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Every Force Evolves a Form
Dust jacket design by David Bullen. His 16th book. Twenty essays about both high & low culture.
171 pages, Hardcover
First published February 1, 1987
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
March 25, 2013
A core of three intense near-manifestoes – “The Artist as Critic,” “The Scholar as Critic,” “The Critic as Artist” – surrounded by occasional essay-reviews which show us Montaigne’s Italian journey (a “medicine-and-book-laden coach set out for Rome…”), the props and repertoire of third-century Alexandrian mimes, Nabokov teaching Don Quixote at Harvard (“Nabokov was lecturing in the hotbed of Spanish romanticizing. Lowell and Longfellow had invented a Spain which has stuck in the American imagination”); Balthus, late Beckett, the automotive deformation of the small American city; and so much more. In his Paris Review interview Davenport called himself “an obscure and experimental writer” – or I would say one of those mandarins Updike neatly sketched as “beyond commercial hopes, beyond the general earthbound sensibility,” with no rousing tale to tell or public thesis to prove, but a “rare sensibility and a curious found of information.” I love Davenport like I love Marguerite Yourcenar and Guido Ceronetti. He’s such a surprising and unpredictable writer that he can repeat all the most ig’nant shit ever said about Ulysses Grant in an essay that is nonetheless one of the best things I’ve read on the American Civil War. This is good:
When I read J.F.C. Fuller’s Grant and Lee a few years ago I was shocked by the evidence of Lee’s carelessness and fatalism, his ineptitude as an administrator and indifference to high strategy, his seeming failure to grasp the nature of the war he was fighting, and by the aristocratic arrogance that let him believe that to chasten a Federal army was to destroy it. Perhaps Lee was simply an inferior general who didn’t “know his business,” but sometimes I wonder if he knew he was wrong and his heart just wasn’t in it. He did say before the war that slavery harmed Southern society, and he had spent his life in the US Army, and his father had been one of George Washington’s trusted lieutenants. The North’s superiority is always described as one of men or material, less frequently of morale; the North retained a far larger portion of the country’s mystic nationalism, the evangelical certainty that God created the United States to redeem humanity from dark centuries of class tyranny and sectarian oppression. Lincoln and Sherman wrote like melancholic ironists but acted like fanatical warlords; muted Grant, in whom Davenport weirdly finds no ideals, writes of Providence guiding his armies. Beside such certainty Confederate nationalism seems like bravado and duelist pique. At the outbreak of war Grant and many others thought the slaveholders were committing suicide.
What Olmstead shows us is a culture in the raw, capable of a high civilization in Charleston drawing rooms and in a few private homes, but for the most part not working, clumsy, perhaps purposeless to those who took stock of what they thought they were doing. In their most idealistic picture of themselves, Southerners looked back to Greece and Rome (a decade or so after the century of the Enlightenment!) for a model, but many of them must have seen that they were awkwardly out of phase, that they were maintaining a feudal society in the dawn of the Age of Steam. Slavery gave them the opportunity to be idle, demoralized, and vain. The beautiful irony is that it was a man bored with being idle [Grant], for whom war was something to do, who fought them to the death over an ideal which perhaps both North and South, each in their own way, had betrayed.
When I read J.F.C. Fuller’s Grant and Lee a few years ago I was shocked by the evidence of Lee’s carelessness and fatalism, his ineptitude as an administrator and indifference to high strategy, his seeming failure to grasp the nature of the war he was fighting, and by the aristocratic arrogance that let him believe that to chasten a Federal army was to destroy it. Perhaps Lee was simply an inferior general who didn’t “know his business,” but sometimes I wonder if he knew he was wrong and his heart just wasn’t in it. He did say before the war that slavery harmed Southern society, and he had spent his life in the US Army, and his father had been one of George Washington’s trusted lieutenants. The North’s superiority is always described as one of men or material, less frequently of morale; the North retained a far larger portion of the country’s mystic nationalism, the evangelical certainty that God created the United States to redeem humanity from dark centuries of class tyranny and sectarian oppression. Lincoln and Sherman wrote like melancholic ironists but acted like fanatical warlords; muted Grant, in whom Davenport weirdly finds no ideals, writes of Providence guiding his armies. Beside such certainty Confederate nationalism seems like bravado and duelist pique. At the outbreak of war Grant and many others thought the slaveholders were committing suicide.
