`Hard Simplicity'

Some writers we swallow whole, anaconda-fashion. We consume everything, sequentially or hopscotching about; juvenilia, unpublished, uncollected or unreadable; commentaries, biographies, bibliographies. It’s passion, not reason, and verges on the pathological. That’s how I’ve read writers as various as Montaigne, Whitman, Kafka and Marilynne Robinson. The only critic I’ve read that way is the late Hugh Kenner, a teacher by profession and temperament. His first book was devoted to Chesterton, his second-to-last to cartoonist Chuck Jones. In between he gave us Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Beckett and Buckminster Fuller. His books are filled with delicious, arcane information, always with a context. Kenner wrote for people who like to know things and the linkages among them, a disappearing breed. In his fond remembrance of Kenner, Guy Davenport (another adept of data mining) writes:

“His telephone calls about specifics were for vital information he thought I might have: the sonnet Wordsworth wrote about pre-historic cave-painting, the Greek for Jocasta’s brooch, the likelihood that Jesus’s having been a carpenter is an assumption, as teknon meant practically any trade (mason, tile-layer, smith).”

By my count, Kenner published 27 books, and I finally have my hands on the only one I had not read, the 12th -- Studies in Change: A Book of the Short Story, a text book anthology he edited in 1965. Of the 25 stories included, three I haven’t read -- “The Jack Rabbit Drive,” by Robert McAlmon; “Friendship,” by Edward Loomis; “The Unicorn,” by Allan Seager – and I’ve never even heard of Loomis. Some omissions are contentious – Gogol, Melville, Conrad, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Colette, Cheever – and so are some inclusions – Samuel Johnson (Kenner excerpts an anecdote from The Idler), Graham Greene (an insignificant writer), Wyndham Lewis (an excerpt from Rotting Hill, a novel). Here, from his introduction, is Kenner’s gloss on the uncertainty of knowing built into the short story:

“This is perhaps the minimum formula for the short story, that it is concerned with how experiences are valued: not merely what was said and done, but what difference it made to someone. Men move through affairs they only partly understand, says the story-writer; I narrate this affair as carefully as I can, so that you can see why it matters; what someone learned or failed to learn, felt or did not feel, saw or failed to see; and you who read, if you read well, will at the end understand better than anyone; better even, perhaps, than I.”

Kenner includes five pages of the famous stone-sucking passage in Beckett’s Molloy. It’s hardly a short story, but it is hilarious, and of it Kenner writes:

“…Beckett undertakes like a conjuror to hold our attention with the very minimum of color, rhetoric, or incident, eliciting problem, complication, passion, resolution, and coda from nothing more than an elderly fanatic and sixteen stones. The passions engaged, though seldom touched on by fiction, are by no means eccentric or fantastic, as anyone knows who has arranged dishes on a shelf, and Sir Isaac Newton would have read these pages entranced.”

Some of Kenner’s asides are so concise they read with the illuminating force of aphorisms. Writing of Hemingway’s protagonist in “After the Storm,” he says, “The story’s insight is ours, not his, and so is most of the wonder.” Davenport observes of Kenner’s style:

“Hugh’s prose remains the envy of everybody who has ever tried to write. It is elegant in its hard simplicity, in its diction, and in its adherence to tradition.”

Kenner closes his introduction with observations that remind us again of his penchant for facts, data, knowledge from many fields:

“To be learning something, said Aristotle, is the chief human pleasure; and when a short story works as the best stories can, we learn more, irrevocably more, of what men and women can do and suffer, and of what their doing and suffering can mean.”

I’ve been reading Kenner for almost 40 years, and the teaching and learning have never ceased.