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What shall we make of "August Blue" which has--in its four sections--four
settings, four narrators, and four (or at least three) time periods?
Ideas overlap, to be sure. Two sections involve formal education, and a
third the contrast between being educated and being not. (Or, if you
prefer, all three of these sections concern that contrast.) Two feature
settings on the coast of England; two, the meaning of the Hebrew letter
alef. The first and last sections revolve around characters who are,
in one form or fashion, in disguise. But can these pieces, as lovely as
they may be individually, form a whole?
 In Davenport's hands, certainly.
At first glimpse the overriding tie might seem to be the dichotomy of
light and dark, knowledge and ignorance, since even the third and
shortest section--which ostensibly gives a description of the fens about
the Isle of Ely--concludes with an annotation of the fogs that wrap Ely
in gloom when the surrounding countryside falls under sunlight: an
evocative implied metaphor of how knowing and not-knowing can be no more
than a step apart. And indeed this commonplace threads through each
section of the tale: from the Jewish boy who knows not only more than
his school friends but also more than their teacher; to the ineducable
"yahoos" at the University of Virginia in 1842; to the rural young men
who model for the artist Tuke, but don't know who Aircraftsman Ross is.
(T.E. Lawrence, by the way.) All of these characters stand on one side
or the other of a line (that alef of sections 1 and 2.) All of the
unknowers are in the presence of something much larger, wider and more
full of heart than they can imagine--and the presence of what we might
pretentiously call the unveiled mystery remains a mystery to them. They
can't seem to see the line in order to cross it. They move about in
darkness, perfectly content, never able to see their own limitations or
the way to get beyond them.
But Davenport is up to something more than a didactic juxtaposition of
gnostics and idiots: he has created, in "August Blue," a portrait (that
title is the name of one of Tuke's paintings) of happiness in
enlightenment: Nirvana, if you will. That oh-so-clever Jewish boy,
expounding the link between heaven and earth (represented by the alef)
while freely handing out figs as treats, is Yeshua--Jesus--already
living in that state of grace King David sought so hard to attain, and we
are welcome to read his figs as a foreshadowing of both the feedings of
the multitude and the curse on the unproductive fig tree as well as a
gentle and humorous tweak at "disciples" who cannot see the joy available
at their fingertips. The "aristocratic" dolts of section 2 are being
offered one of the finest educations that the young United States has,
but they are more concerned about vulgar retorts and status.
It is the fourth section, however, that most clearly expostulates
Davenport's heaven-on-earth. As Tuke and Ross/Lawrence discuss Tuke's
paintings and their antecedents, Davenport draws up a kind of history, a
linking of periods of time--classical Greece, the late Middle Ages, the
present (1922)--in which a sort of Eden is being recovered, a world in
which "they were naked, and knew it not." And it is here that Davenport
twists his images and their reverberations a final time, for Ross and
Tuke--the knowers--clearly include the innocents in their paradise, in
which not-knowing can become not an opposite to, but a form of, knowing.
As Ross says to one of the the models, "You know who you are. You will
beget strapping boys like yourself, and sit by your own fireside, you and
your good wife." What separates Tuke's artistically semi-literate young
men from the boys and the rabbi of section 1, the yahoos of section 2,
and the fens of section 3, is their openness: they know that they don't
know and are both curious and incurious to know more, depending upon how
the matter seems to affect them directly. They are not proud in their
ignorance, nor wrapped in ignorance which calls itself wisdom, nor
fearful of what knowledge might entail. And thus they have crossed over,
as it were, out of darkness and illusion into light, even if they
themselves cannot fully see it.
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