Jurgen
Cabell's eighth (and best-known) book,
Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice (1919), was the subject of a celebrated obscenity case shortly after its publication. The eponymous hero, who considers himself a "monstrous clever fellow", embarks on a journey through ever more fantastic realms, even to hell and heaven. Everywhere he goes, he winds up seducing the local women, even the Devil's wife.
The novel was denounced by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice; they attempted to bring a prosecution for obscenity. The case went on for two years before Cabell and his publisher, Robert M. McBride, won: the "indecencies" were double entendres that also had a perfectly decent interpretation, though it appeared that what had actually offended the prosecution most was a joke about papal infallibility. The presiding judge, Charles Cooper Nott, Jr., wrote in his decision that "...the most that can be said against the book is that certain passages therein may be considered suggestive in a veiled and subtle way of immorality, but such suggestions are delicately conveyed" and that because of Cabell's writing style "...it is doubtful if the book could be read or understood at all by more than a very limited number of readers."
Cabell took an author's revenge: the revised edition of 1926 included a previously "lost" passage in which the hero is placed on trial by the Philistines, with a large dung-beetle as the chief prosecutor. He also wrote a short book,
Taboo, in which he thanks John H. Sumner and the Society for Suppression of Vice for generating the publicity that gave his career a boost. Due to the notoriety of the suppression of
Jurgen, Cabell became a figure of international fame. In the early 1920s he became associated by some critics with a group of writers referred to as "The James Branch Cabell School", which included such figures as H. L. Mencken, Carl Van Vechten and Elinor Wylie.
The Biography of Manuel
A great deal of Cabell's works has focused on
The Biography of Manuel, the story of Dom Manuel and his descendants through many generations. The biography includes a total of twenty five works that were written over a 23 year period. Cabell stated that he considered the
Biography to be a single work, and supervised its publication in a single uniform edition of 18 volumes, known as the
Storisende Edition, published from 1927 to 1930. A number of the volumes of the Biography were also published in editions illustrated by Frank C. Papé between 1921 and 1926.
The themes and characters from
Jurgen make appearances in many works included in the Biography.
Figures of Earth tells the story of Manuel the swineherd, a scoundrel who rises to conquer a realm by playing on others' expectations – his motto Mundus Vult Decipi, meaning "the world wishes to be deceived".
The Silver Stallion is a loose sequel to
Figures of Earth that deals with the creation of the legend of Manuel the Redeemer, in which Manuel is pictured as an infallible hero, an example to which all others should aspire; the story describes the story of Manuel's former knights, who remember how things really were and take different approaches to reconciling the mythology with the actuality of Manuel.
Many of these books take place in the fictional country eventually ruled by Manuel, known as "Poictesme", (pronounced "pwa-tem"). It was the author's intention to situate Poictesme roughly in the south of France. The name suggests the two real French cities of Poitiers (medieval Poictiers) and Angoulême (medieval Angoulesme). Several others take place in the fictional town of Lichfield, Virginia.
After concluding the
Biography in 1932, Cabell shortened his pen name to
Branch Cabell. The "truncated" name was used for all his new, "post-
Biography" publications until the printing of
There Were Two Pirates (1946).
Others
Though Cabell is best known as a fantasist, the plots and characters of his first few novels,
The Eagle's Shadow (1904),
The Cords of Vanity (1909), and
The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck (1915), (later all adapted for inclusion into the
Biography) do not wander out of the everyday society of Virginia's beleaguered gentry. But Cabell's signature droll style is clearly in evidence, and in later printings each book would bear a characteristically Cabellian subtitle:
A Comedy of Purse-Strings,
A Comedy of Shirking, and
A Comedy of Limitations, respectively.
His later novel,
The First Gentleman of America: A Comedy of Conquest (1942), retells the strange career of an American Indian from the shores of the Potomac who sailed away with Spanish explorers, later to return, be made chief of his tribe, and kill all the Spaniards in the new Virginia settlement. Cabell delivered a more concise, historical treatment of the novel's events in
The First Virginian, part one of his 1947 work of non-fiction,
Let Me Lie, a book on the history of Virginia.
Other works include:
- The Nightmare Has Triplets (trilogy comprising Smirt (1934), Smith (1935), and Smire (1937))
- The Heirs and Assigns trilogy, comprising Hamlet Had an Uncle (1940), The King Was in His Counting House (1938), ad The First Gentleman of America (1942)
- The It Happened in Florida trilogy, comprising The St. Johns (written in collaboration with A. J. Hanna), There Were Two Pirates (1946), and The Devil's Own Dear Son (1949)
- Anecdotia Americana (with introduction by J. Mortimer Hall)
Cabell also wrote a number of autobiographical and genealogical works.
