Cardiff Team [Hardcover]

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

If James Joyce had been a pederast, he'd have read like Guy Davenport. If salacious material were doled out at a Mensa Meeting, you'd have "The Cardiff Team," Davenport's mid-1990s opus.

The positive reviews cite the book's originality and erudition. The negative ones assert that Davenport's fine intellectual musings are "ruined" by his insertion of "gay kiddie porn" or somesuch.

I like work that is both very sensual and very intellectual. It's the heady combination we find in Hollinghurst's "The Swimming Pool Library," Nabokov's "Lolita," Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," certain passages of "Moby Dick," the poems of Neruda and Lorca, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and J. D. McClatchy.

It is well to remember that, however well-developed our intellect may be, we still inhabit bodies, frail unpredictable things whose oxygen addiction proves fatal in about 80 years. I would go so far as to say the the interplay between the body and the mind, between flesh and intellect, is the single salient theme of Davenport's fiction (and perhaps his essays as well), and that anyone who criticizes his erotic passages while lauding his intellectual ones, betrays his or her own prejudices rather than mounts a credible attack on Davenport's writing.

"Boys Smell Like Oranges" captures this dichotomy perfectly, as Davenport weaves two threads together: a pair of thinking men in heady conversation and a boys soccer team at rough-and-tumble sensual play.

Davenport has Camille Paglia-esque deep knowledge of a wide array of subjects and, like the author of "Sexual Personae," he likes to splash his erudition around bedazzlingly (if a bit excessively).

The first story "The Messengers" imagines Kafka at an Alpine nude spa. There are humorous lines, didactic lines, epigrammatic lines, and lines of pure poetic sensuality: "The sun-browned fingers of a classical hand would scratch around in hair the color of meal. Blue eyes would puzzle themselves closed."

In "The Meadow Lark," a strapping lad pleasures himself in a meadow and then tastes his own ejaculate ("alkali with a tinge of sweetgrass"). This is probably the kind of story that got the reviewer from "Kirkus" bent out of shape, but, reading it, it seems very natural rather than prurient. Even if it were prurient, so what? Even geniuses have glands.

"The River" is the most salacious story in the collection, full of homoerotic athleticism of the Thomas Eakins swimming hole painting variety. Let me try again: If someone edited a Jean-Daniel Cadinot exotic ephebe-filled porno down to soft core and then filtered it through the fused writing styles of Thomas Pynchon and Dylan Thomas you'd get "The River."

The titular "Cardiff Team" is the longest story in the collection, weighing in at 74 pages. It contains a line that sums up its author: "Eros is the most inventive of the gods, with an IQ way out beyond Einstein's."

This collection of short stories jumps settings and characters quite often but its central image seems to be a meadow in summer--perhaps cross-cut by a creek and speared by dusty shafts of sunlight--where adolescent boys with wheaten hair and blues eyes romp and play unabashedly nude. It is an image of perfect beauty, at once prurient and innocent; it is, I suspect, that place in the author's mind he goes after too much labor over a Greek or Hebrew translation.

"Veranda Hung with Wisteria," at only ten lines (!) if the shortest story in the collection of ten. Davenport manages, however, to cram a lot of painterly imagery into this heady paragraph, including a Chinese river "crowded with junks and sampans."

I close with the wittiest sentence I encountered in the book and hope that if you are a fan of the fusion of erotic and the intellectual you'll acquire a copy of this learned yet naughty book, with all the high-minded conversation of the symposium and all the greased wrestling of the gymmasium:

"Nude and naked are different conditions. Michelangelo's David was nude and the lean scouts in "Nas Skautik" were nude in or out of their short khaki pants, but the old fart over there with wings of hair...and pregnant with a volleyball, with spindle legs and wrinkled knees, is naked."

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