Great Science-Fiction
& Fantasy Works
science-fiction & fantasy literature:
a critical list with discussions
Science-Fiction and Fantasy Books by James Branch Cabell
Standard Disclaimer:
This is a brief discussion of James Branch Cabell
and, of course, of some books by James Branch Cabell
This discussion and list does not necessarily include every book by Cabell: it includes only those books that I both know and like. Just as with the author list
itself, omission of a particular item may mean I didn't think highly enough of the omitted item, or it may simply mean that I have not yet sufficient familiarity
with it. (In a very few cases, I have listed some books merely on the strength of my opinion of the author: all such books are clearly marked below, as throughout
these lists, with a hash mark (#) before the title so you know what's what.)
I don't pretend that this discussion is a deep analysis. My intent is no more than to give you a rough idea of what kinds of tales Cabell tells, how those
tales are usually told, and what makes them and Cabell worthy; in sum, to help you rank Cabell (and the works by Cabell listed here) on your
personal literary "to do" list.
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A Few Words About James Branch Cabell
Without a doubt, the central fact of human existence must be the inevitable end of
that existence: death. No philosophies, no beliefs, no ways of life that are not founded
on a careful examination of the significance of life as seen in the light of death are
worth a pitcher of warm spit.
James Branch Cabell was a man who had, earlier in life than most do (of those who do at
all, that is), stared long and hard at the face of death and then reached his private
accommodation with it. That is rare: any life-insurance salesman will tell you that
everyone lives forever, or at least conducts their affairs apparently firm in that belief.
Some--many I suppose--of those who have looked at that grinning skull have taken
their refuge in one or another religion; Cabell was not one of them.
And the tale says that in the cave of Clioth was not absolute darkness, but, instead, a
dim blue glowing everywhere, as though the gleam of decay were intermingled here with the
gleam of moonshine. Upon both sides of the cave showed a long row of crumbling altars;
and every altar was inscribed with the device of one or another god.
Thus upon the first altar that Alfgar came to was engraved: "I am the Well-doer. I only
am the Lord of the two horns, the Governor of all living, and the Conqueror of every
land."
But upon the next altar you read: "I am the Beneficent. I ordained created things from
the beginning. There is no other god save me, who am the giver of winds to all nostrils,
and the bestower of delight and ruin to every person."
The device upon an altar of square-hewn granite said: "I am that I am. I am a jealous
god: my thoughts are tempests. Thou shall have no other god before me."
Yet upon an altar of green malachite carved with four skulls was written: "I am the
Warrior, the far-darting Slayer of all life and the Slayer of death also. No other god
is my peer: through me the sun is risen, and I alone reign over the place where all
roads meet."
Such were the devices on these altars, and upon yet other altars showed yet other
devices, but no living man might say to what gods any of these altars had been erected,
for all these gods had passed down into Antan long ago.
("Antan"--in Cabell's fictive universe a place--is French for "yesteryear"; Cabell is
very much given to wordplay of all sorts--mostly names that are anagrams, but also such
obscure references as that. Devotees cite all this wordplay as one of Cabell's
excellences, but to me they detract somewhat from the collective force of his works.)
Cabell's accommodation to the fact of a permanent death is his election of a certain style
of living as giving some sort of value and possibly meaning to what would otherwise be a
cruel and idle jest. That style is the recognition and continuing pursuit of the
beautiful--"continuing" because capture is inherently impossible. That pursuit will take
a man (not an idle pronoun--Cabell's world-view is masculine, not universal) down lonely
and painful roads, to a doom that will invariably be mocked by his fellows, who live their
sorts of lives, the sorts meant by the phrase "an unconsidered life," in faithful
obedience to conventionality--to doing, as Cabell so often puts it, that which is expected
of them.
Such description may leave the unfamiliar with the sense that Cabell is a gloomy fellow to
read, but the reality is just the opposite, for what is part and parcel of his approach is
a jaunty attitude, a mocking raillery both at conventionality and at his own philosophy,
which he concedes is a form of folly, albeit a fine folly. Indeed, many readers--those
with sensibilities less refined than yours--can read extensively in Cabell and come away
thinking they have experienced nothing but a comic: a light satirist or comedian of
manners. But not at all far beneath that genteel surface of brittle humor is, always,
that iron-cold recognition of the finality of death and the need of humankind to face it.
