Hugh Kenner's Achievement

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2004 by Pritchard, William H

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: