No place in this country has ever fitted itself more perfectly to the geography of my imagination than Kentucky. Here, wind-in-the-willows nights radiate mind and body with an overwhelming sense of homesickness, with the realization that nearness to home is always accompanied by memories lost. It is hard to spell out in words the marriage of heaven and hell that swells in every synapse when the spirit decides to move and groan. Surely there are incantations and rituals that aid its awakening.

Something of a seance for the soul of author Guy Davenport has intrudingly entered my mind upon my recent move back to Kentucky. I’ve been led into a few Davenportian initiation rites, as when I made a pilgrimage to 621 Sayre Avenue here in Lexington to see if I could glimpse how a particular force evolved into a particular form: Could the aura of Davenport’s prose be detected in the form of his home? This is what we seek when we go on pilgrimage, to search and discover the spirit of lost time.

More often than not such a pilgrimage evokes no special feelings. We experience instead a mundane tourism: Here is a house, just like the one next to it. And so was my experience. I asked a friend who traveled with me to take my picture in front of the home. Maybe the camera would catch the magic I couldn’t catch with my naked eye. I was surprised by my fan-boyish request. I prefer the interiority of the soul, where I try to convince myself that memories never really disappear, despite experiences receding like a jet stream behind the arrow of time.

Time is the great philosophical and scientific mystery, as well as the impulse beneath my desire to be photographed at Davenport’s home. The photograph doesn’t preserve a lost moment. The photograph doesn’t still life as much as I thought; rather, as a slice of an “eternal now,” it allows us to fix an experience as it is also passing and transient. A photo is a graphology of time and eternity. This is why great photographers pursue essences rather than facts. Hence Davenport on the great Kentucky photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard:

Light as it falls from the sun onto our random world defines everything perceptible to the eye by constant accident, relentlessly changing. A splendid spot of light on a fence is gone in a matter of seconds. A tone of light is frailer in essence than a whiff of roses. I have watched Gene all of a day wandering around in the ruined Whitehall photographing as diligently as if he were a newsreel cameraman in a battle. The old house was as quiet and still as eternity itself; to Gene it was as ephemeral in its shift of light and shade as a fitful moth.

Given my recent dive into Davenport, I turned green upon the discovery of Questioning Minds, Counterpoint Press’s new release of Davenport’s correspondence with Hugh Kenner, famed scholar of Joyce, Beckett, Pound, and others. These two volumes, masterfully edited by Edward Burns, clock in at nearly two thousand pages.

How does anyone review a collection this large? Kenner and Davenport, who both wrote for the National Review, are often quite candid about the ambiguities of political alliance. Both would call themselves conservative but also thought America a rather wretched experiment that preferred mammon worship over the cultivation of civilization. Neither had much sympathy for what would now be considered “neoconservative.”

For the sake of space, I must narrow this review to a few key themes. One is what Kenner in the letters calls “Davenportisms”: Davenport’s wonderful paragraphical vignettes that Kenner, not expecting such letters to ever be published, worried would be lost if not compiled. Here is an example, written after Davenport, along with his friends the photographers Jonathan Williams and Meatyard, met Thomas Merton at Gesthsemani, the Trappist abbey Merton had entered several years before:

He met us — Gene Meatyard, Johnathan Wmz & I — at the door of Gethsemani and took us up to his delicious little house in the deep Kentucky woods: a cinderblock cabin divided into a study and bedroom, enviously Spartan. After twenty-five years under the Trappist discipline one may then go in for being a hermit, and this Merton has done. He goes down to teach a class in literature (Faulkner’s The Bear at the moment); otherwise he sees no one except rare visitors approved by the abbot. He looks like a cross between Jean Genet and Picasso, brown as a berry and tough as a lumberjack. Tonsured; clean shaven. Dressed in dungaree trousers and jacket worn over the habit, so that he looks like Thorin Oakenshield got up as a locomotive engineer.

As that last sentence indicates, Davenport knew his Tolkien, having studied with Tolkien at Oxford. (I highly recommend his essay “Hobbitry.”) Here are some photographs of Merton and Davenport taken by Meatyard:

Another theme surfaces in the ongoing conversation about the media of writing and how these affect the message; that is, how a pen (and the ink that is used to fill it), versus a typewriter, influences the form of one’s thinking. (Given that Kenner was a student of Marshal McLuhan, this should come as no surprise.)

Here’s a sampler:

Kenner to Davenport, 29 March 1962:

Beautiful, beautiful pen. As a long-time fan of German technology, I am delighted to have it. In time, far-reaching personality changes are to be expected, since the implement (vide cuneiform) makes the character, which in turn leads to the expressive faculty. Prufrock, the first modern poem to have been typewritten by its author? (on a Blickensderfer, which made only italics). And of course Ezra, the first master of the typewriter, bent to his will. The Cantos exist on the page in technological space, whereas Paradise Lost still inhabits a psychic economy of vellum scrolls, for which Mr. Gutenberg supplies the instant-coffee substitute….I mean, printing not yet being used as Joyce uses it. Was it printing that killed the fourteener, line too long to see in an eye span?

Davenport to Kenner, 3 April 1962:

The one is a gift, chef a rimembrar il Marzo questo anno, therefore I return the improbably high price you imagine it costs {I wd. have to return the change, considerably even if I were merely the purveyor}; you are Pacific enough to submit to Potlatch. A pleasure to give it. First typewriter at Oxford was blessed by the bishop thereof. Twain typed Huck Finn: first typed MS. Page width may have killed fourteener; or length of composing stick.

Kenner to Davenport, 5 April 1962:

I forgot if I told you that Higgins #892 is $.25 a bottle in Goleta. I mention this so that you may haggle in Haverford.

Davenport to Kenner, 9 April 1962:

Your Higgins 892 slightly grey: Shd. be printers ink black. As here; perhaps it’s the yellow paper and its capacity to drink the ink into its fibers. You will have discovered that the pen improves with use, as its point gets polished and your hand learns the stylus-angle.

Kenner to Davenport:

Is bishop blessing typewriter Oxford lore, or has it a printed source somewhere, with picturesque detail? I have a hazy idea that anecdote belongs in The Pound Era somewhere, since Pound Era is coeval with the typewriter, and the machine will have to incur discussion. Typescript displays the words (i cant); or else is the means for rattledebanging speech into form-of-sorts…

For many, exchanges of this sort will sound like dull reading. For me, these letters serve as a phenomenology of everyday life, a fascinating peek into two minds fighting the mildewed slumber of modernity by paying deep attention to the things a modern person might take for granted. To read these letters is to bear witness to how this kind of attention animates two highly eccentric thinkers. Genius, after all, has its origin in the mind’s openness. Seemingly insignificant objects make up our atmosphere: the feel of Italian Aurora ink flowing through a fountain pen nib, autumn light through the window painting your kitchen table. The essence of things is to be perceived, as Berkeley reminded us. Davenport writes in his splendid essay “Metaphysical Light in Turin,” “One way of recognizing verities is to look at them as if you had never seen them before, to make an enigma of the familiar.”

This is the great program and paradox of this epistolary collection: the more familiar  Davenport and Kenner become to each other, the deeper their estrangement. The letters end in a distance achieved through deep intimacy. The correspondence stops in 1996. The next and last, unanswered, letter is from Kenner in 2002.