Paying Attention

One of the qualities I most admire in a writer, especially a nonfiction writer, is deft characterization – the economically artful portrayal of a specific man or woman. As a writer of features for newspapers and a wire service for many years, I worked hard at delivering human essence with a minimum of words. The work involves an instinct for significant, revealing detail – learning it and describing it. As such, it has a moral dimension. One of the masters, unacknowledged, is Guy Davenport. Here he is on Whitman:

“Lincoln on horseback tipped his hat to him in Washington one day, a gazing stranger whom Lincoln must have supposed was some office seeker or underling in one of the departments, perhaps a geologist with that grizzled beard. It was the republican equivalent of Napoleon looking in on Goethe to talk history and poetry.”

Indirectly, Davenport tells us he knows the literature, primary and secondary, but his paragraph is no show-off stunt. In a nutshell he gives us Lincoln, Whitman and Washington, D.C., in wartime. He also gives us context, a sense of the historical momentousness of the event. By implication, he gives us a sense of fondness and respect for both men. Here’s Davenport on his friend the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard:

“He was an unfailing follower-up, which is why I think of him as the best educated man I have ever known. As a professor I must work with people for whom indifference is both a creed and a defense of their fanatic narrowness of mind, but Gene knew nothing of 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 he were a painter he would look at his paintings.”

Just as Meatyard honors Zukofsky, so Davenport honors Meatyard. A writer respects his subject by devotion to detail. Attention is honor.