Produced by Suzanne Shell, Virginia Paque, Anuradha Valsa,
and Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders
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 THECORDS OF VANITY, performs an act of reclamation which is at the sametime an act of fresh creation.
For the purely reclamatory aspect of what he has done, his reward (sofar as that can consist in anything save the doing) must come frominsignificantly few directions; so few indeed that he, with a wrilyhumorous exaggeration, affects to believe them singular. The author ofthis novel has been pleased to describe the author of thisintroduction as "the only known purchaser of the book" and, further,as "the other person to own a CORDS OF VANITY". I could readily enoughacquit myself, with good sound legal proofs, of any such singularityas stands charged in this soft impeachment—and that without appeal toThe Cleveland Plain Dealer of eleven years ago ("slushy anddisgusting"), or to The New York Post ("sterile and malodorous …worse than immoral—dull"), or to Ainslee's Magazine ("inconsequentand rambling … rather nauseating at times"). These devotees of theadjective that hunts in pairs are hardly to be discussed, I suppose,in connection with any rewards except such as accrue to the possessorsof a certain obtuseness, who always and infallibly reap at least thereward of not being hurt by what they do not know—or, for thatmatter, by what they do know. He who writes such a book as THE CORDSOF VANITY is committing himself to the supremely irrational faith thatthis dullness is somehow not the ultimate arbiter; and for him thepronouncements of this dullness simply do not figure among either hisrewards or his penalties. So, it is not exactly to these tributes ofthe press that one reverts in noting that THE CORDS OF VANITY, on itspublication eleven years ago, promptly became a book which therewere—almost—none to praise and very few to love. After all, itsauthor's computation of that former audience of his—his actualindividual voluntary readers of a decade ago—appears to be butslightly and pardonably exaggerated on the more modest side of thefact. If there were a Cabell Club of membership determined solely bythe number of those who, already possessing THE CORDS OF VANITY in itsfirst edition, recognize it as the work of a serious artist of highachievement and higher capacity, I suspect that the smallness of thatclub would be in inordinate disproportion to everything but itsselectness and its members' pride in "belonging".
Be that as it may, the economist-author, on the eve of his book'semergence from the limbo of "out of print", prefers that it come intoits redemption carrying a foreword by someone who knew it withoutdislike in its former incarnation. No contingent liability, it seems,can dissuade Mr. Cabell from this preference. An author who onceelected to precede a group of his best tales with an introductioneloquently setting forth reasons why the collection ought not to bepublished at all, is hardly to be deterred now by the mereinexpediency of hitching his star to a farm-wagon. His own graciouslyunreasonable insistence must be the excuse, such as it is, for the