James Branch Cabell (April 14, 1879 - May 5, 1958) was an American author of fantasy fiction.
Biography
James Branch Cabell was descended from a venerable Southern family; his great-grandfather, William H. Cabell , was governor of Virginia from 1805-1808. Cabell was born in Richmond, Virginia on 14 April 1879 and lived most of his life there. Cabell had two brothers; his parents separated during his teens and were divorced in 1907.
Cabell attended William and Mary College between 1893 and 1898, and taught courses in French and Greek while an undergraduate. He worked briefly at the Richmond Times as a copy-holder, then lived in New York City for two years (1899-1901), working for the New York Herald as a social reporter, and served for a time in the paper's Harlem office. In 1901 he returned to Richmond, where he worked for several months for the Richmond News.
Although there is little extant information about them, there were two notable incidents in Cabell's early life, both of which were mentioned in the memoirs of his close friend, author Ellen Glasgow (published posthumously in 1954). The first controversy, Glasgow claimed, took place while Cabell was studying at William and Mary College -- his friendship with a professor was considered 'too intimate', and as a result of the supposed scandal that ensued, the school expelled Cabell, although he was later readmitted and finished his degree.
The second controversy stemmed from alleged rumours that Cabell's mother was having an affair with a wealthy Richmonder, John Scott. According to Glasgow, when Scott was murdered in 1901, Cabell was suspected by some of his killing. Although he dismissed Glasgow's claims as "fiction", it is possible that he was obliquely referring to these rumours in his 1928 novel Domnei -- the hero, Perion, is an outlaw who has been wrongly accused of the murder of a king.
Over the next ten years he undertook genealogical research and wrote numerous short stories and articles, contributing to national magazines such as Harper's Monthly Magazine and the Saturday Evening Post. His first published work in a journal, a college paper, "The Comedies of William Congreve", appeared in the April 1901 edition of International. His first book, The Eagle's Shadow, was published in 1904 after first being serialised in the Saturday Evening Post.
Cabell worked in the office of his uncle's mining business in West Virginia in 1911-1912 and returned to Richmond in 1913, where he married Rebecca Priscilla Bradley Shepherd (1874-1949), a widow with five children from her previous marriage. They had one son, Ballard Hartwell Cabell (1915-1980), who was born with Down's Syndrome.
His work was slow to draw critical attention but by 1918 he had published ten major works and had begun to attract a following, and was praised widely by fellow writers. In an article published that year in the New York Evening Mail, H.L. Mencken described Cabell as "the only first-rate literary craftsman that the whole South can show."
On 14 January 1920, the New York State Society for the Prevention of Vice charged Cabell's publishing editor, Guy Holt , with violation of the anti-obscenity provisions of the New York State Penal Code by publishing Cabells' novel Jurgen. The case attracted a great deal of publicity, with fellow writers defending the artistry of the work and Cabell's right to publish it, and college students and others reading it because it had been banned. The obscenity trial began on 16 October 1922, and ended three days later with an acquittal of all charges. Presiding judge Charles C. Nott 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."
Throughout the 1920s, Cabell continued to refine his style, a combination of satire, parody, eroticism, symbolism, allegory and fantasy, blended myths and legends from many lands and times and lacing them with complex word-games including puns and anagrams. Most of these works eventually became part of the eighteen volume collection entitled The Biography of the Life of Manuel. The last volume of the series was published in 1930.
Cabell was highly regarded by many prominent American authors of his time and he conducted an extensive correspondence with a wide circle of writers and friends, including Mencken, Joseph Hergesheimer , Burton Rascoe , Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Carl Van Vechten, and fellow Richmonder and close friend Ellen Glasgow.
He served as editor of the Virginia War History Commission (1919-1926) and later joined Dreiser, Eugene O'Neill and others on the editorial board of the American Spectator (1932-1935). In 1937, Cabell was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
While the controversy over Jurgen assured Cabell of an audience for most of the 1920s, interest in his books dropped sharply in 1930s and continued to decline thereafter. In 1932, he tried to break with his past and wrote under the name Branch Cabell. Over the next three decades he wrote and published nearly twenty more books, which were grouped in a series of trilogies. He returned to the name James Branch Cabell in 1947 with the publication of Let Me Lie, the first installment of his fifth and last trilogy, consisting largely of semi-autobiographical essays.
Cabell lived and worked most of his life at his home at 3201 Monument Avenue, Richmond. The family began to spend winters in St. Augustine, Florida after Cabell began to suffer from attacks of pneumonia in 1935. His wife died there from heart failure during the winter of 1949.
In 1950, he remarried to Margaret Waller Freeman (1893?-1983), whom he had known for many years. Cabell suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died at his home on 5 May 1958. He is commemorated by the library of the Virginia Commonwealth University which was named in his honour and which now houses an extensive collection of Cabell's papers.
Writings
In his lifetime he published more than fifty books. Most are now long forgotten, but his eighth book, Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice, (1919) gained wide public attention in the United States and beyond. 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 State Society for the Suppression of Vice and as a result of pressure from this conservative group, Cabell was charged with obscenity. The case ran nearly two years before Cabell and his publishers won. The supposed "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. As the judge wryly noted, Cabell's complex prose style was such that few readers at the time would have been able to fully understand his writing. 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.
Many of the works of this period formed part of what is believed to be the only octodecalogy (18-volume series) in English literature -- the Biography of The Life of Manuel. It includes Figures of Earth, which introduces the central character of Manuel the Redeemer, who conquers the land of Poictesme. Pronounced "Pwa-tem", the name was compounded from two ancient provinces in southern France, Poictiers and Angoulesme.
Manuel rises from swineherd to become lord of Poictesme largely by exploiting the expectations of those around him -- his motto, Mundus Vult Decipi, means "the world wishes to be deceived". (Jurgen makes a minor appearance at the end of Figures, as the small boy who was the last to see the Redeemer). The Silver Stallion is a sequel that deals with the adventures of the knights in Manuel's company after his departure and satirised established religion by showing how the reputations of such legendary figures are manipulated after their death, for political gain. These two novels and Jurgen are the first three works in the Biography and remain his best known works, having been reissued in paperback form in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Cabell's work was highly regarded by his literary peers, including H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Carl Van Vechten, Margaret Mitchell and Ellen Glasgow. Like Tolkien his work drew on an encyclopedic knowledge of myth, legend and fantasy literature, but beneath the guise of his medieval romanticism and fantasy much of his writing in fact contained acerbic commentaries on the morals and manners of the times.
His erudite, ironic and highly mannered style fell out of favour after the advent of 'realist' writers such as Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck in the 1930s. Although now largely forgotten by the general public, his work was nonetheless very influential on later authors of fantastic fiction.
Robert A. Heinlein was greatly inspired by Cabell's boldness, and originally described his famous masterpeice Stranger in a Strange Land as "a Cabellesque satire". A later Heinlein work, Job, A Comedy of Justice (with the title derived from Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice), has an appearance of the Slavic god Koschei (from Jurgen). Fritz Leiber's Swords of Lankhmar was also influenced by Jurgen. 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. Neil Gaiman's series "The Sandman" also contains references to Cabell and his works.
Other works include:
- Something about Eve
- The Cream of the Jest
- Domnei
- Smirt, Smith, Smire (trilogy)
- The High Place
Quotes
- "...In the early part of the 20th century, there was a fantasy writer named James Branch Cabell who had a theory of writing as magick. 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
- "Yet creeds mean very little, Coth answered the dark god, still speaking almost gently. The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true." -- James Cabell, "The Silver Stallion"
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