible line between good manners and intelligent curiosity.
— Oh, I don’t mind, Ross grinned. The answer, Leo my fine fellow, is that I’m not Aircraftsman Ross 352087. The Brough is real, and the 352087 is real, and the uniform is real enoug
h for the RAF. For the rest, I was born an impostor.
— Look straight ahead, and slightly up, Tuke said. I do hope the vicar doesn’t turn up. He’s well up on things, if you see what I mean.
— I don’t, I said without thinking.
Tuke and Ross exchanged smiles.
— He would most probably recognize Private Ross.
— You’re playing a teasing game with us, I said. Vicar, of all people! He didn’t know Lord Gower when he was here with Frank or that French writer with the square face.
— Ross is different, Tuke said.
— Oh, I’m not afraid of the vicar, Ross said. I’ve got being an impostor down to an art. I’ve posed for a painter who didn’t recognize me in the street the next day. The trick is to feel that you’re nobody, and act accordingly.
— You’ve got to tell us, Leo said. You’ve gone too far not to.
— But, said Ross, there’s really nothing to tell. I could tell you that my name is Chapman, which happens to be true, and you’re none the wiser, are you? Things in this world are like that. A bloke whose name you know as Ross turns out to be named Chapman. It’s worth Fanny Fuck All, as we say in barracks. Georgie Fouracre is Georgie Fouracre. You know who you are. You will beget strapping boys like yourself, and sit by your own fireside, you and your good wife.
— Mary Baskins, Leo said, more fool her.
— You lost your hopes with her by belching in church. Sounded like a bullfrog, and Vicar lost his place in Deuteronomy.
— But Vicar would recognize Chapman here, from the papers, from the pictures, from knowing him?
— I’ve said quite enough, Tuke said. I’ve got the profile. What about a bathe, what say?
Tuke was out of his clothes in the shake of a lamb’s tail. Ross swam well, effortlessly. It was Willy who said later that he did everything with style, as if there was the one right way of doing a thing.
The Guy Davenport Reader Page 21