If asked to give an account of myself between 1995 and 2004, I would have to say that I spent the decade waiting for letters from Guy Davenport. The first came when I was twenty-six and working as a substitute teacher of high school French in Las Cruces, New Mexico, a small city near El Paso, Texas. My qualifications were zero: I had an undergraduate degree from a fancy school but no experience teaching. My tenth-grade students—they were growing up near the Mexican border, and many spoke Spanish as their first language—were left to endure my inept attempts at divining what their regular teacher (beloved, on maternity leave) had covered to date, and my baffling explanations of why and how to use the subjunctive. During a particularly undistinguished day of teaching, I attempted a disastrous, spontaneous etymology of “homeboy,” suggesting it came from the French homme, a claim immediately dismissed by a young man who said, apologetically, “Monsewer, that’s just not right.” I would return via bicycle to my little house in the desert, three miles away, either through hundred-degree temperatures or in the sudden downpours of early fall, utterly demoralized.
On one such day, I received my first Davenport letter. Two typewritten pages, it responded to a query I’d sent to him care of New Directions, one of his publishers. That query, equal parts presumptuous and embarrassing, had traveled from New Mexico to New York, been forwarded to Davenport’s home in Lexington, Kentucky, and generated a response in ten unbelievable days. I won’t apologize for calling the moment I opened my PO box magical. Even as I’d expected him to write back, I hadn’t expected him to write back. And he shouldn’t have: somehow I’d thought it was perfectly fine to send a stranger a letter that included a not exactly short manuscript of a translation I’d done years earlier, a translation in which no one had shown the least interest.1 I’d hand-painted a cover for it, bound it—in best fourth-grade fashion—with brass fasteners, and somehow convinced myself that it was perfectly fine to begin my letter with “I do not arrive by train.” Things went rhetorically downhill from there. And yet Davenport had written back.
That same feeling of astonishment accompanied my receipt of each of the next hundred letters Davenport sent me, the last arriving ten days before he died. But as I came to learn, and was not surprised to learn, Davenport would reply to anyone who wrote him. A grade school teacher had his students read a story of Davenport’s, “Belinda’s World Tour,” one that imagines a series of postcards to a little girl from her lost doll, postcards that Kafka mentions (in his diary) having written to a friend’s child who’d indeed lost her doll. All the students wrote to Davenport; he responded, sending each child a separate letter. When Eudora Welty, a pal of Davenport’s, visited him in 1965 in Kentucky to do a reading at the university (she asked him if they could skip out on it and go see Help!), she noticed a few letters on his desk. “Guy, are those fan letters?” “Yes Eudora.” “Are you answering them.” “Yes Eudora. Don’t you answer yours?” Pause. “I cain’t.”
Davenport could. Born in Anderson, South Carolina, in 1927, dying in Lexington in 2005, Davenport went to Duke at seventeen, then to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, where he produced the first thesis on James Joyce ever written at that university, then to Harvard, eventually landing at the University of Kentucky, where he taught for nearly thirty years. He published eight collections of short and long fiction (Tatlin!, Apples and Pears, and A Table of Green Fields among the high points, but my selection is effectively arbitrary: they all tower); four collections of essays (The Geography of the Imagination and Every Force Evolves a Form have joined the core curriculum for two generations of a certain kind of writer—the one who accidentally finds their way to them and, afterward, mines them shamelessly); translations from half a dozen languages (necessary versions of Archilochus, Heraclitus, and Diogenes among them, gathered into his anthology 7 Greeks); a long poem (Flowers and Leaves, which deserves reconsideration2); illustrations for books by others (Hugh Kenner’s The Counterfeiters) and various journals (his covers for Arion and Parnassus are particularly lovely); and his own collections of fiction (where his drawings are integral to and integrated through the stories). All the while, with no less application, he was producing paintings, many hundreds of canvases that were the subject of a sensitive study arguing for the interdependence of his verbal and visual art.3 And when not generating all that—some fifty books that managed mostly to evade the readers who did not know they needed them—he was also writing letters. Tens of thousands of them.
According to a finding aid at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, where his papers are held, 150 of the 226 Davenport document boxes consist of correspondence. By comparison, of Don DeLillo’s 151 boxes—also at the Ransom Center—twenty-seven are correspondence; of Anne Sexton’s forty-four, thirteen; of David Foster Wallace’s forty, parts of nine; and of Frederick Seidel’s thirty-three, parts of three. Between 1944 and his death at age seventy-seven, Davenport amassed, the finding aid tells us, more than 2,300 correspondents. They amount to what the Ransom Center calls, hyperbolically but not unjustifiably, “a twentieth-century publisher’s rolodex.” Here’s 1.26 percent of the haul: Donald Barthelme, Samuel Beckett, Robert Bly, William F. Buckley, Umberto Eco, Leon Edel, T.S. Eliot, Jonathan Safran Foer, Eva Hesse, August Kleinzahler, Richmond Lattimore, Christopher Logue, Harry Mathews, Cormac McCarthy, J.D. McClatchy, Thomas Merton, W.S. Merwin, Marianne Moore, Richard Pevear, Dorothy and Ezra Pound (and Olga Rudge), Roger Shattuck, John Updike, Eliot Weinberger, William Carlos Williams, Garry Wills, and Louis Zukofsky.
Given Davenport’s relative obscurity, it’s surprising just how much of his correspondence readers can actually buy. Tally: about 2,500 pages.4 James Laughlin sums up some of it. In 1992, when New Directions acquired its first book by Davenport, A Table of Green Fields (which contains my favorite of his stories, “August Blue”), Laughlin wrote to his staff about his excitement, mentioning in passing that the letters he’d been getting from Davenport for twenty-five years “are the most learned-funny that I’ve received since Dudley Fitts left this earth.”5
More than a dozen of Davenport’s books remain in print (stories, essays, translations, poetry, correspondence). This abundance is mostly thanks to the publisher and editor Jack Shoemaker. Beginning in 1981 he put out thirteen Davenports under four different imprints, none of which had the intended effect of gaining him a wider readership. New Directions keeps four books in print; David Zwirner has reissued Davenport’s 1989 A Balthus Notebook. If we collate the unlikely commitment to keeping his work available despite the lack of clamor for it with the insistence his letters’ recipients have shown in sharing them with a wider audience, we might draw the conclusion that Davenport enthusiasts aren’t cranks so much as disciples who, having seen things at intimate firsthand, felt they had no choice but to evangelize.
I have hopes that the recent reissue of The Geography of the Imagination—with a sparkling and useful introduction by John Jeremiah Sullivan—will draw a new generation to his work. Geography was the book that gave me the idea that I should write to Davenport and send him a difficult manuscript, because if he didn’t get it, there was nothing there to get. I had stolen my copy from a friend when I was twenty, and I look back on the act as one of my moments of purest virtue. The critic and novelist James Wood tells me he stole his copy of Geography from a bookstore in Durham, England, when he was nineteen. The title was part of the attraction for me, as was my friend’s endorsement, but really it was the first sentence:
The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all a difference of the imagination.
In fifty-two words, Davenport manages to pursue architecture, toolmaking, music, theater, transportation, history, anthropology, and myth, uniting these disciplines under the single umbrella that shelters them all: our power to form images in the mind, and our practice of putting those images into the world. I know no single sentence that does a more efficient job of making clear the habit of mind that producing a work of art entails: the difference between the world as we find it and the world as we make it. We choose nothing we are born into, whether 100,000 years ago or tomorrow. Art is the province of choice, of saying not this, that; not those, these; not theirs, mine.
“As to your ‘small talent for belles lettres’ disclaimer,” Cormac McCarthy wrote to Davenport in 1985, in one of the letters the men exchanged across three decades, “I suppose modesty is a good and noble quality and God knows it is scarce to extinction among the scriveners (Borges a fine exception) but those essays are as good as any written in this country to date.” The essays in question are Davenport’s, from Geography, which had appeared four years earlier. Onward through the 1980s McCarthy, in his wide-ranging letters (books read, trips taken, work under production—shoptalk), kept Davenport abreast of his evangelism for that collection (and for the next one, Every Force Evolves a Form). McCarthy harangued bookstores to stock them (“I’ve got the local book store [sic] stocked up with a good supply of TGOTI in both paper and hardbound copies.”) and reported news of other fans (“I was pleased to see William Gaddis with a copy sticking out of his coat pocket last April in Chicago.”) He also sent Davenport, a half-dozen times, copies of Geography and Every Force that he had bought, along with prepaid envelopes addressed to McCarthy’s family and friends (his brother, a niece, a nephew, and on), with requests that Davenport inscribe them: “I’m once again—as you see—presuming upon your good nature with a request for your signature.”
