"Unextinguishable Curiosity"

I became a devotee of Guy Davenport's writing -- fiction and non-fiction alike -- long before I knew much about the man himself. And when he died earlier this year, Davenport still was someone I knew mostly by the biographical details he revealed in his writings.

Now, an unsigned remembrance in the New Criterion tells me I liked him even better than I thought I did, without knowing it.

A less academic personality is difficult to imagine. Indeed, although Guy was a gentle, accommodating soul, someone whose unextinguishable curiosity generally left him amused rather than indignant at the spectacle of human foibles, he made an exception for the arid, the pedantic, the politically correct, in short, for the academic —- the one term, so far as we can recall, that was for him invariably a term of diminishment, a term of contempt.

And so forth. That's not the main point of the piece, which is a delightful romp through Davenport's greatest hits in writing essays and reviews.

The New Criterion also has reprinted one of Davenport's pieces, "The Hunter Gracchus."