Cabell reviews

Wirkman, you've lived up to your handle: just ran through your Cabell reviews and found them fun and informative.

Actually, I ran through every Cabell review, since I could find no easy way to simply call up Wirkman's. It's not so difficult to find an individual LT member's specific reviews, providing (a) the member hasn't written too many, and (b) there aren't too many reviews for the individual works the member has included in his list of reviews. Anyone know how to get around that, should I want to find a specific person's full list of reviews of an author, and the author has bajillion reviews? And the member also has written, say, 301 reviews?

Regardless, I'm very interested in following up more Cabell. I just brought home 3-5 titles, inherited from my grandfather's library, and everyone's comments and enthusiasm has helped stoke the fire. Perhaps some short stories, next.

I've enjoyed wirkman's Cabell reviews too, especially the fact that he appreciates books beyond the core handful of fantasies. Oops! here I am referring to wirkman in the third person, as if he's not here! hey wirkman-- I notice you haven't entered reviews for Chivalry and Gallantry-- what's your take on those?

I've just finished reading them (well, re-reading them, but I didn't remember them at all from 35 yrs or so ago), and I was very impressed. I read them in the Storisende edition but while I was doing so I compared some passages with the Harper versions and I can see the improvements, but it's also clear they were more or less as good when they first came out. And they both clearly pre-figure later more famous Cabell books...

Chivalry is in some ways a proto-Figures of Earth. As I read I found that Edward I was described as a large, strong, slow-seeming man with one squinty eye who was subtler than he seemed. Ah! I thought, he's revised this to make the character more like Manuel-- but when I checked the original, I found that Edward already possesses those traits: Manuel is instead (in some ways) an elaboration of Cabell's Edward. Also the concept of a devil-tainted family runs through Chivalry but in this case it's the Plantagenets instead of the Manuelides. (Of course, later the Manuelides were revised into the mix.).

Gallantry somewhat prefigures The High Place (Florian's son is a character) with its French court intrigue, poisonings etc. It's also very well written -- I laughed out loud so much reading A Casual Honeymoon that people on the subway were giving me the hairy eyeball. The first half of it especially is redolent of good Restoration comedy -- not surprisingly, as that was one of Cabell's favorite genres. Cabell is sometimes criticized for having an overblown style (e.g. by that cretin Oscar Cargill) but while his style is certainly more 'heightened' than we're used to, he is such a master of it that, to me, it's like... oh, I don't know... eating ice-cream?

This is not to say that I think that Chivalry and Gallantry are masterpieces on the level of Jurgen or Figures or Silver Stallion or High Place. And they're not 'fantasies' if that's all you're up for (Mr. Swanwick!); they're a kind of historical fiction, but (as Howard Pyle complained) they are neither wholly historical nor wholly fictional. Perhaps they're better for that-- but they are certainly very well-constructed, very well-written and highly recommended by me.

If you love those two books you'll probably like The Line of Love as well: similar kind of thing, though a bit less deftly done-- it was earlier and he was still feeling his way a bit. It does contain what was once (pre-Jurgen) one of his most famous and popular stories -- The Love-Letters of Falstaff. I think that was more because people love Falstaff than because it's a great story-- though it's ok. The Kalki and Storisende editions include two later stories that were not in the 1905 Harper edition-- The Wedding Jest and Porcelain Cups. The former features Domnei's Melicent as a grandmother, as well as a drinking-bout with a corpse; the latter invents an episode of Elizabethan history and mixes in the death of Christopher Marlowe. In spite of the fact that these two new stories were written about the time of Cream of the Jest and Jurgen, I'd rate them both as ok but not earth-shaking.

Well! I meant this to be a brief post and it ended up being 3 reviews...

I have not read all the short stories in Cabell's several collections. So, barring a complete perspective, I have offered none.

I remember not liking what I tried of THE LINE OF LOVE (I have the first edition). I remember liking, somewhat, a few from CHIVALRY and GALLANTRY.

By the way, "Some Ladies and Jurgen" is included in a post-BAF Lin Carter anthology, REALMS OF WIZARDRY.

> 3

Line of Love is certainly the least of Cabell’s short story collections. But I believe you’re a fan of The Wedding Jest and that story was added to lead off the revised Line of Love; and another mature story, Porcelain Cups, added to finish it off. So, what with stylistic revisions and two new stories, the Kalki/Storisende LoL is presumably less worse than the 1905 1st edition.

It’s interesting to look at the range of the original dates of composition (well, really dates of publication, but they usually followed soon after composition) of the stories that went into these collections…

The Line of Love - 1905
1902 – 1
1903 – 3
1904 – 2
1905 – 1
(1919 – 2 additions)

Gallantry – 1907
1902 – 2
1903 – 1
1905 – 3
1906 – 2
1907 – 1

Chivalry – 1909
1905 – 1
1906 – 3
1907 – 2
1908 – 2
1909 – 1

Certain Hour – 1915
1909 – 1
1911 – 1
1912 – 1
1913 – 1
1915 – 4

There was a learning curve. Only 1 of the 7 original LoL stories was written as late as 1905; 6 of the 9 Gallantry stories were written 1905 or later; all of the Chivalry stories were written 1905-09. It is noteworthy that in Gallantry two of the best stories (Casual Honeymoon and In the Second April) were written in 1906 and 1907 while the fluffiest (Ducal Audience) was written in 1902. Weaving these stories, some of which originally had no connection with each other, into more or less connected narratives was good preparation for the larger weaving project of the Biography.

