'On Good Terms in a Quiet Sort of Way'

Thirty years ago today I visited Guy Davenport at his home on Sayre Avenue in Lexington, Ky. We had exchanged letters for several years but this was our only in-person meeting. His yard and house were notably clean and orderly, the opposite of a bohemian hovel. He owned many oversized art books and I marveled at how well he had organized them on his shelves. He had the most tasteful tchotchkes I’ve even seen.

I can’t claim to have much insight into Davenport the man. I knew him as a writer and teacher, though never in a formal sense. With me he was always generous and encouraging. When I reviewed his 1989 volume A Balthus Notebook (Ecco Press), he replied with a letter of gratitude in which he didn’t exactly correct me but expanded on what I had written. His first instinct was to share knowledge. It was a memorable exercise in tact and courtesy. As a newspaper reporter I had met and interviewed many “celebrities.” None was so charming and just plain interesting as Guy Davenport.

One of the pleasures of reading Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner (Counterpoint, 2018) was learning more about his private nature. The editor Edward M. Burns does a heroic job of annotating the correspondence of formidably learned men. The two fat volumes in a slipcase total 2,016 pages and weigh almost eight pounds. One of the most moving and revealing letters in the collection was written by Davenport from his hometown of Anderson, S.C., on Feb. 21, 1964. It begins:

“I’ve been down here—home—all week. Daddy died Wednesday; funeral this morning, Friday.”

You know a Southerner wrote this. Davenport was thirty-six and called his father “Daddy.” Guy Mattison Davenport had spent most of his working life as a shipping clerk for the Railway Express Agency. Davenport describes his father’s lung cancer and emphysema, and continues:

“We all—Mama, my sister, and I—saw him just before he died. He was a jolly, easy sort and everybody in town knew him, so that some 300 folk came to the funeral and an ocean of flowers fills the house and makes a great mound on his grave. He was 64. We were always on good terms in a quiet sort of way; I never ‘rebelled’ and he never coerced. He was always proud of my drawing and my education, and I reciprocated by taking seriously his hobbies—an impressive collection of Indian weaponry and utensils, trees and flowers, fervent expeditions to visit everything historical and antiquarian.”

And there we have the origin of Davenport’s finest essay, “Finding” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981), which begins:

“Every Sunday afternoon of my childhood, once the tediousness of Sunday school and the appalling boredom of church were over with, corrosions of the spirit easily salved by the roast beef, macaroni pie, and peach cobbler that followed them, my father loaded us all into the Essex, later the Packard, and headed out to look for Indian arrows. That was the phrase, ‘to look for Indian arrows.” Children detect nothing different in their own families: I can’t remember noticing anything extraordinary in our family being the only one I knew of that devoted every Sunday afternoon to amateur archaeology.”

In the essay, Davenport goes on to trace his artistic interests and attentiveness to detail to these childhood rambles: “Our understanding was that the search was the thing, the pleasure of looking.” In a metaphoric nutshell, that was his credo. Davenport continues in his letter to Kenner:

“I chose I John 4: 17-21 for his eulogy—the minister thought a scholarly son ought to set the tone of the sermon. He could only have lived in terrible pain, and we are thankful for the mercy that gave him a swift death. Mama has been beautifully brave, and Southern custom has kept us distracted from raw grief—e.g., twenty-three dinners ‘brought in’ yesterday: Homeric, or even Tlinkit Eskimo, generosity.”