MLN

The Kenner Era:
Hugh at Eighty

Richard Macksey

[Figures]

In a culture where academic fashions change with the rapidity of hem-lines, the birthday of an elderly critic is seldom cause for extensive public notice let alone international celebration. But then Hugh Kenner, who was born eighty years ago this January in Peterborough, Canada, is hardly a representative specimen of "the academic critic." The ways in which he departs from the norm are almost as various as the range and intellectual longevity of his publications, which currently extend from his first book (Paradox in Chesterton) in 1947 to The Elsewhere Community on the cusp of the new millennium. Quite apart from his achievement as the premier cartographer of High Modernism in English, Kenner, "the indispensable guide to indispensable Guides" in Richard Stern's phrase, has given us books on matters as diverse as "geodesic math," the genius of Chuck Jones, Buster Keaton, Charles Babbage, and Buckminster Fuller, as well as the arts of satire and counterfeiting, the tradition of "the grand tour," and the history of the "mechanization" of society. But he also has the distinction of having pursued a vigorous academic career in this country without having ever attended a session of the Modern Language Association of America; of having taught in the United States, as a loyal Canadian, for half a century on a "green card"; and, before Al Gore invented the internet, of having built his own personal computers.

Granting that Hugh Kenner is an "original" of formidable proportions, how are we to comprehend the work of more than half a century? It would take the wit and daring of a Kenner to answer this question adequately and concisely. He has been called many things— [End Page 1098] elucidator, exegete, satirist, annotator, cultural map-maker, lexophile, scourge of the foolish, pretentious, and boring—but the title that perhaps fits best and still covers the subject is the same nomination that another writer of omnivorous curiosity, Borges, chose for himself: Reader. [End Page 1099]

Although Hugh Kenner is constitutionally impatient with literary theory and most theorists, he is a model of patience as a reader of texts. Nietzsche observed that the best thing to be said about philology is that it forces us to read more slowly. Kenner has repeatedly reminded us in startlingly original ways that we must read more attentively. Without his example, who would have recognized the importance of the placement of furniture in Ulysses, or how William Carlos Williams' metrical line actually works (despite what the poet himself often said on the topic), or the wit invested by Beckett [b. 1906] in translating himself from French to English, or, for that matter, how many words there are in his last work, Stirrings Still [1906 exactly]? Even Kenner's occasional "principles" are drawn from the scrupulous practice of careful reading, e.g. the "Uncle Charles Principle," which has the additional irony of a deaf critic teaching us how to listen to narrative tone.

The course of his reading has drawn him into many projects both large and small. He is, remarkably, the master of both "the big book" and the most minute and often neglected literary forms. The Pound Era obviously looms vast on the horizon, a very large and ambitious book (c. 2.75 pound avoirdupois), which in the beauty of its physical design and style seems much lighter in the reader's hands. His later take on modernism, the trilogy written from another perspective, is also another large work: A Homemade World, which in a mosaic considers those modernist poets and novelists who drew their strength from American themes; A Colder Eye, which follows the course of two unruly generations of Irish writers emerging from "the shadow of Yeats"; and, finally, in HK's trajectory eastward, A Sinking Island, which considers British modernism and its aftermath as London, the original center of international modernism, is displaced by what Kenner sees as a vast, tectonic shift westward (a displacement the two earlier books of the trilogy elucidate). And his individual studies of Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Beckett, taken in each case cumulatively, constitute further hefty monuments to our understanding of those authors.

But Hugh Kenner has put his wine in bottles of many different sizes as well as magnums, including what he calls "one-evening books." Much vintage Kenner, in fact, appeared in very small bottles indeed—reviews, tributes, obituaries, lecturettes, notes. He may, in fact, have invented a new genre, the "meta-obituary," witness his "decoding" of the New York Times obituary for Roland Barthes. HK's application of the Barthesian Five Codes to a reading of the obit is wickedly funny (a [End Page 1100] performance that I suspect the lately departed, despite his immense courtesy and somewhat somber mien, would have appreciated, accustomed as he was to dueling with far less witty Sorbonnistes). Some of the best of these minor genres are collected in Mazes and Historical Fictions, but so many more have to be sought in out-of-the-way places. Many drowsy readers have, I am sure, had the experience of starting a review (say, in Harper's) and being awakened by a style that one gradually recognizes can only have come from the Kenner PC.

