It is with great sadness that we note the passing of Guy
Davenport, poet, novelist, book illustrator, essayist
nonpareil, raconteur indefatigable, master of humane
inquiry. Guy was entirely sui generis, an autodidact of the
old school who managed to sample Duke, Merton College at Oxford, and
Harvard University (Ph.D. on Ezra Pound) with no visible
deformation. He taught for decades: at
Washington University in St. Louis, at Haverford College, and at the
University of Kentucky from 1963 until 1991 when a MacArthur
“genius” award (for once they got it right) set him free,
free at last. Yet if Guy was in, he most certainly was not
of, the academy. 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.

At first blush, Guy’s anti-academic animus might seem odd,
for few people were more learned in so many fields than Guy
Davenport.
Part classicist, part visual artist, entirely a
man of letters, Guy was as at home in the niceties of botanical
taxonomy as he was in the world of the Greek Anthology. He
had rummaged around expertly in the arcana of Pound’s
Cantos, had followed Darwin to the Galapagos Islands, and
what he didn’t know about Kafka or Proust or Henry James
wasn’t worth knowing. He had a keen eye for etymology, not
just in the dictionary sense of word derivations, but in
what we might call (though Guy would never have called) the
metaphysical sense: he knew that the etymology of “etymology”
was the science or logos of the true (etumos) meanings
of words, and it was that inexhaustible, ever-wily beast
which was his
ultimate intellectual prey. Nevertheless,
though he was a meticulous, almost a persnickety,
scholar—quick to register a misspelling, grammatical
solecism, rote usage, or factual error—he was too firmly
grounded in the felt pulse of what he studied to be called

“academic.” It is not quite right to say that Guy lived
through the ideas he entertained—there is a sense in which
George Eliot’s supreme pedant, Mr. Casaubon, did that.
Rather, he understood that life is animated, for good and
for ill, by ideas, and that a scrupulous regard for reality
is the necessary accomplice of any genuine intellectual
pursuit. Guy was a dazzlingly imaginative writer, but one
whose final allegiance was to truth. Hence his respect for
science, for the factual, for the ascertainable details of
whatever subject happened to embrace him. It is telling that
his first book, published in 1963, was about the
nineteenth-century American naturalist Louis Agassiz.

Guy was the recipient of many awards and honors: the
MacArthur, as mentioned, an O. Henry Award,
a Morton Dauwen Zabel award for fiction from the
American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and many
others. He wrote more than a score of books and contributed
hundreds of essays and reviews to a galaxy of magazines:
Harper’s, National Review (to which he contributed
regularly in the 1960s and 1970s), and many “little
magazines.” Guy was also a frequent contributor to The New
Criterion, beginning in 1987 with a review of a translation
of Proust’s reflections on reading Ruskin.

Proust, Hawthorne, Kafka, Darwin, the naturalist and
travel writer William Bartram, the Swedish botanist Carl
Linnaeus, Augustus John, some recently published
scientific writings by Thoreau, Gertrude Stein, Stephen
Crane, Nabokov’s lepidoptery, and
The Oxford Book of Comic Verse: Guy juggled a
multiplicity of subjects for The New Criterion.
In 1992, in a review of a biography about Hawthorne, Guy
summed up our master of Gothic fastidiousness in words that
seem to us to apply to Davenport as much as to Hawthorne:
“Quite early he learned to live in his imagination, though
he also had the rare gift of living sanely and evenly in the
practical world, taking his time with a patient diffidence.”
That combination of imaginative zeal, level sanity, and
infinite patience is a quality that stamps everything Guy
wrote.

One of the pleasures of reading Guy Davenport is learning
things. This may sound like small beer, but think about it:
how often do you actually learn something from reading an
essay or review? Did you know that Thoreau invented and
marketed the lead pencil? (He also, Guy tells us, invented
raisin bread.)
“The fascination this text holds for us,” Guy wrote about
Faith in a Seed,

is precisely Thoreau’s
detective work in finding out how squirrels disperse seeds by making
their winter store, and how birds drop part of their dinner, how
winter wind sails seeds across snow, how “parachute seeds” ride the
air. (The phrase is startling until we realize that we are in the
age of ballooning, and thus of parachutes, long before the airplane.)
Sherlock Holmes, we remember, invoked Thoreau in the matter of
circumstantial evidence, “as when we find a trout in the
milk.”

