The Guy Davenport Reader

by Guy Davenport

  As a teacher, Guy lectured. Or rather, he talked for fifty minutes in elliptical patterns, moving from one subject to the next much like an electron. Sometimes Guy would draw arrows back and forth on the chalkboard, from Vico to de Vinci to Samuel Beckett to Buster Keaton. But more often, he just leaned against the board, rolled a piece a chalk back and forth across the palm of his right hand, and talked. Rarely did he speak directly to whatever text we happened to be reading. “Comp Lit I” went on like this for eight weeks until one day Guy suddenly asked the class, “Who here has read The Kreutzer Sonata by Tolstoy?” I was stupid enough to raise my hand. “What’s it about, Erik?” he asked. My mind went blank. “It’s about sex, Erik, the story is about sex.” Unimpressed with that failed attempt at class participation, Guy lectured on for the rest of the semester. We all took notes, but God knows what sense we made of them afterwards.

  Guy always returned our essays the class period after we turned them in. They were neatly creased down the middle and on the back was a generally low grade with a one- or two-word explanation. Still, when the roles were reversed at the end of the semester, and more than a few students gave him low marks on the course evaluations, he always seemed wounded, genuinely aggrieved. Gradually Guy came to see himself as a failed teacher. But he wasn’t. I think the failure was more on our part, as students. Too many of us lacked that one thing Guy thought so vital to education — curiosity. If we couldn’t see what an amazing movement modernism was in the history of literature and art, what more could he do? He told anecdotes about meeting T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. He had personally tracked down some of the most important artists of the 20th century. He could tell us first-hand what they had said about the nature of art in the modern world. If we couldn’t get excited about that, what were we doing in “Comp Lit I?” The sad truth is that most of us probably didn’t even know. Friends like Hugh Kenner and John Barth urged Guy to leave UK, to move on to a more prestigious school where his expertise would be better appreciated. But Guy had hunkered down at 621 Sayre Avenue, where the fashionable literati and the salons could not find him, and that’s the way he liked it. He would continue to make the half-hour walk to UK, chain-smoke Marlboros in his office, deliver his two lectures for the day, and head back home to write.

  Guy hated pretense and it could bring out a real strain of anti-intellectualism in him. I remember one night about ten years ago when a prominent American poet came to give a reading in Lexington and requested Guy’s presence at dinner (I was there as his driver). This poet and Guy had been at Harvard together in the ’50s, and the poet’s erudition was on full display. He quoted medieval philosophers, he switched from one language to the next, he dismissed Walter Benjamin as overrated. I could tell Guy was recoiling at this public immodesty. At a break in one of these soliloquies, Guy piped up and said, “Hey, has anybody seen the new Harry Potter movie?” The prominent American poet looked aghast. We soon left.

  Guy was never about status or career or fame or reputation. He never went on a book tour nor exhibited any of his paintings. He hated everything related to the notion of self. I don’t mean that he hated himself, but rather that he hated the American cult of self and he especially hated the role of the writer as prophet. He found it all unseemly and would quote Menander as saying, “Talking about oneself is a feast that starves the guest.” The natural world, the world of art and literature, the human mind and body — these things were so fascinating, why waste time talking about oneself?

  There was something both refreshing and terrifying about how Guy always said exactly what he was thinking. Once, on a flight to Paris, a French flight attendant asked Guy how his coffee was. He replied, “It tastes like vacuum cleaner dust stirred around in tepid water.” This so amused the flight attendant that she fetched Guy a complimentary bottle of port. But he could be cruelly honest in his judgment of your work. When a neighbor, who had spent two years in prison for refusing to fight in Vietnam, showed Guy the poems he had written while incarcerated, Guy told him unceremoniously that he had no talent for poetry and should go back to protesting the war. Once, when I showed him a chapter of what I thought might be a novel, he replied, “Jesus Christ, I didn’t know you wanted to be John Updike.” It was, I’m quite sure, the meanest thing he could think to say. While I was living in Virginia, Guy and I kept up a steady correspondence, and his letters often included some kind of hand-painted collage. I tried once to reciprocate by sending him my colored pencil rendering of a prairie warbler. He wrote back: “You draw like a talented third-grader.” But when you wrote something good, Guy told you that as well. When he would praise a poem of mine, I knew I could trust that judgment; I knew the poem must be alright.

  Guy didn’t take up causes. Unlike his UK colleague Wendell Berry, who puts reform at the heart of his work, Guy thought American consumer culture was beyond reform. He told me once that he gave up on American politics when Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson for President in 1952 (Guy had worked as a graduate assistant for Archibald MacLeish, who at the time was writing speeches for Stevenson). He spoke with bemused detachment about campus idealism during “the glorious ’60s.” And though he reviewed books for right-wing The National Review, he did so simply because Hugh Kenner got him the job, not because he felt any allegiance to William F. Buckley or the conservative movement.

  There was also some whispering from time to time that Guy had anti-Semitic tendencies because of his allegiance to Ezra Pound. This is simply nonsense. It was precisely because of the Holocaust that Guy never allowed his books to be translated into German. Moreover, one of Guy’s great heroes was the Polish pediatrician and educator Janusz Korczak, who ran an orphanage in pre-World War II Warsaw. Korczak exposed the children to the challenges of real life and the orphans took on more and more responsibility until they gradually formed a kind of children’s republic within the orphanage. Korczak also wrote a novel called King Matt the First about a child king who rallies both children and adults around a constitution of trust and cooperation. But in the cruelest of ironies, it was the barbaric adults of the Third Reich who sent all 192 of Korczak’s Jewish orphans to be murdered at Treblinka. Korczak, a non-Jew who wanted nothing to do with that adult world, accompanied his wards to his own voluntary death in the gas chambers. One day, when Guy was recounting this story to our “Comp Lit I” class, he broke down in tears and staggered out of the room.

  Guy kept smoking right up to the last. “I’m operating on the assumption that I cannot get cancer,” he said after the diagnosis had been confirmed. The last time I saw Guy, a few days before he died, he was sitting by his fireplace, wrapped up in a thick red blanket. He was cold, shivering, unshaven, weak as a kitten. He didn’t want to talk, because if he did, he would start coughing and wouldn’t be able to stop. He dozed by the fire. I rearranged logs, moved stacks of paper, paced. He would open his eyes from time to time to see that I was still there, then close them again. There was a strange kind of understanding in his tired gaze: “You are here. I am dying. This is it.”

  In the years following Guy’s death people would occasionally ask me, “What was Guy really like?” I think, in part, what they were asking is, “What was Guy like when he wasn’t holding forth on some matter of high art, when he wasn’t lording his great intellect over you?” But that’s who Guy was in public as well is in front of his fire. That part of his nature wasn’t false or meant to create distance. He was simply, as he liked to quote Lincoln, “interested in the things he was interested in.” His interests and his curiosity were so vast, it sometimes looked like demagoguery, but it wasn’t.

  Having said that, I think there were at least five Guy Davenports. There was the man who wrote some of the most beautiful prose in our country’s history. There was the lively, congenial writer of letters. There was the erudite professor whose fifty-minute lectures usually covered at least 3,000 years of human history. There was the man who talked with his few friends in front of his firep
lace. And then there was the mysterious, utterly private man that no one knew. I do not know, of course, how future scholars will judge Guy’s work and his life. But I do know that such judgment is something Guy cared nothing about. I return, again and again, to Bonnie Jean’s statement about the innocence of Guy’s mind. Guy’s affections were purified by their innocence, and I believe his soul ascended out of his battered flesh with lightness and grace.

  —Erik Reece