Geography provides an education in the same good-humored voice as the letters, refined for the varied subjects of the essays, all of which, despite their variety, can be said to be about the same thing: finding. Davenport’s essays are a set of paths that lead us to places we haven’t been. All it took, he said, was an open eye. “I was never trained to argue,” Davenport told me. “I only observe.” But observation requires curiosity, and one of the remarkable features of Davenport’s essays—which overwhelmingly explicate “difficult” modernist texts by Joyce and Pound, though they are no less interested in Welty, Joyce Kilmer, and Tarzan—is how his writing moves the reader into darknesses in their knowledge that yield to illumination. A text is revealed to be a cave into which an intelligence has descended, by torchlight, to make marks that, once discovered, will require some work to see: an inversion of Plato’s gloomy allegory.6
A number of distinctive critics were working in parallel during Davenport’s lifetime, among them Randall Jarrell, Mary McCarthy, Lionel Trilling, Frank Kermode, Elizabeth Hardwick, Northrop Frye, John Updike, and Helen Vendler. I set Davenport apart. He was our most insightful reader of modernist writing, one no less able to confront Pound’s obvious difficulty than to reveal the hidden complexity of Welty, a writer he judged the American equal of Joyce. Proust’s definition of style—“a quality of vision, the revelation of the particular universe that each of us sees and that no one else sees”—may also be applied to Davenport’s way of seeing, of detecting what had been there all along. In a rare autobiographical essay, “Finding,” Davenport offered an origin for his habit of mind:
Every Sunday afternoon of my childhood, once the tediousness of Sunday school and the appalling boredom of church were over with, corrosions of the spirit easily salved by the roast beef, macaroni pie, and peach cobbler that followed them, my father loaded us all into the Essex, later the Packard, and headed out to look for Indian arrows. That was the phrase, “to look for Indian arrows.” Children detect nothing different in their own families: I can’t remember noticing anything extraordinary in our family being the only one I knew of that devoted every Sunday afternoon to amateur archaeology.
Trained not to argue but to look. “The House That Jack Built” is exemplary of that practice, a pursuit of forces that forge unique literary forms. It begins with Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera:
Fors is a kind of Victorian prose Cantos, arranging its subjects in ideogrammatic form, shaping them with a poetic sense of imagery, allowing themes to recur in patterns, generating significance, as Pound did, by juxtaposition and the intuition of likenesses among dissimilar and unexpected things.
When I read that paragraph at twenty, I was encountering the names Ruskin and Pound for the first time, as I was most of the other names in the essay, including Alexander del Mar, Louis Agassiz, Alexander von Humboldt, Maria Edgeworth, Brancusi, Charles Olson, Pavel Tchelitchew…. Among Davenport’s gifts was his ability to make the reader not feel stupid for what he does not know—rather, smart for beginning to see that there is so much he could want to find. And so we find our way to Olson:
His poetry is inarticulate. His lectures achieved depths of incoherence. His long poem Maximus was left unfinished, like most of his projects and practically all of his sentences. He put food in his pockets at dinner parties. He was saved from starving by Hermann Broch. He once ate an oil rag. He was, like Coleridge, a passionate talker for whom whole days and nights were too brief a time to exhaust a subject. He wrote a study of American musical comedies, was a professional dancer, served in the State Department under Roosevelt, went to the rain forests of Yucatan, was rector of a college. He was taller than doors and had the physique of a bear. He was an addict as he grew older to both alcohol and drugs.
A brief biographical march, all those alluring narrative lures. Who wouldn’t read on? “Inarticulate” is also a lure. This is seemingly a dismissal of Olson, but by essay’s end we understand it as a signal trait, his necessary difference. Davenport makes the case that reading Olson cannot be a solitary act. Rather, it requires multiple sets of knowledge to bring the poem forward, to articulate—from the Latin articulare, “to divide into joints”—the poem, to sound the depth of the thing. For the reader reflexively resistant to that level of work—too hard!—Davenport reveals the civilizational utility of difficult things:
Like Pound’s ideogrammatic forms, it is poetry that demands consideration among several people, and thus easily becomes social discourse, rich material for classes in schools. Its seeming inarticulateness is not a failure to articulate, but a declining to articulate images and events which can be left in free collision.
Reading as a community project, a means to the end of knitting us together through a common love. It is not explication that Davenport asks of us. Rather awareness, attention triumphing over indifference. As he told Sullivan in an interview for The Paris Review in 2002:
My view, as one who taught [literature], is that the whole purpose of a literary education should be to tell people that these things exist. I don’t think any teacher should try to “teach an author” but rather simply describe what the author has written.
