The Apex of Urbanity: James Branch Cabell's Figures of Earth (1921)

You've never heard of him, I suspect. He's most famous for being sued for being outrageously pornographic. His novel Jurgen thereafter leapt to the tops of the bestseller list, disappointing anyone who had hoped for an especially titillating read. Mind you, this was back in 1920, and you could be arrested in Toronto for not wearing a shirt in the park as recently as 1960, so it didn't take much. Eventually Judge Nott acquitted the book, ruling that even though some passages were suggestive (especially regarding Jurgen's sword-wielding ability), the book's "unreal and supernatural nature" let it off the hook.

So let's start there: Cabell wrote fantasy, for the most part. He wrote fantasy back in the day when only a handful of people did so (other than children's books and fairy tales). Moreover, he was considered a major literary figure, amongst the most important living American writers (when Sinclair Lewis won a Nobel Prize, he cited Cabell as worthy of international attention).

By the 1930s, however, tastes changed. Cabell's delicate, witty, and escapist fantasies had fallen out of fashion. Social realism was in vogue (e.g. Steinbeck, or those British novels that Cold Comfort Farm so effectively skewers). Ballantine Books (and later Del Rey) brought Cabell back in the late 1960s to an audience of fantasy enthusiasts desperate for content after finishing The Lord of the Rings and finding little to nothing else out there. Jurgen, due to its notoriety, had remained in print via Avon Books, but this was the first opportunity in decades for avid readers to rediscover the other joys of Cabell.

The centerpiece of his work was a series of books known as The Biography of Manuel, consisting of umpteen novels all connected to a character known as Dom Manuel, or more exactly, since he dies at the end of the first book, his descendants. Some of these books were written before the Biography was conceived, and later rewritten to make them fit. Cabell decided beloved heroines of his early works could be Dom Manuel's' daughters, and so forth.

But it is this first book chronologically, the one that introduces (and ultimately dispenses with) Dom Manuel which is my particular favourite: Figures of Earth.

Cabell's style takes some getting used to. He prides himself in being urbane, a world you hear so rarely nowadays that perhaps it requires some explaining. Etymologically it's related to "urban," but rather than connotating busy and loud, it means "courteous and refined in manner" and was generally used to describe gentlemen. There are additional connotations: one expects an urbane gentleman to be polite, of course, but also witty, suave, and debonair. I picture a 1920s metrosexual with a strong background in Western Civilization and the ability to drop bon mots as required. Cabell himself stated that urbanity was a rare, almost impossible ideal, but that didn't stop him from striving for it.

So to read Cabell is to plunge into a different world: not because it is fantasy, but because the author is determined to write the most elegant prose possible. For those of us who are used to what Ursula LeGuin referred to as Poughkeepsie writing, it is a bit of a shock encountering Cabell at his most urbane. In his third preface to Figures of Earth, written in 1927 (the preface, not the book), he writes this:

It followed that—among the futile persons who use serious, long words in talking about mere books,—aggrieved reproof of my auctorial malversations, upon the one ground or the other, became in 1921 biloquial and pandemic. Not many other volumes, I believe, have been burlesqued and cried down in the public prints by their own dedicatees.... But from the cicatrix of that healed wound I turn away.

And so to the dictionary one must turn, with some expediency. Auctorial? (I can guess that as "having to do with authors" and hope I'm right). Malversations? Bad conversations perhaps? Bioloquial? Pandemic I know, but not in this context.

When he's leaning in to his urbanity, he can become essentially unreadable (or if not unreadable, at least un-understandable). But very much like Longfellow's girl with the curl, when he's good, he's terrific. Take this passage from Figures of Earth itself:

Now it was evening, and the two sought shelter in a queer windmill by the roadside, finding there a small wrinkled old man in a patched coat. He gave them lodgings for the night, and honest bread and cheese, but for his own supper he took frogs out of his bosom, and roasted these in the coals.

Nothing could be simpler or more clear.

Figures of Earth was the first Cabell novel I ever read, and it's still my favourite, and is considered by most to be one of his best. I read it at thirteen years of age, and was astonished at how funny, moving, clever, and (especially) how different it felt from the many Tolkien imitations. Well, of course it differed from Tolkien, it predated even the Hobbit by more than a decade. And while yes, this is fantasy, it's not a mere fun bit of genre fiction, it's a fun bit of Literature in the fantasy vein. Which (especially if you're thirteen) can be read as a fun bit of genre fiction, which is nice.

What is the plot? It hardly matters in a book that's so much about style, but Cabell nails it: Manuel begins as a swineherd working for the miller, and eventually rises to Count of Poictesme, a fictional French province, along the way encountering many magic users, bedding remarkable women, and all the while attempting to make good a promise to his mother that he would make "a figure in the world" which he took literally, sculpting them out of earth and trying to give them life. There's more to him than being a swineherd, which is subtly and gradually mentioned: his father, in particular, is a person of especial note. An early lover appears to be more than she might seem as well. It's an outrageously subtle book, all-in-all, and I'm sure Cabell would think subtlety is very much the mark of an urbane author.

His love of urbanity seems to involve a love of conversations. There's no shortage of dialogue here, as characters exchange their world views, as well as their takes on the current situations at hand. Thus his characters often give way to philosophical venting, and there's perhaps a smidgeon too much of it. But despite the urbanity, Cabell manages something fairly miraculous with this novel, and I say miraculous because I can't put my finger on why it has the effect it does.  By the end of the book, which is also the end of Manuel's life, I'm in tears, no matter how often I've re-read it. It's incredibly moving: it's largely about loss, the loss of a first love, then the loss of one's youth, one's dreams, and finally death. It's also humorous—very witty—and never depressing, largely due to Manuel's optimistic character. He's a tall handsome hunk, too, and a bit of a chick magnet, but he's impossible to dislike, despite his many fine qualities, he's no Mary Sue.

Cabell's world is terrific: you can tell he reads, and he's been inspired to create characters who seem as if they ought to be part of our Western mythology but, so far as I know, largely aren't, or if they are, they're transformed into something novel, but without ever belabouring it: they remain mysterious, and more interesting as a result. (Nowadays hardly a thing can happen without a long character exposition sequence, or at least a good paragraph or two in Appendix B). So you wonder: who are the Leshy? What is Suskind? (She's mentioned at the beginning, but you believe her to be a local maiden who meets Manuel for twilight romps in the woods: not so). You can guess, but you never really know, and that's a good thing. Is Alianora = Eleanor of Aquitaine? Maybe? (Undoubtedly. But he doesn't say so.)

He's sui generis, in the best possible way. And this, I think, is his most profound work. I wouldn't recommend it to everybody: but if you liked Jack Vance, there's a good chance you may like this as well. And if you hated Ronald Firbank, rest assured, this is better.

I would say his most accessible books are this, The High Place, Jurgen, and The Silver Stallion, and everything else might only appeal to those who genuinely love his style. But I strongly urge all to give at least this one a try: it was my gateway drug, and it worked.

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Notes and Links:

James Branch Cabell - America's most urbane author

Figures of Earth - his best book (IMO)

Mary Sue - an impossibly perfect character beloved by their author and no one else

Jack Vance - influential American author celebrated for baroque witty prose and vivid world-building

Ronald Firbank - satiric author known for a unique fragmented writing style

Poughkeepsie writing - a term coined by LeGuin for fantasy using modern colloquial language

Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons' novel parodying popular melodramatic rural novels