INTRODUCTION: JURGEN
In 1919, James Branch Cabell’s humorous odyssey about a man trying to make peace with the slow shock of middle-aging made the author so famous that by the end of the 1920s his prominent place in American literary history seemed more assured than that of his younger contemporaries Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner: “There seems to be no longer any reason for not associating him with the only comparable American romancers, Hawthorne and Melville,” wrote Carl Van Doren.1 H. L. Mencken wondered: “How long will Jurgen last? How long will Cabell last? I venture the prophecy that he and all his books will last a long while. There is in him, indeed, more assurance of permanence than in any other contemporary American of his trade.”2 Joe Lee Davis, in his study of Cabell’s career, insists that “simple justice” should make us “rank him among the major rather than the minor authors of the twentieth century” Davis claims “Cabell is both the Spenser and the Boccaccio of the second American Renaissance.”3 Literary fame? Easy come, easy go.
The hero of Jurgen is Jurgen, a never-at-a-loss smart-aleck who lives in a vague storybook place and time. A poet at heart and a pawnbroker by profession, he follows after his shrewish wife who has disappeared into a borderland cave. He doesn’t know what he wants as he proceeds on his quest to rescue her, but he takes what comes, meeting it all with a flippant catch-phrase: “I am willing to taste any drink once.” His cynicism wins him an opportunity to journey for a year through his romantic memories of lost-love. He has already experienced the poignancy of middle age: “... youth had gone out of him, and it seemed that nothing in particular happened.” (22)4 What has happened is revealed as he encounters an old flame, just as she was way back when. He marvels as he realizes she was not all that extraordinary—his youthful passion and then his misty nostalgia had glorified her; she, on the other hand, reels at his double-aged image: “... I see the face of Jurgen as one might see the face of a dead man drowned in muddy water.” (24) Poor Jurgen!
What a miserable magical journey that would be, to re-encounter one’s life and loves while hauling around an old carcass. It is fortunate, then, that after he sings a song for the ancient sorceress Sereda, in gratitude for his sweet words and in pity for his mortal vanity, she restores to him his twenty-one-year-old body.
To be young again! Better than wisdom, it seems, is to see with the eyes of youthful love! But his mind remains middle-aged, and as he re-encounters his re-embodied ideals and beliefs, he is led to troubling reflections:
The people whom he loved when at his best as a fine young fellow were so very soon, and through petty causes, to become nothing to him, and he himself was to be converted into a commonplace tradesman. And living seemed to Jurgen a wasteful and inequitable process. (40)
So life isn’t fair, but as he continues on his wayward journey, enlivened by his restored youth and emboldened by his middle-aged cynicism, he finds it easy to seduce the goddesses of his past. The continual sensual wish-fulfillment with Guenevere, various wood nymphs and enchantresses, Helen of Troy and even Satan’s wife amuses him yet eventually leaves him restless. Living for a season in the land of Cocaigne (yes, that cocaine) with the divine Anaitis, he finds the constant dizzying indulgence in sensual pleasure is rather too much. His mate reproaches him for his occasionally preferring to amuse her children with games or for squirreling himself away in the library. (Cabell liked to joke that Jurgen was completely autobiographical.)
Over the course of his year, Jurgen sees that a young man’s undisillusioned imagination and self-dramatic miseries are quite compelling; he has to agree with youth’s sense of superiority:
“... I wonder that you who are only a king, with bleared eyes under your crown, and with a drooping belly under all your royal robes, should be talking of rewarding a fine young fellow of twenty-one, for there is nothing you have which I need be wanting now.” (67-68)
The joys and miseries of a young man are, Jurgen learns, the heights of delight. Even the overwhelming “miseries.” When Jurgen operatically moans over his beloved Guenevere’s impending marriage, that same scorned king tells him:
“For in point of fact, you are as happy as anyone is permitted to be in this world, through the simple reason that you are young. Misery, as you employ the word, I consider to be a poetical trope: but I can assure you that the moment you are no longer young the years of vain regret will begin ...” (76)
Though he is usually too light-hearted to dwell on vain regrets, Jurgen finds himself meditating over the meaning of life. The witchy washerwoman of time, Sereda, who eventually bleaches the details of everything, teases her pet:
“It may be that there is no meaning anywhere. Could you face that interpretation, Jurgen?”
“No,” said Jurgen: “I have faced god and devil, but that I will not face.” (280)
(That is, he had talked himself out of his father’s Hell, a habitat Jurgen rather enjoyed, and then talked himself into Heaven, where he discovered he envied his grandmother’s conception of God.) The fulfillment of his giddy youthful desires still leaves him anxious. “What if by some misfortune he were to get back his real youth, and were to become again the flustered boy who blundered from stammering rapture to wild misery, and back again, at the least word or gesture of a gold-haired girl?” (196) What if he has simply discovered he yearns for his natural middle-age . . . for his scolding wife and the comforts and discomforts of home?
This is, after all, a novel of comic resignation: “Jurgen fell to thinking of how unsubstantial seemed these curious months devoted to other women, as set against the commonplace years which he and Lisa had fretted through together . . .” (310) The life Jurgen wants is the life Jurgen had. Go figure. Edmund Wilson, the preeminent American critic for much of Cabell’s career, has it right: “The work of Cabell differs . . . from that of most of the writers who were fashionable in the twenties in that he does not regard human destiny as tragic.”5
The first-time reader of the novel need not feel trepidation upon entering Cabell’s and Jurgen’s world, in spite of the continual literary references. While some familiarity with European, classical Greek and Biblical legends and stories could help with the comprehension of a few jokes, the novel creates its own little world, and balances and spins on its own two dancing feet. The allusions to myths and chroniclers are, for the most part, whimsical. One reference ought to be noted: Cabell plucked from Russian fables the all-powerful yet essentially passive “Koshchei the Deathless, who made things as they are,” to preside over Jurgen’s adventures. Jurgen’s wife grouchily mistakes the old man for the devil. One of the “mysteries” of the novel, explained in the end, is the persistent shadow that trails Jurgen. The Latin inscriptions and allusions to other familiar-seeming myths can be ignored without penalty; the faux-Chaucerian epigraph (“Of Jurgen eke they maken mencioun . . .”), like many of the other literary references, is Cabell’s own playful creation.
The novel in your hands includes Frank Cheyne Papé’s illustrations made in 1921 for the first British edition. Upon receiving it, Cabell delightedly wrote to Papé: “The only fault I find is that you display such a wealth of inventiveness and wit as troubles me with misgivings lest the text run thin and pallid beside it. I can but meekly envy your opulence, your gusto, and your glad microscopy, in the grotesque.”6 Papé’s and Cabell’s ideas of what constituted wink-wink naughtiness was neatly aligned, and Papé illustrated several more of Cabell’s works in the 1920s.
Born in 1879 in Richmond, Virginia, to Dr. Robert G. Cabell, Jr., the assistant superintendent of a hospital for the insane, and a beautiful society belle (nee Anne Harris Branch), Cabell was the grandchild of proud Confederates. His parents lived most of their marriage apart, leaving James and his brothers on their own and down on their luck with grandmother and mother. At fifteen Cabell left to go to the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, where at sixteen he caught the writing bug that never left him. After graduation at nineteen, he went north and worked for the New York Herald as a reporter in the Bronx and Manhattan for a couple of years. When he returned to Richmond in 1900, he lived with his mother while writing for the Richmond News. He found enough time to dabble in fiction, and at the age of twenty-two, his very first stories were accepted by three major magazines, and he gave up journalism. His fanciful, dialogue-driven Southern tales were amusing and philosophical love stories.
In the midst, however, of his launch into the literary world, he was accused of murdering his mother’s lover. The details of the case from 1901 read today like a hapless whodunit, and it is hard to see how or why Cabell was a suspect, but he was, and it was months before he was cleared of any possible connection to it. Over the next several years, in spite of his considerable magazine and book publications, he did not have dependable income. Through a political connection and his excellent foreign-language abilities, he was offered a diplomatic post by President Theodore Roosevelt, but he turned it down, and worked instead as a genealogist. In 1913, he married Priscilla Bradley Shepherd, a wealthy widow who had five children, and moved to her home in Dumbarton Grange on the outskirts of Richmond. He took to his new family and they to him, and in 1915 he and Priscilla had a son.
Even before his marriage, Cabell had had enough of writing naturalistic romances, and he began cultivating a freer artistic outlet for his imagination. In The Cream of the Jest (1917), he earned new critical interest and regard. From now on, Cabell’s protagonists would be poets—pipsqueaks perhaps, but wisecracking lady-killers, with occasional forays into dragon-slayings. The hero of The Cream of the Jest “leads a dual life; during the day he lives in a real world with his pedestrian wife, but nightly he escapes into a dreamworld, lured there by Ettarre, the eternal witch-woman.” Each morning, “the dream vanishes, and he awakens again in his mundane surroundings.”7
The short story “Some Ladies and Jurgen,” which Cabell wrote in 1917 for H. L. Mencken’s The Smart Set,8 is the germ of the novel; the idea of a nostalgic return to lost and hopeless loves ever intrigued Cabell. We have included the story as an appendix for its own interest, and it may clarify as well some of the details that the diffusion of Jurgen makes hazy. “By the way,” Cabell queried his editor Guy Holt while composing the novel: “what is the name of this book? I must protest The Pawnbroker’s Shirt looks excellent to me, whereas Jurgen is a mere waiving of calling the book anything.“9 Cabell also suggested the short story title as an alternative, but Holt held to just plain “Jurgen,” and also insisted upon Cabell deleting passages that he believed were too sexually explicit to avoid censorship. Cabell balked before relenting: “. . . in a fashion I have made the changes demanded by your pruriency, and do not think the book suffers very, very much thereby.—I am making six expurgations, with modest asterisks to mark them, in six of the immaculately proper chapters, and am calling attention thereto in the preface as all that was necessary to conform the book to the standards of the most squeamish. Result, the reader will imagine something very horrible indeed to fill in these lacunae, and will take the really ticklish portions for granted as having passed the censor.“10 (The asterisks on the page are “modest” indeed, and likely to be overlooked. The deleted passages were never restored or published.) Though Cabell pretended in the book’s 1926 Foreword that there were no sexual allusions intended, while he was composing it he was rather naive himself about the ability of others to detect them. He noted to a friend, Burton Rascoe, to whom he dedicated the novel: ”The book is now a jungle of phallic hints and references, which will shock nobody because nobody will understand them.“11 But what if his none-too-sly sexual allusions, meant for a laugh, actually got the book banned?
