Saturday Links

Remembering Guy Davenport, British war grave gardeners in France, visiting the CIA’s creative writing group, the persistence of the blackboard, and more.

Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Good morning! John Jeremiah Sullivan remembers Guy Davenport: “My grandmother lived just two blocks away. I could walk to visit him. His house was built in 1923, meaning it turned a century old last year, A squat, two-story brick house with a broad wooden staircase inside . . . This would have been 1999 or 2000. I was a books editor at Harper’s. My friend Roger Hodge said, ‘Hey, don’t you know Guy Davenport?’ Guy and I had corresponded. I must have dropped his name — Oops! I wrote to him and asked if he would write a monthly books column. I was surprised when he agreed, though now looking back I can see how it was a gratifying invitation for him, at that phase in his career . . .  After Guy died somebody tactlessly asked Bonnie Jean if he was gay. She said something quite colourful about how good the sex had been. I remember sitting with them in front of Guy’s ground-floor fireplace. He would burn trash in there, paper bags and empty cigarette packs. Now and then they would scrounge around for more stuff to throw in, Especially after they’d exhausted the stack of rejected review copies, talking that famous Guy Davenport talk, which will never exist again, literary-historical free-association punctuated with dramatic pauses, ready to laugh but rarely silly, sometimes gossipy, sometimes bitchy. He might tell you about a conversation that he had with his neighbours or about one that he had with Samuel Beckett at an old café in Paris. He told me an anecdote about a visit he’d had from Cormac McCarthy.”