The Guy Davenport Reader

by Guy Davenport

  By then, however, I had read a few more of Guy’s books. Something I couldn’t have named at the time kept pulling me back to their richly layered world. I had become fascinated with early 20th-century painting, and slowly I began to see that Guy was translating many of those techniques — particularly collage — into language. I also began to appreciate how sensuous that language appeared, how many things grounded the sentences, like sand bags holding down a hot air balloon. If Guy’s thinking seemed to rise inevitably into the Pythagorean realm of the abstract, then the sensual, tactile world kept seducing it back to earth:

  Late afternoon, rich coffee, a tobacco smelling of tar and of honey from a cedar hive, a map of Rotterdam on the wall, as Vermeer would have it. Adriaan sipped the sumptuous coffee, smoked the fragrant pipe.

  That’s Adriaan von Hovendaal, the Dutch philosopher Guy invented as an alter ego in his early fiction. But Guy wasn’t writing fiction in any conventional, recognizable sense. Instead, he was constructing prose assemblages out of philosophy, poetry, natural history, archeology, mathematics and a particularly arcane version of the erotic. At times he interspersed these prose hybrids with his own meticulous pen-and-ink drawings.

  The course I had signed up for was “Comp Lit I.” On my first essay, Guy took issue with some of my assertions about Cubism, but allowed that I had made a few good points. On my second essay, he wrote only: “Promising.” At the end of my third essay, he asked if we might get together for “coffee and conversation.”

  This threw me into a kind of panic. I was a provincial kid from Kentucky. My parents were Sunday school teachers. I didn’t speak French, or Italian, or any of the other five languages in which Guy was fluent. On top of that, there were the vague rumors around campus that Guy was gay, perhaps even a pedophile. Despite the obvious fact of his thirty-year relationship with Bonnie Jean Cox, many of Guy’s stories take as their subject the alliances between boys and an older, wiser guardian — or what the Los Angeles Times once called “pederastic sex play.” That got tongues wagging around campus, especially the tongues of some colleagues who (if you can imagine this in academia) resented Guy’s success.

  We met for coffee at his house in Bell Court, the oldest suburb in Lexington. Nothing salacious or even very remarkable happened. Guy could sense my nervousness, I think, and he tried to put me at ease by talking about the Southern Baptist upbringings that we had in common. His house had a quality about it that the Danish call hygge, a word that translates poorly as “coziness.” It was cluttered but neat, dark but welcoming. The walls of his living room were covered in burlap instead of wallpaper, but you could barely see it for all of the bookcases and paintings. Even the mantel (and as I later learned, the cupboards) functioned as a bookcase. Two rather worn chairs sat facing each other on either side of the fireplace. We sat there and talked.

  Over the next few years, we became friends. Guy would invite me over for coffee — he loved coffee, disapproved of alcohol — and we would spend long Friday afternoons talking, looking at books and paintings, and listening to anything from Mozart to Leadbelly to field recordings of music by the Dogon tribe of Africa. I remember those afternoons as luminous and exciting. I was learning a great many things, and of course Guy’s attention made me feel that perhaps I too had what it took to be a writer, perhaps I could translate the psychic forces of my own life into a form that might rise to the level of art. Guy didn’t drive. If I didn’t have any place to be that night, he and I would walk a mile to the grocery store and buy the makings for cheeseburgers or bologna sandwiches. On the way back, Guy gathered up fallen branches; “There’s free firewood everywhere,” he’d say. By the time we reached his house, we both had two armloads of wood. While the evening’s fire crackled at our feet, we sat and talked some more. And while I don’t believe it was ever his intention, as we sat before many fires, Guy gradually taught me how to think and how to write.

  Other times, if it was a sunny day, Guy painted while we visited. He had made a studio out of a small second-floor room. With windows on three sides, light poured into it, and Guy would sit at his easel in an old wicker chair. He liked to paint portraits of the subjects he was writing about at the time — Heraclitus, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein. As an artist, Guy’s style varied wildly. He could paint as sensuously as Modigliani or as severely as Mondrian. Usually he would be working on some geometrical abstraction while we talked. He loved to paint grids (“Grids are good for you,” he would say) and he rendered them with a tiny brush as if to savor as long as possible the tactile nature of the work. “Men talk about the world without paying attention to the world, as if they were asleep,” wrote Heraclitus. I slowly began to see that, in Guy, I had met for the first time someone who was completely awake and alive.

  In 1990, Guy was awarded the MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. No one at the University of Kentucky had ever won a MacArthur. The genius that a few critics had attributed to Guy was suddenly confirmed and certified. The local paper asked what he planned to buy with the prize money. Guy said a few more bottles of Perrier.

  I was taking his James Joyce graduate seminar at the time. After class he and I would walk to a nearby deli for lunch. Each day I made a feeble gesture of trying to pay for my sandwich, and each day Guy said, “Oh, we’ll let John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur get this one.” If it was a nice day, we ate outside on the limestone steps of a campus amphitheater. I remember one week when Guy was puzzling over, as many scholars have, that mysterious sentence Thoreau inserted into Walden: “I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove, and am still on their trail.” Guy was rereading all of Mencius because he dimly remembered that the Chinese philosopher had said something similar. This is what he finally found:

  If one loses a fowl or a dog, he knows well how to seek them again; if one loses the sentiments of his heart, he does not know how to seek them again. The duties of practical philosophy consists only in seeking after the sentiments of the heart which we have lost; that is all.

  Thoreau’s turtledove and the hound could be found again. But the bay horse — the sentiment of the heart, the laws of one’s own nature — that we must seek to recover through what Mencius called a practical philosophy. Guy, I think, applied such a practical philosophy to his own life. Because he found himself so out of place as a bookish child in the South (“I was thought to be retarded,” he later wrote), he seemed to give up very early on the prospect of assimilation. Instead he began learning, as he wrote in his essay “On Reading,” “the philosophical simpleness that would get me through life.” He didn’t go to faculty parties because he didn’t like small talk. He spent so much time alone because he enjoyed his own company. He didn’t own a TV because he would rather read. He didn’t drive because he thought the speed and impersonality of the automobile (“a bionic roach”) had ruined the modern city that Le Corbusier envisioned. He didn’t think there was enough beauty in the world, so he created entire imaginary countries and populated them with artists, philosophers, Boy Scouts and enlightened Scout masters. He lived alone. He had tried marriage, briefly, and the disaster of that entanglement convinced Guy that his DNA had predisposed him to a more solitary habitation. He had consciously chosen that island life, alone in a house full of books and paintings, and it seemed that he knew himself well enough to realize this was the only life with which he could be satisfied.

  Guy thought there were two kinds of genius: one that is cultivated by an enlightened society (think Mozart), and another that God simply drops in the middle of nowhere as a kind of cosmic joke (think Joseph Cornell). Guy’s genius was of the latter sort. He grew up in Anderson, South Carolina, surrounded by a family that loved him, but could make little of his talent or his very un-Southern, solitary nature. As soon as possible, he left for Duke University, then Oxford, then Harvard, with two involuntary military stints in between. While at Harvard, he published in the school literary magazine a couple of short stories that today read like pretty bad imitations of Faulkner. Per
haps sensing this, he quit writing fiction for twenty-four years. And when he returned to it in the early ’70s, he was a wholly different writer. When Alfred Corn initiated an interview for The Paris Review by characterizing Guy as a Southern writer, Guy called a halt to the interview. He even perversely stacked all of his books from floor to ceiling in his living room, then pointed out to Corn, by letter, that exactly six pages of that towering prose took up the South as its subject. Those six pages comprise two stories. One is about a little boy who likes to wear gingham dress; the other is about the burial of a dove.