"I fight against the gluttony of time with so many very amusing weapons--with gestures
and with three attitudes and with charming phrases; with tears and with tinsel, and with
sugar-coated pills, and with platitudes slightly regilded. Yes, and I fight him also
with little mirrors wherein gleam confusedly the corruptions of lust, and ruddy loyalty,
and a bit of moonshine, and the pure diamond of the heart's desire, and the opal
cloudings of human compromise: but, above all, I fight that ravening dotard with the
strength of my own folly."
So speaks Horvendile, that "wandering demiurge" who flits in and out of so many of
Cabell's tales and who might be Cabell's persona in his own tales or who might be
humankind itself--or at least sophisticated adult humankind--or both. The brief passage
quoted above (which, like the previous passage, is from the short work The Way of
Ecben) is in many ways a summing-up of Cabell, though one must read many of the
individual books before returning to it to see how truly so it is. The "little mirrors"
are, of course, tales, fictions--especially, but not necessarily only, Cabell's tales,
which are indeed filled with the things he mentions.
To anyone who has read even a few pages of each author, it may seem bizarre to compare
Cabell to Eric Eddison. But the differences, which are
obvious, are in the superficies: Eddison writes an Elizabethan prose, his characters are
larger-than-life heroes doing suitably heroic deeds, and in his books--and, apparently,
his personal beliefs--he envisions rewards for right living (as he defines it) beyond this
life; Cabell writes a languid Victorian prose, his characters (his male characters, that
is) are, in the main, petty if droll fellows out for the main chance by way of whatever
deceits they find necessary, and--despite the prevalence in his tales of numerous
afterlives (the simultaneous prevalence!) from the Christian Heaven and Hell to
the Norse Valhalla--Cabell himself sees no afterlife waiting.
But the kinship is there beneath those superficies. Both Eddison and Cabell see as the
sole point of life the wholehearted, singleminded pursuit, through all vicissitudes, of
the ideal of Beauty, and both see that Beauty as idealized or incarnated in woman (or, I
suppose one should type, Woman). And, once agreed on the sole point of life, what
differences then matter?
Two references in the quoted passage especially call for explication. The first is "the
pure diamond of heart's desire," for it is here that Cabell is most closely like Eddison:
his ultimate value is ultimate beauty, forever unobtainable, forever sought. It is
perception of that beauty, and the lifelong devotion to pursuing it, despite the sure
knowledge that it is unobtainable, that ennobles man. I say "man" advisedly,
for--yes, yet again--like Eddison, Cabell embodies that ultimate of Beauty in feminine
form. The two themes that represent that quest and that ideal are "the music from behind
the moon"--the call that once heard must be forever followed--and Etarre, a
personification of ideal Woman. No: not "ideal"--supreme, for Etarre, and the ideal she
incarnates, can and usually does bring vast grief to the men who would pursue her, yet
pursue her they do, even in full knowledge of that banefulness. Here is yet more from the
same work:
"Then I must tell you," said Horvendile, "that my immortality has sharp restrictions.
For it is at a price that I pass down the years, as yet, in eternal union with the
witch-woman whose magic stays--as yet--more strong than is the magic of time. The price
is that I only of her lovers may not ever hope to win Etarre. This merely is permitted
me: that I may touch the hand of Etarre in the moment that I lay that hand in the hand
of her most recent, foredoomed lover. I give, who may not ever take."
Now Horvendile is certainly Cabell himself, the writer who can but fleetingly touch
Etarre--Beauty, the very ideal of Beauty--as he delivers her to her next lover--you, his
reader. This is the eternal pain of the artist who has a vision of ultimate beauty that
he knows he cannot ever truly attain: nothing he can write can capture that which is
innately ineffable.
The other reference requiring explication is to the "three attitudes," for much of
Cabell's work revolves around examination of those "three attitudes," which Cabell sees as
man's (but, I think, not necessarily woman's) basic ways of meeting life; those attitudes
are, in Cabell's terms, the poetic, the chivalrous, and the gallant. Each of his books,
in or out of the Biography cycle (see below), explores at length a working-out in life of
one or another of those attitudes. As Cabell uses the terms, they are perhaps not quite
what you might think they are. The poetic attitude is to remain largely unaffected by
what befalls one, to regard it as grist for the esthetic mill; the poet, as Cabell uses
the term, seeks not any realization of his poetic dreams, nor does he suffer from that
lack of realization. The chivalrous attitude Cabell frequently associated with the word
"vicarship"; the vicar, the chivalrous one, acts always for another--his God, his Lady,
his honor (for to the chivalrous, their honor is effectively an abstract thing distinct
from themselves). The gallant is the ironist, the one who accepts "reality" and makes the
best of it--often his own looking-out-for-number-one "best"--with no great scruple.
