[Marxism] Guy Davenport Dies at 77; Prolific Author and Illustrator

["Charlie Parks" <jcparks5550@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Obit of an extraordinary figure in American letters. Davenport was a genuine
modernist in an era of postmodernists, both in terms of his aesthetics and
in terms of his view of the relation between art and politics (he believed
the former could rise above the latter, both in his own work and in that of
the authors he admired, such as Ezra Pound, whose Cantos formed the subject
of his doctoral dissertation).--CP

Guy Davenport Dies at 77; Prolific Author and Illustrator

January 7, 2005
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT





Guy Davenport, a many-sided author, painter, teacher and
scholar whose work, while ranging from critical essays to
translations to poetry, was perhaps most admired for short
stories in the modernist tradition of Pound and Joyce, died
on Tuesday in Lexington, Ky. He was 77 and lived in
Lexington, where he taught English at the University of
Kentucky for three decades.

The cause was lung cancer, said Bonnie Jean Cox, his
companion of almost 40 years.

Just as Mr. Davenport arrived at his teaching career
serendipitously - "I never intended to be a teacher," he
once said, "I just like going to school and learning
things" - he considered writing fiction "just a hobby," as
he told several interviewers.

Yet he published more than a half-dozen collections of
stories, among them "Da Vinci's Bicycle: Ten Stories"
(Johns Hopkins, 1979), "Apples and Pears and Other Stories"
(North Point Press, 1984), "The Jules Verne Steam Balloon:
Nine Stories" (North Point, 1987) and "A Table of Green
Fields" (New Directions, 1994).

In 1990 he received a so-called genius grant from the John
D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for his short
fiction and essays linking American civilization with the
traditions of classical and European culture.

In typical Davenport short stories, Kafka promises a little
girl that her lost doll, Belinda, is actually on a trip
around the world and will write to her ("Belinda's World
Tour"), or there's a juxtaposition of Gertrude Stein and
Alice B. Toklas in Paris, the Wright brothers at Kitty
Hawk, Fourier's utopian New Harmony community, Leonardo's
bicycle, pollinating bees, and Beckett in conversation ("Au
Tombeau de Charles Fourier").

Mr. Davenport's playful explanation for his technique was,
"You get up in the morning and you've got Keats' 'Odes' to
take some sophomores through, and you've got a chapter of
'Ulysses' for your graduate students, and the mind gets in
the habit of finding cross-references among subjects," he
told an interviewer for the periodical Vort in 1976.

But critics saw the deeper point to his fiction. Hilton
Kramer, in The New York Times Book Review, wrote of
Davenport's conception of the short-story form: "He has
given it some of the intellectual density of the learned
essay, some of the lyric concision of the modern poem -
some of its difficulty too - and a structure that often
resembles a film documentary. The result is a tour de force
that adds something new to the art of fiction."

In 1974, his story "Robot" won a third prize in the O.
Henry Awards, and in 1981 he won the Morton Douwen Zabel
award for fiction from the American Academy and Institute
of Arts and Letters.

Guy Mattison Davenport Jr. was born in Anderson, S.C., on
Nov. 23, 1927, the younger child of Guy Mattison Davenport,
a Railway Express agent, and Marie Fant Davenport. An older
sister, Gloria Williamson of Anderson, survives him, in
addition to Ms. Cox.

In 1944, Mr. Davenport quit high school to study art at
Duke University. He eventually majored in classics and
English literature, and won a Rhodes Scholarship in 1948.
At Merton College, Oxford, he wrote the first thesis on
Joyce to be accepted by the university, received a degree
in literature in 1950, and returned to the United States.

After serving from 1950 to 1952 in the Army's 18th Airborne
Corps he taught at Washington University in St. Louis. A
meeting with Pound in 1952 solidified his interest in
modern literature and led him to take a doctorate at
Harvard, where he wrote his thesis on Pound's "Cantos,"
which helped to highlight Pound's poetic achievement in the
face of his mental problems and support of fascism.

After teaching at Haverford College from 1961 to 1963, he
joined the University of Kentucky faculty, where he
remained until he retired in 1991, after winning the
MacArthur grant with its award of $365,000.

In 1963, he published his first book, "The Intelligence of
Louis Agassiz: A Specimen Book of Scientific Writings"
(Beacon), a study of a Harvard University natural
philosopher. There followed some four dozen books, among
them, in addition to the stories, the novel "Bicycle Rider"
(1985), books on art, and even several works he
illustrated, including Hugh Kenner's "Counterfeiters."

"He was an unqualified genius, so he talked over
everybody's head," Erik Reece, a former student, a friend,
the author of a book on Mr. Davenport's visual art and now
a lecturer in Kentucky's English department, told The
Louisville Courier-Journal, "but in a way that made you
want to get to where he was."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/07/books/07davenport.html?ex=1106103074&ei=1&en=27e906b77ad3b8f9



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