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GUY DAVENPORT Born in Anderson, South Carolina, in 1927, Guy Davenport completed a B.A. at Duke University and a B.Litt. as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. Following service in the Army, he taught English at Washington University in St. Louis. After completing his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1961, he taught for a while at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and in 1963 began a long and distinguished teaching career at the University of Kentucky. In 1990 he won a MacArthur Fellowship and began writing full time. In addition to numerous translations and edited texts, his many books include the critical-essay collections, The Geography ofthe Imagination (1981), Every Force Evolves a Form (1987), and The Hunter Gracchus (1997); the poetry collection Flowers andLeaves (1966); and the short story collections, Tatlin! (1974), Da Vincis Bicycle (1979), The jules Verne Steam Balloon (1987), A Table ofGreen Fields (1993), The Cardif!Team (1996), and 12 Stories (1997). Davenport's short stories are experimental and learned, and they demand a great deal from the reader. He dispenses with much of the traditional conventions of fiction to create what he has described as "assemblages," a term borrowed from modern art. AI> Carl Singleton has noted, Davenport "fills his works with allusions from history, religion, art, and science-particularly classical ones-such that his scholarship is a bedrock ofthe fiction." First published in the Santa Monica Review in 1993 and included inA Table ofGreen Fields, "Belinda's World Tour" is an epistolary short story whose kernel was Max Brod's biographical reference to Kafka's writing postcards to a little girl. An example of metafiction, the story is as much about the little girl's encounter with the imagined marriage and world journey ofher doll as it is about a reader's encounter with fiction. It reminds us ofthe power ofstory, of our own need to believe. • A little girl, hustled into her pram by an officious nurse, discovered halfway home from the park that her doll Belinda had been left behind. The nurse had finished her gossip with the nurse who minced with one hand on her hip, and had had a good look at the grenadiers in creaking boots who strolled in the park to eye and give smiling nods to the nurses. She had posted a letter and sniffed at various people. 324 GUY DAVENPORT Lizaveta had tried to talk to a little boy who spoke only a soft gibberish, had kissed and been kissed by a large dog, and had helped another little girl fill her shoes with sand. And Belinda had been left behind. They went back and looked for her in all the places they had been. The nurse was in a state. Lizaveta howled. Her father and mother were at a loss to comfort her, as this was the first tragedy ofher life and she was indulging all its possibilities. Her griefwas the more terrible in that they had a guest to tea, Herr Doktor Kafka of the Assicurazioni Generali, Prague office. -Dear Lizaveta! Herr Kafka said. You are so very unhappy that I am going to tell you something that was going to be a surprise. Belinda did not have time to tell you herself. While you were not looking, she met a little boy her own age, perhaps a doll, perhaps a little boy, I couldn't quite tell, who invited her to go with him around the world. But he was leaving immediately. There was no time to dally. She had to make up her mind then and there. Such things happen. Dolls, you know, are born in department stores, and have a more advanced knowledge than those of us who are brought to houses by storks. We have such a limited knowledge of things. Belinda did, in her haste, ask me to tell you that she would write, daily, and that she would have told you ofher sudden plans ifshe had been able to find you in time. Lizaveta stared. But the very next day there was a postcard for her in the mail. She had never had a postcard before. On its picture side was London Bridge, and on the other lots ofwriting which her mother read to her, and her father, again, when he came home for dinner. * Dear Lizaveta: We came to London by balloon. Oh, how exciting it is to float over mountains, rivers, and cities with my friend Rudolf, who had packed a lunch of cherries and...

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