Those attitudes are just that: attitudes, broad strategies. There are many varieties of
tactics by which each of the three may be attempted in this world, and that is what I mean
when I say that Cabell's books are each an exploration of one working-out of a given
attitude, showing the possible or probable consequences of certain kinds of tactical
decisions within the framework of a specific one of his three perceived attitudes.
Cabell was once the bright pole star of American literature. H.L. Mencken wrote of him
that "his one aim in life [was] to make himself a first-rate writer--and this aim, I am
inclined to think, he has come nearer to realizing than any other American of his time";
today, however, Cabell hangs quite low and dim in the literary firmament. It is not
opinions of Cabell or his quality that have changed: it is opinions on what literature
is. Today, Cabell's literary form--belles lettres--is about as popular (and
salable) as horse-drawn carriages.
Lengthy essays could be--have been--written on whether or not that contemporary lack of
popularity, indeed unpopularity, stands as a milepost on the road to intellectual Hell
(here are few thoughts from
Cabell himself on the general topic). But we are concerned here with the value of
writers sub specie æternitatis, and Cabell so seen is a master, if nothing
else for his philosophical illuminations--but his work is not a matter of "nothing else,"
for Cabell was, above (or below) the stimulating of our mental processes, exquisitely
accomplished in the basic elements of giving pleasure with his writing.
Cabell's characters play out their various histories in widely differing settings. It is
the underlying theme that provides the unity, not the mode or style of a given work. Some
are "fantasies" of the classic sort, in which magical things happen in lands that never
were; some are comedies of manners set in period or near-contemporary Virginia (where
Cabell lived). Some are tales, some are plays, some are poems, some few are essays. All
have the Cabell touch, even when, as in many of the tales in medieval settings, he sounds
like Balzac in The Droll Stories. (I am not much taken with seeking "sources" for
authors, but the likeness between Cabell's tales and Balzac's is striking.) No individual
attribute of his settings stands out save this single but crucial one: they are
authentic. Cabell wrote every passage with some particular real place, whether indoors or
out, in mind as his model; that is especially clear in his many charming descriptions of
the countryside in medieval Poictesme--all taken from views of rural Virginia. (There is
much about this in his book These Restless Heads, which is a sort of envoi
to the "Biography," which is in turn described below).
(I say "near-contemporary" because Cabell made it a point never to write things set in
truly contemporary times, lest he be taken for something he despised: a "modern" author
dealing with "today's affairs.")
Cabell's plots have at times seemed invisible to hostile critics (and there were many of
those, for the times in which Cabell wrote were not congenial to works containing pretty
unsubtle sexuality, and Cabell achieved his artistic renown despite, not because of,
popular sentiment about his works--recall that his fame derives largely from the
ridiculous "obscenity" trial sprung from the bletherings of one of that tribe of
self-appointed guardians of public morals so common then and by no means unknown in our
own age--the particular book singled out being Jurgen); but that "invisibility"
arises largely because those critics were unaware of or indifferent to the themes Cabell
was playing out. The tales often seem episodic but, in retrospect and with some idea of
what the tale was trying to show us, the plots can be seen to have been cleverly woven of
threads of just the needful size and color, with the true pattern emerging only when the
weaving is fully done.
Cabell's characters vary considerably, as they must needs to act out the themes they are
being called on to elaborate; but most or all of them are not, nor are they expected to be
taken for, "realistic" portrayals of plausible persons. Nor should we expect to find many
of them to be what is usually called "sympathetic" characters--persons we might think to
have to dinner. But though "unrealistic" and often unsympathetic, they are nonetheless
most curious, quirky, and thoroughly interesting folk whose disportings amuse us vastly.
That lack of sympathy characterizes primarily the males in Cabell's works (though there
are some "sympathetic" male characters, most are what, exercising the utmost
possible charity, we would have to call "scamps," thereby avoiding the more natural phrase
"selfish bastards"). The women in Cabell usually--though by no means always--are persons
with whose fortunes or misfortunes we can have sympathy, but the men who so often
victimize those women usually end up paying the piper, with their victims calling the
piper's tune.
Still, of what I have set out as the four methods by which tales may please--language,
plot, characters, and setting--easily the foremost element in Cabell is his language. It
is, as I have already noted, a languid Victorian sort of prose, filled with dry,
understated ironies and subtle (and sometimes unsubtle) double entendres. Here are
a few random samples.
