These the Companions by Donald Davie

First published: 1982

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1922-1979

Locale: Great Britain, Ireland, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Italy

Principal Personages:

• Donald Davie, an English poet, teacher, and literary critic
• F. R. Leavis, an English literary critic
• Yvor Winters, an American literary critic
• Philip Larkin, an English poet
• C. S. Lewis, an English writer, literary critic, and Christian apologist
• Austin Clarke, an Irish poet
• Wacjaw Lednicki, a Polish scholar

Form and Content

Donald Davie is a well-traveled and well-respected poet, literary critic, and academic. His life has centered on words, the makers of words, and those places where works of the imagination are valued. In this autobiography he remembers some of those words, those makers, and those places. Davie realizes that many people do not share his love of words and the imagination, and that others will not think his life particularly enlightening on these things. Yet his sense of responsibility to record a perhaps disappearing notion of literary culture triumphed over the paralyzing “Who cares?”—and the result is an engaging series of scenes from a literary life.

These the Companions: Recollections is an autobiography which is only indirectly concerned with its author. Much like Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast (1964), Davie reveals himself primarily by writing about those around him. He takes his title from a phrase in Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos (1948), a work written at a similar time in Pound’s life in a similar spirit of gazing back over a life and assessing its accomplishments and failures. Like Pound, Davie finds much of the value of his life to have derived from the people and places he came to know, and from an attitude toward culture to which he has tried to contribute.

Along with his title, Davie seems to derive part of the book’s methodology from Pound. Pound’s infamous “ideogrammic method” for writing poetry called for placing side by side “luminous details,” those apparently insignificant details from life that are in fact carefully chosen to illuminate surrounding circumstances, the significance of which is left to the reader to ascertain or construct. Davie uses a similar strategy in These the Companions. Rather than offer an exhaustive recounting of his life, he focuses on a handful of times and locales, capturing in relatively few strokes the tone and temper of the time, the people, and himself. The relationship between one episode and the next—say between his war years in the Soviet Union and his postwar years at Cambridge—is left largely unstated, but the cumulative effect is to create an increasingly rounded picture of a man of letters and of a fading idea of culture.

Another insight into the style of These the Companions is found in the chapter titled “Americans,” in which he notes the American love of “feeling their way” along in their approach to life. Something of that sort describes the strategy and tone of these recollections as well. Davie repeatedly makes a proclamation or sketches a memory or offers an evaluation only to qualify or cancel it with a phrase to suggest that he has not got it right, or that he is putting on airs, or that he is wearied of his own attempts at self-justification. This self-deprecation is in part a conscious strategy with specific intended effects, one of which is to lend a relaxed, intimate, and appealingly nondogmatic quality to the work.

Yet Davie the autobiographer is also still Davie the poet. His ability to evoke place, and the aesthetic implications of place, is crucial to the success of these recollections. For example, he muses on poetry in his beloved Cambridge:

But now as when Leavis began, the poems that come out of Cambridge are just what they always were: at best sensitive, intelligent, well-mannered, but never conclusively and passionately clinched. I am prepared to believe, now, that this is inevitable. It is a matter of light, and the climate. As the fog swirls into Trinity Street in the early afternoon, or hangs there until nearly midday, as the warm lights high in the walls wink on and glow through the haze, I recognize the irremediably Gothic Cambridge that I best know and love. And how can the art that comes of such weather be anything but crepuscular, approximate, a composition of fugitive or hulking shadows?

As with most effective autobiography, Davie’s gift with words and his guiding sensibility make compelling what would otherwise be the mundane details of a seemingly unexceptional life.

Another part of the attraction of this book is the names and reputations to which Davie’s remembrances give flesh: F.R. Leavis, Yvor Winters, Hugh Kenner, C.S. Lewis, and numerous less known figures. To some he offers homage; with others he settles scores, unable to resist the writer’s ultimate last weapon—having the last word. (Davie is usually more generous to others, however, than he is to himself.) In the process, he lightly seasons his recollections with the kind of insider literary anecdotes that delight the bibliophile. He recounts Kenner’s story of Pound’s response to a critical comment about T.S. Eliot: “Never under-estimate the Possum [Eliot]; he has a lot of low vitality—like a crocodile.”

Critical Context

In These the Companions, as in both his poetry and his scholarly work, Davie consciously goes against the tide of contemporary culture. The contemporary literary scene is dominated by theories of language and texts according to which genuine meaning is nearly impossible because of the ambiguous, self-destructing nature of words. Ethical and moral considerations, whether arising from the text or brought to it, have long been seen as irrelevant. In many circles, close attention to the craft and tradition of poetry has been secondary to notions of self-expression or to sincerity of feeling or politics.

Davie registers his complaint against these trends, and records his own different path, without expending much effort to refute them. There is a sort of diffidence in Davie’s autobiography that perhaps grows out of his sense of his own shortcomings and from the awareness that he has fought the good fight in other contexts.

Those other contexts include both his poetry and his academic writing. Davie is known in both these areas as a defender of classical qualities: restraint, control, urbanity, wit, formal elegance, and public morality. In the 1950’s he was associated with a loose affiliation of writers known as “the Movement,” who reacted against what they saw as the romantic excesses of the Anglo-American modernists and later poets such as Dylan Thomas, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath, whose poetry was marked by verbal and emotional self-indulgence.

These the Companions is consistent with Davie’s lifelong work. It is sometimes poignant yet emotionally restrained. It speaks out for classical values in a romantic age, yet with a certain sense of defeat that is also found in Davie’s later poetry. It reflects Davie’s desire for something more stable than that provided by twentieth century culture, yet also demonstrates once again his great interest in poets such as Pound (about whom he has written two books) whose basic approach to poetry is at odds with his own.

Bibliography

Bedient, Calvin. “Donald Davie,” in Eight Contemporary Poets, 1974.

Dekker, George, ed. Donald Davie and the Responsibilities of Literature, 1984.

Powell, Neil. Carpenters of Light: Some Contemporary English Poets, 1980.

Rawson, Claude. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVII (November 21, 1982), p. 9.

Simpson, Louis. “Review” in The Times Literary Supplement. October 8, 1982, p. 1097.