The Guy Davenport Reader

by Guy Davenport

  When I returned the biography of Leonardo, the generous Mrs. McNinch lent me Carl Van Doren’s Benjamin Franklin, also published in 1938 and a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. This was harder going, with phrases like “minister plenipotentiary,” which I would mutter secretly to myself. It is a truism that reading educates. What it does most powerfully is introduce the world outside us, negating the obstructions of time and place. When, much later, I ran across the word opsimathy in Walter Pater, I could appreciate the tragic implications of late learning. All experience is synergetic: Bucky Fuller should have written, and probably did, about the phenomenon of Synergetic Surprise. We cannot guess what potential lies in wait for the imagination through momentum alone. The earlier Leonardo and Franklin enter one’s mind, the greater the possibility of their bonding and interacting with ongoing experience and information.

  My childhood was far from bookish. I spent a lot of it hunting and fishing, searching Georgia and South Carolina fields for arrowheads, longing to work on the Blue Ridge Railroad, playing softball in the street, building tree houses. The hunting was done with my Uncle Broadus Dewey on Saturdays with a bird dog named Joe. Joe was gun-shy and had conniption fits with pitiful howls when we took a shot at game. Many lives were spared, of squirrels and partridges and rabbits, to spare Joe’s nerves. I myself never managed to shoot anything. What I liked was the outing and the comradeship and pretending to have Leonardo’s eyes in looking at plants, rocks, the landscape. Back from hunting, I would try to imitate a page of the notebooks. On manila construction paper from Woolworth’s I would draw in brown ink leaves in clusters, and rocks, and insects, hoping that the page resembled one by Leonardo.

  When the first American paperbacks came along, they, too, opened other worlds: Sherlock Holmes and other detective fiction, leading me to read people in the Holmesian manner at the barbershop and on the street.

  I now have ample evidence for tracing synergies in reading. A few summers ago I spent a beautiful day in Auvers-sur-Oise, standing by the graves of Vincent and Theo. The wheat field is still unmistakably there, across the road from where they are buried against the cemetery wall, the Protestant place; and Gachet’s house and garden. This day began with Irving Stone’s trashy and irresponsible biography and the hilariously vulgar film based on it, but one must begin somewhere. Opsimathy differs from early learning in that there are no taproots, no years of crossbreeding, no naturalization in a climate.

  After I had taught myself to read, without reading friends or family, I kept at it, more or less unaware of what hunger I was feeding. I can remember when I read any book, as the act of reading adheres to the room, the chair, the season. Doughty’s Arabia Deserta I read under the hundred-year-old fig tree in our backyard in South Carolina, a summer vacation from teaching at Washington University, having lucked onto the two volumes (minus the map that ought to have been in a pocket in vol. II) at a St. Louis rummage sale. (The missing map was given me fifteen years later by Issam Safady, the Jordanian scholar.)

  I read most of Willa Cather and Mann’s Joseph tetralogy in the post library at Fort Bragg. The ordnance repair shop was on one side, the stockade on the other, and I was “keeping up my education” on orders from the adjutant general of the XVIIIth Airborne Corps, who kindly gave me Wednesday afternoons off specifically to read.

  Proust I began among the spring blossoms of the Sarah P. Duke gardens in Durham, North Carolina, and finished forty years later by my fireplace in Lexington, Kentucky, convalescing from a very difficult operation to remove an embedded kidney stone. These settings are not merely sentimental; they are real interrelations. The moment of reading is integral to the process. My knowledge of Griaule’s Le renard pâle is interwoven with my reading a large part of it in the Greenville, South Carolina, Trailways bus station. Yeats’s A Vision belongs to the Hôtel Monsieur-le-Prince, once on the street of that name, as does Nightwood and Black Spring. The Seven Pillars, an Oxford room; Fanny Hill, the Haverford cricket field. And not all readings are nostalgic: the conditions under which I made my way through the Iliad in Greek were the violence and paralyzing misery of a disintegrating marriage, for which abrasion, nevertheless, the meaning of the poem was the more tragic. There are texts I can never willingly return to because of the misery adhering to them.

