Note 1 — A STATEMENT

“James Branch Cabell is making a clean getaway with Jurgen, quite the naughtiest book since George Moore began ogling maidservants in Mayo. How come? Dreiser had the law hot after him for The Genius and Hager Revelly came close to landing Daniel Carson Goodman in Leavenworth, yet these volumes are innocent compared with Jurgen, which deftly and knowingly treats in thinly veiled episodes of all the perversities, abnormalities and damn-foolishness of sex. There is an undercurrent of extreme sensuality throughout the book, and once the trick of transposing the key is mastered one can dip into this tepid stream on every page. Cabell has cleansed his bosom of much perilous stuff—a little too much, in fact, for Jurgen grows tiresome toward the end—but he has said everything about the mechanics of passion and said it prettily. He has a gift of dulcet English prose, but I like better the men who say things straight out and use gruff Anglo-Saxon monosyllables for the big facts of nature that we are supposed to ignore.

“It is curious how the non-reading public discovered Jurgen. A few days after it appeared on the newsstands a male vampire of the films who once bought Stevenson’s Underwoods in the belief that it was a book of verses hymning a typewriter, began saying up and down Broadway: ‘Say, kid, get a book called Jurgen. It gets away with murder.’

“This sold the first edition quickly. How do they discover these things?”

Walter J. Kingsley.