Apples and Pears

by Guy Davenport

  I cannot pretend not to know the painter: I am the Philosopher in a Rietveld Chair, and I posed for the elder in Circassian dress in the Fourier series. Indeed, in the course of encouraging this young painter, I advised him to elude the enticements and snares of publicity. He has agreed, not because my word has any authority, but because his dedication to his work is absolute. Goethe noted that when a man has done something extraordinary, the world enters into a conspiracy to ensure that he doesn’t do it again. Epicurus’ advice to live unknown is wisdom with more point to it now than then. The telephone, the interviewer, mail from importunate strangers, the collector of acquaintances, invitations into society, moths around the glamor of fame: Sirens, all, indifferent to the shipwrecks they cause. We have seen poets murdered by adulation, writers smothered, actors sent into a spin. Publicity is a blowfly. One of the few details of Shakespeare’s blank biography is a note declining a drinking party, pleading that he had a raging toothache. One imagines rather that he spent the evening writing.

  Culture makes experience possible. Experience does not deposit culture, its symbols, or its tone. Experience follows culture as an orchestra a score. Culture is tacit, unconsciously learned, invisible to the fish in its water. All events are echoes.

  Mondriaan’s Dutch flatness and linearity were once Vermeer’s walls, Rembrandt’s blank spaces. Sander carries forward Rembrandt’s whole figures on an integral ground.

  For every lack of civilization we pay dearly with boredom, outrage, death.

  Apple and pear come into history when there are orchards, brick walls, hive houses as in Anatolia, storks nesting, stretching their wings most Netherlandishly on white mud roofs, houses with mazes of warren rooms as at Phaistos whose apples Sappho sings, barge ports on the brown Indus and yellow Euphrates. People who hung dolls of the twins Castor and Polydeukes in the flowering pear, and Leda in the apple white with blossom.

  Apple and pear, brother and sister.

  It was in The Netherlands that Fourier saw the fields of tulips which the Little Hordes were to resemble.

  Dressing the littles in Magyar finery, to pose for Sander, is like Rembrandt and his trunk of costumes for getting Juffrouw Peperkorrel down the canal onto canvas as Ruth or Naomi. Sander, who calls Fourier a sweet idiot and agrees with Grietje that the Harmony sounds like nothing so much as a troop of retarded Boy Scouts inventing Nationalsozialismus, is nevertheless taken with the vision. A subject matter, he says. After eighty years of bony French women in footbaths and Braque’s mandolin and Picasso’s guitar and Morandi’s kitchen table and Klee’s puppet theatre, we need a subject matter. Balthus got through it all and came out into landscapes as beautiful as the fields of Heaven. Picasso ended like Goya, seeing that what we have to stave off the seven sins which are death to the soul is practically nothing: some pages of poetry in Greek and Latin, a round of fiddles playing Bach, a Cezanne and an Henri Rousseau every other century, mint and grass underfoot, the cold sea, the burning sun.

  Hans on a Quagga. Naked but for Mongol boots, blue neckerchief. Snaffle bit, yellow reins, no saddle, though the quagga is shod. De heer Floris depicts a member of Fourier’s Little Horde. The hordes are organized into forward and rear guards, right and left wingtips and wings, with a pivot in the center. This quagga rider would be a forward scout. His nudity bespeaks the season and his virginity. The bandana is an insignia of rank as well as a mop for sweat. The boots are for walking. Quaggas (not yet extinct in Fourier’s lifetime) were untameable. Fourier imagined that children in the Harmony could tame them. They would keep, however, a measure of their wildness. Hence the excitement and glory of their belonging to twelve-year-olds. The model is the engineer Bruno Keirinckx’s son Hans.

  Diogenes with Fourteen Dogs. The deployment of so many dogs, each with a distinct character, gait, and attitude, with the philosopher striding among them, staff in hand, seems a conscious following of Hokusai’s handling of figures on a white ground in the Manga.

  16 MESSIDOR

  Postcard from Sander: Hei! Paris! You once promised. I could come over for a while with the wee bit encouragement from you if you’re still speaking to me I mean Broeder en Zuster is to schande roepen over you were cool enough about it in your letter for which thanks, good man uw liefhebbende S.

  Two Balthuses in the Centre Pompidou: the one with the old hag combing out a naked girl’s hair, a fully, rather formally dressed young man sitting beside them. Because of Sander I read them as brother and sister, though Balthus does not hide meanings. And an enormous one of his Japanese woman, his wife I think. I will have to live with it awhile to see it. Clots of middle-aged American tourists looking at everything with hard, suspicious eyes. Multimedia, Mildred, all of this stuff is multimedia. And an American man looking at a large Dufy with utter disgust.

