James Branch Cabell

Carl Van Doren does what most of us do who read and admire Cabell: write about Cabell in Cabellian style. The opening gambit shows as much:

"There are more arguments to prove that James Branch Cabell is a legend than to prove that he is a fact."

But Van Doren is no mere epigone. He's gone all the way into literary criticism, and can focus in on the crucial truth:

"Mr. Cabell is the most humorous of mythologists. Out of what might seem pedantry if there were less gusto in it, or ignorance if there were less method, he has inextricably jumbled all the mythologies as well as all the histories and geographies. nor has he hesitated to invent with a large hand. The result is that he crowds his pages with symbols which may be brilliantly suggestive and which may be merely mystification. But Mr. cabell no more minds irritating than he minds mystifying. he works under cove, always by the method of indirection. . . . Allegory lurks where no one has any reason to suspect it; allegory is also sometimes absent from passages wherein by all precedent it ought to be. What reader, in such circumstances, can be quite sure that Mr. Cabell is not having sport with him?"

Exactly. This is a necessary little book for those who love Cabell. And, perhaps, even for those who are offended at being made sport of. ( )