  Guy was from the South but he wasn’t a Southerner; he was raised by Baptists, but he wasn’t a Christian. These were things we had in common, and they formed the basis of many long conversations. Guy used to say that he was a “Baptist agnostic” — that is, he didn’t believe in the church’s promise of eternal salvation, but he was also under no illusion that he could wholly escape its influence. Perhaps as a result of this tension, much of his fiction is a long working out of an alternative theology purged of prudery, doctrine and boredom. Like the Mediterranean street preacher, Yeshua, Guy’s two most prominent characters, Adriaan von Hovendaal and the Danish scout master Hugo Tvemunding, gather around them people from the margins of their cultures to form a wholly new kind of social unit. Yet unlike Yeshua’s followers, Guy’s outcasts are mostly children. He viewed childhood as its own kind of utopia, a realm that had been almost completely obliterated by post-Victorian Comstockery. To Guy, the oppression of boys begins at birth, with circumcision, which he viewed as outright mutilation of the body. And Guy agreed with World War I pacifist and progressive Randolph Bourne that the greatest and final failure of that oppression was to march eighteen and nineteen-year-old boys off to fight a war thought up by old men. Instead, childhood should be a radical, amoral adventure, driven by that most innate of youthful engines, curiosity. In “August Blue,” the Henry Scott Tuke painting that hung in Guy’s bedroom, three naked boys splash playfully around in a wooden row boat on the Thames, but behind them, a fleet of battleships looms on the horizon.

  Guy’s writing was as radical in content as it was beautiful in form. In that, it reminds me of Nietzsche, and perhaps like the philosopher who lived alone in rented rooms, Guy felt the need to retreat, to cloister, to isolate himself from the judgment of his colleagues and his neighbors. In his last published essay, Guy praised the reclusive Chicago “outsider artist” Henry Darger for having “the integrity to work in peaceful solitude from 1912 until his death in 1973.” Then Guy added, “Darger lived, richly, in a parallel world that he had to create daily, page by page.” And that is where Guy lived as well, for much of his life. In his first book of essays, he gave that realm a name — the geography of the imagination. It was there that Guy made peace with his obsessions.

  But why was that imaginary geography populated by so many naked boys? That is often the question that seems to lurk around Guy’s work. We know from Doctors Freud and Kinsey that all human sexuality exists along a continuum. Mothers leave their husbands and children for other women; linebackers have involuntary dreams about the quarterback. Guy rejected the labels that Americans obsessively apply to sexuality: homosexual, lesbian, heterosexual, pedophile. He shared Michel Foucault’s view, filtered through the ancient Greeks that standards of moderation are more important than the standardization of sex.

  The shrewd critic Wyatt Mason has suggested that all of Guy’s fiction is really asking one, persistent question: “What if we were free?” That Guy may have wanted to be free to love boys has made many critics, colleagues and friends uneasy. One could say that because Guy wasn’t legally free to love boys, he sublimated his affection through his fiction. And I think that is true, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough. A much larger point needs to be made: Guy believed that attraction is fundamentally amoral. We love what, and who, we love. Period.

  Guy found his greatest ally for what we might call this erotic economics in the utopian writings of Charles Fourier, and I think that in an important way, Fourier saved Guy and helped him map out a psychological geography where he didn’t feel so alone. Fourier contended that all Western philosophy was rubbish because it ran counter to human nature, trying to make us into something other than who we naturally are. Happiness was the point of life, wrote Fourier, not virtue, or goodness, or truth. But in pursuit of virtue, we too often repress the natural instincts, which then reappear perversely as malevolence. Far better, said Fourier, to work with, rather than against, the instincts, and to organize communities in such a way that individual desires served the general good. In Fourier’s utopia of New Harmony, someone with a violent nature was made the butcher. People who liked to lick toes were paired with those who liked their toes licked. And so on. Mania was not a disease, but simply an expression of nature’s diversity.

  By the end of his life, Fourier had decided that only a group of children, uncorrupted by civilization, could make New Harmony work; he even wrote a letter to Napoleon asking to adopt 500 French orphans. Guy’s most ambitious work of fiction, the novel Apples and Pears, takes the form of Adriaan von Hovendaal’s journal from 1981 as the Dutch philosopher sets up a small Fourierist phalanx in the Netherlands (nether land, no land), made up mostly of adolescents and children. When the book was going to press in 1983, Guy panicked, thinking its content — a free-love commune where incest and pedophilia were condoned — might get him fired from UK. He tried to withdraw the manuscript, and I have no idea what his publisher Jack Shoemaker said to convince Guy that the book should go forward.

