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The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers
Using juxtapositon and collage, Guy Davenport creates brilliant assemblages that adhere into four stories that illuminate how one's elusive sexual nature can be hidden and paradoxically revealed by outer appearances, and one novella that completes his trilogy begun by Apples and Pears and The Jules Verne Steam Balloon.
- GenresFiction
208 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1990
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 26, 2019
In Wo Es war, soll Ich werden, the novella that anchors this collection, Davenport went full pedophile, with all the airs and sacraments. It's feeble, ridiculous, and disgusting.
December 21, 2014
The novelle, Wo es war, soll ich werden, is the most beautiful and hopeful thing I've ever read. Davenport thought of it as his finest work.
November 6, 2024
Guy Davenport is difficult to review because he is immensely erudite, 'cenopythagorean categories' (page 89) is one of the more understandable constructs found in these stories (I assure you I could fill this review with words and phrases that both stumped and dazzled me) and even knowing who Thorvaldsen was (the Danish equivalent of Canova - but does that help your understanding or simply make me look pretentious?) doesn't help because I am unsure of how many layers of meaning and allusions to his life and work are being referenced?
In a Paris Review article in 2017 https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...) Norman Rush wrote:
"The other day I realized that the contemporary American writer whose personal journals I most wished I could read before I die was Guy Davenport...(beause) of his achievements in fiction. I mean his latter-day fictions. He tried, and then abandoned, the conventional narrative-driven change-of-consciousness short story early in his career while distinguishing himself in poetry, translation, and criticism. Twenty years elapsed, and then he emerged, utterly remade, as a creator of experimental prose works. his stories are unique constructs. They are put together with elegant skill and power and tend toward the unclassifiable. In fact, scrutinous readers may change their minds more than once in the matter of what exactly it is that they are reading: Are these essentially armatures for Davenport’s aphorisms and philosophical asides? Are they primarily demonstrations of the possibilities in the interpenetration of poetic and prose forms (and visual—he sometimes illustrated his pieces). Are they freestanding baubles? In his “inhabiting,” in his writing, of the minds of iconic figures in the history of Western art and thought, is he being obscurely didactic? Is he subtly deconstructing the inner lives of culture heroes like Picasso and Diogenes?—What?"
The Kirkus Review in 1984 in a review of his earlier collection 'Apples and Pears' was more condemnatory:
"These stories, with their sense of aesthetic harmony strung tightly upon a juxtapositional mechanism, are enjoyable if one can tolerate Davenport's pedantry--which is unapologetic, sharp, and deep. And the pros and cons of this rarified approach are even more vivid in the title novella...the story...concerns two bisexual Dutchmen, philosopher Adrian and younger painter Sander--now joined by Sander's sister Grietje and various post-pubescent boys in an assortment of socio-sexual experiments: posing nude for Sander, in all combinations; Sander/Grietje incest; pederasty; constant undressing, hugging; more painting, reading, masturbating. Davenport delivers all this in painfully tight prose, mixed with chips of Dutch: ""Pulled on jeans to the flat hollow underlip, saddling the wortel of scrotum and schacht out over the crotch seam of his spread fly, standing with knees hasped straight, bare feet parallel 30 centimeters apart, animal cunning in the nipped corners of his mouth and flat gray eyes."" And he tries to build these pseudo-Utopian sexual fantasies on a base of artistic principles. But the result is mostly just a quasi-pornographic drone: a fascinating failure for students of fiction, perhaps (in its visionary/linguistic ambitions), with virtually no appeal beyond certain ivory towers."
I have quoted it because what it says about can be applied, with few changes, to the novella 'Wo es war, soll ich werden' in 'The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusilliers' or any of the other stories in the collection. But there is more to all this then an attempt to cloth pederasty in a pretentious veneer. "Wo es war, soll ich werden" is Freud's dictum "Where id was, let ego be" (but try and get any two Freud scholars to agree a translation or meaning. See for example: https://burthurts.blogspot.com/2009/0...) and the drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusilliers was a 16 year old drummer boy named Thom White executed in 1811 for the crime of 'sodomy'. Both references are essential to this collection but are not the support of evasions of pornography, even literary pornography. Try and find anything as Subtle in Sade.
