'Elegant in Its Hard Simplicity'

I interviewed Hugh Kenner by telephone in December 1994. For my newspaper I was writing a profile of William Murphy, the Yeats scholar who had recently published his second book devoted to that Irish artistic dynasty, Family Secrets. I had already been reading Kenner for more than twenty years, and he was as much a writing hero to me as a critic could ever be. He wrote about and often knew the Modernist stalwarts – Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Beckett, among others. I respected his work and admired his prose despite his preoccupation with Pound, a deeply unsavory character whose impact on literature was frequently unfortunate.

In 1978, Kenner had reviewed Murphy’s Prodigal Father, a biography of John Butler Yeats, the painter and father to the poet. Kenner called it “an achievement nearly as rare as its subject, the right book written by exactly the right man.” To me he described Murphy’s book as “one of the very few good literary biographies.” I was impressed by Kenner’s friendliness and erudition – a rare combination among academics. We spoke for almost an hour. With Murphy and Yeats out of the way the interview turned to his friend Guy Davenport, G.K. Chesterton, Marianne Moore and R. Buckminster Fuller. After Kenner’s death, Davenport wrote:

 

“I had the feeling that Hugh was a displaced member of Samuel Johnson’s circle (Pope was for him the poet for inexhaustible study). I have heard him anatomize a paragraph of Johnson’s, showing how its words consistently answered to their Latin derivations. I don’t know all that many people who have paragraphs of Johnson off by heart.”

 

Kenner dedicated A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (1975) to Davenport, who returned the honor by dedicating The Geography of the Imagination (1981) to Kenner. I have spent almost half a century making amends for the stupid review I wrote for an “underground” magazine of Kenner’s A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett (1974). In that worthy book he writes:

 

“Beckett’s sensibility is profoundly conservative, and nowhere is he more traditional than in his regard for the integrity of the printed work, the scrupulousness of its phrasing, the accuracy of its proof-reading, the exemplary adequacy of the translations.”

And in his fond post mortem, Davenport observes of Kenner’s style: “Hugh’s prose remains the envy of everybody who has ever tried to write. It is elegant in its hard simplicity, in its diction, and in its adherence to tradition.”

 

Kenner was born one-hundred years ago, on January 7, 1923, in Peterborough, Ontario, and died on November 24, 2003 in Athens, Ga.