The Cords of Vanity

The Cords of Vanity

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Title: The Cords of Vanity
Author: James Branch Cabell et al
Release Date: January, 2006 [EBook #9608] [This file was first posted
on October 9, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English

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THE CORDS OF VANITY
A Comedy of Shirking
Revised and Expanded Edition
by JAMES BRANCH CABELL
with INTRODUCTION by WILSON FOLLETT

To
GABRIELLE BROOKE MONCURE
_Plus sapit vulgus, quia tantum, quantum opus est, sapit._

AN INTRODUCTION
by Wilson Follett
Mr. Cabell, in making ready this second or intended edition of THE
CORDS OF VANITY, performs an act of reclamation which is at the
same time an act of fresh creation.
For the purely reclamatory aspect of what he has done, his reward (so
far as that can consist in anything save the doing) must come from
insignificantly few directions; so few indeed that he, with a wrily
humorous exaggeration, affects to believe them singular. The author of
this novel has been pleased to describe the author of this introduction as
"the only known purchaser of the book" and, further, as "the other
person to own a CORDS OF VANITY". I could readily enough acquit
myself, with good sound legal proofs, of any such singularity as stands
charged in this soft impeachment--and that without appeal to The
Cleveland Plain Dealer of eleven years ago ("slushy and disgusting"),
or to The New York Post ("sterile and malodorous ... worse than
immoral--dull"), or to _Ainslee's Magazine_ ("inconsequent and

rambling ... rather nauseating at times"). These devotees of the
adjective that hunts in pairs are hardly to be discussed, I suppose, in
connection with any rewards except such as accrue to the possessors of
a certain obtuseness, who always and infallibly reap at least the reward
of not being hurt by what they do not know--or, for that matter, by what
they do know. He who writes such a book as THE CORDS OF
VANITY is committing himself to the supremely irrational faith that
this dullness is somehow not the ultimate arbiter; and for him the
pronouncements of this dullness simply do not figure among either his
rewards or his penalties. So, it is not exactly to these tributes of the
press that one reverts in noting that THE CORDS OF VANITY, on its
publication eleven years ago, promptly became a book which there
were--almost--none to praise and very few to love. After all, its author's
computation of that former audience of his--his actual individual
voluntary readers of a decade ago--appears to be but slightly and
pardonably exaggerated on the more modest side of the fact. If there
were a Cabell Club of membership determined solely by the number of
those who, already possessing THE CORDS OF VANITY in its first
edition, recognize it as the work of a serious artist of high achievement
and higher capacity, I suspect that the smallness of that club would be
in inordinate disproportion to everything but its selectness and its
members' pride in "belonging".
Be that as it may, the economist-author, on the eve of his book's
emergence from the limbo of "out of print", prefers that it come into its
redemption carrying a foreword by someone who knew it without
dislike in its former incarnation. No contingent liability, it seems, can
dissuade Mr. Cabell from this preference. An author who once elected
to precede a group of his best tales with an introduction eloquently
setting forth reasons why the collection ought not to be published at all,
is hardly to be deterred now by the mere inexpediency of hitching his
star to a farm-wagon. His own graciously unreasonable insistence must
be the excuse, such as it is, for the present introduction,