'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 . . .”

ADDENDUM, 10-1-25: Dave Lull, as usual, completed my homework for me, and found additional references to Landor in Guy Davenport’s work.

 

Da Vinci’s Bicycle, p. 115

“When I first knew him, years before, at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Washington, he was not yet the immensely old man that I would eventually have to remember, old as Titian, old as Walter Savage Landor, glaring and silent, standing in gondolas in Venice like some ineffably old Chinese.”

 

The Geography of the Imagination, p. 112

“Occasionally a Landor or a Hazlitt has helped us to see the breathing Englishman, hazel-eyed, superbly deep but always clear of thought, with the heart of man helplessly naked to his gaze. But the student begins to think of him very soon as an institution vaguely religious, vaguely pedagogical, inscrutable, endless of corridor, governed by generations of quarreling wardens. The institution endows chairs, gives assistant professors grants for studies of kingship, Tudor allusions, image clusters, stage history. As if all this grind and cough had never existed, Zukofsky has written a book about a poet whose precision of word and eye can be talked about endlessly.”

 

Thasos and Ohio: Poems and Translations 1950-1980, p. 86

“Mulberries, cedars, and fig-trees

In a Warwick garden, ᾧ δαμάλης ἔρως,

Landor with a yellow-stippled trout,

πλέξαντες μηροῖς πέρι μηρούς . . .”

 

p. 88

“Calvert defined Blake, read Landor

And Chapman, engraved a tough line

Fine as Bewick’s. (Knowledge rusts

If the mind can’t love . . .”

 

12 Stories, p. 236

“A witty Frenchman has said that I am a writer who disappears while arriving. I would like to misunderstand him that I come too late as a Modernist and too early for the dissonances that go by the name of Postmodernism. All writers being creatures of language and the past, I look back (however inaccurately) to Lucian reading his dialogues in Greek to Roman consular families in Gaul, to Ausonius trying to see the Garonne in the Moselle, to Walter Savage Landor writing his imaginary conversations in Fiesole.”

 

The Cardiff Team: Ten Stories, p. 161 

“. . . kindly angels might lead her through a study of Braque. I love her for that, love that in her. They've discovered that there are stars older than the universe. So much to learn, so much to take in. I've been reading an English writer of the last century, name of Landor, and found a passage about a young Greek of the fifth century, Hegemon, age fifteen, whose curls are pressed down by the famous saloniste Aspasia, with her finger, to see them spring up again. He bit her finger for the liberty she had taken, and said he must kiss it to make it well, and perhaps kiss her elsewhere, here and there, to prevent the spreading of the venom. Playing Eros, he was.”