In a 1956 essay, Edmund Wilson wrote: “Cabell is out of fashion.” Withdrawing his dismissal of James Branch Cabell, Wilson gave him a critical accolade—and his generosity was praiseworthy. For by 1956, Cabell was not only out of fashion but virtually forgotten, though he was not alone in this. Most of his contemporaries, more or less, had faded. Sinclair Lewis, for example, was remembered more for his battles with ex-wife Dorothy Thompson and for his coinage of “Babbitt” as a term in America’s lexicon than for his novels. Scott Fitzgerald, never understood by critics still trying to fathom Amory Blaine, had dissolved in a pool of alcohol and self-pity. Ernest Hemingway was still assiduously combing his chest hair and flexing his muscles, but he remained vital only because his genius could not be barbered. John Dos Passos, stylistically the weakest of the postwar generation but certainly the most pertinent and perceptive, had fallen under the onslaught of the “socially conscious” hatchet brigade and an Establishment that found greater sustenance in the potboilers of Howard Fast.

But “fashion” is an ambiguous word, and time-frames deceptive. Going back not too many years, I recall that as a preparatory school rebel I read, along with equally enlightened contemporaries, the fervent discussions of Cabell by Benjamin de Casseres and other critics in books still on library shelves. I wrote and published derivative pieces on The Cream of the Jest and The High Place, never understanding that the latter title linked it to pagan practices imbedded in the history of the race. Yet to this degree, Edmund Wilson was correct, for the literary journals of the 1950’s did not fluctuate from their concern with the delicate or muscular expression of Hemingway and his imitators, at least not long enough to give a thought to Cabell’s word. Oddly enough, in the 70’s and 80’s, I noticed that Cabell’s books would disappear far more rapidly from the shelves of my favorite bouquinistes than those of other writers presumably in fashion.

Considerations of Cabell are today sadly limited to Wilson’s excellent essay in The Bit between My Teeth, the third volume of his chronicles, and to Vernon Parrington’s thoughtful assessment in Main Currents in American Thought. For the rest, we have enthusiastic one-liners by George Bernard Shaw and other writers and H.L. Mencken’s extravagant praise of one who was more discussed than read in the days of Smart Set and The American Mercury. Mencken, of course, was mainly interested in Cabell’s ironic comments on the Southern scene, though the Cabellian assessment dealt in historical perspectives and not in thumbing its nose at the booboisie. Mencken was appalled by the vapidities and turgidities of the Erskine Caldwells and William Faulkners to their recapitulations of the New South—and he was also pleased to contemplate a gentleman writer interested in writing rather than in mental self-abuse.

Cabell was a gentleman—and I must be forgiven for using what has become a pejorative word—and a writer who, as he asserted in These Restless Heads, wrote principally for his own diversion. He was indulging himself, less devotionally than Balzac, in la comedie humaine—comedy in its Renaissance connotation. And though Cabell denied repeatedly that he was in any way a participant in the pages of his books, this was reverse modesty on his part. For of all the writers since Michel de Montaigne, James Branch Cabell was involved in what he set down on paper, though the involvement was almost never autobiographical. He walks through his pages unabashedly, the small smile over the epigram or the sly sexuality dominant.

Cabell was writing of a South that, having spent its treasure, its élan, and its cultural currency in a war it could not win, against a brash, industrial, and economically predatory north, was attempting in the 20th century to preserve its crinoline manners, its Jeffersonian pretensions, and the frayed class system it had salvaged from the War of Independence. The South was psychologically depleted and could not contend against a new breed of carpetbagger or a rising redneck lower-middle class, which had seized the political establishment. Tradition had degenerated to pose, and symbolically the South could be likened to Toledano Street in New Orleans, named after the first Spanish governor of what would be Mr. Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, which the middle-class whites would snigger to visiting northerners as being “in the niggah redlight section.”

In the Virginia where Cabell lived and wrote—to be precise, Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy—hypocrisy, which La Rochefoucauld characterized as the tribute vice pays to virtue, flourished. There was honor, trivialized to protect the reputation of women and the manhood of their spouses, and a virginity that lived in song but not in story. The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck, Cabell’s most poignant title, captures the decaying South that would collapse under the twin blows of Depression and democracy. The mythical world of Poictesme, Cabell’s dream kingdom of irony and nonromantic romance, does not enter into this novel of a perishing and discouraged region—and the furbelows of the period hardly matched the vigor of the Restoration ditty, “Adam catched Eve by the furbelow, and that’s the oldest catch we know.” That was left for Poictesme, not the Musgroves and the Charteris of this novel. Even Mispec Moor (that anagram of “compromise”) does not exist outside of Richmond’s city limits, whatever the South’s endless compromises.

The elaborate medieval world Cabell created—as alive and articulate as the thronging streets in Rabelais—was appropriate to the time and place of its writing. His style is sui generis—rich, beautifully contrived, and sometimes euphuistic, but always a delight to those who contemplate the infinite facets of English. The ironies, and they are everywhere, often creep on you unawares as in the last pages of The Cream of the Jest when Felix Kennaston realizes that the magical sigil that has been transporting him back in time to Poictesme is but a flattened bottle cap.

In his lifetime, indeed from the time he gave up popular fiction for a long series of “comedies” and commentaries, Cabell was praised by some as Shavian and Chestertonian and berated by others as cheap and shallow in his comments on the human condition. His best known book, Jurgen, was banned in Boston as obscene for some quiet ribaldries and jeux that would have gone unnoticed in, say, Voltaire’s Candide. His formal verse, which did not seek to challenge the poets of his time, was taken as his true measure as versifier, though the real poetry was in his beautiful and cadenced prose. Encased in his Chaucerian strophes and Rabelaisian sallies was a shrewder assessment of his contemporaneity than that of novelists who, as Somerset Maugham quipped, found philosophy in calling a spade a damned shovel. He did not find it necessary to invade the bathroom or the bagnio to observe sex and the bodily functions, and his wit and laughter in observing them was more perceptive and certainly healthier than that “rubbing of the dirty little secret”—D.H. Lawrence’s formulation—which so occupied the writers of his and later times. He poked fun at a common sense which was more senseless than common as he scratched it delicately or broadly.

The problem and the dilemma for those who once read Cabell deeply, and for those who may do so in the future as literature recycles itself, is suggested by some of his titles: the philosophical work Beyond Life; the altar at The High Place on which he lays his dreams; The Cream of the Jest, which is not in the sigil but in the dialectics of life; and the acres of Poictesme, in which the ape-man “strives blunderingly, from mystery to mystery . . . not understanding anything . . . honeycombed with poltroonery, and yet ready to give all, and to die fighting” for the sake of an “undemonstrable idea” that he is a symbol. Cabell responds in his dreams, and it is overwhelming and significant that the early pages of These Restless Heads are both an adumbration and an explication de texte of Prospero and Shakespeare’s most engaging play, The Tempest.

In his concept of Woman and women —what he calls “the essence of domnei”—Cabell starts with the concepts of courtly love (accurately limned for some of my generation in the lectures of Raymond Weaver at Columbia though never understood by writers of pseudo-troubadour romances), skirts but does not reject the Platonic wisdom of Diotima, and presents the Helens and Ettarres and various Dames of his creation. In the end he arrives at the paradox that in reaching for the ideal of Woman, to possess is to lose. (To today’s martial and sordid feminists, Cabell’s delineations would be repugnant, if not unconstitutional.) In The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck—rivet and neck never fully defined—the dialectics of love and gallantry confront us, the more movingly because they struggle in the exhausted Virginia soil. Is Cabell Elizabethan? Or “modern” in a manner that poets and novelists of our cultural diaspora may envy?

In his lifetime, the works of James Branch Cabell and those he signed simply Branch Cabell were published in a uniform edition. He writes in one of his books of a visit by a young author who sat before this monument to Cabell’s literary industry and lectured him on the art of writing—a spectacle I witnessed in John P. Marquand’s living room, the lecturer being James Jones with one book to his credit at the time. As he told the story, Cabell’s smile lingered on the printed page, for though he knew his worth, he was not a vain man. If the wheel of taste spins again for him, the best of his books will reappear in thick volumes on india paper, accompanied by the rapture of critics who have never quite understood him or his manner of breathing. But from his corner of some heavenly Poictesme, he will probably and in continued modesty recall the dying thoughts of the writer he created, Rudolph Musgrove, the central character in The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck:

Once, very long ago, someone had said that the most pathetic tragedy in life was to get nothing particular out of it. . . . And Rudolph Musgrove knew he had forgotten something of vast import, but what this knowledge had pertained to he no longer knew.

That melancholy may have pertained to James Branch Cabell’s later years. But if he has forgotten what of vast import he once knew, his books have left us more than a clue.