In such estate it was that Count Manuel came, on Christmas morning, just two days after
Manuel was twenty-one, into Provence. This land, reputed sorcerous, in no way displayed
to him any unusual features, though it was noticeable that the King's marmoreal palace
was fenced with silver pikes whereon were set the embalmed heads of young men who had
wooed the Princess Alianora unsuccessfully. Manuel's lackeys did not at first like the
looks of these heads, and said they were unsuitable for Christmas decorations; but Dom
Manuel explained that at this season of general merriment this palisade also was
mirth-provoking because (the weather being such as was virtually unprecedented in these
parts) a light snow had fallen during the night, so that each head seemed to wear a
nightcap.
That from Figures of Earth. Then we have, from Domnei:
Said Perion:
"Since she permits me to serve her, I may not serve unworthily. To-morrow I shall set
new armies afield. To-morrow it will delight me to see their tents rise in your meadows,
Messire Demetrios, and to see our followers meeting in clashing combat, by hundreds and
by thousands, so mightily that men will sing of it when we are gone. To-morrow one of us
must kill the other. To-night we drink our wine in amity. I have not time to hate you,
I have not time to like or dislike any living person. I must, instead, devote all
faculties which Heaven gave me to the love and service of Dame Melicent."
Demetrios said:
"To-night we babble to the stars and dream vain dreams, as other fools have done before
us. To-morrow rests--perhaps--with Heaven: but depend upon it, Messire de la
Forêt, whatever we may do to-morrow will be foolishly performed, because we are both
besotted by bright eyes and lips and hair. I trust to find our antics laughable. For
you and I are different, messire, in that I imagine every looking-glass to afford me
nourishing food for mirth and wonder and derision. Yet there is in me that which is
murderous when I reflect that you and she do not dislike me. It is the distasteful truth
that neither of you considers me to be worth the trouble. I find such conduct
irritating, because no other persons have ever ventured to deal in this fashion with
Demetrios."
Or, to round out, this from Jurgen:
"It was not my husband's negligence that I minded. In fact, Smoit killed me in a brutal
fit of jealousy, and jealousy is in its blundering way a compliment. No, it was a worse
thing than that which befell me, Jurgen, and embittered all my life in the flesh." And
Sylvia began to weep.
"But what was that thing, Sylvia?"
Queen Sylvia whispered the terrible truth. "My husband did not understand me."
"Now, by Heaven," says Jurgen, "When a woman tells me that, even though the woman be
dead, I know what it is she expects of me."
So Jurgen put his arm about the ghost of Queen Sylvia Tereu, and comforted her. Then,
finding her quite willing to be comforted, Jurgen sat for a while upon the dark steps,
with one arm still about Queen Sylvia. The effect of the potion had evidently worn off,
because Jurgen found himself to be composed no longer of cool imponderable vapor, but of
the warmest and hardest sort of flesh everywhere.
That is the sort of thing that got Jurgen prosecuted for obscenity, without the
benefit of which notorious and amusing prosecution Cabell would likely today be an obscure
footnote in literature.
Cabell wrote over fifty books, but is best remembered today for the 18 (or 20, or more,
depending on how you count) works making up what is usually called "The Biography of
Manuel," that Biography being loosely in the form of a multi-generational saga beginning
with the medieval exploits of Dom Manuel, pig-herd become Count of Poictesme--a fictitious
region of France--and running through the centuries up almost to Cabell's own time.
Cabell afterwards took the position that the Biography was a single work--he always called
it a book, as if it were one continuous tale. Well, it is not a continuous tale in the
narrative sense, but a good case can be made out for its continuity in a philosophical and
even literary sense, for each volume is integral to what the whole is presenting to us.
The order in which the volumes are read is probably not critical, but on the whole the
best approach is doubtless to follow Cabell's own plan of ordering.
(The definitive edition of the complete Biography is the so-called "Storisende" edition,
named after a castle in the saga--that castle's name itself being a simple jest--of 18
volumes, the edition supervised directly by Cabell himself.
Note that after completing the Biography, Cabell took to publishing under the name
"Branch Cabell," to avoid confusion between works belonging to the Biography and his
other, later, independent works.)
The Biography is considered Cabell's magnum opus; nevertheless, it would be a fool
who ignores his other works. My own feeling is that as excellent as the Biography
is, some of Cabell's later work is at least as good if not better (though all is
masterly). It is as if Cabell, having finished the Biography, felt a leisure not
previously available to him, and indeed his writings suggest strongly that to finish the
Biography before his death was a morbid obsession (folk died younger then, and he
had in his mind examples of other contemporary writers who had died relatively young
before finishing their chief projects). With that leisure, he wrote some leisurely books;
I am not sure that the Nightmare trilogy mightn't be his real magnum opus, and
the so-called Heirs and Assigns trilogy is on a par with his best. The
Florida trio begins with a non-fiction book, part of a commissioned set, Rivers
of America, by various authors--Cabell, in partnership with A. J. Hanna, wrote on the
St. Johns river of Florida, but the book, though a history, has a flavor much like
Cabell's novels--but the next two are much like the Biography in style and flavor.
