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The Biography of Manuel #13
The Cords of Vanity
James Branch Cabell (1879-1956) is best known for his tales of the imaginary land of Poictesme, where chivalry and galantry live on. All of Cabellâ (TM)s works from before 1930 (including The Cords of Vanity, an otherwise â oemainstreamâ novel) were assembled into the grand â oeBiography of the Life of Manuel, â the supposed redeemer of the land of Poictesme, and they form a series which follows Manuel and his descendants through the centuries. Cabell has been a favorite author of many famous writers, raniging from Lin Carter to Robert A. Heinlein. THE CORDS OF VANITY Introduction by Wilson Follett â oeMr. Cabell gives an airy chronicle of the love affairs of his hero, Robert Townsend, who has adopted â oeinfancyâ as a profession, and never gets out of boyhood. Townsend is also one of the self-hypnotized persons who, in the moment of saying it, believes everything that he says, and thus romances alluringly of himself with no regard to the fetters of factâ "truly a captivating liar. In this â oehigher carelessnessâ all his contradictions and repetitions are merged into a fine unity. By playing at emotion so long he finally breaks down the inward integrities, so that he is not able to realize when he is acting a part and when he is sincere. And his sin overtakes him in the circumstance that, having played at love so long, he finally is not able to love anybody in reality.â â "Edwin Markham, in N. Y. American
- GenresFantasy
Paperback
First published March 1, 1909
4 people are currently reading
56 people want to read
About the author
James Branch Cabell
256 books125 followersJames 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."
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 11, 2025
Reread 4-stars
Continuing my reread of the Biography of Manuel, now in hardcopy. Physical object, a leatherbound print-on-demand with the text being the 1920 McBride edition with introduction by Wilson Follet.
"you write about women as though they were pterodactyls or some other extinct animal, which you had never seen, but had read a lot about."
Now the intro does say the revisions had a fairly substantial effect and that the new version was less harsh. Not sure which one i read originally anyway.
Main thing this time around was just noticing how interesting the women are. Its easy to miss because our hero is an ass and never really listens to them.
However if you pay attention as a reader you see that they have a lot to say and quite solid characters. Whether its Stella's ambitions twarted by her sex. Avis's descrtiptions of how much worse life is for a poor woman than a poor man. Elena actually doing what our hero did to someone else before but he fails to grasp the similarity. George's (can't recall her real name) book.
It's really quite good, although this is still my least favourite of Cabell's book types.
His books being divided into this (socual satire), historical short fiction and pre-tolkien fantasy. The latter being my favourite.
First Read 3-stars
"When the gods of Hellas were discrowned, there was a famous scurrying from Olympos to the world of mortals, where each deity must henceforward make shift.. Eros went to the Grammarians. He would be a schoolmaster...
teaching dunderheaded mortals the First Conjugation.
...and ever since this period has the verb 'to love' been the first to be mastered in all well-constituted grammars, as it is in life.
"Heigho! it is not an easy verb to conjugate. One gets into trouble enough, in floundering through its manifold nuances, which range inevitably through the bold-faced 'I love', the confident 'I will love', the hopeful 'I may be loved', and so on to the wistful, pitiful Pluperfect Subjunctive Passive, 'I might have been loved if'...
This is probably the weakest Cabell i've read so far although i was still sorely tempted at times to give it 4 stars.
It follows a young man/writer and his various love affairs. It smacks a bit too much of biography in places, its sporadic and each love is like a short story by itself. However there is a lot of variety in the female characters with one even being an author writing under the penname George, not sure if that was a reference to George Elliot.
I think i missed about 15% of the text as the conversations were sometimes hard to follow and between the style, slang and era specific references it can be hard to parse.
HOWEVER, there is also a lot of sections i liked and the usual high amount of quotable lines. Not recommended as a starting point for cabell but still entertaining.
Note: There were a number of references to Setebos and i finally rembered thats a name i actually know. Setebos is the god Caliban created for himself in the Tempest, yay me, i'm erudite ;) .
