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Apples and Pears
And Other Stories
Guy Davenport
To the Memory of
FRANÇOIS MARIE CHARLES FOURIER [1772–1837]
Contents
THE BOWMEN OF SHU
FIFTY-SEVEN VIEWS OF FUJIYAMA
THE CHAIR
APPLES AND PEARS:
Het Erewhonisch Schetsboek: Messidor-Vendémiaire 1981
JOOP ZOETEMELK GAGNE LE MAILLOT JAUNE
EREWHONIAN APPLE, NEW HARMONY PEAR
QUAGGA
THE VESTMENTS OF THE BAND
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
since Eden gardens labor, For
series distributes harmonies, attraction Governs
destinies.
Louis Zukofsky, “A”–23
THE BOWMEN OF SHU
27 DECEMBER 1914
Here we are picking the first fern shoots and saying when shall we get back to our country, away from das Trommelfeuer, the gunners spent like winded dogs, white smoke and drizzle of sparks blowing across barbed wire in coils, the stink of cordite. 27 December 1914. Avalanches of shrapnel from field guns firing point-blank with fuses set at zero spray down in gusts, an iron windy rain. Here we are because we have the huns for our foemen. It’s with pleasure, dear Cournos, that I’ve received news from you. We have no comfort because of these Mongols. You must have heard of my whereabouts from Ezra to whom I wrote some time ago. Since then nothing new except that the weather has had a change for the better. We grub the soft fern shoots, the rain has stopped for several days and with it keeping the watch in a foot deep of liquid mud, the crazy duckwalks, hack and spit of point guns.
HOOGE RICHEBOURG GIVENCHY
The smell of the dead out on the wire is all of barbarity in one essence. Also sleeping on sodden ground. The frost having set it, we have the pleasure of a firm if not warm bed, and when you have turned to a warrior you become hardened to many evils. When anyone says return the others are full of sorrow. Anyway we leave the marshes on the fifth January for a rest behind the lines, and we cannot but look forward to the long forgotten luxury of a bundle of straw in a warm barn or loft, also to that of hot food, for we are so near the enemy and they behave so badly with their guns that we dare not light kitchen fire within two or three miles, so that when we get the daily meal at one in the morning it is necessarily cold, but alike the chinese bowmen in Ezra’s poem we had rather eat fern shoots than go back now, and whatever the suffering may be it is soon forgotten and we want the victory.
SCULPTURAL ENERGY IS THE MOUNTAIN
Sculptural feeling is the appreciation of masses in relation. Sculptural ability is the defining of these masses by planes. The Paleolithic Vortex resulted in the decoration of the Dordogne caverns. Early stone-age man disputed the earth with animals.
LES FALLACIEUX DÉTOURS DU LABYRINTHE
The rifles, crack! thuck! whip at the bob of helmets of the boches in the trenches across the desolation of an orchard. If they stir too busily at a point, our mitrailleuses rattle at them, their tracers bright as bees in a garden even in this dead light. With my knife I have carved the stock of a German rifle into a woman with her arms as interlocked rounded triangles over her head, her breasts are triangles, her sex, her thighs. Like the Africans I am constrained by the volume of my material, the figure to be found wholly within a section of trunk. De Launay handles the piece with understanding eyes and hands. He is an anthropologist working on labyrinths, and has a major paper prepared for the Revue Archéologique. I am, I tell him, a sculptor, descended from the masons who built Chartres. We have seen a cathedral burn, its lead roof melting in on its ruin. De Launay sees a pattern in this hell. We are the generation to understand the world, the accelerations of the turn of vortices, how their energy spent itself, all the way back to the Paleolithic (he tells me about Cartailhac and Teilhard and Breuil). But our knowledge, which must come from contemplation and careful inspection, has collided with a storm, a vortex of stupidity and idiocy. His tracing of the labyrinth from prehistory forward has put him in a real labyrinth of trenches, its Minotaur the Germans, that cretinous monster of pedantic dullness. Yet, Henri, he says, we are learning the Paleolithic in a way that was closed to us as savant and sculpteur. His smile is deliciously ironic in a face freckled with mud spatter, his eyes lively under the brim of his helmet.
