Two New Cabell Books

"As I Remember It is a volume of reminiscences, in the most elegant Cabell manner, looking back over his life, his career, and the literary scene of which he was a part. An important source for the study of fantastic literature, and also the literature of the American South." - Amazon. To be more precise, this 1955 work of autobiography is about his "collaborators" - in the first half of the book his first wife Priscilla Bradley Shepherd and in the second half his many literary friends (which included H. L. Mencken, Ellen Glasgow, and Sinclair Lewis).

When Let Me Lie was first published in 1947, most reviewers missed the double meaning of the book's title. Deaf to James Branch Cabell's many-layered ironic wit, they read the book as a paean to the old South. Readers of this edition are unlikely to repeat the mistake. Let Me Lie is indeed a carefully researched and brilliantly written historical narrative of Virginia from 1559 to 1946―focusing on Tidewater, Richmond, and the Northern Neck―but as a fictional scholar remarks in the book, Cabell's history is "both accurate and injudicious." Virginia's story of itself, Cabell claims, depends on illusion and myth, and his skill as a satirist allows him to construct and deflate these myths simultaneously. Ranging from Don Luis de Velasco and Captain John Smith to Edgar Allan Poe and Ellen Glasgow, from Confederate heroes to the oddities of the post-Civil War Old Dominion, Let Me Lie remains compulsively readable, as history, entertainment, or both.  – Amazon. My copy lacks this cover.

I little thought when I picked up that Del Rey edition of The Silver Stallion back in 1979 what an interest I was sparking. But here it is, forty-two years later, and still being fed, having passed beyond the fantasy.