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Tatlin!
The American comments on the modern age, mechanization, and the division between animate and inanimate in this selection of his fiction
261 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1974
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 22, 2014
"This is not the flight of fancy, though flight it is."
(That was Stalin stalling liftoff.)
This is Icarus before the fall, when the red left hand of the moon's just begun its bequeathing the kindled crab grass to the new-fixèd sprinklers.
This is the mercury caught off a Baltic squall.
This is Kafka und Brod in Brescia--glaux, the aeros glinting, as the olives there are wont to, and not shining.
This is Wittgenstein in Brescia, nodding at the aeros.
This is the attic Greek--a garret, or silo of cut stone.
This is a shirtless boy the color of chestnuts, a shrapnel blast to shake the trees.
These are the reindeer, and those are the reindeer.
This is my dog, his name is Robot. bo, bo bo
That's where the beach is! Numbskullnutsackery!!
(That was Stalin stalling liftoff.)
This is Icarus before the fall, when the red left hand of the moon's just begun its bequeathing the kindled crab grass to the new-fixèd sprinklers.
This is the mercury caught off a Baltic squall.
This is Kafka und Brod in Brescia--glaux, the aeros glinting, as the olives there are wont to, and not shining.
This is Wittgenstein in Brescia, nodding at the aeros.
This is the attic Greek--a garret, or silo of cut stone.
This is a shirtless boy the color of chestnuts, a shrapnel blast to shake the trees.
These are the reindeer, and those are the reindeer.
This is my dog, his name is Robot. bo, bo bo
That's where the beach is! Numbskullnutsackery!!
March 3, 2012
I have a great idea for a drinking game. You take turns reading from "The Dawn in Erewhon", the last of the six stories in Tatlin! (and one that makes up half the book's length), and every time Guy Davenport uses the word "scrotum", everyone takes a drink. Participants will be well and truly hammered by the end, but they'll also likely be a little more cultured, having been exposed to various and sundry bits of information about Charles Fourier, Braque, Heraclitus, C.S. Pierce, Kierkegaard, Dutch culture, and theories of time in modern physics, along with colorfully rendered allusions to classical mythology and ancient civilizatons from China to Benin, from Ugarit to the Aztec Empire. So, yeah, there's a lot more to Davenport than his bizarre ball sack fixation. "The Dawn in Erewhon" oftentimes reads like the product of game of cadavre exquis played by Jorge Luis Borges, Ezra Pound, Robert Graves, Henry Miller, and Jean Genet. It can be as disjointed as that description sounds, and it's definitely the least successful work in the book. Each of the other five, much shorter stories, amazingly, packs in even more evidence of Davenport's erudition. We're talking pages overflowing with references to the history of art from cave paintings to cubism, with historical, philosophical, scientific, and literary personages of all stripes, and with enough Ancient Greeks, both historical and mythological, to fill the Acropolis ten times over. Sounds like a recipe for a pretentious mess, right? Well, every now and then it is, but for the most part the author manages to use this deluge of information to give a sense of immediate presence to the geographical and temporal expanses of cultural history, drawing connections and uncovering unexpected affinities across decades, centuries, and millenia. These stories are the polar opposite of, say, the insular minimalism of Samuel Beckett's late prose works. They open out to the ocean of accumulated human intellectual endeavor. Davenport quite consciously stands on the shoulders of giants, but I'll be damned if he doesn't seem to know their every fee, fi, fo, and fum.
May 22, 2009
Amazing range of stories in a high modernist mode. Davenport was most at home with classical and modern literature and it shows in his stories. He's a literary stylist of the highest order - you'll find phrases of his haunting you and summoning you to clarity. This is the only book by him on Bloom's Western Canon and I think it's the right choice.
April 12, 2022
His poetry emerges out of dreams – of a very special kind that abide wholly within the realm of art. (Blok on Mandelstam)
Guy Davenport's essays are more read than his stories – and so would begin a critical lament, if Davenport's use of the modes were more distinct; if his stories did not abide “wholly within the realm of art”; if his essays and reviews were less visionary, were mere journalism, Sunday summaries; if his early essays were not the soil of his late-blooming fiction. For Davenport, criticism carried the demands of storytelling, and vice-versa. Kafka, for instance, is as likely to figure in a story as to provide the subject of an essay. In his Paris Review interview Davenport said that the "The Hunter Gracchus," his essay on Kafka's story, started out as a story, and "The Aeroplanes at Brescia," his picture of Kafka's visit to an early exhibition of flying machines, and one of the wonders of Tatlin! (1974), started out as an essay. Of his compositions he concluded, “It's all one big happy family.” Tatlin! was Davenport's first collection of stories, and “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” the first story he'd written – aged forty-three – since some undergraduate Faulknerisms.
Davenport's critical prose is sibling to that of his onetime friend and fellow Pound disciple Hugh Kenner, whose The Pound Era Davenport hailed as a "new kind of book in which biography, history and analysis of literature are so harmoniously articulated that every page has a narrative sense." Like The Pound Era, Davenport's early essays, collected in The Geography of the Imagination, vividly narrate influential encounters and pungently picture shocks of recognition. Degas, tracer of haunches equine and balletic, is awake all night with Muybridge's Zoopraxia, with its leaping nudes and galloping tarpans. Shelley and his guest, a literary banker, inspect a copy of Diodorus; both note the boastful inscription attributed to a pharaoh whose name a Greek source had garbled to “Ozymandias,” and they sit down to their respective sonnets.
In Davenport's stories such encounters are magically magnified, and made even stranger. Coming to Tatlin! from the essays one finds a personal and particular use of the information. This is Davenport's dreamt world, with its archaic echoes, classical pederasty, and precisely described machines ("the logos hides in technology in our time"). Davenport takes a few recoverable facts, second- and third-hand “doubtful certainties,” and makes an environment of them, a collage, concrete, habitable, and above all, seen. He says of "The Aeroplanes at Brescia":
Davenport goes on to say that the subjects he chose for the stories in Tatlin! "are all in a position of being, as fact, almost not there." To animate these mysteries he sidestepped verisimilitude "from the outset," and for guidance looked to Kafka's fantasy Amerika, to Henri Rousseau's “meticulous and pedantic mistakes,” and to Max Ernst's world, "which is always of verifiably real things that are not, however, where they are supposed to be." Davenport's collages (and those of Pierre Michon, whose novella "The Life of Joseph Roulin," about the Arles postman Van Gogh repeatedly painted, Davenport did much to bring to English readers) offer endlessly interesting treatments of recorded mysteries – the events whose few verifiable fragments can be meaningfully rearranged, and the lacunae opened to inspired suggestion, crossed with imaginative connections. "[The] Dogon sense that man is a forager trying to find God's complete plan for the universe instructs (I hope) every page of Tatlin!"
Guy Davenport's essays are more read than his stories – and so would begin a critical lament, if Davenport's use of the modes were more distinct; if his stories did not abide “wholly within the realm of art”; if his essays and reviews were less visionary, were mere journalism, Sunday summaries; if his early essays were not the soil of his late-blooming fiction. For Davenport, criticism carried the demands of storytelling, and vice-versa. Kafka, for instance, is as likely to figure in a story as to provide the subject of an essay. In his Paris Review interview Davenport said that the "The Hunter Gracchus," his essay on Kafka's story, started out as a story, and "The Aeroplanes at Brescia," his picture of Kafka's visit to an early exhibition of flying machines, and one of the wonders of Tatlin! (1974), started out as an essay. Of his compositions he concluded, “It's all one big happy family.” Tatlin! was Davenport's first collection of stories, and “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” the first story he'd written – aged forty-three – since some undergraduate Faulknerisms.
Davenport's critical prose is sibling to that of his onetime friend and fellow Pound disciple Hugh Kenner, whose The Pound Era Davenport hailed as a "new kind of book in which biography, history and analysis of literature are so harmoniously articulated that every page has a narrative sense." Like The Pound Era, Davenport's early essays, collected in The Geography of the Imagination, vividly narrate influential encounters and pungently picture shocks of recognition. Degas, tracer of haunches equine and balletic, is awake all night with Muybridge's Zoopraxia, with its leaping nudes and galloping tarpans. Shelley and his guest, a literary banker, inspect a copy of Diodorus; both note the boastful inscription attributed to a pharaoh whose name a Greek source had garbled to “Ozymandias,” and they sit down to their respective sonnets.
In Davenport's stories such encounters are magically magnified, and made even stranger. Coming to Tatlin! from the essays one finds a personal and particular use of the information. This is Davenport's dreamt world, with its archaic echoes, classical pederasty, and precisely described machines ("the logos hides in technology in our time"). Davenport takes a few recoverable facts, second- and third-hand “doubtful certainties,” and makes an environment of them, a collage, concrete, habitable, and above all, seen. He says of "The Aeroplanes at Brescia":
Kafka's account of this event is his first published writing, and as he could not in 1909 know the significance of what he has seen, I combined his newspaper article with Brod's memory of the occasion in his biography of Kafka, and with what I could discover of other people (D'Annunzio, Puccini) who were there, as well as of people who might well have been there (Wittgenstein). To realize certain details I studied the contemporary photographs of Count Primoli, read histories of aviation, built a model of Blériot's Antoinette CV25, and collected as rich a gathering of allusions to the times as I could. I presided over the story like a playful Calvinist God who knew what would happen in years to come.
Davenport goes on to say that the subjects he chose for the stories in Tatlin! "are all in a position of being, as fact, almost not there." To animate these mysteries he sidestepped verisimilitude "from the outset," and for guidance looked to Kafka's fantasy Amerika, to Henri Rousseau's “meticulous and pedantic mistakes,” and to Max Ernst's world, "which is always of verifiably real things that are not, however, where they are supposed to be." Davenport's collages (and those of Pierre Michon, whose novella "The Life of Joseph Roulin," about the Arles postman Van Gogh repeatedly painted, Davenport did much to bring to English readers) offer endlessly interesting treatments of recorded mysteries – the events whose few verifiable fragments can be meaningfully rearranged, and the lacunae opened to inspired suggestion, crossed with imaginative connections. "[The] Dogon sense that man is a forager trying to find God's complete plan for the universe instructs (I hope) every page of Tatlin!"
August 17, 2025
I wanted to drink this book up- some of the most beautiful writing I’ve ever experienced. That being said, it’s written so lushly that it took me 20 years to get through.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews