Beyond Life

I recently finished Beyond Life— incredible piece of writing. Structurally, philosophically, and just on the sentence level. Has all the Cabell traits I love: musicality, wit, melancholy, a plurality of levels of meaning... Why isn't this one discussed more? Perhaps because it's hard to say what exactly it... is?

I'd say that's a fair take ... the mentions it's received here on LT (among the Rabble) have been positive but also tend to end with, "read it for yourself".

And it does take some prior knowledge of JBC's approach, it seems to me, if the reader is going to get any overall view of the Biography, for example. He doesn't spell it out as much as I thought he might, but I was well pleased for all that.

ETA for touchstone: Beyond Life

Yes. A basically unclassifiable text of cultural philosophy and literary theory by an author who is generally advertised as a "novelist" tends to be neglected. It's wonderful, but fundamentally inaccessible to most 21st century readers, I fear.

Beyond Life (Jan 1919) came between his two breakthrough books: Cream of the Jest (Sept 1917) and Jurgen (Sept 1919).

Beyond Life trivia:

- Some passages are heavily revised versions of essays he wrote as a teenager while attending the College of William and Mary in the late 1890s.

- Much of it was serialized in Chicago newspapers (and syndicated) during 1918, with Burton Rascoe and Ben Hecht orchestrating a letters-to-the-editor controversy regarding it between Mr Cabell and conservative critic Rupert Hughes (who happened to be Howard Hughes' uncle).

- Much of the last (or was it the penultimate?) chapter was revised from a letter written to Cabell by Guy Holt (his editor at Robert M. McBride & Co). Holt and Cabell had been arguing through the mail about aspects of Beyond Life; Cabell enjoyed the give-and-take and re-wrote some of their correspondence for use in the book.

ETA: Much can be learned about the writing of Cream, Beyond Life and Jurgen (along with much entertaining literary gossip) in the pages of Between Friends, an edited compilation of letters both to and from Cabell between 1915 and 1922. Cabell's correspondents include Guy Holt, Burton Rascoe, H. L. Mencken, Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald, Arthur Machen, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, William Rose Benet, Wilson Follett, Joseph Hergesheimer, George Jean Nathan, Frances Newman, Vincent Starrett, Carl Van Doren, Carl Van Vechten, Louis Untermeyer and Hugh Walpole -- among others.
(Used copies are available very inexpensively: http://tinyurl.com/y8pw7u5m )

Yes . . . Beyond Life is beyond classification, and that's a good thing, a relatively unique trait in a writer that should—merely because of its seemingly unclassifiable nature, inspire more discussion and critique. Ought to be required reading for critics and book reviewers everywhere.

I remember paradoxosalpha sharing Aleister Crowley's review of Beyond Life in another thread a couple years ago, right here, that elicited more discussion...

Oh this is fascinating! Thank you!

My follow-up on the Crowley connection is in this thread: https://www.librarything.com/topic/299882

Belles-lettres. That was the form of non-fiction Cabell excelled at. Beyond Life might show belles-lettres taken to epic proportions, but it does fit the genre.

Almost no one writes in the form today. Less is the pity.

I own two nice editions, one of them a Modern Library pocket-sized. Looking for a Storisende, of course.

Compare and contrast with Straws and Prayerbooks.

>1 les-lanciers-du-roi: I wholeheartedly sympathize with your take on Beyond Life, it's fantastic. Unclassifiable perhaps, but it certainly has more than a few similarities with Mencken's cultural compendium Prejudices of the same era; both works similar in tone, but of course, not in style, and in their critical takes on literature, religion, democracy, women, Prohibition and so on. Seems like both men would have had little to disagree with.

>3 paradoxosalpha: "... fundamentally inaccessible to most 21st century readers ...": Yes, but also likely inaccessible to most readers a century ago. Even so, I'm surprised at the modest overall rating given the book on LT, albeit from a limited sample size. Perhaps perplexed "fantasy" fans not finding what they wanted/expected...(?)

>10 vaniamk13:

Yeah, expectations. My first Cabell book was a Modern Library edition of Beyond Life given to teenage me by an elderly Virginian widow for whom I did yardwork. She whispered to me that it had been her husband's and that the author had a reputation for writing 'naughty' books. I pored over that volume searching for naughty bits but was of course disappointed. And what I did find went right over my teenage head.

... and then a few years later came the Ballantine reissues with the Lin Carter intros...

I remember my surprise when a colleague of mine, a literature professor, responded to my confession of being a Cabellian by saying he was happy about that (irony?), and that he recognized Beyond Life as a great book (huh?).

The oddball work does provide much interest to literary critics, of course, because it is ostensibly criticism — or at least a literary manifesto — so the judgment is not wholly surprising coming from what amounts to a teaching literary critic. But I thought that odd, anyway, since my list of Great Cabell does not include it (and since I enjoyed Straws and Prayerbooks more.

My current list of favorites...

Most heartbreaking: Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck

Most lovely and profound: Music from Behind the Moon

Best plotted: The High Place

Greatest of his obscure works: “Concerning David Jogram”

Most characteristic short story: “The Wedding Jest” (from The Line of Love)

Best essay: “The First Virginian” from Let Me Lie

Most quease-inducing: The White Robe tied with Hamlet Had an Uncle

Most fun non-Biography: The Devil’s Own Dear Son

Funniest non-fiction book: Special Delivery

Greatest all-around: The Cream of the Jest

The few from your list which I've read myself struck a similar chord in me: Cream of the Jest and The White Robe specifically, though I think that "lovely and profound" is a good description of my experience with Music from Behind the Moon, as well. So your list may help in deciding which book to read next, among those on my shelves.

I would love Library of America to produce at least one volume of Cabell, ideally one each for fiction and non-fiction. I fear it's too much to hope for the complete works, much as I like that idea, or even the complete Biography.

>12 wirkman: Having just finished reading BL for the first time a few days ago, I may be suffering from some sort of recency bias. That said, I think I would have agreed with your lit. professor's take that this is a great work. It might even be my favorite Cabell work so far, or at least the most satisfying. I believe Cabell placed it first in the Collected Works as a comprehensive introduction of his world-view. It provides the archetype for which the Life of Manuel would follow.

It's an "oddball" work indeed, but I've found most of Cabell to be amusingly odd. I really can't compare his style to any other author (perhaps the translated works of Anatole France come close). I suppose, depending on personal taste, one might fault its "dated" idiosyncratic and florid manner, reference to authors and critics no longer relevant, haughty critique of popular tastes and sentiments, or its aristocratic snideness. It's certainly not a work for the "masses". Actually, that Cabell was ever considered a "popular" writer (in the 1920s) is hard for me to fathom. Perhaps popular as The Velvet Underground and Joy Division are with musical artists and critics today, but not actually popular. It seems whatever general popularity he actually had was driven solely by the Jurgen succès de scandale.

In your reviews of this and Straws and Prayer-books you seem to to be saying that by Cabellian standards BL is an immature and frustrating work. I can't agree.

I read and reviewed Straws and Prayerbooks twelve years ago. I remember only my memories of it now. I just finished Beyond Life last night. I had read that over a long period of time a much longer time ago — probably in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I was borrowing books from the Multnomah County Library, not buying them. Since that distant reading I had merely poked around in it.

I am going to take a knife and slice apart the pages of the later book in my Storisende copy in a few days. So I can make a direct comparison.

Right now, all I can say is that Beyond Life is one of those great flawed masterpieces. It is far from perfect . . . if one may use a word that rarely makes sense when applied to a book-length prose work.

Here you may find pre-pub extracts from what became Beyond Life as they were printed in the Chicago Tribune in 1918. We don't have all of them but there are seven here with live links. Conceivably they will repay comparison too.

http://www.silverstallion.karkeeweb.com/contribution_periodicals/chicago_tribune...

And here is part of what would become Beyond Life as it existed in 1901:

http://www.silverstallion.karkeeweb.com/contribution_periodicals/international_....