  LILY, Rossini contralto, dove or egret, monarch butterfly, spinning, virginity, Raphael, white, longing, anarchy, girlhood of the Virgin, Joan of Arc.

  SUNFLOWER, trumpet, lion, wasp, the smithy, moral grandeur, Vincent, yellow, male orgasm after fugal intensity, monarchy, Sparta, Alexander.

  PRIVET, harpsichord, hen, midge, needlework, patient diligence, Corot, pale green, sentimental solicitude, a good aunt, the early XVIIIth Century, Marianne North.

  DAISY, a country jig, bee, carpentry, girlish titillation, Denis, golden brown, l’embrassement de deux jeunes filles, the management of a dairy, Huizinga’s XIVth Century, Chaucer.

  TULIP, drum, camel, ladybug, glass-blowing, genial arrogance, Rubens, purple, eroticism as gourmandise, zamindary, the Caliphate of the Umayyads, Haroun al-Raschid.

  ZINNIA, Scott Joplin, Szechuan blue-combed copper-tailed bantam cock, Viceroy butterfly, arc welding, passionate exuberance, Matisse, pepper red, wild Gypsy humping behind the hawthorn in an odor of mint and sweat, feudalism, the Sicilian Vespers, Maria Callas.

  To Fourier’s grave, through Celine territory to get there. Si la série distribue les harmonies, et les attractions sont proportionelles aux destinées, some genius of poetic justice must establish the harmonies, or some mathematician find them and show how they generate (like the other Fourier’s series), and a more open awareness of attraction and destiny must become a social commonplace. It is a metaphysical intuition that can be traced either to Herakleitos or to the structure of primitive thought as Levi-Strauss has anatomized it: a symbolic language preferred by children, illiterate societies, and artists, as he has said.

  PHALLUS IMPUDICUS, Bessie Smith at her raunchiest, billy goat in rut, flea, sculpture, male pride of being, Picasso, olive rose of glans, omnidirectional zaadgulp, democracy, the cult of Ta’angaroa, Rabelais, Archilochos, Deens jeugdherberg, Marseilles shore-leave.

  17 MESSIDOR

  Mouthbreathing German tourists with vacant eyes and macaque teeth clattering their goose gabble in front of monuments to Parisians who fell in the liberation of the city. The war! they cackle, ja! Have seen a busload of them so gabbling and giggling at the monument to Jean Moulin at Chartres. They sit in restaurants with their legs out to trip the waiters, push their chairs back to take up all the space they think they’re entitled to. Nobody else exists for them. Suspicious, stupid, and arrogant, they followed their grimping, mincing Hitler like an hysterical woman who has at last found the occasion and means to throw a tearing fit that will destroy everything, everything there is, every uncomprehended thing that others have made with genius and kept with love. And they did it in the stupidity of assuming that afterwards they could wallow in self-pity for what it cost them, and gorge on chocolates and beer.

  To Les Belles Lettres, which has all the Budé editions, right around the corner from where Gertrude Stein lived. Some nice work being done on Plutarch. On into the Luxembourg, memory upon memory. Gide sitting on a bench, warming his old bones in winter light. Donkey cart full of toy boats for sailing on the pond. Vistas. Just outside, the deaf-and-dumb school where Itard taught, and where Victor the Wild Boy of Aveyron refused to leave the realm of the animal.

  Brie
fkaart from Kaatje: I tell Hansje and Saartje you are staying in the Eiffeltoren, throw parties for all the Parisiennes over 15 and under 3 5 in the Triomboog, all in black-lace panties (They’ll catch a cold, is Hansje’s solemn opinion) and eat snails in the Concordplaats. They believe every word of it. Bruno (just home and out of his clothes already) says tell you Zoetemelk can’t lose. Wish we were there too. Those beautiful boulevards. Lascivious thoughts from the four of us, which by the littles means toffee and licorice in handfuls though I’m not so certain.

  Keirinckx sends this delightful lyric, a Shaker hymn from America that an architectural historian at MIT sent him a Xerox of. He wants me to translate it. Says it is Rietveld, de Stijl, and my philosophy all in one.

  Love the inward, new creation,

  Love the glory that it brings;

  Love to lay a good foundation

  In the line of outward things.

  Love a life of true devotion,

  Love your lead in outward care;

  Love to see all hands in motion,

  Love to take your equal share.