Cabell seemed constitutionally unable to write a book less than as perfect as he could
make it, and, so far as I can see, he never did.
Envoi: Cabell's non-fiction and quasi-fiction (essays lightly disguised as fiction, or
simply set as conversations between him and one of his characters, the author John
Charteris) are gems in every way as scintillant as his fiction; the reader will do well to
not overlook These Restless Heads and--from the Biography--Straws and
Prayer-Books.
Other James Branch Cabell Resources
James Branch Cabell Resources On the Web
The Virginia Commonwealth University maintains a useful
Cabell
page with links to a few other Cabell sites (there are not that many out there). Also
look at the
Violet
Books Cabell page, not linked at the University Library page. There is an insightful
essay,
from the December, 1921 issue of The Pacific Review. Mike Keith has a modest but
pleasing
Cabell
page up, and there is another
appreciation by Christopher Jon Caldwell. (The address www.branchcabell.com is
just a "parked" domain name with no content.)
A pleasing, amusing, and informative mini-site elaborating many of the references and
other obsurities appearing in Jurgen (and thus, in many instances, in other tales
from the "Biography") can be found at
David
Rolfe's Jurgen site.
James Branch Cabell Resources In Print
Desmond Tarrant's book
James Branch Cabell: The Dream and the
Reality
is considered the definitive study of Cabell and his works;
a
brief essay about Cabell by Tarrant is available on line. (Tarrant there remarks that
"His best books and those on which his reputation really and firmly rests include
chiefly . . . " and lists (ordered by publication date, not order in
the Biography):
By and large, I concur, though I would add a few other titles; but, truth to tell,
all of Cabell is comet-vintage wine.
Notable Science-Fiction and Fantasy Books by James Branch Cabell *****
- The "Biography" Cycle:
The full cycle is a mix of fantasies, historical romances, essays, verse, and plays. Although some of the component works are, in and of themselves, not exactly in our fields, they
are integral parts of a larger whole that most assuredly is, and so are all duly noted in the list. The
"Storisende
Edition", an integral set of the Biography--published over the years 1927 to 1930--had special introductions and notes. The numbers after the titles below are their volume
designation in the Storisende set (a number of the form 4a means the title was one of two or more published as one volume in the set).
-
Beyond Life, #1
(nominally fiction but essentially an essay on life and fiction-writing)
- Figures of Earth, #2
- The Silver Stallion, #3
-
Domnei, #4a
(an earlier version of this was published as The Soul of Melicent)
- The Music from Behind the Moon, #4b
- Chivalry, #5
- Jurgen, #6
- The Line of Love, #7
- The High Place, #8
- Gallantry, #9
- Something About Eve, #10
- The Certain Hour, #11
- The Cords of Vanity, #12
-
From the Hidden Way, #13a
(verse)
-
The Jewel Merchants, #13b
(a play)
- The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck, #14
- The Eagle's Shadow, #15
- The Cream of the Jest, #16a
-
The Lineage of Lichfield, #16b
(a pseudo-genealogy of the Biography)
-
Straws and Prayer-Books, #17
(essays, plus one fantasy story)
-
Townsend of Lichfield, #18a
(essay)
- The Way of Ecben, #18b
- The White Robe, #18c
-
Sonnets of Antan, #18d
(verse)
-
Taboo, #18e
(a thinly veiled fantasy-style recounting of the Jurgen obscenity trial)
The #18 Storisende volume also contains several more essays and appendices.
-
The Witch-Woman
(an omnibus of three related books--The Music From Behind the Moon, The Way of Ecben, and The White Robe--extracted from the
Biography, plus a discursive introduction); not part of the Storisende set.
(There is a preferred edition of this work.)
-
Preface to the Past
(prefaces & notes extracted from the Storisende Edition)
- The "Heirs and Assigns" Trio:
These are nominally related to the "Biography of Manuel", though how is not obvious.
- The Florida Trio:
- The Nightmare Trilogy:
-
Between Dawn and Sunrise
(Cabell selections edited and annotated by John Macy)
-
These Restless Heads
(a mix of fantastic and biographical reflections on life in general and the Biography in particular)
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