'Let the Tradition Live'

Here is a passage I marked in the August 7, 1962, letter Guy Davenport wrote to Hugh Kenner. He notes the death of Marilyn Monroe (“the classiest comedienne in the business”) three days earlier:

 “Too many of the grand are going under. Faulkner was perhaps the last southernor [sic]. Picasso holds on. Someone ought to point out by how few lives culture is kept going, without pretending that the imitators would have done anything alone.”

 

Consumers of culture – readers, listeners, movie and museum goers – keep it going. Creation is only half the job, and the other half is its own reward. Eugenio Montale referred to “the second life of art.” That’s what we enable when read Ben Jonson, Italo Svevo, J.V. Cunningham, et al. Call it life support.

 

Early in the young century we endured a rough patch. We lost Anthony Powell, Edgar Bowers, William Maxwell, W.G. Sebald, R.S. Thomas, Penelope Fitzgerald, C.H. Sisson, Eudora Welty, D.J. Enright, Anthony Hecht, Thom Gunn, Donald Justice, Czesław Miłosz, Saul Bellow – and Davenport and Kenner. More recently: Hilton Kramer, Thomas Berger, Roger Scruton, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Geoffrey Hill, Evan S. Connell, Richard Wilbur, Clive James, Whitney Balliett, Les Murray, Turner Cassity, Helen Pinkerton, Terry Teachout, V.S. Naipaul, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Life and culture have been depleted but we have their books for consolation.

 

In April 1888, Henry James published an essay on his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, collected later that year in Partial Portraits. In it he writes:

 

“He makes us say, Let the tradition live, by all means, since it was delightful; but at the same time he is the cause of our perceiving afresh that a tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.”

 

Tradition (the energy sustaining culture) is more like a museum than a mausoleum, open to all, no charge.

 

[The letter quoted above can be found in Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner (ed. Edward M. Burns, 2018). Henry James was born on this date, April 15, in 1843.]