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The Author. James Branch Cabell was born in Virginia in 1879 and graduated from William and Mary College in 1898. He entered newspaper work, but quit it for fiction. His first novel, The Eagle's Shadow, appeared in 1904. It stirred up controversy. Its heroine, roused to anger, emitted non-Victorian explosives.
Mr. Cabell became famous in 1919 when Jurgen was suppressed.
His novels fall under two categories —romances laid in the mythical land of Poictesme, comedies of present day Virginia. In the first group are Jurgen, Figures of Earth, The High Place. Among the Virginia stories are The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck, The Cream of the Jest, The Eagle's Shadow.
Married, he lives at Dumbarton Grange, Dumbarton, Va.
On Digressions
The Technique of the Untechnical
There is no reason to question the sweeping dictum that a novel, like a kiss or a football game, should have a beginning, a middle and an end. The most conservative technical theory seems to insist on at least one of the three. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that the term "middle" is a perilously inclusive one. The most inconspicuous of novelists possesses an inalienable—if at times discomfiting— right to digress.
What has been called the "greatest novel in the English language"—Tristram Shandy—may be said to consist wholly of assorted digressions, loosely knit together on a thread of other digressions. Each digression is repeatedly digressed from with a resultant unity in diversity which is divertingly bewildering. The same may be said to a slightly less degree of such pristine best-sellers as Tom Jones, Pickwick Papers, Alice in Wonderland.
Of late, fictional technique may be said to have digressed from digression. Under the influence of the Gallic formalists, as for example, Flaubert, there has come into being a new solidity in the structure of the novel. For the last quarter of a century almost nothing has been allowed to appear in a novel that has not at least a remote bearing on the whole. If the hero stubs his toe in Chap. One, the toe will have swelled to amazing (figurative) proportions by Chap. 22. There is something uncanny about the way the veriest trifles in the "well-constructed" novel fit into the relentless pattern of the whole. Take, for example, the horrible precision with which the most insignificant actions of any Thomas Hardy hero or heroine inevitably contribute to their eventual complete and gratifying undoing. If there is anything that happens to them that has no bearing on the eventual catastrophe, the reader, at least, is not allowed to know about it.
At last, however, has come a rebellion. The youngest of all generations has begun to overthrow the idols of our fathers. Its works are so deftly digressive that it has become agreeably impossible to distinguish between the story and the digression. Take any first novel of the last few years—Benet's Beginning of Wisdom, Hume's Wife of the Centaur, even This Side of Paradise. Try to find any one chapter, episode, word, that has any bearing on the plot or the theme or the events under discussion. The very notion is palpably absurd.
Are we, then, entering on a millennium where any story may be picked up, started at either end, and read backwards, forwards, or sideways with equal satisfaction? J.A.T.