'Trained Not to Argue But to Look'

Finally, a readable article in The New York Review of Books. That hasn’t happened at least since the death of V.S. Pritchett in 1997. Wyatt Mason portrays Guy Davenport as an industrious correspondent in “An Epistolary Critic.”  “[A]s I came to learn, and was not surprised to learn," Mason writes, "Davenport would reply to anyone who wrote him,” including me. Mason tells us of the Davenport collection at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center:

 

“Between 1944 and his death at age seventy-seven, Davenport amassed . . . more than 2,300 correspondents. They amount to what the Ransom Center calls, hyperbolically but not unjustifiably, ‘a twentieth-century publisher’s rolodex.’”

 

This suggests Guy was a small-d democrat, a virtuoso of what Michael Oakeshott calls conversation, “in which the participants are not engaged in an inquiry or a debate; there is no ‘truth’ to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought. They are not concerned to inform, to persuade, or to refute one another, and therefore the cogency of their utterances does not depend upon their all speaking in the same idiom; they may differ without disagreeing.”

 

I had a small but highly valued acquaintance with Guy. I interviewed him by telephone in 1988 for a profile I was writing of Paul Metcalf, a writer and the great-grandson of Herman Melville who lived in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. Metcalf’s best book, Genoa, appeared in 1965 and received two reviews – one by Guy, the other by William H. Gass. Both loved it. In our first conversation, after I identified myself as a reporter for the newspaper in Albany, N.Y., Davenport mentioned he had been reading Francis Parkman’s description of the Indian massacre at Schenectady. What was the city like today? I would come to learn that Guy, in private life as in his writing, was endlessly curious and generous with his learning – a natural-born teacher in the old-fashioned sense.

 

I quickly wrote him a fan letter, and Guy as quickly replied – correcting my spelling of Edgar “Allen” Poe and a sloppy reference I had made to Goethe. Coming from Guy, what in another professor might come across as bullying pedantry felt like knowledge shared. I knew he wasn’t scoring cheap points or putting me in my place. He wanted me to know some of what he knew, and this communion of knowledge, not merely with his students at the University of Kentucky, gave him immense, quiet pleasure. 

 

We corresponded sporadically for several years, and I am even more grateful for this exchange now than I was then, having learned of the immense number of people with whom he exchanged letters. In June 1990, a friend and I took an open-ended trip across the Midwest, starting from upstate New York. We camped outside Lexington, Ky., and the next morning I visited Guy at his home at 621 Sayre Ave. He was pleased with a review I had written of his latest book, A Balthus Notebook. In a later he had already told me, “You probably make it out to be a better book than it actually is; I’m not complaining.” Pro forma modesty? I'm not sure.

At his home we spoke of Montaigne and Robert Burton. He showed me a painting he had recently made of Gertrude Stein. I felt privileged to be in the artist’s studio for a private showing. Davenport wrote me (he was a master of flattery you hoped was true): “You paid more attention to my paintings than five other people together. Most folks look the other way, and change the subject.” I told him that the night before, while doing laundry at the campground, I had been reading the hefty, black Library of America edition of Walt Whitman. A teenage boy approached, asked to see the book, I obliged, and the kid said, “We have a book, too, you know – The Book of Mormon.” Guy laughed until he wept. 

 

On February 3, 1990, Guy wrote to me, after I sent him an obituary/column I had written following Samuel Beckett’s death: “Thanks for the Beckett obit. Good touch, the [Vaclav] Havel [to whom Beckett dedicated his play Catastrophe (1984)]. I imagine George Bush could not identify Sam even as a writer, much less as our greatest since Joyce. (is it known that GB has ever read a book?)” 

 

I had been reading Guy, at first in such journals as The Hudson Review, since the 1970s. I remember the delight I experienced in 1981 when by chance I saw a brand-new copy of Guy’s The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press) in the window of a lesbian bookstore in Manhattan. Nine years later, Guy would sign my copy of the essay collection along with Apples and Pears (North Point Press, 1984), a collection of stories. Mason glosses Guy’s intent in all of  his work: 

 

“Geography provides an education in the same good-humored voice as the letters, refined for the varied subjects of the essays, all of which, despite their variety, can be said to be about the same thing: finding. Davenport’s essays are a set of paths that lead us to places we haven’t been. All it took, he said, was an open eye. ‘I was never trained to argue,’ Davenport told me. ‘I only observe.’ But observation requires curiosity, and one of the remarkable features of Davenport’s essays—which overwhelmingly explicate ‘difficult’ modernist texts by Joyce and Pound, though they are no less interested in Welty, Joyce Kilmer, and Tarzan—is how his writing moves the reader into darknesses in their knowledge that yield to illumination. A text is revealed to be a cave into which an intelligence has descended, by torchlight, to make marks that, once discovered, will require some work to see: an inversion of Plato’s gloomy allegory.” 

 

An illustration of Oakeshott’s point that two people engaged in conversation “may differ without disagreeing”: Guy’s devotion to writers I find repellant, such as Ezra Pound and Charles Olson. It didn’t seem to matter that our thinking so radically differed. I am even more grateful for our exchange now than I was then, having learned of the immense number of people with whom he corresponded. At his home in Lexington he told me of his delight when he learned that Franz Kafka’s eyes were blue. 

 

As a gift I brought him a duplicate copy of Steven Millhauser’s latest story collection, The Barnum Museum (Poseidon Press, 1990). Subsequently I sent him my review, which he thanked me for in a July 7 note. His letter dated dated July 20, 1990, must have been in response to me congratulating him on winning the MacArthur Fellowship: “Thanks! As for who’s responsible, at least three have claimed credit so far. Many committees chew through the lists, I believe.” 

 

And a concluding suggestion: “Why don’t you do a survey of contemporary writers, in the manner of Hazlitt (and parallel to Ved Mehta’s ‘Fly and the Fly Bottle’)? JC Oates writing three books at once, Paul [Metcalf] in his little house. That is, subvert the worn-out interview format and go for the writer as human. ALL observation.” 

 

Mason distills an essential part of Guy’s method: “Trained not to argue but to look.” Which is much of the reason Guy, in person and in print, was almost never boring – a rare quality in my experience.