Davenport isn't writing pornography or stories that would appeal to the NAMBLA boy/love crowd, he is writing from a time and an international intellectual culture that also produced, for example, the films of Lasse Nielson. Just because the works of Davenport or Nielsen make us uncomfortable and would not be published or made today doesn't mean they are bad. Nor does my lack of condemnation mean that I think works like those of Davenport or Nielsen should be produced today. They grew out of specific time and currently that time has passed but that doesn't mean that they have nothing to teach us or that we have reached such an acme of perfect understanding and judgement that standards are now established that will apply forever.
Davenport is an odd and compulsive (no puns or double entres intended) author and I am sure I haven't skimmed a fraction of what these stories hold. But I will be reading more of his stories.
In a Paris Review article in 2017 https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...) Norman Rush wrote:
"The other day I realized that the contemporary American writer whose personal journals I most wished I could read before I die was Guy Davenport...(beause) of his achievements in fiction. I mean his latter-day fictions. He tried, and then abandoned, the conventional narrative-driven change-of-consciousness short story early in his career while distinguishing himself in poetry, translation, and criticism. Twenty years elapsed, and then he emerged, utterly remade, as a creator of experimental prose works. his stories are unique constructs. They are put together with elegant skill and power and tend toward the unclassifiable. In fact, scrutinous readers may change their minds more than once in the matter of what exactly it is that they are reading: Are these essentially armatures for Davenport’s aphorisms and philosophical asides? Are they primarily demonstrations of the possibilities in the interpenetration of poetic and prose forms (and visual—he sometimes illustrated his pieces). Are they freestanding baubles? In his “inhabiting,” in his writing, of the minds of iconic figures in the history of Western art and thought, is he being obscurely didactic? Is he subtly deconstructing the inner lives of culture heroes like Picasso and Diogenes?—What?"
The Kirkus Review in 1984 in a review of his earlier collection 'Apples and Pears' was more condemnatory:
"These stories, with their sense of aesthetic harmony strung tightly upon a juxtapositional mechanism, are enjoyable if one can tolerate Davenport's pedantry--which is unapologetic, sharp, and deep. And the pros and cons of this rarified approach are even more vivid in the title novella...the story...concerns two bisexual Dutchmen, philosopher Adrian and younger painter Sander--now joined by Sander's sister Grietje and various post-pubescent boys in an assortment of socio-sexual experiments: posing nude for Sander, in all combinations; Sander/Grietje incest; pederasty; constant undressing, hugging; more painting, reading, masturbating. Davenport delivers all this in painfully tight prose, mixed with chips of Dutch: ""Pulled on jeans to the flat hollow underlip, saddling the wortel of scrotum and schacht out over the crotch seam of his spread fly, standing with knees hasped straight, bare feet parallel 30 centimeters apart, animal cunning in the nipped corners of his mouth and flat gray eyes."" And he tries to build these pseudo-Utopian sexual fantasies on a base of artistic principles. But the result is mostly just a quasi-pornographic drone: a fascinating failure for students of fiction, perhaps (in its visionary/linguistic ambitions), with virtually no appeal beyond certain ivory towers."
I have quoted it because what it says about can be applied, with few changes, to the novella 'Wo es war, soll ich werden' in 'The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusilliers' or any of the other stories in the collection. But there is more to all this then an attempt to cloth pederasty in a pretentious veneer. "Wo es war, soll ich werden" is Freud's dictum "Where id was, let ego be" (but try and get any two Freud scholars to agree a translation or meaning. See for example: https://burthurts.blogspot.com/2009/0...) and the drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusilliers was a 16 year old drummer boy named Thom White executed in 1811 for the crime of 'sodomy'. Both references are essential to this collection but are not the support of evasions of pornography, even literary pornography. Try and find anything as Subtle in Sade.
Davenport isn't writing pornography or stories that would appeal to the NAMBLA boy/love crowd, he is writing from a time and an international intellectual culture that also produced, for example, the films of Lasse Nielson. Just because the works of Davenport or Nielsen make us uncomfortable and would not be published or made today doesn't mean they are bad. Nor does my lack of condemnation mean that I think works like those of Davenport or Nielsen should be produced today. They grew out of specific time and currently that time has passed but that doesn't mean that they have nothing to teach us or that we have reached such an acme of perfect understanding and judgement that standards are now established that will apply forever.
Davenport is an odd and compulsive (no puns or double entres intended) author and I am sure I haven't skimmed a fraction of what these stories hold. But I will be reading more of his stories.
October 7, 2019
Quirky in content and rather mannered. I'm not sure that I understood all that I read in these short stories.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews