Questioning Minds: Volumes I and II: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner

by Guy Davenport, Hugh Kenner

Hugh Kenner (1923–2003) and Guy Davenport (1927–2005) first met in September 1953 when each gave a paper on Ezra Pound at Columbia University. They met again in the fall of 1957, and their correspondence begins with Kenner's letter of March 7, 1958. In the next forty-four years, they exchanged over one thousand letters. An extraordinary document of a literary friendship that lasted half a century, the letters represent one of the great and—with the dawn of the age of text and Twitter—one of the last major epistolary exchanges of its kind. Students and lovers of modernism will find, in the letters, matchless engagements with Eliot, Joyce, Beckett, Basil Bunting, Charles Tomlinson, R. Buckminster Fuller, Stan Brakhage, Jonathan Williams, and the American modernists William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Louis Zukofsky. The correspondence ends with Kenner's letter of August 9, 2002, lamenting how they had drifted apart.The extensive notes and cross-referencing of archival sources in Questioning Minds are a major contribution to the study of literary modernism. The letters contained within explore how new works were conceived and developed by both writers. They record faithfully, and with candor, the urgency that each brought to his intellectual and creative pursuits. Here is a singular opportunity to follow the development of their unique fictions and essays.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, American, Literature

3159 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2018

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Best of '18 for me.

Here's something that we still want but which never developed. Davenport had worked on a translation of Enrique Jardiel Poncela's comic novel La «tournée» de Dios. [966n17]. I'd be really cool if someone would pull it out of the archive (assuming the manuscript is there), dust it off, give it some polish, and place it into the public sphere. It sounds fantastic.

And here's a lovely thing I'd like to share. Kenner says [1306] to Davenport in May of 1970 :: "Fine remark of Schoenberg's quoted by John Cage: that if a long composition is cut it does not become a short composition, it becomes a long composition that is too short in places." Isn't that lovely?

That's all I've got. I hope you find the opportunity to soak yourself in this wonderful exchange of minds. There's nothing else quite like it.



_________
A little taste, re: novella sperimentale ::

[Kenner of 19 March 1968] :: "I enclose a doodle of my own, executed in distaste for the NY Times. Final version tidier in detail, but I can't care about it enough to transcribe the corrections onto this draft. The one good idea in it is that mechanisms of the cause-&-effect novel turn slowly comic. That I shall use in the books somewhere.
"I'm hoping this fierce negativism will persuade the Times to stop sending me experimental novels. I detest reading them."

[endnote p1150n182] :: "The 'doodle' was a typescript of HK's review of Robert Nye's novel Doubtfire and the translation of Claude Simon's novel Histoire. [....] {nr's ellipsis}

[Davenport of 22 March 1968] :: "And your review of the novella sperimentale is great fun. Nothing is duller than an avant-garde maintained for fifty years. You really should do the nuvvle reviews for NR [National Review {[ie, not me, nr}], except that only a sadist would wish such a chore onto your shoulders."

[Kenner of 15 May 1968] :: "Speaking of rejected reviews, the NY Times paid me for that piece on French & Scotch nuvvles but seems not to have run it. There is apparently an orthodoxy re Simon, at whom one does not shy rocks. Of only the very great, e.g. Beckett, are reviewers free at whim to assert that they are wearing no clothes. The monkey-minds conspire to protect the second-raters. As Ez was saying in his London period. Howe slowly I learn."

{Doubtfire has a gr score of 0::0. I have his Falstaff on the shelf. Simon's Histoire a score of 15::1 ; the four-word five-star review is in neither English nor French. Simon won the Nobel in 1985 ; and is also featured in the RCF of that year.-nr}


And of course a list we might delight in ::

[Davenport 31 May 1968] :: "Louis Z writes cryptically that he suffers unavoidable publicity in The Washington Post Book World for June 7, Page 7. Wch journal will turn up in the library by next Wednesday."

{to the para's endnote} [1167n375] :: "Lois Canto did a piece, 'Ten neglected American writers who deserve to be better known,' for {WaPo 7 June 1967}. The writers were Edward Dahlberg, John A Williams, William Gaddis, John Hawkes, Alfred Grossman, Chaim Grade, I.A.L. Diamond, Alison Lurie, Louis Zukofsky, and Allan Seager. {bold is mine ; you bold yours -nr}. The column on Zukofsky opens, "Louis Zukofsky, along with Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound, 'is one of the three most distinguished living American poets.' Thus Guy Davenport in the National Review.""


