Tatlin! is historical fiction of an unusual kind. It is concerned more with the sensibility than with the events of the period it covers. That period is our own; four of the six stories are set between 1900 and 1970, and the collection is unified by a vision of modernism in art, science, philosophy, and politics. Like Hugh Kenner, Davenport believes that the intellectual life of the twentieth century is qualitatively different from that of any preceding period. Tatlin! attempts to do in the form of fiction what The Pound Era attempts to do in the form of literary criticism: to characterize the distinctive mental habits, or the unique intellectual "signature," of the modern age….
[Pound's] influence upon the six stories is indirect but pervasive. To begin with, he affects the structure and texture of the book, which are consciously modernist. The structure is ideogrammic, in that the six stories are discrete and independent, yet unified by a network of recurring themes and images. The texture of the prose is dense, allusive, polyglot, discontinuous—"difficult" in the way that Eliot, Joyce, and the men of 1914 are difficult. These features are not uniquely Poundian, but Pound has clearly helped to shape them. Similarly, Davenport's sense of the integrity of human history, and of the power of the past to inspire and define the present, owes a great deal to the author of the Cantos. But again, the influence is not exclusive and cannot be demonstrated in terms of specific sources or passages. Some of Pound's most important contributions to Tatlin!, in other words, are difficult to isolate because they are integral to Guy Davenport's imagination, and inseparable from the very conception of the book….
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