"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."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company