'I Like the Way You Go About a Sentence'

For a profile I was writing of Paul Metcalf (1917-1999), author of Genoa and the great-grandson of Herman Melville, I interviewed Guy Davenport by telephone in the summer of 1988. I worked for the newspaper in Albany, N.Y., and Metcalf lived over the line in Becket, Mass. Davenport had reviewed Genoa enthusiastically when it was published in 1965, praising its “achieved richness.” When my story was published that July, I mailed him, with some anxiety, the tear sheets. I had been reading his work for a decade, since I first encountered his stories in The Hudson Review, and I very much wanted to please and not offend or disappoint him.

I assumed the letters I received from Davenport were lost. I’ve lived in three states since then, and much has been misplaced or thrown away, but at the bottom of a cardboard box, beneath an unsorted heap of mementos of dubious worth, I found his stack of letters bound with a rubber band. On top, in a yellow envelope, addressed to my office at the newspaper, was his first letter to me, the one acknowledging receipt of the Metcalf story. On Aug. 3, 1988 he wrote:

“Very fine indeed. Complete with cat looking in at the door. I’d say you have a real talent as a writer. I like the way you go about a sentence.”

I had forgotten Davenport’s fulsomeness, though I plan to use that last sentence as my epitaph. Then Davenport the teacher takes over:

“One forgets that Paul is 70. Tell your copy desk it’s Edgar Allan Poe. . . You’ve probably done more for Paul with this article than a dozen scholars. . . You will forgive my English teacherly correction of ‘ur-text’ (it is a discourtesy to you to shirk my duty): an Ur-text (cap requisite, as German capitalizes all nouns) is the first version of a work revised by its own author (e.g. Goethe’s first draft of Faust). So go stand in the corner.”

His pedantry, gratefully received by this backward student, became a familiar routine in our letters. In the letter accompanying the tear sheets I must have indulged in a bit of fulsomeness myself. Davenport wrote:

“I’m flattered to be on your shelf with Walt, Burton, and Boswell. Add Montaigne, Plutarch, and the Bible, and you’re ready for anything. Find more neglected writers around your neck of the woods.”