James Branch Cabell

Born: 14 April 1879 in Richmond, Virginia.

Died:   5 May 1958 in Richmond, Virginia.

Aleister Crowley called Cabell's book Jurgen one of the "epoch-making masterpieces of philosophy" in 1929, the book contains a parody of Crowley's Gnostic Mass. Crowley's famous phrase from The Book of the Law, "There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt"—or its source, Rabelais's "there was but this one clause to be observed, Do What Thou Wilt"—is parodied as "There is no law in Cocaigne save, Do that which seems good to you."

James Branch Cabell was an American author of fantasy fiction and belles lettres. Cabell was well regarded by his contemporaries, including H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, and Sinclair Lewis. His works were considered escapist and fit well in the culture of the 1920s, when they were most popular. For Cabell, veracity was "the one unpardonable sin, not merely against art, but against human welfare."

Although escapist, Cabell's works are ironic and satirical. H. L. Mencken disputed Cabell's claim to romanticism and characterized him as "really the most acidulous of all the anti-romantics. His gaudy heroes . . . chase dragons precisely as stockbrokers 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.

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 despite the onset of World War II. Alfred Kazin said that "Cabell and Hitler did not inhabit the same universe".

Cabell was born into an affluent and well-connected Virginian family, and lived most of his life in Richmond. The first Cabell settled in Virginia in 1664; Cabell's paternal great-grandfather, William H. Cabell, was Governor of the Commonwealth from 1805 to 1808. Cabell County in West Virginia is named after the Governor. James Branch Cabell's grandfather, Robert Gamble Cabell, was a physician; his father, Robert Gamble Cabell II (1847–1922), had an MD, but practiced as a druggist; his mother, Anne Harris (1859–1915), was the daughter of Lieutenant Colonel James R. Branch, of the Army of the Confederate States of America. James was the oldest of three boys—his brothers were Robert Gamble Cabell III (1881–1968) and John Lottier Cabell (1883–1946). His parents separated and were later divorced in 1907. His aunt was the suffragist and educationist Mary-Cooke Branch Munford.

Although Cabell's surname is often mispronounced "Ka-BELL", he himself pronounced it "CAB-ble." To remind an editor of the correct pronunciation, Cabell composed this rhyme: "Tell the rabble my name is Cabell."

Cabell matriculated at the College of William and Mary in 1894 at the age of fifteen and graduated in June 1898. While an undergraduate, Cabell taught French and Greek at the College. According to his close friend and fellow author Ellen Glasgow, Cabell developed a friendship with a professor at the college which was considered by some to be "too intimate" and, as a result Cabell was dismissed, although he was subsequently readmitted and finished his degree. Following his graduation, he worked from 1898 to 1900 as a newspaper reporter in New York City, but returned to Richmond in 1901, where he worked several months on the staff of the Richmond News.

1901 was an eventful year for Cabell: his first stories were accepted for publication, and he was suspected of the murder of John Scott, a wealthy Richmonder. It was rumored that Scott was involved romantically with Cabell's mother. Cabell's supposed involvement in the Scott murder and his college "scandal" were both mentioned in Ellen Glasgow's posthumously published (1954) autobiography The Woman Within. In 1902, seven of Cabell's first stories appeared in national magazines and over the next decade he wrote many short stories and articles, contributing to nationally published magazines including Harper's Monthly Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post, as well as carrying out extensive research on his family's genealogy.

Between 1911 and 1913, he was employed by his uncle in the office of the Branch coal mines in West Virginia. On November 8, 1913, he married Priscilla Bradley Shepherd, a widow with five children from her previous marriage. In 1915, son Ballard Hartwell Cabell was born. Priscilla died in March 1949; Cabell was remarried in June 1950 to Margaret Waller Freeman.

During his life, Cabell published fifty-two books, including novels, genealogies, collections of short stories, poetry, and miscellanea. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1937.

Cabell died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1958 in Richmond, and was buried in the graveyard of the Emmanuel Church at Brook Hill. The following year the remains of Cabell and his first wife were re-interred in Hollywood Cemetery.

Significant Cabell collections are housed at various repositories, including Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Virginia.

Works:

Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice.

Cabell's best-known book, Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice (1919), was the subject of a celebrated obscenity case shortly after its publication. The eponymous hero, who considers himself a "monstrous clever fellow," embarks on a journey through ever more fantastic realms, even to hell and heaven. Everywhere he goes, he winds up seducing the local women, even the Devil's wife.

