“…on behalf of a halved generation.. though I do demand the other half of the amulet.”
The late Hugh Kenner’s (d. November 2003) contributions to literary studies were immeasurable, but I hope here to make a few measurements, particularly of his rethinking of how to think about poetry in English. Those who know his work know it mainly through his pioneering studies of what he liked to call International Modernism, as it was created by Pound, Joyce, Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and Samuel Beckett. Viewed in this light, his masterwork is The Pound Era (1971), the massive compendium of analysis and anecdote devoted to establishing the centrality of The Men of 1914 (Lewis’ name for them) and, as focal point of energy in the literary vortex they formed, the germinating presence of Ezra Pound.1 Yet some readers, including this one, have found it difficult to make the enormous investment Kenner has made in every part of Pound’s work. For these less intrepid readers it is impossible to see the Cantos as always brilliant, to be admired throughout; or to see Pound’s criticism-literary and social-as inevitably shrewd, relevant, useful; or his excursions in the literatures of other times and other lands-Provençal lyric, Confucian analects, Greek tragedy newly translated-as excursions only pedants and timid preservers of the status quo could be less than enthusiastic about.
Attempts to grapple with the whole of Kenner’s oeuvre bring out one’s readerly limitations. Mine reveal themselves most notably in the failure to take up, or take on, his guide to Buckminister Fuller (Bucky, 1973) or his Geodesic Math and How to Use It (1976). Sections of The Pound Era, notably the ones on China, or on Major C. H. Douglas’ economic theories, or on the British biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form-whose “economies and transformations” Kenner uses to describe, by analogy, Pound’s transactions with Latin in Homage to Sextus Propertius-these mainly go past my head. Kenner can be downright intimidating, too much for anyone, except perhaps his loyal disciple Guy Davenport, to assimilate. After all, we learn that as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto he was torn between concentrating in English or in mathematics, deciding upon the former because (one of his sons has said) he would never be more than a competent mathematician. This particular reader, incompetent as a scientist, is further intimidated by what feels in Kenner’s writings to be a rich familiarity with physics, with electronics (he assembled his own computer), with “science” generally and particularly. The remarkable thing is that he shows a similar inwardness not just with literature, but with music, fine art, architecture. That he wrote forty-odd columns for the magazine Art & Antiques is no more surprising than is his expert fascination with the art of stoic screen comedians like Buster Keaton and W. C. Fields, or his approach to the movie King Kong with the help of Paradise Lost.
Enough throat-clearing. I can at least recall and describe the impact Kenner made nearly fifty years ago on the sensibility of a graduate student of English at Harvard, circa 1958. In that year Kenner published his first collection of essays-many of them having appeared in The Hudson Review-titled provocatively, Gnomon: Essays in Contemporary Literature and dedicated to his friend and colleague at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Marvin Mudrick.2 Gnomon contained a number of pieces about recently published things of Pound, but what first engaged me was its opening essay on Yeats, in which Kenner put forth the notion that some ofYeats’s individual books of poetry should be read as sequentially organized, rather than arranged chronologically or just willy-nilly. To demonstrate, he adduced The Wild Swans at Coole and described the organic continuity exhibited by its first five poems; to introduce that description the essay began not like a traditional academic essay (“I shall be concerned here to show, etc.”) but with a dialogue between speakers A and B, in which A begins to expound his theory that there is much method to Yeats’s placing a poem here rather than there. After a short while B interrupts him with “Stop, you grow prolix. Write it out, write it out as an explanation that I may read at my leisure. And please refrain from putting in many footnotes that tire the eyes.” The ensuing essay does contain three footnotes, not at all hard on the eyes, but unexpected rather, witty and arresting, just as was the dialogue that began things. No one at Harvard, certainly no English professor, had told me I should read this man Kenner; he had been mine to discover, and I was pleased and excited by the discovery.
Gnomon featured useful measurings of Conrad’s virtues and limitations as a novelist; of Ford Madox Ford’s just reissued Parade’s End; and of Wyndham Lewis’ climactic work, The Human Age. It also included a less than reverent look at Freud as he appeared in Ernest Jones’s biography (“Tales from the Vienna Woods” was the review’s excellent title) and a hilarious survey of nine recent textbook-anthologies of poetry. There were also essays on two contemporary critics; and as a reader brought up to revere William Empson and R. P. Blackmur as consummate analysts of poetry (they had been exalted in Stanley Edgar Hyman’s survey of modern critics, The Armed Vision), I was surprised, indeed disturbed, by Kenner’s less than admiring treatment of them. The Blackmur essay, a review of Language as Gesture, began with a flourish:
Despite his habitual doodling with other men’s idioms (“The menace and caress of waves that breaks on water; for does not a menace caress? does not a caress menace?”-p.204) in the hope that something critically significant will occur, Mr. Blackmur has achieved institutional status among the company, not inconsiderable in number, for whom “words alone are certain good.”
