The High Place*

Cabell Molds Beauty, Coarseness, Laughter, Horror, Wit

The Story. Poictesme again, the land of Dom Manuel and Jurgen, but a Poictesme of later date--Poictesme in the last years of Louis the Sun-King.

Manuel's blood and Jurgen's ran in the veins of Florian de Puysange--a heroic but discomfortable inheritance. It did not help him to live easily in this world.

Even as a child he had strange adventures. Melusine, the immortal elvish sorceress, found him daydreaming one day, took him into the forest of Acaire. There was a high place in the middle of that wood. There Florian beheld Melior, asleep beneath a coverlet of violet wool in her father's bemagicked palace, and, having seen the perfect beauty of Melior, all great satisfaction in mortal women was spoiled for him. When he grew up, it is true, he married four times, lived a life of extreme if elegant debauchery and committed crimes too numerous to note. But in spite of all that, he maintained the romantic faith of a child in beauty and holiness--the beauty of Melior, of Acaire--the holiness of Holy St. Hoprig, his patron in Heaven. And then, on the eve of his fifth marriage, he encountered Janicot, a sedate and uncanny personage with curious feet and many damnable names.

They bargained for two prizes, Melior and the sword, Flamberge. For the sword Florian promised Janicot the life of the greatest man in France; for brief happiness with Melior, the life of the first child born to Melior and Florian.

"Of course," said Janicot reflectively, "if there should be no child--"

"Monsieur, I am Puysange," said Florian, "There will be a child."

So Florian won his desire and brought Melior home as his duchess. Then his disenchantment began. Melior was as beautiful as day--a beautiful, chattering fool. And as for Holy St. Hoprig, whom Florian discovered alive in the flesh--the saint's conversation alone destroyed Florian's belief in holiness completely. The child of .sacrifice was born, and then the end came an end too odd and unexpected for us to reveal here. Suffice it to say that it taught Florian that the great law of living is "thou shalt not offend against the notions of thy neighbor" and that wisdom lies in submission, without demanding of this life too much of beauty or holiness.

The Significance. The polish, the precision, the elaborate grace and subterranean acridity of Mr. Cabell's characteristic style have never been displayed to better advantage than in this, which is among the very bitterest of his books. He is not afraid of coarseness, but he is not afraid of beauty--and in The High Place he has molded beauty and coarseness and sadness and horror and wit and defiant laughter together in a strangely complete and unique achievement.

The Critics. Burton Rascoe: "The conclusion ... is a moving diminuendo on muted strings after a stirring approach to the climax. It is a matter of charm and solace after excitement, of emotion remembered in tranquillity."

The New York Times: "... a false paganism, a sophisticated grace. . . . The effect is one of conscious insincerity."

The Author. James Branch Cabell was born in Virginia in 1879 and graduated from William and Mary College in 1898. He entered newspaper work, but quit it for fiction. His first novel, The Eagle's Shadow, appeared in 1904. It stirred up controversy. Its heroine, roused to anger, emitted non-Victorian explosives.

Mr. Cabell became famous in 1919 when Jurgen was suppressed.

His novels fall under two categories --romances laid in the mythical land of Poictesme, comedies of present day Virginia. In the first group are Jurgen, Figures of Earth, The High Place. Among the Virginia stories are The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck, The Cream of the Jest, The Eagle's Shadow.

Married, he lives at Dumbarton Grange, Dumbarton, Va.

On Digressions

The Technique of the Untechnical

There is no reason to question the sweeping dictum that a novel, like a kiss or a football game, should have a beginning, a middle and an end. The most conservative technical theory seems to insist on at least one of the three. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that the term "middle" is a perilously inclusive one. The most inconspicuous of novelists possesses an inalienable--if at times discomfiting-- right to digress.

What has been called the "greatest novel in the English language"--Tristram Shandy--may be said to consist wholly of assorted digressions, loosely knit together on a thread of other digressions. Each digression is repeatedly digressed from with a resultant unity in diversity which is divertingly bewildering. The same may be said to a slightly less degree of such pristine best-sellers as Tom Jones, Pickwick Papers, Alice in Wonderland.

Of late, fictional technique may be said to have digressed from digression. Under the influence of the Gallic formalists, as for example, Flaubert, there has come into being a new solidity in the structure of the novel. For the last quarter of a century almost nothing has been allowed to appear in a novel that has not at least a remote bearing on the whole. If the hero stubs his toe in Chap. One, the toe will have swelled to amazing (figurative) proportions by Chap. 22. There is something uncanny about the way the veriest trifles in the "well-constructed" novel fit into the relentless pattern of the whole. Take, for example, the horrible precision with which the most insignificant actions of any Thomas Hardy hero or heroine inevitably contribute to their eventual complete and gratifying undoing. If there is anything that happens to them that has no bearing on the eventual catastrophe, the reader, at least, is not allowed to know about it.

At last, however, has come a rebellion. The youngest of all generations has begun to overthrow the idols of our fathers. Its works are so deftly digressive that it has become agreeably impossible to distinguish between the story and the digression. Take any first novel of the last few years--Benet's Beginning of Wisdom, Hume's Wife of the Centaur, even This Side of Paradise. Try to find any one chapter, episode, word, that has any bearing on the plot or the theme or the events under discussion. The very notion is palpably absurd.

Are we, then, entering on a millennium where any story may be picked up, started at either end, and read backwards, forwards, or sideways with equal satisfaction? J.A.T.

Frank Swinnerton

He Wanted a "Paper Knife"

Frank Swinnerton has arrived in America almost on the heels of the publication of his Young Felix--, a novel rapidly gaining in public favor, and critical acclaim. Swinnerton, himself, is one of the most amiable men in the world. He is short--with small hands which he uses much to emphasize conversational points. He has a red beard, wears glasses, smiles almost constantly. His witticisms--mainly anecdotal and dramatic--follow one another in rapid succession. He is amazed and delighted by America and feels himself mothered by her hospitality.

Swinnerton has tried his best to spend some money since his arrival. He finally succeeded, the other evening, in getting rid of what he calls "one hundred and fifty cents." He found it quite easy to get around in Manhattan until he asked for a "paper knife." No one seemed to be able to supply him with what he needed. Finally he was informed that what he wanted was a "paper cutter." He was immediately relieved and carried this ivory implement about with him all day. He has been in town only a week and he has met "everyone," from Irvin Cobb to Gloria Swanson. He is so friendly and so human that it scarcely seems fair to catalog him as an English novelist.

Swinnerton has had a somewhat difficult life. Much of Young Felix is autobiographical. He was born in a suburb of London and as a child went through various struggles to achieve both a personality and an education. This has marked him with a shyness which is now less a matter of reality than a survival of what, I imagine, was an earlier manner. He was associated with a publishing house at an early age, and is now literary adviser and reader to Chatto & Windus in London. Many of his novels have been written under the most trying circumstances, when he was lonely, pressed for time or ill. Yet he has preserved through all this an extraordinarily sweet attitude toward life.

He acknowledges his debt to Bennett and Wells--but this debt is more evident to him than to his readers--for to me, certainly, Swinnerton's style possesses a freshness which makes it absolutely his own. That we must return to an approximation of the 18th Century novel, the novel of Fielding, is his belief. Any novelist, Mr. Swinnerton holds, to write a really great novel must possess both a sense of humor and an almost overpowering love of mankind. J. F.

Good Books

The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion:

AUNT POLLY'S STORY OF MANKIND-- Donald Ogden Stewart--Doran ($2.00). Rather more than a parody on the various popular descriptions of recent date that deal with man's rise from protoplasm to the glorious estate of sack-suited citizenry--a satire, often bitingly savage, on Man in general and civilized Man in particular. Mr. Stewart's keen little knife slits many accepted shams. His characteristic humor is admirably present. Indeed his description of the attempted revivification of the Siege of Troy by a group of infant bandits could hardly be bettered, and his parody of The Married Life of Helen and Warren is gloriously funny. But the book, as a whole, is rather more in the vein of Swift than of, say, Leacock. Recommended to all who like salt in their humor.

Jo ELLEN--Alexander Black--Harper ($2.00). The history of Jo Ellen Rewer, red-headed modern tomboy, her odd environment, her growth, her adventures in business and love. She is forced to choose between a gentlemanly ex-crook (who reforms according to schedule) or a "safe," ineffably serious young man whom she has known all her life. The safe young man's limp supposedly contracted in the War, swings the balance. She marries him. He is paralyzed on their wedding day. Jo Ellen has to go back to work to help support him. He grows peevish and madly jealous. They have to live with his family and his mother hates Jo Ellen. After great todo, the tangle is solved at last by his nobly rolling his wheelchair off the roof. Fade-out.

MICHAEL'S EVIL DEEDS--E. Phillips Oppenheim--Little Brown ($2.00). This chronicle of the pursuit of an uncannily elusive and merciless Napoleon of Crime by Sir Norman Greyes of the Yard, is the beet Oppenheim thriller for some years. The story is told from three angles--the criminal's, the detective's, that of the girl whom both, in their several ways, adore. The blood-chase and the love-chase will furnish a breathless and satisfactory evening for any devotee of pistol-shots and false whiskers.

DECLASEE AND OTHER PLAYS--Zoe Akins--Boni ($2.00). Three plays by one of the most promising of modern American playrights--Declasee, Daddy's Gone aHunting, Greatness (produced as The Texas Nightingale). Her wit, technique and courage to attempt the unusual have earned the praise of many rather diverse critics--including Alexander Woollcott and George Jean Nathan.

*The HIGH PLACE.--James Branch Cabell --McBride ($2.50). --Young Felix was reviewed in TIME Nov. 19.