Davenport, Again

I've written about the late author Guy Davenport here, and here.

I've long been resigned to the fact that he's never going to be everyone's cup of tea. But those who appreciate him do so passionatey. Witness Bruce Bawer, unknown to me until this article was pointed out to me by another Davenport fan. I already can tell Mr. Bawer and I disagree on a great many things. But we have one essential common passion:

Modernism was Davenport's turf, Pound his hero. But since, in his view, the twentieth century's genius was that it began "to connect what had seemed to be abrupt discontinuities of culture into whole fabrics," he did not stay put in his own period but ventured far afield, seeking out and discerning ties across cultures, disciplines, and centuries (Don Quixote's influence on Lolita; Conrad's Chance as "a translation, into another style, of Dombey and Son"), and writing stories ("Christ Preaching at the Henley Regatta") in which personages from far-flung epochs and places bumped up against one another. For Davenport, civilization was one unbroken text: If Apollinaire "could see the modern," he observed, it was "because he loved all that had lasted from before. You see Cézanne by loving Poussin and you see Poussin by loving Pompeii and you see Pompeii by loving Cnossos." Just as the North Carolina poet Lenard Moore had learned to see "tobacco country ... through the eyes of the medieval Japanese poet Basho," so was the young Davenport, an aspiring painter, helped to see his native South Carolina countryside by Constable's English landscapes ("Culture," as Davenport wrote in these pages last year, "continues").

Naturally, Davenport's disciples defy and transcend politicalcategories and every other pigeon-hole. Like the writer himself. Davenport wrote that Lévi-Strauss was too original of mind "to be the exponent of a master or a school," and Bawer correctly observes that "he might have been referring to himself."

Long a contributor to National Review, he mocked academic groupthink —- and thwacked the New York Review of Books for having "done more to discourage good writing in the United States than the Litkontrol branch of the Politburo has in the Soviet Union." But he also railed against conservative orthodoxies, reviling religious fundamentalism and decrying capitalism's obliteration of American communities.

Indeed, even as Davenport rejoiced in modernism and echoed his idol Pound's determination to "make it new," he (who never learned to drive) despised modern technology, comparing the twentieth century —- the "most miserable of ages since the Barbarians poured into Rome" —- unfavorably to Whitman's time: "His age walked with a sprier step than ours; it bounced in buckboard and carriage; a man on a horse has his blood shaken and his muscles pulled. A man in an automobile is as active as a sloth. ... Dullness, constant numbing dullness, was the last thing Whitman would have thought of America, but that is what has happened." If Susan Sontag called for an erotics of art, for Davenport —- whose forthrightly homoerotic fiction celebrated active minds in active bodies —- art, ideas, and frank physicality were parts of a single whole (as a character in the title story of The Cardiff Team [1996] puts it, "Finding out about what's in books and the world and feeling great in my pants were cooperative").

In Davenport's view, modern Americans, possessed by the twin demons of anti-intellectualism and car lust, had sold both mind and body in return for a mess of pottage—and forfeited their souls in the process. And he saw this Faustian transaction mirrored in the fate of an apple and a pear tree near his Lexington house that "had grown around each other in a double spiral" of breathtaking beauty, only to fall one day to a developer's chain saw, its cruel scream "the language of devils at their business."

Having watched my neighbors cut down a century-old pine tree, the better to park their six cars on their lawn (they only have five people in the family), I could only wish for the skill of Davenport to invoke down the proper curse on their heads.