Those who would like a panoptic glimpse of the range and variety of his intellectual life may now consult the website of the Kenner Papers at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas (hrc.utexas.edu/research/fa/kenner). The archives, now having reached 1994 and still growing, are lodged in 106 boxes (45 linear feet), 3 oversize boxes, 1 oversize folder, 1 card file, and 11 galley files. We are told by the indexers that the papers are generally in good condition "except for occasional stains and smudges, some identified as food and drink spills." (Unfortunately, ingredients and recipes from the legendary hospitality of the Kenner kitchen are not identified. Patrons are, however, warned about the possible presence of "dormant spores" [of ideas?] in some of the folders.)

The Texas archives give an eagle's-eye view, across the second half of the 20th century, of the trajectory of the Kenner career. The analyzed folder-lists of the collection are organized into a number of categories: mss, typescripts, working notes, etc., of (a) 36 books and edited volumes, including some unpublished items; (b) 439 articles, obituaries, and lectures; (c) 336 reviews; and (d) 23 introductions. There is also a massive list of correspondence—in-coming and outgoing—totaling almost 1500 names, a gallery that includes the familiar figures of Kenner's now canonical mentors as well as several generations of scholars and writers whom he himself has mentored. And, as a further gage of his reach (and powers of retention), there is a large, somewhat eccentric "subject file" of in-coming off-prints and related correspondence, research materials, photocopies, and clippings. (Under "Yale," we find several boxes of "class papers" and his prize-winning Pound dissertation. All the numbers in the primary listings given above are approximate, since there those folders tantalizingly labeled "unidentified.") There are now more than eight years of additional Kenner files to be transferred to Austin and duly indexed. (Some of the more inventive spelling in the indices have no doubt amused the author of the papers—and might someday elicit from him a brief essay on the archival mind.) [End Page 1101]

Aside from noting the sheer bulk of the collection, the more than half century it covers, and the extraordinary conflux of authors and ideas that it musters, we should remark the range of venues in which HK has published: although there are relatively few entries for the customary "scholarly journals" (save for his essays on Pound, Joyce, and Eliot), there are the usual suspects from the larger circulation and high-culture publications: the New York Times Book Review, TLS, Harper's, National Review, Poetry, New Republic, and Hudson Review, as well as many encyclopedia entries, articles for major newspapers and Festschriften. What is more surprising, and yet characteristic of the author, are the extensive contributions to journals off the customary academic radar screen. There are some mass-media representatives: Life, Time, U. S. News, Saturday Evening Post, and The Reader's Digest; a large array of "little magazines" and campus publications with titles like Tamkang Review and Zeniada (often tokens left by a generous guest on his academic travels). But then there are also the many contributions to Arts & Antiques and Byte, as well as to journals as diverse as Architectural Digest, Art Center Review, Buss (Heath Co. Newsletter), Discover ("the science newsmagazine"), Film Quarterly, GQ, PPC Calculator, Science & Children, Sextant, and the WSJ. Such extravagant promiscuity so cunningly executed suggests why, in our time, Kenner deserves the Homeric epithet of Odysseus—polútropos, "the man of many turnings."

For those weary of archival and bibliographic statistics and seeking more intimate, snap-shot glimpses of Hugh Kenner's distinctive features, one can turn with pleasure to a small, hard-copy piece of evidence. To celebrate his 70th birthday, two lustra ago, Carroll Terrell—the Pound scholar and Maine impresario—gathered a garland of toasts, tributes, and recollections arranged alphabetically by the contributors' names, a system that yielded some instructive juxtapositions (There is No End of Things in the Heart, 1993). At the center of this celebratory libellum, along with a sheaf of informal photographs of HK at work and play, are poised two brief essays by Kenners from the next generation: Lisa and Rob. With wit, grace, and affection, these two essays demonstrate several essential points. First, that one could grow up in the Kenner household and still—with the right designer's genes—develop one's own signature style. And second, that the childhood memories from these two privileged perspectives attest to the father's irrepressible gifts as a story-teller and reader of artfully chosen books. Citing but two examples from the canon of bedtime reading offers a few clues to their father's own [End Page 1102] abiding interests: Wally the Wordworm and The Adventures of Paddington Bear. The first book reminds us that Kenner père has been, early and late, a devoted if eccentric lexicographer alert to the surprising lives of words. The second book, about the bear from Peru, is testimony to the abiding interest that Hugh shares with the rest of his family in the [End Page 1103] lives of our neighboring species—feline, canine, lupine, and ursine. In her essay ("He casts a tiger's eye") Lisa salutes her father as a naturalist (who taught her how to name and raise "a top-notch cat") and savors his quarky humor. Moving from Paddington to Wally, Rob muses on the role of words and poetry (from Yeats to Chuck Jones) in his earliest education, and on the paternal precept to "store up random details." He quotes the epigraph from Gnomon: "Study with the mind of a grandson / and watch the time like a hawk."