The novel was denounced by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice; they attempted to bring a prosecution for obscenity. The case went on for two years before Cabell and his publisher, Robert M. McBride, won: the "indecencies" were double entendres that also had a perfectly decent interpretation, though it appeared that what had actually offended the prosecution most was a joke about papal infallibility. The presiding judge, Charles Cooper Nott, Jr., wrote in his decision that "... the most that can be said against the book is that certain passages therein may be considered suggestive in a veiled and subtle way of immorality, but such suggestions are delicately conveyed" and that because of Cabell's writing style ". . . it is doubtful if the book could be read or understood at all by more than a very limited number of readers."

Cabell took an author's revenge: the revised edition of 1926 included a previously "lost" passage in which the hero is placed on trial by the Philistines, with a large dung-beetle as the chief prosecutor. He also wrote a short book, Taboo, in which he thanks John H. Sumner and the Society for Suppression of Vice for generating the publicity that gave his career a boost. Due to the notoriety of the suppression of Jurgen, Cabell became a figure of international fame. In the early 1920s, he became associated by some critics with a group of writers referred to as, "The James Branch Cabell School," which included such figures as H. L. Mencken, Carl Van Vechten and Elinor Wylie.

The Biography of the Life of Manuel.

A great deal of Cabell's work has focused on The Biography of the Life of Manuel, the story of a character named Dom Manuel and his descendants through many generations. The biography includes a total of 25 works that were written over a 23-year period. Cabell stated that he considered the Biography to be a single work, and supervised its publication in a single uniform edition of 18 volumes, known as the Storisende Edition, published from 1927 to 1930. A number of the volumes of the Biography were also published in editions illustrated by Frank C. Papé between 1921 and 1926.

The themes and characters from Jurgen make appearances in many works included in the Biography. Figures of Earth tells the story of Manuel the swineherd, a morally ambiguous protagonist who rises to conquer a realm by playing on others' expectations—his motto being Mundus Vult Decipi, meaning "the world wishes to be deceived." The Silver Stallion is a loose sequel to Figures of Earth that deals with the creation of the legend of Manuel the Redeemer, in which Manuel is pictured as an infallible hero, an example to which all others should aspire; the story is told by Manuel's former knights, who remember how things really were and take different approaches to reconciling the mythology with the actuality of Manuel.

Many of these books take place in the fictional country eventually ruled by Manuel, known as "Poictesme", (pronounced "pwa-tem"). It was the author's intention to situate Poictesme roughly in the south of France. The name suggests the two real French cities of Poitiers (medieval Poictiers) and Angoulême (medieval Angoulesme). Several other books take place in the fictional town of Lichfield, Virginia.

After concluding the Biography in 1932, Cabell shortened his professional name to Branch Cabell. The truncated name was used for all his new, "post-Biography" publications until the printing of There Were Two Pirates (1946).

Others:

Though Cabell is best known as a fantasist, the plots and characters of his first few novels, The Eagle's Shadow (1904), The Cords of Vanity (1909), and The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck (1915) (later all adapted for inclusion into the Biography), do not wander out of the everyday society of Virginia's beleaguered gentry. But Cabell's signature droll style is clearly in evidence, and in later printings each book would bear a characteristically Cabellian subtitle: A Comedy of Purse-Strings, A Comedy of Shirking, and A Comedy of Limitations, respectively.

His later novel, The First Gentleman of America: A Comedy of Conquest (1942), retells the strange career of an American Indian from the shores of the Potomac who sailed away with Spanish explorers, later to return, be made chief of his tribe, and kill all the Spaniards in the new Virginia settlement. Cabell delivered a more concise, historical treatment of the novel's events in The First Virginian, part one of his 1947 work of non-fiction, Let Me Lie, a book on the history of Virginia.

Other works include:

The Nightmare Has Triplets trilogy, comprising Smirt (1934), Smith (1935), and Smire (1937)

The Heirs and Assigns trilogy, comprising Hamlet Had an Uncle (1940), The King Was in His Counting House (1938), and The First Gentleman of America (1942)

The It Happened in Florida trilogy, comprising The St. Johns (written in collaboration with A. J. Hanna), There Were Two Pirates (1946), and The Devil's Own Dear Son (1949)

Cabell also wrote a number of autobiographical and genealogical works.

circa 1893

circa 1935