Hugh Kenner; literary critic, writer, professor
Hyfler/Rosner
Hugh Kenner, Commentator on Literary Modernism, Dies at 80
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
Hugh Kenner, the critic, author and professor of literature regarded as
America's foremost commentator on literary modernism, especially the work of
Ezra Pound and James Joyce, died yesterday at his home in Athens, Ga. He was
80.
He had been suffering from heart problems, his wife, Mary Anne Kenner, said.
The variety of Mr. Kenner's interests was contained in 25 books of his own
(he contributed to 200 more) and nearly 1,000 articles, as well as
broadcasts and recordings. He wrote commandingly on everything from Irish
poetry to geodesic math and Li'l Abner's pappy (Lucifer Ornamental Yokum),
to the Heath/Zenith Z-100 computer (one of which he built for himself and
then wrote the user's guide) and the animated cartoons of Chuck Jones.
But it was for his pioneering guide to English-language literary modernism
and for his books "Dublin's Joyce" (1956), "The Pound Era" (1971) and
"Joyce's Voices" (1978) that Mr. Kenner was best known. In these works and
others he employed the techniques proposed by the writers themselves to
define new standards by which to judge their work.
In "The Pound Era," perhaps his masterwork, he tried to show how the
American expatriate poet absorbed the altered sense of time created by
Einstein's revolution and helped to pass it on to artists like Joyce,
Wyndham Lewis, Eliot, William Carlos Williams and the sculptor Henri
Gaudier-Brzeska.
While some faulted Mr. Kenner for attributing to Pound too much prominence
in the scheme of modern art, no one failed to be impressed by the vigor and
importance of Mr. Kenner's analysis.
In a 1988 review of "A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers," the
critic Richard Eder wrote in The Los Angeles Times: "Kenner doesn't write
about literature; he jumps in, armed and thrashing. He crashes it, like a
party-goer who refuses to hover near the door but goes right up to the guest
of honor, plumps himself down, sniffs at the guest's dinner, eats some and
begins a one-to-one discussion. You could not say whether his talking or his
listening is done with greater intensity."
William Hugh Kenner was born in Peterborough, Ontario, on Jan. 7, 1923, the
son of Henry Rowe Hocking Kenner, the principal, instructor of Latin and
Greek and baseball coach of Peterborough Collegiate and Vocational Institute
(now School), and Mary Isabel (Williams) Kenner, a classics teacher. After
graduating from the Peterborough institute, he attended the University of
Toronto, where he studied under Marshall McLuhan, taking his bachelor's in
1945 and master's in 1946, with a gold medal in English. He had difficulty
deciding whether to study English or mathematics and opted for English
because he said he would have been "only a competent mathematician," his son
Robert said in an interview yesterday.
In 1947 he married Mary Josephine Waite, a librarian, who died in 1964. They
had five children, Catherine, Julia, Margaret, John and Michael. In 1965 he
married Mary Anne Bittner, an instructor in nursing at the University of
Virginia. This marriage produced two children, Robert and Elizabeth. All
seven children survive him, along with 12 grandchildren. Also in 1947, his
first book, "Paradox in Chesterton," was published in England, with an
introduction by McLuhan, who insisted that the author take a doctorate.
In 1950 Mr. Kenner completed his Ph.D. at Yale. His thesis was published in
1951 as his first book in the United States, "The Poetry of Ezra Pound." In
it, he deplored Pound for having delivered radio broadcasts in Italy during
World War II in support of that country's fascist government; at the same
time he argued on behalf of the poet's important literary achievement. The
book received the Porter Prize in 1950.
Having completed his degrees Mr. Kenner was appointed an instructor at Santa
Barbara College (later the University of California at Santa Barbara), where
he taught until 1973. From 1973 to 1990 he taught at Johns Hopkins
University, where he was Andrew Mellon professor of humanities. From 1990
until his retirement in 1999, he taught at the University of Georgia.
All the while, the writing poured forth, his other major books being studies
of Lewis, Eliot, Beckett, as well as "Ulysses" (1980; revised in 1987), "A
Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers" (1975) and "A Colder Eye:
The Modern Irish Writers" (1983).
Over time his prose style grew increasingly graceful, witty and accessible,
prompting C. K. Stead, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, to call him
"the most readable of living critics." He thought of writing as an "abnormal
act," as he told an interviewer at U.S. News & World Report in 1983,
rendered an increasingly "quaint skill" by the rise of other forms of
communication.
Yet he scarcely confined his communication to print. Told by Pound in the
early 1950's "to visit the great men of your own time," Mr. Kenner
befriended many of his subjects, as well as the poet Louis Zukofsky,
Buckminster Fuller and William F. Buckley Jr., who was best man at his
second wedding.
Nor, surprisingly, did he deplore the decline of print as our main medium.
"We forget that most of what people read when everybody read all the time
was junk - competent junk," he told U.S. News & World Report. "Now they get
it from television. The casual entertainment people get in The evening from
the box was what they used to get from the short fiction in The Saturday
Evening Post. That magazine and others like it were the situation comedies
and cop shows of their era. It is not a cultural loss that this particular
use of literacy has been transferred from one medium to another."
Bob Champ
the passing of this scholarly and critically astute man.
The history of literary criticism of the modern era would be
incomplete without significant mention of him--a fact that will go
rumbling down the byways of lit crit for the next hundred years, if
not longer.
Bob C.
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