The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays (Nonpareil Book, 78)

Rating:
Summary: Magic carpet ride
Review: Whether it's criticism, social commentary or his amazing historical fiction, Davenport has that knack for plunging an arm into the stream of time and pulling up luminous pebbles, then arranging them brilliantly.

This is mostly a collection of writings about writers, but don't let that deter you. When Davenport writes about writers, the result has the quality of a madman's mosaic, a Watts tower of literary observation.

"The Geography of the Imagination," which lends its title to this collection, relates the Dogon trickster legends of West Africa to Brer Rabbit, to an essay on furniture by Poe, to Oswald Spengler's "Decline of the West" (seen in terms of World War I and the first three stories in Joyce's "The Dubliners"), to the Persephone myth (and its realization in a bit of O. Henry sentiment). It ends with a close analysis of classical imagery in Grant Wood's painting, "American Gothic." Along the way, Davenport introduces, in cameo appearances, John Philip Sousa, Heraclitus, Amerigo Vespucci, the sack of Eleusis by the Visigoths, the idea of Germany, Thomas Jefferson's dinners, the discovery of binary stars, and the industrial revolution. The essay itself is not quite 12 pages long.