February 3, 2020
Thus we can trace Leonardo's "obstinate rigor of attention" (the phrase is
Paul Valary's) to one fine detail of nature as it caught the sharp eye of Montaigne. Just as we have to be alerted age after age by our own new concerns
to go back to Leonardo to see if he wasn't there first, so must we reread Montaigne, the travel journal along with the inexhaustible Essays, with fresh eyes
every generation.
My wife and I went to Lexington yesterday for a day of bookstores, yarn shops, West African cuisine and warm almost humid weather on the First of February. Guy Davenport taught at the University of Kentucky for quite a while so I had him as a target when I hit the first of three bookstores (by the way, I was shocked that a city the size of Lexington can support three used bookstores in 2020.) I inquired after browsing whether they had a specific section for Kentucky authors. I was shown a shelf of Davenport. I quickly discovered that most of them were a$100 a title as they were signed by the author. The inscription in question was uniform and printed. Just about seven words in black ink. I pondered for a second tearing out each of the inscribed pages and then inquiring about the resulting discount. Alas, it was only my wily imagination and nothing further occurred. I did buy my copy at the next store, one without inscription and for about ten dollars. Reading Questioning Minds: Volumes I and II: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner upon its publication I was aware of Davenport's meandering attention and protean focus. Both are on display in this tome. I particularly liked the pieces on Montaigne and Joyce. No surprises there. Davenport was always the polymath and is again here. Somehow this penumbra of dread shades his sparkling curiosity.
Paul Valary's) to one fine detail of nature as it caught the sharp eye of Montaigne. Just as we have to be alerted age after age by our own new concerns
to go back to Leonardo to see if he wasn't there first, so must we reread Montaigne, the travel journal along with the inexhaustible Essays, with fresh eyes
every generation.
My wife and I went to Lexington yesterday for a day of bookstores, yarn shops, West African cuisine and warm almost humid weather on the First of February. Guy Davenport taught at the University of Kentucky for quite a while so I had him as a target when I hit the first of three bookstores (by the way, I was shocked that a city the size of Lexington can support three used bookstores in 2020.) I inquired after browsing whether they had a specific section for Kentucky authors. I was shown a shelf of Davenport. I quickly discovered that most of them were a$100 a title as they were signed by the author. The inscription in question was uniform and printed. Just about seven words in black ink. I pondered for a second tearing out each of the inscribed pages and then inquiring about the resulting discount. Alas, it was only my wily imagination and nothing further occurred. I did buy my copy at the next store, one without inscription and for about ten dollars. Reading Questioning Minds: Volumes I and II: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner upon its publication I was aware of Davenport's meandering attention and protean focus. Both are on display in this tome. I particularly liked the pieces on Montaigne and Joyce. No surprises there. Davenport was always the polymath and is again here. Somehow this penumbra of dread shades his sparkling curiosity.
June 4, 2018
Guy Davenport is a genius. He is one of those rare breeds of intellectuals who can straddle between being a literary critic and an art critic. With deep knowledge of classics, keen taste in poems to an acute sense of observation and sensibility to art, Guy Davenport traverses each of these and more diverse subjects effortlessly.
He surprises the reader with the very first chapter "The Champollion of Table manners", which is about Claude Levi Strauss's book "The origin of Table manners", where we read the so-called bourgeois etiquette(an invention of its class) was already in its crude form(for us civilized people) among Indians, if at all we have only taken the real meaning out of it by becoming self-centric and snobbish.
This is a more of an anthropological and cultural study.
Next chapter is perhaps my most favorite and it shows davenport's keen eye for art and history of it.
It's about Henri Rosseau-titled "what are those Monkeys doing?". The title centers on the painting "Les Joyeux Farceurs". I don't want to give any spoilers, so I will refrain from adding any further about it.
Here the genius of Davenport at his full shine. We see he is referring and quoting Rimbaud, Flaubert, Apollinaire and how they are so close to paintings and settings of Rosseau!
There is a chapter on Joyce and the circularity of text in his full oeuvre. A Terrific essay. A deep study of Joycean wordplay.
