Guy DavenportRezensionen

I continue to enjoy essay collections from the '50s, '60s, and '70s (this one a current re-issue). Most of the essays here are very dense. It sometimes felt like Davenport was simply 'erudition dumping' - so many references. But the central argument(s) and idea(s) of each piece always came through. In one of the latter essays, it became apparent that many of the writers he discusses were good friends or, at least, acquaintances. This made me wonder if they are the vital artists he makes them out to be. Still, an enlightening read. One minor complaint with this edition but I hate when the publication date (or year) of each piece isn't provided in any easily identifiable way. Perhaps it is OCD on my part. Recommend.

I first encountered Guy Davenport in the review section of The National Review magazine. These letters are endlessly interesting with the thoughts, interests, and sometimes quotidian details that might not be as appealing if they did not come from the minds of two of my favorite authors. It is undoubted because they are both fascinating and challenging, providing ideas and spurring reading of topics and ideas that are mentioned.

I do not pretend the ability to read Guy Davenport properly. I have neither the background or education in the classics and/or poetry to intelligently discuss his erudite, esoteric works, but I do continually try to "find a mode of perception other than one's own."
Mr. Davenport has pointed me in the direction of many, many perceptions/ world views. I am grateful. I look forward to following his leads, and reading more of his words.

It didn't take long to figure out that sticking with The Death of Picasso...was going to be The Death of Me.

What am I missing? Do tell me if you get it.

Our liveliest literary tradition, as usual, is an unknown, even an unsuspected one.


Being fair, I likely rounded up as I think this would've been pristine were it 31 or 32 essays rather than 40. Many reviewers have noted that this is a master class of sorts; well, it is of a certain reading/poetic ideology. Yeah, I used that word. While Davenport confesses to subsisting often on fried bologna, canned soup and candy bars, his reclusive career is one to be celebrated. There may be cost to such a choice. Davenport is a follower of Ezra Pound. This extends to the authors elected to his poetic canon in the [b:ABC of Reading|145108|ABC of Reading|Ezra Pound|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347568729s/145108.jpg|140013] and [b:Literary Essays of Ezra Pound|145107|Literary Essays of Ezra Pound|Ezra Pound|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347579025s/145107.jpg|140012]. This is sort of accepted without question. No need for everyone to learn Provencal but maybe someone should consider the merits of Auden or Gruppe 47?


It was wonderful learning about some new poets: Ronald Johnson features on my immediate horizon and I may now have sufficient impetus to purse Hugh Kenner's magnum opus. Yet questions remain, even-hound. Why exactly Eudora Weltry? I appreciate the situating of her plotlines into a Persephone tradition but still?


Despite the objections, there is much to marvel. I remain unsure of what my immediate course will be. Olsen and Duncan still intimidate but the essay on Whitman is one for the ages.

In our time the anthropoligists and philosophers have tried to find the boundary line between wild and tame, nature and culture, the uncivilized and the civilized. The line is easily found for other species. But we will have tamed ourselves, and how?

Halloween has become more important since we bought this house. It is the only day of the year when I talk at length to our neighbors. Sure, the guy next door will ask me about the Heidegger I'm befuddled with as I struggle to tend to my grilling during summer's dog days, but it is only on that spooky night do we as a loose gathering of people who habitate in such proximity actually listen and espouse. This season I had devoted more time than any of recent memory to reading about the supernatural, the chilling and those unnamed bumps in the blackness of our primitive souls. When the actual holiday arrived I had stumbled across that morning a couple of volumes of Davenport and subsequently discovered myself rathered adhered. Davenport is like a neighbor who when asked attempts to inform and entertain. I loved the pieces on Joyce, Whitman and Thomas Merton. The latter has been a source of serial concidences as of late.

Suggests interpretations of paintings by the controversial modern artist, and discusses the influence of Rilke and Picasso on his work

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.½

Spanning from the eighth to the third century B.C., included here are four poets (Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman and Anakreon), two philosophers (Herakleitos and Diogenes, the Cynic philospher), and Herondas, who wrote comic skits. Almost all of the above survive only in fragments found in pot shards, scraps of papyrus used to wrap mummies and quotations by grammarians and others. Davenport puts brackets in the gaps where missing and illegible words were found. Some fragments consist of only one word: rhinoceros, nightingale, imposter, grape, plums, naked. It lends a poignancy to many of these ruins of once magnificent structures.

Among the poets represented I regret most those gaps with Archilochos and Sappho. Both of them despite the fragmentary nature of what survived come through as personalities and amazing poets--in what couldn't be a wider contrast. Archilochos was a mercenary with what Davenport calls a "nettle tongue;" there was a legend wasps hovered over his grave. I definitely can see the soldier here--often biting, crude, lewd, blunt. The most striking (and possibly complete) poem, Number 43 is comic and frankly erotic at once. Sappho is the great lyric poet of antiquity. Plato called her the "tenth muse." She's Archilochos opposite pole, vernal, refined--but like him at times frank in speaking of desire.

Both philosophers were standouts, despite that all that Davenport can provide are a couple of lines or short passages. Herakeitos, according to Karl Popper a forerunner of Plato, wrote on the theme of change. His sayings remind me of Ecclesiastes, or a Buddhist sage: One cannot step twice into the same river, for the water into which you first stepped has flowed on. And I loved, loved, loved Diogenes, who often made me smile madly with delight. What he said about, and to, such people as Plato and Alexander the Great! ("I've seen Plato's cups and table, but not his cupness and tableness.")

