Guy Davenport on Writing and Reading

Guy Davenport, illustration from Apples & Pears

I've just begun reading Andre Furlani's Guy Davenport: Postmodern and After, a magnificent book (so far), and went to track down one of the items cited there, a 2002 interview by B. Renner for the website Elimae. Alas, the site seems to have died, but god bless the Wayback Machine: here it is, cached.

The interview is not as meaty as some others, for instance Davenport's Paris Review interview, but it's always interesting, and I was particularly struck by this:

DAVENPORT: At Duke I took Prof Blackburn's Creative Writing course (Bill Styron and Mac Hyman were in the class) and got the wrong impression that writing is an effusion of genius and talent.  Also, that writing fiction is Expression of significant and deep inner emotion.  It took me years to shake off all this.  Writing is making a construct, and what's in the story is what's important.  And style: in what words and phrases the story is told.  (William Blackburn, the full name.  His guiding us all toward autobiographical, confessional, "emotional" writing is -- in reaction -- why I write about concrete objectivities that are fairly remote from my own experiences.  I like to imagine how other people feel in a world different from my own.)

Also:

ELIMAE: Almost none of your stories take place in the U.S. or involve American characters. Is there a particular reason for this? Are Americans and the U.S. less noteworthy than other peoples and places, especially Europeans and Europe, or is it as simple as a matter of going to subject matter that hasn't already been done to death by other American writers? 

DAVENPORT: A clever critic might note that they are all set in the USA.  "Tatlin!" is a fable about totalitarian governments strangling creativity, not always blatantly and openly.  At the time I was lecturing on Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil, the classic study in our time of Government and The Poet.  Vladimir Tatlin's genius suffocated by Stalin seemed to me to be paradigmatic and timely.  I learned from Kafka's Amerika that you don't have to have a realistic knowledge of a place, and from Nabokov that "realism" is simply a fashionable mode.

We are still immigrants.  Culture imports and exports.  There was a great anxiety that European culture would be obliterated twice in the 20th century.  I became interested in "Europe" through Whistler's etchings.

And then there's a Davenport desert island list!

ELIMAE: Here's my version of the "desert island" question: if you could select any six books (besides your own) originally written in your lifetime, and be the author of those books, which six would they be?  

DAVENPORT: Your 6 books question is diabolical!  I couldn't have written any of 'em.
    Eudora Welty, The Golden Apples
    P. Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower
    Michel Tournier, Les Meteores
    Isak Dinesen, Anecdotes of Destiny
    Mann, Doktor Faustus
    Beckett, Molloy

Finally, I also found an interesting mention of Davenport in this interview with John Jeremiah Sullivan, whose whole response about the connection of writing and reading is great, but here's the Davenport part:

That said, how do you get to be a better reader? I asked Guy Davenport this question one time, because talking to him could really make a person despair; he just knew so much, he’d read so much in many languages, but not in a pedantic or scholastic way, in a really passionate way. He gave me what I thought was very solid advice, which was: first of all, start reading and don’t stop. The other thing is to follow your interest. He said there ought to be a phrase, “falling into interest,” to go with falling in love.

Follow your interest; follow the writers who energize you, not the ones who exert a sense of obligation on you. The books that do the one or the other will change, as time gone on. The landscape shifts. Don’t adhere to systems unless that feels good.

The Guy Davenport Reader

Guy Davenport; photograph by Jonathan Williams

Counterpoint Press has just released The Guy Davenport Reader, edited by Davenport's literary executor, Erik Reece. It's a good, basic overview of Davenport's work, and a nice opportunity to review some of the highlights of that work. Davenport was one of the greatest of American writers, and a single 400-page book can only offer a brief taste of his large and eclectic oeuvre, but it seems to me that the Reader achieves what it sets out to achieve: to bring together various genres of Davenport's writing (fiction, essays, poetry, translations, journals), and, in Reece's words, "to make an argument for the extraordinary range and even, yes, the accessibility of this remarkable writer."

Accessibility is, of course, in the mind of the perceiver, and poses particular problems with Davenport's work, a fact that befuddled reviewers pointed out with every book he published. As a Rhodes Scholar, he wrote the first Oxford University thesis on James Joyce, and he later visited with Ezra Pound and Samuel Beckett, so his devotion to literature often considered "difficult" was longstanding. But he wasn't only devoted to the heights of Modernism — his knowledge of ancient literatures was tremendous (7 Greeks is a marvelous collection of translations); he not only had a comprehensive grasp of European and American cultures and histories, but also those of many other regions; and he maintained a long interest in various writers and philosophers many readers would consider esoteric, particularly Charles Fourier.

But the challenge of Davenport is not merely his wide range of references. His fiction in particular causes some readers to struggle because, though they are written in a remarkably clear and precise prose, many of the stories thrive on juxtapositions and collage. They are, as Davenport called them (following Pound and others), assemblages. (Typically eclectic, Davenport said that this collage form was influenced not only by the Modernists, but perhaps even more so by the experimental filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Gregory Markopoulos.) The fictions have no conventional plot, the purpose for including some scenes and conversations may not be easily comprehended even at the end, and Davenport had no interest in following the sorts of precepts offered by countless "how to write" manuals: action based on conflict and resolution, characters that create the illusion of psychological roundedness, etc. His interests were elsewhere: in form, style, and imagination. His stories provide another obstacle to accessibility as well: many of the best of them are about naked young men discovering the pleasures of their penises. More than one reviewer referred to Davenport's stories as pedophiliac or pornographic.

As far as I can tell, Davenport never published a single uninteresting page, which means that editing an anthological overview of his work could be easy: throw in anything, and it's great! But then there's Reece's goal of accessibility, and there the problem lies. I think he's overcome it as well as can be done, including some of Davenport's more immediately delightful writings without entirely glossing over the nature of this writer's work.

New Strange Horizons

The latest Strange Horizons has a marvelous essay by Abigail Nussbaum on Anna Kavan's novels Ice and Guilty:

Ice's plot doesn't so much progress as spiral inwards, tightening in on the moment in which the encroaching ice leaves only the narrator and the woman alone in the world. Even this point of convergence, however, isn't the novel's purpose -- indeed, the story ends ambivalently, holding out the possibility of yet more iterations of the narrator's story to come. Ice is an exercise in sustaining an emotional tone -- an oppressive, terrifying, senseless one. It succeeds at this task admirably, making for a reading experience that is not so much pleasant as irresistible, and an emotional impact that proves very difficult to shake off.

(For another view of Ice, see L. Timmel Duchamp's essay from Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet.)

Also in this issue of Strange Horizons is my latest column. This one is about Guy Davenport's story "Belinda's World Tour" (available in A Table of Green Fields and The Death of Picasso). The column is a sort of companion piece to my previous one, continuing to look at the representation of historical figures in fiction.