Letters that keep teaching

Edited by W.C. Bamberger

W.W. Norton. 262 pp. $29.95

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Reviewed by Patrick Kurp

Two years have passed since the death of Guy Davenport, who swore he wrote for "people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things," but his teaching duties remain dauntingly heavy.

Attentive readers of Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: Selected Letters will learn, among other things, the etymology of Kierkegaard's surname, Thoreau's debt to Confucianism, the Wittgenstein/Gertrude Stein linkage, gossip about Brancusi, and various niceties of Greek grammar. Davenport even had the temerity to educate the publisher of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams.

He taught at the University of Kentucky for 30 years, but Davenport's instructional instincts, his delight in linking minds and sharing useful information, was reflected even in a brief thank-you note (to me, in this case, not Laughlin), laced with digressions on Robert Burton, Goethe and Edgar "Allen" Poe (I had misspelled the name).

Laughlin, heir to the Jones & Laughlin steel fortune, was 22 years old when he founded New Directions in 1936 at the urging of Pound, who had scoffed at his efforts to write poetry. I'll keep this short, but New Directions was the publisher, and often the first publisher in the United States, of Jorge Luis Borges, Bertolt Brecht, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Henry Miller, Eugenio Montale, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Olson, Rainer Maria Rilke, W.G. Sebald, Dylan Thomas, Paul Valery, Tennessee Williams, and dozens more.

Including, of course, Pound and Williams. Throw in the Grove Press list, and you have the beating heart of literary modernism and most of its successors. Laughlin's only professional missteps seem to have been his failure to publish, when he had the chance, Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain and Nabokov's Lolita. Late in both their lives, when Laughlin signed Davenport to New Directions, the latter wrote to his new publisher:

"I am inordinately proud to be accepted by a publisher whose books have been the best part of my education (without Pound or WCW I would have been somebody else), and to whose list I never dared to hope to be added."

Elsewhere, Davenport referred to Laughlin as "the impresario of modernism in the U.S." Their lasting bond was Pound - both knew him, wrote about him, and lobbied for his release from St. Elizabeth's Hospital - but their friendship, as reflected in their letters, remains intriguingly unlikely. Laughlin was an American patrician, a fabled womanizer, and founder of a ski lodge in Utah. His poetry has had its admirers (including Davenport) but I find it prosaic in all senses. In his letters, Laughlin remains an admirably business-minded dilettante - an impresario.

In contrast, Davenport was a Southerner who never learned to drive a car. He was also the finest essayist of his time, combining erudition, precision and concision of language, and a judicious use of the autobiographical. He had a genius for making connections across time and space. His mind was a search engine, but he might have remained an obscure and fairly conventional college professor had he not chosen in middle age to start crafting collagelike short stories. Tatlin!, Da Vinci's Bicycle, Eclogues, and his other collections are glories of postwar American fiction.

Laughlin initiated their correspondence in 1969, congratulating Davenport for a remembrance he had written of Merton, their mutual friend, but the letters don't take off until the '80s, when Davenport is established as a writer. If you enjoy reading literary letters, don't expect Keats or Flaubert. Davenport and Laughlin are gossipy and use the letters as a way to conduct business, though Davenport's are studded with aphorisms and ad hoc literary criticism.

There is tedium, though not much. More than 30 times, Davenport refers to his fiction as "my ravings," and Laughlin is often smutty-minded when the subject is women. As edited by W.C. Bamberger, the collection is a congenial entree to Davenport's work. In 1993, Laughlin writes a fine testimonial for his friend:

"How can you remember so much? What does your head feel like with so much ideational circulation? Does it give you migraine pressure of ideas trying to burst out? Or make you feel tipsy? When I smoke a good cigar there can be a feeling like word-grasshoppers jumping around in my head - but nothing at your level."