Obituary

Hugh Kenner

Literary critic with a passion for Ezra Pound

Jon Elek
Friday November 28, 2003
The Guardian

The north American critic Hugh Kenner, who has died aged 80 following heart
problems, produced some of the most perceptive accounts of literary
modernism. Much of his knowledge was gained at first hand, by following
Ezra Pound's injunction "to visit the great men of your time". Pound
provided the letters of introduction, and his pupil embarked with
unrelenting zest on his grand tour, later described in The Elsewhere
Community (1998), which also contains Pound's definition of modernism as
"simple words placed in natural order".

Thus Kenner befriended the titans of the movement: TS Eliot, Samuel
Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Basil
Bunting and Louis Zukofsky. The only one he could not get to was Ernest
Hemingway, because it would have meant a separate trip to Cuba.

Despite his wanderings, Kenner retained an unswerving fidelity to Pound,
whom he promoted as the central presence in modernist writing. At a time
when Eliot was enthroned as the monarch of contemporary letters, Kenner
argued that the era had, in fact, belonged to Pound.

Though he made his case effectively, it was inevitably regarded as
unconventional and tendentious, since the dedicatee of Eliot's The Waste
Land was being held as a prisoner in St Elizabeth's hospital for the
criminally insane, just outside Washington, DC. He was detained there, from
1946 to 1958, on a treason charge, for making radio broadcasts in support
of Mussolini from wartime Italy.

In 1948, Kenner, who had been born in Peterborough, Ontario, visited Pound
in St Elizabeth's with another Catholic Canadian, Marshall McLuhan.
McLuhan, later best known as a communications scholar, had mentored the
precocious undergraduate to a bachelor's degree (1945) and a master's
(1946) at the University of Toronto, and had written the introduction to
his first book, Paradox In Chesterton (1947).

At McLuhan's prompting, Kenner left Toronto for Yale, where he took a
doctorate in 1950 under the supervision of Cleanth Brooks, the leading
light of American new criticism, with its emphasis on text rather than
biographical and historical background.

At a time when what Kenner called "thickets of misunderstanding" kept Pound
at a distance from most critics and professors of poetry, he took it upon
himself to brush them aside. During one summer holiday, he returned to
Ontario and spent six hours a day for six weeks writing The Poetry Of Ezra
Pound (1951).

His labour of love was published by New Directions Press, a small firm
founded by Pound's old pupil and friend, James Laughlin. It established
Kenner's reputation as a major scholar, and did much to rehabilitate
Pound's literary reputation. As Laughlin put it, Kenner got Pound "listed
on the academic stock exchange".

A job at Santa Barbara College (now the University of California, Santa
Barbara) followed, as did another couple of dozen books - on Joyce, Eliot,
Lewis, Beckett and others, many of them still the strongest in their
fields. Dublin's Joyce (1956) and Joyce's Voices (1978) were succeeded by
Ulysses (1980), still in print and seeking to make Joyce's complex
masterpiece understandable.

Kenner adapted his critical style to suit the particular author under
scrutiny, following Dr Johnson's observation that literary criticism must
be regarded as part of literature or be abandoned altogether. His work
avoids academic jargon, and draws on a massive range of influences, seeing
connections and parallels in unlikely places.

In a Los Angeles Times review, Richard Eder said of Kenner's proactive
approach that "he jumps in, armed and thrashing. He crashes [literature],
like a partygoer... You could not say whether his talking or listening is
done with greater intensity."

Kenner's magnum opus is unquestionably The Pound Era (1971), the result of
two decades of research. This encyclopaedic critical biography explicated
the notoriously difficult poetry of Pound and his contemporaries with
lively authority.

It begins, for instance, with an evocative account of a 1914 encounter
between Pound and Henry James in London: "Toward the evening of a gone
world, the light of its last summer pouring forth into a Chelsea street
found and suf fused the red waistcoat of Henry James, lord of decorum, en
promenade, exposing his Boston niece to the tone of things." Kenner's book
dealt with Pound's literary genius knowledgeably and carefully, and
sympathetically revealed how such a mind could be duped by the vile
ideology of fascism. Kenner himself deplored such politics.

In 1973, he left California for Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where
he remained until 1990. A post at the University of Georgia brought him
once again to a more temperate climate, and he remained there until his
retirement in 1999. He did not receive US citizenship, and found it amusing
to be a perennial "resident alien".

As a student, Kenner had been faced with a choice between writing and
mathematics; his grandfather was a skilled mathematician, and his parents
were classics teachers - the local school in Peterborough is named after
his father. A childhood illness had left him partially deaf, and he took to
reading copiously, reckoning to have covered most of the University of
Toronto syllabus by the time he matriculated.

However, science and technology remained important, and he wrote A Guided
Tour Of Buckminster Fuller (1973), an engaging account of the American
techno-transcendentalist thinker; Geodesic Math And How To Use It (1976),
on the theory behind Fuller's celebrated dome structures; and Chuck Jones:
A Flurry Of Drawings (1994), on the creator of Bugs Bunny and the Road
Runner, arguing that Jones had invented an art that was as precise and
technical as any other. In 1984, he even wrote a user's guide to the Heath
computer, one of which he built himself.

When I met Hugh Kenner last summer, he was dressed in a stripey, light-blue
suit, with a bow tie and glasses slightly askew. Even then though, the
quickness and sensitivity of his mind were evident. He recited long
passages from memory, and told anecdotes of Tom, Sam and Ezra. When I
mentioned that I had come from London, his face registered the vivid
recollection of a gone world.

The Pound Era had been dedicated to the memory of his first wife, Mary
Josephine Waite, with whom he had three daughters and two sons. A year
after her death in 1964, he married Mary Anne Bittner, with whom he had a
son and daughter; she and the seven children survive him.

· William Hugh Kenner, writer and critic, born January 7 1923; died
November 24 2003


http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1095054,00.html