What are we to make of all this prodigious industry, scope, and curiosity? Not to mention the remarkably effective domestic pedagogy. Hugh Kenner is fond of reminding us that contemporary readers are seldom able to identify the "style" (and, by extension, the cultural connections) shaping the times in which they live. The late Elizabethans were not aware that they were living in the "Age of Shakespeare," nor would the Georgians of the 1920s, distracted by "pseudobearings," have recognized that they inhabited the "the Pound Era." (In fact, it took the prescience of a Kenner some decades later to define that term and to demonstrate the centrality of EP—as editor, mentor, provocateur, and poet—in comprehending the generation of the international Modernists.) He would consequently find it somewhat premature to announce that, consciously or not, we have been living in the Kenner Era.

And just what, we might ask, is an era? In contemporary use an era (orginally "aera") is a "period of historical time," conventionally identified by an eponym or some other marker, such as "the Vulgar Era" or "the Era of Good Feelings" (notably brief). Etymologically, the word descends from the Latin mathematical term for "a given number according to which a reckoning or calculation is to be made"; only later, in the seventh century with Isidore of Seville, did it come to mean "an era or epoch from which time is reckoned." (Both these senses of the word should please HK, who taught us what compulsive counters his friend Sam Beckett and his mentor Joyce were.) And this is not inappropriate as we count eighty candles on the birthday cake. But how does an "era" begin? When do we start counting? The Pound Era opens with a chance encounter, the meeting between two ages in Chelsea on the last summer before the watershed of the Great War: Henry James, "exposing his Boston niece to the tone of things," encounters on a street corner his compatriot Ezra Pound and his wife Dorothy. It will take the course of history and the ingenuity of Hugh Kenner to explain why this is a place to begin counting. There are usually omens and portents. [End Page 1104]

If we begin at a conventional beginning—the years of Hugh Kenner's gestation and birth—there were certainly a number of omens and portents attending his arrival. 1922 saw the appearance of The Waste Land and Ulysses; Wyndham Lewis published the second and final issue of The Tyro and began work on his satiric portrait of Edith Sitwell; Wittgenstein's Tractatus appeared, as did Valéry's Charmes. In 1923, Yeats receives the Nobel Prize; Beckett matriculates at Trinity, Dublin; Buster Keaton issues Our Hospitality and W.C. Williams Spring and All; on the old Continent in a final burst of energy Rilke publishes Die Sonette an Orpheus and Duineser Elegien; on two other continents there are first books from J.L. Borges (Fervor de Buenos Aires), Wallace Stevens (Harmonium), and Jean Toomer (Cane); and, to cite two items little noticed at the time, a pair of linguistic émigrés to English were stirring: 12-year-old Brian O Nuallain [aka Flann O'Brien & Myles na Gopaleen] comes down from the north to Dublin and in New York 19-year-old Louis Zukofsky begins writing poetry in earnest in a language he had learned from Irish cops and schoolmarms.

If we now see some interesting connections between these otherwise random details, and have some sense of how these events are part of a larger cultural fabric, it is precisely because of the labors Hugh Kenner, inveterate counter and collector of coincidences.

Finally, we see some signs of closure as well. After 52 years in the classroom HK "retired" in 1999. At the turn of the millennium, the Passionate Pilgrim who had taken to heart Pound's command ("You have an ob-li-ga-tion / to visit / the great men of your own time") announced that he had met the obligation and that he and Mary Anne henceforth would cheerfully become the Invisible Tourists. (Not, certainly, completely invisible and not, presumably, only in cyber-space!) May they both enjoy a peripatetic retirement, gestate those projects still to come (see the clues scattered in the archives), and may we, on Hugh's 80th birthday, consider an emendation of a Buddhist custom. According to this custom, the celebrant of a birthday gives presents rather than the guests. Since Hugh has been showering us with presents in the form of his writings all these years and since, at this stage in the Kenner era, most are familiar with some of these gifts, but few are of all of them, I would suggest that each of us should artfully select some titles from this profusion and give copies to friends whose education still has some lacunae. These are the vintage growths to raise on the birthday of an Era.