Retrospective for Guy and Ralph

Guy Davenport was a literary and scholarly neurotransmitter who linked readers, writers and other artists with precision and enthusiasm. The one time I met him, at his home in Lexington, Ky., in 1990, I gave Guy a copy of The Barnum Museum, the newly published collection of stories by Steven Millhauser. I knew he had written an admiring blurb for Millhauser’s previous collection, In the Penny Arcade. His response, after thanking me, was to place Millhauser, without pedantry or condescension, in a literary tradition that included Kafka and Borges and, closer to home and less predictably, Nathaniel Hawthorne. That was enough to send me back to Hawthorne, whom I had never read systematically. Guy was right: Except for the problematic case of the Russian-born Nabokov, Hawthorne is clearly Millhauser’s closest American precursor. Also, I learned I don’t much care for Hawthorne’s work, but now I know why.

In 1981, North Point Press published The Geography of the Imagination, Guy’s literary encyclopedia and style book disguised as a collection of essays and reviews. I remember certain passages from it as readily as familiar pieces of music. Included was “Ralph Eugene Meatyard,” a remembrance of his friendship with the self-taught photographer and American original. I had never heard of Meatyard, but I remedied that quickly after reading sentences like this:

“When he met Louis and Celia Zukofsky at my house, he went away and read Zukofsky. Not that he was an enthusiast. He simply had a curiosity that went all the way, and a deep sense of courtesy whereby if a man were a writer he would read what he had written, if a man were a painter he would look at his paintings.”

Of course, Guy is also describing himself in that passage, as he is in this one:

“He was rare among American artists in that he was not obsessed with his own image in the world. He could therefore live in perfect privacy in a rotting Kentucky town. He was forever sending off shows, he kept up with everything, he encouraged everybody. He was a quiet, diffident, charming person on the surface, a known ruse of the American genius (William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore). This modesty amounted to there being at least two distinct Gene Meatyards in the world: an invisible Lexington businessman and a genius who achieved one of the most beautiful styles in twentieth-century art.”

This week I have been enjoying Ralph Eugene Meatyard, a collection of Meatyard’s photographs that was edited, in part, by Guy. In 2001, he reviewed thousands of black-and-white pictures in the Meatyard estate (Meatyard died of cancer in 1972) and at the University of Kentucky (where Guy taught for 26 years). Guy whittled down the selection to about 400, after which the International Center of Photography made the final pick.

Guy died Jan. 4, 2005, and the book had been published a few months earlier, in time for the Meatyard exhibition at the International Center of Photography, in New York City, which ran from Dec. 10, 2004, to Feb. 27, 2005. This must have been among Guy’s final projects. It’s typical that he would have devoted himself, even while sick with cancer, to another artist, one who was also a friend.

Meatyard’s pictures are genuinely strange, floating somewhere between folk art and the strictures of high modernism, seldom descending into Diane Arbus’ pandering after the melodramatically grotesque. To use a bookish analogy, they are closer to Flannery O’Connor than Kathy Acker. Most of the time, their strangeness is earned because he depicts it in the context of the recognizably familiar. Meatyard often used his wife and children as props. (Much of his work can be viewed online, beginning here.)

The picture on page 94, untitled (like most of Meatyard’s photos) and dated from 1964, is typical – two boys, one side of a wooden house, a sprawling sumac bush. The younger boy, about 9, is on the left, seated on wooden stairs. His right hand cups his left knee; his left, fingers bent at the second joint, holds his chin and covers his mouth. On the right, a few feet from the first, the other boy, about 13 or 14, stands under a wing of the house. His hands are above his head, lost in the shadows, as though he were pushing against the frame of the picture. Both boys have short hair, wear white t-shirts and stare at the camera. They seem wary, trying unsuccessfully to look tough (especially the older boy). What gives the photo its interest is the sumac, which fills half the frame and covers most of the older boy. The house is all straight lines; the bush, a luxuriant explosion of curves. The boys are arranged like a defensive buffer between the human and the natural worlds, but that sounds pretentious. As the father of three sons, I’m intrigued by the demeanors of the boys, and I wonder how much Meatyard coached them (I assume they are his sons). At the same time, I admire the composition of the photo, the way the sumac divides the picture into two roughly equal triangles.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard reproduces three photographs of Guy, including one of him memorably posed with his friend, Thomas Merton. Among the other writers pictured are the Zukofskys, Denise Levertov and Wendell Berry. The essay from The Geography of the Imagination is printed at the front of the book, as well as an interview Guy did with the book’s editor, Cynthia Young. Here’s a sample that might help illuminate the picture described above. Asked about the derelict buildings and their relationship with the Meatyard children, Guy said:

“Well, you can read them all sorts of ways, New World, Old World, a Lexington that the children will never know because it is being torn down. There is an eloquent set of pictures inside a house, a building being destroyed, and there is a pickax stuck in the wall, and I always felt that was a very forceful symbol.”

And this:
“Gene wanted to do a parallel creation in photography to William Carlos Williams’s poem Paterson. And I asked him, `So, you are going up to Paterson?’ `Oh no,’ he said. `I will do all of the photography here in Lexington.’ And that is a great clue to what he was thinking about and how his mind worked. He had a copy of Paterson in the front seat of his car, and he would read it while he was driving. This rather scared me if I was in the car. But he said he could pay attention to driving and read the poem at the same time.”

And I can’t resist one more:

“…most of Sayre Avenue where I live are nonreaders, the kind of people who own one or two books which are decorations on a shelf in the living room, never to be read. One percent of the American population buys books, it is not known what lesser percent of that reads them. We are almost as illiterate and hopeless as Australia, and yet we publish more books than anybody else, or as Bill Buckley says, `We publish more “nonbooks,”’ meaning coffee table books, weight loss books, art books that have very short sales. O, actually, I think the United States now is extremely lively: we have more important writers than I can keep track of. I get a book a day and a literary magazine a day, just, you know, over the transom, never mind the manuscripts.”

I wish Guy were still around just to ask him which “important writers” he meant.