Figures of Earth: A Comedy of Appearances Read online

  FIGURES OF EARTH

  A Comedy of Appearances

  JAMES BRANCH CABELL

  Illustrated by Frank C. Pape

  1921

  "Cascun se mir el jove Manuel, Qu'era del mom lo plus valensdels pros."

  Contents

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  A FOREWORD

  PART ONE: THE BOOK OF CREDIT

  CHAPTER

  I HOW MANUEL LEFT THE MIRE II NIAFER III ASCENT OF VRAIDEX IV IN THE DOUBTFUL PALACE V THE ETERNAL AMBUSCADE VI ECONOMICS OF MATH VII THE CROWN OF WISDOM VIII THE HALO OF HOLINESS IX THE FEATHER OF LOVE

  PART TWO: THE BOOK OF SPENDING

  X ALIANORA XI MAGIC OF THE APSARASAS XII ICE AND IRON XIII WHAT HELMAS DIRECTED XIV THEY DUEL ON MORVEN XV BANDAGES FOR THE VICTOR

  PART THREE: THE BOOK OF CAST ACCOUNTS

  XVI FREYDIS XVII MAGIC OF THE IMAGE-MAKERS XVIII MANUEL CHOOSES XIX THE HEAD OF MISERY XX THE MONTH OF YEARS XXI TOUCHING REPAYMENT XXII RETURN OF NIAFER XXIII MANUEL GETS HIS DESIRE XXIV THREE WOMEN

  PART FOUR: THE BOOK OF SURCHARGE

  XXV AFFAIRS IN POICTESME XXVI DEALS WITH THE STORK XXVII THEY COME TO SARGYLL XXVIII HOW MELICENT WAS WELCOMED XXIX SESPHRA OF THE DREAMS XXX FAREWELL TO FREYDIS XXXI STATECRAFT XXXII THE REDEMPTION OF POICTESME

  PART FIVE: THE BOOK OF SETTLEMENT

  XXXIII NOW MANUEL PROSPERS XXXIV FAREWELL TO ALIANORA XXXV THE TROUBLING WINDOW XXXVI EXCURSIONS FROM CONTENT XXXVII OPINIONS OF HINZELMANNXXXVIII FAREWELL TO SUSKIND XXXIX THE PASSING OF MANUEL XL COLOPHON: DA CAPO

  To

  SIX MOST GALLANT CHAMPIONS

  Is dedicated this history of a champion: less to repay than toacknowledge large debts to each of them, collectively at outset, ashereafter seriatim.

  Author's Note

  Figures of Earth is, with some superficial air of paradox, the onevolume in the long Biography of Dom Manuel's life which deals with DomManuel himself. Most of the matter strictly appropriate to a Preface youmay find, if you so elect, in the Foreword addressed to Sinclair Lewis.And, in fact, after writing two prefaces to this "Figures ofEarth"--first, in this epistle to Lewis, and, secondly, in the remarks[1]affixed to the illustrated edition,--I had thought this volume couldvery well continue to survive as long as its deficiencies permit,without the confection of a third preface, until I began a little morecarefully to consider this romance, in the seventh year of itsexistence.

  [Footnote 1: Omitted in this edition since it was not possible to includeall of Frank C. Pape's magnificent illustrations.--THE PUBLISHER]

  But now, now, the deficiency which I note in chief (like the superiorofficer of a disastrously wrecked crew) lies in the fact that what I hadmeant to be the main "point" of "Figures of Earth," while explicitlyenough stated in the book, remains for every practical endindiscernible.... For I have written many books during the last quarterof a century. Yet this is the only one of them which began at oneplainly recognizable instant with one plainly recognizable imagining. Itis the only book by me which ever, virtually, came into being, with itsgoal set, and with its theme and its contents more or lesspre-determined throughout, between two ticks of the clock.

  Egotism here becomes rather unavoidable. At Dumbarton Grange the libraryin which I wrote for some twelve years was lighted by three windows setside by side and opening outward. It was in the instant of unclosing oneof these windows, on a fine afternoon in the spring of 1919, to speakwith a woman and a child who were then returning to the house (with theday's batch of mail from the post office), that, for no reason at all, Ireflected it would be, upon every personal ground, regrettable if, asthe moving window unclosed, that especial woman and that particularchild proved to be figures in the glass, and the window opened uponnothingness. For that, I believed, was about to happen. There would be,I knew, revealed beyond that moving window, when it had opened all theway, not absolute darkness, but a gray nothingness, rather sweetlyscented.... Well! there was not. I once more enjoyed the quite familiarexperience of being mistaken. It is gratifying to record that nothingwhatever came of that panic surmise, of that second-long nightmare--ofthat brief but over-tropical flowering, for all I know, ofindigestion,--save, ultimately, the 80,000 words or so of this book.

  For I was already planning, vaguely, to begin on, later in that year,"the book about Manuel." And now I had the germ of it,--in the instantwhen Dom Manuel opens the over-familiar window, in his own home, to seehis wife and child, his lands, and all the Poictesme of which he was atonce the master and the main glory, presented as bright, shallow, veryfondly loved illusions in the protective glass of Ageus. I knew that thefantastic thing which had not happened to me,--nor, I hope, toanybody,--was precisely the thing, and the most important thing, whichhad happened to the gray Count of Poictesme.

  So I made that evening a memorandum of that historical circumstance; andfor some months this book existed only in the form of that memorandum.Then, through, as it were, this wholly isolated window, I began to gropeat "the book about Manuel,"--of whom I had hitherto learned only, frommy other romances, who were his children, and who had been the solewitness of Dom Manuel's death, inasmuch as I had read about that also,with some interest, in the fourth chapter of "Jurgen"; and from theunclosing of this window I developed "Figures of Earth," for the mostpart toward, necessarily, anterior events. For it seemed to me--as itstill seems,--that the opening of this particular magic casement, uponan outlook rather more perilous than the bright foam of fairy seas, wasalike the climax and the main "point" of my book.