There follows, after praise of some of Blackmur’s early essays on modern poets, a severe but, I think, just critique of his fatal fondness for irritating verbal self-displays. Kenner notes that Blackmur “achieves divinations . . . by inspecting the entrails of his own formulations,” points out his penchant for “alliterative jingles” and “compulsive repetition of quotations that catch his fancy,” and deplores the “intolerably kittenish” essay titled “Lord Tennyson’s Scissors,” with its “pseudo-wisdom,” toying so idly with quotations as to produce “a sort of thwarted poetry”: “His hairtrigger pen, tickled by some homonym or cadence, is free to twitch out dozens of words at a spurt.” In a word, Kenner is at odds with the “poetry” of a criticism that achieves its effects through words interacting in a closed system and is to that degree irresponsible and irrelevant to words on the page out there. This was sufficient at least to make me question Blackmur’s unshakeable place on the pedestal I had arranged for him.
As for Empson (“Alice in Empsonland”), Kenner begins his review of The Structure of Complex Words with another killer sentence that salutes Empson’s earlier Seven Types of Ambiguity, even as it distances Kenner from its procedures: “In 1930 William Empson published a book of criticism which had the unique distinction of reducing the passivity before poetry of hundreds of readers without imposing-or proposing-a single critical judgment of any salience.” Could this be true? As for The Structure of Complex Words, a book whose individual chapters I had found myself starting but not finishing, Kenner asserted that for all the impressive lexicographical feats performed in them the chapters were dull
because the method is wrong for discussing poetry. Long poems deploy a far more complex weight than Mr. Empson appears to suppose. They can’t really be reduced to the intricacies of their key words-it is a little like discussing an automobile solely in terms of the weight borne by its ball-bearings.
It was surely possible for an admirer of Blackmur or Empson to take issue with Kenner’s judgments, but there’s no doubt that judgments they were indeed, guaranteed to shake up previous valuations of each critic’s work.3
The jacket blurbs to Gnomon included one by Marianne Moore that went like this: “Hugh Kenner, upon technicalities of the trade, is commanding; and when intent upon what he respects, the facets gleam. Entertaining and fearless, he can be too fearless, but we need him.” Too fearless in his undeniable penchant for being entertaining? Whatever Moore mischievously meant, she brought out something essential in the aggressive-though good-humoredly so-posture of Kenner’s criticism.
In the months that followed my discovery of Gnomon, I looked up the three books Kenner had published in a remarkable five-year period from earlier in the decade. These studies, all of which deserve the overused word “pioneering,” were devoted to three of the Men of 1914: The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951), Wyndham Lewis (1954), and Dublin’s Joyce (1956). (I failed to locate a copy of his earliest publication, from 1948, Paradox in Chesterton with an introductory essay by Herbert Marshall McLuhan.) The book on Joyce was a rewritten version of Kenner’s doctoral dissertation at Yale in 1950, supervised by Cleanth Brooks; the book on Pound, really the first book-length study of that poet’s work, was prompted by a visit to Pound at St. Elizabeth’s he and McLuhan made in 1948. That summer, Kenner tells us later, working at a picnic table overlooking a Canadian lake, he typed out (on a Smith-Corona) in six weeks what became a 342-page book on the poet, including a substantial section on the Cantos right down to the recently published Pisan ones. The shorter book on Lewis-156 fully-packed pages-was, as with Pound, the first serious book about that controversial writer.
It is no less than astonishing to note that Kenner wrote these books when he was in his twenties (b. 1923). They show throughout an irrepressible self-confidence in their descriptive and critical pronouncements; one thinks, by contrast, of Blackmur’s and Empson’s interest in teasing out and exploiting the ambiguities they discover in poems, as well as ambiguities discovered (in Kenner’s words about Blackmur) by consulting the entrails of their own formulations. Kenner, on the other hand, from the beginning was convinced that, like the created universe, art possessed an intelligible structure that was there to be revealed by the intelligent reader-critic. His business was exegesis-explanation and interpretation of the structures made by significant artists like Pound, Joyce, and Lewis. It is perhaps legitimate to note here that, although he never addressed it explicitly in his writings, Kenner became a Roman Catholic sometime in his formative years, and his procedures in scouting out the intelligible forms in works he admires are as energetic and untroubled by doubts or second thoughts as appears to be the case with Thomas Aquinas on metaphysics.