  Students often tell me that an author was ruined for them by a high-school English class; we all know what they mean. Shakespeare was almost closed to me by the world’s dullest teacher, and there are many writers whom I would probably enjoy reading except that they were recommended to me by suspect enthusiasts. I wish I knew how to rectify these aversions. I tell bright students, in conference, how I had to find certain authors on my own who were ruined for me by bad teachers or inept critics. Scott, Kipling, Wells will do to illustrate that only an idiot will take a critic’s word without seeing for oneself. I think I learned quite early that the judgments of my teachers were probably a report of their ignorance. In truth, my education was a systematic misleading. Ruskin was dismissed as a dull, preacherly old fart who wrote purple prose. In a decent society the teacher who led me to believe this would be tried, found guilty, and hanged by the thumbs while being pelted with old eggs and cabbage stalks. I heard in a class at Duke that Joyce’s Ulysses was a tedious account of the death of Molly Bloom. An Oxford don assured me that Edmund Wilson is an astute critic. Around what barriers did I have to force my way to get to Pound, to Joyce, to William Carlos Williams?

  All of this points to our having a society that reads badly and communicates execrably about what we read. The idea persists that writing is an activity of thoughtful, idealistic, moral people called authors and that they are committed to protecting certain values vital to a well-ordered society. Books mold character, enforce patriotism, and provide a healthy way to pass the leisurely hour. To this assumption there has been added in our day the image of the author as a celebrity, someone worth hearing at a reading or lecture even if you have no intention of parting with a dime for one of the author’s books.

  There is little room in this popular concept of writing for the apprehension and appreciation of style. I had all along, I would like to think, been responding to style in my earliest attempts to read. I knew that the books I failed to enjoy — Scott’s The Black Dwarf was the worst of these — were texts that remained foggy and indeterminate, like a moving picture experienced through bad eyesight and defective hearing. Style is radically cultural both linguistically and psychologically. I couldn’t read Scott, Stevenson, and Cooper because I had not developed the imaginative agility needed to close the distance between me and the style of their texts. I could read, with excitement and a kind of enchantment, the biographies I encountered so early of Leonardo and Franklin not only because my curiosity about them was great, but because these biographies were in a contemporary, if academic, English.

  My discovery of style came about through various humble books. Hendrik Van Loon’s whimsical history of the world (a Pocket Book from Woolworth’s) alerted me to the fact that tone makes all the difference. It was this book that began to make something of an aesthete of me, for I progressed to Van Loon’s biography of Rembrandt (conflating the rich experience of the Leonardo biography with the pleasure of reading for style), a book I kept reading for the pleasure of the prose, despite my ignorance of his historical setting. In it, however, I saw the name Spinoza, which led me to dear old Will Durant, who led me to Spinoza’s texts, and all fellow readers who have ever taken a book along to a humble restaurant will understand my saying that life has few enjoyments as stoical and pure as reading Spinoza’s Ethics, evening after evening, in a strange city — St. Louis, before I made friends there. The restaurant was Greek, cozy, comfortable, and for the neighborhood. The food was cheap, tasty, and filling.

  Over white beans with chopped onions, veal cutlet with a savory dressing, and eventually a fruit cobbler and coffee, I read the De Ethica in its Everyman edition, Draftech pen at the ready to underline passages I might want to refi
nd easily later. Soul and mind were being fed together. I have not eaten alone in a restaurant in many years, but I see others doing it and envy them.

  At some time, as a freshman in college I would guess, my pleasure in style came together with the inevitable duty of having to read for content. I became increasingly annoyed with inept styles, like James Michener’s, or styles that did violence to the language (and thus knew nothing of sociology until I could read it in French), with the turkey gobble of politicians and the rev. clergy. I began to search out writers whose style, as I was learning to see, was an indication that what they had to say was worth knowing. This was by no means an efficient or intellectually respectable procedure. I found Eric Gill’s writing (all of which has evaporated from my mind), Spengler (all retained), Faulkner (then unknown to my English profs), Joyce (whose name I found in Thomas Wolfe), Dostoyevsky.

