Hugh Kenner RIP at 80

Hugh Kenner, Commentator on Literary Modernism, Dies at 80

November 25, 2003
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."

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