A related aspect of Kenner’s criticism, evident early on, is its commitment to Eliot’s principle, enunciated in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” that “Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.” Tutelage under McLuhan, then under W. K. Wimsatt and Brooks at Yale, could only have confirmed this emphasis; but in Kenner’s case it involved a lifelong disinclination (to use a mild word for it) to practice biographical criticism. The introductory note to his Lewis book begins with a warning:
I had better make it clear that this book is not a biography but an account of a career, and that the Wyndham Lewis that figures in it, not always resplendently, is a personality informing a series of books and paintings, not the London resident of the same name who created that personality and may be inadequately described as its business manager and amanuensis.
This conviction that a too sanguine acceptance of biographical appraisal would inevitably result in “explanations” of a writer’s work that simplified and distorted it comes out most fully in his less-than-admiring review of Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce, universally lauded when it appeared in the late 1950s. Needless to say, Kenner never wrote a biography, even as, in later works like A Sinking Island or The Mechanic Muse, he is adept at placing his writerly subjects in various cultural, philosophical, and historical contexts.
Although, in the opening sentence to Wyndham Lewis, Kenner claims that the Lewis of its pages figures “not always resplendently,” his standard practice was to assume an imaginative coherence in Lewis’, Pound’s, Joyce’s, and later in Eliot’s work as a whole, so that even if some of the writer’s books are less highly charged than others, they still demonstrate the emerging pattern of a literary career. In a sense then, the chosen writer can do no serious wrong, and although Kenner judges a minor piece of fiction by Lewis, Snooty Baronet (1932), to be “a peppy and pointless novel,” it also reveals-in the coldness with which Lewis renders a sex grapple between his hero and a woman-”a technical feat,” a prose under “better control” than it was in The Apes of God that just preceded Snooty. Kenner’s “holistic” bent in approaching his writers, each of them treated as heroic in his intransigence and audacity, may be contrasted with that of the man he and Mudrick brought to Santa Barbara to join the English department for a year, Donald Davie. Perhaps the leading scholar of Pound after Kenner, Davie, in his Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (1964), a still valuable book about the poet, showed a much more mixed response to Pound’s writing than did Kenner. For example, Davie found large portions of the Cantos indigestible, raised questions about how Hugh Selwyn Mauberley did and didn’t go together, talked about Pound’s ruinous anti-Semitism, and in general-while benefitting enormously from Kenner’s book-strove to take a more balanced, more qualified judgment of Pound.
Kenner completed his cycle of books about the Men of 1914 when he published The Invisible Poet (1959), his substantial account of T. S. Eliot’s literary career. This superb book, still the best overall treatment of Eliot’s poetry and prose, has lost none of its freshness four decades and more later. At the time it was notable for not only its commentaries on “Prufrock,” on “Gerontion,” on The Waste Land and Four Quartets, but on related matters that hadn’t yet been explored: like the significance of Eliot’s Harvard dissertation on the philosopher F. H. Bradley, a dissertation that would not be published until 1964; or the importance of anonymity (the invisible poet) in the essays Eliot published as a young critic in the Times Literary Supplement. Kenner also brought out, as had no one previously, the incorrigibly humorous character of Eliot’s temperament, as displayed for example in the fatuous letters he fabricated (in The Egoist), written by the following names: J. A. D. Spence, Thridlingston Grammar School; Helen B. Trundlett, Batton, Kent; Charles James Grimble, The Vicarage, Leays; Charles Augustus Conybeare, The Carlton Club, Liverpool; and Muriel A. Schwarz, 60 Alexandra Gardens, Hampstead, N.W. Not only the names and addresses but the tones of voice -from high-minded approval to outrage-are fine comic achievements. Here for example is the contribution from Charles Augustus Conybeare:
The philosophical articles interest me enormously; though they make me reflect that much water has flowed under many bridges since the days of my dear old Oxford tutor, Thomas Hill Green. And I am accustomed to more documentation; I like to know where writers get their ideas from. . . .
The book provides a lively and continuous narrative of Eliot’s literary life, combined with exegesis (“Comparison and analysis,” the tools of the critic, said T. S. E.) and supplemented by glances at relevant events in the world outside Eliot’s head. In the views of this particular reader, The Invisible Poet stands at the peak of Kenner’s critical work, even as it is less ambitious and wide-ranging than The Pound Era.
In the same year that The Invisible Poet appeared, Kenner brought out his unfortunately short-lived The Art of Poetry, a textbook for students and their teachers in introductory poetry courses. I myself used it once in such a course, but as is the case with 99 percent of such textbooks, it soon fell out of print for good. This is a shame, since The Art of Poetry is notable for its good sense and for the taste with which poems are assembled to form an anthology of illustrative specimens. It contains pithy formulations throughout that stick in the mind, like this one about taste: “Taste is comparison performed with the certainty of habit.” Other formulations deal with the notion of “pace”-”the rate at which the poem reveals itself,” or with the reading of poetry generally: “The first requisite is not analytic skill but a trained sensibility.” Kenner had no illusions about how easy it was to train sensibilities. In his mainly dismissive survey of poetry textbooks that he included in Gnomon, he concluded by wondering about the whole enterprise of studying poetry: “To study Poetry requires an unusually tenacious mind, fortified by a wide acquaintance with poems. It is doubtful whether very many people should be encouraged to undertake such a study.” The “elitist” ring of this is likely to be troublesome to those teachers of literature who know that reading poetry is a good thing and try to sell that line to often unconvinced students.
The clear model for Kenner’s textbook was its highly successful predecessor, to be reprinted many times, Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry. But Kenner manages to avoid their somewhat humorless and often relentless tone of instruction. For example, Brooks and Warren devote three pages to showing the student why a slight poem of Shelley (“The Indian Serenade”) is hopelessly sentimental, and they point out the dangers of such a state of mind: “We often use the term sentimentalist occasionally to indicate a person whose emotions are on hair trigger. And we also use it to indicate a person who likes to indulge in emotion for its own sake.” So beware. Kenner’s intervening commentary is typically less rigid than theirs. In an introductory note to the teacher, he says wryly that “Much of the commentary has been kept sufficiently gnomic not to impede the teacher who wants to modify or dissent from it,” and such a note is borne out by what follows. Every so often, however, he raises a warning finger, as when suggesting that poetry should be “nutritive”: “Some kinds of poetry are like chocolates, in individual instances pleasant and harmless, but as a staple diet destructive to the sense, the digestion, and the appetite.” This witty admonition is followed by some lines from Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters” and an example of late Swinburne, “A Ballad of Burdens” (“And love self-slain in some sweet shameful way, / And sorrowful old age that comes by night / As a thief comes that has no heart by day”). There follows a one-sentence paragraph: “Probably everyone should read enough of Swinburne to get tired of him.” (We remember Eliot’s declaration that reading Swinburne gives one the effect of repeated doses of gin and water.) Kenner’s remark holds off the poet a bit but doesn’t really disparage him. Yes, we say, I too should read enough Swinburne to get tired of him.
What is perhaps most engaging and convincing about The Art of Poetry is the way Kenner refuses to encumber “the student” with all sorts of names and terms that will presumably help in the reading of poetry. He does introduce a few useful ones, like the names for poetry’s different feet, but pretty quickly draws back from systematizing by declaring, “With a sufficiently elaborate system of marks and names it is possible to affix labels to most of the things that happen in lines of verse, and construct uninterested models of them, but the usefulness of this procedure is not evident.” Instead he delivers this terse advice: “Listen to the way the verse moves.” The emphasis on listening is very much a Poundian one, and the master’s voice may be detected behind the following tip from Kenner:
Insensibility reveals itself more surely in rhythmic forcing (or else in the absence of any rhythmic assurance at all) than in any other way. You can tell a live poem from a dead one just as you can tell a heart beating from a watch ticking.
His message is, trust your ear to detect the difference between live and dead work. An unstated corollary is that most of the verse from any period is immediately disposable-is dead-on grounds of its rhythmic insensibility.
Trusting the ear goes along, in Kenner’s recipe for alert response to poems, with trusting that the words in a poem mean what they say. In a section titled “The Image,” he points out that much of the time we get through swatches of printed matter by not bothering about the meanings of words-as in the politician’s “There exists a solid argument favoring such a course.” But when, for example, Shakespeare has Romeo say “Night’s candles are burnt out,” we are to think of candles. Rather than enforcing distinctions between metaphor, simile, and other specialized terms for poetic figures, he adopts the all-purpose “image” to designate “the thing the words actually name.” We are not to think of expression as “a colorful way of saying something rather commonplace,” which may then be translated into some equivalent; rather, “The poet writes down what he means. Poetry is the only mode of written communication in which it is normal for all the words to mean what they say.”
