Reading Modernism, After Hugh Kenner (1923-2003): Hugh Kenner's Modernism and Ours

Unlike many speakers at memorial panels this past year, I did not know Hugh Kenner personally or work with him as a student. But I knew him. When The Pound Era appeared in paperback in 1973, I invested in it on my starveling student budget and read it, riveted, transported, from the stunning Gaudier-Brzeska panther crouched on the cover to the very last page. Of all the intellectual experiences that shaped my decision to center my scholarly work on modernist art and thought, The Pound Era was one of the most immediate. It helped impel me toward my early work on the manuscripts and texts of Ezra Pound's Cantos, and it played a role in my first academic appointment. During my MLA interview with a large half-circle of English department faculty from the University of Alabama, their chair asked what I thought of The Pound Era. "Oh," I said, "it's full of amazing moments," and gave for example the song from Cymbeline, "Fear no more the heat o' the sun"—its last lines, "Golden lads and girls all must, / Like chimney sweepers, come to dust," lit up as if by an illuminator's brush by Kenner's anecdote (via William Arrowsmith and Guy Davenport) about the twentieth-century Warwickshire denizen who blew the head off a dandelion saying, "We call these golden boys chimneysweepers when they go to seed." My interviewers seemed to share my delight in the critical sensibility that could so deftly weave this trouvaille of Elizabethan local knowledge into a modernist cultural history—at least, nobody asked me what it had to do with Pound or modernism, and I got the job.

I could have called up any number of such moments in The Pound Era: the photograph of San Zeno's column in Verona, its carved words "Adaminus . . . me fecit" glossing a line in The Cantos; the tracing of poetic affinities from Li Po and other Chinese poets through French Jesuit missionaries to Thoreau, Emerson, Ernest Fenollosa with Japanese scholars Mori and Ariga, and, through the chance gift of Fenollosa's papers, Pound; the dazzling exposition of Pound's and Aldington's translations of Sappho's broken papyri; the red-weskited Henry James inquiring of Pound whether his bride, Dorothy Shakespear, was "a compatriot?" and more. Parlaying Pound's poetics of the luminous detail into a critical method that sets the significant detail in its historical surround, Kenner inaugurated a new historicism avant la lettre for an international, multidisciplinary modernism that, like Gaudier's crouched panther, now seemed to leap from its New Critical cage into history, its own and ours. At the same time, one could resist Kenner's grand literary historical claim, instead seeing in The Pound Era a provocative illustration of Paul de Man's theoretical point that "what we usually call literary history has little or nothing to do with literature" while "what we call literary interpretation—provided only it is good interpretation—is in fact literary history."¹

That was not all I knew about Hugh Kenner as I sat talking with my MLA interviewers. Through my research in the Ezra Pound Archive at Yale's Beinecke Library on The Cantos' text—one of the most complex editorial challenges in twentieth-century English literature, not excluding Finnegans Wake—I had learned that Kenner and the German scholar Eva Hesse had formed an ad hoc editorial committee to recommend changes for the New Directions text. Many of these changes had actually been made, notwithstanding that Pound was too old and ill to approve them; that the editorial committee had no clear policy or principles, no systematic method or procedures; and that their working assumption that The Cantos ought to be "correct" with respect to its sources did not comport with Pound's own stance toward error in his poem.² In The Pound Era Kenner fondly evokes these impressionist editorial endeavors: "Fantastic and great men loom in time's mists. As we edit and annotate them (for the Early English Texts Society perhaps) we funnel time's romance through...