This week’s Style Weekly has a cover article by Edwin Slipek Jr. on Richmond’s “forgotten” literary figures. Included in this feature is an overview of the life and career of James Branch Cabell (1879-1958), who became famous in the early days of the 20th century for penning the only Octodecalogy — an 18 volume epic — in American writing.
As Slipek’s piece reminds us, Cabell’s ambitious 50-book bibliography is too seldom thumbed these days. The good man’s name may grace the main library at Virginia Commonwealth University, only blocks from where he was born and where he died, but few beyond academics and Richmond history buffs have committed Cabell’s elaborately plotted, floridly metaphorical, quaintly erotic prose to memory. Today, he’s best known for coining a Quote Book mainstay about the difference between optimism and pessimism — not as the author of books such as Jurgen and These Restless Heads.
Cabell’s chief relevance today may lie in his powers as a social critic… one who focused an unflinching eye on the constrictive relationship between Richmond arts and letters and its business community, a dysfunctional association that he traced back to the days of Edgar Allan Poe.
In this second installment of our new series, “Richmond Arts Flashback,” we take a look at James Branch Cabell’s writing on this ever-timely subject. If you think Save Richmond is hard on today’s business leaders for their heavy-handed “patronage,” you ain’t read Cabell. In 2006, I wrote a piece for RVA Magazine that highlighted the good man’s devastating essay on the subject, “Mr. Ritchie’s Richmond.”
[Fans of irony will no doubt note my passing criticism of the Arts Council's Arts and Cultural Consortium. I'm now a member of that politically-appointed body thanks to the wild sense of humor of outgoing "maverick" L. Douglas Wilder. Thanks Doug!]
An excerpt from my RVA piece, which I titled “Mr. Cabell’s Richmond”:
If you are familiar with the other side of James Branch Cabell — the social critic of Richmond who never flinched from calling it like he saw it — you know that he had plenty of quotable bon mots in his repertoire. His book, The Rivets in Grandfather’s Neck, serenely explores contemporary Virginia life. And Let Me Lie, Cabell’s “ethnological account of the remarkable Commonwealth of Virginia” is a satiric achievement worthy of a Southern H.L. Mencken (the thought!); filled with observations that reveal a proud son’s optimism alongside the cursings of a pessimist who knows his hometown all too goddamn well. The book (reprinted by the University Press of Virginia) more than just holds up as a gloriously colorful rant — its stinging criticisms offer up a window of clarity on today’s Virginia.
In his tome, Cabell hones in on such topics as the dominating influence of the Negro nanny on white culture… the shallow tourism of Colonial Williamsburg… unproved myths of the Confederacy… and the sad state of Virginia arts and letters.
It is with the latter subject that this grandson of a former Virginia governor, a well-bred man of literature, scores his most prescient bullseyes. He points his unwavering finger at the Virginia gentlemen, many in his own class, who condescend to the arts, who don’t understand the arts, who wouldn’t be caught dead associating with artists or their ilk, but who nevertheless, for centuries, have been self-appointed as the gatekeepers of the arts.
“(Richmond’s) professional men and our business men have always been the custodians of our culture,” he writes. “The main, the official, promotion of every humane art has been entrusted, without fail to this or the other coterie of highly estimable tax payers in the higher brackets who, despite their many virtues, know very little, or else precisely nothing, about that special art that was their protegee.
Go here and read the entire piece.
… and here is the first installment in SR’s new Richmond Arts Flashback series, “Salvage Work.” We are running this series in honor of Richmond’s forthcoming Cultural Action Plan… because you don’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.