'One Way of Recognizing Verities'

My middle son the Marine is home from Quantico for the first time since Christmas, so Saturday turned into a two-bookstore day. He found four volumes and I only one but it’s a beaut: Guy Davenport's Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature (Counterpoint, 1998). It’s based on four lectures he delivered at the University of Toronto in 1982. This is the hardcover first edition to replace the paperback I already had. 

I’ve referred before to Davenport as my virtual teacher through the medium of his books, the letters we exchanged and the one visit I made to his home in Lexington, Ky., in 1990. The fourth lecture in the volume, “Metaphysical Light in Turin,” begins with Nietzsche in the final months of his sanity, moves on to De Chirico’s early work, Milton, Keats and Kipling, with stops along the way for Shelley, Claude Levi-Strauss, Charles Olson and Joyce, among others. This is not pretentious academic name-dropping. Davenport is orienting us to navigate the geography of the imagination. Casually, in the middle of all this energized linkage (energized with thought), Davenport pauses to define the very method he utilizes:

 

“One way of recognizing verities is to look at them as if you had never seen them before, to make an enigma of the familiar.”

 

Some readers will recognize the allusion to the Russian critic Viktor Shklovski. Davenport continues:

 

“This ‘estrangement’ of reality, in order to know it at all, was the program of De Chirico’s and Joyce’s contemporaries Osip Mandelstam and Viktor Shklovski. Mandelstam in his terse novels and tightly wrought poems manipulates the inventory (as of his father’s bookshelf, like Joyce’s cataloging Bloom’s books) . . .”

 

The reference to Mandelstam’s father’s bookshelf  is to Chap. 4, “The Bookcase,” in The Noise of Time (trans. Clarence Brown, p. 77, The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, 1965):

 

“The arrangement of its shelves, the choice of books, the colors of the spines are for him the color, height, and arrangement of world literature itself. And as for books which were not included in that first bookcase— they were never to force their way into the universe of world literature. Every book in the first bookcase is, willy-nilly, a classic, and not one of them can ever be expelled.”

 

All of which reminds me that it was Davenport who introduced me to Mandelstam and his wife Nadezhda. In 1974, in The Hudson Review, he published “The Man Without Contemporaries,” later collected in The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press, 1981). He reviewed the memoir Hope Abandoned (trans. Max Hayward) by Nadezhda Mandelstam; the biography Mandelstam by Davenport’s childhood friend Clarence Brown; and Selected Poems by Osip Mandelstam (trans. Brown and W. S. Merwin). The review resulted in an unpayable intellectual debt that I can only repay by encouraging others to read Davenport and trace his suggestions.

 

To Davenport’s enthusiasm I owe my first reading of, among others, Ruskin, Zukofsky, Paul Metcalf and Charles Doughty, my first exposure to the photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard and films of Stan Brakhage, and a revived attention paid to Beckett, Welty, Robert Burton and Montaigne.

[The Marine bought three science-fiction novels and something by a writer I don’t know, Nassim Taleb.]