MAÇON
How veddy interesting, Miss Mansfield said, sipping tea, when I told her I was descended from the craftsmen who carved Chartres. I could have died of shame, Sophie screeched at me as soon as we were outside. These people, she said, will have no respect for you. I am of the Polish gentry, which is hard enough to get them to understand. Very much the pusinka.
SMOKING RIVERS OF MUD
We say will we be let to go back in October. There is no ease in royal affairs. We have no comfort. Our sorrow is bitter. But we would not return to our country. What flower has come into blossom. We have time to busy ourselves with art, reading poems, so that intellectually we are not yet dead nor degenerate. Whose chariot, the General’s horses, his horses even, are tired. They were strong. We have no rest. Three battles a month. By heaven, his horses are tired. The generals are on them, the soldiers are by them. If you can write me all about the Kensington colony, the neo-greeks and neo-chinese. Does the Egoist still appear? What does it contain? My best wishes for a prosperous and happy 1915. Yours Sincerely Henri Gaudierbrzeska.
THE NORTH BORDER. BLUE MOUNTAINS. BARBARIANS.
The horses are well trained. The generals have ivory arrows and quivers ornamented with fishskin. The enemy is swift. We must be careful. When we set out, the willows were drooping with spring. We come back in the snow. We are hungry and thirsty, our mind is full of sorrow. Who will know of our grief? The newspapers say that our trench labyrinths are comfortable, that the British throw grenades with the ease of men accustomed to games of sport from their infancy. Tiger in the bamboo. Thunder from beyond the mountain. How and when we shall survive who knows? Stink of cordite. Rain of ash.
THE IMP
Stands in mischief, knees flexed to scoot.
DAS LABYRINTH
Between Neuville-St.-Vaast to the north and Arras to the south, and Mt. St.-Eloi and Vimy east and west, lay the underground maze of tunnels, mines, fortresses in slant caves, some as deep as fifty feet, which the Germans called The Labyrinth, as insane a nest of armaments and men as military strategy ever conceived. Its approaches were seeded with deathtraps and mine fields. It was invisible to aerial observation. Even its designers had forgotten all the corridors, an Irrgarten lit with pale battery-powered lights. Foch himself came to oversee its siege. The British hacked their way toward Lille, the French toward Lens, past The Labyrinth. The offensive began 9 May 1915. Out from Arras, past Ste.-Catherine, 7e Compagnie, 129e Infanterie, IIIc Corps, Capitaine Ménager the Commandant, marched on the road to Vimy Ridge, Corporal Henri Gaudier at the head of his squad. Except for mad wildflowers in sudden patches, their tricolor was the only alleviation in the grey desert of craters, burnt farms, a blistered sky.
THE SOLDAT’S REMARK TO GENERAL APPLAUSE
Fuck all starters of wars up the arse with a handspike dipped in tetanus.
BRANCUSI TO GAUDIER
Les hommes nus dans la plastique ne sont pas si beaux que les crapauds
.
THE WOLF
Is my brother, the tiger my sister. They think eat, they think grass, bamboo, forest, plain, river. Their regal indifference to my drawing them, on my knees outside their cages, is the indifference of the stars. I feel abased, ashamed, worthless in their presence. But I close, a little, the gap between me and them, in catching some of their grace. And afterwards, they will say, He drew the wolf, the deer, the cat. His sculpture was of stag and birds, of men and women in whom there was animal grace.
THE CATHEDRAL BURNT IN FRONT OF MY EYES
Rheims. My Lieutenant sent me to repair some barbed wire between our trenches and the enemy’s. I went through the mist with two fellows. I was on my back under the wire when zut! out comes the moon. The boches could see me et alors! pan pan pan! Their fire cut through the tangle above me, which came down and snared me. I sawed it with my knife in a dozen places. The detail got back to the trench, said I was done for, and with the lieutenant’s concurrence they blasted away at the boches, who returned the volleys, and then the artillery joined in, with me smack between them. I crawled flat on my stomach back to our trench, and brought the repair coil of barbed wire and my piece with me. The lieutenant could not believe his eyes. When the ruckus quieted down, I went back out, finished the job, and got back at 5 a.m. I have a gash, from the wire, in my right leg, and a bullet nick in my right heel.
LA ROSALIE
The bayonet, so called because we draw it red from the round guts of pig-eyed Germans.