More than once in his commentary in the anthology, Kenner suggests a historical view of what happened to English poetry, his suggestion surely influenced by, though distinct from, Eliot’s emphasis on the “dissociation of sensibility” he claimed occurred in the mid-seventeenth century. Kenner’s warning that some kinds of poetry were, like chocolates, destructive as a staple diet, comes out of a historical conjecture that a relishing of rhythm and sound for its own sake had roots in “the fact that in its period of greatest life so much English verse was written to be declaimed from a stage.” This fact he found not to be “wholly fortunate,” and indeed, three years previously, he had addressed the fact more fully in a lecture delivered in England to the Royal Society of Literature. It was published m Essays by Divers Hands (1958) but never reprinted by Kenner in any of his collections, so it has been somewhat overlooked. Its title, “Words in the Dark,” alludes to what he called a poetry of “majestic imprecision and incantation” that originated in the Elizabethan era, more precisely in the great speeches from Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s plays. By way of demonstration he quotes the famous lines from Doctor Faustus about Helen of Troy
Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
… O, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;
Brighter art thou than flamingjupiter
When he appear’d to hapless Semele;
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa’s azur’d arms;
And none but thou shalt be my paramour!
and says about them:
These words don’t make us see the vision, they are a verbal substitute for the vision. What they achieve by incantation the vision, could we be shown it, would, it is understood, achieve directly. What the audience saw was the costumed and painted boy; the words however don’t encourage it to examine what can be seen, but to dream away from the visible. … A “face” is mentioned but it is not shown; we see ships and towers. And while the words evoke hapless Semele and wanton Arethusa, Helen is not compared to either of them, but to a brightness and a loveliness: the loveliness of the monarch of the sky and the brightness of flamingjupiter.
What this “parable” shows, in Kenner’s view, is that these dramatists were engaged in creating “an illusion more powerful than the testimony of the senses,” through words that “sound well in the dark.”
By contrast, some different verse of Marlowe shows that dreaming away from the visible is not the only way for poets to proceed:
Now in her tender arms I sweetly bide,
If ever, now well lies she by my side,
The air is cold, and sleep is sweetest now,
And birds send forth shrill notes from every bough:
Whither runn’st thou, that men and women love not?
Hold in thy rosy horses that they move not.
These lines from Marlowe’s rendering of one of Ovid’s elegies, lines written 180 years after the death of Chaucer, remind us that in the poetry of Marlowe’s predecessors, the “visible” was something to be presented rather than dreamed away from. Such Chaucerian potentialities involved “a close fit between the words and its object and a certain plainness and clarity of sense and definition in the refusal to let every phrase run almost unbidden into metaphor.” This last formulation is not from “Words in the Dark” but from Charles Tomlinson’s 1989 essay “The Presence of Translation: A View of English Poetry.”4 There Tomlinson describes how he was struck when Kenner pointed out, in the 1956 lecture, that the poetry of Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, neither of whom had made much impact on English readers, might seem difficult to ears coming to poetry with Shakespearean expectations. Since, Tomlinson said, his own poems were being written with the examples of Moore and Williams very much in mind, Kenner’s evoking of them was excitingly germane.
“Words in the Dark” would presumably have been part of-probably a key part of-a historical survey of English poetry to be titled The Night World. The book never got written, probably because Kenner had so many competing projects in his head that did get written, also perhaps because his interesting idea about the influence of Elizabethan dramatic verse on succeeding poets resisted being worked up into a large-scale argument. (How, for example, Kenner would have handled the poetry of Wordsworth in these terms is a chapter from that unwritten book we would have loved to have seen.)5 The essays about earlier English poetry he did publish-the introduction to his anthology of seven-teenth-century poetry, The Schools of Donne and Jonson; a fascinating account of rhyming in Pope (“Pope’s Reasonable Rhymes”); an essay on syntax in poetry (“Post-Symbolist Structures”) with examples drawn from Ben Jonson, Tennyson, Yeats, and Eliot-provide glimpses of remarkable insights into certain instances of English verse. But it may well have been that he found the three centuries of poetry between Jonson and Yeats to be more various and ungeneralizable about than “Words in the Dark” had suggested.