One scene for which Cabell later mocks a persecuting tumblebug is as silly as a men’s magazine cartoon:
“The avenging sword of Jurgen, my charming Sylvia, is the terror of envious men, but it is the comfort of all pretty women.”
“It is undoubtedly a very large sword,” said she: “oh, a magnificent sword, as I can perceive even in the dark.”
The byplay foreplay, such as it is, continues:
“But you upset me with that big sword of yours; you make me nervous, and I cannot argue with you as long as you are flourishing it about. Come now, put up your sword! Oh, what is anybody to do with you? Here is the sheath for your sword,” says she.12
Even with the deletions of more blatant material, Cabell was deliberately kicking over a hornet’s nest and couldn’t really have wondered later what all the mad buzzing was about. “It was, in 1919, wild and bitter stuff,” wrote H. L. Mencken, looking back over his shoulder only a dozen years. “How wickedly charmingly the writing! What a hand the fellow had for the slippery and narcotic phrase.”13 The novel immediately delighted literary readers, but of course it also provoked a few outrage-able prudes. The resultant hubbub over Jurgen‘s wantonness attracted the interest of thousands of readers who would most probably not otherwise have heard of it. In January 1920, the secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice helped publicize the novel to millions when he “secured a grand jury indictment in the Court of General Sessions in the county of New York . . . charging Jurgen with being a ‘lewd, lascivious, indecent, obscene and disgusting book.’”14 Cabell’s publisher, being led to expect a conviction, suspended publication.
With the notoriety of Jurgen assured, with his publisher happy to accommodate the suddenly sensational author, Cabell, though disgruntled and distracted by the legal battles, made hay and continued the revision of all of his earlier novels to fit into a grand scheme. He was creating a kind of Cabell- Wonderland, where all roads led back to himself—all of Cabell’s books supposedly being written by a character, and Cabell’s work being the “Biography” of this character, one Dom Manuel. (Cabell could have been invented by the great Jorge Luis Borges if he hadn’t already existed.) Down but not out, in 1921 Cabell published the novel Figures of Earth and revisions of two earlier novels. When in the fall of 1922 the ban on Jurgen was lifted, Cabell, the shy, discomfited novelist, had become the reigning class clown of literary fiction, and he exulted. Everybody knew Cabell.
As he proceeded with his books, however, he was piqued that his readers continually brought up Jurgen as the reference point, seeing in the new novels either a rehash of better Jurgen adventures or feeling disappointment by the lack of Jurgen-like adventures. His big hit would come to define him not only for readers but for himself. In a follow-up volume to Jurgen, his own characters tease him:
“I am putting . . . the author of the Biography,” said Charteris, “into a phrase.”
“And that phrase is—?”
Charteris grinned. “The author of Jurgen.”15
Cabell’s pet project (published from 1927 to 1930), the eighteen-volume Storisende Edition of the “Biography” contained all of the last three decades’ novels and stories (including Jurgen, of course). Through the ‘30s and ’40s, he continued to produce novels and memoirs. He and his son survived his first wife, who died in 1949, and he was remarried in 1950 to an old friend. He had seen, without much fuss, his literary star descend and nearly disappear, until a revival in the 1950s brought him academic attention and Edmund Wilson’s positive reassessment in The New Yorker. Cabell died of a brain hemorrhage in 1958. His star has again nearly disappeared, with only Jurgen sending its gleam of light through space and time.
The lone full-length biography, James Branch Cabell and Richmond-in-Virginia, by Edgar MacDonald (Jackson, Mississippi, 1983), is deathly dull. Better is the short biographical study by Joe Lee Davis, James Branch Cabell (New York, 1962), and brighter are The Letters of James Branch Cabell (Norman, Oklahoma, 1975) and Between Friends: Letters of James Branch Cabell and Others (New York, 1962). Interesting and full of grand assessments are the essays written during Cabell’s heyday by H. L. Mencken and Carl Van Doren in James Branch Cabell: Three Essays (Port Washington, New York, 1967).
—BOB BLAISDELL