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=                       The_Cream_of_the_Jest                        =
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                            Introduction
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'The Cream of the Jest : A Comedy of Evasions' is a comical and
philosophical novel with possible fantasy elements, by James Branch
Cabell, published in 1917.  Much of it consists of the historical
dreams and philosophical reflections of the main character, the famous
writer Felix Kennaston.  An early reviewer said it was more a series
of essays than a novel.


                         Plot introduction
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The novel takes place almost entirely around Lichfield, Virginia,
Cabell's fictionalization of Richmond, Virginia, particularly in
Kennaston's house, in the country.  However, Kennaston's dreams take
place in various parts of Europe and the Mediterranean basin at
various times in the past.  Also, part of 'The Cream of the Jest'
consists of the ending of the first version of Kennaston's novel,
which is set in the Middle Ages around the castle of Storisende in a
mythical country.

The time covers a few years, apparently not long before the novel's
publication in 1917.


                            Plot summary
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The book begins with a chapter in which Richard Harrowby, a Virginian
cosmetics manufacturer, promises to explain the sudden appearance of
"genius" in his late neighbor, Felix Kennaston.  His story will be
based on his notes from a conversation with Kennaston.

There follow the last six chapters of Kennaston's first draft.  A
clerk named Horvendile is in love with the heroine, Ettare, but sees
her as the ideal woman who is in all desired women, not someone he can
love with the disappointments of living with a flesh-and-blood person.
He brings about the climactic confrontation between hero and villain.
After the hero wins, Horvendile reveals to him and Ettare that they
are characters in a book and that he is the Author's stand-in.  He
must return to his own, prosaic country.  As safe-conduct back to
Storisende, Ettare gives him half of a talisman she wears, the Sigil
of Scoteia.

Having composed this while walking in his garden, Kennaston realizes
he has dropped a piece of lead: a broken half of a disk inscribed with
indecipherable characters.  He surmises he was unconsciously inspired
by it to invent the sigil.  That night he falls asleep looking at the
gleaming metal and has a lucid dream of Ettare, who is also aware that
she is dreaming.  When he touches her, he wakes up.

Kennaston writes a new ending for his novel.  After a reviewer
condemns it as indecent, it becomes a bestseller.

When Kennaston sleeps facing light reflected from the mysterious
sigil, he dreams that he as Horvendile meets Ettare in various times
and places, but she is always untouchable.  (He can set up the
reflections conveniently because he sleeps in a separate room from his
wife; their relations had long been friendly but mutually
uncomprehending.)  Fascinated by the sigil and mysterious clues he
receives, by his dreams, and by the ironic philosophical speculations
they lead him to, he loses interest in ordinary life apart from his
next book.

Just before that book is published, he enters his wife's dressing room
in her absence and finds the other half of the sigil.  He concludes
that she was Ettare all along, and he remembers his former love for
her.  However, she ignores his tentative affection, and her only
comment when he shows her the sigil is that their neighbor Harrowby
might know something about it. She throws both pieces away.  Without
the inspiration of his dreams, Kennaston largely stops writing.

His wife dies.  As Harrowby is interested in the occult, Kennaston
follows his wife's hint by showing him the sigil (found in her
dressing room) and telling him about the dreams.  Harrowby recognizes
it as the mock-antique lid of his company's brand of cold cream.  He
does not disillusion Kennaston, but "gently" raises the possibility
that the sigil might not be miraculous.  Kennaston scornfully replies
that such a possibility would not change what the sigil taught him:
everything in life is miraculous.

Cabell himself drew the book's image of the sigil, which looks like
writing in a strange alphabet.  When turned upside-down, it reads,
"James Branch Cabell made this book so that he who wills may read the
story of man's eternally unsatisfied hunger in search of beauty.
Ettare stays inaccessible always and her loveliness is his to look on
only in his dreams".


                             Reception
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According to Edmund Wilson, 'The Cream of the Jest' achieved "critical
success".  A review in the 'New York Times' of the first publication
called the book "interesting and something more than entertaining",
though not for the "prosaic" or the "literal-minded".  It was "one of
those books which make one feel that it was written because the author
more than enjoyed, actually loved, writing it."

Also on the book's publication, Burton Rascoe compared it to the work
of Anatole France and James Stephens. He praised Cabell's delicacy and
self-directed satire, and suggested that Cabell understood himself and
others better than most writers do.

Louis D. Rubin praised its "hilarious situations" and specified that
"the scene in which Harrowby 'deciphers' the meaning of the Sigil is
absurdly comic."  C. John McCole, though stating that the reader would
"nod a great deal" during this and Cabell's earlier work, also singled
out some humorous parts—the rejection letters Kennaston gets on his
first novel and his discussion with "his rather unsympathetic wife" of
a writer's difficulties—as among Cabell's best.

Seeing a more serious side, Carl Van Doren wrote that Kennaston's
story allegorically represented the human race's tendency to "create
better regions to dream in"  Likewise Hugh Walpole regarded the story
as less interesting than Cabell's theme of longing for dreams, given
its clearest expression (as of 1920) in this book.

For Frank Northen Magill, what Cabell expressed with more
sophistication here than elsewhere was his "genius for metafictional
illusion".


                             Allusions
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The name Horvendile is that of characters in Germanic mythology and
history also spelled Aurvandil, Horwendill, and the like.  In other
books Cabell connects the name both to Hamlet's father in the 'Gesta
Danorum' and to the character in the Prose Edda whose big toe froze
off and was made into a star.

In the excerpt from Kennaston's book, Horvendile extemporizes a poem
in Provençal; aside from two lines in the original, it is given in
English prose.  The poem is 'Can vei la lauzeta mover' by Bernart de
Ventadorn.

A minor character, a man famous for many achievements, is a portrait
of Theodore Roosevelt.

The narrator mentions a number of Protestant theologians whose ideas
Kennaston sees as akin to the Christianity he arrives at, with its
"Artist-God" Whose greatest character was Himself as Christ.  Among
those theologians are exponents of the moral-influence theory of
Christ's atonement such as Friedrich Schleiermacher and Horace
Bushnell.


                References to other works by Cabell
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Kennaston's novel is reminiscent of Cabell's 1913 novel 'The Soul of
Melicent', later republished under the writer's original title
'Domnei', which is part of his series 'Biography of the Life of
Manuel'.  Horvendile and Ettare appear in various other stories in
this series, set in the fictional realm of Poictesme, and Lichfield is
a setting of other Cabell books.  'The Cream of the Jest' connects the
two settings.  Felix Kennaston had appeared and been quoted in some of
Cabell's previous books.  In particular, in Cabell's fictional
genealogies, he shows Kennaston to be a descendant of Dom Manuel.

Both Theodore Roosevelt and another minor character warn Kennaston
cryptically about the sigil in his novel, in which connection they
mention white pigeons and a small mirror.  The latter items figure in
a mysterious ceremony that appears throughout Cabell's work but is
never described.


                          Literary legacy
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This book inspired Flann O'Brien to write of characters who rebel
against their author, as in 'At Swim-Two-Birds'.  (Though Kennaston's
characters interact with him in the person of Horvendile, they do not
rebel against him.)

The book appears on a bookshelf in the killer's residence in the final
frame of the 'Columbo' episode 'A Case of Immunity'.


                           External links
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*
*
*
*[http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/cabell/menu.html Full text with
images of the first edition] at Literature of the South. The
frontispiece image shows the Sigil of Scoteia.


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