  The Netherlands of Apples and Pears was created wholly out of Guy’s imagination, but when he began traveling to Denmark in the ’80s, Guy was thrilled to find a culture that looked so much like the imaginary homelands of his later books, The Jules Verne Steam Balloon and The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers. Of course it might be that Guy simply saw what he wanted to see, a Denmark that aligned with his own expectations. Guy could invent reality as easily and convincingly as he could fiction. But what Guy claimed to see was a country of “successful and happy human beings” who “are unembarrassed by the facts of life” and have “decriminalized every affection they can think of.” It was no accident to Guy that the Danish scholar Georg Brandes was the first person to lecture on Nietzsche. It was Nietzsche, after all, who had written, “To have to fight the instincts — that is the formula of decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct.” And it is true that Denmark usually scores highest every year on some new Happiness Index. Many scholars attribute this to the convivial nature of the Danes, a people who are compulsively social, inveterate joiners of clubs and leagues. Guy, I think, always secretly wanted to be a joiner, but only of the kind of culture he had imagined in his fiction, one where he was the benevolent overseer.

  This isolated him, and while Guy praised and protected his solitude, I think it must be said that, in the end, there was something missing. Namely, friends. Guy had very few of them. He was lucky, of course, to have found a life-long companion in Bonnie Jean, with whom he shared dinners, evenings and vacations. And during the ’60s, he seemed to very much value his friendships with the monk Thomas Merton (cloistered nearby in Bardstown, Kentucky) and the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard. But by the time I met Guy, both men were dead: Merton accidentally electrocuted in Thailand, Meatyard lost to cancer.

  When it first occurred to me that Guy spent so much time as a writer dreaming up communities in which he would have liked to belong, I felt a raw sadness. Friendship is really the dominate theme winding throughout his fiction. Heraclitus said that a friend is another self, and I think Guy was always looking for that elusive true friend, that other self. He had found Thoreau’s bay horse, the sentiments of his own heart, but I’m not sure he ever found Thoreau’s hound — the true friend. There is a painful passage in the “Wednesday” chapter of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, where Thoreau writes, “We never exchange more than three word
s with a Friend in our lives on that level to which our thoughts and feelings almost habitually rise. One goes forth prepared to say, ‘Sweet Friends!’ and the salutation is, ‘Damn your eyes.’” I suspect that this perverse psychology lay behind much of Guy’s perceived coldness. He seemed at times to hold Thoreau’s nearly impossible standards for friendship. And he felt too vulnerable in his affections to say “Sweet Friend!” so as a result, more than a few people felt the sting of “Damn your eyes!”

  There is, in Guy’s story “The Jules Verne Steam Balloon,” a very revealing, and I think very autobiographical, passage. Hugo Tvemunding’s father, a retired minister, is telling Hugo’s girlfriend, Mariana,

  I’m wonderfully delighted that you and Hugo are friends. He has always been a friendly boy. He used to toddle off behind the postman, and grieve that he could not stay longer than to hand over the mail and exchange comments on the weather. He made friends with the girl who delivered butter and eggs. He fell in love with all his schoolmates. He is indeed, Mariana said, a very loving person. His loving nature, Pastor Tvemunding said, causes him grief from time to time.

  I believe the same can be said about Guy. He harbored a deep sensitivity, accompanied by a deep fear of being hurt or misunderstood. What Guy harbored, of course, was the child we all carry within us, but for Guy, the child seemed particularly fragile. To protect himself, to scab over his wounds, Guy often put up a front, and so he often came across as distant and aloof. That, coupled with his natural erudition, often made people uncomfortable. What’s more, Guy’s default mode of discourse tended to be the long monologue; he talked at you. And when you finally responded, he could be very dismissive of what you had to say. This got worse as he got older, and the few friends he did have stopped coming around. I stopped, for the most part, until the very end, when I was needed.