TORONTO — Hugh Kenner, who died last week at age 80, began his
career as a great literary critic in a characteristically eccentric
way, by reading a book smuggled in by a priest and visiting a
genius locked away in a madhouse. To understand why the book and
the genius changed Kenner’s life we have to return to Kenner’s
formative years, in the provincial backwater that was Canada in the
1940s.
From a young age, Hugh Kenner was equally interested in the arts
and the sciences. As an undergraduate entering the University of
Toronto in 1941 Kenner had to decide whether he wanted to major in
mathematics and physics or literary studies. Literature won out
over science but Kenner would remain blissfully free of the sniffy
disdain for technology that so many cultured people confuse with
humanism.
Canada was an inhospitable place for a budding scholar of
modernism: the University of Toronto curriculum stopped dead-cold
at 1850. More contemporary books were not only disdained, they were
often forbidden by the government. At Canada’s skittish border,
novels by Balzac, Zola, D.H. Lawrence, and James Joyce were kept
out of a country that feared anything foreign and new. One modern
masterpiece Kenner did have access to was Joyce’s Finnegans
Wake, tolerated because it was deemed incomprehensible.
Excited by Wake, Kenner discovered that Joyce’s
Ulysses, otherwise verboten in Canada, could be found in
the restricted access section of the University of Toronto library.
However, in order to take a look at the illicit text, Kenner needed
to secure two letters of reference: one from a religious authority
and one from a medical doctor. Kenner knew a priest who could vouch
for his morals, but, unfortunately, was not able to find an M.D.
who could attest to the fact that reading Joyce would not be
corrupting. Ultimately, Kenner had a family friend, a Jesuit
priest, smuggle into Canada a copy of the greatest novel of the
twentieth century.
Compared to the traditional literature, pre-1850 vintage, Joyce
seemed wild and chaotic. A friend of the young Kenner argued that
he shouldn’t expect to find coherence in modern culture, that you
can only “just let it hit you.” This despairing notion haunted
Kenner, raising what he called “the generic twentieth-century
problem, discontinuity.” As Kenner notes in his book
Bucky, reading Joyce and the other modernists forced him
to wonder whether we “still have lines of communication open with
Jefferson, Socrates, Christ? Or have we spot-welded about ourselves
a world we can’t think about? Must you just let it hit you?”
Kenner was never willing to write off contemporary culture as
beyond understanding and he soon found a mentor who shared his hope
in finding an underlying order beneath the surface chaos of modern
life and literature. Marshall McLuhan, later famous as a gnomic
media guru, was then a young English professor interested in the
parallels between literature and mass culture.
Sharing a fascination with technology and modern culture,
McLuhan and Kenner became fast friends. In the warmth of their
initial enthusiasm, they had planned to co-write several books,
including studies of T.S. Eliot and the cartoonist Al Capp. (Kenner
would write the Eliot book alone and the Capp project never came
off, although Kenner eventually wrote a book on animation director
Chuck Jones.)
Both Kenner and McLuhan felt that the great modernists should
not be seen as representing a permanent break from the past.
Rather, writers like Joyce and Eliot helped us re-connect with
tradition, but re-energizing the stories found in Homer and
Shakespeare for our times.
More than intellectual interests drew Kenner and McLuhan
together. Both men were born Protestants but found religious solace
in Catholicism. McLuhan converted in 1937 and Kenner would do the
same in 1964 (although he had clearly been within the ambit of
Catholicism for many years prior). As Catholics enthusiastic about
modernist culture and even some forms of lowbrow popular
entertainment, Kenner and McLuhan cut against the grain of their
adopted faith.
After all, Roman Catholicism at that time still lived under the
shadow of Pius IX’s 1864 “Syllabus of Errors,” which condemned the
idea that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself
… with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.”
Kenner would lament the fact that “middlebrow Catholic
intellectuals” of the early twentieth century “found a facile role
in condemning modernity en bloc.…Alienation from the
whole century could be made to seem a Catholic English layman’s
moral duty.” In their own work, Kenner and McLuhan heralded a newer
and more confident Catholic mood of Vatican II, where the church
sought to reconcile itself with modernity.
In June 1948, Kenner and McLuhan made a fateful trip to visit
Ezra Pound, then incarcerated as a mental patient St. Elizabeth’s
Hospital in Washington, D.C. After his wartime support for
Mussolini and alleged descent into madness, Pound’s personal and
literary reputation was at a low. Yet Kenner found in Pound’s
company a sane genius. “Enthralled by the master, I resolved that
if no one else would make the case for Ezra Pound as a poet, then I
would,” Kenner once recalled.
With McLuhan as an intellectual ally and Pound as a poet needing
a champion, the trajectory of Kenner’s career was set. Kenner would
always remain a loyal Poundian: Kenner’s book The Pound
Era (1971) is by far the best tribute that poet has received
and a classic in twentieth century literary criticism. By contrast,
Kenner’s friendship with McLuhan would fray. Because Kenner was
always a much more facile and readable writer than McLuhan, his
early essays and books got a great deal of attention. Quite
unfairly, McLuhan accused Kenner of stealing his ideas.
The reality was that McLuhan was at his best as an oral thinker,
rather like Socrates, who developed his sharpest thoughts in
conversation with bright students. Yet when McLuhan tried to
transcribe his thoughts, the results were usually a mess,
half-developed notions splattered all over the page. McLuhan needed
Kenner to complete his thoughts and give them form. Plato had
performed a similar function for Socrates.
Unlike McLuhan, Kenner was a phrasemaker: his best expository
prose hummed and sparkled with wit. It’s hard to quote a small
passage from Kenner to give a feel for his work, since his greatest
effects were in meaty paragraphs. But consider this tribute Kenner
wrote to the literary tradition of the “stoic comedian”:
Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett are their own greatest
inventions, and the books they contrived, or had their contrivances
contrive, record a century of intellectual history with intricate
and moving fidelity: suffering our partner the machine to mechanize
all that the hand can do yet remaining obstinately, gaily, living;
courting a dead end but discovering how not to die.
Here, compactly, is the essential Kenner theme: that modernists
incorporated the mechanical forces of contemporary life precisely
to keep the humanist heritage alive.
Kenner’s genius was always in doing the unexpected: showing that
Pound’s poetry illustrated the principles of fractal math, arguing
that Alexander Pope anticipated the techniques of Pop Art,
demonstrating that Bugs Bunny cartoons gained their speed and
energy from tight-fisted economic policies at the Warner Brothers
Studio.
All of these are unlikely connections, yet Kenner made them real
and convincing. He never simply accepted the world as it appeared,
but always looked for deeper patterns that demonstrated coherence
and order. Perhaps Kenner’s Catholic faith gave him confidence to
carry out his inquiries, sure in the ultimate goodness of creation.
Yet even if those of us who don’t share his faith can still cherish
the beautiful patterns he uncovered.
