Davenport was a fabulously inventive assembler of strange modernist fictions, an illustrator, teacher and essayist of great energy and erudition who tried to decipher the world and then present his own peculiar vision there of. For Davenport, convention and category were anathema; in DaVinci’s Bicycle he draws from history, anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, zoology. He takes some singular, striking detail from an unexpected wellspring and then fashions an elaborate circumstance to associate with some other inscrutable occurrence—the mating of wasps, for instance, and the decomposition of the body of Charles Fourier in Montmartre. Or Apollinaire and Joyce on the Haile Selassie funeral train.

It’s not just the excavation at odd angles across unexpected juxtapositions that makes Davenport’s fiction a pleasure to read. He wrote flamboyant, vocabulary-rich prose that didn’t feel forced; colorful, scientifically precise descriptions that didn’t dry; and witty vernacular dialogue. The effect of reading Davenport is almost visual, more akin to an abstract painting (Kandinsky, Klee, Ernst) than a short story.

…Genius is as wide as from here to yonder. Long ago, William James said in a lecture, the earth was thought to be an animal as yes it is.

Its skin is water, air and rock. A single intelligence permeates its every part, from the waves of the ocean of light to the still hardness of coal and diamonds deep down in the inmost dark.

In Professor James the nineteenth century had its great whoopee, saw all as the lyric prospect of a curve which we were about to take at full speed, but mistaking the wild synclitic headlong for propinquity to an ideal, we let the fire die in the engine.

On the page opposite that passage are Davenport’s drawings of a steam locomotive, horses from the Lascaux cave, an old-timey newsboy in knickers and cap, a young wrestler in headgear kneeling, and wasps.

Brian Blanchfield wrote in the Oxford American in 2017 that Davenport’s talent was, ‘as a consequence of good, free lifelong idiosyncratic investigation…unlike even [his] own ilk.’ That ilk would probably include Donald Barthelme, who was more self-consciously funny, and W.G. Sebald (at least re Kafka and aeroplanes), who wasn’t funny at all. ( )