Apples and Pears

by Guy Davenport

  The Olympics are reborn in Rousseau’s Les Joueurs de Ball. It was his sense that games are played, as at Elis, in a clearing in the wood, that the players are friends, that they are playing for the fun of the game, not to be a spectacle for the entertainment of an idle crowd. He knows that the game is a dance, and creates what also might be a ballet by Stravinsky or Satie. Huizinga and Montherlant were meditating on sports much later: Homo Ludens, 1938. Les Olympiques, 1924, with a new edition augmented and with a new introduction in 1938. Nice rhyme and synchronicity.

  How now (Sweetbrier with one of those English sideways looks, a kind of wise gawp, to Jan being walked in circles as a wheelbarrow by Hans) can you say you think you’ve been to Oxford? Goodness gracious! You remember Sicily and Paris and Florence. You would remember the curved High Street, gardens, walls, colleges. A big park with ducks and cricket players, said Jan. Bateaux pushed by poles on a river. I add a memory of an evening hearing Paul Wittgenstein play the piano at Balliol. Ludwig’s brother. He’d lost his right arm on the Russian Front early in the Great War. This evening was in 1949, a concert at Balliol. I never met the great philosopher, and I’ve often wondered if he were present that evening. Very likely he was, Sweetbrier said.

  With one arm he played the piano? Hans asked. Far better than most pianists with two. Sweetbrier corroborates, with a whoop of laughter, my memory of the coffee. It was made by undergraduates who were my hosts by putting coarsely ground coffee in a flower vase of tepid water. Gossie, said Hansje. So throughout Wittgenstein’s concert I kept finding grains of coffee between my teeth and under my tongue. All very Oxford, said Sweetbrier with delight. And whether Wittgenstein was actually there, you can take the probability in all its rich potential and believe that he was. There may be, don’t you know, ways of finding out. It would be a jolly bit of detective work.

  Why would it matter? asked Hans. I can see why, said Jan.

  Moisei Ginsburg’s and Mikhail Barshch’s plan for a linear city submitted in 1929 to the Green Town Competition of the Soviet Planning Commission, to be built in 15,000 hectaren of forest, was inspired, they said, by the hypothetical sociology of Comrade M. A. Okhitovich, who in turn was inspired by the French utopian economist Charles Gide, Fourier’s disciple who spoke his eulogy at the Cimitière Montmartre in 1837, October the twelfth, and laid a heap of roses on the coffin. Ginsburg and Barshch in fact took their plan from the American Edgar Chambless, who published his plan for a linear city in 1910, a continuous house with a subway train in its endless basement and a highway and arcades on its roof. Outside every door was the forest, or prairie, or garden, or orchards, or fields of grain. He likened it to city skyscrapers laid on their sides, made continuous. Here civilization could not puddle, stagnate, or congest, as it was strung out room by room along an axis, a molecule of humanity, a syntax that could articulate every human expression. China! says Sweetbrier, moving into the Wall and setting up house! Chambless’ plea was for all cities, towns, and farms to be dismantled and built into his continuum, to prevent their deterioration into slums or alienated byways, before the corrosion of estrangement set in.

  The cry of the horse is known by the name of neighing, that of the ass by braying, which is a long, disagreeable noise, consisting of alternate discords from sharp to grave and from grave to sharp. He seldom cries but when pressed with hunger or love. The voice of the female is clearer and more piercing than that of the male.

  Harold Schimmel writes from his guard post overlooking de Jordaan that a fox brings her two cubs there and teaches them to steal. They are frisky, bright, impudent jongen with none of their mother’s craftiness. The bored soldiers, glad of something to watch, pretend they don’t see them. One cub secures a bit of bread and looks to his mother for approval. The other gets a green banana and is full of doubt that he has the right thing. Yes yes, Mama says. Stealing is stealing, and off they whip into the desert, where Harold can see them through his binoculars, on blond rocks like those in a Renaissance Sint Hieronymus, Bellini or Leendert van Vinci. The little fox is taught to kill the green banana by shaking it in his teeth.

  Jan whistles There Was an Old Man with a Blue-Eyed Daughter and Hans does a klompschoen dans in my gumboots, fingers snapping, hair flopping, grinning like an imp. I add a flute accompaniment, with fancy sweetenings and trills, and Sweetbrier, clapping the beat, joins in.

  You’re writing this down? asks Sweetbrier. Essences, I say. Annals of the Harmony in its cradle days. I’m convinced that some wrenching catastrophe is about to happen. He suggests that the four of us draw up a list of details of civilization which can function as modules for the Harmony, for our diversion on a rainy day, for the good of humanity.

