PositiveThe Russell Kirk Center for Cultural RenewalIt offers a Master’s in literature in two volumes, or, if you read the footnotes, a Ph.D. It brims with drafts, translations, learned queries, disquisitions on Greek meter, Babbage, Beckett, Ruskin, the Modernists, Fourier transformations, the tying of knots ... But it is also—like Kenner’s ironically titled masterpiece The Pound Era (1971)—a story of missed connections and frustrated effusiveness, a vortex barely discerned before it sputters out. And it educates the reader, as well, in the limits, moral and intellectual, of these two great minds ... The mood of the early letters is joyous, collaborative. They are like men who have jointly conceived some tremendous and endlessly expandable private joke and can rely only upon each other to keep the thing oxygenated and nourished ... In a larger sense, both writers prefer, intellectually speaking, to keep to their own rooms. Their generosity with each other, and with those of similar mind, balances a vast disgust or contempt toward the world at large, not always earned. They share the misanthropic streak of the committed avant-gardist, writing always as though silliness were worse than wickedness ... there’s an implicit politics at work, as there always is, for these professedly apolitical writers: they are stoic Roman aristocrats many centuries too late ... They will endure as examples of everything best about the stoic mind: its orderliness, and its ability to discover and name unexpected connections, born of the tendency to see time as an impertinence. Thought is, among other metaphors, a labyrinth. And what’s a labyrinth without minotaurs?
