'What Exquisite Logodaedaly'

“ZOWIE!! Your botanical pastourelle of tumescence is so beautiful. What exquisite logodaedaly. What Danish for the breakfast of our readers.” 

James Laughlin is writing to Guy Davenport on December 21, 1985. Davenport had sent him the story “Wild Clover,” published in New Directions 50 the following year. “Your gifts reduce me to stuttering at the keys,” Laughlin writes. The story was retitled “The Meadow” and collected in Davenport’s The Jules Verne Steam Balloon (North Point Press, 1987). I remember buying the volume from a bookstore in Albany, N.Y., and starting to read it as soon as I got back to my car.

 

“Linguistic quibbles,” Laughlin continues in his letter. “I can’t find ‘gutulliocae’ in my Harvard-days dictionary. Is it so bad that they couldn’t put it in? All I could find is ‘gutus,’ a ‘small drop.’”

 

W.C. Bamberger, the editor of Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (W.W. Norton, 2007), tells us in a footnote that “gutulliocae” means “small, droplike spots.” I don’t find the word in the OED. The closest is guttus, a term from classical archaeology meaning “a narrow-necked cruet or oil-flask.” A citation from an archaeological dictionary seems to confirm Laughlin’s guess: “a vessel with a very narrow neck and mouth, by means of which liquids could be poured out drop by drop.” Davenport uses gutulliocae in a brief section of “The Meadow” titled “The Patrol”:

 

“Quark said in the old Latin, mama of Quirinus, chaster than Vesta, cunninger than Minerva. Hrff! said Sabina, et lactentes ficos et gutulliocae. Carissa! said Quark. I saw you playing with the frogs and crickets, pretending to dance and pounce, laughing all the while.”

 

That Davenport’s language mashup should feature a character named Quark is fitting. The word for a subatomic particle was coined by the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who borrowed it from Finnegans Wake: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!”

 

Laughlin’s use of logodaedaly is likewise inspired. The OED defines it as “cunning in words; skill in adorning a speech.” Coleridge used it in Aids to Reflection (1825): “For one instance of mere Logomachy I could bring ten instances of Logodædaly, or verbal Legerdemain.”

 

The prose in Davenport’s fiction is not to everyone’s liking – even mine, on occasion. It is never less than rich and musical, and must be read with patience and close attention. It is lapidary, an overused word but here appropriate. He sets individual words in place like stones in a mosaic. Davenport’s first book was The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz (Beacon Press, 1963), a selection from the writings of the Swiss-born American biologist and geologist, with a long introduction by Davenport (collected in The Geography of the Imagination, 1981). Interpolated into “The Meadow” are many Agassiz-like botanical and geological passages, such as the section titled “Landtong,” from a Dutch word meaning “spit of land” or “headland.” The story concerns three teenagers on a camping trip in the Dutch countryside. Their carryings-on alternate with passages of scientific observation:

 

“The feldspar and quartz pebbles derive from Precambrian gneisses or granites and the small fragments of tourmaline and garnets from crystalline schists. The general inference, therefore, from the pebbles is that the beds in which they occur were uncomformably related to certain precambrian gneisses and certain slates, limestones, and quartzites of Cambrian or Lower Silurian age.”