Förra året publicerades ett urval av korrespondensen mellan James Laughlin och Guy Davenport. Jag vill ha.

Recension i Washington Post.

When girl-crazy Laughlin brings up sex, Davenport responds that "[the poet] David Jones's biographer tells me that David had one sensual encounter -- lying and hugging a woman on a couch. I find this moving, and somehow beautiful -- it would have interested Kierkegaard, who apparently had no sensual experience at all. Flaubert buggered an Egyptian boy, in case he needed to describe same. Walt Whitman slept with his retarded brother, and God knows what they did in bed."

At the head of another letter, Davenport casually tosses off that it is the 75th anniversary of the publication of Tarzan, and that Edgar Rice Burroughs first thought to call his hero Zantar. He mentions that "the wonderful old English word for sticks picked up in the woods is estovers." He confesses that "My only theory about writing is that words have to mean something." And "I'll go on record that the most interesting human being I've ever heard of is Charles Marie François Fourier, followed by Herakleitos, W. Shakespeare, and Plutarch."

Laughlin quickly shoots back: "You can come up with more provoking ideas than Brer Rabbit and Possum together. Where do you keep them all? On cards? How can you remember so much? What does your head feel like with so much ideational circulation? Does it give you migraine, pressure of ideas trying to burst out? Or make you feel tipsy?" He later tells Davenport, "Your letters are the best that have ever blessed me. Ezra's were too jumpy, and [Kenneth] Rexroth's were too vituperative. Yours have the best style and the way the phrases are assembled is magical."

But how does the author of The Geography of the Imagination and Da Vinci's Bicycle and 7 Greeks know so much? Davenport casually reveals that "one scribbles in notebooks, else things will get away from you, and then in making a story" -- or an essay or a review -- "mines the notebooks." He clearly bases his own criticism and fiction on the observations and hard facts harvested from decades of omnivorous reading. But who, alas, values such wide learning now?