I wasn't impressed with the 7 complete and fragments of skits by Herondas, and the verse of Alkman and Anakreon didn't speak to me the way those of Archilochos and Sappho did. But this is definitely a book I consider a keeper.

The essays collected hear will point you to writers, poets, and artists that you must have a relationship with. Many are introductions to, or critiques of, the works of others; some are brief biographies; others seem to be simply exceptionally lucid and attentive forays into whatever Davenport was thinking about at the time.

It's difficult to describe this wide-ranging adn erudite collection, but I will say that, after reading all of it, I am left with the nagging desire to spend the rest of my life studying at Davenport's feet. Unfortunately, he's no longer with us, except in collections such as this.

I expect to read these essays over and over, as I try to extract what I can from my reading of the best of literature 9archaic and modern), because Davenport touches on so much, and ties so much of the best works together.

Os.

The Bicycle Rider, one of the short stories is a Utopina fiction where supremely bright and beautiful 12-year-old boys embrace sexual liberation with themselves and adults.

A young adolescent boy discovers his sexuality.

Sexual relationships between teachers and young boys.

Sexually precocious boys and a licentious Boy Scout troop leader.

A world where a group of friends have sex with everyone. Four children (two boys and two girls) are encouraged to enjoy sexual activity. Men who are associated with an organised paedophile group are sexually intimate with the boys with the approval of the children's parents.

I go back to this book when I am feeling too tired to read anything new, or feeling dull or complacent. Most of these essays involve making connections among writers and books and ideas, getting to the heart of a book I've never read in a way that gets me excited to pick it up.

includes best article ever on Wittgenstein, Erich Heller notwithstanding

Twenty-four essays about various topics in literature, criticism, culture and history. There's some high-level thinking going on here, but I must confess it's a little too erudite and high-flown to really grab me. Guess I'm not so broadbanded a Renaissance man, after all.

While the backbone of this collection is its defense and decoding of the great modernists (Joyce, Pound) and early postmodernists (Zukofsky, Olson), the book also forays ceaselessly into all sorts of other areas: Dogon myth, Wittgenstein, Shaker aesthetics, hobbitry, the invention of the buttonhole, Stan Brakhage, and Indian arrowheads, to name but a few. Davenport's true genius is his ability to synthesize: he arranges these disparate subjects into a single staggering design so complete that the book seems to contain no digressions, only elaborations. A thrilling collection; highly recommended.

When Guy Davenport died in Kentucky in January 2005, the United States lost one of its last great men of letters. The experience of reading The Geography of the Imagination is truly a geographic sort of rush-- a "Cortez-seeing-the-Pacific-for-the-first-time" feeling (yes, I *know* who it was, and you know why I'm saying Cortez-- and if you don't, you can find out in Davenport.) In his writing, erudition is worn so lightly it turns into a hang-glider-- to read these essays is to be reminded, palpably and unmistakably, what being learned is *for.*

His was a mind to which nothing was foreign. Davenport wrote fiction, poetry, art and music criticism, and literary essays of wide-ranging and never-failing fascination. His anecdotes from a lifetime of studying under those who he admired will inspire and make you guffaw; his surprising connections between cultural moments a thousand years apart will make you blink with wonder.

He will also show you how easy a difficult text is, and how difficult an easy one. Davenport's efforts to create public appreciation and support of poets beyond the mainstream was a labor of love and radical commitment, and every American reader of poetry is indebted to him. It was from Davenport that I first learned who Jonathan Williams and Robert Kelly were, and why to read Lorine Niedecker and Ronald Johnson. He championed the reading of Olson and Zukofsky and will, if you let him, open up Pound's "Cantos" for you in ways that leave mere *explication du texte* rusting on the side of the road.

Davenport had read everything-- read and digested. Not just "Robinson Crusoe," but its two (!) sequels; not just "Moby-Dick," but "Clarel"; not just Thoreau, but Agassiz, Audubon, Muir, and Lewis and Clark. He compared dozens of translations of Homer and himself rendered the poems of Archilochus, Sappho and others; he studied Chinese inspired by Pound and Fenollosa; for Anglo-Saxon he went to learn from J.R.R. Tolkien. His erudition was always at the service of his curiosity, and high- and low-brow meant nothing to him, decades before it was cool to deconstruct a television commercial. In a few pages, sometimes one, his thought may leap like a living spark from O. Henry to James Joyce to Walt Disney, from Charles Ives to Rimbaud to the Lone Ranger; and moreover-- what is all the more refreshing-- *never* with the cuteness or cleverness that poisons "cultural studies" with the malaise of the always-already-passe. Despite his unflagging chastisement of know-nothing anti-intellectualism and laziness, Davenport was an optimist in a way that used to be considered characteristically American; but his enthusiasm extended to everything, old-world, new-world, what may yet be and what never was.

This is to say, that Davenport's great learning was first of all gratitude, which-- glory be to God-- he expressed over and over again in irrepressibly articulate and unfenced prose. Now that he is gone, who is left so catholic in interest and intrepid in craft? There are still a few truly wide-ranging scholars who do write beautiful and soul-changing sentences: George Steiner, Roberto Calasso, Martha Nussbaum, Anne Carson.... but for sheer generosity married to such voracious self-education, making such song and argument as to shake the mind awake and make the heart glad, Davenport was sui generis. We shall not see his like again.