{"id":130935,"date":"2018-11-14T13:30:38","date_gmt":"2018-11-14T18:30:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=130935"},"modified":"2018-11-14T15:40:15","modified_gmt":"2018-11-14T20:40:15","slug":"an-intellectual-love-affair-guy-davenport-and-hugh-kenner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/11\/14\/an-intellectual-love-affair-guy-davenport-and-hugh-kenner\/","title":{"rendered":"An Intellectual Love Affair: Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Hugh Kenner (left) and Guy Davenport (right)<\/p><\/div>\n

When we read the collected letters of artists we admire, it tends to erode the marble busts we have chiseled of them like strange and abrasive weather. These are, in some ways, revealing documents\u2014Elizabeth Hardwick suggested that in reading letters \u201cwe expect to find the charmer at his nap, slumped, open-mouthed, profoundly himself without thought for appearances.\u201d But their disclosures are often merely aspirations in disguise. As a form, the letter encourages gentle self-mythology. Life submits to editing, and if days or weeks produce but one golden aper\u00e7u, the letter writer has grown used to treating time with voluptuous contempt. The jittery spontaneity of conversation is slowed down, encased within amber. A glacial, anticipatory pleasure reigns. Letters suggest a dream self, a living fiction, whether bustling and crowded with incident, or possessed of an indolent charm. These emanations that come to resemble their authors\u2019 fears and fantasies make for incomplete but fascinating biography.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Though the form itself is vanishing, the pleasures afforded by reading literary correspondence have, if anything, intensified. Given the brittleness of the text message and the anxious sterility of email, there is a luxury to the epistolary rhythm: write\u2014and wait. The fecundity of such a record has obvious appeal for scholars, who set out like lepidopterists, netting scandals, id\u00e9es fixes, house guests, marital strife, disease, inspiration, signs of madness. The publication of a collection of letters pays the writer the compliment of such scrutiny. Questioning Minds<\/em>, a gem of the form, was published this October by Counterpoint Press. It collects the voluminous correspondence\u2014more than one thousand letters\u2014between Hugh Kenner, modernist advocate and critic-savant, and Guy Davenport, literary collagist, essayist, and uncanny illustrator. It amounts to something like an intellectual love affair, replete with moments of courtship, seduction, devotion, and, eventually, betrayal. Given the polymathic depth of the correspondents, their associative flair and plasticity, and the sheer duration of their passionate exchange\u2014nearly five decades, all told\u2014we are unlikely to find a document of its like again.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is in the author\u2019s mind so seldom gets on the page,\u201d Kenner wrote to Davenport in 1958, early on in their letters\u2014a shocking sentiment for a man about to embark on one of the lengthiest and most digressive correspondences of the twentieth century. (The collection is wonderfully, exhaustively annotated throughout by editor Edward Burns.) Kenner, then on the faculty at University of California, Santa Barbara, and Davenport, a nontenured lecturer at Haverford College, share ideas in a kind of ecstatic volley. Their friendship is at home in the dialectic; ideas are mere starting points, containers of iterative potential. From the great figures of literary modernism\u2014James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Samuel Beckett, Marianne Moore\u2014to archival curiosa, Sapphic fragments, studies of motion, geodesic math, Walt Disney, Hellenic aesthetics, and the history of cinema (\u201cI think Ulysses<\/em> owes much to silent film,\u201d Kenner wagers),\u00a0Questioning Minds<\/em> often reads like the almanac of a brilliant and eccentric family. Beneath the heat of their native curiosity, even the most arcane subjects achieve a sudden, flaring warmth.<\/p>\n

Ezra Pound, whom both men idolized, exerts a pull over the correspondents like a collapsed star. Kenner and Davenport met in 1953 while presenting papers on the mercurial poet at Columbia University. That shared obsession animates their exchanges with a kinetic and gossipy energy. Sightings, rumors, and health scares abound. Pound, referred to as \u201cEz\u201d or \u201cEP\u201d, haunts the letters without ever quite fully manifesting. The glimpses we\u2019re offered are of a man in his dotage, puttering, cranky, made nearly transparent by time: \u201cThe news from Merano is that Ezra has quit writing, hope gone, Cantos unfinished, and is aging about 5 years a month,\u201d Kenner laments. Later, while visiting the poet in Italy, Davenport provides this dispatch from a Rapallo beach: \u201cEz in long black drawers, something Tennyson might have worn in swimming \u2026 EP swam a while, floated a while. Bumped into one of the floating platforms gently.\u201d The tone is protective, indulgent, lightly mocking though rarely less than affectionate. More than any other scholar, Kenner is responsible for the rehabilitation of Pound\u2014without excusing his frankly terrible politics, he restored his standing as the central figure of literary modernism, il miglior fabbro<\/em> of Eliot\u2019s The Waste Land<\/em>, the editor of Hemingway\u2019s adjectives, the impresario of the literary avant-garde. Kenner\u2019s masterpiece, The Pound Era <\/em>(1971), is a gorgeous, knotty, unthinkably erudite reckoning with the poet\u2019s work, \u201can X-ray moving picture of how our epoch was extricated from the fin de si\u00e8cle<\/em>.\u201d For a Kenner fan, seeing the first intimations of the book\u2019s \u201cpatterned integrities\u201d come to life in the letters is pure, voyeuristic pleasure.<\/p>\n

