'Let's Talk About Your Projects More'

There’s a Jamesian charm to reading one half of a correspondence, especially when you are the absent half. On Feb. 3, 1990, Guy Davenport wrote to me:

“Thanks for the Beckett obit. Good touch, the [Vaclav] Havel [to whom Beckett dedicated his play Catastrophe (1984)]. I imagine George Bush could not identify Sam even as a writer, much less as our greatest since Joyce. (is it known that GB has ever read a book?)”

I remember writing a column about Beckett after his death but had forgotten sending it to Davenport. He goes on to describe a “lovely evening” he and a friend had with Beckett at the Closerie des Lilas some years earlier. “The surprise was his constant smile, and readiness to laugh.” The political cavils are boilerplate American grousing. No one expects a politician to keep up with literature, and I’m not sure it’s even important (or desirable). From Davenport on May 21, 1990:

“Thanks for sending along your review of the Balthus [A Balthus Notebook, Ecco Press, 1990], and for giving it your attention. You probably make it out to be a better book than it actually is; I’m not complaining.”

Now it seems ballsy of me to have sent the review, a little impertinent, though his book helped me better appreciate Balthus. His expression of modesty and the semi-colon-ed demurral is very smooth. I visited Davenport at his home in Lexington, Ky., that year, on June 18, when I gave him a duplicate copy of Steven Millhauser’s latest, The Barnum Museum. Subsequently I sent him my review of the collection, which he thanked me for in a July 7 note. We had spent an hour or more of my visit looking at his paintings. I felt privileged to be in the artist’s studio for a private showing. Davenport writes (he was a master of flattery you hoped was true):

“You paid more attention to my paintings than five other people together. Most folks look the other way, and change the subject.”

The next note, dated July 20, 1990, must have been in response to me congratulating him on winning the MacArthur Fellowship:

“Thanks! As for who’s responsible, at least three have claimed credit so far. Many committees chew through the lists, I believe.”

And a concluding suggestion: “Why don’t you do a survey of contemporary writers, in the manner of Hazlitt (and parallel to Ved Mehta’s ‘Fly and the Fly Bottle’)? JC Oates writing three books at once, Paul [Metcalf] in his little house. That is, subvert the worn-out interview format and go for the writer as human. ALL observation.”

The Mehta reference surprised me, and I must have asked him about it. On July 27 he wrote:

“By citing Ved Mehta I was indicating the top of the art of the interview, portrait-from-life, ‘profile’ form . . . Something between the Masques of Remy de Gourmont and the standard magazine interview . . . (The one time I met [Joyce Carol Oates] her hand was ice cold, and I have 2 letters from her, one praising a story and the other complaining that I’m unfair to her in reviews).”

He concludes with his typical generosity: “Let’s talk about your projects more.”