Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner ed. by Edward M. Burns (review)

"[P]eering, absorbing, translating" — that's what Walt Whitman (in "Out of the Cradle") discerned to be the stages of the scholar-poet's work, and the correspondence of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner exemplifies and confirms the soundness of Whitman's insight. Davenport may have written more than a few substantial poems and translations, and Kenner may have scribbled a few bits of light verse (some of them in these letters), yet neither is particularly known as a poet. But they think like poets, they follow Whitman's direction, Davenport in his translations, assemblages, and essays — and in his drawings and paintings — and Kenner in his myriad critical essays and books. Both of them, too, have the wide-range of playfulness and interests one might associate with Whitman. And like Whitman too they persist, and they share. With over eleven hundred pages of letters and a further five hundred and more close-printed pages of thorough, pertinent and indeed brilliant notes, Questioning Minds is essential reading for anyone interested in modernist writing in English, no matter what they think they already know. Helpfully, the seventy-page Index is printed in both volumes, and navigation and cross-reference are easy.

Davenport and Kenner exchanged more than a thousand letters between 1960 and 1976 or 1977, after which the correspondence began sporadically to falter until it finally, after gaps and silences, came pretty much to an end in about 1989 — only eleven letters after that, until on 9 August 2002, Kenner laments "in the final months of my 79th year", that "[w]e've been separated too long". That is the last letter between them, and Kenner would die fourteen months later, 24 November 2003. Davenport died just over a year later, 4 January 2005. Their correspondence tells a story of the invention and construction of modernist writing by two of its shapers who, in describing and defining it, invented it. Questioning Minds is utterly absorbing, chock-full of information, news, ideas and pleasures. And it reads like a novel.

"Stood on roof of Municipal Building, I mean the ledge thereof", Davenport wrote to Kenner, 3 August 1962, "to see how brave Harold Lloyd was. Very". He had done his military service in an airborne regiment (he ended up as a corporal), and if you can remember Harold Lloyd's antics in the famous clock scene in the film Safety Last! (1923) — Lloyd did his own cliff-hanging stunts — then Davenport's words carry the central attributes of this extraordinary correspondence, something of its flavour and attitudes: See for yourself. Pay attention, especially to detail. And above all, Tell, no matter how trivial it might seem. "I jumped from rock to rock over the dry falls in Paterson", Davenport told Kenner after visiting William Carlos Williams in 1958; "climbed to the park, and drank the tone of the gorge". Ask questions, consult, beg favours: "PLEASE", Kenner wrote on 27 June 1964, "if you can, get the matter of the 'Burne-Jones cartons' settled". He wanted to settle an exact detail of Ezra Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley", every detail, for The Pound Era (published in 1971), and between them Kenner and Davenport did.

"There is no property in things of the mind", Kenner had told Daven-port on 26 May 1962; "I will with equal aplomb use anything handy that I pick up from you". Davenport's name for that was "buccaneering scholarship" (12 January 1962) — they both reveled in it, and for over twenty years they enthusiastically helped themselves to each other's work, Kenner with his mathematical and computer expertise, Davenport with his Greek, his fiction, and his graphics. Two polymaths, delighting in each other's thought as well as the very processes of thinking, and delighting in sharing what they found. "I simply need instruction in visual matters", Kenner told Davenport on 6 February 1963...