'And Enjoy Each Other’s Company'

When I was young and still reading most books for the first time, I fantasized about meeting certain writers, those I imagined to be both gifted with words and utterly indulgent of the abject tedium of my company. It was fantasy, so naturally I could arrange things as I wished. I thought I would get along just fine with the first two writers, then still living, whose styles I imitated – Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud. Now I know differently. I didn’t even let death get in the way. I thought James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling and I would hit it off famously. I excelled at optimistic naïveté.  

The first professional writer I met was Max Ellison, later the poet laureate of Michigan. He visited my high school in suburban Cleveland in 1969. He had just self-published a collection, The Underbark. I bought a copy for $2.50 and he signed it. I recognized his poems were folksy sub-Sandburg, but what I remember is sitting with him in the school library, just the two of us, talking. I was awed to meet a guy who had actually written a book and published it – in hard cover! I have no recollection of the substance of our conversation, except that Ellison encouraged me to write if that’s what I wanted to do. To a directionless sixteen-year-old, he was a nice man and I was nervous but thrilled.

 

At the state university I met a lot of writers: Anthony Burgess, Gary Snyder, Jerzy Kosinski, Stanley Plumly and John Hawkes – not an impressive lineup, though there were two others whose work I loved: Ralph Ellison and Peter Taylor. Later, as a newspaper reporter, I met and interviewed William Gaddis, Peter Matthiessen, William Kennedy, Robert Coover, Steven Millhauser, William Gass and Ralph Ellison again, among others.

 

Only one writer have I sought out nonprofessionally, actually traveled some distance out of my way to meet in person: Guy Davenport. I visited his home in Lexington, Ky., while on a cross-country drive, on June 18, 1990. We had been corresponding for about two years – old-fashioned, typewritten letters. By this time I had overcome shyness and become, as the result of working for more than a decade as a newspaper reporter, a professional extrovert. With Davenport I needed no excuses. He was utterly gracious, interested in what I had to say about books in general and his in particular. His personality was a balancing act of guardedness and volubility. Time with a stranger for me has never passed so effortlessly.

 

Among the last things Davenport wrote before his death in January 2005 was the brief introductory note to A Garden Carried in a Pocket: Letters 1964-1968 (ed. Thomas Meyer, Green Shade, 2004), a selection of his correspondence with Jonathan Williams. He writes:

 

“The self, as some fancy psychologists have said, is always several selves, a congeries of identities. We like people who make us like ourselves (Jonathan is one of these). We tend to have a different self for all our acquaintances, accomplished hypocrites that we are. Consequently, we never really know another person. What’s going on in a friendship is that friends find each other interesting, appreciate each other’s jokes (this complicates things for the readers of other people’s mail), and enjoy each other’s company.”