Guy Davenport

64

Guy Davenport : biography

November 23, 1927 – January 4, 2005

Two sentences he wrote about Meatyard apply to himself as well: "He was rare among American artists in that he was not obsessed with his own image in the world. He could therefore live in perfect privacy in a rotting Kentucky town."Davenport, Guy. "Ralph Eugene Meatyard." The Geography of the Imagination. San Francisco: North Point, 1981. 371–72.

In one of his essays, Davenport claimed to "live almost exclusively off fried baloney, Campbell’s soup, and Snickers bars"."The Anthropology of Table Manners from Geophagy Onward", The Geography of the Imagination, p. 349

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

Writing

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 also translated the occasional other piece, including a few poems of Rilke’s, some ancient Egyptian texts [after Boris de Rachewiltz], and, with Benjamin Urrutia, the sayings of Jesus, published as The Logia of Yeshua.

Published bibliography

  • Crane, Joan. Guy Davenport: A Descriptive Bibliography, 1947–1995 (Green Shade, 1996).

Notes

Criticism, reviews, and interviews

  • Alpert, Barry (ed.). "Guy Davenport / Ronald Johnson". VORT 9, 1976.
  • Bawer, Bruce. "Wise guy". Bookforum, April 2005.
  • Cahill, Christopher. "Prose" (The Cardiff Team and The Hunter Gracchus). Boston Review, April/May 1997.
  • Cohen, Paul. "Art in the Soviet Union: Davenport’s Visual Critique in ‘Tatlin!’". Mosaic, 1985.
  • Cozy, David. "Knowledge as Delight / the fiction of Guy Davenport", RainTaxi, Fall 2002.
  • ———. "A Plain Modernist" (The Death of Picasso: New and Selected Writing). The Threepenny Review, Summer 2004.
  • ———. "Guy Davenport". The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 2005.
  • Delany, Samuel R.. "The ‘Gay Writer’ / ‘Gay Writing’…?" in Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary (Wesleyan University Press, 1999).
  • Dillon, Patrick. "Dimensions of Erewhon: The Modern Orpheus in Guy Davenport’s ‘The Dawn in Erewhon’". CUREJ: College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal (University of Pennsylvania, 2006).
  • Dirda, Michael. "Guy Davenport," in Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments (W.W. Norton, 2000).
  • Furlani, Andre. "A Postmodern Utopia Of Childhood Sexuality: The Fiction Of Guy Davenport", in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
  • ———. Guy Davenport: Postmodernism and After (Northwestern University Press, 2007).
  • Mason, Wyatt. "There Must I Begin to Be: Guy Davenport’s Heretical Fictions". Harper’s Magazine, April 2004.
  • Quartermain, Peter. "Writing as Assemblage / Guy Davenport" in Disjunctive Poetics (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
  • Shannon, John (ed.). "A Symposium on Guy Davenport". Margins 13, August–September 1974.
  • Zachar, Laurence. "L’écriture de Guy Davenport, fragments et fractals". Lille : A.N.R.T. Université de Lille III, 1996. OCLC: 70116807. (Zachar’s thesis is in French, but extensive interview material and letters appear in English in an appendix, 426–488.)