Save Richmond

“(Richmond’s) professional men and our business men have always been the custodians of our culture.”— Author James Branch Cabell, 1947

“I’m not a patron of the arts — at all” — Beverley “Booty” Armstrong, former board member for the Richmond Arts Council and Virginia Performing Arts Foundation, 2005

Richmond writer James Branch Cabell became famous for penning the only Octodecalogy — an 18 volume epic — in American writing, but the author’s ambitious 50-book bibliography is too seldom thumbed these days. The good man’s name may grace the main library at Richmond’s Virginia Commonwealth University, only blocks from where he was born and where he died. But few beyond academics 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.

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 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 protégé.”

In a most memorable chapter, “Mr. Ritchie’s Richmond,” he transports us to a dinner that the city’s “best people” had thrown for a visiting Charles Dickens, soon after the author of “Great Expectations” met struggling writer Edgar Allan Poe in 1842. At the same time the rich arts patrons of Richmond were hosting their distinguished British guest in high style, poor Poe was being “forced to leave Richmond rather than starve in Richmond,” writes Cabell.

Presiding over Dickens’ swanky dinner was one Mr. Thomas Ritchie, a semi-retired newspaper editor whose introductory speech revealed that no one here really knew who Dickens was, they didn’t read his books, know his world. But they couched this ignorance in a veil of superiority, affluence and Virginia pride. Tellingly, there was no local artist, no noteworthy Richmond man of letters, in attendance at this dinner. “We have no Washington Irving to grace the chair,” Mr. Ritchie is quoted apologizing to Dickens. “(That’s) because the forte of the Old Dominion is to be found in the masculine production of her statesmen, her Washington, her Jefferson, and her Madison, who have never indulged in works of imagination, in the charms of romance, or in the mere beauties of the belles lettres.”

“The exact trick of it lies in that ‘mere,’” Cabell wrote with a sneer.

“One may be wholly certain that when Mr. Ritchie, speaking without anguish, commented upon the paucity of fine writers in and about the dining room of the Exchange Hotel, he was not thinking about Edgar Allan Poe. . . young Mr. Poe was beyond the consideration of Richmond’s elite, in any and all capacities,” Cabell writes. Poe “was, in a word, ‘tacky.’”

“We who can enjoy nowadays the products of Poe’s genius without being concerned with his personality do reprehend Richmond,” Cabell summarizes. “We dwell, with an appropriate scorn, upon the smug Pharisaic obtuseness of Mr. Thomas Ritchie… we remark fleetingly upon Virginia’s customary neglect of genius until a while after any possible tribute takes the form of a tombstone.”

More than a century and a half later, “the arts” in Richmond are still being patronized by the descendants of Thomas Ritchie, only the club is officially called an Arts Council and an Arts & Cultural Funding Consoritum. Those determining what is and isn’t art are learned arts authorities from such institutions as Bank of America, LandAmerica, Wachovia, Philip Morris, McGuire-Woods law firm and Richmond City Council; the board of authority is represented disproportionately by businessmen and politicians. One business leader and former Arts Council member, Mr. Beverly “Booty” Armstrong of CCA Enterprises, has admitted several times in the press that he has no interest in, no knowledge of, the arts. Why “Booty” would be among those consistently entrusted with dispersing money to the area’s worthwhile visual, literary and performing artists of Richmond is a question Cabell wrestled with nearly 60 years ago, along with other writers:

“When a state or a city organizes — in Edith Wharton’s agreeable phrase — ‘to pursue culture in bands, as if it were highly dangerous,’ why, then the machinery of the resultant organization needs, it is obvious, to be handled by persons who are familiar with the chicane of all organizations. That is logic… and yet, just somehow, this mechanical hunting down of culture does fail, in Virginia at any rate, to produce art of noteworthy importance.”

Patronage in the arts is essential — Cabell wasn’t doubting this. But true patronage requires interest, knowledge and — above all — a sense of what art really is to truly work. He surmised that Richmond’s “culture in bands” patronage created, not great art, but “in large numbers, art’s patron and apologist… Mr. Thomas Ritchie.”

The hometown writer would be angry, but not surprised, to learn that today, entire boards of directors are teeming with contemporary Thomas Ritchies, administering and judging culture — some of them genuinely interested in their charge (just because you work for a bank doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate great art), some don’t even attend the meetings. Cabell would no doubt pose this query to them: “If Mr. Ritchie’s condescending and exclusionary excuse for the state of the arts in 1842 — and the absence of actual artists at the party — was that the commonwealth of Virginia was too busy indulging its political visionaries, what is the excuse today, from our contemporary Mr. Ritchies? “The forte of the Old Dominion is to be found in the masculine production of her statesmen, her Eric Cantor, her George Allen, and her Tim Kaine…”!

Not as persuasive, is it?

“The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds,” he had written famously, “and the pessimist fears that this true.” Cabell had his publisher release the acidic polemic while he vacationed in Florida, hoping to avoid the controversy he was sure would follow.

But this was not the best of all possible worlds — the very people in Richmond he hoped would be scandalized by his essays didn’t even bother to read the book. And, as R.H.W Dillard writes in the foreword to the new edition, “most reviewers missed the double meaning of the book’s title. Deaf to James Branch Cabell’s many-layered ironic wit, they read the book as a paean to the old South.”

But to understand why the arts and artists are so little valued and trusted among our gatekeepers, among many other things, the crackin’ Let Me Lie — and “Mr. Ritchie’s Richmond” — remains a required read.

— Reprinted from RVA Magazine by permission and lightly expanded.