The middle section is a triptych- The Artist as Critic, The Scholar as Artist, The Critic as Artist. He takes an investigative mode through literary history and shows us as to how at various points these three professions had crossed boundaries, gave and took from each other, which has enriched each's sphere.
There is a chapter on Montaigne (he asserts that it's Plutarch who invented essay, not Montaigne), E.E Cummings ( was a delight to acquaint more on this witty and smart poet), Beckett, Webster, Balthus(Where again davenport's sensibility to art history is clearly visible), Don Quixote, Walt Whitman and Poe ( one of my favorites for it's format- as a loosely joint journal entries; as well a close study of Poe's Raven and generally Birds as a form of divine creature in literature).
Before I end this review, I will leave you with a few quotes from the book:
Obliquity is the structuralist trademark. There is always something to be explained before something else can be explained. We begin with many versions of a myth about a clinging woman, "The Hunter Monmancki and His
Wives," from the Tucuna of South America. We don't know it yet, but the essence of the book is all here in this strange and apparently pointless tale.
The hero gets a frog pregnant by pointing his penis at her, they marry, go hunting together, and straightway bump into the fact that they dine on wholly different things, and the hunter's mother has a sharp word for a
daughter-in-law who serves cockroaches as a delicacy. Our hero marries four more wives, with indifferent success. One of them breaks in half at the waist. When he tries to abandon her, the top half clings to his back and appropriates his food. Indian myths tend to be Bosch-like, nightmarish,
strange.
Some fifty transmutations and variants of this myth later, we move to
North America to hear another set. These also have to do with marrying frogs.
Sun and Moon, looking down on the earth one day, decided to choose wives from the creatures below. Moon chose a maiden, but Sun, who did not like the squint on human faces when they looked at him, chose a frog. The
mother of Sun and Moon was willing to be charmed by both her daughters-
in-law, though Frog Wife came under suspicion immediately, because she peed at every hop. The test, however, was table manners. The wedding feast was a nice mess of buffalo chitterlings. The Indian wife crunched hers with a fine loud smacking noise and was much admired. Poor Frog Wife did not even know which was the food and which the fire beneath. She fished out a
piece of charcoal, sucked on it, and let black spit run down her chin. This made everybody sick. Moon was derisive. Frog Wife jumped on his face and stayed there, like the clinging woman in the South American myth.
In the chapter about Montaigne :
Thus we can trace Leonardo's "obstinate rigor of attention" (the phrase is
Paul ValCry's) to one fine detail of nature as it caught the sharp eye of Montaigne. Just as we have to be alerted age after age by our own new concerns
to go back to Leonardo to see if he wasn't there first, so must we reread Montaigne, the travel journal along with the inexhaustible Essays, with fresh eyes
every generation.
This quote is about Montaigne recording in his essays, after hearing from a craftsman that rings in the structure of the trees point to their age. We learn it isn't Montaigne but the foremost polymath Leonardo who found out that first. But to how it reached the ears of a craftsman in the city of pisa is a story best read from the book.
If good reads is any indication of readership, it's a pity that many haven't read this guy.
This small fact made me remember an incident. Once, when another genius of an essayist by the name of Eliot Weinberger (who mentions Davenport as the best essayist working in present times) came to India, he was interviewed by The Hindu newspaper. In which we see a journalist puts forth as a matter of fact question that he is less read in his own country(America), while having many fans in this side of the world (which was an exaggeration or a lie of worst form).
I hope many people will discover and read more of Davenport's works.
Read
August 23, 2018Guy Davenport is one of those people who has such a vast palette of references that he sounds like he's bullshitting even when he's not -- he mentions two Scandinavian semioticians writing a book about the role of pumpkins, squashes, gourds, and cucumbers in world literature, and holy fuck, that was actually a thing.
I know because I wrote that down as a book to read. In fact, I kept writing down references to books to read, because Davenport is above all else a curator of ideas. He comes off as a bit of a mad professor, a bit of a dissident Southern gentleman, and above all else, the best person to talk to at the cocktail party. He can be witty, acerbic, erudite, and self-deprecating in one paragraph, and that one paragraph is about Catullus, Ezra Pound, and the American Civil War all at once. Do not sleep on this, people, do not sleep.
