'Questioning Minds'

For my birthday last week I received precisely two presents: a snappy blue-and-white check shirt and Questioning Minds: The Letters of Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport (Counterpoint, 2018). The latter, edited by Edward M. Burns, comes in two fat volumes with a slipcase. Its 2,016 pages weigh almost eight pounds, and reading it in my preferred position – supine – is a minor aerobic workout.

A reader in England not long ago wrote to say he shared my admiration for Davenport but was honest enough to admit that some of the critic’s conclusions seem dubious. Exhibit A: Ezra Pound. Pound is omnipresent in the work of Davenport, who wrote his dissertation on the poet at Harvard (published in 1983 as Cities on Hills: A Study of I-XXX of Ezra Pound's Cantos), and Kenner, whose masterwork is The Pound Era (1971). I first read Pound when young. Everybody made a big deal out of him so I did too, beginning with the shorter poems and translations, and slowly nibbling away at what I could decrypt of the Cantos. I was susceptible to critical pressure at that age and didn’t want to appear like a hick from Cleveland. Prudent skepticism comes only with age. That’s when I could admit Pound’s work often was incoherent, almost always pretentious and frothingly anti-Semitic. His most ardent defenders are gymnasts of logic, rationalizing his poisonous ravings. I still admire Karl Shapiro for voting against Pound as recipient of the first Bollingen Prize for poetry in 1948.

Pound’s name appears on almost every page of Questioning Minds, which I started reading as soon as I opened the gift on my birthday. The authors were inarguably brilliant men. I corresponded with Davenport and visited him at his home in Lexington, Ky., like a lot of pilgrims, and once interviewed Kenner by telephone. The day after my birthday, Robert Bowers entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed eleven elderly men and women because they were Jews. Each mention of Pound in the letters reads like a muted explosion. The letters are a feast of humor, erudition, gossip -- and moral tone-deafness. My admiration for Davenport and Kenner is not diminished. They are not alone among readers and critics suckered by abhorrent writing. Céline, Neruda and Sartre have their admirers. The frequent mention of Pound in Questioning Minds is less offensive than humbling. Learning and artistry immunize no one from foolishness.