There's also a whole batch of stuff to do with their many many cats (and occasional dog) that would be charming to cut out and present as their own ;; The Adventures of the D-K Cats (And Dogs).




___________
I've finished the first half. The first volume. Through 1966. And like Michael Dirda ("The most intellectually exhilarating work of the year") I'm going to use this half=point as my reviewing=point. Because this book like so so many books can be fully reviewed at a juncture like this and you don't have to have read the whole thing.* And, like Dirda, I'm not going to Really Review it. The book is astounding. Davenport and Kenner know a hell of a lot. And after following editor Burns' massive annotations, you will too. Every damn thing is annotated. Even 'Hitler'. D&K, not only smart, but terribly entertaining prose people even and especially in the informal nature of these letters. And with Burns' as the ThirdWheel ; I don't exaggerate when I say this is an awful lot like reading a Novel in Letters with a Criti=Fic apparatus.

And not to worry. I have read Nothing. Zero. Not one thing by Davenport. Not one by Kenner. Nothing by Pound (the pig=size presence here). Naught Elliot. Nor Wyndham. Nicht Marianne Moore. Weder William C Williams (well, one book). I've read my Joyce of coyse. And Beckett too (I'm not entirely illiterate). But this whole scene has not been my scene. The closest we get is a frequent use of Federman's Beckett biblio :: Samuel Beckett: His Works and His Critics: An Essay in Bibliography. And A. Theroux gets a cameo. But it matters not. This is an education, sitting at the feet of these monstrous geniuses.



________
So I've made just a few notes with regard to my Number One Concern which is of course The BURIED Book. Some titles that have pop'd up in the course of this first volume. Not at all necessarily that either D nor K speak highly of them nor recommend them. But they both wrote for the National Review (that right=wing rag) and frequently reviewed books. And Burns annotates those things so without digging up old dusty neo-fascist periodicals you can still glean a few titles that may be new to you. Here's what I came up with (use the index for more specific info etc) ::

Henry (1795) by Cumberland.

HK's friend John Reid wrote a novel Horses with Blindfolds (not in gr=db) ; and The Faithless Mirror: A Historical Novel (ditto). He's Canadian.

You ComicBook junkies should be familiar with Milt Gross. And you novel'rs with his He Done Her Wrong. The Great American Novel, Told Without Words..

"I'm sending under separate cover a copy, my only irreplaceable copy, of Carl Andre's BILLY BUILDER, which Evergreen Review rejected after 6 months' cogitation. Maybe you can think of what's to be done with it." --Hugh

22 Novels by the same Andre and Bret Harte's Condensed Novels and Other Papers.

"Read last night (our first winter's evening and perfect for nuvvle, pipe, and easy chair) Ethel Voynich's [daughter of the famous Boole ; married [...] the eponym of the Voynich manuscript -nr cnp'ing gr] The Gadfly, which the young Ezra and HD read together in the old days." --Guy

GD reviews 3 novels ::
Take Heed of Loving Me: a Novel about John Donne by Elizabeth Gray Vining
Don't Knock the Corners Off by Caroline Glyn
The Little Girls by Elizabeth Bowen

Mafarka le futuriste : Romain Africain by Marinetti. Another fascist.

GD reviews another three ::
Jean Stafford's Bad Characters
Henry de Montherlant's Chaos and Night
Thomas Berger's Little Big Man

Three more from GD
The Clown by Böll
Romain Gary's The Ski Bum but not Ski Bum
Stuart Cloete's The Thousand And One Nights Of Jean Macaque

Richard Stern's Stitch

Jens Peter Jacobsen, two novels (cf Ellmann's Joyce bio (89, 193 in the revised ed) -- Marie Grubbe - A Lady of the Seventeenth Century & Niels Lyhne.

GD, three ::
Square's Progress by Wilfred Sheed
Amazing Grace by Robert Drake
The Makepeace Experiment by Abram Terz


That's all I've got for now. Bye!


* This is similar to how, without having read the whole thing, for instance Bottom's Dream, you could still have conferred the BTBA. This is a thing about the relation between Whole and Part ; one that is not understood by those who read only to find out 'how things get tied up in the end' and experience frequent SpoilerAnxiety.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting in a thousand ways. To pick, somewhat at random:

1. Guy Davenport dwindles at the end, withering into crotchety invisibility as Kenner goes on, if anything gaining in brio. The last 30 pages or so are thus weirdly like listening to half of a telephone conversation - and it's not the half that we prefer.

