How to Correctly Pronounce Names Like Cabell, Dunsany, Machen, Powys and Tolkien

The Literary Digest was a weekly American magazine published by the Funk & Wagnalls Company of New York. It began in 1890, and by mid 1937 it was evidently stumbling, for in February 1938 it folded.  One of its editors in the 1930s had responsibility for a filler column called “What’s the Name, Please?” This editor, Charles Earle Funk, wrote to various prominent or up-and-coming people with names that could be easily mispronounced, asking them how their name should be pronounced. A number of the responses appeared in issues of The Literary Digest, and the column was reportedly popular. Funk decided to make a book of the responses, including names which were yet expected to appear in the future issues of The Literary Digest. The book was titled What’s the Name, Please? A Guide to the Correct Pronunciation of Current Prominent Names, published by Funk & Wagnalls Company in May 1936.  A second printing came out in June, but the overall sales were evidently small, for the book is rare today.

A number of writers of fantasy with easily mispronounced names appear in the book.  (I do not know if their notes ever appeared in The Literary Digest.) Here are the entries for James Branch Cabell, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, John Cowper Powys, and J.R.R. Tolkien.  

I've written about the pronunciation of Cabell previously on this blog, here. 

Here's is Lady Dunsany's reply:

Arthur Machen's entry (which crosses over two pages) also includes notes on the American J. Gresham Machen, who had a different pronunciation of his last name:

John Cowper Powys's entry includes his brother Llewellyn Powys:

And it seems early for Tolkien (here, in the never-used form of "John R.R. Tolkien") to have appeared in such a formulation. When Funk's book was published in May 1936, Tolkien was six months from delivering his landmark British Academy lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, and The Hobbit wouldn't be published in England until September 1937, and in the U.S. in March 1938.

 

 

 

Cabell and the Rabble

I have written previously about the unknown source of the couplet that tells how to pronounce correctly Cabell's surname ("Tell the rabble / My name is Cabell").  Some recent digging has produced some interesting further information. 

Burton Rascoe (1892-1957) discovered Cabell's The Cream of the Jest in the fall of 1917, and early the following year he serialized parts of Cabell's next book, Beyond Life (published in book-form in January 1919), in The Chicago Tribune. This began a bit of controversy, summed up by H.L. Mencken in The Smart Set for August 1918 ("A Sub-Potomac Phenomenon"). But ancillary to the main commentary there appeared a bit of verse by Bert Leston Taylor in his Chicago Tribune column, "A Line o' Type or Two": 

The Seething Question

 

In all literary gabble

Concerning Mr. J.B. Cabell

No one has yet got up to tell

If it be Cabell or Cabell.

To which, Burton Rascoe (himself by that time a correspondent of Cabell's) replied: 

You may slip it to the rabble

That his name is James B. Cabell. 

This appeared in the 27 May 1918 issue of The Chicago Tribune.

Pronouncing "Cabell"

The source of the rhymed couplet, "Tell the rabble / My name is Cabell" (discussed briefly in my previous post), is still unknown.  It is usually mentioned as something that Cabell told an unnamed journalist, but Bill Lloyd (of the excellent website for all-things Cabell, The Silver Stallion) notes that the closest actual source by Cabell that we have for this is a letter from Cabell to Sinclair Lewis dated 26 November 1917:

And the name of the sulky beast is Cabell, in ironic consonance with rabble. I don't wonder you did not know, since I was forced to spend two years in New York under the alias of Cáy-bel and Cay-béll, through the utter impossibility of persuading any Northerner to pronounce my actual name.  (Between Friends: Letters of James Branch Cabell and Others, p. 13)

The James Branch Cabell Library at Virginia Commonwealth University produced a nice button with the couplet. (See also their website for further information.)

Thanks to Bill Lloyd!

James Branch Cabell's Precious Balms

In 1924, Arthur Machen published a small volume entitled Precious Balms, collecting bad reviews his works had received over his publishing career.  The title came from Psalm 141: 

Let the righteous rather smite me friendly, and reprove me. But let not their precious balms break my head

Machen was not the first to be entertained by disseminating his own bad reviews. James Branch Cabell did it, in a bunch of pages at the back of his book Beyond Life (1919), where the pages look just like advertisements for Cabell's other works, until you start reading the copy.  And in various printings of the book Cabell added to the pages, and changed some of the reviews. When he compiled the Storisende edition of his works, he put the reviews within a different title, Straws and Prayer-Books (1930).  I copy a some examples below, including the early version of the Jurgen page, and the final version.  At that end of this post, I post the details for the bibliographically inclined.  Thanks to Bill Lloyd of The Silver Stallion website for helping me with details on the various printings. 

Gallantry (1907) 

In Gallantry the characters, their costumes, manners, ideas and actions have about the naturalness of a modern costume ball. The author tries hard to maintain a stilted style, but frequently loses patience with it and relieves himself with the most modern of slang. --New York Sun

 The Cords of Vanity (1909)

 About as poor stuff as one can find in a book put out by a reputable publisher. The whole thing is slushy and disgusting. --Cleveland Plain Dealer, Ohio

The Certain Hour (1916)

A collection of "romantic" tales about poets dead and gone, prefaced by a fatuous essay on literature. Two poems, far from poetic, are included in the book. --The Independent

From the Hidden Way (1916) 

From the Hidden Way was published by Robert M. McBride & Company, in 1916. The rest was silence. --Louis Untermeyer, in the Literary Review

Beyond Life (1919)

Theses as devoid of interest as they have been, these last hundred years, of mportance. --Floyd Dell, in The Liberator 

Straws and Prayer-Books (1924)

Oh! are we never to hear the last of Jurgen--must this stupid, stilted, silly book be forever flaunted in our reluctant face? Mr. Cabell goes on descanting about his experiences with the vice squad in New York, or wherever it was, as if he were a decadent small boy, proud of being haled into the police court for chalking dirty words on a wall. The Jurgen episode seems to have gone to Mr. Cabell's head, it would seem to have developed in him a sort of megalomania. He writes with a fatuous self-exploitation which arouses, in a sensitive reader, something akin to the curious personal sense of shame felt when a speaker or singer or player makes an absurd display before an audience. --Hartford Courant, Connecticut

Domnei (1913)

Jurgen (1919)

Jurgen (1919)

Notes:

Beyond Life

New York: Robert M. McBride & Company, 1919

“Published January, 1919”

“Second Printing, March, 1919”

“Third Printing, August 1920”

“Fourth Printing, May, 1921”

“Fifth Edition” 1924 [year on title page]

“Sixth Printing, December, 1930”

In Storisende edition, the reviews are moved to Straws and Prayer-Books (1930), pp. 279-297

Beyond Life

In the first printing, the rear pages are numbered as follows:

p. 359. “Some Other Books by Mr. Cabell (With Tributes of the Press)”

p. 360. The Cream of the Jest

p. 361. The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck

p. 362. The Certain Hour

p. 363. The Cords of Vanity

p. 364. The Soul of Melicent

p. 365. Chivalry, Gallantry, The Line of Love

p. 366. The Eagle's Shadow

The second printing retains the same text, but the page numbers have been removed.

The third printing has twelve (unnumbered) pages of such reviews:

[1] “Some Other Books by Mr. Cabell (With Tributes of the Press)”

[2] The Cream of the Jest

[3] The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck

[4] The Certain Hour

[5] The Cords of Vanity

[6] Domnei

[7] Beyond Life

[8] The Line of Love

[9] Gallantry

[10] Chivalry

[11] Jurgen

[12] The Eagle's Shadow

The fourth printing has fourteen pages of such reviews, adding these two after Jurgen and before The Eagle's Shadow:

[11+1] Figures of Earth

[11+2] From the Hidden Way

The Fifth Edition and Sixth Printing match the fourth.

The catalog was reordered and expanded (by the last four titles) in Straws and Prayer-Books (1930), pp. 279-297

p. 279 “Books by Mr Cabell in the Order of Their Publication, with Tributes of the Press”

p. 281 The Eagle's Shadow

p. 282 The Line of Love

p. 283 Gallantry

p. 284 The Cords of Vanity

p. 285 Chivalry

p. 286 Domnei

p. 287 The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck

p. 288 The Certain Hour

p. 289 From the Hidden Way

p. 290 The Cream of the Jest

p. 291 Beyond Life

p. 292 Jurgen

p. 293 Figures of Earth

p. 294 The High Place

p. 295 Straws and Prayer-Books

p. 296 The Silver Stallion

p. 297 Something About Eve

James Branch Cabell and E.R. Eddison

When Ballantine reprinted James Branch Cabell’s Domnei in the Adult Fantasy series in March 1972, the rear cover sported a new blurb by E.R. Eddison, who had died in 1945. Where did the blurb come from?  It turns out that it came from a letter Eddison wrote to Cabell in 1926, and it related not to Domnei but to Jurgen.

When Albert & Charles Boni published the first American edition of The Worm Ouroboros in May 1926, they included in the front matter of the book a facsimile letter dated 21 November 1925 from James Branch Cabell to the publishers.  It reads, as follows:

Gentlemen:

In reply to your letter of the twelfth, it has now for three years stayed a puzzle to me that The Worm Ouroboros is not better known. The book, to be sure, is not for everyone. So many persons, indeed, to whose attention I have introduced it, have gotten from the volume only boredom that I have at last, through a series of depressing failures to communicate my enthusiasm, been reduced to concluding that a reader finds perforce in this book exceeding joy or else nothing at all,—in either case, quite unpredictably.

To me, in any event, The Worm Ouroboros remains a rather majestic example of romance,—of really pure romance, untitivated, in our modern way, with satire or allegory, or even with humor,—of the romance, in fine, which purchases, through its own unadulterate magic, and for no utilitarian ends whatsoever, the momentary “suspension of disbelief” in many very beautiful impossibilities.

Yours faithfully,

James Branch Cabell

Eddison wrote to Cabell on 19 June 1926:

Dear Sir

I have just received copies of the American edition of my Worm Ouroboros, and read for the first time your generous comments on my book. I must write this line to thank you. Also to thank you for the pleasure I have had from Jurgen; and most of all, from Queen Anaïtis, with whom I have hopes that someday, in Elysium, I too may voyage to that island in Cocaigne. In that passage (end of Ch. XX and CH. XXI) you have, in my humble judgment, touched perfection. It has that quality of really great writing, to be better always at the last time of reading than at the time before; and its delightful humour is without all topical or extraneous adulteration which, growing out of fashion, could rob it of its freshness with the lapse of time.

I am proud to have your name on my books, and to know that you like it.

Yours faithfully,

E.R. Eddison

These letters were published in a 1968 issue of Kalki, the journal of the James Branch Cabell Society, where Lin Carter saw them and later applied Eddison's comments to Domnei. (Carter even recommends reading Kalki and joining the Cabell Society in his introduction to Domnei.)

After Eddison’s novel Mistress of Mistresses (1935) was published, Cabell reviewed it favorably in the January 1936 issue of The American Mercury. Some of Cabell’s review was reworked into the discussion of literature in the twenty-fourth chapter of Cabell’s novel Smire (1937).