There is a similar satisfaction in following the collaborative efforts of the two writers, the fruit of which resulted in a pair of books, The Stoic Comedians: Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett <\/em>(1962), and The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy <\/em>(1968). Both featured words by Kenner, and illustrations by Davenport, with drafts and sketches making their way from California to Pennsylvania and back, often accompanied with daring syntheses, marginalia, corrections, affirmations, and words of warm encouragement. Of his images, Davenport writes: \u201cNor wd I have slaved over \u2019em\u2014and slave still\u2014for anybody except you, all effort being to approach (hopelessly) the plastic goodness of your prose.\u201d Kenner\u2019s praise is usually briefer, though no less ardent: \u201cYou bury<\/em> more good work than most of the best have published.\u201d As in the greatest collaborative projects, the resulting work has a crackling, synchronous power. It is lucid and passionate criticism that avoids the abstruse literary theory of the sixties and seventies, gorgeously written at a line level\u2014Kenner is a king of phrase making\u2014and webbed with the filaments of ideas first broached in the letters.<\/p>\n

The collection, though, is not merely a rich modernist inventory (even if, for some readers, this will happily be its main appeal). There are also instances of unlikely literary adventure and intrigue, what Burns in his introduction calls \u201cHolmesian moments.\u201d For example, there was the multiyear search for T. S. Eliot\u2019s manuscript of The Waste Land<\/em>, the coveted version marked with Pound\u2019s influential edits. Tipped off by Pound\u2019s estranged wife, Dorothy, Kenner and Davenport believed the secretary of the famous collector John Quinn, a woman named Jeanne Robert Foster, might have information. \u201cJ. Foster, by the way, has \u2018deposited\u2019 her Quinn papers in Houghton, so that to find out what \u2018the Eliot MS\u2019 might be, without letting [librarian William Jackson] know that I was snooping, I had to send a spy.\u201d Though they never discover the elusive manuscript, the passion with which they pursue it is worthy of a crime novel.<\/p>\n

More terrestrial difficulties are stitched through their intellectual banter like black thread: the death of Kenner\u2019s first wife, Mary; the death of Davenport\u2019s father; professional anxieties and health concerns; flaccid book sales. As is often the case with friendships, there is no final break-up. Instead, there is a slow fraying of ties. \u201cWe, you and I, are beginning to drift out of synchronicity,\u201d Davenport wrote to Kenner in 1977. While neither ever offers a reason for this cooling, Burns suggests that it may have been due to Kenner\u2019s disapproval of Davenport\u2019s sexual relationships with men. We watch their correspondence dwindle to a handful of missives in the nineties, mainly holiday greetings written by Kenner\u2019s second wife, Mary-Anne. There is only one letter in 2000, and an additional short letter\u2014it was to be the last\u2014in 2002, roughly a year before Kenner\u2019s death. \u201cWe\u2019ve been separated too long,\u201d Kenner writes. And then: \u201cAre you still nontech, or have you by any chance an email address by now?\u201d<\/p>\n

A Kenner and Davenport email thread? After one thousand letters, it is difficult to imagine. Still, perhaps the form is finally inconsequential, given the caliber of the minds. Like any intellectual exchange, the letters of gifted writers become an atlas of their intricate subjectivity. \u201cThought is a labyrinth,\u201d Davenport wrote to Kenner in 1963, a phrase he was much struck by. Eight years later, Kenner would end The Pound Era<\/em> with those very same words. It was the greatest compliment he could have bestowed upon his friend: that his wisdom should leap from the surface of these treasured letters and their thoughts be permanently conjoined.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read Guy Davenport\u2019s\u00a0<\/i>Art of Fiction interview<\/u><\/i>.<\/i><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Dustin Illingworth is a writer in Southern California. His work has appeared in <\/em>The Atlantic,<\/em> the<\/em> Times Literary Supplement, and the <\/em>Los Angeles Times.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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