Program Information

Program: Hollywood: Richmond's Garden Cemetery
Segment Number: 9 (Watch entire program)
Duration: 00:06:12
Year Produced: 2004
Description:

Among the writers in Hollywood two early twentieth century contemporaries earned national acclaim for their novels. Pulitzer Prize winner Ellen Glasgow was occasionally beleaguered by rivalry from her longtime literary friend James Branch Cabell.

Richmond boasts a cemetery, named Hollywood because of the natural proliferation of holly trees on the grounds, whose history, beauty and tranquility have made it a local treasure. Hollywood Cemetery lives out its original intention for the living and the dead. It is a mature green space with a commanding view of the James River that serves the public as a natural retreat within the confines of the city. It is the final resting place for two U.S. presidents, the only confederate president, several confederate generals, a Supreme Court justice, writers and local celebrities - as well as many people who are not famous at all. In addition to its legendary status in Richmond and beyond, Hollywood remains a working cemetery.

For more information visit: http://ideastations.org/hollywood

Transcript

Maurice Duke:

“Well James Branch Cabell was one of the major writers, American writers of the early twentieth century. He was a Richmond native, had a tremendously large reputation in the twenties.”

“Cabell is a highly symbolic writer, romance writer primarily.”

“All of the major writers of the early twentieth century were his peers. He was friends with most of them. He was close friends with Scott Fitzgerald for a while. Very close friends with H.L. Mencken.”

“One particular person he was not friends with was Hemingway, and Hemingway couldn’t stand Cabell. He said he needed an expletive genealogical chart to be able to read Cabell and understand him.”

“Cabell’s most popular work was a novel called Jurgen. It was published in 1919 and immediately was seized upon by the censors. And one man in particular, a fellow named John Sumner who was the president of the society for the suppression of vice.”

“He got court order, went down to Cabell’s publisher, seized the plates to the novel, brought it to court called it a lewd, lascivious and indecent book and it went through the courts.”

“When Cabell was found innocent of having written a piece of pornography, the judge said not only was it a beautiful and lyrical book but he doubted if many people could understand it anyway, which is probably the truth.”

“That made Cabell’s reputation, really in a negative sort of way because Cabell is not a pornographer by any stretch of the imagination. He’s a very serious writer dealing in the tradition of western mythology. But that stuck to him.”

“Well Ellen Glasgow again was another major 20th century novelist. She and Cabell happened to be residents of the same city.”

“She was a writer who worked in the vein of realism and she was interested in recording the life of the common man, as she said, in Virginia from the time of the civil war on up to the present.”

“Her novels are quite readable. Cabell’s are not readable. For the uninitiated going to Cabell, it’s a real intellectual journey.”

“Ellen Glasgow was a shy reticent person. She was a brilliant woman and like so many southern women of the day was not given a higher education.”

“The education she got was at home in reading philosophy and reading in her father’s library.”

“And of course Miss Glasgow was an intellectual rebel, there is no doubt about that.”

“Her novels were not well receive, at least by a certain large segment of Richmond society, because many people thought she should be using her talents to glorify the past and to glorify Virginia to glorify the American Civil War, or as it was always called, the war between the states, and she didn’t do that.”

“She dealt with realistic people. With dirt farmers and with women who had been spurned in love. In the case of Darinda Oakly in the Sheltered Life, here’s a young woman who has a fling with a man, she’s not married of course. She gets pregnant. Well that’s just taboo in early twentieth century America and certainly in Richmond Virginia at the time.”

“When Richmond became sort of a literary center with Cabell and Glasgow here, H.L. Mencken came down to visit, Sinclair Lewis came to Virginia. Gertrude Stein came Richmond. And occasionally Cabell and Glasgow would get together for literary dinners and they traded literary information.”

“Their relationship, it was an on-again, off-again kind of thing.”

“Cabell reviewed one of Ellen Glasgow’s books and had what she considered, not necessarily negative but somewhat typical Cabell ironic innuendo about her. And she thought he was, I suppose, in a sense taking intellectual liberties with her in print.”

“They were both, in a sense, genteel Virginians so there was not but so much they would do. It was a very subtle kind of thing between the two of them. And they would have a little tiff and they wouldn’t communicate for a few months or a year or something like that, and then they’d get back in their good graces. And that’s the way it went back and forth.”

“I don’t think they ever totally reconciled their differences.”

“Ellen Glasgow died in 1945. After her death she published the woman within which is an autobiography of course. And Cabell reviewed that and said she wrote some of her finest fiction there. Well that’s a pretty smart kind of slap and I think that was an attitude he had had about her for quite some time.”

“By that time Cabell was somewhat embittered himself because he had an enormous literary reputation in the twenties. This began to disappear after the thirties, or wane I should say. And by the time of his death in 1958 he was not being read.”

“Ellen Glasgow was buried on one of the hills over in Hollywood Cemetery.”

“And Cabell is buried down, lower in the cemetery within line of vision.”

“I’ve often wondered what Miss Glasgow would have thought of that for posterity with her being on the top of the hill looking down on James Branch Cabell as she would be for all eternity.”

“It probably would have irked the hell out of him if he had known (laughs).”

Virginia Standards

9th Grade SOLs » English » 9.1
10th Grade SOLs » English » 10.1
11th Grade SOLs » English » 11.1
12th Grade SOLs » English » 12.1