For you and I are going a queer way, in search of justice, over the grave of a dream and through the malice of time. Jurgen
The great American scholar Vernon Louis Parrington wrote, in Main Currents of American Thought, that Cabell was:
A self-reliant intellectual, rich in the spoils of all literature, one of the great masters of English prose, the supreme comic figure thus far granted us, he stands apart from the throng of lesser American novelists. .
Who was Cabell, what was his philosophy of life, and what did he write?
He was born into one of Virginia's leading families on the 14 April 1879 in Richmond, Virginia. In Mark Twain's last tragic years, Cabell was his chief reading. Cabell was directly descended from two distinguished Southern families. He married Priscilla Bradley, a little older than himself, and they lived for many years in Dumbarton Grange, Virginia, an eighteenth century house which provided the setting for many of his novels. Later, he moved to Monument Avenue, Richmond, where I met him in 1957.
Priscilla was described as "fair, energetic, and charming". In Cabell's autobiography he explained how she was the heart of his spiritual development and the figure who most haunted his writings. Gradually, he became one of America's most learned authors, fully matching the New England Transcendentalists.
In Europe he found, in the South of France, the area for his own mythical world of Poictesme. He returned to Virginia and a quiet life of reading and writing to compose eventually one of the most comprehensive bodies of imaginative literature his country had yet produced.
In 1919 he published Jurgen. This was called "vicious and indecent" by a group of tumblebugs calling themselves a society for the prevention of vice. H.L. Mencken wrote: "The Cabell case belongs to comedy in the grand manner. For fifteen years...the man wrote - good stuff, sound stuff, extremely original stuff, often superbly fine stuff. Then...the imbeciles who operate the Comstock Society raided and suppressed his Jurgen and at once he was a made man."
When cleared, Cabell was launched into international notoriety, being translated into many languages. I visited him on Thanksgiving Day 1957, with a draft of a book on him - my Master's Thesis. He was then almost completely neglected. We discussed all and sundry from Hemingway and Gertrude Stein to his own "scurrilous" works. He had had very varied visitors from Hugh Walpole to red-haired Sinclair Lewis. His reputation had included very varied implications. He asked me about my family. I assured him, to his relief, that I had a very female wife and two very mobile small sons.
We discussed Southern Negroes. It was, he said, all a question of the "right relationships". We recalled that many of the slave ships had been built in Boston. He talked of his great champion Mencken, asking, perhaps a little unfairly: "What does the reformer have? Not even his reforms..." He noted, with a grin, that he had met William Faulkner and had thought at the time that: "Faulkner was a young man who would come along well." A small figure, he sat in his comfortable tweeds beneath a large window, perky, alert, and his real inner Self. I survived his necromancy and left to give a talk on him at Washington and Lee, carrying an inscribed copy of As I Remember It (1955).
He read my draft, saying he liked it "entirely and enormously"; he promised to write a Foreword. It was not to be - he died shortly afterwards aged seventy-nine. Such was the state of Romance, that it was some ten years before it was published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1967, entitled James Branch Cabell: The Dream and the Reality. It helped trigger off a revival of interest. Currently he has fourteen books in print. Two of his best are: Jurgen (Dover Publications, New York, paper, $6.95) and The Cream of the Jest (New College and University Press, New Haven, Conn., paper. $11.95), "a comedy of evasions". There are fourteen studies of him; there is the great JBC library for 800,000 volumes and 4,000 people in Richmond. He has come into his own as the nearest the Americans have yet come to their own Shakespeare.
What was his philosophy of life? Cabell's periods of analysis in essays alternated with synthesis in his fiction. His philosophy is summed up very clearly in Beyond Life (1919), its title from Milton. This stands as the Prologue to his writings. The twentieth century has been primarily an age of anxious analysis and increasing functional complexity. The Imagination (needing both heart and head) has lain fallow or been exercised chiefly in science and technology. Cabell's stature derives from his fighting his way through to a pragmatically based spiritual synthesis. As a Virginian he had an innate admiration for idealism and self-sacrifice (the basis of evolution) but he was very intelligent and his intelligence made him savour humbug and hypocrisy; it made him sceptical about all easy answers. His feelings pulled him towards Romance, Fantasy, and Religion; his intellect made him face facts realistically. Thus he outstripped most of his contemporaries, many of whom he made seem puerile in the inadequacy of their thought and expression as he transcended his own time to speak to all time.
He defined his philosophy at the end of Beyond Life:
I prefer to take it that we are components of an unfinished world, and that we are but seething atoms which ferment towards its making, if merely because Man as he now exists can hardly be the finished product of any Creator whom one could very heartily revere. We are being made into something quite unpredictable, I imagine: and through the purging and the smelting, we are sustained by our instinctive knowledge that we are being made into something better. For this we know, quite incommunicably, and yet as surely as we know that we will to have it thus.
And it is this will that stirs in us to have the creatures of earth and the affairs of earth, not as they are, but "as they ought to be", which we call romance. But when we note how visibly it sways all life we perceive that we are talking about God.
Who is the Realist now?
The best of his work is in the eighteen volumes of the Storisende edition completed when he was fifty. These deal with the warriors, heroes, saints and villains of sunlit Poictesme, a fertile land of meadows, streams, deep forests filled with mystery, and splendid walled cities populated by strange mythical figures and creatures.
Let us glance at perhaps his best novel, Jurgen. The overlord of Poictesme is the valiant old warrior Manuel, known as a Redeemer. He is, ultimately, a bewildered man of action. Jurgen is his counterpart - the speculative thinker who lacks faith. He speaks not for Cabell but for Twentieth Century Man. He is a pawnbroker. Keeping his "wisdom" he is given the gleaming shirt of Nessus and regains his lost youth. He mislays his wife, Lisa, and embarks on a journey to find a throne and spiritual fulfilment.
At the beginning we are told: "...this fable of Jurgen is, as the world itself, a book wherein each man will find what his nature enables him to see; which gives us back each his own image; and which teaches us the lesson that each of us desires to learn". Cabell uses everything that the imagination of previous ages has created, from classical mythologies to the chivalric romances of the France of Chrétien de Troyes and the England of Gawain and the Green Knight; Arthurian legend and the universe of Milton meet with the fairy land of Spenser and the voluptuous nights of the Orient. There is great humour and pathos, searching thought and sympathetic feeling as Cabell weaves from American life a mythologem of all life. The humorous Rabelaisian attitude of the "hero" guards against sentimentality while allowing the author the full power of the poetic depths of Romance.
One of the many wonderful places Jurgen visits, including Philistia where the Queen delights in his ability to put one and one together to make three, is Heaven. Here he pulls the beard of the Almighty Himself so difficult is it at times to distinguish between the true and the false. Finally, he regains his wife and is not entirely dissatisfied as he returns to his shop and a fair line of business.
Cabell persevered to the ends of thought and the limits of imagination. He equated his activity with that of mountain goats ranging the heights of idiocy. It may seem so sometimes in our perverse world. But in both form and content he created that Beauty which is a joy for ever, shining a powerful searchlight into the infinite but starlit darkness surrounding us all. He is a pleasure to read. His is, indeed, an excellent achievement.
Professor Desmond Tarrant here considers the latest biography of his subject, James Branch Cabell and Richmond-in-Virginia, by Edgar MacDonald (University Press of Mississippi, 1993)
In the notorious 1920s Cabell was a household name and the favoured of the intelligentsia. His best books and those on which his reputation really and firmly rests include chiefly The Cream of the Jest: A Comedy of Evasions, 1917, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice, 1919, Beyond Life (essays), 1919, Figures of Earth: A Comedy of Appearances, 1921, The Silver Stallion: A Comedy of Redemption, 1926, Straws and Prayer Books (essays), 1926, and Something About Eve, 1927, the last of his books to have a general circulation, a comedy of fig-leaves.
This biography opens the case for this writer who was championed by H.L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis; it may help to give Cabell the status he deserves. He coincided with the decline of all cultural values and his merit rests on the battle he waged to resist this decline without becoming priggish.
He is presented as a jesting critic of southern chivalry which harked back to the troubadours of France in the sunlit 12th century and the code of courtly love. This still flourishes in Cabell's mythical and wonderful world of medieval Poictesme. In writing thus, Cabell meets a deep, abiding and vital need of human beings to see in women something divine, something that can take us into another and entirely better world. In other words this biography chronicles the life of a Romantic who stood by his guns in an age of crass materialism and ugly realism. Thus he offers us an escape route from the sordid and squalid.
What inspired Cabell to create Poictesme? The answer is in part an area in Virginia called Rockbridge Alum Springs. Cabell went there throughout the 'twenties even after its decline. It began as a summer retreat in the 1880s and rivalled America's leading spas. Dedicated to romance and illusion it was far from the workaday world of Richmond. Towards the end of his life Cabell wrote: "I found nothing that sent my imagination soaring like that little charmed circle of buildings called Rockbridge Alum Springs."
There are many insights here into the people who were the sources of his literary figures and the society that moulded his writing. Also we see this society's limitations and the way in which Cabell transcended them to become an international man of American letters translated into many languages.
The author tells me that this work is "intended solely as a social biography, underlining the emotional stresses out of which his work grew". However, I think mention should have been made of my book James Branch Cabell: The Dream and the Reality. No understanding of Cabell is complete without a reading of this, the definitive critical study of him according to the reviewers. Cabell told me he had read it with "unavoidable deep interest".