'A Hell of a Lot of Wonderful Learning'

In the second volume of Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner (Counterpoint, 2018), Davenport writes to Kenner on June 10, 1968:

“The summer of 1949 Chris Middleton and I wandered around France and Italy, and had with us the Cantos and a volume of Donne. The upshot of that summer was that it dawned on me that a hell of a lot of wonderful learning never alluded to in my undergraduate education existed, and in a large way.”

Davenport later worked the anecdote into his obituary/tribute, “Ezra Pound, 1885-1972” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981): “One fine summer Christopher Middleton and I walked about Italy and France with two books only, a Donne and a Cantos.” In 1949, Davenport was twenty-one, had graduated from Duke University and was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford. It’s natural for students to question the extent and worth of their formal education. For a polymath like Davenport, it was inevitable. I’ve become convinced that the function of education is to teach the means of self-education, to permit students to learn how to learn and become competent autodidacts.

One can question Davenport’s choice of Pound as a foundational text and the focus of much of his subsequent scholarship. Put that aside for now. Pound’s failings as man and writer are well-documented. I’m not guiltless on this count. There was a time in the nineteen-seventies when, briefly, I was nearly homeless and had lost access to most of my library. I salvaged three books: Spinoza’s Ethics, a complete Blake and Finnegans Wake. Today, I couldn’t return to Joyce’s hermetic farrago on a bet and can only sparingly read Blake (he was crazier than Cowper and Smart combined and at least as nuts as Pound). I still keep Spinoza handy.

In his essay “On Reading” (The Hunter Gracchus, 1996), Davenport recalls how he first became aware of style in writing while reading Hendrik Van Loon’s “whimsical history of the world” (presumably The Story of Mankind), which led him to Van Loon’s biography of Rembrandt, in which he first encountered the name of Baruch de Spinoza. That reference, in turn, sent him to Will Durant, who finally sent him directly to Spinoza’s work. Davenport writes:

“[A]ll fellow readers who have ever taken a book along to a humble restaurant will understand my saying that life has few enjoyments as stoical and pure as reading Spinoza’s Ethics, evening after evening, in a strange city – St. Louis, before I made friends there. The restaurant was Greek, cozy, comfortable, and for the neighborhood. The food was cheap, tasty, and filling.

“Over white beans with chopped onions, veal cutlet with a savory dressing, and eventually a fruit cobbler and coffee, I read the De Ethica in its Everyman edition, Draftech pen at the ready to underline passages I might want to refind easily later. Soul and mind were being fed together. I have not eaten alone in a restaurant in many years, but I see others doing it and envy them.”