That pleasure taken in watching a bladesmith at work,
or, (Snicker-snack).
“And this is the only woman whom I ever loved,” Jurgen remembered, upon a sudden. For people cannot always be thinking of these matters.
That’s from Jurgen, the book currently living in the pocket of whichever coat I happen to be wearing, to be pulled out and dipped into whenever there’s a spare moment, its pages littered with bus transfers marking this passage or that, or the one following:
“Why, it seemed to me I had lost the most of myself; and there was left only a brain which played with ideas, and a body that went delicately down pleasant ways. And I could not believe as my fellows believed, nor could I love them, nor could I detect anything in aught they said or did save their exceeding folly: for I had lost their cordial common faith in the importance of what use they made of half-hours and months and years; and because a jill-flirt had opened my eyes so that they saw too much, I had lost faith in the importance of my own actions, too. There was a little time of which the passing might be made endurable; beyond gaped unpredictable darkness: and that was all there was of certainty anywhere. Now tell me, Heart’s Desire, but was not that a foolish dream? For these things never happened. Why, it would not be fair if these things ever happened!”
(If you happen to note that I’m quoting rather extensively from the early bits, specifically Chapter 4, “The Dorothy Who Did Not Understand,” it’s because the other book in my pocket is The King of Elfland’s Daughter, which I’d been reading til yesterday, when a surfeit of “the fields we know” prompted me to set it aside and cast about for a more bracing tonic. —Not to knock Dunsany, mind; Pegana’s one of my all-time faves. But enough every now and again is enough.)
I’m not sure where I first picked up the name Cabell as one to watch; it may well be that I merely saw the slim, well-used, gorgeously stringent 1940s Penguin paperbacks on the shelf at Powell’s and said, huh. Jurgen and The Silver Stallion have been in my to-read-one-of-these-days pile for a while; and now that I’ve dipped my toe, I can tell I’ve got a new obsession to occupy my spare book-hunting moments. (I’m rather amused if mildly taken aback to discover Cabell’s apparent influence on one my bêtes noires, Robert Anson Heinlein. [We can argue it later and elsewhere if you’re so inclined, and I’ll concede his importance and wouldn’t dream of denying his influence which, after all, is the reason this bête is so very noire. And I’ll even allow as how “The Menace from Earth” has a fond place in my heart and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a great book. But but but. Let’s just say for now that much as comic booksters have Papa Jack Kirby, speculative fictioneers have Papa Robert Heinlein, and the comics folks got the better deal by far.] —Not that I’ve much of a leg to stand on at the moment, but based on my familiarity with Heinlein, having skimmed a couple of biographical and critical essays on Cabell, and oohed and aahed over a couple-dozen pages of Jurgen, I’m going out on a limb and saying I think the Grand Master rather tragicomically Missed the Point. Or a Point. And even if one can argue successfully that Heinlein’s ends were largely sympathetic to Cabell’s, his means were quite different—and as the world seems hell-bent on proving beyond the shadow of any faith to the contrary these days, there are no ends. There’s never an end. Only means. But I’m legless and on a thin branch here; keep your salt handy. I will.)
Don’t mind me too much; I’m in the first mad throes of an infatuation. The bloom will fade, I’ve no doubt; it always does. (Nor could I detect anything in aught they said or did save their exceeding folly.) But until then—I mean, Jesus wept, would you look at this? Is it not a splendid rose?
Before each tarradiddle,
Uncowed by sciolists,
Robuster persons twiddle
Tremendously big fists.
“Our gods are good,” they tell us;
“Nor will our gods defer
Remission of rude fellows’
Ability to err.”
So this, your Jurgen, travels
Content to compromise
Ordainments none unravels
Explicitly . . . and sighs.
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Hmm, this Heinlein:SF::Kirby:Comics thing bears some thinking about. Certainly no-one can craft dialogue quite so deleriously addled and clumsy as Pappa Jack. I send a dedicated pulp fan screaming from the room once by reading him choicer bits from New Gods.
Whoa, sonny Jim. Not Kirby-as-writer. Kirby-as-cartoonist. The syllogism works much better with that tweak, I think you'll find. (I agree with Ampersand, by the way: weird to think Chabon intended Joe Kavalier to have drawn like Kirby. [Especially with that first sketch of Rosa. Even as written.] --Myself, I kept seeing Eisner.)
_Job, or a Coemdy of Justice_ is held by those who should know as to have been Heinlein's attempt at writing a Cabell book. Or so I remember form rec.arts.sf.written discussions.
I should look out for Cabell myself. Don't worry too much about your infatuation; i've been there.
—Also Glory Road, one of the few “major” Heinleins I haven’t read (okay, it’s borderline, but still), and the solipsistic multiversal collapse of his later stuff, The Number of the Beast on out—though also reaching back to his future history in The Past Through Tomorrow—which use long-running overlapping storysets and multiple points of view, much like Cabell. Now, I realize this seems to reverse the ends/means argument I made above (the one that seemed so pretty on paper). What I was getting at there—Heinlein is didactic in a way that Cabell is not. While I could see him writing passages similar to the ones quoted above, I can’t see them meaning nearly the same thing in Heinlein: he had the occasional spot of pathos for the straw men whose arguments he mocked, but never sympathy. He used his multiple points of view to circle again and again around those arguments where he felt himself to be right (and supremely confident in that, too); Cabell, well. We’ll see. But there’s a sympathy for human folly in Jurgen so far that I never got from Heinlein.
These, then, are (speaking terribly broadly) the two different sets of means towards which each pursue what might be seen as the same (broad) end: using ironic takes on Romance to comment on the human condition.
Yeah, yeah. I’ll just sit quietly here in the corner and read some more. —Except John finally returned my copy of Ægypt, which means I can work my way through that and Love and Sleep and, finally, Dæmonomania, which in turn means I might be setting Cabell aside for the moment. Fickle, I am.