'Some Spirit That Didn’t Wobble'

“As a youngster I came to the classics simply by following the clues of other writers. Cooper, Stevenson, Whitman, even Edgar Rice Burroughs seemed to lead, allusion by allusion, back to a body of writing that was solider and wiser, some spirit that didn’t wobble, wasn’t under argument as to its validity, and shone with its own light.” 

This stands as further confirmation of my pet theory about literature: all books are one book. If a reader ranges widely, he can begin anywhere and find himself everywhere. There are no cul-de-sacs or dead ends. Pay sufficient attention, follow the implicit maps, and you’ll return to where you started, ready to launch a new journey. Reading is not linear but spiral.

 

In the Winter 1964 issue of Arion: A Journal of the Humanities and the Classics, the editors published almost one-hundred pages of answers to a questionnaire they sent to dozens of writers and scholars. In their introduction to “The Classics and the Man of Letters” they write: “These answers show once again--what only classicists have ever doubted--how much the classics and classical  studies owe, and will go on owing, to the writers and the great amateurs. Lector, intende: laetaberis.”

 

The passage at the top is from Guy Davenport’s reply to the Arion questionnaire. (Among his fellow respondents were Auden, Edward Dahlberg, Marianne Moore and Anthony Powell). Guy had published his first book in 1963: The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz (Beacon Press), an anthology of extracts from the biologist’s work accompanied by a long Davenport essay (collected in The Geography of the Imagination, 1981). In 1964 he published Carmina Archilochi: The Fragments of Archilochos (University of California Press). He was thirty-six, had only recently joined the faculty at the University of Kentucky and had not yet written a single short story or any of his best essays (most of which you can find in Geography).

 

One of the first questions Guy asked me when I visited him at his home in Lexington, Ky., in 1990 was this little expression of wonder: Did I know that Franz Kafka’s eyes were blue? Guy had recently read it in a biography. I have the sort of mind that exults in such tidbits of seemingly gratuitous wonder, and Guy’s work is studded with them. Some will read Davenport and conclude his work is a variation on Trivial Pursuit. I think of a line from his essay “On Reading,” describing a revelation he had as a boy growing up in South Carolina: “And then I made the discovery that what I liked in reading was to learn things I didn’t know.” Don’t mistake that for a tautology.

 

Here is the third question posed by the Arion editors: “Claims are still made for a living continuity between Graeco-Roman civilization and our own. If these claims are anything more than familiar cultural gestures, at what levels, and in what contexts, can they still valuably be made?” And here is Guy’s reply:

 

“Real continuity is metamorphic. The molds grow and in growing change. To say that there is a continuity from Greece and Rome to the United States is to say that there is an obvious continuity to all history, and our strain is particularly closed and neat. I cannot think of an example of my or my neighbors’ life that cannot, sometimes with a little strained ingenuity, be traced to the classical world. The world simply isn’t that old.”

 

Guy was born on November 23, 1927 and died on this date, January 4, in 2005 at age seventy-seven.

["On Reading" is collected in The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature and Art (Counterpoint, 1996).]