The Cardiff Team: Ten Stories

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Summary: The Humane, Harmonic Elegance of Guy Davenport
Review: How is it that the finest, wittiest, most humane writer in the United States was recently called "prurient" by a major book review? It would seem that the greatest threat to American letters remains the American literary establishment. Our greatest writers have always worked on the fringes of this establishment. One could list, for starters, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Ezra Pound. And Guy Davenport. The Cardiff Team shows this remarkable writer at his finest. As always, his fluent erudition and breadth of knowledge astounds. He moves with ease from Kafka in a nudist colony to the philosopher George Santyana eating dinner to Edgar Allan Poe reading about Chinese poetry (all excellent pieces) within the first twenty pages. The critic George Steiner wrote a number of years ago: "Davenport is among the very few truly original, truly autonomous voices now audible in American letters." This assesment hold true, more than ever. Davenport has developed a style and subject matter all of his own.But the gem of the collection is the moving title piece. We start in a vibrant metaphorical meadow created by an act of language, and brought to the story by an act of quotation (from Francis Ponge). We end in a geographical meadow, overhearing a delightful conversation about all sorts of learned things. That is to say, we overhear two people recognizing each other's humanity, like the people they speak of. In between these meadows, the most intelligent, sexy, and delightfully charming characters you can imagine (rakish children, single mothers, a lonely young boy, and a tutor finding himself ignorant even in his great knowledge) teach and learn about that central human mystery, desire, in all of its many open-ended forms. They grow to be comfortable in their own skin. The Cardiff Team continues a remarkable body of work unlike anything else in literature. Everything Davenport writes is essentially, wonderfully sane. His charcthers, like Davenport himself, wage war against what he has called the "meaness and smallness" that threatens to atrophy the world. As they learn from eachother, they teach US to recognize each other's humanity-- carnal, graceful, and most importantly, fundamental. That the accusation of prurience has been hurled at such work only shows how desperately we are in need of the lesson. -Jeremy Melius