Figures of Earth | Page 2

window,
when it had opened all the way, not absolute darkness, but a gray
nothingness, rather sweetly scented.... Well! there was not. I once more
enjoyed the quite familiar experience of being mistaken. It is gratifying
to record that nothing whatever came of that panic surmise, of that
second-long nightmare--of that brief but over-tropical flowering, for all
I know, of indigestion,--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 instant
when Dom Manuel opens the over-familiar window, in his own home,
to see his wife and child, his lands, and all the Poictesme of which he
was at once the master and the main glory, presented as bright, shallow,
very fondly loved illusions in the protective glass of Ageus. I knew that
the fantastic thing which had not happened to me,--nor, I hope, to
anybody,--was precisely the thing, and the most important thing, which
had happened to the gray Count of Poictesme.
So I made that evening a memorandum of that historical circumstance;
and for some months this book existed only in the form of that
memorandum. Then, through, as it were, this wholly isolated window, I
began to grope at "the book about Manuel,"--of whom I had hitherto
learned only, from my other romances, who were his children, and who
had been the sole witness of Dom Manuel's death, inasmuch as I had
read about that also, with some interest, in the fourth chapter of
"Jurgen"; and from the unclosing of this window I developed "Figures
of Earth," for the most part toward, necessarily, anterior events. For it
seemed to me--as it still seems,--that the opening of this particular
magic casement, upon an outlook rather more perilous than the bright
foam of fairy seas, was alike the climax and the main "point" of my
book.

Yet this fact, I am resignedly sure, as I nowadays appraise this
seven-year-old romance, could not ever be detected by any reader of
"Figures of Earth," In consequence, it has seemed well here to confess
at some length the original conception of this volume, without at all
going into the value of that conception, nor into, heaven knows, how
this conception came so successfully to be obscured.
So I began "the book about Manuel" that summer,--in 1919, upon the
back porch of our cottage at the Rockbridge Alum Springs, whence, as
I recall it, one could always, just as Manuel did upon Upper Morven,
regard the changing green and purple of the mountains and the tall
clouds trailing northward, and could observe that the things one viewed
were all gigantic and lovely and seemed not to be very greatly
bothering about humankind. I suppose, though, that, in point of fact, it
occasionally rained. In any case, upon that same porch, as it happened,
this book was finished in the summer of 1920.
And the notes made at this time as to "Figures of Earth" show much
that nowadays is wholly incomprehensible. There was once an Olrun in
the book; and I can recall clearly enough how her part in the story was
absorbed by two of the other characters,--by Suskind and by Alianora.
Freydis, it appears, was originally called Hlif. Miramon at one stage of
the book's being, I find with real surprise, was married _en secondes
noces_ to Math. Othmar has lost that prominence which once was his.
And it seems, too, there once figured in Manuel's heart affairs a
Bel-Imperia, who, so near as I can deduce from my notes, was a lady in
a tapestry. Someone unstitched her, to, I imagine, her destruction,
although I suspect that a few skeins of this quite forgotten Bel-Imperia
endure in the Radegonde of another tale.
Nor can I make anything whatever of my notes about Guivret (who
seems to have 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 this heresiarch yet survives in the present book. I am wholly
baffled to read, in my own penciling, such proposed chapter headings
as "The Jealousy of Niafer" and "How Sclaug Loosed the
Dead,"--which latter is with added incomprehensibility annotated

"(?Phorgemon)." And "The Spirit Who Had Half of Everything" seems
to have been exorcised pretty thoroughly.... No; I find the most of my
old notes as to this book merely bewildering; and I find, too, something
of pathos in these embryons of unborn dreams which, for one cause or
another, were obliterated and have been utterly forgotten by their
creator, very much as in this book vexed Miramon Lluagor twists off
the head of a not quite satisfactory, whimpering design, and drops the
valueless fragments into his