  Love to love what is belovéd,

  Love to hate what is abhorr’d;

  Love all earnest souls that covet

  Lovely love and its reward.

  Love repays the lovely lover,

  And in lovely ranks above

  Lovely love shall live forever,

  Loving lovely loved love.

  18 MESSIDOR

  A conversation with some American students outside the Pompidou (they approached me, wanting to know what the great trussed and beamed glass building was) leads me to speculate that just as (so Renan charged) Catholicism cretinized French children (one knows what his hyperbole means, our fundamentalist doppers do the same), so it is now the young who cretinize themselves. Manners, none; grace, none; education, none. These were university students: they’d never heard of the Marais, the Commedia dell’ Arte, of Racine, of Les Halles as was, of Georges Pompidou. I was foolish enough to sit them down over a drink and attempt a thumbnail sketch of the neighborhood. I showed them the trompe I’œil façade and had a devil of a time getting them to understand it. It didn’t occur to them to ask who I was, what my nationality might be: I think they thought that all Europe can speak English if it wants to; that is, that we can talk, our own languages being a quaint affectation. They are neither feral, like Itard’s Victor, nor culturally alien, like an Eskimo, but nonconversant with their own culture, analogous to slum urchins, except that the ones I was talking to are from well-to-do American families. They make a curious mistake: they assume that what Europe has to show them will be instantly intelligible and meaningful to them. They come at all because their ancestors came, but their ancestors, earnest New Englanders, idealistic Middle Westerners, swotted up their subject before they set out, and arrived knowing a Rembrandt from a Titian, architectural styles, history, places, philosophy, literature. These kids know nothing, and their French is Ningre Tongo.

  There were mimes while we talked. The standard blue-jeaned barefoot French boys with May Revolution blind white masks. Torsos bare today, brown as gingerbread, innocent navels neatly punctuating suave mesial dents. The plot, as before, of provocation and face-down: must ask Gerard if he knows where it comes from. Venice, Crete, Sardinia? A leans forward on one leg, stretching the other behind him like a cat that’s finished its nap and is planning to prowl. B backs away, a Javanese dancer’s steps, feet turned outward. A stalks, B retreats. Then both leap, and the roles reverse. B stalks, A retreats. The things these French think up! says one of the American girls. But what they’re doing, I say, is a thousand or so years old. There were mimes here when Hadrian was emperor. When was that? Roman as in Rome, Italy? A circles B, nose of mask to nose of mask. Little hops, tentative touching of feet. A’s hand spread on B’s midriff, slid upward to throat, slid downward to inside jeans. Hey! B retreats, dancing indignant, stomping, high-kneed. Stops, dreams with swaying head, repeating A’s caress with his own hand, up torso to throat, down torso and inside jeans. I think this is going to be gross. A struts around in a circle, straight-legged, with military swing of the arm not holding his mask to his face. B droops, bewildered. He sits cross-legged, leans his forehead to the cobblestones. A strides to him and stands so that when B raises his head it is caught between A’s knees. A springs away and does a little dance on his heels. He’s dropping his pants and not a God’s thing on underneath! A stands charmingly naked, his jeans around his ankles. B looks up, stands, approaches, twirling around with every step. When he is mask to mask with A, he unzips his fly, pushes his jeans down to midthigh. One of the American boys looks away. Jesus, he says. A and B rock their heads metronomically. Both step back. B drops his jeans all the way, pushes them aside with his foot, and A copies him. They turn their backs to one another and walk in reverse until they meet butt to butt. Each reaches a hand around to the other’s tummy. They unmask: a nice touch. They pass their masks over their heads, swapping. As the masks are identical, the gesture is keenly mysterious. Can you figure this out, Alice? I’m not trying. A rolls around B, chests and genitals briefly together, until they are again butt to butt. B rolls around A. Can you explain this? one of the American girls asked me. What’s to explain? I said, and she gave me a hard look. I dearly wanted her to talk about the mimes, but she misunderstood me. A and B swap masks over their heads again. Nice Gaulish darkeyed flatcheeked faces they have, as impassive as their masks. They pivot suddenly and stand front to front, each with a hand on the other’s backside. Forehead to forehead, the masks are thereby held on, freeing hands. These they insert between them, against each other’s pubic hair. Cute, said American Alice. A and B reverse the gestures that brought them close, hands back to the chins of their masks. They pivot, walk backward with locked knees to their jeans, remove their masks, and bow. They entrouser to applause and begin working the crowd for coins tossed into their masks.

