'Colder Here Than Organized Charity'

Hugh Kenner’s first extant letter to Guy Davenport is dated March 7, 1958. Its manner is at once business-like and chatty: “I hope subsequent activities haven’t yet sufficed to obliterate our Boston dinner last fall from your memory.” The men had first met in 1953 when each delivered a paper on Ezra Pound at Columbia University. They met a second time in Boston in 1957, the meeting referred to in Kenner’s first letter. Over the next forty-four years they would exchange more than one-thousand letters. 

In 2018, Counterpoint published a reader’s delight: Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner, edited by Edward Burns – 2,016 heavily annotated pages in two fat boxed volumes. The final letter, postmarked August 9, 2002, is from Kenner to Davenport. He writes: “We’ve been separated for too long; here I am in the final month of my 79^th year. Are you still non-tech, or have you by any chance an e-mail address by now?” Kenner would die November 24, 2003, age eighty; Davenport, January 4, 2005, age seventy-seven. In his eulogy for his friend, published in The New Criterion, Davenport writes:

 

“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.”

 

I’m stirred to know all of these letters were composed during my lifetime, that such minds coexisted with mine. I would visit Davenport at his home in 1990 and interview Kenner by telephone in 1994. Only a certain rare species of reader will brave both volumes of letters, the sort who loves to observe the workings of passionately learned, connection-making sensibilities. Both know things. They have more than opinions. Sharing all of their literary interests is not essential. I detest Pound, man and poet, while he remained the quintessential Modernist writer for both men. Kenner would publish his summa, The Pound Era, in 1971, and Davenport, in 1983, Cities on Hills: A Study of I- XXX of Ezra Pound's Cantos, though all is not academic dreariness. Both men had locked-and-loaded wits.

 

Davenport on February 17, 1963: “It is colder here than organized charity and I find myself preferring man’s ingratitude.”

 

Kenner in his reply dated five days later: “John (age 9) [one of his sons] suggests that Marx wore an undershirt that buttoned down the front. This gave employment to button-girls in sweat-shops, which in turn led to their exploitation and discontent. They are now working in razor-blade factories.”

 

Davenport on September 11, 1966: “I remember reading [Herbert] Spencer in my tender adolescence. He is one of the heroical souls who waste a lifetime wondering if man is naturally benevolent or malevolent, modern philosophy being the art of abandoning every advantage of Western thought to see if something new will occur to the severed mind.”

 

He adds Spencer’s “only known witticism”: “Why is the Devil like George Eliot? Because they’re both like A Polly Ann.” Victorian humor.