James Branch Cabell

Last year was the hundredth anniversary of The Cream of the Jest, and next year will be the hundredth anniversary of Jurgen. (It is also the sixtieth anniversary of his death.) Both are still being published, and read, even if by a smallish audience: so, by one standard measure, Cabell has entered into the pantheon of the classics, tel qu’en Lui-même enfin l’éternité le change.

Although he is frequently characterised (and sometimes disparaged) as a light and superficial writer on account of his ironic attitude, Cabell's view of the world is not a cheerful one. Looking at The Cream of The Jest and Smire, and taking one reasonable interpretation of Figures of Earth, one is driven to conclude that he viewed the world as governed by idiots - modern versions of the talking façades in Swift's Polite Conversation.

In the Biography, there are other levels of running the world, but they aren't pleasant. The Léshy are essentially puppet-masters with little sense of compassion or empathy, though they may have an artistic sense. There's also a hinted-at human magical inner circle which various characters brush up against but never join.

It's notable how many of the novels depict the achieving of absolutely nothing. The entire plot of Jurgen is retroactively expunged from existence by Koschei; something similar, in an endless return to the beginning because nothing has been achieved, is true of Figures of Earth (and something similar may he said of The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck). The bulk of The High Place is erased from reality by Florian's second chance. The Cream of the Jest is, possibly, about no more than the dream life of an author after he has produced his major work. (Admittedly, in the context of the rest of the Biography, this is less likely.) The later Nightmare trilogy is about a dream, or set of interconnected dreams. Much goes on in a typical Cabell book, but little of permanent import. Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas.

Cabell was sold by Lin Carter as a fantasy writer, a precursor of Tolkien (and, for that matter, treated by Edmund Wilson as an alternative to Tolkien), but it does violence to Cabell's work to measure it by the later emergence of a fantasy genre. The only major books which are, in hindsight, irreductibly fantasy - where dream is not available as an explanation - are Figures of Earth, Domnei, and The Silver Stallion, with the Witch-woman stories also in that space. All of these use not only magic but other elements to set them off from anything like the present day. (Cabell several times deplored the modern world as a come-down from earlier ages with brighter colours and more emphatic senses of good and evil[1].)

Cabell was a self-declared romantic, and he meant by it not that he followed in the footsteps of Wordsworth and Lamartine, but rather that his ideal of making was founded on the romance in the old sense (Amadis, or Arthur, or Charlemagne), which overlaps heavily with one of the Fryeian senses: the depiction of figures who are both in personality and powers more than the run of humankind: but he's a disillusioned, sardonic, romantic. In some cases he depicted romantic characters trying to live in the modern world, and failing to cut much of a figure; in some cases he showed somewhat more effective characters striding across an idealized world. He rarely showed the modern world as being compatible with a romantic approach to life.

(He takes the works of modern "realist" authors, some of whom he counted among his friends, as accurately holding a mirror up to life. He just didn't want to hold a mirror up to modern life without in some way trying to reach beyond it.)

The urge to write beautifully of people doing larger-than-life things led Cabell into the fantastic, by modern definitions, as the territory of romance[2]: a County of Poictesme which is somewhere close to Poitou and Angoulême, but not quite either, powers such as Horvendile and Miramon Lluagor, and peregrinations through worlds of legend. But that just escapes being an urge behind the historical novel of a certain sort: it isn't very different from being led to the high mimetic, in a world which is ours in the past. (In some ways the motivations behind creating Francis Lymond and Jurgen are very close.) Cabell is, in a way, a fantasist by accident. (Beyond Life considers both the high mimetic - not under that title - and the earlier romance; and the stories in Chivalry and Gallantry are in the historical fiction mode.)

Tolkien's attention was caught, at a young age, by things high and clear and far-off, in the Germanic alliterative poetic corpus and the Kalevala and, somewhere beyond that, the horns of elfland; and when he looked down again at the world around it looked drear and dull. Cabell, in contrast, begins by looking at the world around (the early novels are witty but very much of his contemporary world), finds it lacking, and then looks elsewhere for more vibrant deeds and greater actors. It may come to something similar in the end, but in an inverted way: Tolkien defines the author as a sub-creator, delegated power from the creation in which we live; Cabell compares (at various times) the demiurge to the author.

On his own terms, Cabell's œuvre is worth the continuing effort of consideration. It stands as a critique not only of the realist fiction against which he was reacting, but also of unreflective fiction in general. Perhaps a course of reading in Cabell and Borges might make sense. (It may be worth noting how much (though not all of) "mainstream" fiction has moved away from the straight realism of Lewis - Hemingway - Steinbeck - Waugh - Fitzgerald etc. towards incorporating metafictional or fantastic elements.)

[1]Cabell isn't alone here. Huizinga's Autumn of the Middle Ages paints how much more dramatic public life was, and how much more public and private life were intermingled, than in later periods.

[2]Beyond Life is quite clear about the models in mediaeval romance on which Cabell drew.