2. Why is Kenner, who would seem by far the alpha of this relationship, so obviously the poorer writer? This question has bothered me for years. There's just something subtly wound up about him - a pitch to his prose that makes it seem to be constantly aiming ever so slightly past the reader (not edificatingly beyond, either - he thinks he's being direct, but he's constantly losing us). Meanwhile, by comparison G.D. is one of the most colloquially-suggestive writers ever. His manners are superb; he knows just when, and how, to navigate our attention. Above all, he seems to constantly have us in mind. Kenner is always just 10 degrees more involuted, and that 10 degrees makes a big difference.

3. That said, I came to (begrudgingly) really like H.K. by the end of the books. He's a kook, with his crazy hair and absolute devotion to the Cantos. Yes, there is the politically conservative, W.F. Buckley Jr.-bro-ing streak, but it comes off so frequently as clumsy. You never get the sense that his conservatism is actually "conservatism." He's taking one step back to take two steps forward.

4. It is literally absurd how much these two accomplished and knew. At the same time, they were both charlatans. I mean that in the best possible way, and close readers of these letters will know what I mean: they both admit as much to one another over and over again. For all that the two of them denounced pseudo-scholarship and fakes when they encountered them, they themselves were largely building castles out of air.

5. In some ways, their art and scholarship both profit mightily from Pound's old idea (in his letters somewhere?) that you can gain a lot from just choosing some random minor or under-read writer and reading everything he/she wrote. Kenner's list of totems is flashier, partly because his famous efforts raised the prestige of everybody. But Davenport is the master Reader of Random Oeuvres. Doughty, Santayana, Wilkie Collins, O'Henry - the list goes on and on. And he is no mere collector - he doesn't just possess these works as curios for his shelf: he thinks and feels through them, absorbs them, incorporates them into his larger sphere. This to me is the most appealing aspect of their Renaissance-manliness.

6. Their "other interests": both men had passions that were extra-literary, but which they used to enhance and shape their views on literature. For Davenport, this was most obviously drawing, painting, film. For Kenner, drawing again, cartoons, technology, and the weird Buckminster Fuller stuff.

7. Buckminster Fuller

8. The Stoic Comedians, an early collaboration, is a key to both men's work, in that it looks both forward, into Joyce and Beckett and all the high modernist stuff we recognize, and backwards, to Flaubert and the 19th century. The comedy of logic was a key theme to both H.K. and G.D., and their performance of the mind depended on it. Also: Kenner is never funny, although frequently witty. Davenport is frequently funny and rarely stoops to wit.

9. Blind spots: women. This is not latecoming, historical-hindsight-type bias. Both writers seem to have had a legitimate problem accessing and benefitting from the alternative, more female-modulated traditions that were a big part of the story of their times. For example, neither can see Virginia Woolf. Like, shockingly, they seem to be literally unable to see her. Exceptions: Marianne Moore, Eudora Welty. Also, for what it's worth, when circumstance brings unexpected art into their kens, the men always seem to be able to respond to it sincerely and without prejudice.

10. Both men were anti-transcendentalists, or at least on that side. The Melvilles and Thoreaus. The luminous particular.

11. The life of the mind is worth living. It is not boring or a waste. Casaubon was supremely happy working on his Key to All Mythologies. Interest is its own reward. At the same time, we all are alone. Good luck.

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of only the very great, e.g. Beckett, are reviewers free at whim to assert that they are wearing no clothes. The monkey-minds conspire to protect the second-raters.


There was an audible sigh as I finished the last letter some time after midnight. There was no sense of triumph or even completion. I have problems accepting that these two prolific men as friends/critics/academics would allow the precipitous drop in frequency as displayed here. There must be a cache of letters elsewhere or perhaps regrettably carbonized in a fireplace-- a manifestation of pique, a blow to posterity. As noted, my time with the first volume was enhanced by the sensation of the pages not being entirely cut. That sweet tearing sound was music, like the dulcet tones of Dusty Springfield.

Rather than concede what I learned from these two hulking tomes, I should note what they inspired. First off, to read more of both these men. Then, Beckett -- especially the novels. Wittgenstein as well. It is curious that my wary hesitation towards The Cantos is largely intact, might even be enhanced.


