Guy Davenport

Guy Mattison Davenport (November 23, 1927 – January 4, 2005) was an American writer, translator, illustrator, painter, intellectual, and teacher.

Guy Davenport was born in Anderson, South Carolina, in the foothills of Appalachia on November 23, 1927.

His father was an agent for the Railway Express Agency.

Davenport said that he became a reader only at 10, with a neighbor’s gift of one of the Tarzan series.

At age eleven, he began a neighborhood newspaper, drawing all the illustrations and writing all the stories.

At 13, he "broke [his] right leg (skating) and was laid up for a wearisome while"; it was then that he began "reading with real interest", beginning with a biography of Leonardo.

He left high school early and enrolled at Duke University a few weeks after his seventeenth birthday.

At Duke, he studied art (with Clare Leighton), graduating with a BA summa cum laude in classics and English literature.

He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa his junior year.

Davenport was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford, from 1948 to 1950.

He studied Old English under J. R. R. Tolkien and graduated with a B.Litt., with a thesis on James Joyce.

In 1950, upon his return to the United States, Davenport was drafted into the US Army for two years, spending them at Fort Bragg in the 756th Field Artillery, then in the XVIII Airborne Corps.

Davenport befriended Ezra Pound during the poet's incarceration in St. Elizabeths Hospital, visiting him annually from 1952 until Pound's release, in 1958, and later at Pound's home in Rapallo, Italy.

After the army, he taught at Washington University in St. Louis until 1955, when he began earning a PhD at Harvard, studying under Harry Levin and Archibald Macleish.

They carried on a voluminous correspondence from 1958 till 2002, as recorded in the book Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner.

Davenport was married briefly in the early 1960s.

After completing his PhD, he taught at Haverford College from 1961 to 1963 but soon took a position at the University of Kentucky, "the remotest offer with the most pay," as he wrote to Jonathan Williams.

Davenport described one such visit, in 1963, in the story "Ithaka".

Davenport began publishing fiction in 1970 with "The Aeroplanes at Brescia," which is based on Kafka's visit to an air show in September 1909.

His books include Tatlin!, Da Vinci's Bicycle, Eclogues, Apples and Pears, The Jules Verne Steam Balloon, The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers, A Table of Green Fields, The Cardiff Team, and Wo es war, soll ich werden.

His fiction uses three general modes of exposition: the fictionalizing of historical events and figures; the foregrounding of formal narrative experiments, especially with the use of collage; and the depicting of a Fourierist utopia, where small groups of men, women, and children have eliminated the separation between mind and body.

The first of more than four hundred Davenport essays, articles, introductions, and book reviews appeared while he was still an undergraduate; the last, just weeks before his death.

Davenport was a regular reviewer for National Review and The Hudson Review, and, late in his life, at the invitation of John Jeremiah Sullivan, he spent a year writing the "New Books" column for Harper's Magazine.

His essays range from literary to social topics, from brief book reviews to lectures such as the title piece in his first collection of essays, The Geography of the Imagination.

His other collections of essays were Every Force Evolves a Form and The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature and Art.

He also published two slim volumes on art: A Balthus Notebook and Objects on a Table.

Although he wrote on many topics, Davenport, who never had a driver's license, was especially passionate about the destruction of American cities by the automobile.

Davenport published a handful of poems.

The longest are the book-length Flowers and Leaves, an intricate meditation on art and America, and "The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard" (borrowing the title from a painting by Stanley Spencer).

A selection of his poems and translations was published as Thasos and Ohio.

Davenport translated ancient Greek texts, particularly from the archaic period.

These were published in periodicals, then small volumes, and finally collected in 7 Greeks.

He dedicated Eclogues, 1981, to "Bonnie Jean" (Cox), his companion from 1965 to his death.

Davenport wrote his dissertation on Pound's poetry, published as Cities on Hills in 1983.

This interest led him to Hugh Kenner, who became one of his most important literary friends.

Davenport taught at Kentucky until he received a MacArthur Fellowship, which prompted his retirement, at the end of 1990.

Other Davenport volumes dedicated to Cox include Objects on a Table (1998) and The Death of Picasso (2004).

Cox became Trustee for the Guy Davenport Estate.

In one of his essays, Davenport claimed to "live almost exclusively off fried baloney, Campbell's soup, and Snickers bars."

He died of lung cancer on January 4, 2005, in Lexington, Kentucky.