Hugh Kenner on Firing Line

I have had the above video open in a browser for several weeks without watching it. I wanted to see Hugh Kenner, but the topic title, "The Political Responsibility of Artists," put me off. I finally screwed up the courage to watch and found it stimulating...I shouldn't have let the title guide me. Kenner is engaging and there's an obvious comfort-level between host and guest. I highly recommend it for Kenner's comments and responses.

A few background facts on the show, which was recorded on June 28, 1974. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had been driven out of the Soviet Union earlier that year, making him one of the major topics of the show. Also of relevance was Kenner's resignation from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences after Ezra Pound's Emerson-Thoreau Medal was rescinded by "central committee" (as Buckley put it). The Academy's actions occurred two years earlier, shortly after Kenner had published The Pound Era. A few other writers of note mentioned during the show include Milton, de Sade, and Céline, particularly in discussions about honoring the art but not the artist.

My favorite section of the show was Kenner's discussion on Samuel Beckett and his involvement in the French Resistance during World War II. At the 29-minute mark, Kenner demonstrates why Waiting for Godot may have been inspired by those experiences. After giving a concise overview of the play, Kenner remarks about a few of the play's lines, “Nobody recognizes that is almost a literal transcription of a Resistance anecdote.”

Even funnier is Kenner's observation that the best American literature are essentially instruction manuals. You'll see what I mean in the video. Kenner's renown may have been for Modernist writing, but he demonstrates a wide-ranging knowledge of literature. His comments on the best of politically inspired writing and what helps it transcend potentially narrow strictures are insightful. Again, highly recommended.

Kenner: “The ability to see the realities that politics handles in non-political terms is a gift which the artist can confer on the rest of us. We are so trapped in political categories that we cannot see any others.”

Reissue planned: Gnomon by Hugh Kenner

Thanks to Anthony @timesflow for tweeting about the planned reissue by Dalkey Archive of Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature by Hugh Kenner. Unfortunately it's not scheduled to be released until next summer, but it's a chance to set aside some money for wonderful essays written in the 1950s about 20th century literature.

From the bookflap of my copy:

The function of criticism, Mr. Kenner says in his provocative preface to Gnomon, is to elucidate. These essays on twentieth century literature clarify, without tedious infighting, both specific works like Williams' Paterson and Pound's Rock Drill Cantos, and the whole achievement of writers like Yeats and Ford. Never soggy, fussy, or commonplace, the essays proceed by quotation and sharp, exact statement; Mr. Kenner succeeds in realizing his subjects as wholes while discussing them in terms of producible fact. The result is to induce not vague appreciation but a renewed and exact understanding of the salient literary developments of our century.

The epigraph quotes from Chapter 85 of Pound's Rock Drill Cantos must be part of his view of the critic: "...study with the mind of a grandson / and watch the time like a hawk." The essay on Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, released as a tetralogy in 1950, alone is worth the price of admission. The breadth and depth of the essays are astounding while providing joy in their reading. From the looks of the Dalkey Archive info, the number of pages is the same so all original essays should be included. Very highly recommended.


Side-side-sidenote: my copy came from the library of J. S. Lewis. While the initials could be for hundreds if not thousands of people, I've wondered if it is the father of the author Jon Samuel Lewis.