  19 MESSIDOR

  Boezemvriend Adriaan: We have been in the Combarelles cave at Les Eyzies and I know what an artist is. He’s the one scratches the elk and horse and cow on the wall. Simple as that, mijn kameraad kunstenaar. Some hunt, some cook, some sew clothes, some incise shapes on walls. You draw words, I draw lines, making us kin even more than you finding me under the jeugdcrimineel, under the clown, and when we hit Amsterdam you’re in for more than puppy frolicking, Grietje says so. The reindeer drinking at the pool, the wildcat marking his territory, the solemn fuzzy rhinoceros (spelling by Grietje who, klikken van iemand nabij, is very Modigliani, spelled between a yipe and gasp, with hand by Tiziaan, she thinks he may be spelled, followed by a woef!) and the lumbering bear. Anyway, we’re dossed down here in an ultramodern blue Danish tent, complete with the Danes who own it and kameraadlijk took us in. There’s a Jeugdbeweging Vergadering and Hippy Jamboree here at Sarlat that’s all mixed in with Boy Scouts and a film festival and the odd toothy English tourist and gaping Americans, lots of unwashed Swedes with guitars and brainy French kids talking Structureelisme. Our two Danes, Pier my age, and Tom his maat, a verbluffend 15 with charming big blue eyes and a frisky long opkrul of eyelash, so that Grietje says her instincts are fifty-fifty between changing his diapers and seducing him, latched onto us at a brasserie on the square, both brown and goodlooking and under each other’s skin, hands all over each other. Pure accident, as these things always are, that we fell in with them: two places at our barrel-head of a table on the trottoir. They oh most decidedly gave off what you call an inspanning of healthy fresh Danish sexiness, what you say I give off as a good dog gives off dogginess, well the very doggy beweeglijkheid of these two got through the solid bone of even my head (I see your smile) though Grietje the Explainer says it was my legs, little gymbroekje, and handsome chin with a day’s stubble of beard on it that buckled their knees and made them run a temperature. Grietje makes these things up, you understand, wheels whirring in her brain. It was she who after the standard exchange of origins and destinations asked if they were lovers, a
nd then Grietjelijk, admiring, sympathetic, and we the new generation can discuss anything, can’t we, she danced into what do they do and how many times a day and what does it feel like. Let us show you was what Tom de jonger said with a smile like a lighthouse sweeping fullface, and Grietje the goose gave me to them, all heart, and Pier said come live with us in our tent and Tom said he would love me up unforgettably well if I wanted him to. This, liefje Adriaan, to jelly your mind, as if you weren’t perfectly aware of what I’m scheming, een plattegrond min of meer Fourieristisch, ha! Anyway, we knocked our drinks back and walked up into a hilly meadow through an orchard (stone path, wildflowers, a tolerant cow) above a Boy Scout camp on one side and the orchard on the other, to their trim ample blue tent all aluminum tubes bent into elbows and nylon ropes and backpacks with forty pockets and snaps and zippers and insignia patches with little green fir trees and orange sunbursts and the Gemini buddies from the horoscope and even one with a circle of Greek saying that where two come together in love God is with them, in between I suppose. Grietje copied this for you. A tent is such a cozy place, like your cabin. So, to get on, here was Grietje babbling about the beauty of boys and golden friendships, de jonger Tom dispensed with his jeans, sapperloot! and his briefs (elastic frazzled, seam ripping in the pod) and flopped out like 18 cm of suntanned Danish weewee, hemeltje. Grietje’s Modigliani pose has changed to Klimt, and I’m reading this to her as I write not only for the spelling but to see how to catalogue the doings and still have you speak to us again. In a word, Grietje the stinker gave me to these two pure-hearted Danes raised on buttermilk and granola, and helped them skin me to adamskostuum. Pier de ouder has a nice body, gymnast’s chest, tummy like a plank, and an outsized thumper with the same long backslope to the glans as mine. Grietje says add the knobby bulbing around the eye. Are you still there? Ach and oh me, but we horsed around and swapped kisses. Grietje shed every stitch and we had a can of worms going, decidedly juicy and unprejudiced. I know, blushes flashing off and on, that this sounds like before you civilized me, but I think it isn’t, as Pier is writing a thesis about the Wandervogel kids way back before the wars, for some theoloog in Kopenhagen, and Tom aside from being dol op his and everybody else’s peester, is a poet and botanist and is a sweet person. Here they come, back from a dip in the river. More, later. Liefhebbende, Sander.