Mr. Cabell Goes South

THE FIRST GENTLEMAN OF AMERICA--Branch Cabell--Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

Author (James) Branch Cabell of Virginia spent several pleasant winters in St. Augustine, Fla., where he got interested in the character of Pedro Menendez de Aviles, who founded the town (oldest continuous white settlement in the U.S.) in 1565. Cabell read in a guidebook that the headboard of Menendez' coffin was in the City Hall.

He discovered not the headboard but the coffin itself, forgotten and dust-covered in an attic. Thereafter he so stirred up the civic pride of St. Augustinians, even addressing the local Chamber of Commerce, that in 1940 the coffin was removed to a more seemly resting place in the Chapel of Nuestra Senora de la Leche, where in three months it was viewed by 16,000 tourists.

Mr. Cabell also set about composing an urbane and bloody tale of Menendez' time, compact of history, folklore and imagination.

The "first gentleman" of The First Gentleman of America is not Menendez but Nemattanon, Virginia Indian chief. Nemattanon learned the ways of the Spanish hidalgos, but returned to Virginia to protect his tribe from plundering, torture and slavery which the Spanish high-mindedly practiced. Despite their irreconcilable views, there was a grudging affection and respect between Menendez and Nemattanon, and they managed with some effort to avoid killing each other.

All of Mr. Cabell's books have the urbanity and elegance, the polite understatement of enormous evil and the wily circumlocution of enormous sex, which Mr. Cabell's admirers admire. At 62, there seems no good reason why he should either stop his writing or change its character.

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