  Yet this fact, I am resignedly sure, as I nowadays appraise thisseven-year-old romance, could not ever be detected by any reader of"Figures of Earth," In consequence, it has seemed well here to confessat some length the original conception of this volume, without at allgoing into the value of that conception, nor into, heaven knows, howthis conception came so successfully to be obscured.

  So I began "the book about Manuel" that summer,--in 1919, upon the backporch of our cottage at the Rockbridge Alum Springs, whence, as I recallit, one could always, just as Manuel did upon Upper Morven, regard thechanging green and purple of the mountains and the tall clouds trailingnorthward, and could observe that the things one viewed were allgigantic and lovely and seemed not to be very greatly bothering abouthumankind. I suppose, though, that, in point of fact, it occasionallyrained. In any case, upon that same porch, as it happened, this book wasfinished in the summer of 1920.

  And the notes made at this time as to "Figures of Earth" show much thatnowadays is wholly incomprehensible. There was once an Olrun in thebook; and I can recall clearly enough how her part in the story wasabsorbed by two of the other characters,--by Suskind and by Alianora.Freydis, it appears, was originally called Hlif. Miramon at one stage ofthe book's being, I find with real surprise, was married _en secondesnoces_ to Math. Othmar has lost that prominence which once was his. Andit seems, too, there once figured in Manuel's heart affairs aBel-Imperia, who, so near as I can deduce from my notes, was a lady in atapestry. Someone unstitched her, to, I imagine, her destruction,although I suspect that a few skeins of this quite forgotten Bel-Imperiaendure in the Radegonde of another tale.

  Nor can I make anything whatever of my notes about Guivret (who seems tohave been in no way connected with Guivric the Sage), nor about Biduz,nor about the Anti-Pope,--even though, to be sure, one mention of thisheresiarch yet survives in the present book. I am wholly baffled toread, in my own penciling, such proposed chapter headings as "TheJealousy of Niafer" and "How Sclaug Loosed the Dead,"--which latter iswit
h added incomprehensibility annotated "(?Phorgemon)." And "The SpiritWho Had Half of Everything" seems to have been exorcised prettythoroughly.... No; I find the most of my old notes as to this bookmerely bewildering; and I find, too, something of pathos in theseembryons of unborn dreams which, for one cause or another, wereobliterated and have been utterly forgotten by their creator, very muchas in this book vexed Miramon Lluagor twists off the head of a not quitesatisfactory, whimpering design, and drops the valueless fragments intohis waste-basket.... But I do know that the entire book developed,howsoever helterskelter, and after fumbling in no matter how many blindalleys, from that first memorandum about the troubling window of Ageus.All leads toward--and through--that window.

  The book, then, was published in the February of 1921. I need not heredeal with its semi-serial appearance in the guise of short stories:these details are recorded elsewhere. But I confess with appropriatehumility that the reception of "Figures of Earth" by the public was, asI have written in another place, a depressing business. This romance, atthat time, through one extraneous reason and another, disappointedwell-nigh everybody, for all that it has since become, so near as I canjudge, the best liked of my books, especially among women. It seems,indeed, a fact sufficiently edifying that, in appraising the twolegendary heroes of Poictesme, the sex of whom Jurgen esteemed himself aconnoisseur, should, almost unanimously, prefer Manuel.

  For the rest,--since, as you may remember, this is the third prefacewhich I have written for this book,--I can but repeat more or less whatI have conceded elsewhere. This "Figures of Earth" appeared immediatelyfollowing, and during the temporary sequestration of, "Jurgen." The factwas forthwith, quite unreticently, discovered that in "Figures of Earth"I had not succeeded in my attempt to rewrite its predecessor: and thiscrass failure, so open, so flagrant, and so undeniable, caused what Ican only describe as the instant and overwhelming and universal triumphof "Figures of Earth" to be precisely what did not occur. In 1921Comstockery still surged, of course, in full cry against the imprisonedpawnbroker and the crimes of his author, both literary and personal; andthe, after all, tolerably large portion of the reading public who werenot disgusted by Jurgen's lechery were now, so near as I could gather,enraged by Manuel's lack of it.

  It followed that--among the futile persons who use serious, long wordsin talking about mere books,--aggrieved reproof of my auctorialmalversations, upon the one ground or the other, became in 1921biloquial and pandemic. Not many other volumes, I believe, have beenburlesqued and cried down in the public prints by their owndedicatees.... But from the cicatrix of that healed wound I turn away. Ipreserve a forgiving silence, comparable to that of Hermione in thefifth act of "A Winter's Tale": I resolve that whenever I mention thenames of Louis Untermeyer and H.L. Mencken it shall be in someconnection more pleasant, and that here I will not mention them at all.

  Meanwhile the fifteen or so experiments in contrapuntal prose were, inparticular, uncharted passages from which I stayed unique in derivingpleasure where others found bewilderment and no tongue-tied irritation:but, in general, and above every misdemeanor else, the book exasperatedeverybody by not being a more successfully managed re-hashing of thethen notorious "Jurgen."

  Since 1921, and since the rehabilitation of "Jurgen," the notion hasuprisen, gradually, among the more bold and speculative thinkers, thatperhaps I was not, after all, in this "Figures of Earth" attempting torewrite "Jurgen": and Manuel has made his own friend.

  James Branch Cabell

  Richmond-in-Virginia

  30 April 1927

  A FOREWORD

  "Amoto quoeramus seria ludo"

  To

  SINCLAIR LEWIS