'Wetness Is Indeed a Flabby Skin'

For months I’ve had my eye on a first edition of Guy Davenport’s first collection of short stories, Tatlin!, published by Scribner’s in 1974. Until now I’ve relied on the paperback reissue brought out by Johns Hopkins in 1982. The cover is a beauty, vaguely Constructivist in design, with a reproduction of John Russell’s The Face of the Moon (c. 1795) on the front and, on the back, four drawings by Davenport and blurbs from Thomas Berger and Richard Stern.

Davenport claimed to be embarrassed by his early fiction, and modestly repudiated Tatlin!, but I think he was being disingenuous. The first thing I can remember reading by him was the story “The Aeroplanes of Brescia,” published in The Hudson Review in 1969, the year of the moon landing, which figures in the final paragraph in Tatlin!, in the story “The Dawn in Erewhon.” I was hooked.

What swayed me to buy Tatlin! was the letter I found tucked into the rear of the book. Two sheets are folded three times, the text is doubled-spaced, perfectly typed and dated “1.vi.1981.” It’s addressed to “My dear Alex,” and I wish I could report it was written by Davenport, but the signature is so stylized I can’t make it out. The closest decryption I can make, and this seems unlikely, is “Aida.” “Alex” is sexually ambiguous but I’m fairly certain the writer is a man. The only geographical reference is in the first sentence: “I seem to recall your giving me credit for the beautiful weather that greeted us in Maryland.” The writer is a teacher and adopts a tone of languid coyness:

“I can’t say I’m physically unwell; I just tire easily and there are times in the day when I find I can’t go on, must lie down, leave. It’s probably a postponed reaction to the semester which was, all in all, grueling: teaching all those hours every week, anxiety about writing, emotional ups and downs of a generally unpleasant sort, then the media blitz at the end.”

That final phrase is intriguing but we’re given no further explanation. The next paragraph turns literary:

“[William] Gaddis is a wonderful diversion. Because, I suppose, of the success of Sophie’s Choice (which isn’t, by the way, very good), they’re re-issuing all of Wm. Styron’s novels and I picked up Set This House on Fire which I’m eager to read. I found Lie Down in Darkness utterly consuming. Although I’m certain it’s well-written, I can’t really judge whether or not it’s important because I only now can see clearly the personal psychiatric level on which it involved me.”

More private intrigue. Our correspondent is markedly self-involved. Is a seduction taking place? Has the seduction already been accomplished? Why no mention of Davenport in the letter? A reader of Gaddis would be a likely reader of Tatlin! Much psychodrama follows: “My public persona and private self collide more violently than many people’s and this makes it difficult not only for me but for those I’m involved with.” Something close to candor follows two sentences later: “Which all is, I suppose, one way of telling you that I am going to need help if we are to continue this, need reassurance that I may not appear to need or respond to. I’m much more skilled at controlling the surface of my poems than the surface of my self.”

Our author adds a P.S. dated “2 June.” Alex has telephoned. “It was sweet of you to call. I’m going to go ahead and send this off, patchy as it reads now in the bald light of day (rainy again: wetness is indeed a flabby skin).”