Guy Davenport - Writing

Writing

Davenport began publishing fiction in 1970 with "The Aeroplanes at Brescia," which is based on Kafka's visit to an air show in September 1909. His books include Tatlin!, Da Vinci's Bicycle, Eclogues, Apples and Pears, The Jules Verne Steam Balloon, The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers, A Table of Green Fields, The Cardiff Team, and Wo es war, soll ich werden. His fiction uses three general modes of exposition: the fictionalizing of historical events and figures; the foregrounding of formal narrative experiments, especially with the use of collage; and the depicting of a Fourierist utopia, where small groups of men, women, and children have eliminated the separation between mind and body.

The first of more than four hundred Davenport essays, articles, introductions, and book reviews appeared while he was still an undergraduate; the last, just weeks before his death. Davenport was a regular reviewer for National Review and The Hudson Review, and, late in his life, at the invitation of John Jeremiah Sullivan, he spent a year writing the "New Books" column for Harper's Magazine. His essays range from literary to social topics, from brief book reviews to lectures such as the title piece in his first collection of essays, The Geography of the Imagination. His other collections of essays were Every Force Evolves a Form and The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature and Art.

He also published two slim volumes on art: A Balthus Notebook and Objects on a Table. Although he wrote on many topics, Davenport, who never had a driver's license, was especially passionate about the destruction of American cities by the automobile.

Davenport published a handful of poems. The longest are the book-length Flowers and Leaves, an intricate meditation on art and America, and "The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard" (borrowing the title from a painting by Stanley Spencer). A selection of his poems and translations was published as Thasos and Ohio.

Davenport translated ancient Greek texts, particularly from the archaic period. These were published in periodicals, then small volumes, and finally collected in 7 Greeks. He also translated the occasional other piece, including a few poems of Rilke's, some ancient Egyptian texts ), and, with Benjamin Urrutia, the sayings of Jesus, published as The Logia of Yeshua.