I know because I wrote that down as a book to read. In fact, I kept writing down references to books to read, because Davenport is above all else a curator of ideas. He comes off as a bit of a mad professor, a bit of a dissident Southern gentleman, and above all else, the best person to talk to at the cocktail party. He can be witty, acerbic, erudite, and self-deprecating in one paragraph, and that one paragraph is about Catullus, Ezra Pound, and the American Civil War all at once. Do not sleep on this, people, do not sleep.
April 9, 2017
The most enjoyable Davenport [for me] is the critical cat railing on e.e. cummings in "Transcendental Satyr", or Noah Webster in "More Genteel than God". I also enjoyed the opening essay on Levi-Strauss, "The Champollion of Table Manners". The titular essay was brilliant, studying birds as daimons and harbingers in Poe, Whitman, Auden. "Imaginary Americas" also had some great insights.
I read that Davenport's short stories are nothing short of immaculate, so that's likely the next stop with this author.
I read that Davenport's short stories are nothing short of immaculate, so that's likely the next stop with this author.
February 2, 2008
Shakers + Charles Ives + Joyce + Levi-Strauss.
Says hilarious old man things about cars.
Says hilarious old man things about cars.
August 10, 2017
alright, some circles to follow (with apologies to those just trying to find out about davenport; often i wish i could make individual reviews private for those times when books have few enough reviews that the diary function of my own sticks out even more sorely than usual)—
i was at powell's today and found two books of short stories by davenport, which i knew would happen, because when one writer you've been vaguely searching for for a while comes into your life via one volume then the rest of their books do, in a heap. by which i mean i'd spent an unrewarding sleepy hour at the newberry book fair a couple weeks ago when i saw this and practically snatched it, as if anyone else there was competing with me for a book of essays by guy davenport. i was on the way to a book club run by a nonprofit i've been "interning" for populated sparsely by thirty-to-forty-year-olds who like lots of meditation and lots of weed. i enjoyed it and thought about how wide even the narrow bits of the world are and how i limit myself.
i'd found davenport before, actually, at uncharted books a while ago, a book of letters between him and james laughlin. there's some weird remarks about anne carson in it that i love because they're the only time she's ever managed to come off as a real person. i don't remember when or why i was there at that point but it must have been last summer and it may well have been around a haircut, both off the logan square blue line stop, the same place where i got a Short Haircut a few weeks ago, where everyone in my university circles goes to get their short haircuts, their queer haircuts, whatever.
on the way back from the book club the 55 was late in a way i hadn't encountered in a while, with bunches of people hanging around waiting for it, enough that when it came it filled up to its gills, people standing in the aisle. one of the first people waiting for it was a girl standing up reading a book, a lauren groff book, the monsters of templeton i think—it certainly wasn't arcadia or that latest one, narrated by the husband then the wife—healthy and interested in a way i, on my phone, wished i could be again. (along the same lines, today i saw someone who i was pretty sure was in a class of mine walking while reading on 57th street). self-consciously twice i took out the newly purchased davenport and read distractedly through the first page or two. the 55 came and we both sidled up to the front of the line and snagged seats and then several stops later after some layers of people were gone so was she.
the davenport, like my favorite notebooks, stays open without the base of the palm of a hand pressed upon it, weird for a book of its slenderness. so the book mimics the writing within it in smoothness, friendliness, succinctness. portable in a stuffed tote bag, readable beside a plate. monday night i went to salonathon, an event series populated by the sort of people who get their hair cut where i get my hair cut, an event i first heard of when the Very Famous professor for a class i took fall second year mentioned it in our syllabus. and now there i was! there. i was earlier than i expected, as always, and my friend was later than he expected, as always, and so rather than face what was inside (a bar) (people) ("you have to live with the pleasure of not knowing, if you can bear it" —my Very Famous professor, somewhat recently, in a piece a lot of people have been reading belatedly, very recently) i stood outside and sort of leaned against a pole and read the davenport.
overheard in the bathroom stall at salonathon: "I'm not cool enough to be here." embarrassing, since no one is cool enough to be anywhere. "form can't solve the problem of living" —my Very Famous professor, again. i stood up reading the davenport again later that evening, when we left a bit early and i was waiting for the blue line at the chicago stop at 12:21am after the person who was promised would give me a ride home would not, could not. i read the davenport on the blue line, and then on the 6, too.
