Hugh Kenner, RIP By Jeet Heer National Post (January 24, 2004) (A fuller version of an article that appeared in truncated form on Slate.com and The American Spectator online). Hugh Kenner who died in late November at age 80, began his career as a great literary critic in a characteristically eccentric way, by reading a book smuggled in by a priest and visiting a genius locked away in a madhouse. To understand why the book and the genius changed Kenner's life we have to return to Kenner's formative years, in the provincial backwater that was Canada in the 1940s. From a young age, Hugh Kenner was equally interested in the arts and the sciences. As an undergraduate entering the University of Toronto in 1941, he had to decide whether he wanted to major in mathematics and physics or literary studies. Literature won out over science but Kenner would remain blissfully free of the sniffy disdain for technology that so many cultured people confuse with humanism. Canada was an inhospitable place for a budding scholar of modernism: The University of Toronto curriculum stopped dead-cold at 1850. More contemporary books were not only disdained, they were often forbidden by the government. At Canada's skittish border, certain novels by Balzac, Zola, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce were kept out of a country that feared much that was foreign and new. One modern masterpiece that Kenner did have access to was Joyce's Finnegans Wake, tolerated because it was deemed incomprehensible. Excited by Wake, Kenner discovered that Joyce's Ulysses, otherwise verboten in Canada, could be found in the restricted access section of the University of Toronto library. However, in order to take a look at the illicit text, Kenner needed to secure two letters of reference: one from a religious authority and one from a medical doctor. Kenner knew a priest who could vouch for his morals, but, unfortunately, was not able to find an MD who could attest that reading Joyce would not corrupt him. Ultimately, Kenner had a family friend, a Jesuit priest, smuggle into Canada a copy of the greatest novel of the 20th century. Compared with the traditional literature of pre-1850 vintage, Joyce seemed wild and chaotic. A friend of the young Kenner argued he shouldn't expect to find coherence in modern culture — "just let it hit you." This despairing notion haunted Kenner, raising what he called "the generic 20th-century problem, discontinuity." As Kenner notes in his book Bucky, reading Joyce and the other modernists forced him to wonder whether we "still have lines of communication open with Jefferson, Socrates, Christ? Or have we spot-welded about ourselves a world we can't think about? Must you just let it hit you?" Kenner was never willing to write off contemporary culture as something beyond understanding and he soon found a mentor who shared his hope of finding an underlying order beneath the surface chaos of modern life and literature. Marshall McLuhan, later famous as a gnomic media guru, was then a young English professor interested in the parallels between literature and mass culture. Sharing a fascination with technology and modern culture, McLuhan and Kenner became fast friends. In the warmth of their initial enthusiasm, they had planned to co-write several books, including studies of T.S. Eliot and the cartoonist Al Capp. (Kenner would write the Eliot book alone and the Capp project never came off, although Kenner eventually wrote a book on an animation director, Chuck Jones.) Both Kenner and McLuhan felt the great modernists did not represent a permanent break from the past. Rather, they argued, writers such as Joyce and Eliot helped readers reconnect with tradition, and re-energized the stories found in Homer and Shakespeare for our times. More than intellectual interests drew Kenner and McLuhan together. Both men were born Protestants but became Roman Catholics. McLuhan converted in 1937 and Kenner would do the same in 1964 (although he had clearly felt the gravitational pull of Catholicism for many years prior). As Catholics enthusiastic about modernist culture and even some forms of lowbrow popular entertainment, Kenner and McLuhan cut against the grain of their adopted faith. After all, Roman Catholicism at that time still lived under the shadow of Pius IX's 1864 "Syllabus of Errors,'' which condemned the idea that "the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself ... with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.'' Kenner would lament the fact that "middlebrow Catholic intellectuals" of the early 20th century "found a facile role in condemning modernity en bloc. ... Alienation from the whole century could be made to seem a Catholic English layman's moral duty." In their own work, Kenner and McLuhan heralded the newer and more confident Catholic mood of Vatican II, where the Church sought to reconcile itself with modernity. In June, 1948, Kenner and McLuhan made a fateful trip to visit Ezra Pound, then incarcerated as a mental patient at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. After his wartime support for Mussolini and his alleged descent into madness, Pound's personal and literary reputation was at a low. Yet Kenner found in Pound's company a sane genius. "Enthralled by the master, I resolved that if no one else would make the case for Ezra Pound as a poet, then I would," Kenner once recalled. With McLuhan as an intellectual ally and Pound as a poet needing a champion, the trajectory of Kenner's career was set Kenner would always remain a loyal Poundian. His book The Pound Era (1971) is by far the best tribute that poet has received and a classic in 20th-century literary criticism. By contrast, Kenner's friendship with McLuhan would fray. Because Kenner was always a much more fluent and readable writer than McLuhan, his early essays and books got a great deal of attention. Quite unfairly, McLuhan accused Kenner of stealing his ideas. The reality was that McLuhan was at his best as an oral thinker, rather like Socrates, who developed his sharpest thoughts in conversation with bright students. When McLuhan tried to transcribe his thoughts, the results were usually a mess, half-developed notions splattered all over the page. McLuhan needed Kenner to complete his thoughts and give them form. Plato had performed a similar function for Socrates. Kenner and McLuhan were both interested in how technology interacted with culture, but Kenner, unlike his erstwhile mentor, actually had a sense of how science works. If you want to build a geodesic dome, you could do worse than to turn to Kenner's Geodesic Math and How To Use It (1976). This book has recently been reissued by the University of California Press, after many years of being the most requested out-of-print book in their catalogue. English professors don't normally moonlight as the authors of practical engineering guides, but Kenner was always a bundle of contradictions: a technophile, a Catholic convert, a political and social conservative, a cultural radical, an explicator of recondite poetry and a celebrator of animated cartoons. "As a teacher at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and later at Johns Hopkins and the University of Georgia, Kenner sought to impart his way of seeing to students," recalls John Wilson, a former student, now the editor of Books & Culture. "Chain-smoking, spreading his long fingers to illustrate a point, with his hair seemingly electrified by sheer brainpower and his odd, synthesized-sounding voice (the result of childhood influenza that left him almost completely deaf), he could appear as a slightly alien if benign presence, a member of a species closely related to humans yet clearly superior in intelligence. In the classroom, he quoted from memory whatever he needed to cite." Kenner's polymathic writing earned him a wide array of admirers in unlikely places. (For many years he was one of the most popular columnists in Byte magazine.) Yet among academic literary critics, Kenner was always an odd man out. Because of his offbeat approach, he belonged to no lit-crit school and had no followers. You can't be a Kennerite the way you can be a Leavisite or a Derridean. Moreover, Kenner's politics made many people nervous. Many of the modernists Kenner celebrated, notably Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, had been fascists. And so there was occasional suspicion that he was in sympathy with their ideology as well as their aesthetic. In 1958, Leslie Fiedler wrote that the typical young conservative critic was "a limp, Hugh Kennerish admirer of Ezra Pound or Wyndham Lewis, dreaming that all their manly spite and vigour are his own; and writing careful exegeses of the Cantos, in which he conceals certain bitter political comments for the initiated." This notion of Kenner as a covert fascist is simply absurd. Among other things, Kenner was as much inclined to praise a left-wing poet, such as George Oppen or Robert Duncan, as the Tory modernists. In short, Kenner was a slippery writer who evades any easy political labelling. Rather than placing him on the left-right spectrum, it would be better to describe him as a collector of marginalized thinkers and artists: He loved to demonstrate that figures who were dismissed as cranks or freaks did work that has coherence and value. During his lifetime, Kenner's crank collection included Marshall McLuhan, Louis Zukofsky, Buckminster Fuller and Chuck Jones, as well as Pound and Lewis. Some of these people were right-wingers, but what they have in common is that they tend to be undervalued or misunderstood. Kenner can, indeed, be described as a conservative, but he was an eccentric one. In the late 1950s, Kenner befriended William F. Buckley. The two men shared a passion for boating and for good prose. Buckley recruited Kenner as poetry editor for the National Review, but the assignment proved awkward. Kenner was as much an anomaly at the National Review as he would have been at any other magazine. The only difference was the National Review, then a fledgling publication without a fully coalesced editorial point of view, had room for distinctive writers. In bringing Kenner onboard, Buckley demonstrated the high literary aspiration he had for his magazine. During the 1950s and 1960s, under the guidance of the editor Frank Meyer, the National Review had an excellent arts section, featuring such writers as Guy Davenport, Joan Didion, Arlene Croce and Garry Wills — all of whom had voices as distinct as Kenner himself. In his few political articles and stray comments, Kenner showed himself to be broadly conservative but never partisan or predictable. Early on, he mocked Ronald Reagan's fake "aw shucks" populism and warned Buckley against becoming mired in the moral quagmire that was the Nixon presidency. In his book on Buckminster Fuller, Kenner decried environmental degradation. As a social conservative, he praised a collection of essays by Joseph Sobran that attacked legalized abortions, gay rights and feminism. McLuhan could sometimes coin snappy phrases ("the global village" and "the medium is the message") but his densely written paragraphs could be hard to suss out Kenner, by contrast, was a sparkling writer. His best expository prose hummed with energy and shone with wit. Consider Kenner's celebration of Buster Keaton's films as an example of physics in action, which starts by deftly contextualizing their 1920s sensibility: "You could understand how a thing worked by looking at it. A locomotive, a steam shovel, Calvin Coolidge hid nothing from the mind; they did not require to be explained as all subsequent technology has required endlessly to be explained.... Trajectories Everyman intuited with ease, and the Parallelogram of Forces irradiated his mind as Love does an angel's. The collaboration between audience and kinetic mime was nearly ideal. No one had trouble understanding how a snagged log with Buster clinging to its end could pivot up like a mast and then out over a waterfall's lip like bowsprit; nor why, swinging down from its end on a rope to rescue the girl, he launched himself not toward her but away from her; nor by what conversion of potential to kinetic energy he is carried up, having snatched her from her ledge, exactly to that handy shelf of rock." The characteristic Kenner touches are all present: the vigorous syntax and rich diction, the confident leaping through time and space, the unexpected juxtapositions (the steam shovel with Coolidge), the linkage between technology and culture, and even a slight hint of his religious convictions. Kenner's genius was always in doing the unexpected: showing that Pound's poetry illustrated the principles of fractal math, arguing that Alexander Pope anticipated the techniques of Pop Art, demonstrating that Bugs Bunny cartoons gained their speed and energy from tight-fisted economic policies at the Warner Brothers Studio. All of these are unlikely connections, yet Kenner made them real and convincing. He never simply accepted the world as it appeared, but always looked for deeper patterns that demonstrated coherence and order. Perhaps Kenner's Catholic faith gave him confidence to carry out his inquiries, sure in the ultimate goodness of creation. Yet even if those of us who don't share his faith can still cherish the beautiful patterns he uncovered.