Faulkner and james Branch Cabell
CharlasWilliam Faulkner and his Literary Kin
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2Macumbeira
I am on tenterhooks
3SandraArdnas
I had to google Cabell and it made my day. Wikipedia says the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice tried to suppress his novel Jurgen for obscenity. They lost the case.
"Cabell took an author's revenge: the revised edition of 1926 included a previously "lost" passage in which the hero is placed on trial by the Philistines, with a large dung-beetle as the chief prosecutor." LOL
"Cabell took an author's revenge: the revised edition of 1926 included a previously "lost" passage in which the hero is placed on trial by the Philistines, with a large dung-beetle as the chief prosecutor." LOL
4Crypto-Willobie
>3 SandraArdnas:
There's a whole LT group dedicated to Cabell and his works:
http://www.librarything.com/groups/therabblediscusscabe
>2 Macumbeira:
Brief version...
In the earlier 1920s, when Bill Falkner (sic) was still a wannabe romantic poet, Cabell had just come into his own. After almost 20 years of writing magazine stories that were both droll and sentimental he developed an ornate kind of ironic fantasies that caught the eye of HL Mencken, Burton Rascoe, Hugh Walpole, Sinclair Lewis and some others. This was capped by the Jurgen scandal (published 1919, banned 1920, exonerated 1922). Suddenly Cabell of Richmond was the most famous Southern writer in the country.
But Mencken (especially) didn't do him any favors by pushing Cabell on the littery polloi. Cabell, for all his virtues, was an acquired taste: some critics hated him from the start, some fans tired of him and turned away (e.g. Steinbeck, TS Eliot), and by the proletarian 1930s his star had fallen and he was considered a has-been for the next three decades. He was remembered more or less only as 'the author of Jurgen, that smutty book' -- though it's so much more and is hardly smutty by our present standards. But it's almost like Cabell didn't notice for he continued to write and publish a number of pretty good novels and belles-lettres almost til his death in 1958. He's always retained some fans (e.g. Edmund Wilson, Robert A. Heinlein, Neil Gaiman) and in the post-Tolkien fantasy explosion there was a Cabell revival of sorts until he faded again. Next year in Poictesme!
But Faulkner? Faulkner became a fan in the 1920s, and before he became WILLIAM FAULKNER!!!!! he wrote a short Cabell pastiche Mayday and a short Cabellian children's fantasy The Wishing Tree (see my review); borrowed some phrases and images from Jurgen for his early novel Soldier's Pay; was known to have given Cabell books as gifts; and spoke well of Cabell's non-fantastic "Southern" novel The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck (which was also an influence on Ellen Glasgow). Cabell and Faulkner appear to have met briefly at a conference in the early 30s but Cabell was reclusive and rather waspish so they never became buds or even correspondents.
But some later academics acknowledged a connection, for instance Cleanth Brooks, Carvell Collins, & Joseph Flora. Maurice Duke's 1965 master's thesis Some new uses of myth in modern American fiction compared Absalom Absalom with Jurgen (I myself would compare it with Figures of Earth). In the early 1970s there was an MLA panel on Faulkner and Cabell with some papers being reprinted in the Cabell journal Kalki. And every so often a little bit of Cabell/Faulkner bubbles up somewhere.
So, different wavelengths, differing trajectories, but still some connective tissue.
There's a whole LT group dedicated to Cabell and his works:
http://www.librarything.com/groups/therabblediscusscabe
>2 Macumbeira:
Brief version...
In the earlier 1920s, when Bill Falkner (sic) was still a wannabe romantic poet, Cabell had just come into his own. After almost 20 years of writing magazine stories that were both droll and sentimental he developed an ornate kind of ironic fantasies that caught the eye of HL Mencken, Burton Rascoe, Hugh Walpole, Sinclair Lewis and some others. This was capped by the Jurgen scandal (published 1919, banned 1920, exonerated 1922). Suddenly Cabell of Richmond was the most famous Southern writer in the country.
But Mencken (especially) didn't do him any favors by pushing Cabell on the littery polloi. Cabell, for all his virtues, was an acquired taste: some critics hated him from the start, some fans tired of him and turned away (e.g. Steinbeck, TS Eliot), and by the proletarian 1930s his star had fallen and he was considered a has-been for the next three decades. He was remembered more or less only as 'the author of Jurgen, that smutty book' -- though it's so much more and is hardly smutty by our present standards. But it's almost like Cabell didn't notice for he continued to write and publish a number of pretty good novels and belles-lettres almost til his death in 1958. He's always retained some fans (e.g. Edmund Wilson, Robert A. Heinlein, Neil Gaiman) and in the post-Tolkien fantasy explosion there was a Cabell revival of sorts until he faded again. Next year in Poictesme!
But Faulkner? Faulkner became a fan in the 1920s, and before he became WILLIAM FAULKNER!!!!! he wrote a short Cabell pastiche Mayday and a short Cabellian children's fantasy The Wishing Tree (see my review); borrowed some phrases and images from Jurgen for his early novel Soldier's Pay; was known to have given Cabell books as gifts; and spoke well of Cabell's non-fantastic "Southern" novel The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck (which was also an influence on Ellen Glasgow). Cabell and Faulkner appear to have met briefly at a conference in the early 30s but Cabell was reclusive and rather waspish so they never became buds or even correspondents.
But some later academics acknowledged a connection, for instance Cleanth Brooks, Carvell Collins, & Joseph Flora. Maurice Duke's 1965 master's thesis Some new uses of myth in modern American fiction compared Absalom Absalom with Jurgen (I myself would compare it with Figures of Earth). In the early 1970s there was an MLA panel on Faulkner and Cabell with some papers being reprinted in the Cabell journal Kalki. And every so often a little bit of Cabell/Faulkner bubbles up somewhere.
So, different wavelengths, differing trajectories, but still some connective tissue.
5Macumbeira
This is what I call a GREAT post ! Thanks for the info Crypto. I never even heard of that Cabell - man
6Crypto-Willobie
People differ as to where to begin reading Cabell.
Jurgen (1919) is one obvious point of entry, followed perhaps by the two other novels in the sometimes-called 'Jurgen Trilogy' -- Figures of Earth (1921) and The Silver Stallion (1926).
The Cream of the Jest (1917) was his breakthrough novel. It combines a contemporary Virginia setting and modern satire with a bittersweet fantastical dream-world.
Some say that The High Place is structurally his best-written novel, but some of its characters might be indicted for misogyny, anti-clericalism, and fast-and-loose narrative strategies.
The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck is the last and best of his early non-fantastical 'Southern' fiction. Probably seems a little old-fashioned by modern standards but it has its fans.
Aside from the LT Cabell group there is this Cabell collectors' website
http://www.silverstallion.karkeeweb.com/cabellmain.html
run by two LT members (one of them me...)
And the James Branch Cabell Library at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond has a number of Cabell pages on their website, starting here:
https://gallery.library.vcu.edu/exhibits/show/jamesbranchcabell
Jurgen (1919) is one obvious point of entry, followed perhaps by the two other novels in the sometimes-called 'Jurgen Trilogy' -- Figures of Earth (1921) and The Silver Stallion (1926).
The Cream of the Jest (1917) was his breakthrough novel. It combines a contemporary Virginia setting and modern satire with a bittersweet fantastical dream-world.
Some say that The High Place is structurally his best-written novel, but some of its characters might be indicted for misogyny, anti-clericalism, and fast-and-loose narrative strategies.
The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck is the last and best of his early non-fantastical 'Southern' fiction. Probably seems a little old-fashioned by modern standards but it has its fans.
Aside from the LT Cabell group there is this Cabell collectors' website
http://www.silverstallion.karkeeweb.com/cabellmain.html
run by two LT members (one of them me...)
And the James Branch Cabell Library at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond has a number of Cabell pages on their website, starting here:
https://gallery.library.vcu.edu/exhibits/show/jamesbranchcabell
