James Branch Cabell and Richmond-in-Virginia by Edgar MacDonald In his
prime Vanity Fair nominated James Branch Cabell for "Immortality" on its
pages reserved for acclaiming the most select of notable achievers.
Favored by the intelligentsia, Cabell was the author of a series of
fabulous, well-told fictions that in the 1920s made him a household
literary name. Among his many acclaimed books published by 1930 are
Jurgen, The Lineage of Lichfield, The Silver Stallion, Something About
Eve, The White Robe, and The Works of James Branch Cabell in eighteen
volumes. By the time of his death in 1958 the list of his works had
become prodigiously long, but he had been in eclipse for almost three
decades. This definitive biography serves to restore to Cabell the
recognition he deserves. Here he is portrayed as a jesting critic of
southern chivalry, an ambivalent artist whose feelings for Richmond
required a lifetime to reconcile. He was quintessentially a Virginian.
His native Richmond shaped him, and its social milieu indelibly marked
him. He matured as a writer in the climate of the postbellum South and
excelled in subjecting the rigid graces of "Richmond-in-Virginia" to
satire and burlesque. Like his fellow Virginian Ellen Glasgow, he had
mixed emotions about home. Not to love Virginia was an act of betrayal,
yet to condone its stultifying, Old South idealism was to betray
oneself. With the deterioration of Richmond's Edwardian values in the
1920s Cabell emerged as a major literary figure, hailed as an iconoclast
and debunker of myths, but by the 1930s his mannered, self-conscious
style was out of fashion. Cabell was dogged by scandal. There was the
question of homosexuality. It was charged that he murdered the man
reputed to be his mother's lover. After a notorious New York trial his
most notable book Jurgen was suppressed for violating antiobscenity
laws. In this inclusive examination of Cabell's life and milieu a
fascinating literary figure is rescued from the literary shadows and
acknowledged as a writer of major worth in the canon of American
literature. Edgar MacDonald is Cabell Scholar-in-Residence at the James
Branch Cabell Library, Virginia Commonwealth University.