As often as not, such descriptions are told as adventure stories. Just such a “consideration among several people” unfolded in one of Davenport’s classrooms. Sometime in the 1960s he and his students were working to figure out what was going on in Olson’s “The Kingfishers.” As Davenport tells it,
An enterprising student, as frustrated as his teacher by sections of the poem for which we could find no help at all, did something which I had neither the time nor the gall to do. He drove, one weekend, to the poet’s house in Gloucester, Mass., and knocked on the poet’s door. This was early on a Sunday morning. The poet, a man…just under seven feet tall, had been up to a late hour. He shouted through the door that he wanted whoever was knocking on his door to desist, and go away, quickly, and forever. The student shouted through the door that he wanted to understand “The Kingfishers” and had questions about it. The poet replied that he would soon emerge, if the knocking and shouting didn’t cease, and do grave damage to the head and limbs of the student. The student kept knocking. The poet bellowed. This story, implausibly, has a happy ending. The poet’s rage gave way. He appeared in his clothes, in which he habitually slept, invited the student in, and told the student more about “The Kingfishers” than the student could absorb. Olson kept saying of his more cryptic allusions, “Your teacher will know what I mean.”
He didn’t, Davenport makes clear, nor was he impeded by that ignorance. It was all about the pleasure of pursuit, in search of the beauty of other, stranger minds. Davenport, after all, had hiked throughout Italy with the poet Christopher Middleton one summer during his time at Oxford, carrying two books: “a Donne and a Cantos.” As they hiked they read The Cantos aloud to each other. “Neither of us, I think, had much notion as to what [it] was about,” but they gave it the full effort of their attention. A community of two, they knew they found it beautiful.
The Geography of the Imagination is dedicated to the critic Hugh Kenner. Best known for The Pound Era (1971), a deep study of modernism that situates Pound at its center, Kenner was four years older but much further along in his career when he met Davenport at a conference in 1953, each of them giving a paper on Pound. Kenner helped Davenport gain a larger audience, for although the younger man had published twenty pieces in small journals (Audience, Spectrum, Curled Wire Chronicle) it wasn’t until he was thirty-four, in 1961, that Kenner got him writing for a general interest publication, National Review. Davenport didn’t share its politics, but it had a lively books section, and two of Davenport’s first three essays for the magazine—on Edgar Rice Burroughs and on Poetry—would end up, twenty years later, in Geography.
The two men seem to have begun corresponding in 1958—the earliest of their extant letters—and went on to exchange around a thousand over the next forty-five years. For the reader keen to know where to start, the 250 pages of 1963, their busiest year, contain a world. Davenport is translating Archilochus and writing on Marianne Moore, Günter Grass (he tells Kenner, “Have just read the 700-pp. Tin Drum…; not worth it, but still an interesting book”), Joan Didion (Davenport reviewed, negatively, Run, River, her first novel, drawing a letter to the editor in protest; Davenport told Kenner, “Why won’t people see that book reviews evaporate as they’re written and that nobody’s trying to gag the Miss Didion or put a hex on her or paralyze her with witchcraft. Goodness Gracious”7),and Beatrix Potter (among his seventeen reviews that year); Kenner is compiling an anthology of seventeenth-century poetry and another of short stories, writing The Pound Era, delivering essays on Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, Cocteau, F.R. Leavis, and a eulogy for William Carlos Williams (as Davenport was doing his own).
A March letter from Davenport begins with Henry James, suggesting “The Jolly Corner” for Kenner’s anthology of short stories, and ends with Williams, doctor and poet:
Carlos Williams, rest. He so resented the paralysis, a special cruelty to a man so clever with his fingers; obstetricians can pick up a basketball with a flat hand, without perceptible purchase to ordinary eyes—the strong gentleness needed to turn an emerging baby’s head without crushing the tissue-thin bone. I’m glad I went over [to see Williams] this summer. We talked for two hours. No guile in him, all raw honesty, utter lack of polish (bless him); all the squirming bashfulness of adolescence still there, lacked with a countrified slyness.
Pound’s oldest friend gone. There seems to be a pressing need of poets Up Yonder. I wonder if his sick elm (in the front yard at 9 Ridge Road) did it? He said he wouldn’t outlive it. It was his Tree when he was a boy. Thought is a labyrinth.
Eight years later, Kenner’s six-hundred-page The Pound Era would begin with Henry James and end with the sentence “Thought is a labyrinth.” Kenner told Davenport in his reply what he had given him:
The Pound Era could well close with those words….
In fact I think you have supplied me with an ending phrase. Thing is to build up to it with sufficient complication in last 2 paragraphs, and then clang, let it reverberate in the terminal stillness…. Whole point of a book is what happens in the five minutes after one has finished reading it.
They communicated almost not at all during the final two decades of their lives. It’s not clear why. But the regard never waned. Each man wrote the introduction to the descriptive bibliography of the other; Davenport’s appeared in 1996, and Kenner’s in 2001. They died just over a year apart. A kind of conversation died with them.
English (US) · 