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The Cardiff Team. Ten Stories. By Guy Davenport. New York: New Directions, 1996.
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The Cardiff Team
The Cardiff Team. Ten Stories. By Guy Davenport. New York: New Directions, 1996.
Contents:
- The Messengers
- Dinner at the Bank of England
- Veranda Hung with Wisteria
- Boys Smell Like Oranges
- The Meadow Lark
- The Table
- The River
- Concert Champêtre in D Minor
- Home
- The Cardiff Team
Acknowledgements (verso title page):
These stories are published here for the first time, except for
- 'Dinner at the Bank of England' which appeared in The Paris Review,
- 'The Meadow Lark,' which was issued as a book called The Lark by Barry Magid at his Dim Gray Bar Press, and
- some excerpts from 'The Cardiff Team,' which ran in Conjunctions.
To Dr. Magid, Bradford Morrow, and the editors of The Paris Review, the author is grateful for permission to reprint.
"Notes and Acknowledgements" pp. 167-168:
'The Messengers' -- This fourth of my stories about Kafka (the others are 'The Aeroplanes at Brescia' in Tatlin!, 'The Chair' in Apples and Pears, and 'Belinda's World Tour' in A Table of Green Fields) derives from his diary for 1912.
'Dinner at the Bank of England' -- The occasion is recorded in George Santayana's autobiography Persons and Places. The identity of the captain of the guards is given in the notes to William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp Jr.'s critical edition, M. I. T. Press, 1986. The passage at the end about the old man with a guitar -- the instigation (not Picasso's painting) for Wallace Stevens's 'The Man with the Blue Guitar' -- is from Santayana's The Realms of Being.
'Boys Smell Like Oranges' -- The two old men walking in the Bois are Maurice Leenhardt (1878 -- 1954), missionary and ethnologist, and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857 -- 1938). I am indebted to Rodney Needham's Belief, Language, and Experience (1972) and James Clifford's Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World (1982), as well as to Leenhardt's Do kamo (1947) and Lévy-Bruhl's Carnets posthumes (1949). The passages about soccer players are freely adapted from a few pages of Henry de Montherlant's classic Les Olympiques, a Theokritean idyll which I have lifted out and collaged into my text, sometimes translating ad verbum, always performing variations (in the musical sense): Peyrony does not eat quite so much grass and leaves in Montherlant.
'The Meadow Lark' -- Section III quotes Balzac.
'Veranda Hung with Wisteria' -- Poe's Eureka is dedicated to Alexander von Humboldt (1769 -- 1859). His Cosmos: A Physical Description of the Universe (4 vols.) began to be published in English in 1845.
'The Cardiff Team' -- The opening paragraph quotes Francis Ponge's 'Le Pré.' The book being read at bedtime in Section 9 is Sigismund Krzyzanowski's Vospominaniya O Budushchem (Moscow 1989) in the French translation of Catherine Perrel and Elena Rolland-Maiski (1991). Section 13 is from Scientific American, 18 May 1889. Section 18 is from Scientific American, 1 July 1893. Section 31 translates Henry de Montherlant's 'Sur des souliers de foot' (in Les Olympiques). Section 38 translates Vicente Huidobro's 'Pour Robert Delaunay.'
Note: During one of my visits with GD, I recalled something he once told me about orange juice tasting like motor oil. He replied, ''That was a quotation." One way of reading GD is to enjoy the discovery of quotations juxtaposed. "My stories are made up of fiction with necessary fact" GD once said (which would have been as true if he had said, "fact with necessary fiction". The Cardiff Team might be read by starting with the notes (and the books referenced therein) quoted above.
Photograph of GD (dust jacket, rear inner fold) is by Douglas P. Haynes.
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