James Branch Cabell Quotes (1879-1958)

“I have followed after the truth, across this windy planet upon which every person is nourished by one or another lie.”

“I have followed after the truth, across this windy planet upon which every person is nourished by one or another lie.”

“Now, the redemption which we as yet await (continued Imlac), will be that of Kalki, who will come as a Silver Stallion: all evils and every sort of folly will perish at the coming of this Kalki: true righteousness will be restored, and the minds of men will be made as clear as crystal.”

“You touch on a disheartening truth. People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.”

“Whatever pretended pessimists in search of notoriety may say, most people are naturally kind, at heart.”

“The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. So I elect for neither label.”

“You must understand that it is little rest a vampire gets on earth, with so many fine young fellows like yourself going about everywhere eager to be destroyed.”

“Now, the redemption which we as yet await (continued Imlac), will be that of Kalki, who will come as a Silver Stallion: all evils and every sort of folly will perish at the coming of this Kalki: true righteousness will be restored, and the minds of men will be made as clear as crystal.”

“At the gate of the garden, beside the lingham post which stood there in eternal erection, sat a boy who was diverting himself by whittling, with a small green-handled knife, a bit of cedar-wood into the quaint shaping which the post had. His hair was darkly red: and now, as he regarded Alfgar with brown and wide-set eyes, the face of this boy was humorously grave, and he nodded now, as the complacent artist nods who looks upon his advancing work and finds all to be near his wishes.”

“A strange thing happened to the American fantasy author James Branch Cabell in 1920. Cabell was a writer of novels, short stories and poetry who'd been published regularly for about twenty years to great critical acclaim (fans included Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken) but no commercial success whatsoever. The previous year, his latest mediaeval fantasy novel, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice, had been published to the usual glowing reviews and public indifference, and appeared destined for the same obscurity as the rest of his work. Then the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, under John S. Sumner, brought an action against the novel for obscenity. The case went to court, amid considerable publicity – one side dedicated to protecting outraged public morals, the other championing the author as a martyr to the philistines – and dragged on for two years, at the end of which Cabell and his publishers were fully vindicated. The result was inevitable: Jurgen became a huge bestseller, and for several years everything Cabell wrote was a commercial success.”

“There is an outcry against epoch-making masterpieces of philosophy like Jurgen. The salacious musical comedy goes its libidinous way rejoicing, while Ibsen and Bernard Shaw are on the black list. The fact is, of course, that the puritan has been turned by sexual repression into a sexual pervert and degenerate, so that he is insane on the subject.”

“In the early part of the 20th century, there was a fantasy writer named James Branch Cabell who had a theory of writing as magic. His books (highly recommended, especially Jurgen) are both funny and mythological ... and it's easy to see how his process of creating characters was really a process of evocation and invocation.”

“Actually, my favorite treatment of bad reviews is James Branch Cabell who, in the back of the 18 volume beautiful, huge collection of all of his works the Biography of Manuel, did a final section detailing what the reviewers said for each of his books. The book reviews go like this. The first 5 or 6 books, the reviews he quotes say something like: "Beautiful illustrations by the artist; such a pity about the words." Then you get to the reviews of Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice and the reviews say: "This a terrible book. It has no redeeming features; it's simply awful; a major misstep." And then every single review for every book he wrote after Jurgen begins, "Well, this isn't Jurgen. Apparently the author has lost the facility with which he wrote that delightful book." So he did put this wonderful parade of the ridiculous things that the reviewers said over time. As I mentioned in the blog, the only final thing that you can say about the reviewers, is this. The same day that the Publisher's Weekly review came in which said, "The road trip plot was completely aimless, but I liked the stuff in Lakeside," the Summer Book Forum book review came in which said, "The roadside stuff is amazing -- the novel only loses focus when you get to the stuff in Lakeside." ... If you actually pay any credence to it, it does make you crazy. So you just kind of smile and think, "Maybe someday I'll review all the reviewers someday." But you probably won't.”

“Among the literary men of the time, Cabell's circle of friends was large: Sinclair Lewis, Joseph Hergesheimer, Carl Van Vechten, Burton Rascoe, Arthur Machen, to name a few. In his Nobel Prize Address in 1930, Lewis mentioned Cabell as one of the three American writers, along with Hemingway and Faulkner, worthy of the attention of the Swedish Academy. All in all, Cabell's reputation in the 20's must have seemed unassailable. But fortune's wheel turned, and the years that followed his initial popularity gave rise to a series of hostile critics. Cabell's novels were attacked from almost every conceivable position: stylistically, ideologically, socially, personally. In 1933, Granville Hicks, abdicating the critic's responsibility of balanced judgment, strikes at the author himself, calling him "a sleek, smug egoist," and his work "a structure of lies." Hicks begins the series of attacks; and Oscar Cargill in Intellectual America (1941), after damning "Cabell's reputation as a stylist" as "overblown," attempts to have the final word. He sums Cabell up "as a museum piece representing the psychology of a Virginian who would be an intellectual leader yet had not quite what it takes." However, the 1950's had better words for Cabell. Edward Wagenknecht in the Cavalcade of the American Novel (1952) reminds us that "James Branch Cabell …is still a unique and incomparable figure in American literature … He will never be the voice of a 'party' or of a 'movement'; he will never speak for anything smaller or more limited than the human spirit itself." Four years later, Edmund Wilson in a long article in the New Yorker suggested that Cabell's work had been maligned by partial critics and called for a reevaluation of his novels. In the 60's two book-length studies have appeared, and a biography is in preparation. Joe Lee Davis concludes that "one must — in common decency and simple justice — rank him among the major rather than the minor authors of the twentieth century... . Cabell is both the Spenser and the Boccaccio of the second American Renaissance." After years of neglect, Cabell's work is again receiving the attention it deserves.”