Smirt

The Nightmare Has Triplets #1

by James Branch Cabell

Cabell's most substantial post-Biography fantasy was "The Nightmare Has Triplets," a sequence comprising Smirt: An Urban Nightmare, Smith: A Sylvan Interlude, and Smire: An Acceptance in the Third Person. This explicitly emulates the logic and geography of dreams... successfully mistly and dreamlike...
--The Encyclopedia of Fantasy

Genres: Fantasy

332 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1934

About the author

James Branch Cabell was an American author of fantasy fiction and belles lettres. Cabell was well regarded by his contemporaries, including H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, and Sinclair Lewis. His works were considered escapist and fit well in the culture of the 1920s, when they were most popular. For Cabell, veracity was "the one unpardonable sin, not merely against art, but against human welfare."

Reviews

[Tait · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fifteen years after his obscene, pre-Tolkien, fantasy masterpiece, “Jurgen,” James Branch Cabell decided to write an “adult” version of “Alice in Wonderland,” as no one—according to him—had written a mature novel using the logic of dreams. Cabell believed he was preeminently the writer who could do so.

He was not.

“Smirt” is, at best, a satirical (and misogynistic) allegory about an author’s increasingly megalomaniacal ego. It is filled with lengthy dialogues in which Cabell’s thinly-veiled alter-ego, Smirt, diatribes about being so urbane and intellectually-profound that he is more creative than God.

Halfway through the novel when actual imagery approximating dreams begins to appear, is is merely hackneyed tropes drawn from mythology and nothing approaching the sublime weirdness of the human unconscious (and certainly nothing close to “Alice in Wonderland”).

On top of which, one of the chief psychological functions of dreams—to disrobe and disintegrate the rigidity of daytime consciousness—is entirely missing from Cabell’s imitation of the oneiric condition. While reading I was increasingly ready for Smirt’s smugness to be entirely upended by one of minor deities or fetishized fantasy women he lords his ego over. Sadly nothing of the sort happened, at least in the first book of the trilogy, and I was left wondering when Cabell’s dream would begin.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first volume of Cabell's Nightmare trilogy. Actually "dream" would be more descriptive. A sleeping author dreams of the reading public, his readers in particular, his critics, his rivals, ancient pagan deities (including female ones), God, and the devil. He meets Arachne, to whom he promises to find her legend, which was destroyed by a vengeful Greek Goddess. During this rambling quest he stops to enjoy the company of several females, of varying degrees of immortality. He winds up with a talisman that makes him "omnipotent, within limits," and finds himself the supreme deity of a planet. He gets the lesser gods to make the planet less realistic and more fantastic. So the newspapers have fewer murders and more dragons. There are more castles, elves, and knights-errant, which are more interesting than political news. Also, as an omnipotent being, he always has cigarettes (Virginia tobacco - not Turkish) and matches when he needs them. And there is something about a princess in the corner of his mind, but he can't remember which princess or what she means to him.