'Books Are to Read'

“We live in an awful time. Philosophy has abandoned us; religions offer despair or incompetent help; events rival the worst nightmares. The universities have shrunk what they used to be into two semesters of sophomore cultural survey (Homer to Racine, Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath).”

And that was written thirty-seven years ago. From this excerpt alone you would never guess that Guy Davenport was writing a compressed but thorough eye-witness report on the books and career of his friend Hugh Kenner. The title is an echo of Kenner’s masterwork: “The Kenner Era.” It appears in the December 31, 1985 issue of National Review, a magazine both men had written for starting more than twenty years earlier. After a brief review of Kenner’s work, Davenport continues:

“The nature of literature changed around 1910. Inside the great sonorities and humane fables of Henry James, Conrad, and Kipling there appeared radically inventive forms containing a wholly different subject matter. Ulysses, The Cantos, The Waste Land, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Finnegans Wake, Happy Days.”

Kenner’s academic turf, Davenport’s fondest reading matter. James, Conrad, Kipling – proto-Modernists. Yes, Kipling. Read his story “Wireless.” Elsewhere, Davenport writes, “What got Kipling a bad name among Liberals is his intelligence, humor, and affection. These they cannot tolerate in anybody.” Wait for the punch line:

“Each epoch has its major art. Ours is not that of Haydn, Mozart, and the Bachs, nor is it the age of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Poussin. Of our architecture all you have to note is that a culture that would build a glass skyscraper the windows of whose first floor must be washed by a human being on a plank suspended 49 stories by two ropes is a culture without a shred of humanity. Never mind that the building must breathe through a power house ten miles away. No, the genius of our time is in our literature.”

By “our time,” Davenport clearly does not mean 1985. Like Kenner, he views the world like a dragonfly – 360 degrees and in full color. Eighty percent of a dragonfly’s brain is devoted to vision – the envy of any writer. Davenport means Modernism and its literary legacy. He continues:

“That is our voice. We are, as the world was once before in the Renaissance and before that in the welding of a world out of the ruins of Rome and barbarian hordes, a world incomprehensible to ourselves. We did not see that the twentieth century would revert to violence; every foresight promised exactly the opposite. We did not see that religion would turn into fanaticism, medicine into drug addiction, cities into jungles. We did not see, but our arts saw. They are our eyes and ears: as supplement, catalyst, or substitute.”

Davenport concludes:

“Books are to read; reading is a communal activity. The illiterate formed societies to have Dickens read to them; early movies had a public reader. Modernist literature requires a community reader, or critic. We are lucky to have many, no ten of whom quite add up to Hugh Kenner.”