Satirists From The United States

"We come from a generation of people who need their TV or stereo playing all the time. These people so scared of silence. These soundaholics, these quietophobics."

"These people so scared of silence. These are my neighbors. These sound-oholics. These quiet-ophobics."

"You turn up your music to hide the noise. Other people turn up their music to hide yours. You turn up yours again. Everyone buys a bigger stereo system. This is the arms race of sound You don't win with a lot of treble. This isn't about quality. It's about volume. This isn't about music. This is about winning. You stomp the competition with the bass line. You rattle windows. You drop the melody line, and shout the lyrics. You put in foul language and come down hard on each cussword. You dominate. This is really about power."

"The muffled thunder of dialogue comes through the walls, then a chorus of laughter. Then more thunder. Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead."

"The problem with every story is you tell it after the fact. Every play-by-play description on the radio, the home runs and strikeouts, even that's delayed a few minutes. Even live television is postponed a couple seconds. Even Sound and light can only go so fast."

"The things you own end up owning you. It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything."

"Going to spring break at Ft. Lauderdale, getting drunk and flashing your breasts isn't an act of personal empowerment. It's you, so fashioned and programmed by the construct of a patriarchal society that you no longer know what's best for yourself. A damsel too dumb to know she is even in distress."

"If we can forgive what's been done to us... If we can forgive what we've done to others... If we can leave our stories behind. Our being victims and villains. Only then can we maybe rescue the world."

"All I do is track a profane route to something (I hope) profound. Like swimming a river of shit for a kiss."

"I love being with people. But I need a script, a role, something that will help me overcome my fears of rejection and shame. Most religions and belief systems provide a blueprint for some sort of community. And the religion's leaders model a way of being. For example, in my book Choke, a character enacts his own death and resurrection every night – as does the narrator in Fight Club. Here's Jesus, allowing himself to look terrible in front of his peers. That's the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public."

"The first step — especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money — the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art."

"How sweet! You still believe in death... that's just so... quaint. Well, sorry to pop your death bubble, but there's no such thing. So make the best of things. Any real belief in death is just wishful thinking. Don't waste good drugs on killing yourself. Share them with friends and have a party. Or send them to me."

"Why have I sold out? You think I'm supposed to grow old, beating some trite old protest drum that people don't hear anymore? Please; protest is now just a backdrop for a Diesel clothing ad in a slick fashion magazine. My goal is to create a metaphor that changes our reality by charming people into considering their world in a different way. It's time — for me, at least — to be clever and seduce people by entertaining them. I'll never be heard if I'm always ranting and griping."

"It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one."

"I haven't had a TV in 10 years, and I really don't miss it. 'Cause it's always so much more fun to be with people than it ever was to be with a television."

"I think they've always gone on. I've gotten some irate letters from oldsters saying "We did this in the 1930s. You didn't invent anything." And I'm like, "Gramps, you should have put a name on it and sold it, because that’s all I did.""

"You, whom I made for man's worship when earth was younger and fairer, hearken, and learn why I breathe new life into husks from my scrap-heaps! Gods of old days, discrowned, disjected, and treated as rubbish, hark to the latest way of the folk whose fathers you succored! They have discarded you utterly."

"Manuel gave it up, and shrugged. Well, let us conquer as we may, so that God be on our side. Miramon replied: "Never fear! He shall be, in every shape and attribute.""

"Cabell certainly doesn't take himself too seriously. I enjoyed Figures of Earth a lot; its humour was so enjoyably sophisticated that I had to check that the author really was an American :-)."

"The more I have thought about Figures of Earth — and its sequel The Silver Stallion — the more remarkable they have come to seem. Looking back, one can now understand the abrupt fluctuations of Cabell's fame. ... Published when Cabell was forty-two, the chronicle of Manuel the Redeemer was not a book for the Young nor was it a book in the mood of the twenties. The story of the ambitious man of action who is cowardly, malignant and treacherous and who does not even enjoy very much what his crimes and double-dealing have won him, but who is rapidly, after his death, transformed into a great leader, a public benefactor and a saint, has the fatal disadvantage for a novel that the reader finds no inducement to identify himself with its central figure. Yet I am now not sure that this merciless chronicle in which all the values are negative except the naked human will, is not one of the best things of its kind in literature — on a plane, perhaps, with Flaubert and Swift."

"I believe, that certain people — especially, perhaps, in Britain — have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash. ... You can see it in the tone they fall into when they talk about Tolkien in print: they bubble, they squeal, they coo; they go on about Malory and Spenser — both of whom have a charm and a distinction that Tolkien has never touched. As for me, if we must read about imaginary kingdoms, give me James Branch Cabell's Poictesme. He at least writes for grown-up people, and he does not present the drama of life as a showdown between Good People and Goblins. He can cover more ground in an episode that lasts only three pages than Tolkien is able to in one of this twenty-page chapters, and he can create a more disquieting impression by a reference to something that is never described than Tolkien through his whole demonology."

"Ideal Beauty, Ideal Love, and a Dream World belong to the romanticist. And it is through his concepts of these terms and the exercise of his talents with them that James Branch Cabell overtops to-day all other romantic writers in America. To watch his progress, to trace it through his works, is to observe how he cast off shackle after shackle of limitation, to ultimate unhampered movement over the earth, in the zenith that is Heaven or the pit that is Hell."

"I am amazed that this remarkable and original talent has been at America's service for nearly twenty years, its patient waiting entirely unrewarded whether by the public or the critics or even the superior cranks. Let it be said at once that Cabell's art will always be a sign for hostilities. Not only will he remain, in all probability, forever alien to the general public, but he will also, I suspect, be to the end of time a cause for division among cultivated and experienced readers. His style is also at once a battleground. It is the easiest thing in the world to denounce it as affected, perverse, unnatural, and forced. It would be at once an artificial style were it not entirely natural to the man."

"I had not been two weeks in the United States before someone said to me: "Well, at any rate, there is Cabell." That was a new name to me. I was given Beyond Life to read. My excitement during the discovery of that perverse and eloquent testament was one of the happiest moments of my American stay. I spent then a wild and eccentric search after his earlier masterpieces. Inside the cover of Beyond Life there were the titles of no less than fourteen books. I could see from the one which I held in my hand that Mr. Cabell was no careless writer. He had been writing then for many years and he was unobtainable! "No, he has never had any success," a bookseller told me. "No one ever asks for his books." That situation is now changed. There are, I imagine, a great many more persons in the United States of America asking for Jurgen than are likely to obtain it. That good, at any rate, an idiotic censorship has done."

"If the poets and warriors who make up the list of Mr. Cabell's heroes devote their lives almost wholly to love, it is for the reason that no other emotion interests him so much or seems to him to furnish so many beautiful happenings about which to write perfectly. Love, like art, is a species of creation, and the moods which attend it, though illusions, are miracles none the less. ... In this tale love is canonized: throned on alabaster above all the vulgar gods it diffuses among its worshipers a crystal radiance in which mortal imperfections perish — or are at least forgotten during certain rapturous hours. Ordinarily one cynical touch will break such pretty bubbles; but Mr. Cabell, himself a master of cynical touches and shrewdly anticipant of them, protects his invention with the competent armor of irony..."

"Of all the fine places in the world where beautiful happenings come together, Mr. Cabell argues, incomparably the richest is in the consciousness of a poet who is also a scholar. There are to be found the precious hoarded memories of some thousands of years: high deeds and burning loves and eloquent words and surpassing tears and laughter. There, consequently, the romancer may well take his stand, distilling bright new dreams out of ancient beauty. And if he adds the heady tonic of an irony springing from a critical intelligence, so much the better."

