Quiet, Please

 

Quiet, Please (1952) by James Branch Cabell, is a short (at 105 pages) sort of autobiographical follow-up to As I Remember It. Partly a defense of his latest work - The Nightmare Has Triplets: Smirt, Smith and Smire – and the literature of dreams, and partly a memoir of how the ladies in his life inspired his work. Or rather, how it inspired the person he used to be in his youth, whom he looks at with dispassionate eyes as another fellow entirely. At this point of his life, the being who is now James Branch Cabell hears the present generation, the literary world, and even Death, telling him “Quiet, please.”

The book has a frontispiece illustration of a bust done of Cabell, and Marjorie L. Burke bulks out the little volume with an introduction, a rather leaden Cabellian pastiche, featuring a conversation of the author with his image. I turned with relief from this production to Cabell’s actual words. It may say something about his status at the time (though I found his skill still impressive) that it was published by a university press. I tried reading The Nightmare Has Triplets in college and found it impenetrable; perhaps (inspired by this book) it is time to give it another shot.