`He Was Younger Than Any of Them'

Today would have been Guy Davenport’s 80th birthday. The one time I met him, in June 1990, he was 62 and looked and spoke as though he were 20 years younger. His was the most nimble of minds, as close readers of his fiction and essays know. He was a lifelong teacher for whom teaching was a mingling of love and enthusiasm, not a paycheck or a pretext for bullying. He was formidably learned but never pretentious or grimly pedantic. In his “Introductory Note” to The Hunter Gracchus (1996) he came close to identifying writing with teaching:

“The way I write about texts and works of art has been shaped by forty years of explaining them to students in a classroom. I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.”

In 1963, Guy published his first book, The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz: A Specimen Book of Scientific Writings, an anthology drawn from the work of the great Swiss-American zoologist. Among Agassiz’s friends and admirers were Thoreau, Longfellow, William James and Henry Adams. In his 25-page introduction, Guy tells the delicious anecdote of Emerson squirming while Thoreau and Agassiz discussed the mating habits of turtles. The entire book, essay and selections from Agassiz’s work, is refracted autobiography, for Guy seems most impressed with Agassiz as a teacher and writer, less so as a scientist. His conclusion to the introduction is pure self-portrait:

“In an age of touchy formalities and pathological restrictions of spirit, Agassiz insisted that the teacher was both a dedicated scholar and a good-natured human being. The Agassiz intellect was as admirably liberal in its commerce with the world as intense and uncompromising in scholarship. Agassiz’s father, Benjamin Rodolphe, hunted on Sabbath mornings, leaving his game and fowling-piece at the church door while he preached to his congregation at Motier, on Lake Morat. Agassiz himself broke every smoking rule at Harvard, fenced with his students, and once offered the Emperor of Brazil an assistant’s position at the university museum.

“Scholarship, imagination, energy, intellect, good nature. Theodore Lyman, watching the Harvard students bearing Agassiz’s heavy casket to the chapel in the Yard, said: “He was younger than any of them.”

Among the last things Guy wrote before his death on Jan. 4, 2005, more than 40 years after the Agassiz essay, was an introduction to Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments, selected and translated by Burton Raffel. Here, too, the self-portrait is disguised but discernable:

“Burton Raffel calls these Greek poems `pagan’ because they were not written in Chicago or Aberdeen. Pagan is defined by Samuel Johnson as meaning `heathenish’; both words, pagan and heathen, mean `living in the country.’ The Greeks, like all civilized people, felt that country life was more authentic, more earthy and forthright, sexier and healthier, than life in the city. It was more natural. So these poems are pagan because the past is another country. The pagan is always other, over yonder, or way back when, interesting because different.”

Guy, who was born in Anderson, S.C., and lived the last 40 years of his life in Lexington, Ky., was the most interesting, different country boy you could ever hope to meet. The best way to do that is to read his books.