"Poor and naked as this aspiring ape must seem to the eye of reason, asks Mr. Cabell, is there not something magnificent about his imaginings? Does the course of human life not singularly resemble the dance of puppets in the hands of a Supreme Romancer? How, then, may any one declare that romance has become antiquated or can ever cease to be indispensable to mortal character and mortal interest? The difference between Mr. Cabell and the popular romancers who in all ages clutter the scene and for whom he has nothing but amused contempt is that they are unconscious dupes of the demiurge whereas he, aware of its ways and its devices, employs it almost as if it were some hippogriff bridled by him in Elysian pastures and respectfully entertained in a snug Virginian stable."

"Mr. Cabell has a profound creed of comedy rooted in that romance which is his regular habit. ... only gradually did his gaiety strengthen into irony. Although that irony was the progenitor of the comic spirit which now in his maturity dominates him, it has never shaken off the romantic elements which originally nourished it. Rather, romance and irony have grown up in his work side by side. ... He allows John Charteris in Beyond Life — for the most part Mr. Cabell's mouthpiece — to set forth the doctrine that romance is the real demiurge, "the first and loveliest daughter of human vanity," whereby mankind is duped — and exalted."

"I have finished Jurgen; a great and beautiful book, and the saddest book I ever read. I don't know why, exactly. The book hurts me — tears me to small pieces — but somehow it sets me free. It says the word that I've been trying to pronounce for so long. It tells me everything I am, and have been, and may be, unsparingly... I don't know why I cry over it so much. It's too — something-or-other — to stand. I've been sitting here tonight, reading it aloud, with the tears streaming down my face..."

"The Cabell novels are ordinarily anything but grim. He is essentially a comic writer, and those who have placed him in the lineage of Boccaccio, Rabelais, Petronious Arbiter, Laurence Sterne are generally correct. Mr. Cabell is amused by the world; his novels are constructed upon that amusement. If the laughter seems sardonic sometimes, when the absurdities of his people seem only too recognizable to us, then we must remember that Mr. Cabell considers that amusing too."

"Once we understand the fundamentals of Mr. Cabell's artistic aims, it is not easy to escape the fact that in Figures of Earth he undertook the staggering and almost unsuspected task of rewriting humanity's sacred books, just as in Jurgen he gave us a stupendous analogue of the ceaseless quest for beauty. For we must accept the truth that Mr. Cabell is not a novelist at all in the common acceptance of the term, but a historian of the human soul. His books are neither documentary nor representational; his characters are symbols of human desires and motives. By the not at all simple process of recording faithfully the projections of his rich and varied imagination, he has written thirteen books, which he accurately terms biography, wherein is the bitter-sweet truth about human life."

"It is true, of course, that like the fruit of the tree of life, Mr. Cabell's artistic progeny sprang from a first conceptual germ — "In the beginning was the Word." That animating idea is the assumption that if life may be said to have an aim it must be an aim to terminate in success and splendor. It postulates the high, fine importance of excess, the choice or discovery of an overwhelming impulse in life and a conscientious dedication to its fullest realization. It is the quality and intensity of the dream only which raises men above the biological norm; and it is fidelity to the dream which differentiates the exceptional figure, the man of heroic stature, from the muddling, aimless mediocrities about him. What the dream is, matters not at all — it may be a dream of sainthood, kingship, love, art, asceticism or sensual pleasure — so long as it is fully expressed with all the resources of self. It is this sort of completion which Mr. Cabell has elected to depict in all his work: the complete sensualist in Demetrios, the complete phrase-maker in Felix Kennaston, the complete poet in Marlowe, the complete lover in Perion. In each he has shown that this complete self-expression is achieved at the expense of all other possible selves, and that herein lies the tragedy of the ideal. Perfection is a costly flower and is cultured only by an uncompromising, strict husbandry."

"Cabell's Biography of Manuel had been structured as parallel examinations of three contrasting modes of life, the Way of the Artist, the Way of Chivalry, and the Way of Gallantry. Cabell's personal "picture" of gallantry is said to have derived from the phony chivalry of late 19th century Virginians, which he imbibed with his mother's milk, his family being respectably connected to the upper crust of Virginian aristocracy. ... The models he cites, however, are the gallants of Restoration Comedy ... Mark Twain, fascinated by the chivalric ideal, was quite taken with Cabell's writings on the subject. His encouragement directed to Cabell resulted in Domnei, published in 1911 as The Soul of Melicent. ... in both The Silver Stallion and in his explications, Cabell conceptualizes the progressive vitiation of the Life as a matter of the blurring of the realities of person and place by the remove of time and the world's will to be deceived, and the work of the cosmic Romancer."

"Mr. Cabell has played too long with the ideal of gallantry; he has devoted too much precious time to creating to fall in love with; he has listened too credulously to the ."

"Surely the cosmic irony that loves men's dullness because it alone can preserve them from madness, and retorts upon the cosmic terrors with a jest, is higher than gallantry and more enduring. It arrives at tolerance for all human shortcomings; it embraces high and low in its sympathies; it achieves urbanity as a final goal. It is the stuff of which great literature is made. And Mr. Cabell is creating great literature. A self-reliant intellectual, rich in the spoils of all literatures, one of the great masters of English prose, the supreme comic spirit thus far granted us, he stands apart from the throng of lesser American novelists, as Mark Twain stood apart, individual and incomparable."

"A curious, singular and enchanting book. I have read it with admiration and delight."

"A book of dreams it is, and of very wonderful dreams."

"Cabell and Hitler did not inhabit the same universe."

"A Cabellesque satire on religion and sex."

"We may list Fitzgerald as one of the sources of Cabell's cosmic skepticism. As important as the source, however, is the attitude evinced. In his late teens, Cabell is beginning to feel the same tension between real and ideal apparent in his later novels. Man feels that it is "not fitting" (Jurgen would say "not just") that he should be trapped in a completely material world of "Raiment, Food and Fire," and yet, at the same time, he realizes the futility of seeking after "Knowledge" of "higher things." In this tension between real and ideal, man must somehow make the best of an infinitely poor situation."

"Torn between the ideal and the real, Cabellian man is forever thwarted in his quest for the ideal by the demands of the real. Cabell explores all the aspects of this human dilemma, perhaps reaching the conclusion that man can never achieve his ideals, simply because he must exist in the world of reality; and yet, for his self-preservation in that world he must, paradoxically, cling to these very ideals, unrealized, unrealizable. Even in the face of materialistic denial of spiritual value, man must believe in some kind of transcendent worth. Although the meaning of Cabellian comedy can be comprehended without the ability to recognize each learned allusion, the incidents of the novels are often based on classical, Russian, Hebrew, medieval, and even Aztec myths and legends. The reader is quite obviously in the presence of a learned author, and many of Cabell's intellectual pursuits can be traced to his college years."