Continuing my reread of the Biography of Manuel, now in hardcopy. Physical object, a leatherbound print-on-demand with the text being the 1920 McBride edition with introduction by Wilson Follet.
"you write about women as though they were pterodactyls or some other extinct animal, which you had never seen, but had read a lot about."
Now the intro does say the revisions had a fairly substantial effect and that the new version was less harsh. Not sure which one i read originally anyway.
Main thing this time around was just noticing how interesting the women are. Its easy to miss because our hero is an ass and never really listens to them.
However if you pay attention as a reader you see that they have a lot to say and quite solid characters. Whether its Stella's ambitions twarted by her sex. Avis's descrtiptions of how much worse life is for a poor woman than a poor man. Elena actually doing what our hero did to someone else before but he fails to grasp the similarity. George's (can't recall her real name) book.
It's really quite good, although this is still my least favourite of Cabell's book types.
His books being divided into this (socual satire), historical short fiction and pre-tolkien fantasy. The latter being my favourite.
First Read 3-stars
"When the gods of Hellas were discrowned, there was a famous scurrying from Olympos to the world of mortals, where each deity must henceforward make shift.. Eros went to the Grammarians. He would be a schoolmaster...
teaching dunderheaded mortals the First Conjugation.
...and ever since this period has the verb 'to love' been the first to be mastered in all well-constituted grammars, as it is in life.
"Heigho! it is not an easy verb to conjugate. One gets into trouble enough, in floundering through its manifold nuances, which range inevitably through the bold-faced 'I love', the confident 'I will love', the hopeful 'I may be loved', and so on to the wistful, pitiful Pluperfect Subjunctive Passive, 'I might have been loved if'...
This is probably the weakest Cabell i've read so far although i was still sorely tempted at times to give it 4 stars.
It follows a young man/writer and his various love affairs. It smacks a bit too much of biography in places, its sporadic and each love is like a short story by itself. However there is a lot of variety in the female characters with one even being an author writing under the penname George, not sure if that was a reference to George Elliot.
I think i missed about 15% of the text as the conversations were sometimes hard to follow and between the style, slang and era specific references it can be hard to parse.
HOWEVER, there is also a lot of sections i liked and the usual high amount of quotable lines. Not recommended as a starting point for cabell but still entertaining.
Note: There were a number of references to Setebos and i finally rembered thats a name i actually know. Setebos is the god Caliban created for himself in the Tempest, yay me, i'm erudite ;) .
May 31, 2016
A surprising gem of literature! This is one of the Dom Manuel fantasy series that does not get discussed much these days. I almost passed this entry by, because what little I have heard of this novel prior to actually reading it is that the story is dated, sexist, racist, and overall pompous. But after reading it as part of the entirety of the epic Biography of the Life of Manuel series, I realized such comments to be entirely based on superficial observations. You don't have to read this book having already been a Cabell otaku, but as a reader with an interest in the human condition.
When this book was written, America was transitioning from an agrarian society to an industrial one. Just as Americans were wowed by early sci-fi of the 20th century, the American South was living through their own post-Civil War Buck Rogers apocalyptic-fiction turned reality, for their way of life, no matter how we may see it through modern eyes, was invaded and overthrown. In other words, the Life that people knew in the 19th century South was changing as much as the world of Romero's zombie world.
This book contains the psychology of Post-Civil War Southern American nobility (imagine the descendants of "Gone with the Wind" being deconstructed as they must have looked 50 years later) combined with some of the best prose I've ever read.
This is one of Cabell's earlier novels, written in 1909, and so you can really see the author writing autobiographically in the style of the young emo that he was. But it contains the roots of the ascerbic wit that characterizes his later works. It also shows, through the character of the 25 year old Robert Townsend, how Cabell must have struggled with the acceptance of his role in the universe as a "Southern gentleman of breeding." The final mind game near the end of the novel is particularly poignant, as Townsend and his prospective wife fall in love both falsely believing that each other is to inherit a great deal of money.
