I don't care for what I've read of Cabell, but he seems to have some sort of contact with Arthur Machen, my favorite weird author. I'm working on an article dealing with a rather uncharacteristic and surprising remark about Africans in something Machen presumably wrote in the 1920s, and I wondered if perhaps he had come into contact with such attitudes through Cabell -- of course such attitudes were known in Britain too. Anyway, would anyone here be able to inform me about racial attitudes in Cabell? I'm not sure what they were or even if they are known; I'm at the beginning of an inquiry. Thanks for any help.

Dale Nelson Wrote:
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> I don't care for what I've read of Cabell, but he
> seems to have some sort of contact with Arthur
> Machen, my favorite weird author. I'm working on
> an article dealing with a rather uncharacteristic
> and surprising remark about Africans in something
> Machen presumably wrote in the 1920s, and I
> wondered if perhaps he had come into contact with
> such attitudes through Cabell -- of course such
> attitudes were known in Britain too. Anyway,
> would anyone here be able to inform me about
> racial attitudes in Cabell? I'm not sure what
> they were or even if they are known; I'm at the
> beginning of an inquiry. Thanks for any help.

I'm extremely reluctant to make any judgement based on currently views of the racial attitudes of previous eras. I tend to view anything that I find offensive as a sort of a quirk in a favorite uncle--you know, "Uncle Pat drinks more than is good for him, but he's one heck of a conversationalist..."

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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Sawfish, understood, but at this point I'm trying to gather data. It's a little as if I had always known Machen liked gin punch and then, sometime after I believed he'd been in touch with Cabell, he'd written something praising bourbon for the first time.

Very funny!

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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I know nothing of Cabell. Except I sampled some of his prose. My first impression was "The Terry Pratchett of his era". And I have no idea if that is really a fair assessment, because the truth is, I could never bring myself to read Terry Pratchett either.

Yes, yes. That's my impression too -- from admittedly little reading.

The figures of mythology, the creatures of folklore -- portraying them in silly situations as an exhibition of one's cleverness; that's not what they are for. If we deflate them, make them mere figures of fun, then what do we have left to evoke the awe-full, the mysterious, the eerie? Poetry is greatly impaired. (By "poetry" I don't mean only that which is written as verse, though I mean that too, but also even the visual arts, and music.)

It's true that there is, occasionally, humor even in mythology as well as in folktale. There's the Greek myth in which Hephaestus makes a net to catch his wife, Aphrodite, when she's betraying him with Ares. There's the Norse myth in which Thor is bested in combat with a scrawny old mag (who turns out to be Time itself, or the Earth). But I think these stories are not "sophomoric," as, say, it seems to me it is if someone writes a story in which the Dwarfs form a miners' union and go on strike, or a vampire goes to the blood bank to make a withdrawal, etc.

More than 50 years ago now, I suppose, I read some of those Harold Shea stories by de Camp and Pratt, and later I figured I was probably a bad reader of those works -- because I wasn't interested in reading them in the spirit they were intended, as farces or whatever; I read them for such glimpses as I could get of mythology and adventure, etc.