"Among the literary men of the time, Cabell's circle of friends was large: Sinclair Lewis, Joseph Hergesheimer, Carl Van Vechten, Burton Rascoe, Arthur Machen, to name a few. In his Nobel Prize Address in 1930, Lewis mentioned Cabell as one of the three American writers, along with Hemingway and Faulkner, worthy of the attention of the Swedish Academy. All in all, Cabell's reputation in the 20's must have seemed unassailable. But fortune's wheel turned, and the years that followed his initial popularity gave rise to a series of hostile critics. Cabell's novels were attacked from almost every conceivable position: stylistically, ideologically, socially, personally. In 1933, Granville Hicks, abdicating the critic's responsibility of balanced judgment, strikes at the author himself, calling him "a sleek, smug egoist," and his work "a structure of lies." Hicks begins the series of attacks; and Oscar Cargill in Intellectual America (1941), after damning "Cabell's reputation as a stylist" as "overblown," attempts to have the final word. He sums Cabell up "as a museum piece representing the psychology of a Virginian who would be an intellectual leader yet had not quite what it takes." However, the 1950's had better words for Cabell. Edward Wagenknecht in the Cavalcade of the American Novel (1952) reminds us that "James Branch Cabell …is still a unique and incomparable figure in American literature … He will never be the voice of a 'party' or of a 'movement'; he will never speak for anything smaller or more limited than the human spirit itself." Four years later, Edmund Wilson in a long article in the New Yorker suggested that Cabell's work had been maligned by partial critics and called for a reevaluation of his novels. In the 60's two book-length studies have appeared, and a biography is in preparation. Joe Lee Davis concludes that "one must — in common decency and simple justice — rank him among the major rather than the minor authors of the twentieth century... . Cabell is both the Spenser and the Boccaccio of the second American Renaissance." After years of neglect, Cabell's work is again receiving the attention it deserves."

"I think that unless a reviewer gets their facts completely wrong, the author should shut up (and even then, the author should probably let it go — although I'm a big fan of a letter that James Branch Cabell wrote to the New York Times pointing out that their review of Figures of Earth was bollocks. ... For most authors, not being James Branch Cabell, it's probably wisest after reading a particularly stupid or vicious or bad review to mentally compose your letter to the editor, fill it with your sharpest and most cutting and brilliant bon mots, and then, having made it up, to successfully resist the urge to put it to paper, and to return cheerfully to work."

"Cabell's far and away my favourite forgotten American writer — he wrote about 25 books, most of them very different from each other. The only ones to have remained more or less in print over the last forty years are the fantasies Figures of Earth, Jurgen and The Silver Stallion."

"The Silver Stallion, Jurgen, The High Place: Eighteen volumes of beautiful, worldly-wise writing by a forgotten American master. The books aren't all in print, and they range all over genre (including poetry and literary criticism). Of the fantasies, The Silver Stallion, Jurgen, and The High Place are three of the most notable, each book different but united in their sly wisdom."

"Actually, my favorite treatment of bad reviews is James Branch Cabell who, in the back of the 18 volume beautiful, huge collection of all of his works the Biography of Manuel, did a final section detailing what the reviewers said for each of his books. The book reviews go like this. The first 5 or 6 books, the reviews he quotes say something like: "Beautiful illustrations by the artist; such a pity about the words." Then you get to the reviews of Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice and the reviews say: "This a terrible book. It has no redeeming features; it's simply awful; a major misstep." And then every single review for every book he wrote after Jurgen begins, "Well, this isn't Jurgen. Apparently the author has lost the facility with which he wrote that delightful book." So he did put this wonderful parade of the ridiculous things that the reviewers said over time. As I mentioned in the blog, the only final thing that you can say about the reviewers, is this. The same day that the Publisher's Weekly review came in which said, "The road trip plot was completely aimless, but I liked the stuff in Lakeside," the Summer Book Forum book review came in which said, "The roadside stuff is amazing -- the novel only loses focus when you get to the stuff in Lakeside." ... If you actually pay any credence to it, it does make you crazy. So you just kind of smile and think, "Maybe someday I'll review all the reviewers someday." But you probably won't."

"In the early part of the 20th century, there was a fantasy writer named James Branch Cabell who had a theory of writing as magic. His books (highly recommended, especially Jurgen) are both funny and mythological ... and it's easy to see how his process of creating characters was really a process of evocation and invocation."

"There is an outcry against epoch-making masterpieces of philosophy like Jurgen. The salacious musical comedy goes its libidinous way rejoicing, while Ibsen and Bernard Shaw are on the black list. The fact is, of course, that the puritan has been turned by sexual repression into a sexual pervert and degenerate, so that he is insane on the subject."

"The only American author of genius to devote his career to fantasy."

"James Branch Cabell totally ripped off Neil Gaiman!"