The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Twelve Stories by Guy DavenportAlexander Theroux
Guy Davenport. Twelve Stories. Counterpoint, 1997. 236 pp. Paper: $14.00.
Guy Davenport, fabulist and scholar, is a champion of knowledge and wit, one of the rare writers nowadays who, without condescension, depends on his readers to have as much curiosity of scholarship—never mind a high working IQ—as he himself has. This original paperback gathers twelve stories from three of his early collections: Tatlin!, Apples and Pears, and The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers. “A Gingham Dress,” a dialogue between two mountain people, is two-and-a-half pages long. “Tatlin” is a slight nouvelle, fifty-three pages, taking in Tatlin, a Russian artist’s life from 1932 to 1953, a fable/art essay in which Father Gapon, Viktor Shklovsky, Wittgenstein, and Mayakovsky, among others, make splendid appearances. Davenport, who writes gnomically and with chiselled grace, leaves us with aphorisms (“Shape answers use. And then use modifies shape”) that lay open whole panoramas of thought.
“Colin Maillard,” a story of bullying boys and their gentle prey, is as good as James Joyce’s “An Encounter.” “The Aeroplanes at Brescia,” in which aeronaut Blériot, the Wright brothers, and Tolstoy make appearances, is a masterpiece after Franz Kafka (“Franz Kafka, jackdaw. Despair, like the crane’s hunch on Kierkegaard’s lilting back, went along on one’s voyages”). To read Davenport, one has to be willing to look up words, ponder phrases, do extramural reading and not be threatened by arcane illusions. All of these stories of Davenport are written with the tenderest respect for his readers, as opposed to the insolent disregard that hacks and phony novelists and bullshit artists—Maya Angelou, John Grisham, the dork who wrote The Bridges of Madison County, etc.—have for their readers by serving up bowls of crapulosity and cliché and expecting, like poisoning cooks, it be eaten and we go away. Guy Davenport’s stories should be read like Cubist essays, for their turns, sides, shapes, and the delectability of their genius. [Alexander Theroux]