Hugh and Guy

Almost everything that makes this collection worth reading happens between 1962 and 1964, with 1962 being the year when Kenner and Davenport are maximally stimulating of each other’s ideas — as I think this post demonstrates. Much later in life, both men are aware that their friendship is not what it once was. In 1977, Davenport wrote to Kenner, “We, you and I, are beginning to drift out of synchronicity” (II:1671). But it had already happened, indeed had happened a decade earlier.

It seems to me that it’s quite easy to pinpoint the moment that initiated the change. In September of 1964, when Kenner’s wife Mary-Jo was dying of cancer, both of them were received into the Roman Catholic Church.

Kenner explained his decision to Davenport thus:

Yesterday was the first day in the Christian west that baptism all in English has been [licit], and one assumes that the unclean spirit, whose ears are perhaps inured to Latin, was astonied out of his skin. Then Penance. Then Mass with Communion. The Change, while I sat beside Cathy Ann [his daughter] at Mass on the morning of the Feast of the Assumption, was instant, massive, silent, total, and unlike any previous previous major decision of mine was quite untended by a certain reckless postponement of detailed consequences. In the hospital that afternoon, Mary-Jo turned out to have been likewise gathered, independently, and she was received that evening, being an emergency case, and carried even as far as Extreme Unction. [I:614]

(The phrase “turned out to have been likewise gathered, independently” is a strange one, and I assume means that he didn’t know precisely when a priest would show up to receive her. They obviously had been on the same path together.)

To this Davenport replied,

I can only stand in awe of your metanoia, not having the gift of faith. My religion is a great hash of biological, sexual, botanical, and transcendental ideas, meeting somewhere, never the same place twice, I think. I cheerfully say I’m a Christian, and I’m not being merely poetical when I say it. But to ask for grace within what I think the church is would be (as I’ve twice discovered) and act intolerable to my conscience. I can get so far, no further. Either the devil has a firm grasp, or it pleases the Lord to stiffen my neck. [I:615]

(The “twice discovered” is a mystery to me, but I suspect that one of those occasions was when he was married: that union proved disastrous.)

Kenner:

Re: grace, I suppose what blocks you may be what blocked or rather deflected me for some twenty years, a well-formed suspicion as to where the term of the process will bring one: aut Roma aut nihil. And having come at last, I find not the [constriction] I shunned, but freedom; and (with as much on metaphorical singleness, as though Mr Eliot had never juggled these words) not an end, but a beginning. [I.617]

Later in the same letter Kenner, at the end of an excursus on Modernism and Catholicism, says “Do not worry, I am not deflecting it all into apologetics.” And then the subject is dropped.

From this point on the friendship was never again what it had been. Before Kenner’s reception, each man had opened his mind fully to the other, and that’s how they were able to stimulate each other’s thinking and writing. But now there is an essential element of Kenner’s experience that is a closed book to Davenport, and from that point on Kenner’s letters manifest much less thinking: they are newsy and gossippy, sometimes asking for information about an author or artist or artwork that Davenport might know about, often informative about his own work, but never again open-endedly explorative.

The men continued to be friends, indeed close friends. When Kenner remarried — just eight months after his first wife’s death, and to a woman he had known for only a few weeks when he proposed to her — Davenport not only came to the wedding but also spent a great deal of time playing with and generally attending to Kenner’s children, who had to have been disoriented by this radical change in their lives, coming so soon after the even more radical change of their mother’s death. He had done the same at Mary-Jo’s funeral, which earned Kenner’s profuse thanks (I:650). Davenport’s sensitivity and kindness were much appreciated by Kenner and by Mary Anne, his new wife. Indeed, Mary Anne obviously liked Davenport very much, as can be seen by the letters in this collection that she herself wrote to him. Davenport seems to have reciprocated the affection, and it’s noteworthy that soon after the marriage he regularly addresses letters to Hugh and Mary Anne. But this in itself marks a very different kind of relationship than he had had with Kenner earlier.

Davenport feels the change: in January of 1966 he writes, “Whatever had I done that you’ve not written since you were here [in Kentucky]? Must have been something terrible. To lose your friendship would be hard indeed. What is it?” (I:765) Kenner replies with a brusqueness that I don’t believe he had ever previously shown: “Long silence implies neither indifference nor hostility: merely preoccupation” (I:763). That he says no more, and offers not one word of reassurance about their friendship, strongly suggests a message: Expect no more of me.

The letters become less frequent — which probably had to happen: when their mind-meld had been at its most intense they sometimes wrote each other twice a day. By most people’s standards they write to each other quite often for the next few years, but the heat has been lowered considerably. The two friends talk about what they’re writing and about annoyances with editors and publishers; they commiserate over bad reviews; they consider the relative merits of various academic positions they hold or might hold; they try to figure out how Ezra Pound is doing. (They had gotten to know each other because they were both Pound scholars when there weren’t many of those in the world.) Kenner manages to visit Pound in Rapallo and reports at length to Davenport; later Davenport reciprocates. Davenport is the better storyteller and provides some excellent grist for Kenner’s mill as he writes what would become his magnum opus, The Pound Era (1971). But the thrill is gone, and gone because there is a major element of Kenner’s sensibility that Davenport does not and cannot share.

P.S. Careful readers will have noted that Kenner’s reply to Davenport’s “What have I done” letter comes before that plea. That’s because Edward M. Burns, the editor, has mixed up the chronology. This happens more often than one would like, sometimes because letters aren’t given specific dates; other times because each man will sometimes include two or three letters, written over a period of several days; and occasionally because of simple editorial error. Burns’s decisions to include every letter that survives and to annotate everything he can possibly annotate — the notes are done by year, and some years have over a thousand notes — laid an enormous burden on him, and he does not manage to carry that burden unfailingly. But who would? As someone who has edited texts and made editorial mistakes, I deeply sympathize, especially since the sheer size of the task here is mind-boggling. But there are hundreds of errors in these volumes: Burns’s practice is to correct misspellings and typos, but he does so inconsistently, and sometimes “corrects” words that were already correct; as noted, he occasionally gets letters out of order; he will sometimes identify a person mentioned in a letter on their first appearance, but often will do so only after they have appeared several times; he will send readers to letters that don’t exist or that exist but on different pages than the ones the readers are sent to. It would be great to have a one-volume selection of the most important letters that is more carefully edited and annotated.