In 1991, Guy reviewed a biography of Charles
Darwin for us. The book was by a doctor called John Bowlby. Darwin suffered
terribly from various ailments throughout his life. “Despite
his genius,” Guy noted, Darwin
“was a sufferer of neuroses,
constant illnesses (he vomited every afternoon at four), a
kind of hysteria that took the form of gasping and
palpitations, and seizures of depression in which he
uncontrollably wept.” Bowlby attempted a diagnosis and came
up with Chagas Disease—plausible enough, since Darwin
himself records being stung by an insect that could have
carried the disease. The problem, Guy observes, is that
Darwin’s symptoms began six months earlier.

Bowlby’s book sounds plenty interesting. But as usual, Guy
brings an eye attuned
to the extravagant implausibilities
of the everyday.
Darwin’s sailing on The Beagle, he tells us,
“was a stroke of fate.”

The
Beagle had a naturalist (he abandoned ship in a snit at the
first opportunity). Darwin was along for the very British
reason that the captain was a gentleman who could only
associate with other gentlemen, and on a four-year
scientific journey one wants company. Captain FitzRoy
(Bowlby spells him correctly, and is practically alone in
so doing) might have been invented by Dickens. His mind was
narrow, he had not a scrap of imagination, and he was a
pompous ass. Though he rose to admiral and governed New
Zealand and sat on many naval boards, he was driven mad by
knowing that he had harbored and dined with an atheist.
While Bishop Wilberforce debated Huxley at Oxford, FitzRoy
paced with a Bible before the crowd outside, shouting “The
Book! The Book!” He later slit his own throat.

Guy couldn’t take up a subject without leaving it richer. He
deposited his learning with casual profligacy. There is
always a name, a poem, a fact, an anecdote you did not know but
wish you did (are glad, now, you do). He also also had
something valuable to say about the subject he was
discussing. (Again, this is not as common as you might
think.) Reviewing The Oxford Book of Comic Verse, for
example, Guy offers plenty of comic verses for our
delectation that are not found in the anthology. But he also
has some astute things to say about the task, the job of
comedy. Satire is like a wasp. It causes, and is meant to
cause, pain as well as elicit laughter. So it is not
surprising that satire has often found itself on the wrong
side of the law. “The Romans outlawed it,” Guy notes,

and
several talented satirists found themselves living beyond the Oxus.
But satire’s little sister, Comedy, was civilized quite early and
given the run of the house. Our understanding is that satire is
sneaky, unfair, and takes no prisoners. He knows right from wrong,
he has stern morals, and leaves bruises. Comedy is a free spirit,
full of fun, and has no intention of explaining herself.
In fact, much of her charm is in her mystery, in eluding the serious as
successfully as a kitten who doesn’t wish to be caught.

And how’s this as a summary of Gertrude Stein’s oeuvre?

“It is the very literate equivalent of children playing in a
sandbox. They are happy, busy, purposeful in their own way,
but only angels know what they think they’re doing.”
Guy’s piece on la Stein also contains this splendid bit of
sociological research:

A few months ago [this was in 1993] Gertrude Stein was at a Lexington,
Kentucky, bookstore, promoting her latest. I learned this by
overhearing one sorority sweetheart shouting to another on
campus: “It was fab seeing
her
in person! I mean, you know,
Gertrude Stein!”

It was Gloria Steinem at the bookstore, but what other
American writer, forty-seven years dead, can claim a place
in the sparse learning of the intrepidly illiterate?

Guy’s last piece for us appeared in January 2004. It was
an affectionate remembrance of his
friend Hugh Kenner, the polymathic literary critic who had
died a couple months before. Kenner’s articulateness was
proverbial, as was his garrulousness. Guy recalls
his friend
visiting once and “talking for
three days.”

We suspect
Hugh Kenner was a very different sort of personality from
Guy Davenport. But there were some amusing congruencies.
In the 1970s, Guy recalls, Marshall McLuhan had written that
maps came in at
“such-and-such a date in the Renaissance,
before which we had
no geographical sense. I watched Hugh type a postcard to
McLuhan: Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres. Yours,
Hugh.” That’s a postcard Guy could have written and probably
wished he had. But the real congruence between the two is
summed up in Guy’s commendation of his friend’s literary
style.

Hugh’s prose remains the envy of everybody who has ever
tried to write. It is elegant in its hard simplicity, in its
diction, and in its adherence to tradition. It modulated
from book to book… . I have a feeling
that most of Hugh’s prose is on two levels. The upper one is
as clear and forthright as Hazlitt; the second one is Hugh
talking to himself more intelligently than he is willing to
share with a half-literate public.

How clever (and how characteristic) of Guy to embed
that bit of autobiography in his encomium for a departed
friend.