i guess the last thing is that last week i had dinner at my friend's apartment (she made pasta, i made apple-watercress salad, the third friend brought very necessary bread for the first friend's grandparent-sent lemon olive oil) and one of the books on her desk was a collection of leonard michaels essays. she hadn't gotten to it yet, she told me, a friend gave it to her. to have a friend give one michaels! since michaels i still haven't learned that there is no magic writer and that who you pursue will only be caught years after the fact, after the thrill of purchase. like grace paley. if at all. like that, davenport was born to be a footnote, a very pleasurable footnote, a shaky pleasure. he is good at making you feel like there is so much out there to discover and know about and take joy in, which is one of the essayist's primary duties. you want to burrow in along with him, and so you keep reading, even though you're tired on the CTA in the earliest morning. of the people who he intimates are there to discover and know about and take joy in, most were white men, i think. how wide these narrow bits of the world are!
i was at powell's today and found two books of short stories by davenport, which i knew would happen, because when one writer you've been vaguely searching for for a while comes into your life via one volume then the rest of their books do, in a heap. by which i mean i'd spent an unrewarding sleepy hour at the newberry book fair a couple weeks ago when i saw this and practically snatched it, as if anyone else there was competing with me for a book of essays by guy davenport. i was on the way to a book club run by a nonprofit i've been "interning" for populated sparsely by thirty-to-forty-year-olds who like lots of meditation and lots of weed. i enjoyed it and thought about how wide even the narrow bits of the world are and how i limit myself.
i'd found davenport before, actually, at uncharted books a while ago, a book of letters between him and james laughlin. there's some weird remarks about anne carson in it that i love because they're the only time she's ever managed to come off as a real person. i don't remember when or why i was there at that point but it must have been last summer and it may well have been around a haircut, both off the logan square blue line stop, the same place where i got a Short Haircut a few weeks ago, where everyone in my university circles goes to get their short haircuts, their queer haircuts, whatever.
on the way back from the book club the 55 was late in a way i hadn't encountered in a while, with bunches of people hanging around waiting for it, enough that when it came it filled up to its gills, people standing in the aisle. one of the first people waiting for it was a girl standing up reading a book, a lauren groff book, the monsters of templeton i think—it certainly wasn't arcadia or that latest one, narrated by the husband then the wife—healthy and interested in a way i, on my phone, wished i could be again. (along the same lines, today i saw someone who i was pretty sure was in a class of mine walking while reading on 57th street). self-consciously twice i took out the newly purchased davenport and read distractedly through the first page or two. the 55 came and we both sidled up to the front of the line and snagged seats and then several stops later after some layers of people were gone so was she.
the davenport, like my favorite notebooks, stays open without the base of the palm of a hand pressed upon it, weird for a book of its slenderness. so the book mimics the writing within it in smoothness, friendliness, succinctness. portable in a stuffed tote bag, readable beside a plate. monday night i went to salonathon, an event series populated by the sort of people who get their hair cut where i get my hair cut, an event i first heard of when the Very Famous professor for a class i took fall second year mentioned it in our syllabus. and now there i was! there. i was earlier than i expected, as always, and my friend was later than he expected, as always, and so rather than face what was inside (a bar) (people) ("you have to live with the pleasure of not knowing, if you can bear it" —my Very Famous professor, somewhat recently, in a piece a lot of people have been reading belatedly, very recently) i stood outside and sort of leaned against a pole and read the davenport.
overheard in the bathroom stall at salonathon: "I'm not cool enough to be here." embarrassing, since no one is cool enough to be anywhere. "form can't solve the problem of living" —my Very Famous professor, again. i stood up reading the davenport again later that evening, when we left a bit early and i was waiting for the blue line at the chicago stop at 12:21am after the person who was promised would give me a ride home would not, could not. i read the davenport on the blue line, and then on the 6, too.
i guess the last thing is that last week i had dinner at my friend's apartment (she made pasta, i made apple-watercress salad, the third friend brought very necessary bread for the first friend's grandparent-sent lemon olive oil) and one of the books on her desk was a collection of leonard michaels essays. she hadn't gotten to it yet, she told me, a friend gave it to her. to have a friend give one michaels! since michaels i still haven't learned that there is no magic writer and that who you pursue will only be caught years after the fact, after the thrill of purchase. like grace paley. if at all. like that, davenport was born to be a footnote, a very pleasurable footnote, a shaky pleasure. he is good at making you feel like there is so much out there to discover and know about and take joy in, which is one of the essayist's primary duties. you want to burrow in along with him, and so you keep reading, even though you're tired on the CTA in the earliest morning. of the people who he intimates are there to discover and know about and take joy in, most were white men, i think. how wide these narrow bits of the world are!
