Any Subject, Explicated Beautifully

Sydney Morning Herald

Tuesday February 8, 2005

Peter Craven Peter Craven was co-editor of the literary magazine Scripsi, which was published from 1981 to 1994.

Guy Davenport

Author

1928-2005

Guy Davenport, who has died in Lexington, Kentucky, where he had taught for the past 40 years, was once described by his friend, the literary critic Hugh Kenner, as the "best explicator of the arts alive".

For many years he was professor of English at the University of Kentucky, but he was known around the world by significant groups of people as an extraordinary critic with the mind of an artist, as well as a short story writer of extraordinary formal intensity and a poet, especially a poetic translator who, at his best, had no peer.

He was, for instance, the greatest of all the translators of Sappho, that most staggering of lyric poets who is great in any translation but who somehow in Davenport's translation has a breathtaking musicality and a sensuousness: "God's stunning daughter deathless Aphorodita,/A whittled perplexity your bright abstruse chair,/Don't blunt my stubborn eye with breathlessness, lady,/To tame my heart ... /And if she does not love you, she will love,/Helpless she will love."

The trick with Davenport's Sappho, which first appeared in 1965, is in the subtitle Songs and Fragments. Sappho exists for us as so many musical scraps of beauty that poets have improvised a melody or a meshing around. Davenport left in the gaps so that the poems have the archaic quality of evocative ruins. But so that, at the same time, the spaces themselves radiate with possibility: "Who is this wild girl with the charm/To get you under her spell? [...] She's always/In a country frock [...] Too ignorant to arrange her dress/So that the hem is at the ankle."

Guy Davenport was born in Anderson, South Carolina. He dropped out of school but ended up at Duke studying art (he was always a very able draughtsman whose illustrations of his own work and Kenner's were instantly distinctive.)

He got a Rhodes Scholarship in 1948 which took him to Merton College, Oxford. He was taught by Tolkien and apparently submitted papers on the work of James Joyce. What appealed to him most in Joyce must have been that combination of intense arcane learning and the sense of the myriad ways there are of being alive. Later he wrote his doctorate at Harvard about the poetry of Ezra Pound, a piece bristling with learning.

Davenport was very much in the Pound tradition which often meant that to make it new you had to make it very old. He met Pound when he was incarcerated in St Elizabeth's psychiatric hospital and always stayed true to the ideal of strenuous formal experimentation even when his work was laden with literature. He also remained, in all his essays - which were as often anecdotal as erudite - an easygoing Southerner who liked to indicate the human face of artistic endeavour.

His own fiction is sometimes marvellous and sometimes doodling, but with an extraordinary super-saturated formal finish. Sometimes his stories centre on some familiar typology from literary or biblical history, sometimes they explore with great poignancy the relationship between a young boy and an older man. They always tend to veer close to some edge, whether in the relentlessness of their homoeroticism or in the stylistic density of their prose.

Davenport was an incomparable writer and the grain of his voice, to use Roland Barthes's phrase, subsumes all the different generic categories that contribute to it - translator, poet, fiction writer, essayist, critic.

As a critic, Davenport was extraordinary because he was so imaginatively engaged in the act of perception. It's Davenport who says that one day a critic of genius will point out how comic a writer Kafka is and how a sense of the ridiculous akin to Beckett's or Sterne's informs all his work and that "he saw the absurdity of life as the most meaningful clue to its elusive vitality". Of course, it is Davenport who is the critic of genius though he would never have wanted to say so.

There's his wonderful essay about Joyce's forest of symbols and the way it's the colouration of the symbolic texture, not the realism, that gives Ulysses its defining quality. Nothing Stephen says makes sense, it's all shrouded in mystery. Bloom, on the other hand, is articulate of speech but inarticulate of mind, whereas Molly talks to herself in order to think. So we get three voices in Ulysses that correspond to the three voices in Hamlet: the voice of the prince, the voice that presents the poet as enigma and the ineluctable voice of Shakespeare.

Perhaps the bards of Ireland gazing into futurity knew as much about Jimmy Joyce but I didn't. In 1982, when Scripsi published a centenary issue about Joyce, Davenport wrote to us with a grace and kindliness I will never forget. He knew that we were young and needed encouragement and he gave it unabashed.

His grandmother came from Charleston and he wrote of her, in one of his essays, that she never said "Yankees" but always "the stinking Yankees", "the one unladylike expression she allowed herself".

He was proud of the fact that his father did not process anything but was a locomotive driver and he had his moment of ecstasy when, in childhood, for five minutes his daddy let him drive the train.

He spent every Sunday afternoon of his childhood, with his father and the rest of his family, hunting for native American arrowheads and never thought it odd that his family devoted its Sabbaths to amateur archaeology. He said that anything he had ever done in his life, producing art or elucidating it, was always a matter of going out and finding something. Davenport always wrote of the American Indians with an intense empathy as the people who defied the tame American ideal of progress.

But he could write about anything with an absolute command of cadence and what looks like a complete relaxation of mind. He wrote a few stories that have the overwhelming poignancy and formal perfection of the finest things in Turgenev.

He made friends with everyone including the Trappist hermit Thomas Merton, with whom he drank Jack Daniels and whom he thought one of the most open-hearted and candid men he had ever met. He loved the fact that Merton translated one of Heraclitus's oracular remarks as "Bigotry is the disease of religion."

Davenport, a man who knew as much about the subtleties and winding stair of human civilisation as anyone, remained a Christian, though of the most independent kind. He said that one day he would make his peace with Jesus' terrifying death on the cross "every breath costing him unimaginable pain in lifting himself by his nailed hands", but meanwhile the image of Christ that moved him most was of the man who allowed his hair to be anointed by the sinner woman in the company of Simon the Pharisee. She, not he, anointed his head. She, not he, kissed his feet. As Davenport says, "Jesus forgave the woman her sins and Simon grumbled at that, too."

I don't know of anyone whose writing is more full of the spirit that moves in literature and in life than Guy Davenport.

Was he a minor writer? I think he will get sober praise and dumbstruck praise when famous names are forgotten.

He is survived by his long-time companion, Bonnie Jean Cox.

© 2005 Sydney Morning Herald

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