As is often the case when beginning a short story by Guy Davenport, one is quickly disoriented upon reading the opening lines of ‘Bronze Leaves in Red.’
We appear to be in central Europe, and our protagonist—never granted a proper name—loves the "old Germany, the forests and the mountains, the coffee-houses with their newspapers, chess-games, metaphysical conversations, and scientific journals, the Germany of fine autumns and mists when between the hamlets the little roads are lined with trees whose bronze leaves and red burn with a kind of glory in the afternoon."
Lovely. Quaint. But keen readers will detect unusual notes. Our protagonist, the first sentence suggests, "sleeps on an iron cot and his only income is the royalty the State pays him for the use of his portrait on his postage stamps." Very well. Which century are we in? "They say he can sit by the hour regarding a bust of Nietzsche. He likes to chat with his friends on the telephone." Ah. We learn that he wears an Iron Cross and the "armband of the Party."
Oh dear.
His sense of humor is delicious. Once, out driving in his Mercedes, wearing an aviator cap to keep his hair in place, he exceeded the speed limit by a few miles only and was haled to the shoulder by a motorcycle policeman.
—Follow me, the policeman said, to the Magistrate’s in the next township, where you will catch it.
—Follow him, he instructed his chauffer corporal.
The policeman, you see, did not recognize who was in the Mercedes, because of the aviator cap, but the guard at the Magistrate’s saw who was entering the building, and gave a salute, and the Magistrate gave a salute, and everyone froze.
—I have been arrested for speeding, he said to the Magistrate, who opened his mouth like a fish, struck dumb. When capable of it, the Magistrate whispered a word that sounded like mistake.
—Not a bit of it, he said. We were well over the limit, and whereas I was not heeding the speedometer, I will not blame my chauffeur corporal but take full responsibility myself, like a proper citizen. Germans are law-abiding folk, are we not?
—Yes! all cried.
—Sieg! he shouted.
—Heil! they all replied.
And he paid the fine.
There is of course no doubt by now as to the identity of our "hero," even without the subsequent scene of him interrupting an evening gathering of stunned socialites to deliver "a beautiful oration against Jewishness, communism, atheism, lies in the press, and flagrant immorality in entertainment and the arts"—which, believe you me, sobers the frivolous crowd right up.
Really, there was no doubt in the first paragraph, but the admiring tone of the narrator prevents the reader from easily accepting what the story so demonstrably is, at least in part: An exercise in what a sycophantic prose portrait of Hitler in the ’30s might sound like.
Disorientation was a hallmark of the great—and greatly underappreciated—writer Guy Davenport, some of whose best work recently has been collected in a single-volume reader by his literary executor Erik Reece. This quality was true especially in his fiction, for which he set, as did his inspirations Joyce and Pound, a high bar of prior reading as a condition of enjoyment. If you know that Lascaux is the complex of caves in France wherein some of the oldest paintings known to man were discovered, and further, that the caves were happened upon by French youths hunting rabbits in the company of a puppy named Robot during the Second World War, then Davenport’s imagistic, meditative story ‘Robot’ will make a great deal of sense.
The same applies to ‘The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag,’ a story that whips the reader from Nixon visiting China to Leonardo (da Vinci, the reader must supply, along with the century, which is suggested only by context) testing his flying machine to Gertrude Stein (we presume—it’s never specified) describing in the first person the reactions of Alice (B Toklas—we again presume) to her encounters with Picasso and the European avant-garde—and back again to Nixon, now chatting with Mao.
Some readers will experience a sensation of whiplash. It’s not an unfair complaint. One is just as likely to encounter detailed descriptions of the sexual organs of young boys in a Guy Davenport story than anything resembling a conventional narrative. Admittedly, I haven’t made an exhaustive count, so the balance may well be decisively with the former. (This would certainly be true of references to Picasso.)
For the interpretation of Davenport’s fictions there is no better place to turn than Davenport’s essays. They often pair thematically with the stories—you can read all about Lascaux in ‘The Symbol of the Archaic,’ for example. In this, as in so many other ways, Davenport resembles Jorge Borges. Both men were enthralled by modernism, both were ‘experimental,’ both were at once intensely cosmopolitan in their interests and subjects but remained unmistakably local. Davenport’s prose is a sustained performance in the elegant idiom of Southern gentlemen, which might be expected of a man born in Charleston, educated at Duke, and employed for 40 years by the University of Kentucky. Consider this passage from the autobiographical ‘On Reading’:
So it went with my education. God knows what I learned from classes; very little. I read Santayana instead of my philosophy text (the style of which sucked), I read Finnegans Wake instead of doing botany (in which I made an F, and sweet Professor Anderson, that great name in photosynthesis, wrote on the postcard that conveyed the F, "You have a neat and attractive hand writing."). Instead of paying attention to psychology I made a wide study of Klee and Goya.
