Waugh and Cabell

So, sometimes you're panning for gold and instead you find an interesting nugget of copper. That's what happened to me recently. I was looking up something in a biography of Mary Renault and found a surprising passage which seemed to quote Evelyn Waugh commenting (negatively, this being Waugh) on Lewis and Tolkien. I was not aware of any evidence that Waugh even knew Tolkien existed, much less passed judgment on him, so this seemed something worth following up.

Accordingly, next time I was at the university library doing research, I dug out the Waugh biography given in the book on Renault as the source of the quote,* and found out it was a false lead. Waugh did indeed express that opinion of certain Oxford types, but he didn't name Lewis or Tolkien: it was Renault's biographer who decided L and T were among the people Waugh was criticizing, and put their names into the context. Which might well be the case, but if so it was a general, not a specific or personal, criticism: the Waugh record remains, so far as I know, Tolkienless.

However (and here's where the nugget of copper comes in), a second Waugh biography I checked just in case** revealed the unexpected information that young Waugh was a great admirer of James Branch Cabell, and that his "first serious attempt at fiction" was heavily influenced by J.B.C. Here's the passage in question:


The result was Evelyn's first serious attempt at fiction. It was a macabre story of death entitled Anthony, Who Sought Things That Were Lost. It was set in a tyrannical grand dukedom of Italy in the year 1848. Harold [Acton] published it in The Broom in June 1923. Fears aroused by the preciosity of the title are fully confirmed by reading.

Of this juvenile work Evelyn wrote that it 'betrays the unmistakeable influence of that preposterously spurious artefact, which quite captivated me at the age of nineteen, James Branch Cabell's Jurgen'. The severe self-judgement must stand, but it is to be noted that Harold, according to his own account, had already begun to convert Evelyn from Cabell towards a worthier model, Ronald Firband. Evelyn's story, gruesomely telling of an imprisoned pair of lovers, and the decay of their passion amid the horrors of the dungeon, and of how the love of 'the Lady Elizabeth' was transferred from 'Count Anthony' to the jailer, and of their murderous end, certainly shows the rubbishy influence of Cabell; but others are evident as well. There are weak echoes of Oscar Wilde's 'Happy Prince' stories, of Edgar Allan Poe, of Firband. Oddly enough the strongest resemblance is to an author whom neither Evelyn nor Harold is likely to have read or even to have heard about then, Frederick Rolfe, 'Baron Corvo'. At that time he was completely forgotten. The story is not by any standards a good piece of writing . . . 

[Sykes, p. 47]

I have to admit I've never read any Firbank -- an omission wh. I shd perhaps rectify -- but I do take exception at Sykes' snide dismissal of Cabell, whom I consider a much better writer than Waugh himself. Not that the synopsis given sounds anything like JURGEN, which is worldly and witty, cynical and salacious. Cabell had his limits, and doesn't lend himself well to imitation, but he also had real talent.

The main surprise is that Waugh would have chosen a famous fantasy author as a role model, and an American at that. As with Dunsany at about the same time, it's easy to forget today how popular, and admired, Cabell was as a writer in the late teens and early twenties of the last century.


By the way, it's my understand that Tolkien did read JURGEN and didn't like it (cynical, salacious, and irreverent not being exactly his cup of tea); Lewis also read it (probably at the urging of Joy Gresham***), as is shown by various passing allusions to the book (e.g., AN EXPERIMENT IN CRITICISM, p. 50), but I can't recall his discussing or evaluating it.


So: a fairly typical mainstream dismissal of a fantasy influence on a major twentieth century British author, but of interest for what it reveals about said fantasy author's influence and wide appeal at the time.

--John R.
current reading: SPEAKING FROM AMONG THE BONES (2013)






*EVELYN WAUGH: THE EARLY YEARS 1903-1939, by Martin Stannard [1986], pages 85-86



**EVELYN WAUGH: A BIOGRAPHY, by Christopher Sykes [1975].


***Joy G. being an admirer of both Cabell and Dunsany.

Another Dunsany Spotting (and Cabell too)

So, continuing my slow slog through Edmund Wilson's fiction* I came across an unexpected mention of Dunsany and Cabell that I thought I'd share.

The passage in question comes in Edmund Wilson's 1929 novel I Thought of Daisy, a dismal roman a clef about life in Greenwich Village featuring characters based on EW's friend John Dos Passos, the love of his life Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wilson himself, and an idealized flapper who is the girl of his dreams. In one scene the point-of-view Wilsonian narrator finds himself in an unfamiliar flat and, characteristically, checks out the bookshelves:

". . . on the shallow mantlepiece, a plaster cast of the Winged Victory; and between two narrow windows, which looked down on the Thirty-fourth Street car tracks, a book case containing, I noted, volumes of D. H. Lawrence, Cabell, Dunsany, and Shaw; George Moore's Memoirs of My Dead Life; Freud's Interpretation of Dreams; Frank Harris's Oscar Wilde; several volumes of Levy's Nietzsche and a whole shelf's array of Dostoevsky."

[1995 paperback edition, page 103]

It's not entirely clear (to me, at any rate) what Wilson means by this assemblage, who seem merely to be popular authors of the time, representing what was fashionable to read in the previous decade. It may be intended as characterization of the apartment owners, the Micklers', but this seems somewhat unlikely: we never do meet Mrs. Mick, who's locked herself in the bathroom, while her husband Larry turns out to be drunken lout, given to waving a pistol around and taking pot-shots at things (like the aforesaid Winged Victory).

More likely, it's simply local color: these are the sort of books you'd find on the shelves of a typical apartment belonging to the sort of folks Wilson hung out with back in the day, a detail transcribed from his notebooks for verisimilitude (of which his 'novel' is full).

Of the nine authors mentioned, Lawrence, Shaw, and Wilde are now firmly ensconced in the canon --which was not necessarily the case when Wilson wrote this passage. Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Freud had already come into their own as major thinkers. George Moore is lesser know today but secure in the second tier (authors you hear about when studying for a degree but probably never actually read).

That just leaves Cabell, whose vogue peaked in 1917 with the banning of JURGEN but whose stock remained high throughout the twenties, and Dunsany, who became famous during the war years as a playwright and who reached the height of his renown around 1919-1920 at the time of his U. S. tour. Interestingly enough, a latter-day sign of their lingering cachet can be found in the fact that the volumes of Cabell and Dunsany in C. S. Lewis's library, the remnants of which are now at the Wade, are American editions formerly belonging to Joy Gresham, who was a native-born New Yorker of the next generation (she wd have been in her early teens about the time Wilson's book on Greenwich Village appeared).

Next up: Dunsany and Fitzgerald.

--John R.

*my advice to anyone thinking of reading I Thought of Daisy? Don't.

Final Thoughts re. Wilson

So, three more scattered tidbits that might (or might not) be worth sharing.

(1) Wilson thought so highly of his attack on Tolkien ("Oo Those Awful Orcs") that he sent a copy to Cabell, asking his opinion of Tolkien's book. [EW to JBC, Apr 12 1956; LETTERS ON LITERATURE AND POLITICS, p. 542-543]. There's no record of Cabell's response (I even once asked Leon Edel to help me find if there was one, but to no avail), other than that Wilson found it "a delightful surprise" [EW to JBC, May 16th 1956; ibid p. 543].

(2) There's no record, so far as I know, of Wilson's ever having read C. S. Lewis (I suspect he wdn't have considered any of CSL's fiction "literature"*), but as an equal-opportunity insulter, he did once make a passing slap at Charles Williams, in the poem "The Mass in the Parking Lot"

. . . And whom should we meet there, on the loose,

But Andre Gide in a big burnoose.

What were his words of wisdom? Damn it,

He was whooping it up for Dashiell Hammett.

More correctly garbed, we encountered later

T. S. Eliot, the Great Dictator.

Having just awakened from troubled sleep,

He told us Charles Williams was terribly deep.

And Wystan Auden, with rigorous views

But his necktie hanging around his shoes,

Expounded his taste for detective stories,

Which he reads to illumine the current mores . . .

[NIGHT THOUGHTS, 1961, p. 181]

(3) Finally, yesterday I found out that Edmund Wilson's son with Mary McCarthy was named . . . Reuel Wilson.

Can't make this stuff up.

--JDR

-----------------------------

*what with the trilogy being science fiction, and the Narnia books children's books. TILL WE HAVE FACES might have interested him, but that book of Lewis's didn't do v. well and there's no reason to think Wilson ever heard of its existence. Plus, of course, Wilson disliked Xianity, and CSL's apostlizing was the single best-known thing about him.

Edmund Wilson: wrong about everything

So, I was recently re-reading Edmund Wilson's piece on H. P. Lovecraft ("Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous", 1945), and found I'd missed his ding of Lord Dunsany that occurs in this piece in passing. In his discussion of SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE ("a really able piece of work"), Wilson says that Lovecraft "writes about [his special field] with much intelligence". He then nonetheless uses Lovecraft's admiration for Dunsany as evidence of his innate second-rateness:

"He shows his lack of sound literary taste in his enthusiasm for Machen and Dunsany, whom he more or less acknowledged as models".

While I wasn't aware of this Dunsany reference in Wilson, it's thoroughly in keeping with what I wd have expected. The only fantasy author I know of whom Wilson approved was James Branch Cabell, whom he admired for the satirical and salacious parts.

However, it turns out this was not always the case. In an earlier piece on H. L. Mencken [1926], he had taken Mencken to task as someone who "is never tired of celebrating the elegances of such provincial fops as Lord Dunsany, Hergesheimer, and Cabell, who have announced -- it is, I think, Mr. Cabell's phrase -- that they aim to 'write beautifully about beautiful things'." Here Wilson lumps Dunsany and Cabell (and the unknown-to-me Hergesheimer) among the dilettantes unworthy of serious attention.*

The same Dunsany-&-Cabell-among-the-goats attitude holds in the only other reference to Dunsany I've found so far among Wilson's reviews: this time in a 1928 piece on Thornton Wilder. Here he praises Wilder by contrasting him to Dunsany and Cabell: "he [Wilder] has a hardness, a sharpness, that sets him quite apart from our Cabells, our Dunsanys, our Van Vechtens and our George Moores. He has an edge that is peculiar to himself".

So, that Wilson wd disparage Tolkien was entirely in keeping with his decades-long disparagement of fantasy, even as practiced by the greats, like Dunsany and Tolkien. Which makes his changing his mind on Cabell all the more interesting: having attacked him when he was popular, he began to champion him after he'd slipped into obscurity. Partly this was Wilson's contrariness, which grew on him towards the end of his life, and partly it was due to his seeing his role as one who puffed the unjustly neglected and took down a peg those who were being praised more than he felt they deserved.

More on this later.

--John R.

*Mencken was well-known for promoting Dunsany and played a large part in introducing him to an American audience.