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John E. Grant, 1925–2020 It Didn’T Work out That Way

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John E. Grant, 1925–2020 It Didn’T Work out That Way REMEMBRANCE opaque, and concentrate on Hogarth. When my first efforts in the course came back to me covered front and back with Jack’s marginal commentary—acidic, oracularly terse, and plentiful—I became more determined than ever to steer clear of Blake and, especially, this impossible Grant person. John E. Grant, 1925–2020 It didn’t work out that way. At some point I noticed that although Jack was copiously critical of my work, he was By Alexander S. Gourlay paying extraordinary (and probably undeserved) attention to what I had written—dissecting every argument, looking Alexander S. Gourlay ([email protected]) teaches up every allusion, double-checking my notes—and that at the Rhode Island School of Design. even when he was laying waste to my pretensions and sophistries he was doing so without hostility or sadism. I noticed as well that if I managed to get anything right he would find it and say so. I read some of his published work and was utterly taken by his passionate contrarian- “Singular & Particular Detail is the Foundation of the Sublime” ism and strange prose, glittering and graceful at times, but also rambling and digressive, with occasional baffling pas- first encountered John E. Grant as a graduate student sages in which the enthymemes seem to be suppressing I taking a team-taught course at the University of Iowa. I all premises as too obvious to be mentioned. Particularly had chosen it because half of it was devoted to William Ho- winning were his wit, his occasional ferocity, but most of garth—Jack’s half, the other half, was about Blake. I planned all the great care he took to get everything as right as he to put up with Blake, who seemed by turns naive and utterly possibly could, even if the result was neither immediately impressive, admirably neat, nor notably conclusive. I took a couple more courses from Jack, eventually collaborated on some articles, and wrote a dissertation with him—even This tribute is adapted from the foreword to Prophetic Character: Es- says on William Blake in Honor of John E. Grant (West Cornwall, CT: lived in a basement bedroom in his house while work- Locust Hill Press, 2002). ing as an editorial assistant on the Iowa Blake Videodisc Vol. 54, no. 3 (winter 2020–21) Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Project.1 I came to appreciate his great, peculiar gifts as a they cast light upon matters that concerned him more— scholar, his honesty and doggedness as a thinker, and his he was not a garden-variety intentionalist or a mere criti- extraordinary virtues as a friend and colleague—howev- cal reactionary, as he sometimes appeared to be at his most er terrifying he sometimes seemed to be in print, he was harrumphing. He assumed that both artists and their inter- modest and courtly in person, warm and very funny in preters are engaged in profoundly serious projects, and that company, and a brilliant correspondent. critics must attend with modesty and care to the complexi- ty and subtlety with which texts and/or pictures can convey A chronological checklist of Jack’s scholarly writings on meaning, especially meaning to which the creators might Blake and others follows. Even the Blake pieces are only reasonably be expected to assent. That principle often led in part about Blake, and Jack also wrote in characteristic to exasperation with criticism that didn’t reflect such care fashion about other Romantics and artists and writers as or that was disproportionately attentive to past criticism or diverse as Reynolds and Magritte, Austen and Beckett. Sev- to a novel theory rather than to the creator’s work. eral of his best-known essays are jeremiads against various forms of critical sloth, cant, and carelessness, but these are For Jack a good critic was a prophet, never a priest invoking more properly understood as a side effect of his critical pro- a sacred tradition or a methodological mystery. He was al- ject than as central to it, explosions of exasperated energy ways looking for ideas that were both original and useful accumulated in the course of struggling carefully through for thinking about art, literature, and the world: prophecy arguments that didn’t prove to be worth the effort. Jack in application. He collaborated and/or kept company with was also noted for combining a warlike spirit with exhaus- several great scholar-activists, but for the most part Jack’s tive attention to detail, on the assumption that even the direct engagement in social causes was practical rather most passionate campaign against Error has to be conduct- than theoretical—especially during the Vietnam War, when ed with due attention to Blake’s “minute particulars.” In he spent a vast amount of energy on picket lines, vigils, and struggling to avoid the kinds of mistakes he deplored, Jack meetings. His more recent intellectual engagement tended regularly