'The Word Dear Alone Hangs on the Upper Verge'

“The major writers in whose shadows I grow my mushrooms are Osip Mandelstam, Donald Barthelme, Robert Walser, and Walter Savage Landor.”  

Writers are not always reliable interpreters of their own work, or even willing or able to identify their influences. The impact might be subconscious. Sometimes, naming influences is a protective act. There’s strength in numbers, yes, but also in quality. In the interview quoted above, Guy Davenport offers an unlikely assortment, from a master like Mandelstam to a bric-a-brac-monger like Barthelme. Guy was passionately curious, learned and generous with what he knew, so we pay addition when he lauds a writer’s work.

 

Of few writers can we say to a novice: You can’t go wrong; start anywhere and enjoy yourself. Even Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus. In my experience, even after almost half a century, I reliably enjoy and learn something from Guy’s work, no matter how remote it may seem from my interests. On my shelves sit twenty-five volumes of his work. In his essay “Ernst Mach Max Ernest” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981), Guy names writers with “the styles I find most useful to study”: Hugh Kenner, Mandelstam, Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, Pound and Charles Doughty. He says of them: “All of these are writers who do not waste a word, who condense, pare down, and proceed with daring synapses.” Again, one can quibble. Pound? Really? But it was Guy who introduced me to Doughty, author of Travels in Arabia Deserta, an essential book in my library.

 

The most intriguing name cited by Guy is Landor. I know of no other allusion to the author of Imaginary Conversations in his work. Landor as shadow for Guy’s own work makes sense. He was a classicist, like Guy, and wrote much of his poetry in Latin. Here is “Memory,” a poem I hadn’t encountered before, one I think Guy might have appreciated:

 

“The mother of the Muses, we are taught,

Is Memory: she has left me; they remain,

And shake my shoulder, urging me to sing

About the summer days, my loves of old.

Alas! alas! is all I can reply.

Memory has left with me that name alone,

Harmonious name, which other bards may sing,

But her bright image in my darkest hour

Comes back, in vain comes back, called or uncalled.

Forgotten are the names of visitors

Ready to press my hand but yesterday;

Forgotten are the names of earlier friends

Whose genial converse and glad countenance

Are fresh as ever to mine ear and eye;

To these, when I have written, and besought

Remembrance of me, the word Dear alone

Hangs on the upper verge, and waits in vain.

A blessing wert thou, O oblivion,

If thy stream carried only weeds away,

But vernal and autumnal flowers alike

It hurries down to wither on the strand.”

 

Guy leaves no clues as to why he prizes Landor. Perhaps he numbered him among “earlier friends / Whose genial converse and glad countenance / Are fresh as ever to mine ear and eye . . .”