Some of the Certain Hour stories were written a few years earlier than their 1915 pub date but were considered too edgy to be easily publishable. One of the stories in Certain Hour is Concerning Corrina, one of his first clearly supernatural items, and a favorite of Neil Gaiman.

Previously published stories also went into the make-up of several of his early novels:

Cords of Vanity - 1909
1902 – 3
1903 – 2
1904 – 1

Soul of Melicent - 1913, but finished by 1911
1908 – 1
1911 – 1

Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck. 1915 but finished earlier
1903 – 2
1904 – 1
1909 – 2

Cords, often considered the least successful of his books, uses nothing written after 1904. Surprisingly, Rivet, the best of his Virginia novels aside from Cream of the Jest, recycles 3 pretty early stories.

So far I’ve only dipped into Certain Hour, so can’t report. But I thought that Gallantry and Chivalry, though uneven in places, were pretty well done; but I would definitely go with the Storisende text for maximum effect. Someone who really really liked Domnei (as opposed to wishing it were more like Figures of Earth) would probably quite enjoy Chivalry.

edited to fix typos etc

Though CORDS OF VANITY doesn't hold together, and is too long, I enjoyed the book. The literary comeuppance of the antihero is the best chapter, I think, and pretty funny. It could be the basis of a good rom-com, if you can stand the genre, and the scriptwriter reconceives vast stretches of the story.

May The Rabble pardon me if the following information isn't news to anyone, but in perusing Horror: 100 Best Books (1988 ed.) last night, I noticed that Robert E. Howard's review of Something About Eve is included. It's a juicy and sardonic review. Here's a snippet: "Cabell has the elegant knack of being beautifully vulgar, and of concealing--from the mass--the most jubilant depravities in innuendo…."

Howard's piece on Cabell's novel has also been anthologized in The Conan Grimoire & The Spell of Conan.

It is news to me, so you are pardoned (if indeed I have that power). Your quote persuades me it would be quite interesting to read (after reading Eve, which I have not yet done.)

I'm curious, though: why would this review be included in Horror: 100 Best Books? Neither the review nor the novel would count as an instance of that genre, or does it collect a good amount of supplementary material as well as the more direct reviews of one of the 100?

The editors definition of "horror" is probably too broad. Any mention of the devil or a demon or ghost seemed sufficient to warrant inclusion within the genre, especially among pre-1950 novels. In being so vague they were able to give exposure to a neglected writer like Cabell, though one wonders if perhaps in doing so they actually did Cabell a disservice. How many readers sought out Cabell's novel expecting horror and, disappointed in not finding it, attributed the "defect" to the author rather than the anthologist who mislabeled the author and misled the reader in the first place?

The hero of Eve does encounter a lamia-like woman who plans to kill him (but he gets her first) and there are a few 'weird' aspects -- he has a non-human son, and at the start he switches bodies with the Sylan (sic) spirit -- but 'tis true it's not a 'horror' novel as we understand the term.

His novella The White Robe, about a sexually ambiguous werewolf, or his Machenesque story Concerning Corrina might qualify, but even those are not typical horror...

Curiously I've come across another Cabell review in a Conan(ish) anthology -- the collection The Blade of Conan, also edited by de Camp, contains Fritz Leiber's essay on Cabell in general and Jurgen specifically, entitled "Titivated Romance"...

I'm not sure why The Rabble Discuss Cabell seems to have a gap of four years, but since it came up in 2010 (see 5), I'll comment for the sake of any who haven't read it that I really liked The Cords of Vanity (I read the Storisende edition). I mentioned it to Michael Swanwick as an example of a very enjoyable Cabell novel beyond his core group.

I haven't read all of Cabell's books, but I've actually liked every one I have read. Even Beyond Life, cobbled together as it is, was quite enjoyable. That's just me though.

Hi Lansing -- not sure what you mean about Rabble having "a gap of 4 years"?

I also like Cords of Vanity -- it's one of my favorite early Cabell books. I've read all three versions (four if you count the magazine stories it was cobbled from), and the Storisende is, I think, the best. The novel versions aren't all that different of course, but he finally got the closing-echoing-the-opening bit the way he wanted it, which I found very effective.

I'm guessing lansingsexton is commenting on the time gap between posts 5 & 6. Such are the vagaries of asynchronous discussion.

oh, right... i was thinking it was still 2012!

Lansing and I used to work together at the late great Olsson's Books in WashDC

My wife just discovered a Cabell mention in M. F. K. Fisher's The Gastronomical Me. Talking about dating in college in 1927-28 she says, " The dates I liked best were with a twenty-year-old Irish edition of Jimmy Durante named Cleary, who divided his passion between football and James Branch Cabell, with practically none left over for me." ... " Cleary was said to drink a little...any man full of forward passes and Cabellian double-talk needs to..."

Hah! good catch...