found himself—and sometimes lost himself—dis- to be isolated rather than collective or partisan, perhaps be- covering the irreducible constituent atoms of the matter be- cause telling one’s best account of truth as uncompromis- fore him, and then dealing with them one by one. William ingly as possible is almost always impolitic in the short run. Kupersmith, the longtime editor of Philological Quarterly, once remarked as he read one of Jack’s long, severely de- Not all authors or artists were equally susceptible to Jack’s tailed reviews, “This man has an instinct for the capillaries.” characteristic approach. As a critic he generally focused on But sweating the small stuff was not really the essence of his those who seemed to him to be most serious about their criticism either. The most notable theme for me, in that it own work, then struggled to find an approach that did accounts for so many other features of his work, is his insis- them justice. In the case of Blake this meant respectful- tence, above all, that understanding a work of art requires ly rethinking even the most basic interpretive assumptions the interpreter to take it and its creator seriously, no matter of the first few generations of his critics and vigorously at- how difficult (or impossible) it may be to prove anything tacking subsequent interpreters when they compound the definitive about the creator’s intentions, and no matter how old errors. It also led Jack early to champion Blake criti- many other interesting things might also be going on in cism that treats his visual and verbal art together, recogniz- the individual or collective unconscious, or in the broader ing both as equally sophisticated, inseparable products of culture, or in the mind of the critic. Jack was himself of- the same unconventional, brilliant mind. Jack was not the ten very interested in such epiphenomena, especially when first, loudest, or most prolific advocate of such criticism of Blake. But as a result of his efforts, along with those of sev- eral other scholars of the post-war generation, critics work- 1. The 1981–85 videodisc project, created by Jack, Mary Lynn Johnson, ing today rarely assume, as they once did, that they can and Joan Sustik Huntley, proposed to link databases held in a comput- write about Blake’s visual art without knowing and think- er to several thousand individually addressable video frames of Blake ing about its literary contexts, or write about his poetry or works on a videodisc; a pilot version focusing on the Night Thoughts prose without thinking about his art and its contexts. Jack’s designs worked very well but was not distributable for technical and most characteristic critical move was to review the whole copyright reasons. The full version of the project, eventually reject- ed for funding by the National Endowment for the Humanities, an- history of intellectual responses to a given artistic phenom- ticipated many of the features now incorporated in the William Blake enon or trope, both creative and critical, then show how Archive (http://www.blakearchive.org). The archive uses digital tech- the work at hand might represent a meta-response reflect- nologies barely dreamed of in 1985 (indeed, one NEH reviewer ar- ing not only the most sophisticated of these responses but gued against funding the Iowa project on the grounds that a PC with a somehow transcending the level of understanding that they 20MB hard drive, which was needed to run it, would never be afford- able). See Mary Lynn Johnson, “The Iowa Blake Videodisc Project: A represent. These projects didn’t always pan out. The stage Cautionary History,” Wordsworth Circle 30 (1999). of historical review was often so expansively and digres- Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Vol. 54, no. 3 (winter 2020–21) sively thorough that neither Jack nor the reader could ever manila envelope containing several pages of prose in Jack’s quite get home again from the preliminary tour of the in- loopy, unambiguous handwriting, a copy (“FYI”) of a care- tellectual arena, and sometimes the transcendent dimen- fully sharpened letter to some editor, murky photocopies sion was so subtle that it was doubtful whether anyone but of several pictures with cryptic annotations, and one or Jack could find it. But even when he didn’t wrap everything more postcards bearing only a word or two to hint at their up in a neat bundle, his passionate carefulness and com- relevance. When these packets arrived I knew how I would mitment to discovering some kind of enduring truth about be spending the rest of the day, and I never threw them the art that he was examining set an extraordinarily high away when I finished them, but when an old one turns up, standard for others to follow, and most of his pieces, long carefully repacked into its envelope, I usually find that I or short, are sown with enigmatic references to promising have lost the context, and that what was once a glorious critical paths that he never fully explored.
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