  A memory: I was desperately poor as an undergraduate at Duke, did not belong to a fraternity, and except for a few like-minded friends (Dan Patterson, who was to become the great student of Shaker music; Bob Loomis, the Random House editor; Clarence Brown, the translator and biographer of Osip Mandelstam) was romantically and self-indulgently lonely. I was already learning the philosophical simpleness that would get me through life, and I remember a Saturday when I was the only person in the library. I took out Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (buff paper, good typography) and went back to my room. I felt, somehow, with everybody else out partying (Dan Patterson was practicing the piano in the basement of Duke chapel), Faulkner deserved my best. I showered, washed my hair, put on fresh clothes, and with one of Bob Loomis’s wooden-tipped cigars, for the wickedness of it, made myself comfortable and opened the Faulkner to hear Miss Rosa Coldfield telling Quentin Compson about Thomas Sutpen.

  So it went with my education. God knows what I learned from classes; very little. I read Santayana instead of my philosophy text (the style of which sucked), I read Finnegans Wake instead of doing botany (in which I made an F, and sweet Professor Anderson, that great name in photosynthesis, wrote on the postcard that conveyed the F, “You have a neat and attractive handwriting”). Instead of paying attention to psychology I made a wide study of Klee and Goya.

  On a grander scale I got the same kind of education at Oxford and Harvard, where I read on my own while satisfying course requirements. I can therefore report that the nine years of elementary schooling, four of undergraduate, and eight of graduate study were technically games of futility. If, now, I had at my disposal as a teacher only what I learned from the formalities of education, I could not possibly be a university professor. I wouldn’t know anything. I am at least still trying. I’ve kept most of my textbooks and still read them (and am getting pretty good at botany).

  Wendell Berry, that thoughtful man, once remarked that teachers are like a farmer dropping an acorn into the ground. Some years will pass before the oak comes to maturity. We give grades, and lecture, and do the best we can. But we cannot see what we have done for many years to come. In setting out to write about the pleasure of reading, I find that I have equated my private, venturesome reading with my education, such as it is. There’s much to be learned from this. All useful knowledge is perhaps subversive, innocently and ignorantly so at first. I assumed, with the wisdom of children, that it was best not to mention my fourth- and fifth-grade teachers, Miss Taylor (who made us all take a Pledge of Lifelong Abstinence from Alcohol) and Miss Divver, that I had read Antonina Vallentin’s Leonardo and Van Doren’s Franklin, and wanted very much, if I could find them, to read Frankenstein and Dracula.

  I also read in those grammar-school years the nine volumes of Alexander Dumas’s Celebrated Crimes, a dozen or so volumes of E. Phillips Oppenheim, and the three-volume Century Dictionary (I have always accepted dictionaries and encyclopedias as good reading matter).

  Last year I met a young man in his twenties who is illiterate; there are more illiterates in Kentucky than anywhere else, with the possible exception of the Philippines and Haiti. The horror of his predicament struck me first of all because it prevents his getting a job, and secondly because of the blindness it imposes on his imagination. I also realized more fully than ever before what a text is and how it can only be realized in the imagination, how mere words, used over and over for other purposes and in other contexts, can be so ordered by, say, Jules Verne, as to be deciphered as a narrative of intricate texture and splendid color, of precise meanings and values. At the time of the illiterate’s importuning visits (I was trying to help him find a job) I was reading Verne’s Les enfants du capitaine Grant, a geography book cunningly disguised as an adventure story, for French children, a hefty two-volume work. I had never before felt how lucky and privileged I am, not so much for being literate, a state of grace that might in different circumstances be squandered on tax forms or law books, but for being able, regularly, to get out of myself completely, to be somewhere else, among other minds, and return (by laying my book aside) renewed and refreshed.

  For the real use of imaginative reading is precisely to suspend one’s mind in the workings of another sensibility, quite literally to give oneself over to Henry James or Conrad or Ausonius, to Yuri Olyesha, Bash¯o, and Plutarch.

  The mind is a self-consuming organ and preys on itself. It is an organ for taking the outside in. A wasp has a very simple ganglion of nerves for a brain, a receptor of color, smell, and distances. It probably doesn’t think at all, and if it could write, all it would have to say would concern the delicious smell of female wasps and fermenting pears, hexagonalities in various material (wood fiber, paper) in the architecture of nests, with maybe some remarks on azimuths (for the young). Angels, to move to the other pole of being, write history and indictments only, and if Satan has written his memoirs they would read like Frank Harris, and who would want to read them?

  Music is as close as we will get to angelic discourse. Literature comes next, with a greater measure than music can claim of the fully human. I am on slippery ground here, as the two arts can share natures. Don Giovanni and the Mass in B Minor are both music and literature; all of what we now call poetry was for many centuries song. Even if we had all of Sappho’s texts, we would still be without the tunes to which they were sung — like having only the libretto of The Magic Flute.

  Shakespeare’s sonnets and the Duino Elegies are a kind of music in themselves.

  By “fully human” I mean The Miller’s Tale and the Quixote, Surtees and Humphry Clinker, Rabelais and Queneau. The fully human is suspect in our society; Kentucky high schools keep banning As I Lay Dying. We do not read enough to have seen that literature itself is not interested in the transcendental role society has assumed for it. The pleasure of reading has turned out not to be what our culture calls pleasure at all. The most imperceptive psychologist or even evangelist can understand that television idiotizes and blinds while reading makes for intelligence and perception.

  Why? How? I wish I knew. I also wish I knew why millions of bright American children turn overnight into teenage nerds. The substitution of the automobile for the natural body, which our culture has effected in the most evil perversion of humanity since chivalry, is one cause; narcosis by drugs and Dionysian music is another. I cannot say that an indifference to literature is another cause; it isn’t. It’s a symptom, and one of our trivializing culture’s great losses. We can evince any number of undeniable beliefs — an informed society cannot be enslaved by ideologies and fanaticism, a cooperative pluralistic society must necessarily be conversant with the human record in books of all kinds, and so on — but we will always return to the private and inviolable act of reading as our culture’s way of developing an individual.

  Aunt Mae didn’t read the books she inherited from Uncle Eugene, slain in France fighting for my and your right to read what we want to. She read Cosmopolitan and Collier’s and “the Grit.” And Zane Grey. She knew, however, that books are important, to be kept right-side up on a shelf in the living room near her plaster-of-Paris life-size stat
ue of Rin Tin Tin.

  The world is a labyrinth in which we keep traversing familiar crossroads we had though were miles away, but to which we are doomed to backtrack. Every book I have read is in a Borgesian series that began with the orange, black, and mimosa-green cloth-bound Tarzan brought to me as a kindly gift by Mrs. Shiflett in her apron and bonnet. And the name Shiflett, I know because of books, is the one Faulkner transmuted to Snopes.

  And Aunt Mae, whose father was a horse doctor but not a common horse doctor, looked down her nose at the Shifletts of this world as common white trash (she was an accomplished snob, Aunt Mae). A few years ago, exploring the Cimitière des Chiens et Chats in Paris, I came upon the grave of Rin Tin Tin, Grande Vedette du Cinema, and felt the ghost of Aunt Mae, who had always intended “to visit the old country,” very much with me, for I’m old enough to know that all things are a matter of roots and branches, of spiritual seeds and spiritual growth, and that I would not have been in Paris at all, not, anyway, as a scholar buying books and tracking down historical sites and going to museums with educated eyes rather than eyes blank with ignorance, if, in the accident of things, Aunt Mae and Mrs. Shiflett had not taken the responsibility of being custodians of the modest libraries of a brother and a son, so that I could teach myself to read.

  Spinoza’s Tulips

  A man’s paradise is his own good nature.

  (VI Dynasty, Massime degli antichi Egiziani, Boris de Rachewiltz, 1954)