Friends and Rivals: James Branch Cabell and Ellen Glasgow

Glasgow described Richmond of the 1890s and a young James Branch Cabell in a 1930 overview of his works published in the Saturday Review of Literature. Glasgow remembered Cabell "in boyhood, he appeared shy, reserved, over-sensitive, with a face of tempered melancholy, and with the manners of the Victorian age." She wrote:

"In this transitional period, it is true, the old culture was dying, and the new industrialism was only beginning to prepare the ground for its ultimate triumph. Much was lost of the past, but the little that was left continued to be picturesque; and in Richmond, where the charm of the village still lingered, the little James, peculiar only in his spells of silence, encountered the usual perils of infancy. As he grew up, the world was changing without violence. In his youth, the familiar welcome still awaited one in country houses. The gardens on James River, though untended and fast running to seed, were charming places in which to play games or make love. Even in Richmond, where assembled law-makers were already dismantling the scene for democracy, the established social order had not surrendered unconditionally to its Chamber of Commerce." -- Ellen Glasgow, 1930.

James Branch Cabell dedicated Something About Eve: A Comedy of Fig-Leaves, published in 1927, to Ellen Glasgow. Two years later she dedicated They Stooped to Folly: A Comedy of Morals to Cabell.

This inscription by Glasgow appears in Cabell's copy of In This Our Life, published in 1941. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year. It was also made into a Hollywood film directed by John Houston and starring Bette Davis. Glasgow gave considerable thanks to Cabell in her autobiography for his help in the editing of the book.

Ellen Glasgow died in 1945, thirteen years before James Branch Cabell's death in 1958. In The Woman Within: An Autobiography, published posthumous in 1954, she discussed her friendship with Cabell and included her thoughts on two embarrassing moments of Cabell's life.

The first such event she recounted was an incident in Cabell's youth while he was a student in the late 1890s at the College of William and Mary. Cabell's friendship with a professor had been deemed by some at the school as too intimate. At one point the "scandal" prompted the school to dismiss Cabell. He was later readmitted and he finished his degree. The second controversy involving Cabell that she discussed in her autobiography concerned the 1901 murder of John Scott, a wealthy Richmonder. It was rumored that Scott was "involved" with Cabell's mother and Cabell was suspected by many Richmonders of the murder.

Cabell was not pleased with Glasgow's retelling of these events of his life. Some could argue though that Cabell had the last word on these matters and on the nature of Glasgow-Cabell relationship when he wrote about her in his As I Remember It (1955). In the essay "Speaks with Candor of a Great Lady," Cabell wrote of Glasgow:

"I did not ever encounter, of course, quite the personage whom she depicted in Ellen Glasgow's autobiography, that beautiful and wise volume which contains a large deal of her very best fiction." -- James Branch Cabell, 1955.

Late in Glasgow and Cabell's life friction developed between the two over Cabell's book review of Glasgow's A Certain Measure. His review appeared in three newspapers, including the Richmond Times-Dispatch, in December of 1943. Though it was overall complementary of her work, there were a few Cabell-like jabs that must have stung Glasgow. Once section of the review read:

"Her intellectual self-record is thus made an oddly chameleon-like volume, by turns frank, or seductive, or arrogant, or self-contradictory, or rich with wisdom-being, when the need rises, as bare as Euclid, as diffuse as Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, or as neatly burnished as a carved fragment from Patter-but at every moment the book remains pleasingly human. It is, in brief, all Ellen Glasgow just for this once only very moderately diluted by histrionics. You may, as you read, agree, or you may disagree, or you perhaps may foam at the mouth; but you will go on reading. "A Certain Measure" thus composes a unique and a most stimulating epilogue to an enterprise without any exact parallel in American letters." -- James Branch Cabell, 1943.

Much of the communication that took place between James Branch Cabell and Ellen Glasgow was in the form of letters. Their extensive correspondence began in 1923 and ended with Glasgow's death in 1945. Nearly 200 letters survive. In a letter dated September 25, 1944, Glasgow complained to Cabell about the review of A Certain Measure. It is one of several letters exchanged between the two that mention his review in what clearly became a strain to their friendship in their final years. She wrote:

"Well, James, your letter was most agreeable, but its rightful place was in another summer. It told me everything, except the one thing I was rather curious about, and that is: Does the pleasure of releasing an inhibited gust of malice make the effort, or the satisfaction, worth more than it costs? In this past year, I have learned how easy it is to destroy anything, whether it is a bird or a belief; and I have learned, too, that there is no literary magic, white or black, that can restore either a bird or a belief. Not that I wish to appear over-serious. What you might care to say in a newspaper would certainly be no solemn matter, if only it had not denied everything you had said or written, and I had believed, for the past thirty or forty years. And this is true, even when, by minds less subtle or less literary than yours, what you say is misconstrued as cheap smartness." -- Ellen Glasgow, 1944. In what was probably his last letter to Glasgow, dated August 30, 1945.

Cabell tried to make amends over past disagreements between the two. He wrote:

"I must certainly see you in October. There are so many things which may not be written about with profit, because a face to face quarrel, but not a letter, can end with a kiss." -- James Branch Cabell, 1945.

James Branch Cabell and Richmond-in-Virginia (1983) by Dr. Edgar MacDonald, the James Branch Cabell Library's Cabell Scholar-in-Residence. MacDonald's biography on Cabell includes details on the complex friendship that Cabell and Glasgow shared.

Ellen Glasgow: A Biography (1998) by Dr. Susan Goodman also discuses the relationship between Cabell and Glasgow. Dr. Goodman, professor of English at the University of Delaware, was the guest speaker at the 1999 Annual James Branch Cabell Library Associates Lecture.