A literary culture left to hermits

In a 1981 book review for Harper’s, Hugh Kenner opens with a block-quoted excerpt from a 1978 essay called “Finding” by Guy Davenport. He then writes the following:

So commences a magical account. The day I first read it, on pages copied from a magazine called Antaeus, I resolved that if it ever appeared in a book of Guy Davenport’s nonfictional writings I would lose no time commending that book to the world. So this review was scheduled when The Geography of the Imagination was announced, and it was not to be aborted by the discovery, when the review copy arrived, that the name on the book’s dedication page was my own. If having known a man for twenty-five years is to disqualify one from talking about his work, then our literary culture will have to be left to hermits. (Mazes [1989], 67-68)

This, it seems to me, is the first and last word on reviewing books by people you know—whether onetime teachers, erstwhile students, present colleagues, occasional collaborators, academic acquaintances, outright enemies, or longtime friends. You review the book in front of you. You acknowledge a relationship if necessary. You give honor where it is due. You criticize where necessary, with maximal charity and minimal points-scoring. You grow thick skin when your own work is reviewed. You don’t look for special treatment.

And, without question, you participate in what can only be called a patronage system, a necessarily small network of insiders with varying and ever-changing degrees of authority, status, power, and prestige. Checking your naivete at the door, you do your part to keep the system running but also honest. Because the only checks and balances are internal to it; because the integrity of the particular intellectual culture in question is finally only as good as the individuals who compose it, who send off their little missives, who read and write and review with as little bias as possible—knowing that disinterested does not mean uninterested.

And most of all, you get on with your life when the system fails. Such is life.