The Cambridge Scene

"Book recommenders cramp my bowels," said the middle-aged cynic, and turned away. But there had been a time when he was young, when the Soon-to-be Lost Generation trooped to the local tavern and lit candles to a literary icon most of us have now forgotten.

Whatever happened to the Cult of James Cabell? That quiet Virginian who wrote nineteen books; "the author of Jurgen," as he was loathe to be remembered. James Branch Cabell, a William and Mary graduate, newspaper reporter, magazine writer, coal miner, genealogist, and historian. Any of the latter-day literati who have skipped through the wispy medieval odyssey of a pawnbroker called Jurgen, and chuckled over all the phallic imagery, can appreciate Cabell as representative of an era--the era of gin-flasks, flappers, and sex in the back seat of Mr. Ford's Monstrosity.

Cabell came closer to the era than Fitzgerald, for his symbolism grew out of America's new awareness of sex. His audience ranked him with Poe, Whitman, and Twain. He was an institution, property of campus esoterics; and a legend--a mysterious collector of medieval lore, a scholar in "forbidden topics," a familiar in strange compacts with the devil--and, wrote Carl Van Doren, a rumored participator in "misdemeanors not so spiritual."

In fact, little but the bare skeleton of his life and literature is known. He resolved to "write perfectly of beautiful happenings," and spewed forth fifteen volumes of a Biography, the endless reincarnation of Dom Manuel down through the centuries. He was unquestionably one of America's greatest writers--shrouded today in the anonymity of vogue.

Cabell employed none of the novelist's devices considered important today--stream of consciousness, rendition, authority, and "psychological mechanism." He used the older tools of clear writing, myth, and allegory. He was a pessimist not quite prepared to trust reality, doubtful of "justice" in the universe, and inclined to believe that the discovery of cosmic chaos was not a triumph for man. It only sustained the defeat. But Cabell didn't let things go at anticipating Sartre and the Left Bank anti-ontologists. He did believe in wit and beauty, and symbolistic meaning. Images in Jurgen arise from both his imagination and his erudition.

But then, this kind of writing is old as last week's sports page; we are addicted today to categories--realism, impressionism, and the craft of fiction.

Cabell wrote the Biography because that was what he wanted most to do in life--a remarkably simple philosophy. "Here then," he wrote, "upon this shelf, in these brown volumes . . . I can lay my hand and eye upon just what precisely my life has amounted to."

There is a tale making the slow rounds about the Art of Henry James. James, it goes, constructed a great Gothic Cathedral of his craft. Beneath the arches and between the pews our heels clatter and our voices echo. But upon arriving at the altar (so says the story) we discover a dead cat.

Our literature today is strewn with dead cats, of all sizes and philosophies--and they all stink. As Jurgen and Domnei and Figures of Earth collect their dust, one wonders at fashion and the "bitch-goddess" fame.

"With life, then," Cabell ended the Biography, "I have no personal quarrel: she has mauled, scratched and banged; she has in all ways damaged me: but she has permitted me to do that which I most wanted."

It's recommended summer reading for men of sentiment, cynics notwithstanding.