FONT DE GAUME
A hundred and fifty meters of blind cave drilled a million years ago by a river underground into the soft green hills at Les Eyzies de Tayac in the Val Dordogne, in which, some forty thousand years ago, hunters of Magdalenian times painted and engraved the immediate reaches with a grammar of horses and bison, and deeper up the bore, mammoths, reindeer, cougars, human fetuses, human hands, a red rhinoceros, palings of lines recording the recurrence of some event, masks or faces, perhaps of the wind god, the rain god, the god of the wolves, and at the utmost back depth, horse and mountain cat.
NIGHT ATTACK
We crept through a wood as dark as pitch, fixed bayonets, and pushed some 500 yards amid fields until we came to a wood. There we opened fire and in a bound we were along the bank of the road where the Prussians stood. We shot at each other some quarter of an hour at a distance of 12 to 15 yards and the work was deadly. I brought down two great giants who stood against a burning heap of straw.
SOLDAT
I have been fighting for two months and I can now gauge the intensity of life.
DOGFIGHT
Enid Bagnold, horse-necked, square-jawed, nymph-eyed, finally came to sit, after weeks of postponing, Sophie sniffy with jealousy, suspicion, fright. The day was damp and cold. Gaudier lumped the clay on its armature and set to, nimble-fingered, eyes from the Bagnold to the clay. His nose began to bleed. He worked on. The Bagnold said, Your nose is bleeding. I know, said Gaudier. In that sack on the wall behind you there’s something to stop it. She looked in the bag: clothes. Some male and dirty, some female and dirty. Rancid shirts, mildewed stockings. She chose a pair of Sophie’s drawers and tied them around Gaudier’s face, to soak up, at least, some of the blood, which had reddened his neck and smock. Lower, he said, I can’t see. Take your pose again, quickly, quickly. She dared not look at him, wild hair, bright black eyes ajiggle above a ruin of bloody rags. The light was going swiftly, the room dark and cold. He worked on, as if by touch. And then a barrage of roars pierced the air. A dogfight outside. My God, she said. Tilt your chin, he said. Keep your neck tall. She tried the pose, wondering how he could see her in the dark. The dogfight raged the louder. Gaudier went to the window. The streetlamp at that moment came on, and she watched him with the fascination of horror, masked as he was in bloody cloth, staring out at the dogfight. He watched it with dark, interested eyes, his hands white with clay against the dirty window. Monsieur Gaudier! she said, are you quite in command of yourself? You may go, he said.
PARTRIDGES
Horses are worn out in three weeks, die by the roadside. Dogs wander, are destroyed, and others come along. With all the destruction that works around us, nothing is changed, even superficially. Life is the same strength, the moving agent that permits the small individual to assert himself. The bursting shells, the volleys, wire entanglements, projectors, motors, the chaos of battle do not alter in the least the outlines of the hill we are besieging. A company of partridges scuttles along before our very trench.
FRITH STREET
Sat on the floor at Hulme’s widow’s while he talked bolt upright in his North Country farmer’s body and stuttered through his admiration and phlegmatic defense of Epstein’s flenite pieces, so African as to be more Soninke made than Soninke derived, feck undity in all its so to speak milky bovinity (and Marsh clasping his hands, as if in prayer, and giving responses, teddibly vital isn’t it I mean to say and the phallic note, with Ezra cutting his wicked eye at me from his Villon face). Sat with the godlike poet Brooke and the catatonically seriousMiddleton Murray, and the devout, Tancred, Flint, FitzGerald, and the fair-minded skeptics, Wadsworth and Nevinson. The ale was good and Hulme chose his words with booming precision and attack.
RODIN
Conceive form in depth. Under all the planes there is a center in the stone. All things alive swell out from a center. Observe relief, not outline: relief determines the contour. Let emotion stream to your center as water up a root, as sunlight into a leaf. Love, hope, tremble, live.
