Sinclair Lewis Remembered

28. James Branch Cabell

28 / James Branch Cabell James Branch Cabell (1879–1958), author of novels, short stories, and poetry, is remembered primarily for his works—popu­ lar in the 1920s—of ironic and satirical fantasy fiction, such as Jurgen (1919). He published stories in such esteemed venues as Harper’s and the Saturday Evening Post and was named to the Ameri­ can Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1937. The last manuscript Lewis ac­ cepted for publication as a reader for Stokes was Cabell’s novel The Soul of ­ Melicent (1913), and later, as Schorer explains, “at Doran, he declined the work that was to be called The Cream of the Jest” (1917).4 In the summer of 1919, Lewis invited Cabell to read an early incomplete draft of Main Street. In January 1920, Lewis reported to Cabell that he had “destroyed all but a few pages of the 30,000 words” Cabell had seen. The draft “struck me as incomparably clumsy—and at times vulgar when I read it. It was off on the wrong foot.”5 Source: James Branch Cabell, As I Remember It (New York: McBride, 1955), 166–67. Lewis I had known, and I had liked heartily, both as a person and as a youngster in whose genius I put faith, some two years prior to this spectacular success with Main Street. I was, I believe, when Hal Lewis—for I never called him “Red”— became famous almost overnight, one of the very few living persons who had read each of his five earlier novels, and who already possessed inscribed and autographed copies of them. Well, and the general conception of Main Street, which I had heard all about of course from its not unduly taciturn writer when I read the novel’s uncompleted typescript at the Rockbridge Alum Springs,6 and prompted a few changes in it, during the summer of 1919, appeared to me a deal better than was its final printed expression in the autumn of 1920. I enjoyed, that is, parts of this book far more than I did a vast quantity of its other parts. I thought the novel too long, and the writing of it straggly. Nor, it was an odd thing, saving only myself could I ever find anybody, not even at the height of the book’s fame, who had read actually all of Main Street. It was the general conception of the book—the impairments wrought by the unconquerable smug “village virus” of small town life— which, as we say, caught on and became proverbial. ...