Guy DavenportQuestioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner: 1;2

Davenport and Kenner were polymathic virtuosos of literary modernism. Kenner wrote the first major critical studies of Pound and Beckett; Davenport, as a Rhodes scholar, the first Oxford dissertation on Joyce. Returning to Harvard for his PhD, he wrote the first thesis on Pound. Though Kenner was the elder Pound scholar, Davenport was able to school him in classical Greek metrics and the ways the fragmentary nature of surviving Greek manuscripts influenced Pound's imagistic line. Their letters are filled with wit, erudition and gossip. One early theme is the search for the manuscript of "The Waste Land" with Pound's editorial corrections. Pound mentioned to Kenner in passing that John Quinn may have given it as a gift to one of his mistresses. (It was not included in the sale of Quinn's library). A certain lady in Schenectady is suspected. Guy is enlisted for the approach, pretending an interest in Quinn, only to then subtly raise the question...On the gossip front, those who know Davenport from his prelapsarian homoerotic coming of age stories may be surprised to learn of his dalliances with a certain "kallipygous" girlfriend during his Haverford days. There is much to learn and much to savor for the aficionado. But I have read virtually the complete works of both authors. How many others like me are there? (The Ransom Center where Davenport's archive is housed, lists over 3000 personal correspondents, so there are probably a few...) I am slowly making my way through the 2000 pages (the footnotes -in even smaller type - often contain gems: Laurence Scott, Davenport's Harvard friend and fellow Lowell House printer is identified as having gone on to the design and manufacture of composting toilets) and hope to someday make the acquaintance of someone who gets to the end.

This book is essential for fans of Guy Davenport. The ticklish question is: how many fans are there? Davenport used to claim that there were about 14 readers of his fiction. This was an exaggeration, but by how much? Some of his stories were published for collectors as limited editions: where more than 100 were printed, it is usually possible to collect them! Davenport was a charismatic university professor of English Literature, a prolific reviewer, essayist and critic. He was also a creative artist: he claimed to paint or draw every day, and write poetry every other Tuesday. From the age of 42 he began to publish his short fictions (he called them "stories", Hugh Kenner called them "assemblages" because of his collage technique.) His letters represent an aspect of autobiography, and throw some light on his creative process.Hugh Kenner was also a university professor of English Literature, and a celebrated critic of 20th-century Modernism. But he was not a creative artist - so how valuable are his letters? Are we interested in his biography, and does he actually have "fans"? These letters throw a fascinating light on the collaboration of the two men (Davenport drew the illustrations for two of Kenner's books) and their shared interests. Although the period covered is 1958 to 2002, the most intense exchanges are during the early 1960s (peaking in 1963) and it tails off rapidly after about 1975. Unfortunately, Davenport didn't start to write his stories until about 1968, so there is little light thrown on them.The publisher has done a very good job. There are over a thousand letters, and the sequence has been published complete, in two volumes of over 2000 pages (continuous pagination) with the complete index printed in each volume. The cloth-bound volumes are housed in a slip-case. The proofreading is not perfect, and blame for that should be shared between publisher and editor. The index is not perfect. A more critical publisher would also have looked more closely at what the editor was actually doing. A list of published books is given for both Davenport and Kenner - but in alphabetical order of title, rather than the more useful chronological order (the letters are in chronological order, after all...)Ah yes, the editor. During a career as a third-rate professor of English Literature, Edward M. Burns has published many volumes of writers' letters, so one would have hoped that he would have got the hang of it by now. But no. Perhaps I am just being a perfectionist - after all, a moderately important job has been done reasonably competently. Part of the problem must have been the process: batches of letters were transcribed and annotated out of sequence (as they became available) and then put together. At least three letters have been obviously misdated (one by exactly a year) - something which becomes obvious from simply reading them. Letters between the two authors are printed in sequence for each year, followed by a single sequence of notes for that year. The notes are copious - over-copious, in fact. People are identified and their biographical details given. If other people are mentioned in the note, their details are given, and so on. Sometimes the note relates to the whole paragraph of a letter, sometimes also to the subsequent paragraph! Full information on a person tends to be given in one note, but that is not the first mention. The notes give cross-references to other letters, but you soon realise that these are usually cross-references to the notes to that other letter, but the only way to access them is via that letter. Not everyone mentioned in the notes is indexed: James (Jesus) Angleton is mentioned (not totally relevantly) in a note as an editor of a Modernist poetry magazine, but not in his better known role as the CIA's crazed mole-hunter - nor is he indexed. The notes often don't give the reader the information they might need, and when attempts are made thay are often fatuous and sometimes incorrect.Burns has come to Davenport through Kenner, and his knowledge of him is superficial. He quotes from Davenport's story "The Death of Picasso" in the introduction, but confers a totally wrong name on the unnamed narrator. He fails to spot that Davenport's account of travelling the Vermont Swamp Trail with a girlfriend was later incorporated in the story "Fifty-seven views of Fujiyama". Burns confidently states that Davenport was bisexual, but while Davenport had intense relationships with several male students, they seem to have all been heterosexual - he almost certainly didn't have sex with them. Did he even have sex with his girlfriends? (Did people have sex in 1963?) At least one of them ("Deborah") seems to have been imaginary. Burns seems to have overlooked Davenport's chameleon quality: while he didn't exactly compartmentalise his friends and correspondents, he did reflect back something of their own characters: some of his correspondents were homosexual, most were not. Kenner was a family man and a Roman Catholic convert who at the very least flirted with the conservatism of his friend William F. Buckley (both men reviewed for Buckley's National Review.)

These two heft volumes, running to some two thousand pages, contain the letters of two leading literary minds of the twentieth century who were instrumental in shaping important parts of the Modernist Canon as it is represented by Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, and many others. Guy Davenport was my doctoral advisor at the University of Kentucky, so I am interested to see his letters from those years particularly and reflect on how much of this background appeared in his teaching and in conversation in his living room through the late 1960s and early 1970s.

An amazing correspondence deftly accentuated by astonishing annotations.

A superb read!