It’s likely though that Kenner’s pretty exclusive attention to certain twentieth-century English and American poets rather than to others-often more well-regarded ones-has everything to do with his distrust of language running “unbidden into metaphor” and his admiration for the plain style, the clarity of sense and definition to be found in Chaucer and Ben Jonson, in Pound, Moore, Williams, and some of their more recent descendants.
In A Homemade World (1975), his survey of last century’s American writers-the first in a trilogy of books that includes surveys of Irish and English ones-a major chapter of some length is devoted to American poets who are, to say the least, less than household names. Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, and Carl Rakosi are the post-Poundian poets who matter to Kenner more than what might be called the descendants of Frost, Stevens, or Hart Crane. Among those descendants are the post-World War II generation of vivid individual talents-Lowell, Bishop, Jarrell, Berryman; and the formalist masters, Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, James Merrill. Kenner’s preference for poetry he calls “modernist” (the subtitle of A Homemade World is “The American Modernist Writers”) rather than what might be called modern/traditional, with its willingness still to risk eloquence in presenting a human, dramatic situation, is something of which he is not unaware. On occasion he makes his bias explicit, as when he admits, in the introduction to A Homemade World, “There are distinguished bodies of achievement-Robert Lowell’s, Robert Frost’s-through which the vectors it traces do not run.” His study of these “vectors” doesn’t claim to be “a survey nor an honor roll,” but his extremely high valuation of modernism earlier in the century means that there will be a falling-off from high achievement into something Α good deal lower down. Or so it appears to me the case if (as Kenner does) you ignore Lowell, Wilbur, Bishop, and Merrill in favor of the Zukofsky-Oppen group. A Homemade World ends with chapters on these Objectivists and on Faulkner as “the last novelist” whose work shows “the last mutation . . . of the procedures that dominated the novel for many decades.” Kenner’s references to post-Faulknerian novelists such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gaddis are a brief and less than enthusiastic recognition of these deconstructors of the traditional novel. But what, we might ask, of Bellow or Updike or Philip Roth, who write as if that tradition were very much alive? We remember that Kenner’s interest in novels focused itself on Flaubert, on Joyce, on Beckett (as studied in The Stoic Comedians, 1964, and elsewhere) rather than on Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, Thomas Hardy: on verbal structures that are comic and satiric, rather than “exploratory-creative” (F. R. Leavis’ term) in their tracing of moral issues and human destinies (Leavis’ “great tradition”).
Even more precipitous is the decline (or sinking) Kenner finds in the Modern English Writers, as his subtitle to A Sinking Island (1988) has it. In some ways his most entertaining book, especially in its presentation of different English reading publics at the beginning of the last century, it is also tendentiously and programmatically mischievous, scrupulously “unfair,” as Wyndham Lewis said all satire had to be. In Kenner’s account, English literature after World War II not only declined, it ceased to exist. Of course there are admirable exceptions, such as Charles Tomlinson and Basil Bunting, the poets with whom the book concludes, but they only prove the rule. This process of disintegration had been going on since the 1930s when Auden was the rage (“undergraduate callowness merges with unschooled self-esteem”) and the trumpery modernism of The Waves confused with the real thing (“Bloomsbury self-congratulation, unreal from end to end, voice after voice finely straining for fineness of perception”). Although Kenner admits in a preface that his treatment of twentieth-century English writers will be “highly selective” (he mentions Ivy Compton-Burnett as an example of one of many “good writers who simply did their job”), the urge to sink the island so infects him as to make his dismissal of or non-attention to modern (rather than modernist) writers blatant, and more revealing of his limitations as a reader than he might have wished. Non-modernist, un-Poundian poets from earlier in the century fare poorly: Hardy is just barely mentioned; there is no Lawrence (as poet), no Robert Graves, no Louis MacNeice. Philip Larkin is treated as a “portent” of Philistia-Larkin claimed, provocatively, that he didn’t know who Jorge Luis Borges was, and Kenner pretends to believe him-and his work is dismissed with the faintest of praise (“Not that his best poems are negligible”). Such grudging admission consorts with other swipes at writers who have in fact pleased many readers not merely susceptible to the whims of fashion. Evelyn Waugh survives, in Kenner’s book, on the basis of a single novel, A Handful of Dust (“a popular novel for the mid-thirties. Not a great one”). George Orwell doesn’t appear; Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time is mentioned only to hang the adjective “leaden” on it and to claim (falsely) that no one reads it. Kingsley Amis gets a single mention as one of several “anarchic energies” to have gained applause: “(Yes, Yes, Amis; yes, yes, John Osborne; later yes, yes, Private Eye).” So much for those of us who thought Amis as good a comic novelist who ever practiced the trade. One wonders how many of Amis’ novels Kenner did or didn’t read; then one thinks, how could the author of The Pound Era have any room in his imagination for the Amis-Larkin disparagement of modernism?