  The Rietveld Schröder-Schräderhuis in Utrecht, 1925. Étienne-Louis Boullée’s Hôtel Alexandre in Paris, 1763. The one is the father, the other the mother, of all modern architecture that’s fit to live in. The city of Amsterdam with automobiles banned. Our island long-house. Adolf Vigeland’s sculpture complex in Oslo, as an epitome of Scandinavian idealism. Seurat’s Grande Jatte and Bathers at Asnières and all his drawings, formal beauty in the service of French wit. All of Piet Mondriaan, all of George Herriman.

  Monet’s house and garden at Giverny. Carl Larssen’s house at Sundborn. The Jardin d’Acclimatation in the Bois. All the houses on the Singel. Bicycle. Fountain pen, typewriter, printing press. Jeans, slipje, Adidas, soccer shirt, down jacket, wool scarf, the skateboard.

  Bachelor uncles to supplement parents and brothers and sisters. More cooperative sisters. Wagner’s Scupperdine Preserves. The custom of Oxford visitors to The Netherlands. James Keiller’s Dundee Orange Marmalade. Pelikan India Ink. Ice cream. Toffee. Whiffet isonomy.

  The Olympic games restored to Coubertin’s rules and regulations. Raoul Dufy’s woodcuts for Apollinaire’s Cortège d’Orfée. Centre Pompidou. Windsor and Newton watercolors and gouache. All the photographs of Imogen Cunningham. Chess and checkers. Chocolate and gingerbread.

  What in the world, asks Sweetbrier, is whiffet isonomy? Free Badgerdom! says Hans. Equal rights, says Jan, for children. O I say! says Sweetbrier.

  4 FRUCTIDOR

  Fourier could imitate the voices of all the animals.

  A zebra, Jan says, is a black horse with white stripes. And the only zebra that’s a zebra is a horse. Dol op de zebra, says Hansje. That is, Jan persists with a twirl of fingers around his hair and indignant eyebrows, there are, or were, four species of Equus which Adam named zebra. They are, or were, Grevy’s Zebra, with ears like Michielje de muis and very thin stripes, the Mountain Zebra, stripes German Expressionist, as if by Emil Nolde, Burchell’s Zebra, stripes Late Picasso, and the Quagga, with stripes on its shoulders and neck only. Quaggas were exterminated by German hunters before 1900, so that Hitler’s mother could have nice quaggahide gloves to wear to the zoo. But in this list, dear friends, there is a mistake. The Mountain Zebra, says the Amerikaans zooloog Stephen Jay Gould, is a horse. A black horse with white stripes. And it is the only one in the batch with the family name. Grevy’s Zebra is Equus grevyi, the quagga is Equus quagga, Burchell’s Zebra is Equus burchelli, but that horse in a zebra suit, he’s Equus zebra.

  Sweetbrier wonders if the quagga can be backbred, as with the tarpan? And wouldn’t Fourier’s Harmony be in effect a backbreeding of mankind, back at least to Lewis Mumford’s neolithic communities?

  Rousseau’s football players are wearing not the white duck caleçons and wool jerseys of English fashion but maillots de bain such as Albert Bloch and Robert de Saint-Loup wore at Cabourg to the delight of Palamède de Charlus, and Tadzio on the Lido to the despair of Aschenbach. Moreover, they are playing in a bowling alley in the Bois. Rousseau may have known that Coubertin had been given a soccer field, that it had trees in it which the authorities refused to have cut down, no matter how often Coubertin pleaded that soccer fields are treeless.

  Jarry: bicycling, rowing.

  Degas: Sparta, the ballet, horses.

  Delaunay: footbal
l.

  Fourier knew only the transition from medieval play to an incipient sense of modern sport, but felt the lack, noting the pallor of city children and the rubicund faces of country children, and thus designed work itself into an elaborate, playful agon.

