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An Interview with Guy Davenport |
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ELIMAE: Many of your stories illuminate historical characters, often authors or philosophers. "The Concord Sonata," for example, features quite as much significant information about Thoreau as any biographical or literary essay and in a format which more effectively involves the reader. When you begin work on such a story, do you know from the outset that you are writing a story, and not an essay? Is there any difference in your mental approach to writing fiction and essays? Is an essay less a matter of aesthetics and creativity, and more an issue of subject matter? DAVENPORT: "The Concord Sonata" is a suite for piano by Charles Ives. Its technical name is "Second Pianoforte Sonata: Concord, Massachusetts 1840-1860." The parts of this sonata are "Emerson", "Hawthorne", "The Alcotts", and "Thoreau". In the "Emerson" the Yale marching band suddenly breaks into the thorny, un-lyrical, revolutionary "new" music that can still dismay people who think they like music, and in "The Alcotts" there are stumbling notes of Beethoven's Fifth -- Louisa May Alcott trying to play Liszt's piano version of Beethoven. In the "Thoreau" there's a flute. The flautist is instructed by the score to "play ad lib". Ives in a set of introductory essays claims that Thoreau was a composer, and that his walks around Concord (were) "the true American music".
ELIMAE: Almost none of your stories take place in the U.S. or involve American characters. Is there a particular reason for this? Are Americans and the U.S. less noteworthy than other peoples and places, especially Europeans and Europe, or is it as simple as a matter of going to subject matter that hasn't already been done to death by other American writers? DAVENPORT: A clever critic might note that they are all set in the USA. "Tatlin!" is a fable about totalitarian governments strangling creativity, not always blatantly and openly. At the time I was lecturing on Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil, the classic study in our time of Government and The Poet. Vladimir Tatlin's genius suffocated by Stalin seemed to me to be paradigmatic and timely. I learned from Kafka's Amerika that you don't have to have a realistic knowledge of a place, and from Nabokov that "realism" is simply a fashionable mode.
ELIMAE: Do you see your stories as a part of a tradition? Is there any sense in which you think of your work as part of a continuum or "school" or group? Or, to change gears a bit, we seem to have a critical commonplace, in this country at least, that post-modernism follows Modernism, and that -- maybe -- nowadays we have post-post-modernism. And then we seem to have this other category of work -- Cormac McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike are perhaps some of the likely names -- which don't really fit the accepted scheme of "literary history". Would you comment, even in a broad way, upon any of this? What has happened in fiction in this country in the past 50 years? And do you fit in anywhere, or are you an anomaly? DAVENPORT: Isn't this like asking a dinosaur where he thinks he fits in evolution? I suspect that the way I fit is something an outsider can see better than I. ELIMAE: Your essays, your stories, and for that matter your book column in Harper's exhibit an astonishing breadth of interest: the Bible, the ancient world, bibliophilia, modern art, cave art, hot-air balloons. Is it pure curiosity that draws you so strongly to nonfiction, or are there aesthetic considerations that draw you to nonfiction works? We Americans, at least, are used to thinking that "creative writing" can only be fiction, poetry and drama. Do we have any living writers of nonfiction who are also first-rate verbal artists? DAVENPORT: My range of interests may be accounted for by my being 75. It's really a very narrow range. There ought to be a psychology that studies indifference, the "flat affect" of non-response. Response is, beyond the usual culturally-trained and biological reactions to the things of the world, the result of education carried on by curiosity. ELIMAE: Do you consciously decide to write a story on a particular character or setting, or does inspiration have to strike? DAVENPORT: Well, yes. Inspiration is simply sharpened interest. ELIMAE: What about your education? Did your education prepare you for, or lead you to, your writing career? Some of your earliest publications were introductions to other writers' work -- how did ranging out into other writers help create the ground for your fiction? DAVENPORT: At Duke I took Prof Blackburn's Creative Writing course (Bill Styron and Mac Hyman were in the class) and got the wrong impression that writing is an effusion of genius and talent. Also, that writing fiction is Expression of significant and deep inner emotion. It took me years to shake off all this. Writing is making a construct, and what's in the story is what's important. And style: in what words and phrases the story is told. (William Blackburn, the full name. His guiding us all toward autobiographical, confessional, "emotional" writing is -- in reaction -- why I write about concrete objectivities that are fairly remote from my own experiences. I like to imagine how other people feel in a world different from my own.) ELIMAE: What was it like in your house when you were a child? Were your parents readers and lovers of books? Were you an inveterate library-goer as a child? DAVENPORT: Daddy read E. Philips Oppenheim, Dumas's Celebrated Crimes, and belonged to the old Collier's Crime Club (a mystery-novels book-of-the-month). Mama read two newspapers every day, and we took magazines (Collier's, Life, Liberty, Saturday Evening Post). Daddy bought me a Columbia Encyclopedia, The New Century Dictionary (3 vols), and a big atlas.
ELIMAE: You brought Paul Metcalf, Penelope Fitzgerald and W.G. Sebald to my attention. What is it that you most adore and admire about these strikingly different, but exceedingly accomplished authors? Is it a matter of note, or simply a coincidence, that all of them began their creative careers relatively late? DAVENPORT: Metcalf: an inventor. Fitzgerald: a masterful narrator. Sebald: a kind of inventor (kin to George Borrow and Norman Douglas). ELIMAE: Here's my version of the "desert island" question: if you could select any six books (besides your own) originally written in your lifetime, and be the author of those books, which six would they be? DAVENPORT: Your 6 books question is diabolical! I couldn't have written any of 'em.
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1996 © 2002 |
So the seed of my "Concord Sonata" was Ives's piano suite. The immediate instigation was a search for the source of the mysterious passage in Walden (about losing a dog, a horse, and a dove). I found it in Mencius (whom Thoreau read in a French translation in Emerson's library). My first thought was to write a "found at last!" essay, as no scholar of Thoreau had found the source. I read enough of them to see that the scholars didn't know. (Actually, Thoreau gives us the source in A Week on the Concord and Merimac Rivers -- but only to wide-awake readers paying close attention.)