right to left

[Heer, Jeet]

I haven't heard the story about the pro-Nixon ad. Davenport was a very
frequent contributor to National Review from the late 1950s to around 1970.
He pretty much had a book review in every issue of NR during the 1960s. From
various comments he's made in essays and interviews, I gather that he was
attracted to NR largely out of friendship with Hugh Kenner, who was their
poetry editor, and later William F. Buckley. Also Davenport is a bit of a
southern tory of the older sort (anti-commerical culture). But the Vietnam
war seems to have disillusioned him with politics. Also, I imagine it must
have been hard to write about modern literature for National Review. Judis's
biography of WF Buckley has an amusing anecdote about this. Once in the
early 1960s, Kenner managed to convince William Carlos Williams to publish a
poem in NR. Kenner was, of course, delighted by this coup untill letters
started to pour in from readers upset that NR had soiled its pages with such
a lefty writer. (Williams had signed some fellow travelling petitions in the
1930s). "National Review has some of the stupidest readers in the world,"
was Kenners judgement on this incident, if I remember correctly. Best, Jeet


> ----------
> From: 	Greg Howard
> Reply To: 	lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Sent: 	Friday, February 15, 2002 15:26
> To: 	lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Subject: 	RE: right to left
> 
> 
> 
> > There were a group of smart National
> > Reviewers in
> > the 1960s who moved to the left: Garry Wills, Joan Dideon, John
> > Leonard, and
> > (a bit eccentrically) Guy Davenport. Are there any other cases of people
> > going from right to left?
> 
> 
> Can anybody describe the trajectory of Davenport?  I had always heard that
> his name was included without his permission in a pro-Nixon advertisement
> in
> the NYT, and that he just kind of drifted off after that.  Is there a
> different/better story?
> 
> Greg
>