  The ass is as humble, patient, and tranquil as the horse is bold, ardent, and impetuous. He submits with firmness, perhaps with magnanimity, to strokes and chastisements. He is temperate both as to the quantity and quality of his food. He contents himself with the rigid and disagreeable herbage which the horse and other animals leave to him and disdain to eat. He is more delicate with regard to his drink, never using water unless it be perfectly pure. He looks upon the world with innocence and courage. As his master does not take the trouble of combing him, he often rolls himself on the turf among thistles and ferns. When very young, the ass is a gay, sprightly, nimble, and gentle animal. But he soon loses these qualities, probably by the bad usage he meets with at our hands. He becomes lazy, untractable, and stubborn. When under the influence of love he becomes perfectly furious. Although the ass be generally ill-used, he discovers a great attachment to his master. He smells him at a distance, and searches the places and roads he frequents. He easily distinguishes his master from the rest of mankind. The ass has a very fine eye, an excellent scent, and a good ear. When overloaded, he hangs his head and sinks his ears. When too much teased or tormented, he opens his mouth and retracts his teeth in disgust. This expression of disagreement gives him an air of ridicule and derision. If you cover his eyes, he will not move another step. Whatever the pace he is going at, if you push him, he instantly stops.

  Mice, Hans and Jan in their slaapzak, squeaking in spite of themselves, chirruping and rustling. The promise to be omzichtig whiffles above the dull suff of the night tide, getting busier once there was a regular grump and wheeze from Sweetbrier in the bed at the room’s other end. My drift into sleep was jolted by Hans crawling into my bedroll on elbows and knees, a badger butting into its sett, wiggling around until the capsheaf of his hair snuzzled under my chin. Ome Adriaan. Yes, Munchkin. Where’s your wristwatch? Because it glows in the dark and we’re timing. A hug all ribs and shoulderblades, a tickle for his damp teelsak, a charge of snoezig snuiter, and help with creeping out, watch in fist, back to Jantje who, whispering thanks, pulled on his nape.

  My hemeltje! when we were undressing for bed, despite Sweetbrier’s dithering about, was for Hans’ onderslipje on its way to laddering into lace, scruffy, and jaundiced. A common property, as I knew, worn time about. Sweetbrier out on a call of nature, the rapscallions dived for each other, hugged, rubbed noses and chins, ran heels up the back of legs, clutched crotches, burbled and whoofed. Mice rubbing whiskers. Well, said Jan, jiffling out of his jeans, we can all go have a pee, too, ja? A great white sea owl in the larch back of the landing. A wet wind from crosscurrents brings all sorts of creatures to the island, once an otter, once a brace of storks who looked at us with aristocratic hauteur. Hans, said Jan with a swipe of tongue across his upper lip, is the big-eyed nipper who runs this place, ha ha. Yick, but if you want to be spoiled rotten what you need is a bachelor uncle. Jaloers, counters Hans, and ungrateful pig. Whereupon they circle each other like tomcats. I am given, to hold, Hans’ jeans raining a pocketknife and coins, and the scruffy briefs, Jantje’s next, they say. Their skinny legs flick in and out of the dim late light and swallowing shadows, flouncing gleam of hair, silvery ankles, curled toes, sweet yipes and grunts. Where are you? Sweetbrier calls through the dusk. Up, monkeys. Fried apple pie! cries Jantje flicking trash from his legs. Dutch vegetable soup! shouts Hans. All the photographs of André Kertesz, I add, getting a kiss on the chin from Hans, and a kiss from Jan on the cheek. Fromage Gruyère! shouts Sweetbrier.

  It is precisely, says Sweetbrier, those rhythms that have become dissonant we want to study. They had an harmonic origin. They changed. We changed. We are quite often mistaken about origins.

  A long evening’s talk by the fire, synod of quaggas and zebras. We cut out paper masks with lenticular eyelets and round mouths for Hans and Jan to do a mime such as they’ve seen in Vondelpark. Hans’ mask rucks his hair into a shewel, and in a twink, with my sweater down to his knees, arms lost in the sleeves, he is a chimpanzee shoggling about. How a mask changes the rest of the body! Jan, barefoot in jeans and soccer shirt, loses his charm, his body becomes a stranger’s, his gestures unfamiliar. He walks woodenly on his heels, a robot, Hans doing a limber monkey dance around him, gibbering. While they cavort, a mummery of robot and chimp, Sweetbrier asks about Hans’ prayers. While, last night, Jan stood patiently and barebottomed, Hans knelt, fingers to lowered chin, and thanked de Heer for our health and wellbeing, for Jan’s love, and Ome Adriaan’s, and Mama’s and Papa’s and Saartje’s, before rabbiting into the slaapzak. His mother Kaatje, I explain, raised a Catholic, feels that Hans and Saartje should know a moral code at its source, and have, as she says, religious passions of some sort, a real meaning to Easter and Christmas, if only to be easy with religious people and ideas. So they attend a Calvinist Sunday School.

  Fourier’s rooms were a Mexican jungle by Rousseau the Douanier, potted plants with paths among them negotiated by cats. The Harmony was to display in its windows the flowers peculiar to each day’s symbolism. His notes for this are obscure and a little insane, but the general idea is clear.

  The Harmony, says Sweetbrier, must feature Yorkshire pudding served with cold beef and mustard, beer to drink, or he won’t belong to it. Apple pie, says Hans, with lots of juice and sugary crumbly brown crust. Jan and I vote for vegetable dumpling soup, lots of carrots, as the Harmonian staple.

  Fourier was terrified of frogs, caterpillars, spiders. Against spaghetti he had an aversion, calling it rancid library paste. English cooking he couldn’t abide, and was persnickety about bread. His favorite dish was potatoes baked in their skins, buttered, with onions.

  5 FRUCTIDOR

  Stately, to Sousa, behind the floppy silken strides of a brace of afghans flanking the Corporal Major of the Angelicat, eight, who bore their colors and whose quagga sported the yellow crupper, surcingle, and bridle of the Burgundy Hives, the Little Hordes rode out prancing. Tornado Squadron IX, Suzette Bright Eyes Tibbie Wing, pranced out from the Phalanx Hortense Cezanne like a slope of thistles and wild carrot to see, silvery trumpets and stormy drums, sopranino commands. Glory to the Harmony! With impish swank (it was the Feast of Coubertin, 5 Frimaire, white puffs steaming from their quaggas’ nostrils) they galloped to meet the Dandelion Band from the spadger barracks, on ponies, their captain a girl, their mascots Dalmatians. The toggery of the Band was what they called Greek: last year their orator Skeeter Boussy swallowed a wad of his medicinecabinet cottonball beard in the middle of his ode and had to be pounded on the back by a Vestal, whose oakleaf garland fell off and to pieces.

  The Grammar and Manners Police fined the lot for giggling. Thus the Horde in its Magyar finery of silver-buttoned vests and scarves and boots and gaucho breeches, its long banners and decorations for valor in love and courtesy, stared at them with superior eyes.

  We’re, said Hans, Kangoeroekind I and Kangoeroekind II, and the sleeping bag is Mevrouw Kangoeroe. Jan thought better, as one could see from his eyes, of remarking on this. Ome Adriaan is Washer Rat from the woods behind the red windmill on the Point, who smokes appleginger roadtar tobacco in a rosebrier pipe, takes The Tulip Grower’s Weekly & Dutch Reformed Lutheran Bugle, and reads Aristotle.

  What am I? asks Sweetbrier. An English badger! says Jan. They visit sett to sett. You have come to visit Adriaan in his weekendhuis. Now, says Hans the honest, that you’ve shaved both sides of your face we don’t find you silly at all. English, please, dear Hansje. Say it in English. Jan helps with whispers. Nu, now, have you, hast thou, cut the beard of you, een half face, aren’t he now, are not schrik. Jan turned once on his heel and fell upon Hans with a hug. He offers, complete with Midlands accent, all sides of your face you have shaved now and do not look peculiar. That�
�s it, says Hans. What I said, ja.

  Whereupon Sweetbrier, losing his make-do monocle, tripping on the way, squeezed Hans’ shoulders and called him a brave fellow. Foreign languages require more courage than bearding lions in their dens. Hans gave him a kiss on the corner of the mouth. Ha! said Jan, repeating the salute, which Sweetbrier took with the slightest of flinches. O dear! he said, I feel I’m blushing rather dreadfully. You are! said Jan. It is a nice blush.

  Of Jan’s saying that the sea’s doing Sibelius’ Fourth, sloshing largo, dull and dark, Sweetbrier says, do these tykes always talk like this? I explain the game. Poetry in the Harmony will be a system of analogies and correspondences noted by children and gifted adults. It is an ongoing research project among the cultural and natural inventories. In Amsterdam we have a bulletin board on which the Keirinckx, Hovendaal, Floris, and Sinaasappel households tack conceits, haiku, similes. In the Harmony these will be displayed on posters. Hansje without looking up from coloring his sneakers with Magic Marker recites what’s currently up. Vermeer is Rembrandt with the lights turned on. Bad, says Jan, very bad. Algebra is a detective story about arithmetic. The fox is the cat of dogs. A bee is a Dutch wasp. A wasp is a Japanese bee. Korfball is football for giraffes. An apple is a Protestant pear. To get a poplar, starch a willow. If Robinson Crusoe had met Tuesday, Balzac would have had to finish the book. Seurat is the Poulenc of painters, Poulenc the Seurat of composers.