PARIS 1910
The chisel does not cut the stone, but crushes it. It bites. You brush away, blow away the dust the fine blade has crumbled. The mind drifts free as you work, and memories play at their richest when the attention is engaged with the stone. There was Paris, there was the decision, there was Zosik. England and Germany have nothing like the Parisian cafe where of a spring evening you sit outside making a glass of red wine last and last. It was at the Café Cujas that he met another stranger to the city, a poet, a Czech poet—Hlávaček? Svobodová? Bezruč? Dyk?—who, talking of Neruda, of Rimbaud, sorted out Gaudier’s array of ambitions and focused them upon sculpture. Rodin! Phidias! Michelangelo! It was the one art that involved the heroic, the bringing of a talent to its fullest maturity to do anything at all. It was an art that demanded the flawless hand, a sense of perfection in the whole, a pitiless and totally demanding art. But it had not been to the Czech that he had announced his commitment, but to the woman Sophie, not as an intention or experiment but as a road he was upon, boldly striding out. Moi? Je suis sculpteur. She, for her part, was a writer, a novelist. She had never shown anyone her work, it was too personal, too vulnerable before an unfeeling and uncomprehending world. Night after night he heard her story, not really listening, as it was her face, her eyes, her spirit that he loved, coveting her her maturity—she was thirty-nine, he a green and raw seventeen—and her story was a kind of badly constructed Russian novel. She was a Pole, from near Cracow. Her father threw away a considerable inheritance on gaming and shameless girls. She was the only daughter of nine children, and she was made to feel the disgrace of it, as she was useless as a worker, would have to be provided with a dowry in time. Her brothers called her names, and reproached her with her inferior gender. At sixteen she was put out to work, as her family was tired of supporting her as a burden. They found an old man, a Jew, and offered her to him as a wife. But he, like any other, demanded a dowry with her. This threw Papa Brzesky into a fit. A Jew want a dowry! There were three other attempts to marry her off. Two were likely business for the undertaker. The other was a sensitive young man of broken health whom she loved, the apple of his mother’s eye. He came courting and played cards with Mama Brzeska, who one day accused him of cheating and chased him out of the house. Then her father went bankrupt. Sophie made her way to Cracow, hoping to study at the university, but she was neither qualified to enter it nor able to pay the tuition it asked. She came to Paris, took a nursemaid’s job, and was dr
iven away by the snide remarks of the other servants, who were ill-bred. She went from menial job to menial job until her health, never robust, gave way. Then she was taken on as a nurse to a rich American family about to return to Philadelphia. She was to look after a ten-year-old boy and his sister. The boy died soon after. The sister begged to hear dirty stories, and when Sophie refused to tell her any, complained to her parents that the nurse bored her to tears. Entertain the child, commanded the parents, so Sophie told her dirty stories, and was promptly fired for moral turpitude and kicked out without a reference. She found refuge in an orphanage in New York run by nuns. They farmed her out as a nanny. Fathers made advances to her, which she could have accepted and gotten rich. But all this time she kept her body pure and virgin. What money she could manage to save she sent to her youngest brother in Poland, enabling him to emigrate to America. He came, was disappointed, worked as a garbage boy for a hotel, accused Sophie of having tricked him, and would not speak to her ever afterward. A nursing job came along that took her to Paris again. Here she was destitute, and returned to Poland, where she was taken in by a rich uncle. This uncle was a widower and lived in sin with her cousin, whom he had enticed into his bed by telling her that Sophie had often done so. The shock of this lie unstrung her nerves and made a wreck of her composure for the rest of her life. Her brothers taunted her with having gone to America and failed to come back rich. She took up a life of dissipation. If no one believed in her virtue, why keep it? But dissipation undermined her constitution, and she had to recuperate at Baden, little as she could afford it. She then fell in love with a wealthy manufacturer aged fifty-three. He was witty, bright, kind, and in possession of a keen appreciation of the beauties of Nature. He courted her for a year without asking for her hand. When she tried to bring matters to a head, they had a fight that nearly sent them both to the hospital and thence to their graves. In this fracas he disclosed to her that he loved another, by whom he already had a son, and wished to remain free in case the other ever agreed to be his wife. She felt that her sanity was going. Her rich lover paid for her recuperation at a home in the country. She wrote him daily; he answered none of her letters. She would contemplate for hours the most painless means of doing away with herself. She returned to her family in Poland, where they taunted her with her failure, her age, her pretensions, her ugliness. She made her way to Paris again, and began to observe with fascination the faun-like young man who came every evening to the Bibliothèque Ste.-Geneviève to read books of anatomy. They met on the steps one evening at closing time, and walked along the Seine. She could scarcely believe it when he said he was in love with her.
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