literally

[georgealexander]

James Branch Cabell, 1879 – 1958, Amercan novelist and essayist,.....; first came to notice with the novel JURGEN (1919), attacked for immorality and temporarily suppressed.
Websters Biographical Dictionary

Ever wonder why certain writers are blacklisted??

OUR ROVING BIBLE
Lawrence E Nelson, 1945

This is a book of reference to the Bible in American and English literature – and quite delightful at that:

“The sex-soaked novels of James Branch Cabell are also Bible-saturated. Jurgen praises the devil for delivering man.

How insufferable would be our case if you and I, and all our fellow parishioners, were today hobnobbing with other beasts in the Garden which we pretend to desiderate on Sundays! To arise with swine and lie down with the hyena? - oh intolerable!

He suspect that his wife has been “carried off by a devil, poor fellow.” Lovers all passed in couples, “as though they came from the Ark.” A certain story is old, “and old it was when Methuselah was teething.” One should “render the law what is due the law.” A man rode toward him, “full armed in black, and having a red serpent with an apple in its mouth painted upon his shield.” The failure of a demon to impersonate his wife well “raises the staggering supposition that the majority of married women must to to Heaven.” Says Jurgen to himself:

Why, then, this monarch reminds me in all things of David of Israel, who was so splendid and famous, and so greedy, in the ancient ages. For to these forests and islands and necks and other possessions, this Arthur Pendragon must be adding my one ewe lamb; and I lack a Nathan to convert him to repentance.

Guenevere is the “loveliest thing God ever made, with joy in the new skill that had come to His fingers,“ so Jurgen “talked like an angel, without confining himself exclusively to celestial topics.” “'Well, my pet,' says Jurgen, 'the Jews got into Jericho by trying.'” The vampire's “clothes were orange-colored, for a reason sufficiently well know in Hell, and were embroidered everywhere with green fig leaves.”

“The religion of Hell is patriotism, and the government is an enlightened democracy,” troubled by “pro-Celestial propaganda.” Hell's aim is to make the world safe for democracy, “because Heaven clung to a tyrannical form of autocratic government” and was “ruled by an autocrat Who was not duly elected to His position.”

George Alexander