The novel is the first of the series to truly take place in the fictional town of Lichfield in the early 20th century, depicting characters familiar to the author in his hometown of Richmond, Virginia. As such, it has a different vibe from the stories set in the land of dragons, sorceresses, and living myths as seen in most of the other novels of the Dom Manuel universe. There is very little sword and sorcery in this one, unlike the other entries. This is primarily a romance, but with the twist of being a satire of the "old money" Southern gentry. Cabell is clearly writing from experience here, having been of Southern nobility himself, and paints his characters with ironic bile and nostalgic affection. He does not condone nor entirely despise the people he portrays. He is like a modern stand-up comedian who may tell exaggerated semi-truths of growing up in the ghetto, or of their middle class upbringing. So he writes of things familiar to him that he observed through his years with a critical and comedic eye. The old chaperones and faithful maidservants ("Aunt Marcia also took the trouble to explain, quite confidentially, to some seven hundred and ninety three people, just why the engagement had been broken off.") The semi-homosexual academic living off the wealth of his ancestors' labor (the fabulous and cantankerous John Charteris, introduced in the first book of the series). The young widow who the narrator saves from a hotel fire in the middle of the night, who is described as wearing a pink nightgown when he first finds her panicking in the smoke-filled halls ("It seems, though, that 'in the second year' it is permissible to wear pink garments in the privacy of your own apartments, and that if people see you in them, accidentally, it is simply their own fault.") And the flat broke mother of the narrator who spent the fortune accumulated by her drunken husband, whose only dying wish for her son was "....to keep out of the newspapers—except, of course, the social items..."
On the critique that the novel is sexist, I propose that the position women are placed in this book is a product of the society he is criticising. As one of the love-interests bitterly points out to the protagonist, "our duties are very simple; first, we are expected to pass through a certain number of cotillions and a certain number of various happenings in various tête-à-têtes; then to make a suitable match,—so as to enable theafter that, we develop into bulbous chaperones, and may aspire eventually to a kindly quarter of a column in the papers, and, quite possibly, the honour of having as many as two dinners put off on account of our death." Yet despite the constraints imposed upon his female characters, they are often far stronger in Cabell's novels than the bumbling frauds who are his main male leads. Though his "heroes" often see fit to manipulate women, Cabell knows that they are slaves to their genetics, their geas, and their groins. If anything, that's where the sexism comes in--for Cabell, men are animals and women are akin to the divine.
The tragedy within this satire lies in the fact that the main character, Robert Townsend, mocks the world he lives in, and so makes the most stupid decisions throughout the story so as to buck the caste system he is in, decisions that hurt others in the story and which enrage the reader. Yet, the ridiculous choices the protagonist makes based on his hunger for something beyond his station makes him pitiful, much like Gerald, Jurgen, and Manuel in other books of this series.
In fact, the protagonist is a descendant of Jurgen, the most famous of Cabell's fantasy characters. Spiritually, Robert acts much like his relative this being one of the hallmarks of the entire series...
"The past never remains to us the same past; it grows up along with us; the physical facts may remain admittedly the same, but our understanding accents them differently, finds more in them at some points and less at others. So Robert Etheridge Townsend remains an example..."
So enjoy this once popular but now obscure romance on its own, or for its place in paving the way for the writing of people like Neil Gaiman, C.S. Lewis, Peter Bogdanovich, Woody Allen, Frank Hebert, Piers Anthony and Douglas Adams.
When this book was written, America was transitioning from an agrarian society to an industrial one. Just as Americans were wowed by early sci-fi of the 20th century, the American South was living through their own post-Civil War Buck Rogers apocalyptic-fiction turned reality, for their way of life, no matter how we may see it through modern eyes, was invaded and overthrown. In other words, the Life that people knew in the 19th century South was changing as much as the world of Romero's zombie world.
This book contains the psychology of Post-Civil War Southern American nobility (imagine the descendants of "Gone with the Wind" being deconstructed as they must have looked 50 years later) combined with some of the best prose I've ever read.
This is one of Cabell's earlier novels, written in 1909, and so you can really see the author writing autobiographically in the style of the young emo that he was. But it contains the roots of the ascerbic wit that characterizes his later works. It also shows, through the character of the 25 year old Robert Townsend, how Cabell must have struggled with the acceptance of his role in the universe as a "Southern gentleman of breeding." The final mind game near the end of the novel is particularly poignant, as Townsend and his prospective wife fall in love both falsely believing that each other is to inherit a great deal of money.
The novel is the first of the series to truly take place in the fictional town of Lichfield in the early 20th century, depicting characters familiar to the author in his hometown of Richmond, Virginia. As such, it has a different vibe from the stories set in the land of dragons, sorceresses, and living myths as seen in most of the other novels of the Dom Manuel universe. There is very little sword and sorcery in this one, unlike the other entries. This is primarily a romance, but with the twist of being a satire of the "old money" Southern gentry. Cabell is clearly writing from experience here, having been of Southern nobility himself, and paints his characters with ironic bile and nostalgic affection. He does not condone nor entirely despise the people he portrays. He is like a modern stand-up comedian who may tell exaggerated semi-truths of growing up in the ghetto, or of their middle class upbringing. So he writes of things familiar to him that he observed through his years with a critical and comedic eye. The old chaperones and faithful maidservants ("Aunt Marcia also took the trouble to explain, quite confidentially, to some seven hundred and ninety three people, just why the engagement had been broken off.") The semi-homosexual academic living off the wealth of his ancestors' labor (the fabulous and cantankerous John Charteris, introduced in the first book of the series). The young widow who the narrator saves from a hotel fire in the middle of the night, who is described as wearing a pink nightgown when he first finds her panicking in the smoke-filled halls ("It seems, though, that 'in the second year' it is permissible to wear pink garments in the privacy of your own apartments, and that if people see you in them, accidentally, it is simply their own fault.") And the flat broke mother of the narrator who spent the fortune accumulated by her drunken husband, whose only dying wish for her son was "....to keep out of the newspapers—except, of course, the social items..."
On the critique that the novel is sexist, I propose that the position women are placed in this book is a product of the society he is criticising. As one of the love-interests bitterly points out to the protagonist, "our duties are very simple; first, we are expected to pass through a certain number of cotillions and a certain number of various happenings in various tête-à-têtes; then to make a suitable match,—so as to enable theafter that, we develop into bulbous chaperones, and may aspire eventually to a kindly quarter of a column in the papers, and, quite possibly, the honour of having as many as two dinners put off on account of our death." Yet despite the constraints imposed upon his female characters, they are often far stronger in Cabell's novels than the bumbling frauds who are his main male leads. Though his "heroes" often see fit to manipulate women, Cabell knows that they are slaves to their genetics, their geas, and their groins. If anything, that's where the sexism comes in--for Cabell, men are animals and women are akin to the divine.
The tragedy within this satire lies in the fact that the main character, Robert Townsend, mocks the world he lives in, and so makes the most stupid decisions throughout the story so as to buck the caste system he is in, decisions that hurt others in the story and which enrage the reader. Yet, the ridiculous choices the protagonist makes based on his hunger for something beyond his station makes him pitiful, much like Gerald, Jurgen, and Manuel in other books of this series.
In fact, the protagonist is a descendant of Jurgen, the most famous of Cabell's fantasy characters. Spiritually, Robert acts much like his relative this being one of the hallmarks of the entire series...
"The past never remains to us the same past; it grows up along with us; the physical facts may remain admittedly the same, but our understanding accents them differently, finds more in them at some points and less at others. So Robert Etheridge Townsend remains an example..."
So enjoy this once popular but now obscure romance on its own, or for its place in paving the way for the writing of people like Neil Gaiman, C.S. Lewis, Peter Bogdanovich, Woody Allen, Frank Hebert, Piers Anthony and Douglas Adams.
August 10, 2019
Supremely silly and supercilious. I like it. A sweet diversion.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews