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The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature and Art
Ranging over art and architecture, religion, and literature, these essays create an extraordinary collage of ideas, commentary, and criticism from one of this country's most brilliant writers. An eclectic stylist who crafts sentences like no one else, Davenport will fascinate "people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things".
339 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1996
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 21, 2022
I had greater interest in the essays on literature than art, but that's because I know so little about art and in-depth dives don't work so well when you'd be better off with a primer.
In any event, mostly 3-5 page pieces with the occasional longer one, so easy reading and opinionated as hell, which is what you like in an essayist. (If you're going to write an essay, act like you own the joint.)
Here's a representative paragraph from the essay "Stephen Crane":
"There's nothing extraordinary about Crane's prose in itself. His words are simple. His images have been praised for their startling originality. O. Henry had a better ear for dialogue. The clue, I think, is in his attack. 'None of them knew the color of the sky' became for Conrad and his circle as magic a sentence as the last one of Flaubert's 'Hérodias.' Maggie begins with a rock fight among children. The Red Badge with lifting fog that discloses a bivouac. This abruptness is the first step in masterful timing. It is Crane's pace that distinguishes him. It varies from an amble to quickstep but it is always brisk. He was a superb director of action. He is never retrograde like Conrad or diffuse like James. He has the clarity of a comic strip, and a comic strip's coloring (red, yellow, blue, black, white -- his palette is as distinctive as his narrative pace)."
You, like me, might wonder what Davenport means by "retrograde" when referring to Joseph Conrad's work, but that's how it goes in these essays. He has certain expectations of his readers, like they might be as well-read as he is. As he has read and actually enjoyed Joyce's Finnegans Wake, I'd say this is an assumption of massive proportions, but still, it's fun to take the ride and pretend.
In any event, mostly 3-5 page pieces with the occasional longer one, so easy reading and opinionated as hell, which is what you like in an essayist. (If you're going to write an essay, act like you own the joint.)
Here's a representative paragraph from the essay "Stephen Crane":
"There's nothing extraordinary about Crane's prose in itself. His words are simple. His images have been praised for their startling originality. O. Henry had a better ear for dialogue. The clue, I think, is in his attack. 'None of them knew the color of the sky' became for Conrad and his circle as magic a sentence as the last one of Flaubert's 'Hérodias.' Maggie begins with a rock fight among children. The Red Badge with lifting fog that discloses a bivouac. This abruptness is the first step in masterful timing. It is Crane's pace that distinguishes him. It varies from an amble to quickstep but it is always brisk. He was a superb director of action. He is never retrograde like Conrad or diffuse like James. He has the clarity of a comic strip, and a comic strip's coloring (red, yellow, blue, black, white -- his palette is as distinctive as his narrative pace)."
You, like me, might wonder what Davenport means by "retrograde" when referring to Joseph Conrad's work, but that's how it goes in these essays. He has certain expectations of his readers, like they might be as well-read as he is. As he has read and actually enjoyed Joyce's Finnegans Wake, I'd say this is an assumption of massive proportions, but still, it's fun to take the ride and pretend.
November 2, 2015
In our time the anthropoligists and philosophers have tried to find the boundary line between wild and tame, nature and culture, the uncivilized and the civilized. The line is easily found for other species. But we will have tamed ourselves, and how?
Halloween has become more important since we bought this house. It is the only day of the year when I talk at length to our neighbors. Sure, the guy next door will ask me about the Heidegger I'm befuddled with as I struggle to tend to my grilling during summer's dog days, but it is only on that spooky night do we as a loose gathering of people who habitate in such proximity actually listen and espouse. This season I had devoted more time than any of recent memory to reading about the supernatural, the chilling and those unnamed bumps in the blackness of our primitive souls. When the actual holiday arrived I had stumbled across that morning a couple of volumes of Davenport and subsequently discovered myself rathered adhered. Davenport is like a neighbor who when asked attempts to inform and entertain. I loved the pieces on Joyce, Whitman and Thomas Merton. The latter has been a source of serial concidences as of late.
Halloween has become more important since we bought this house. It is the only day of the year when I talk at length to our neighbors. Sure, the guy next door will ask me about the Heidegger I'm befuddled with as I struggle to tend to my grilling during summer's dog days, but it is only on that spooky night do we as a loose gathering of people who habitate in such proximity actually listen and espouse. This season I had devoted more time than any of recent memory to reading about the supernatural, the chilling and those unnamed bumps in the blackness of our primitive souls. When the actual holiday arrived I had stumbled across that morning a couple of volumes of Davenport and subsequently discovered myself rathered adhered. Davenport is like a neighbor who when asked attempts to inform and entertain. I loved the pieces on Joyce, Whitman and Thomas Merton. The latter has been a source of serial concidences as of late.
August 1, 2020
My favorite writer.
June 28, 2013
As a place marker for an eventual review of this collection, I invite you to listen to this beautiful music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbWTUt...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbWTUt...
September 22, 2022
Really enjoyed reading this, learned a lot, love his style, but four stars because, let's say, his social, moral, and religious imagination isn't entirely congenial
June 30, 2025
I read and enjoyed most of O. Henry's stories in high school. I thought of them as light reading. I recently read and enjoyed a biography of O. Henry. It reminded me that years ago I had read an essay by Guy Davenport about O. Henry. That essay convinced me that there was more to O. Henry and triggered my long-time interest in him.
I decided to look up that essay. It is in this 1996 essay collection. Guy Davenport (1927-2005) was a brilliant and interesting guy. He is one of those intellectuals whose reputations suffered because his interests were so broad. He wrote almost fifty books. He was a poet, a novelist, a painter, a translator, an essayist and prolific letter writer. He was a serious scholar of modern literature and modern art. He made significant translations of classical Greek works.
I have savored his essay. His fiction and poetry are a bit too avant-garde for me, and I am too ignorant of modern art to appreciate his paintings. His essays are brilliant. He issued four collections of essays and there was a posthumous collection issued, "The Geography of the Imagination", which is the place to start.
Davenport had no grand theory. He loved good writing. He appreciated authors who took chances, and he could explain what they were up to. He had a huge range. The first two essay are good examples of his range in subject and tone.
The first essay in this collection, the title essay, is starts with an unfinished fragment by Franz Kafka entitled "The Hunter Gracchus",. From there Davenport looks at the ancient Roman noble, Gracchus, the Wilkie Collins novel, "Armadale", James Joyce, the holocaust, Edgar Allen Poe and much else. I struggled, in an enjoyable way, with it. I think one of the ideas is the way all literature is one thing and individual works show pieces of it. I could be all wrong.
The second essay is, "On Reading". Davenport writes "I was thought to be retarded as a child, and all evidence indicated that I was." He says that the first thing he remembers reading was the Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. He tells how he gradually became a reader. "I think I learned quite early that that the judgements of my teachers were probably a report of their ignorance." He ends this way, "We will always return to the private and inviolable act of reading as our culture's way of developing an individual."
Davenport was an omnivore. He has essays in this volume on the Shakers, Thomas Merton, Donald Bartheleme, what is wrong with our cities, Thoreau, Darwin, Picasso, Gibbon, John Cheever and much more. He has interesting thought-provoking things to say about all of it. He is interested in telling us about things we should know about. There are no hatchet jobs. He doesn't waste time on things not worth wasting time on. (Although he does have several snide comments on Ernest Hemingway. "Hemingway was totally devoid of a sense of humor.")
He writes sentences that get me to stop, think and savor.
"It is difficult to distinguish gratuitous meanness from greed."
"Christianity is still a force of great strength, imagination and moral beauty if you can find it despite the churches and the dogma."
Davenport loved wisdom and struggled very hard to find it and share it.
(Thirty years later, the O. Henry essay was a good as I remembered
I decided to look up that essay. It is in this 1996 essay collection. Guy Davenport (1927-2005) was a brilliant and interesting guy. He is one of those intellectuals whose reputations suffered because his interests were so broad. He wrote almost fifty books. He was a poet, a novelist, a painter, a translator, an essayist and prolific letter writer. He was a serious scholar of modern literature and modern art. He made significant translations of classical Greek works.