…I can therefore report that the nine years of elementary schooling, four of undergraduate, and eight of graduate study were technically games of futility. If, now, I had at my disposal as a teacher only what I leaned from the formalities of education, I could not possibly be a university professor. I wouldn’t know anything. I am at least still trying. I’ve kept most of my textbooks and still read them (and am getting pretty good at botany).
Such style (and Davenport, if he deserves any superlative, is surely in the running for being the finest stylist of his day, as his executor suggests) inclines one to forgive his faults, such as the distinct sense that in his wild associations he moves so quickly and covers so much ground that he often outruns the perimeter of what knowledge any man could possibly command in detail.
This sense is strong in the midst of his most famous essay, ‘The Geography of the Imagination,’ with its flood of erudition. Did the husband-wife pose of Wood’s American Gothic really originate in Egypt, only to disappear in Greece in Rome? Can’t one see Roman tombstones with just such a pose in the basement of the British Museum, or in wall paintings at Pompeii? Tell us lies, Guy Davenport—tell us all your little lies, so long as you write them sweet like you do.
Borges had sympathies with the right. Davenport wrote for National Review and The New Criterion. But to describe him as a conservative in the twentieth century sense would be inaccurate, and something he never copped to on those rare occasions when he spoke about politics. On the evidence of his writings, it is difficult to tell if he was bored by politics, or if his politics were simply too strange for him to have any interest in the conventions of his day.
It is not difficult to detect a sense of social decay in his writings, a belief that the modern world had become, in some decisive way, unmoored. He spoke favorably of Spengler, admired and translated Heraclitus, and read Fourier appreciatively, and could have his narrators speak in approving tones of Chairman Mao.
At the same time, Davenport was too sensitive not to recognize that he was caught in the old Socratic problem: Only his own regime could produce such a man as Socrates to harbor sympathies for other ways of life. Or as Davenport once put it in an interview, "I could never be a Marxist, largely because so many good writers come from the mercantile, well-behaved Middle Class."
In a classic review in the New York Times written a year before the founding of The New Criterion, Hilton Kramer identified Davenport’s obsession with the archaic as his characteristic trait. This analysis wasn’t wrong—for Davenport, Paleolithic cave art and the fragments of Archilochus (which exist today only in what ancient "grammarians quote…brief quotations by admiring critics…papyrus fragments, scrap paper from the households of Alexandria, with which third-class mummies were wrapped and stuffed") were inherently more interesting than what followed and had survived entire.
At the time Kramer found this focus quirky, and perhaps even narrowing. This was wrong. In his focus on the archaic, Davenport was really a late example of the primary belief that drove modernism as a literary and artistic movement, and in a broader sense, of the major continental intellectual trend since at least Nietzsche: That the West was in a crisis the roots of which went back at least as far as Plato. Thus, a resolution could be found only in a deconstruction of a vast cultural edifice, an archeological dig of sorts that would reveal, beneath millennia of accreted mud, hidden principles preserved only in fragments.
In an interview with the Paris Review shortly before his death, Davenport noted that he couldn’t be a postmodernist if "postmodernism means, Let’s break everything off and start over in a new direction." But he also expressed frustration with the need for another prefix, his interviewer having proposed "meta-modernist." Davenport remarked, "But can’t I be just a plain modernist? I mean, aren’t I old enough?"
It seems a sort of personal tragedy that Davenport was born as late as 1929, and that rather than be friends with Ezra Pound he had to write a PhD thesis about him and visit him at St. Elizabeth’s. Never widely read—though intensely admired in some small circles—Davenport was never a major member of the republic of letters, to the degree that anything like a republic of letters could be said to have existed in the second half of the last century.
Not that Davenport would have wanted such a membership. His work betrays a preference for the company of fragments, and of an approach that had left him holding a torch for a movement that had peaked a generation earlier—or holding the bag.