Guy Davenport's The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays

            Davenport’s big book stood on my shelves for years, intimidating me. Finally, with the help of the audiobook Paul Woodson recorded in 2024, I tackled the essays, listening to and reading essays alternately, and found them surprising, enlightening, and entertaining.

            A couple of remarks of Davenport’s help sum up his approach to criticism: “Art is a matter of models” is the clearest of these; a little more cryptic is “the world is all of a piece,” which is slightly illuminated by a little more context:

Art is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world…. Religion, science, and art are alike rooted in the faith that the world is of a piece, that something is common to all its diversity, and that if we knew enough we could see and give a name to its harmony.

For Davenport the myths of northern European or gothic art, of the near and far East, and especially of the Roman and Greek world, are the way artists try to give voice to that harmony. In the title essay, he talks about these realms as the geography of the imagination in Poe, with examples, and then does the same for Joyce, O. Henry, and Grant Wood.

            Davenport is a clear and precise stylist, capable of on the one hand, a charming little New York Times essay of perhaps 1500 words on the writing of Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” and, on the other, attempts in essays of 12,000 words and more to link together the interconnected myths and intertextualities of Shelley, Ruskin, Whitman, Yeats, Joyce, Pound, Hilda Doolittle, Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, and Eudora Welty, whom Davenport believes “one of the greatest of American writers in all our history.”  

He is an inheritor of a newer and more refined version of structuralism when he talks about the world’s harmonies. He is also interested in form, and what he calls architectonics—he admits at one point the influence of the Russian Formalists on his criticism. In an essay on “Narrative Tone and Form,” for example, after pointing out that Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gertrude Stein are “at work on identical linguistic phenomena,” Davenport traces the symmetries and similar cycles in the Iliad, the Odyssey, Dubliners, The Cantos, and other modernist writers—Williams, Olson, and Zukofsky. These writers form a kind of galaxy of influence for Davenport, and when he begins tracing connections in close reading, one often finds such passages as this, where he is discussing an unpublished book of poetry written by Ezra Pound for Hilda Doolittle called Hilda’s Book:

The first poem of Hilda’s Book opens with a hint of Whitman but proceeds as if by Yeats:

Child of the grass

The years pass Above us

Shadows of air All these shall love us

Winds for our fellows

The browns and the yellows

Of autumn our colors.

   But Celtic twilight and Yeatsian diction are but part of the strange beauty of “The Tree.” That a tree can be a persona at all is startling. Joyce, years later, will have a tree speak in his poem “Tilly” (Pomes Penyeach, l927). Pound’s poem trembles between the imitative and a strong originality. It is as precious as the early Yeats while having the masculine boldness of William Morris. It is both Ovidian and Thoreauvian.

I would have said Swinburnian, too.

            The influences Davenport sees operating on a line from Shelley and Yeats through Pound, Olson, and Zukofsky are affected from the sides, as it were, by scientists such as Alexander von Humboldt, Louis Agassiz, and Darwin, and technicians such as Eadward Muybridge. Artists are of course important: Eakins, the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Picasso, Braque, Grant Wood, whom Davenport calls “the great Formalist painter,” and Pavel Tchelitchew, who “began to conceal images within images in his pictures…in the 1930s” and in Cache-Cache, Phenomena, and other paintings revived a tradition of illusion in painting going back to Arcimboldo, da Vinci, and painters of trompe l’oeil works. The music of Charles Ives was also important.

            Davenport thinks appropriation a most suitable form of construction in literature: he loves, for example, Wordsworth’s beginning The Prelude with Satan’s words from Paradise Lost, reworked as “escaped / From the vast city, where I long had pined / A discontented sojourner; now free, / Free as a bird to settle where I will. / What dwelling shall receive me?”

            Many of these pieces are reviews—of one of Donald Hall’s collections of literary anecdotes, of a biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins, of a meeting at the Library of Congress to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Poetry magazine. The style is consistent, though a careful observer could tease out differences when he is writing for the New York Times, National Review, or other large circulation periodicals versus his pieces that were published in little magazines and literary venues like Arion and The Iowa Review.