But disagreeing with Kenner’s judgments is, after a not very long while, a barren occupation, analogous perhaps to disagreeing with Dr. Johnson’s low opinion of Lycidas, or with Eliot’s judgment about Robert Frost (“his verse, it is regretfully said, is uninteresting”). However major a critic you take Kenner to be, and I take him to be a major one, he is like Johnson and Eliot in that he never writes a sentence that doesn’t show a major style, and that includes “sentences” like the one beginning “(Yes, yes, Amis).” So powerful a style can transform a subject we haven’t thought much about-the situation of the Canadian poet, circa 1952-into a memorably creative formulation. A Canadian citizen himself and reviewing an anthology of Canadian poets, he suddenly bursts into a dithyramb on what it is to be such a thing as a Canadian poet:
Situated on a great blank semi-continent whose official culture, as verbalized by the newspapers, isn’t a congeries of activities but a kind of weather precipitated from extra-territorial cold and hot air-from the most exportable clichés of British and American life: British complacency, lower-class caution, sobriety that makes a cult of mufflers, galoshes, and Sunday; American financial enterprise, urban discipline, and satisfaction in the ownership of “consumer goods.”
In these (surprising) terms the Canadian poet is declared to be the most “alienated” in the world. No reader trying to wrap his mind around that sentence is I think likely to raise a dissenting hand and claim that, say, the Icelandic or Australian poet is even more alienated. The sentence is just one, admittedly minor, example of what Kenner found distinctive in Joyce’s fiction, which is “great, as is much poetry, because the language, which does not merely extend the author but transcends him, has gone into independent action and taken on independent life.”
This survey of the work of a voluminous critic-thirty-two books and 856 periodical contributions are listed in Willard Goodwin’s heroic bibliography6-is too patchy even to qualify as a mini-survey. Indeed, two of Kenner’s most original and readable books, The Counterfeiters (1968) and Joyce’s Voices (1978), I haven’t even mentioned till now.7 Instead of doing them justice, I choose rather to close this account of an exceptional writer by noting Kenner’s alert generosity to contemporaries he found exceptional. One expects (and receives) handsome valedictions to Eliot, to Williams, to Pound, to Beckett, as they enter the realm of what Dryden called, elegizing Mr. Oldham, “Fate and Gloomy Night.” But tributes were not withheld from writers still alive, sometimes unexpected ones like Leslie Fielder or Tom Wolfe or Norman Mailer (“the most style-conscious, the most literary of living novelists”). Each of them was praised in the pages of the National Review for the tonic wildness that, it might be said, they shared with Kenner. He admired outlaws when their outlawry was conducted with daring and intelligence. In a review of F. R. Leavis’ contribution in Scrutiny-which magazine Leavis had referred to as “an outlaw’s enterprise”-Kenner saluted Leavis as a writer whom it had been fashionable in many circles to dismiss as a bad writer. No, says Kenner, let us rather seek to record the distinction of those “bad” sentences:
His expository manner-a fascinatingly taut instrument of registration, like that of an engagé Henry James, virtuoso of the trenchant, qualifying clause, the ironically deferred climax, the epithet delicately placed between commas-is like all such complex instruments potentially a body of mannerisms, as I think it became in his late book . . .
Manner only becomes mannerism, as it were, when it is strong and individual enough to be bureaucratized.
Unfailingly Kenner found original ways to eulogize critics who resembled one another only in being each of them distinctive. John Crowe Ransom, he wrote, “exerted more influence on human learning than anyone in this century. . . . He valued the act of criticism because it can be an occasion for the critic’s language to be about something it can clarify but not subdue.” In a more reminiscent mood he concluded an RIP for his old teacher, Northrop Frye, with whom as a graduate student at the University of Toronto he had taken a Blake seminar: “Oh, 45 years back, the final exam for that graduate seminar was graced with a box of chocolates on the table. Norrie thought we’d earned those at least. What we’d chiefly earned was participation in his intelligence.” And in a journal few were likely to see, Conradiana, he paid tribute to his old friend, colleague, and professional outlaw, Marvin Mudrick, whose essay “The Originality of Conrad” (The Hudson Review, Volume XI, Number 4 [Winter 1958-59], pp. 545-553) “drew on a rereading of the whole Conrad canon and a good deal of the major criticism. He reread, as he read, with obsessed intentness, filling flyleaves with pencilled codes that helped him retrieve any beauty, any bathos.” Titling his tribute “The Examiner’s Eye,” Kenner ended by remembering old days with Mudrick at Santa Barbara, also their final meeting in August 1986 when, although “he must have guessed he was dying, he betrayed no sign and was genial as of old”:
Unable to think how I could have spent better hours than the many consecutive ones I spent in his company, I’m grateful to Conradiana for a place to light this candle.
