`The Only Possible Basis for Literary Endurance'

Fifty years ago Hugh Kenner published his fifth book, Gnomon: Essays in Contemporary Literature, and seldom has a collection of book reviews – usually the Kleenex of the literary arts – remained so prescient and worthy of repeated rereading. I say “prescient” because most of Kenner’s subjects were the great “International Modernists,” as he called them – Joyce, Yeats, Ford, Lewis, Pound, Eliot – whom he was able to call “contemporary.” The latter two were alive in 1958 and all had contentiously disputed reputations. Kenner helped solidify and bolster those reputations, as he did Samuel Beckett’s – the only major focus of Kenner’s scholarship not addressed in Gnomon, and that’s because he didn’t meet Beckett until 1958.

A gnomon is the portion of a sundial that casts a shadow, from the Greek by way of Latin for “indicator,” “one who discerns,” “that which reveals,” “judge.” It shares roots with Gnostic. In his foreword Kenner relates the story of Emperor Yao sending astronomers to the four corners of his kingdom “to watch the shadows of their gnomons and so, in fixing the seasons, regulate the conduct of the new epoch by the swing of the sun and stars.” Kenner suggests critics follow the example of the emperor and his astronomers, and that they return to the roots of criticism in exegesis: “The test of exegesis is that it enlightens.” The volume’s title page carries an epigraph from one of Pound’s Rock-Drill Cantos (1955):

“…study with the mind of a grandson
And watch the time like a hawk.”

Studying, watching: The critic’s job, and any good reader’s. Kenner remains the only critic I know whose prose is always excellent and worthy of emulation (one might say gnomic), and who always teaches me something, whether a fact or a lesson. I wished to observe the golden anniversary of Gnomon in the only meaningful fashion – reading it again – but I’m also rereading Ford Madox Ford’s Great War tetralogy Parade’s End. When, in 1950 (11 years after Ford’s death), it was published for the first time in a single volume, Kenner reviewed it. His essay, “Remember That I Remembered,” is the best short piece I’ve read on Ford and his masterpiece. Here’s Kenner in his gnomic mode:

“The artist who can actually get down on paper something not himself – some scheme of values of which he partakes – so that the record will not waver with time or assume grotesque perspectives as viewpoints alter and framing interests vanish, has achieved the only possible basis for artistic truth and the only possible basis for literary endurance.”

And to return to Kenner’s emphasis on the act of studying, watching:

“Ford’s constant concern is to record and anatomize, not to wallow.”

And:

“It would be worth most novelists’ while to spend some years of study and emulation on the procedures and felicities of Parade’s End.”