            Every reader will have favorites here. Mine include the comparisons of translations of the opening of Book Three of the Odyssey in the review of Richmond Lattimore’s version—which may appeal only to those of us who have struggled to learn Greek and read at least some Homer. And I like Davenport as teacher, as when he dives into close reading of Marianne Moore’s poems, or gives us a freewheeling interpretation of Stevens’s “The Comedian as the Letter C.” But there is scarcely an essay of the forty where I have not stopped at some point to marvel at what he was doing.

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES to be published by Genius Books

     Those of you who tune in for the Uncommon Mysteries I post here will be happy to learn that Genius Books has agreed to publish a collection of them to be titled Uncommon Mysteries: An Accidental History of Mystery Fiction. I'm hoping that the book will be out in the late summer of 2026. Genius Books published my last book in 1924--the one illustrated to the right here. These mystery notes began after I retired from teaching, as commentaries on the public radio station WKMS at Murray State University in Kentucky. I got interested in other writing projects after a year or two, but I have continued the mystery notes on my blog, and I now find I have notes on 120 authors and about 150 books, dating from the nineteenth century up to the 2020s, and that taken together they give a history of mystery fiction and all its subgenres of locked-room mysteries, cozies, police procedurals, hard-boiled detective stories, and so on. 

    I'll be continuing to post about my reading here, but for the mystery notes you'll have to wait for the book. Thanks for reading. 

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Dorothy Sayers, Whose Body (1923) and The Documents in the Case (1930)

             Dorothy Sayers, in addition to being one of the most popular writers of the Golden Age of Mystery between the wars, was also a scholar of classical and modern languages, a teacher, a playwright, and a translator of Dante. She invented her detective hero, Lord Peter Wimsey (a courtesy title; his older brother is a duke), in a 1923 novel, Whose Body, which had mixed reviews but began a very successful writing career in which Wimsey was featured in eleven novels and dozens of short stories. In Whose Body, a macabre crime involves switching the body of a murder victim with that of a pauper brought from the workhouse where he died to a teaching hospital, with the idea that the murder victim’s body will be dissected in the anatomy classes. The murderer transports the pauper’s body to the bathtub of an architect whose apartment shares a rooftop with his own. The murdered man is then dissected in the lab and an attempt made to remove all traces of his identity. But some distinctive scars remain.

            Lord Peter Wimsey alternately charms witnesses or stuns them with elaborate stories and persiflage. His friendship with Parker, a Scotland Yard chief inspector, gives him access there. Lord Peter’s valet/butler Bunter was his sergeant during the war and treats his occasional episodes of shell-shock. Bunter is also Wimsey’s crime photographer and research assistant. The Dowager Duchess of Denver is one of the characters, almost as bloviating as Lord Peter, but equally sharp of observation. The older brother, the current Duke, is little more than a caricature of the aristocracy.

            Sayers also wrote a non-Wimsey mystery, The Documents in the Case with Robert Eustace, whose real name was Eustace Robert Barton, the doctor who collaborated with L. T. Meade [Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith] on several mystery story collections around the turn of the century. He may merely have made the initial suggestion about how a poisoning might be discovered, as well as giving other technical advice. The discovery turns on the fact that for certain compounds, including the poison in one variety of mushroom, the natural compound is composed of one enantiomorph, while the synthetic, laboratory-produced compound is racemic, mixed equally of the two enantiomorphs and thus not rotating light left or right in a polarimeter.

            Sayers elected to tell the story in letters or transcripts of statements by different characters, adopting an approach that was popular in 18^th and 19^th century fiction (Clarissa, the original draft of Pride and Prejudice and The Moonstone) but somewhat passé in 1930. Her only epistolary mystery novel is also her only collaboration and her only mystery without Lord Peter Wimsey.

