Old Dominion Casanova

QUIET, PLEASE (105 pp.)--James Branch Cabell--University of Florida Press ($3).

Ignore an egotist and he is apt to become petulant. This is especially true if he is a writer. James Branch Cabell, novelist and egotist, is today largely ignored. What makes it even worse is that he was once the critics' darling, and for a while, in the '20s, the public's too. His comedown has been so complete that the petulance of his 53rd book, Quiet, Please, can be forgiven.

In the brief, informal essays of Quiet, Please, neglected Author Cabell airs his views on life, love and writing. Reflecting that "remarkably few persons" now read his books, that the critics are busy with "the transcendent merits of Francis X. Flubberdub and Gideon Gibberish," he reminds his readers that in the nation's literary supplements he was once "spoken of with fervor, upon every Sunday morning, almost as often as Jehovah."

The Jurgen Cult. It took a while for Cabell to reach that eminence. He was born in 1879, a descendant of two of Virginia's first families. He dutifully went to William and Mary, then worked as a reporter in Richmond and New York and had a brief go at coal mining. Still in his early 20s, he settled down in his native Richmond to write elaborate historical romances. For 18 years, from 1901 to 1919, he published steadily but caused no great ripple. Then came Jurgen--John S. Summer and his New York Society for the Prevention of Vice took one look at the novel and recoiled in shock.

Hero Jurgen, a paunchy pawnbroker of 40-odd, was dreaming his way back through the centuries as the lover of history's most desirable women. The fact that Jurgen eventually snapped out of his dream and accepted life with his shrewish wife, "poor dear," did not satisfy the vice hunters. Cabell's publisher was prosecuted and acquitted. The publicity made Jurgen one of the most avidly read books of the decade, and left Cabell the master of a cult.

One of the cultists was H. L. Mencken, who was caressed by Cabell's flossy style "as I am caressed by the tunes of Old Johannes Brahms." Another was Columbia's Carl Van Doren, to whom Jurgen was "as if a huge organ should burst into laughter." The cult is all but extinct, yet it dies hard. As late as 1949, a University of Washington professor assured his classes that since Huckleberry Finn only Jurgen among U.S. novels has a chance for immortality, and called Jurgen's last pages "as immortal as Beethoven's Fifth."

The State of Virginia. Cabell's novels were the result of two convictions he has never deserted: 1) that life is a tiresome bout whose reward is disillusionment, and 2) that the only way to make life bearable is to retreat into romantic dreams. He created an imaginary world called Poictesme which, in a score of novels, he peopled with medieval devotees of love, chivalry and gallantry. As for hard-won success on earth, Cabell saw "only the strivings of an ape reft of his tail and grown rusty at climbing, who has reeled blunderingly from mystery to mystery, with pathetic makeshifts, not understanding anything, greedy in all desires, and always honeycombed with poltroonery."

At 72, Author Cabell takes back none of this sophomoric estimate, but he cannot help confessing that some cheer keeps breaking in on his misanthropy. With frankness and obvious satisfaction, he discusses his sex life and indulges in bland reveries on his numerous seductions. Fellow F.F.V.s who, he remembers, never bought his books will squirm at some of his recollections, if they ever hear about them. Remembers Cabell: "In practice, among the upper circles of the state of Virginia ... a fair number of accessible young gentlewomen whose social standing stayed unquestioned, whether as wives or as spinsters, were no whit averse to extreme amorous dalliance if only you took sane precautions . . ."

Writer Cabell is no reader these days. Sir Walter Scott, whom he once adored, he now rejects as "balderdash."And "even Shakespeare I find, nowadays, to be somewhat futile reading matter. "As for writers. in general, he offers a prescription and a characterization. The prescription: "A sufficiency, or rather, let us so name it, a glut, of love dealings, no matter whether they should turn out to be joyful or disastrous, will increase his power to write." The characterization: "All writers, even those who bask in the splendor of a 15th reprinting, remain mentally unbalanced." After a lifelong career blowing literary soap bubbles, Writer Cabell feels lucky to "sink, cackling thinly, into an amiable senescence."

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