Remembering an iconoclastic writer and artist.
On Jan. 4 the greatest professor I ever had, but whom I never met, passed away. His name was Guy Davenport. He was a scholar, critic, painter, poet, translator and short-story writer. Davenport was a tremendous teacher, and he placed the imagination above all else.
His first published work, written when he was just a kid, was an obituary for a local cat. He dropped out of high school to attend Duke, was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford (where one of his professors was J.R.R. Tolkien), visited Ezra Pound in the insane asylum, was in a Stan Brakhage film, kept a saucer of sugar water in his kitchen because he liked the company of wasps and ants, explored ancient caves, translated Sappho and Herakleitos, won a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, and wrote 47 books, including a cycle of beautiful ideogrammatic stories set in an imaginary Denmark about young people who apply Charles Fourier's fantastic notions of utopia to their lives and find pleasure in chess, camping, swimming, reading, painting, building houses and making love.
I was in eighth grade when he retired from teaching at the University of Kentucky. But his books themselves are things that teach, and upon discovering them I found myself enrolled in a class from which one never truly graduates, a "geography of the imagination" where "every force evolves a form," as he once put it.
"I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics," Davenport once wrote, "but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things."
He hated what America was doing to its cities. He called cars "insects" and parking lots "gangrene." He thought our educational institutions were backward in their approach. In a 2002 interview with The Paris Review, he remarked, "It's shortsighted of Disney not to have built an amusement park [called] College World, with fraternities, sororities, sports, endless partying, but no classes or library or labs. It would not be appreciably different."
It's depressing that one of the liveliest minds in American letters died with the majority of his books out of print. His final book was a kind of "best of" collection entitled The Death of Picasso. In it, there's no line of demarcation between short story and essay--and with Davenport there's often little difference.
As he said in his essay "The Geography of the Imagination," "The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all a difference of imagination."
Davenport may not be remembered by many, but he'll be deeply missed by a few.
Article:
I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change
Article:
Waiting for Godot
Article:
'Public Service' at Bean Café
Article:
The Calendar: November 18 - November 24
Article:
'The Long Christmas Ride Home
Article:
New American Voices
Article:
The Calendar: November 11 - November 17
Article:
Hunter Gatherers
