Cabell and Religion

Currently reading the MacDonald bio, and this question has been nagging at me: is Cabell's work really as stoutly agnostic as it is popularly thought to be? I see so much mysticism and obsession with myth in JBC's work that I find it hard to believe he was (only) messing around with it as raw material. What do we think of the mystical or religious impulse in Cabell's work? It certainly is a layer of his ironic shrouding, but is it only that?

Related: I'm in an R.A. Lafferty group on Facebook, and brought up what I thought was a fairly simple common spirit between RAL and JBC-- an interest in myth and the tall tale-- only to be dismissed because Lafferty, of course, was a rather devout Catholic. Obviously Cabell was, uh, not that. "And yet at the same time..."

Hard to say for sure -- Cabell kept his cards close to his vest. He proclaimed himself to be an Episcopalian but that seems to be because he felt that was expected of a Virginian gentleman of his station. In one of his earlyish books -- Cream? Beyond Life? he credits God with being a good novelist for coming up with the only-begotten-son/crucifixion story which he felt was very effective -- so that's kind of cynical. And recently I read something in (was it?) Quiet Please or As I Remember It which suggested that in his final decade he was still more or less skeptical, or at least agnostic. Ultimately I think he was at bottom an agnostic who was content to be a conventional Episcopalian.

Btw, Desmond Tarrant's book James Branch Cabell: The Dream and the Reality makes claims for religious and spiritual subtexts in Cabell's works. But it's also written more or less at the level of an undergraduate thesis.

I've paged through Tarrant's book— it is definitely something that got me thinking about all this. But, agreed, the writing is a bit... amateurish. .

Whatever JBC claimed publicly or believed privately, his writings generate no tension between the proper life of Romance, on the one hand, and his frequent allusions to myth and occulted knowledge, on another. These are different aspects of the same perspective, it seems to me. He comes close to saying this himself in Beyond Life: that is the significance of the demiurgic spirit -- anyway, that's how I read it.

The "contradiction" between myth or mysticism and Church doctrine seems most likely a target of Cabell's wit and satire than any concern I can imagine him taking to heart.

I would refine the hypothesis by observing that both Lafferty and Cabell had a pronounced interest in the Faustian mytheme. Such an interest is equally amenable to devout Catholicism and agnostic Episcopalianism.

(I wish there were a Lafferty group on LT; I won't go to |f| even for that.)

We could have a Lafferty thread in this group and you could link to it from the Lafferty author page...

I am pretty sure it is in As I Remember It; Some Epilogues in Recollection — but it could be in another of his books — that Cabell explains his Episcopalian faith. He was quite earnest. “It might possibly be true.” Earnest and ironic. Typical. And, as I have argued before, that chapter in Cream of the Jest, “The Evolution of a Vestryman,” was both a satire and a confession — and prefigured C.S. Lewis’s accounts in Surprised by Joy and The Pilgrim’s Regress. But obviously Lewis took it far more literally than did the more subtle Cabell.

In “Quiet, Please” there is much interesting talk about God. Highly recommended. The chapter “Regards Contentment in Compromise” basically asserts that, as improbable and incoherent the idea of a Deity may be, we need Him to focus our appreciation — our thanks.