Hugh Kenner, R.I.P.

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Friday, November 25, 2003
Hugh Kenner, Commentator on Literary Modernism, Dies
at 80
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
 
Hugh Kenner, the critic, author and professor of
literature regarded as America's foremost commentator
on literary modernism, especially the work of Ezra
Pound and James Joyce, died yesterday at his home in
Athens, Ga. He was 80.

He had been suffering from heart problems, his wife,
Mary Anne Kenner, said.

The variety of Mr. Kenner's interests was contained in
25 books of his own (he contributed to 200 more) and
nearly 1,000 articles, as well as broadcasts and
recordings. He wrote commandingly on everything from
Irish poetry to geodesic math and Li'l Abner's pappy
(Lucifer Ornamental Yokum), to the Heath/Zenith Z-100
computer (one of which he built for himself and then
wrote the user's guide) and the animated cartoons of
Chuck Jones.

But it was for his pioneering guide to
English-language literary modernism and for his books
"Dublin's Joyce" (1956), "The Pound Era" (1971) and
"Joyce's Voices" (1978) that Mr. Kenner was best
known. In these works and others he employed the
techniques proposed by the writers themselves to
define new standards by which to judge their work.

In "The Pound Era," perhaps his masterwork, he tried
to show how the American expatriate poet absorbed the
altered sense of time created by Einstein's revolution
and helped to pass it on to artists like Joyce,
Wyndham Lewis, Eliot, William Carlos Williams and the
sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

While some faulted Mr. Kenner for attributing to Pound
too much prominence in the scheme of modern art, no
one failed to be impressed by the vigor and importance
of Mr. Kenner's analysis.

In a 1988 review of "A Sinking Island: The Modern
English Writers," the critic Richard Eder wrote in The
Los Angeles Times: "Kenner doesn't write about
literature; he jumps in, armed and thrashing. He
crashes it, like a party-goer who refuses to hover
near the door but goes right up to the guest of honor,
plumps himself down, sniffs at the guest's dinner,
eats some and begins a one-to-one discussion. You
could not say whether his talking or his listening is
done with greater intensity."

[...]

In 1950 Mr. Kenner completed his Ph.D. at Yale. His
thesis was published in 1951 as his first book in the
United States, "The Poetry of Ezra Pound." In it, he
deplored Pound for having delivered radio broadcasts
in Italy during World War II in support of that
country's fascist government; at the same time he
argued on behalf of the poet's important literary
achievement. The book received the Porter Prize in
1950.

[...]

... the writing poured forth, his other major books
being studies of Lewis, Eliot, Beckett, as well as
"Ulysses" (1980; revised in 1987), "A Homemade World:
The American Modernist Writers" (1975) and "A Colder
Eye: The Modern Irish Writers" (1983).

Over time his prose style grew increasingly graceful,
witty and accessible, prompting C. K. Stead, writing
in The Times Literary Supplement, to call him "the
most readable of living critics." He thought of
writing as an "abnormal act," as he told an
interviewer at U.S. News & World Report in 1983,
rendered an increasingly "quaint skill" by the rise of
other forms of communication.

Yet he scarcely confined his communication to print.
Told by Pound in the early 1950's "to visit the great
men of your own time," Mr. Kenner befriended many of
his subjects, as well as the poet Louis Zukofsky,
Buckminster Fuller and William F. Buckley Jr., who was
best man at his second wedding.

Nor, surprisingly, did he deplore the decline of print
as our main medium. "We forget that most of what
people read when everybody read all the time was junk
— competent junk," he told U.S. News & World Report.
"Now they get it from television. The casual
entertainment people get in The evening from the box
was what they used to get from the short fiction in
The Saturday Evening Post. That magazine and others
like it were the situation comedies and cop shows of
their era. It is not a cultural loss that this
particular use of literacy has been transferred from
one medium to another." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/25/books/25KENN.html

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