            Novelist John Munting, sharing rooms with the artist Harwood Lathom, becomes entangled with Lathom first by being mistaken for him one night when Lathom is visiting his mistress and landlady Margaret Harrison, and later when he accompanies Lathom to a remote cabin belonging to Harrison’s husband George, whom the two men find dead, apparently having mistakenly cooked and eaten poisonous mushrooms. Harrison’s son Paul investigates knowing his father would not have made such a mistake. A crazy servant in the Harrison’s household and later a venal one in Lathom’s help complicate and then elucidate the mystery, respectively.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: The Best American Mystery Stories 2005, edited by Joyce Carol Oates (2005)

             The first mystery in The Best American Mystery Stories 2005 is really a crime story, and an indication why Joyce Carol Oates was chosen to edit this collection, since she’s not a mystery writer. The books she writes under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly, sometimes billed as mysteries, are crime stories where family secrets come slowly out in the narration, hardly mysteries in the usual genre sense. Such quibbling takes nothing away from her literary judgment though, and this collection contains topnotch stories that have appeared not only in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine but also in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Atlantic, and various small magazines.

            Many will consider the jewel of the collection to be the longish story called “Jack Duggan’s Law,” written by George V. Higgins. Higgins, who wrote the mystery classic The Friends of Eddie Coyle, died in 1999, and this story’s delayed publication in 2005 may make it the last of his works to see print.

            But there are other treats as well. Stuart Kaminsky has a story called “The Shooting of John Roy Worth,” where we learn in the first few paragraphs that the town’s sign painter, probably mentally retarded and certainly mentally disturbed, intends to kill the only celebrity from the little town of Pardo, Texas. From there the story moves toward its conclusion quickly and inevitably. But Kaminsky’s rapidly drawn, convincing characters provide a surprise ending.

            Scott Wolven’s story, “Barracuda,” describes in the best hard-boiled tradition an upstate New York subculture in which the usual human virtues of honesty, loyalty, and pity have no place.

            Here’s the opening from a story by Dennis Lehane that he calls “Until Gwen”:

  Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon, with an 8-ball of coke in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat. Two minutes into the ride, the prison still hanging tilted in the rearview, Mandy tells you that she only hooks part-time. The rest of the time she does light secretarial for an independent video chain and tends bar, two Sundays a month, at the local VFW. But she feels her calling—her true calling in life—is to write.

            That opening, which I would characterize as Elmore Leonard meets Garrison Keillor, might fool you into thinking that “Until Gwen” will be a comic story. But it keeps on getting darker and darker until, as Lehane himself admits in the biographical notes at the end of the book, “it ended up being arguably the darkest thing I’ve ever written.” And that, coming from the man who wrote Mystic River, is dark indeed.

            On the other hand, Daniel Orozco’s story, “Officers Weep,” really is funny throughout. Orozco manages to present a mystery, a love story, and some urban social comedy while never deviating from the form of police reports, a sequence of them from two lines to two dozen lines long  It’s an ingenious narrative device, and Orozco captures the authentic sound of police lingo.

            Among these and the fifteen other stories in this collection, I think you’ll find something you like.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Edmund Pearson, Studies in Murder (1924)

            Pearson’s important contribution to the genre of True Crime recounts what was known in 1924 of five murder cases, using court records, newspaper accounts, and other nonfiction sources to recreate crimes and subsequent trials from 1812 to 1904.

            Pearson spends the most time with the Borden case: the trail and acquittal of Lizzie Borden for the ax murder of her father Andrew Borden and her mother Abby on August 4, 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts. The jury took only an hour and a half to acquit her. Although she made conflicting and implausible statements about where she was during the killings, she was probably acquitted because of the lack of physical evidence, especially no proved murder weapon and no blood on her clothes seen by anyone who encountered her shortly after the murders.

            Then he takes up “The Twenty-third Street Murder” of Benjamin Nathan, a rich Manhattan stockbroker who was bludgeoned to death in 1870. No one was tried for Nathan’s murder, though his playboy son Washington Nathan was suspected. Later reports from convicts pointed toward a robbery planned by several people.

            There was a conviction in the 1896 killings aboard the barkentine Herbert Fuller of the captain, his wife, and the second officer. The first mate, Thomas Bram, was convicted, retried, and convicted again, serving fifteen years for the murders.