May 26, 2025
I loved The Geography of the Imagination. I could feel the singularly crafted language sharpening my focus. The discussions of translation have stayed with me to this day.
Every Force Evolves a Form is a compelling title, especially since the attribution is to Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers. The essays showcase Davenport’s erudition, wit, and precision prose. My eye-opening favorite, on Henri Rousseau’s painting Joyeux Farceurs, is entitled What Are Those Monkeys Doing?.
But in general, the subjects Davenport chose for this collection appeal to me less. Brilliant stylings, but a bit too far down the rabbit hole for me to fully enjoy.
Every Force Evolves a Form is a compelling title, especially since the attribution is to Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers. The essays showcase Davenport’s erudition, wit, and precision prose. My eye-opening favorite, on Henri Rousseau’s painting Joyeux Farceurs, is entitled What Are Those Monkeys Doing?.
But in general, the subjects Davenport chose for this collection appeal to me less. Brilliant stylings, but a bit too far down the rabbit hole for me to fully enjoy.
May 28, 2012
A beautiful cover for a beautiful book - I find it impossible to resist the North Point Press titles almost on the strengths of their visual appeal - here one of my favorite literary critics gets to range far and wide on anything that crosses his fancy - and almost all of it sings and soars.
March 2, 2026
Guy Davenport hands you the keys to Joyce, Pound, Picasso, and Poe in glassy, smug prose. I get this feeling: here's a Theseus who has made it to the center of the labyrinth using only his sense of smell; having arrived, he takes only one piece of ageless gold from the endless storehouses and brings it back to you. Then he says, "alright, now your turn."
May 17, 2021
A lot of this is 5 star material. It's very close. The world doesn't have enough Davenports; the age of the truly learned, erudite man has passed, sadly. I found out about several painters, authors, books, histories I wanted to explore further from this book. The Mann put-down in favor of Joyce worship was icky but almost everything else in here is absolutely incredible reading. For those who like to know about anything and everything, with profundity.
May 7, 2020
I love Davenport for his translations. His essays are erudite and daunting at the same time, as they can’t help but reveal the vast breadth of his reading. He loves so many thinkers and so many ideas. My favorites are his essays on Henri Rousseau, “What Are Those Monkeys Doing?” and the pair of essays “The Artist as Critic” and “The Critic as Artist”.
February 18, 2012
I thought this book was terrific. I was meeting a fellow for lunch and I picked it up at a used bookstore and the day had a magical quality free of the deadening reality of all the gunk in my ordinary life. It carried that on for pages. If you like essays you'll like it.
February 26, 2022
Vagueness has vernacular charm. A footnote in a Shaker hymnal identifies George Washington as "one of our first presidents."
December 10, 2020
No matter how slowly each essay starts out, or how (apparently) meandering it's first few paragraphs are (in this opinion of this easily distracted reader) there is always an insight, a turn of phrase, or some historical oddity (for example, that Poe's "The Raven" came from his observation of a chess-playing machine) that flips the switch, and you're glad you read it.
November 26, 2025
The trilogy of critic/scholar/artist essays are magnificent, but I found the Balthus essay unsettling. What wicked thing do Balthus, Gide, and Montherland have in common? Davenport doesn't say, but he knows. And I'm certain now that he shared in the same wickedness.
December 7, 2017
Vintage Davenport, which means nourishing and vital.
May 28, 2024
Guy Davenport connects the dots between everything, better than anyone.
June 10, 2016
My second favorite book of essays by Davenport (after "Geography of the Imagination"). The title --a quote from Mother Ann Lee-- is great, but it is the cover art that really captures the essence of the book. The cover depicts a Celtic copy of a Roman coin in which the copyist has misread the head of a Roman emperor as a highly stylized horse. The unifying theme of the essays in this collection is the power of art and imagination to preserve and transmit culture; as well as the inevitable mutation and evolution that occur along the way.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews