James Branch Cabell

James Branch Cabell
James Branch Cabell photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1935.
Born	April 14, 1879(1879-04-14) Richmond, Virginia
Died	May 5, 1958(1958-05-05) (aged 79) Richmond, Virginia
Occupation	Author
Alma mater	College of William and Mary
Genres	Fantasy fiction

James Branch Cabell,  /ˈkæbəl/; April 14, 1879 – May 5, 1958) was an American author of fantasy fiction and belles lettres. Cabell was well regarded by his contemporaries, including H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis. His works were considered escapist and fit well in the culture of the 1920s, when his works were most popular. For Cabell, veracity was "the one unpardonable sin, not merely against art, but against human welfare." Interest in Cabell declined in the 1930s, a decline that has been attributed in part to his failure to move out of his fantasy niche. Alfred Kazin said that "Cabell and Hitler did not inhabit the same universe". Although escapist, Cabell's works are ironic and satirical. H. L. Mencken disputes Cabell's claim to romanticism, characterized him as "really the most acidulous of all the anti-romantics. His gaudy heroes ... chase dragons precisely as stockbrockers play golf." Cabell saw art as an escape from life, but once the artist creates his ideal world, he finds that it is made up of the same elements that make the real one.

Honors

In 1970, Virginia Commonwealth University, also located in Richmond, named its main campus library "James Branch Cabell Library" in his honor. In the 1970s Cabell's library and personal papers were moved from his home on Monument Avenue to the James Branch Cabell Library. Consisting of some 3,000 volumes, the collection includes manuscripts, notebooks and scrapbooks, periodicals in which Cabell's essays, reviews and fiction were published, his correspondence with noted writers including H. L. Mencken, Ellen Glasgow, Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser, correspondence with family, friends, editors and publishers, newspaper clippings, photographs, periodicals, criticisms, printed material, publishers' agreements and statements of sales.

The VCU undergraduate literary journal at the university is named Poictesme after the fictional province in his cycle Biography of the Life of Manuel.

Influence

Cabell's work was thought of very highly by a number of his peers, including Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, Joseph Hergesheimer, and Jack Woodford. Although now largely forgotten by the general public, his work was remarkably influential on later authors of fantastic fiction. James Blish was a fan of Cabell's works, and for a time edited Kalki, the journal of the Cabell Society. Robert A. Heinlein was greatly inspired by Cabell's boldness, and originally described his famous book Stranger in a Strange Land as "a Cabellesque satire." A later work, Job: A Comedy of Justice (with the title derived from Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice), features Jurgen, an appearance of the Slavic god Koschei.

Fritz Leiber's Swords of Lankhmar was also influenced by Jurgen. Charles G. Finney's famous fantasy The Circus of Dr. Lao was influenced by Cabell's work. The Averoigne stories of Clark Ashton Smith are, in background, close to those of Cabell's Poictesme. Jack Vance's Dying Earth books show considerable stylistic resemblances to Cabell; Cugel the Clever in those books bears a strong resemblance, not least in his opinion of himself, to Jurgen. Cabell was also a major influence on Neil Gaiman, acknowledged as such in the rear of Gaiman's novels Stardust and American Gods. This thematic and stylistic influence is highly evident in the multi-layered pantheons of Gaiman's most famous work, The Sandman, which have many parallels in Cabell's work, particularly Jurgen.

Cabell maintained a close and lifelong friendship with well-known Richmond writer Ellen Glasgow, whose house on West Main St. was only a few blocks from Cabell's family home on East Franklin St. They corresponded extensively between 1923 and Glasgow's death in 1945 and over 200 of their letters survive. Cabell dedicated his 1927 novel Something About Eve to her, and she in turn dedicated her book They Stooped to Folly: A Comedy of Morals (1929) to Cabell. In her autobiography, Glasgow also gave considerable thanks to Cabell for his help in the editing of her Pulitzer Prize-winning book In This Our Life (1941). However, late in their lives, friction developed between the two writers as a result of Cabell's critical 1943 review of Glasgow's novel A Certain Measure.

From 1969 through 1972, the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series returned six of Cabell's novels to print, and elevated his profile in the fantasy genre. Today, many more of his works are available from Wildside Press.

Criticism

Michael Swanwick published a critical monograph on Cabell's work, which argues for the continued value of a few of Cabell's works—notably Jurgen, The Cream of the Jest and The Silver Stallion—while acknowledging that some of his writing has dated badly. Swanwick places much of the blame for Cabell's obscurity on Cabell himself, for authorising the 18-volume Storisende uniform edition of the Biography of the Life of Manuel, including much that was of poor quality and ephemeral. This alienated admirers and scared off potential new readers. "There are, alas, an infinite number of ways for a writer to destroy himself," Swanwick wrote. "James Branch Cabell chose one of the more interesting. Standing at the helm of the single most successful literary career of any fantasist of the twentieth century, he drove the great ship of his career straight and unerringly onto the rocks."

Other book-length studies on Cabell were written during the period of his fame by Hugh Walpole, W. A. McNeill, and Carl van Doren. Edmund Wilson tried to rehabilitate his reputation with a long essay in The New Yorker.

Quotations

• "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true." — Coth in Cabell, The Silver Stallion
• "... when I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No, Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are," — James Branch Cabell, The Cream of the Jest
• "In the early part of the 20th century, there was a fantasy writer named James Branch Cabell who had a theory of writing as magic. His books (highly recommended, especially Jurgen) are both funny and mythological ... and it's easy to see how his process of creating characters was really a process of evocation and invocation." — Philip H. Farber
• "Once we understand the fundamentals of Mr. Cabell's artistic aims, it is not easy to escape the fact that in Figures of Earth he undertook the staggering and almost unsuspected task of rewriting humanity's sacred books, just as in Jurgen he gave us a stupendous analogue of the ceaseless quest for beauty. For we must accept the truth that Mr. Cabell is not a novelist at all in the common acceptance of the term, but a historian of the human soul. His books are neither documentary nor representational; his characters are symbols of human desires and motives. By the not at all simple process of recording faithfully the projections of his rich and varied imagination, he has written thirteen books, which he accurately terms biography, wherein is the bitter-sweet truth about human life." — Burton Rascoe
• "I have finished Jurgen; a great and beautiful book, and the saddest book I ever read. I don't know why, exactly. The book hurts me — tears me to small pieces — but somehow it sets me free. It says the word that I've been trying to pronounce for so long. It tells me everything I am, and have been, and may be, unsparingly ... I don't know why I cry over it so much. It's too — something-or-other — to stand. I've been sitting here tonight, reading it aloud, with the tears streaming down my face ..." — Deems Taylor, Letter to Mary Kennedy, 12 December 1920
• "... For a book, once it is printed and published, becomes individual. It is by its publication as decisively severed from its author as in parturition a child is cut off from its parent. The book 'means' thereafter, perforce,—both grammatically and actually,—whatever meaning this or that reader gets out of it." — James Branch Cabell, "A Note on Cabellian Harmonics" in Cabellian Harmonics, April 1928

References

• Inge, M. Thomas; Edgar E. MacDonald (eds.) (1983), James Branch Cabell: Centennial Essays, Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, ISBN 0-8071-1028-0 
• McNeill, Warren A. (1928), Cabellian Harmonics, New York: Random House 
• Brewer, Frances Joan (intr. by James Branch Cabell), James Branch Cabell: A Bibliography of his Writings, Biography and Criticism (2 vols.), University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, 1957

External links

James Branch Cabell

• Encyclopaedia Britannica
• James Branch Cabell Library (Virginia Commonwealth University)
• Poictesme, Virginia Commonwealth University's literary journal

Cabell works online

• Domnei (Google Books)
• Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice (Google Books)
• Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice (University of Virginia)
• The Cream of The Jest (University of Wisconsin)
• Works by James Branch Cabell at Project Gutenberg

Bibliographies

• Chronology of James Branch Cabell's Published Works
• Summary Bibliography at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

Fan sites

• James Branch Cabell
• Mundus Vult Decipi