Guy Davenport Dies at 77; Prolific Author and Illustrator -- Rest in Peace

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Subject: Guy Davenport Dies at 77; Prolific Author and Illustrator

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Lexington

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Date Posted: January 07, 2005 1:18:11 EDT

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."

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