Smirk

SMIRT -- Branch Cabell -- McBride ($2.50).

Author Branch Cabell, a newcomer to the U. S. scene, has written only three books (These Restless Heads, Special Delivery, Smirt). But they bear a marked likeness to the 18 volumes of one James Branch Cabell, who announced in 1929 that he would write no more of the Biography of the Life of Manuel. Now 54, Author Cabell has found it impossible to change his spots. A much-gnawed bone of contention, with little marrow left. Author Cabell can still rouse his faithful followers to delight. Considered by himself and his admirers the most polished of U. S. writers, Cabell is often accused of writing in Wardour St. style--defined by Lexicographer H. W. Fowler as "... a selection of oddments calculated to establish (in the eyes of some readers) their claim to be persons of taste & writers of beautiful English."

Smirt, subtitled An Urbane Nightmare, is solemnly introduced by smirking Author Cabell as a serious and scientific attempt to picture "an adult dream represented from the actual point of view of a dreamer." Disregarding James Joyce's partially-published Work in Progress, Author Cabell avers that, with the exception of Lewis Carroll's Alice books, no such attempt has ever been made in English. But Cabell is a lover of red herrings. Actually Smirt is hardly more than a loosely-strung series of essays on its author's favorite topic (his own position as a writer), with occasional Jurgenish passages about love, sprightly interviews with God, the Devil, the public-at-large.

If it were not for his preoccupation with snobbish prose, Author Cabell might be capable of really savage satire. Even in his "habitual vein of romantic irony" he sometimes drops into a phrase that would have given even Jonathan Swift pause, as when he speaks of physical love as "a conjuncture of sewer pipes." But generally Cabell is content to continue astounding the bourgeois by his own superior urbanity. His intelligence and taste alike are now for most readers hopelessly buried under the tricks and oddities of a lush Cabellowing style.

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