While both men wrote for the National Review, each routinely cast aspersions at Nixon and Reagan. What the two men weren't by 21C standards was politically correct. No need for a list. What we also have is a meditation on technology as it is applicable to intellectuals and discourse. The inefficiency and uncertainty involved when Davenport supplied illustrations for Kenner’s Stoic Comedians. That appears maddening to a contemporary reader. There’s a marvel at electric typewriters. Letters cross each other which does enhance the richness of the discussion but it was necessary evil of the epistolary age.


As I noted to Nathan, I feel closer to Davenport if only by reasons of geography. His reference to Kentucky as the American Ukraine is a sound comparison. What I don't understand is his affection for Tolkien. I gritted my teeth as Davenport slammed The Tin Drum but I don't understand the foregrounding of Gandolf and Bilbo.

This was my favorite reading of the year.

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Long review here:

http://quarterlyconversation.com/ques...

[Barry Magid · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Dionysius the Areopagite · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mine is not the Kindle edition, but rather the two-heavy-bricks-edition. My shoulders were fucked up for two days after carrying this one around. They're fine now, thanks. In any event, I'd like to take a moment to give a shoutout to Chip Delany and Barry Magis. And you, dear reader ... are you, uh, lacking real spice in your life? Then why don't you request this via ILL from your library and spend a nice long night annotating the index?

Then, while investigating the various topics, pour another wine, or tea, or whatever you please, and take breaks from the index-items with Davenport's 50 Drawings. Yes, yes, 50 Drawings will be much harder to track down than this volcanology of letters ... but really, whether you obtain 50 Drawings or not, whether you're even all that familiar with Davenport or Kenner, I think you'll find this collection of letters is like straw for the fire of the creative-literary mind, or at least one which is drawn, even in some vague way, in said blazing direction.

I am far too tired to look up whether it was Betrand Russell or someone else, but some mortal or other once said they'd never get anything done if they answered all the letters they received (as an explanation as to why they seldom answered letters). Davenport and Kenner are an interesting inverted corollary in that they seemed to have never *missed* a single letter.

Illuminatingly, or astonishingly, Davenport was a prolific correspondent with many, many others as well. I'll leave that investigation up to you.

In any event, this collection has inspired me to be much more deliberate about global correspondence with readers, friends, strangers, whomever, really. The volumes make one want to start up a sprawling, encyclopedic correspondence. Or I mean, at least certain "ones." Could be a good reason to look into this, if that kind of thing interests or impresses you.

Davenport referred to his short fiction as "constructions." I like that and use it from time to time myself. There are actually two other Davenportisms I utilize, though I am taking these secrets to the grave.

I've also got his painting of Ezra Pound, the single greatest work of art I've ever seen created by a writer, framed on my wall.

But the name thing here is not about me or Uncle Ezra, but about you, reader, and even in the midst of this barbaric world, wielding technologicity to your advantage, and being more deliberate about global correspondence (in my suggestion, via email). Strike up exchanges with digital pen pals, famous and unknown and everybody in between. Work the mind out like a muscle. Fan the flames of the creative fire. Shut down all social media psychosis and start writing more letters. Davenport and Kenner may help compel you.

Ah, the art of letter-correspondence -- a joyous thing!

[Nigel Fenton]

I consistently enjoyed these volumes, all 1,817 pages of them. It is fascinating and pleasurable to eavesdrop on Davenport and Kenner because they are witty, inventive, perspicacious, encyclopaedically knowledgeable--two questioning and dazzling minds. I found this to be so even when the subject-matter of these letters was something for which I had very limited interest--I mean the writings of Ezra Pound or Louis Zukofsky or the other modernist writers they labor to explore. And after a while their personal idioms become over-cutesy or tiresome, like writing 'nuvvle' for novel, or referring to the French as frogs, the Italians as Wops, and so on. Still I enjoyed and profited from visiting them over so many years and places. Edward M. Burns certainly performed a spectacular job in assembling these enormous volumes, and Counterpoint for handsomely producing them.

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

NGL: DNF. I’ve picked through this occasionally over dinner for just over five years. Now, at idk 63% tackled, I must diagnose my stance toward this double doorstop as terminal.

I love Kenner (and really really like Davenport), but this is just…more than I need. Too many annoying Poundesque coinages, too much academic gossip, and not enough narrative energy in the birthings and fleshings-out of innumerable minor epiphanies.

It’s on the reader to modulate his relationship toward the works of those he admires. Being a completist isn’t worth it if it turns one sour. Everyone interested in a literary education should read The Pound Era and a couple dozen of GD’s essays. But no one really needs this; and it turns out that I don’t want it.