How
exciting to be present at the creation of a book so lastingly influential to
the way I think about books, reading and writing. The passage, dated April 14,
1980, is from a letter Guy Davenport wrote to Nicholas Kilmer, who edited “Fragments
from a Correspondence” and published them in the Winter 2006 issue of Arion: A Journal of the Humanities and the
Classics. Jack Shoemaker was the founder and editor of North Point Press,
which was founded in 1980 and published titles by, among many others,
Davenport, A.J. Liebling, Evan S. Connell, Edward Hoagland and M.F.K. Fisher. I
bought The Geography of the Imagination in New York City in
the spring of 1981. In a letter dated June 6, 1980,
Davenport mentions a collection of stories to be published simultaneously with Geography:
“I've
just signed the contract for the third book of stories, Eclogues. Also began the arduous task of supplying Jack with the
meaning of phrases in Dutch, Greek, French, and other tongues, as he says the
copyreader demands to know. Also two pages
of good English words they can't find in Webster's Third International or the OED (platch, humpenscrump, bought [the
noun], pizzle, and so on).”
The
OED reports platch as an intransitive verb meaning “to walk through mud or
mire. As a transitive verb, it means “to splash or mark with drops of water,
etc.; to besmear.” One of the citations for the latter usage is from one of
Davenport’s favorite books, Ulysses:
“All the mud plotching my boots.” Humpenscrump:
“a musical instrument of rude construction; a hurdy-gurdy.” Louis MacNeice used
it in “Autumn Sequel”: “The humpenscrump that charmed some forebear's ear / Now
makes the roast pigs caper in Cockayne.” Bought as a noun means “a bend or
curve; esp. a hollow angle or bend in the animal body” and “a bending in a
coastline, mountain-chain, etc.” Both senses are said to be “Obs.” Pizzle, not surprisingly means “the penis of an animal, esp. a
bull. Now chiefly Austral. and N.Z.” and “a man's penis.” The Recognitions by William Gaddis is
cited for the first meaning: “He entered and walked toward the bull's
stall—There!..There's a masterful pizzle for you!” All of the words but platch appear in the published version
of Eclogues (pizzle three times). Later in the same letter Davenport writes:
“I
revise and revise, trying to keep the last story in E. down to a hundred pages, or at best 150. I pare, whittle, plane,
and still it rises like a cake in the oven.”
For
my friend Levi Stahl, who is reading Anthony Powell’s masterpiece for the fifth
time, I include this passage from a letter Davenport wrote on May 19, 1980:
“I'm
reading Anthony Powell's A Dance to the
Music of Time, an hilarious and very good work. The only book I know that
takes Proust's habitual narrative gestures, Anglicizes them, and succeeds in
the effort. In fact, Powell is the best critical study of Proust. That he has
no equivalent of Charlus or St-Loup or Albertine is simply the difference between
France and England.”
[ADDENDUM: A reader remembers Shakespeare uses “pizzle,” though not in Othello.
The speaker is Falstaff in Henry
IV, Part 1: “'Sblood, you starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat's
tongue, you bull's pizzle, you stock-fish! O for breath to utter what is like
thee! You tailor's-yard, you sheath, you bowcase; you vile standing-tuck,—”]
3 comments:
I'm working from memory here, but doesn't Shakespeare use pizzle in Othello?
It's just a guess, but isn't the author of Finding unlikely to have forgotten the 'large and prominent' pizzle of a whale washed up on the Norfok coast and examined by one of his favourite authors?
"What Sperma-Ceti is, men might justly doubt, since the learned Hofmanus in his work of Thirty years, saith plainly, Nescio quid sit. ... That it proceedeth from a Whale, beside the relation of Clusius and other learned observers, was indubitably determined, not many years since by a Sperma-Ceti Whale, cast on our coast of Norfolk. Which, to lead on further inquiry, we cannot omit to inform. It contained no less then sixty foot in length, the head somewhat peculiar, with a large prominency over the mouth; teeth only in the lower Jaw, received into fleshly sockets in the upper. The Weight of the largest about two pound: No gristly substances in the mouth, commonly called Whale-bones; Only two short finns seated forwardly on the back; the eyes but small, the pizell large, and prominent. A lesser Whale of this kind above twenty years ago, was cast upon the same shore." Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Chap 26
It's just a guess, but is the author of Finding likely to have forgotten the 'large and prominent' pizzle of a whale washed up on the Norfolk coast and examined by one of his favourite authors?
"What Sperma-Ceti is, men might justly doubt, since the learned Hofmanus in his work of Thirty years, saith plainly, Nescio quid sit. ... That it proceedeth from a Whale, beside the relation of Clusius and other learned observers, was indubitably determined, not many years since by a Sperma-Ceti Whale, cast on our coast of Norfolk. Which, to lead on further inquiry, we cannot omit to inform. It contained no less then sixty foot in length, the head somewhat peculiar, with a large prominency over the mouth; teeth only in the lower Jaw, received into fleshly sockets in the upper. The Weight of the largest about two pound: No gristly substances in the mouth, commonly called Whale-bones; Only two short finns seated forwardly on the back; the eyes but small, the pizell large, and prominent. A lesser Whale of this kind above twenty years ago, was cast upon the same shore." Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Chap 26
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