More than once Kenner quoted Pound’s injunction, directed at Kenner when he visited the poet at St. Elizabeth’s, to visit the great men of one’s own time as a clear duty of one’s education. But Kenner added, “it was also part of a duty to such men, who among them comprise the only reason the time, or any time, may be worth remembering, and civilization is memory.” I met Kenner only once, and that most briefly, but his work is something the time, our time, should keep remembering.
Hugh Kenner: A Select Bibliography
1951 The Poetry of Ezra Pound
1954 Wyndham Lewis
1956 Dublin’s Joyce
1958 Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature
1959 The Art of Poetry
1959 The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot
1961 Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study
1964 Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians
1968 The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy
1971 The Pound Era
1973 A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett
1975 A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers
1978 Joyce’s Voices
1980 Ulysses
1983 A Colder Eye: The Modem Irish Writers
1987 The Mechanic Muse
1988 A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers
1989 Mazes: Essays
1990 Historical Fictions: Essays
2000 The Elsewhere Community
1 I won’t be talking about The Pound Emis this essay, but an interested reader may consult my review of it (“Paradise Lost,” The Hudson Review, Volume XXV, Number 2 [Summer 1972], pp. 316-322).
2 The Kenner-Hudson connection was made to seem ominous, at least shameful, by Irving Howe in his free-swinging essay, “The Age of Conformity” (Partisan Review, January 1950). Howe wrote, “When a charlatan like Wyndham Lewis is revived and praised for his wisdom, it is done, predictably, by a Hugh Kenner in The Hudson Review.” (Howe later wrote for the magazine, so must have had a second thought.)
3 Kenner wrote about Empson on three other occasions, the first being a review of his Collected Poems, mainly admiring (“The Son of Spiders,” Poetry, June 1950); the second a dismissive review of Milton’s God (“The Critic’s Not for Burning,” National Review, August 28, 1962). In the latter review, Kenner referred to Empson as “The Playboy of the Western Word” the last word of which phrase a typesetter corrected, thinking of Synge, to “World.” In Milton’s God Empson had called Kenner “the American Roman Catholic critic” and “a spanking neo-Christian.” In A Sinking Island (1988), Kenner quotes from Empson’s preface to the second edition of Seven Types of Ambiguity-”Whenever a reader of poetry is seriously moved by an apparently simple line, what are moving in him are traces of a great part of his past experience and of the structure of his past judgments”-and says about it, “That is wise, and exact.”
4 Collected in Tomlinson’s Metamorphosis: Poetry and Translation (Manchester, Carcanet Press, 2003, pp. 1-20). Tomlinson’s first American book of poems, Seeing Is Believing (1959) was published by Macdowell Obolensky, with Kenner’s urging.
5 In a review of Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909-1962 (National Revietu, Feb. 11, 1964), Kenner spoke of Wordsworth’s poetic procedures-”their evasions, their deliberate blurs of syntax, their odd meditative substantialitives”-and called him the “first specialist in majestically cadenced not-quite-sense.” Could this not be Eliot writing about Milton’s verse?
6 Hugh Kenner: A Bibliography, by Willard Goodwin. Wliitston Publishing Co., Albany, N.Y., 2001.
7 The Counterfeiters contains an especially fine chapter, “The Man of Sense as Buster Keaton,” in which Kenner, with the aid of the classic anthology of bad verse The Stuffed Owl, shows how one of its exhibits, Cowley’s “Ode Upon Dr. Harvey,” describes Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood in a manner so absolutely clear as to be “exquisitely ludicrous.”
Copyright Hudson Review Autumn 2004
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved
Pritchard, William H “Hugh Kenner’s Achievement“. Hudson Review, The. FindArticles.com. 05 Feb, 2010. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4021/is_200410/ai_n9415935/
Copyright Hudson Review Autumn 2004
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved
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A consistent lie is better than a non consistent failure.
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