Peripheral vision

“THAT strange, odd book.” One might add curious, peculiar and unusual too, just to nail down the redundancy. Avram Davidson, the voice behind those quote marks -- the strange, odd man himself -- was not, of course, referring to the same book I am, his own posthumously published “Adventures in Unhistory.” He was writing of R.A. Stewart MacAlister’s “Secret Languages of Ireland,” which is, no doubt, also very strange and odd but only peripherally relevant. In Davidson’s world, though, no relevance is merely peripheral, and few digressions are not worth the mileage. All things are linked, the connections between them divine. Or if not divine, at least faintly amusing. Usually.

Who was Avram Davidson? Don’t be shy, just ask. If we dig through the volume at hand and leave no digression unpursued, among essays on the origins of the legend of the phoenix, the mermaid, the unicorn and the dragon, on werewolves, headhunters, mandrake root and Prester John, we learn that our easily distracted author lived at various times in the highlands of central Mexico, in Los Angeles, on a houseboat in Sausalito, Calif., “in a lighthouse on the eastern Mediterranean littoral” and in a foxhole on the Japanese island of Okinawa. We learn that he was a dear friend of the parentheses (and even (at times) of parentheses within parentheses), that he was perhaps too erudite for his own good, or at least for ours, and that he was extraordinarily fond of quoting Charles Fort, another strange, odd author, who wrote: “In measuring a circle, one begins anywhere.”

If you are a devoted fan of fantasy or science fiction, you probably already know who Davidson was. He was (forgive the preterit, Davidson died in 1993) the author of many novels and dozens of short stories published in such journals as Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Weird Tales. He once explained his work thusly: “My theme is to build my bridge of dreams, to weave it out of the wild and outcast grasses. And thereon to reach out and grasp whatever little bits of grace come wafting by. Whenever.” It is perhaps not necessary to mention that he was also a Talmudic scholar.

“However, let us skip about a bit.” Davidson’s “Adventures” take us to Sumatra, to Madagascar, briefly to Lisbon (once called Olissipo -- did you know? -- after Ulysses, who purportedly founded the city), to Babylon, Siberia, Gog and Magog, “the question of, Quote, India, Unquote,” and to Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, before that Es Serandeeb, or Serendip, and thus the origin of our word serendipity, a useful concept here, for which Davidson cites Webster’s: “The gift of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought.”

Valuable or agreeable things, such as: the fact that the scarab so favored by the ancient Egyptians was in actuality a dung beetle; that the Barbados blackbird, also known as the tinkling grackle, rubs bruised limes beneath its wings; that for seven years, Nebuchadnezzar grew out his hair and ate grass like an ox; that headhunting persisted in Europe, in the Balkans, until the early 20th century, when civilization triumphed and noses were collected instead, complete with upper lip and mustache; and perhaps most important, that the belly of a Siberian mammoth discovered frozen near Berezovka was filled with buttercups.

“Where to start, where to start? As though we have not already started!” Davidson asks questions, and sometimes tries to answer them. Who was Prester John? Where was Hyperborea? Why so many mermaid sightings? Can severed heads sing? What happened to the duck-billed platypus that escaped the Bronx Zoo and was “never, seen, again”? Davidson’s sources are legion, and include, among others, Herodotus, Pliny the Elder (“bitching as usual”), Rabelais, Borges (whose “The Book of Imaginary Beings” was clearly an inspiration), holy scripture, the Encyclopedia Britannica (which he quotes frequently, and at length), Jacob Grimm, someone named Jordanus Catalanus, a conversation overheard on an L.A. bus and a story of Davidson’s called “Manatee Gal Won’t You Come Out Tonight.” His answers, when he gives them, are rarely satisfying. Werewolves are wolves with rabies. Or men with rabies. Unicorn horns are narwhal tusks. Hyperborea has something to do with amber.

But Davidson scorns “the primitive idea ... of there being but one answer to one question.” Conclusions are hardly the point. We are measuring circles here, remember. We can begin anywhere and never end. And who knows what we’ll encounter? The mammoth, did you hear -- it was frozen, but it had buttercups in its belly. Buttercups!

It’s not all dragons and unicorns. Davidson devotes a chapter to extinct birds, including the dodo, the moa, the passenger pigeon and the auroch, which was not actually a bird but a giant long-horned ox that roamed the Baltic until it roamed no more. Also included is a melancholy essay on the occultist Aleister Crowley. Did you know that Crowley (made famous to teens the world over by Ozzy Osbourne) and William Butler Yeats swam in the same esoteric circles? Or that W. Somerset Maugham counted Crowley as “one of my disreputable friends” and later refused his ailing acquaintance a loan of 50 quid? Davidson speculates that Crowley was in fact “the rough beast” of Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming,” which is silly, and observes that it “is impossible to feel sorry for Crowley and impossible not to feel sorry for Crowley,” which is not.

Have I mentioned that Davidson can be very funny? (“There is a story from Old Scotland about a head which, after it was cut off, distinctly said two words, to wit: ‘Ik. Ik.’ If this means something in Old Scottish my source did not say. The head may merely have been expressing an opinion.”) Or that he can craft a truly atrocious pun? (“Apparent exceptions are not worthy of Remarque.”)

I cannot recommend reading this book in one sitting, or even three or four. Davidson is best consumed like, well, powdered unicorn horn, or mandrake: in small doses, widely spaced. You’ll need to be in an expansive, forgiving frame of mind. You’ll need to be patient and prepared to find delight in a multitude of places, strange and odd. Listen: “The net which caught the siren mermaids does catch us all. It is Indra’s Net, a net of almost infinite dimensions, and where any two cords of it come together, there come together a line of time and a line of space, until every moment in time and every point in space are connected.

“And each connection, it is said, shines and glitters, like a jewel.” *