            In the last two cases Pearson treats, Charles Tucker was electrocuted for the 1904 murder of Mabel Page in Weston, Vermont, and Stephen Boorns was about to be executed for the murder of his brother-in-law Russell Colvin when Russell Colvin was found and brought to the court in Manchester, Vermont, where the murder was supposed to have taken place.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: William Roughead, Classic Crimes (1951)

            Mystery writers were inspired by true crime stories, and one of the best chroniclers in that line was William Roughead. Roughead was a Scottish lawyer and student of crime. If he didn’t invent the True Crime genre, he certainly helped make it popular in books starting with his 1906 account of the trial of Pritchard the poisoner. His friends included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with whom he worked to clear Oscar Slater, Henry James, who enjoyed Roughead’s true crime narratives, and Edmund Lester Pearson, whose 1924 Studies in Murder, with its centerpiece the Lizzy Borden case, also helped to make true crime a popular literary genre.

            This is a summary of a dozen of the crimes that Roughead treats at length in his various books. One is the case of Oscar Slater, wrongfully convicted of a murder that took place in late 1908, who served nineteen years of a life sentence that had already been commuted from a death sentence. Slater’s was one of two cases in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle interested himself, and Doyle committed himself for the first ₤1,000 of the expenses for legal redress for Slater, who was released in 1927 and whose conviction was overturned in 1928. The case had been bungled from the beginning, with many false eyewitness identifications coached by the police, the prosecutor’s absurd mistaken argument that a small tack hammer in Slater’s possession was the murder weapon when photographs and the opinion of the first doctor who examined the victim indicated that a chair was used (the doctor was not called at the trial), and other notorious gaffes, but the telling point in the dismissal was the outrageous bias shown by the presiding judge.

            Roughead’s first book in 1906 was about the 1865 trial of Dr. Pritchard the poisoner, and he gives a summary of the case here. Pritchard was tried for poisoning his wife and his mother-in-law, but he seems to have dabbled in other methods earlier. He almost surely killed and then burned the corpse of a servant girl in her bed in a top floor room in his house in 1863. The girl was perhaps less tractable than the one he hired and seduced right after the death of the first servant. Of this liaison Mrs. Pritchard apparently knew, and she allowed it to continue. The defense at Pritchard’s trial attempted to put the blame on his servant/mistress, but unsuccessfully. Pritchard’s hanging in July 1865 was the last public execution in Glasgow.

            “To Meet Miss Madeleine Smith” describes an especially sensational case, concerning a young woman who apparently poisoned her lover Pierre Emile L’Angelier, a clerk considerably below her social standing. When her parents arranged a marriage for her with a prosperous Glasgow merchant, Smith tried to break off her affair. L’Angelier refused and threated to make her explicit letters public. She bought arsenic on at least two occasions, and he died of arsenic poisoning, but no one saw them together in the days leading up to his death, and the 15-man jury returned the distinctly Scotch verdict of “Not Proven.” The year was 1857, the poisoning took place in Glasgow, and the trial was in Edinburgh.

            The Sandyford Murder in July, 1862 was a notorious case in which a servant girl was killed with a cleaver. The murderer was certainly the landlord, James Fleming, but a friend of the murdered girl, Jessie McLachlan, was convicted on Fleming’s evidence as witness for the prosecution, a circumstance that in Scotland sheltered him from being accused of the crime himself.

            A dry sense of humor, a pleasantly old-fashioned style to fit these cases out of the dusty annals of the law, and a salting of Scots phrases all enliven this material, which is sensational enough to begin with.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Circular Staircase (1908)

            Fortyish spinster Rachel Innes has taken a house in the country for the summer, and goes there with her nervous maid Liddy, who, “with a face as long as the moral law,” is “never so happy as when she is making herself wretched.” Intrusions and alarums happen even before the arrival of Rachel’s nephew Halsey and niece Gertrude, whom Rachel has raised ever since the death of her sister, when the children were small. Halsey is in love with the daughter of the landlord of the house, and the landlord’s son is soon murdered, shot from the circular staircase during one of the many nightly ruckuses. Gertrude is in love with the cashier of the landlord’s bank, which soon fails, with the blame falling on the young cashier.

            Rachel helps the detective, Jameson, to work out the mystery, being the one who interviews the dying cook, and also the one who finds the secret room in the house. The slow-moving plot, and its many intricacies, mar the book, but it shows up on many lists of classic mysteries and is remembered as the prime exemplar of the Had-I-But-Known school of mystery fiction, where the narrator often uses some variation of that phrase to foreshadow later plot developments.