I have savored his essay. His fiction and poetry are a bit too avant-garde for me, and I am too ignorant of modern art to appreciate his paintings. His essays are brilliant. He issued four collections of essays and there was a posthumous collection issued, "The Geography of the Imagination", which is the place to start.
Davenport had no grand theory. He loved good writing. He appreciated authors who took chances, and he could explain what they were up to. He had a huge range. The first two essay are good examples of his range in subject and tone.
The first essay in this collection, the title essay, is starts with an unfinished fragment by Franz Kafka entitled "The Hunter Gracchus",. From there Davenport looks at the ancient Roman noble, Gracchus, the Wilkie Collins novel, "Armadale", James Joyce, the holocaust, Edgar Allen Poe and much else. I struggled, in an enjoyable way, with it. I think one of the ideas is the way all literature is one thing and individual works show pieces of it. I could be all wrong.
The second essay is, "On Reading". Davenport writes "I was thought to be retarded as a child, and all evidence indicated that I was." He says that the first thing he remembers reading was the Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. He tells how he gradually became a reader. "I think I learned quite early that that the judgements of my teachers were probably a report of their ignorance." He ends this way, "We will always return to the private and inviolable act of reading as our culture's way of developing an individual."
Davenport was an omnivore. He has essays in this volume on the Shakers, Thomas Merton, Donald Bartheleme, what is wrong with our cities, Thoreau, Darwin, Picasso, Gibbon, John Cheever and much more. He has interesting thought-provoking things to say about all of it. He is interested in telling us about things we should know about. There are no hatchet jobs. He doesn't waste time on things not worth wasting time on. (Although he does have several snide comments on Ernest Hemingway. "Hemingway was totally devoid of a sense of humor.")
He writes sentences that get me to stop, think and savor.
"It is difficult to distinguish gratuitous meanness from greed."
"Christianity is still a force of great strength, imagination and moral beauty if you can find it despite the churches and the dogma."
Davenport loved wisdom and struggled very hard to find it and share it.
(Thirty years later, the O. Henry essay was a good as I remembered
October 13, 2023
I'm kind of grading on a slope here because Davenport pretty much sets the moon for me, but this was maybe a more annoying collection of essays, book reviews, etc, than some of his other collections. Or at least compared to Every Force.
There's good writing in here on Kafka and Hawthorne, some interesting stuff on paintings (mostly late 19th/ early 20th C). If you're a Merton guy, there's a long Merton section. I don't know him as well as I should, so I was like, eh. There are recurrent appearances by some things Davenport was obsessed with in the 80s when most of these were written, like Charles Fourier and the early church/ gnostic gospels.
There are, I think, three selections which are fragments from notebooks, which are, well, what you'd fear Davenport's notebooks would be like-- earnest, making terrible jokes, and showing the obsessive stuff that comes off as cool in the published work as more creepy. There's also a longish essay where he explains the themes of his collections of stories, which I guess is great if you're wondering what was up with those books, but which served only to remind me of how unfun it was to read those books, esp compared to the wit and sparkle of most of his contemporaneous non-fiction.
Oh well. They can't all be gems, and there are some really good things in here and a couple dodgy opinions.
There's good writing in here on Kafka and Hawthorne, some interesting stuff on paintings (mostly late 19th/ early 20th C). If you're a Merton guy, there's a long Merton section. I don't know him as well as I should, so I was like, eh. There are recurrent appearances by some things Davenport was obsessed with in the 80s when most of these were written, like Charles Fourier and the early church/ gnostic gospels.
There are, I think, three selections which are fragments from notebooks, which are, well, what you'd fear Davenport's notebooks would be like-- earnest, making terrible jokes, and showing the obsessive stuff that comes off as cool in the published work as more creepy. There's also a longish essay where he explains the themes of his collections of stories, which I guess is great if you're wondering what was up with those books, but which served only to remind me of how unfun it was to read those books, esp compared to the wit and sparkle of most of his contemporaneous non-fiction.
Oh well. They can't all be gems, and there are some really good things in here and a couple dodgy opinions.
November 24, 2014
The Hunter Gracchus collects pieces of Davenport's non-fiction not otherwise found in The Geography of the Imagination, which is, honestly, the superior anthology. But there’s plenty of good stuff here too.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews