Guy Davenport, RIP By Jeet Heer National Post (January 13, 2005) (expanded and revised). In both his short stories and essays, Guy Davenport often called attention to philosophers who co-existed on easy terms with animals. One of Davenport's heroes was Charles Fourier, the nineteenth century utopian whose crowded apartment was a haven for alley cats. Another Davenport touchstone was Diogenes, a sage of ancient Athens who was called a "cynic" (doglike) because he tried to live as simply as a dog. "He was, to tell the truth, the leader of a pack of dogs, mongrel strays the lot of them," we are told about Diogenes in a Davenport story. The tale ends with the philosopher's death: "He was buried under the pines beside the road into the city. We could not know then how terribly the dogs would howl." Guy Davenport, who died of cancer last week at age 77, was man of many distinctions: a beloved teacher, a sure-footed literary critic, a keen-eyed analyst of the visual arts, a translator of texts from many languages, an illustrator often called upon to adorn the books of his friends, and a short story writer whose revolutionary innovations have been celebrated all over the world. But like Fourier and Diogenes, he was also a thinker who felt akin to animals, and it is perhaps this part of his personality that offers the easiest key to his character and achievement. When still a child, Davenport started up a small newspaper to report local news; one of his first articles was an obituary notice for a neighborhood cat. While doing a doctorate in English at Harvard in the late 1950s, Davenport was shocked at how lab rats were treated. Psychologists, wanting to test the importance of social life to animals, raised rodents in total isolation, carefully recording how they slowly went mad from loneliness. "They had never snuggled against their mothers or another rat," Davenport remembered in Harper's magazine. "When the room was momentarily empty, I took a rat out of its cage, cuddled it, and may even have kissed it. The rat seemed overjoyed, eagerly sniffing graduate-student sweat and grime. Hearing footsteps, I returned it to its solitary confinement. When my sins and kindnesses are weighed by Osiris, I hope to see a white rat on the scales." In Lexington, Kentucky, where Davenport spent most of his adult life teaching English at the local university, all sorts of animal life could be seen milling about his house. "Guy Davenport has ants and bugs in his kitchen," the very young daughter of a friend once noted with astonishment. In response he explaned that he "kept a saucer of water for the wasps, hornets and ants that I liked to see in the house." Cats were especially also welcome in Davenport's world. One of Davenport's books was dedicated to his cat Humphrey; another tomcat, Max, became a character in a short story, transformed in fiction into a fidgety and willful travel guide. (A feline of literary distinction, Max also made it into a poem by Louis Zukofsky.) As with Diogenes, Davenport's death will be mourned by humans and animals alike. "He was the kindest, most thoughtful, most considerate person I ever have known," his former student Charles Ralston noted. "The informed writers and poets of our time in due course will write encomia about Guy Davenport and critical essays about his work. But, the cats living in Lexington's Bell Court today will have to find another curious professor with whom to share their thoughts." The distinction between humans and animals is one of the many binary divisions that our civilization has created over the centuries, in its compulsive desire to divide the world into twos. Other dualisms include the division between art and science, emotion and reason, body and soul, men and women, gays and heterosexuals. A deeply civilized and learned man, Davenport was aware of the long construction of these foundational divisions, going back at least as far as Plato. Without wanting to overturn civilization, he questioned how viable these divisions were; his lifework can be seen as a persistent exploration of how categories that are seen as separate and distinct, like humans and animals, are actually overlapping, complimentary and mutually-reinforcing. Humans are also animals; more paradoxically, we can become even more human by carefully attending to our animal companions and the animal within us. Balance and harmony, so valued by archaic Greek thinkers, were also Davenport's watchwords. The factual resume of Davenport's life is easy enough to record: born in South Carolina in 1927, the son of a Railway Express agent; trained initially to be an artist, and then more extensively educated in literature at Duke, Oxford, and Harvard; military service in the XVIII Airborne Corps from 1952 to 1955; a professor at the University of Kentucky from 1963 until his retirement in 1990. He had the habit throughout his life of picking up awards: he was a Rhodes scholar in his youth, a MacArthur "genius" fellow in his old age. He is survived by Bonnie Jean Cox, his travel-mate and companion of nearly 40 years, as well as his younger sister Gloria Williamson. As a young writer he fell under the sway of the first modernist generation, writing pioneering scholarly theses on James Joyce and Ezra Pound. Like these writers, Davenport saw an affinity between the very old and the very new: for example the way Picasso's art was nourished on the vitality of freshly-discovered cave-paintings from pre-historic times. Wanting to trace the roots of modern literature, Davenport learned ancient Greek so he could read Homer in the original. In the process he became a masterful translator who, like Pound, could make classic texts sparkle like a coin fresh from the mint. Davenport's fiction, starting with the volume Tatlin! in 1974, was another outgrowth of modernism. As a painter turned story-teller, he chaffed at the way drawing and writing were kept in separate compartments (another overly-sharp dichotomy). Taking inspiration from the painter-novelist Wyndham Lewis, developed a highly visual prose. In some of his earlier books, Davenport mixed drawings and text together, prefiguring the experimentation of W.G. Sebald. Here is a scene set in a swimming pool: "The blue-eyed man dove, piercing the water as adroitly as a key slips into a lock. His green body slid in a comet of foam underwater, rose with a scissor kick, and burst to the surface in a grand spray of fiery light." Like a skilled artist, Davenport's prose helps us guide our eyes and sharpen our vision. Although often elliptical and demanding, his fiction is filled with writing of a great lyrical beauty, especially in his descriptions of the natural world. Never a bestseller, Davenport was nonetheless much admired by fellow writers, indeed envied for his deep fund of erudition, his unfailing verbal inventiveness, his panache. This distinguished fan club included Carol Shields, Anne Carson, George Steiner, Samuel Delany, and Alexander Theroux. His stories can be divided into two broad camps, historical and utopian. The historical recreations work like time machines, magically taking us back to remote eras: the Athens of Diogenes, the Jerusalem of the Jesus, the Copenhagen of Kierkegaard, the Prague of Kafka. From one of these stories, here is an unexpected view of Socrates, seen with a downward gaze. "Socrates' feet, we heard, were enormous, bony, unshod, knuckly of hallux, hairy, with oxbone ankles. The man's mind was all there, its strength and endurance." From another story, here is a pen-portrait of the Jonah, a prophet fleeing from the mission assigned to him by the Almighty: "He had a fine black beard, round as a basket. Though his carpetbag were neatly strapped and his clothes showed he was an experienced traveler, there was a furtiveness in his eyes, as if there might be someone about he did not care to meet." In both these passages, we see one of the signature touches of Davenport's prose, his intense visual focus. But there is an oral dimension to Davenport's writing as well. A child of the South, Davenport possessed the alertness to vernacular found in writers from that region. His books are spiced up with quirky words ("mumpery") and charmingly idiomatic turns of phrases ("he's a caution"). Speaking of Davenport, his sister told a reporter, "money didn't mean a doodle to him." We can hear the family likeness in her use of the word "doodle." A glimmer of Davenport's sensibility can be seen in some of the unusual words that he often returned to: trill, chirr, macadam, and caisson. He liked to contrast rooted Anglo-Saxon words with foreign implants. The fabric of English weaves together strands taken many languages. With great care, Davenport unraveled this haphazard embroidery and re-knit it to form a more consciously created pattern. Always toying with language, Davenport fashioned a prose that was in constant motion: it kept evolving and morphing not just from book to book but from story to story. But a few general trends can be noticed about the arc of his evolution. In the early stories collected in Tatlin!, Davenport was still an essayist trying his hand at fiction. The prose in these stories is glittering and rich, but perhaps too much so: we're dazzled by Davenport's leaping erudition but this keeps us distant from what actually happens. The stories gleam with a hard, external surface. As Davenport grew more experienced and confident, the thick writing of Tatlin! has given way to a more agile and limber prose. Unlike the over-powering voice of the early essay-fictions, the tone of the later stories is gentle, tentative, and evocative. His voice became more internal and intimate. It almost seems indecent to comment on some of the later stories, so personal are they in their exploration of a rich inner life. Davenport's utopian fiction, much influenced by Fourier, tends to be set in an imaginary Scandinavia where sex was freed from social constraints. Criticized by some as prurient and obsessive, these utopian tales are part of Davenport's larger project of returning to the archaic roots of creativity. All of his work grows from a single, harmonic vision. His best essays can be found in The Geography of the Imagination (1981); his most accessible fiction is in Da Vinci's Bicycle (1979). But in fact everything he wrote is worth reading. His stature will only grow with time.