'He Liked to Hold Ideas Up to the Light'

The single most influential book in my life, the one that with time altered the way I think, not just what I think, is Guy Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press, 1981). I bought it that year in a lesbian bookstore in Manhattan. Over the previous decade I had read a scattering of Davenport’s essays, stories and reviews in journals and had a loose idea of who he was. In “The Labyrinth of Guy Davenport’s Mind,” John Jeremiah Sullivan describes the charm of the writer and his book: 

“But The Geography of the Imagination is nonfiction, and a masterpiece.

As far as ‘introducing’ it, I’d ask only that you enter it in a spirit of play.

That is how it was written. Guy wrote in joy. He loved to make writings."

 

Sullivan borrows his form from Davenport, as in the latter’s “On Some Lines of Virgil” (Eclogues, 1981). Each of Guy’s paragraphs in that story is four lines long and separated from the next by double-spacing. This Oulipo-like practice is pleasing to the eye and lends a poem-like, stanza-like uniformity to the text, an impression Sullivan emphasizes by capitalizing the first word in each line in his essay:  

 

“I am writing this the way I am, in uniform lines of an arbitrary length,

Because he liked to do that, to draw boxes and write inside of them.”

It was a radical, literal form of ‘Constraint as the friend of the artist.’

Somehow it tied into his ideas on the oneness of form and meaning.”

 

What I remember best from my single visit to Guy’s house in Lexington, Ky., in 1990 was conversation. I walked in intimidated, as when we meet a hero. (Will I bore him? Will he disappoint me?) That quickly dispelled and the talk never  stopped. He reminded me, in conversation, of his prose. He was a natural-born teacher, never pompous or pedantic. He loved sharing what he had learned. Sullivan:

 

“He liked to hold ideas up to the light and rotate them in his fingertips.

He moved between languages and millennia. I couldn’t always follow.

It might be more correct to say that I was almost never able to follow.”

 

Guy’s defining quality, expressed in everything he wrote, was curiosity, the most overlooked of human gifts, the root of all discovery. He made other talk drab in comparison. Again, Sullivan:

 

“Talking that famous Guy Davenport talk, which will never exist again,

Literary-historical free-association punctuated with dramatic pauses,

Ready to laugh but rarely silly, sometimes gossipy, sometimes bitchy.”

 

Sullivan interviewed Guy for The Paris Review in 2000. In a 2012 interview, seven years after Guy’s death, Sullivan said, “For about three years I read nothing but books he’d mentioned. That was a lot of books.” Guy had that effect. Thanks to him I first read John Ruskin, Charles Doughty, the Mandelstams and Paul Metcalf, among others.  “Knowing him,” Sullivan says, “was an invisible college.” I can’t think of another person I admire with whom I so often disagree. His reverence for Pound and Olson baffles me but doesn’t get in the way of my gratitude for him and his work. We exchanged letters. His were always encouraging. Sullivan speaks for me when he writes: “I miss him very much. I miss the human being not just the great writer.”