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3.75 AVERAGE
3.75 AVERAGE
adventurous
funny
lighthearted
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
The Silver Stallion is the fourth volume in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series edited by Lin Carter. The Ballantine version of the book was published in 1969 with cover art by Bob Pepper. The book was originally released in 1926. The edition that I actually read was published by The Bodley Head in 1928, the first large-format British edition containing beautiful artwork by Frank C. Papé. (My page references below are to The Bodley Head edition.) The Ballantine edition also contains reproductions of Papé's illustrations, although The Bodley Head original consists of photogravure prints protected by tissue overlay sheets, and the quality is superior. Papé's art is the perfect accompaniment to Cabell's droll and cynical prose.
The Silver Stallion contains perhaps the most recognizable Cabellian quote, when Coth of the Rocks says, “The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears that this is true” (Chapter XXVI, p. 130).
The Silver Stallion is Volume 3 in the Storisende Edition of Cabell’s 18-volume <i>Biography of the Life of Manuel</i>, coming after Figures of Earth, Volume 2, and before Jurgen, Volume 6. For me, the these three pure fantasies are the epitome of Cabell's best writing, and together form a kind of trilogy.
The order of first publication was Jurgen (1919), Figures of Earth (1921), and The Silver Stallion (1926). Jurgen is Cabell's best known book, though its fame stems largely from the 1920-1922 court case for "indecency"—meaning Cabell's use of sexual innuendo. Figures of Earth, published while the court case was ongoing, is largely free of these veiled sexual references, though The Silver Stallion, published after Cabell had won the case, is again replete with double-entendres—as well as an irreverent approach to established religion.
The three books are best read in the order, Figures of Earth, The Silver Stallion, and lastly Jurgen. Many of the references to earlier times in The Silver Stallion, to when Manuel was still living and the overlord of Poictesme, cannot be appreciated without a familiarity with Figures of Earth.
The Silver Stallion begins with Jurgen as a young boy, who has seen the miraculous ascent of "Manuel the Redeemer." The growth of the Redeemer legend is certainly helped along by Jurgen's vision, no matter Cabell's broad hints that Manuel's miraculous departure was invented by the boy Jurgen to avoid a beating from his father, Coth, for staying out too late. On the other hand, no corpse of Manuel is embalmed in his tomb, and the ending of Figures of Earth, which describes Manuel's passing, is exceedingly mysterious. Where does the truth lie? Cabell is ambiguous.
The Silver Stallion ends also with Jurgen, who is now a middle-aged pawnbroker. Jurgen’s comment here about his “extensive and disturbing dream” upon Walburga’s Eve, the previous month, apparently refers to the story in Jurgen, which places the events of this latter book just before the time of the end of The Silver Stallion.
The Silver Stallion follows the stories of the nine Lords of the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion, those warriors who fought under Count Manuel when the latter was establishing his realm of Poictesme, Cabell's invented province in the south of France. With Manuel included, the Fellowship membership amounts to ten—it being a law that all things should go in ten's forever in Poictesme. One of those lords is that creator of dreams, Miramon Lluagor, who makes a welcome reappearance following his role in Figures of Earth.
The Silver Stallion reads like a series of short stories, as Cabell deals with each lord in turn. Holden and Anavalt do not have chapters of their own, but Gonfal, Miramon Lluagor, Guivric, Kerin, Ninzian, and Donander each have one chapter, and Coth has two chapters. The opening chapter deals with Jurgen's vision and the choosing of each lord's doom by the mysterious Horvendile; the tenth and final chapter is devoted to the Countess Niafer, Manuel's now elderly widow, and the middle-aged Jurgen. All things in Poictesme go in ten's!
What glues the individual stories together is that each of these lords is, as it were, an unwitting apostle of Manuel the Redeemer. The truth of Manuel, as we know from Figures of Earth, is that he is unheroic and self-serving. Yet, unerringly, he makes his way to become Count Manuel of Poictesme, loved and respected by the Lords of the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion, for all his failings. Then, following his death and helped along by the stories of Jurgen, Manuel is transformed into the embodiment of perfection and the object of worship by the cult of Manuel the Redeemer. Characters in The Silver Stallion expect the imminent second coming of Manuel.
One can see how Cabell may be regarded as disrespectful of established religion. Nevertheless, it is better to think of Cabell's approach to religion as pragmatic rather than dismissive. The cult of Manuel the Redeemer makes people happier and better, although it is but a dream, an invention. At the end of The Silver Stallion, Cabell has Jurgen say,
The Silver Stallion contains perhaps the most recognizable Cabellian quote, when Coth of the Rocks says, “The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears that this is true” (Chapter XXVI, p. 130).
The Silver Stallion is Volume 3 in the Storisende Edition of Cabell’s 18-volume <i>Biography of the Life of Manuel</i>, coming after Figures of Earth, Volume 2, and before Jurgen, Volume 6. For me, the these three pure fantasies are the epitome of Cabell's best writing, and together form a kind of trilogy.
The order of first publication was Jurgen (1919), Figures of Earth (1921), and The Silver Stallion (1926). Jurgen is Cabell's best known book, though its fame stems largely from the 1920-1922 court case for "indecency"—meaning Cabell's use of sexual innuendo. Figures of Earth, published while the court case was ongoing, is largely free of these veiled sexual references, though The Silver Stallion, published after Cabell had won the case, is again replete with double-entendres—as well as an irreverent approach to established religion.
The three books are best read in the order, Figures of Earth, The Silver Stallion, and lastly Jurgen. Many of the references to earlier times in The Silver Stallion, to when Manuel was still living and the overlord of Poictesme, cannot be appreciated without a familiarity with Figures of Earth.
The Silver Stallion begins with Jurgen as a young boy, who has seen the miraculous ascent of "Manuel the Redeemer." The growth of the Redeemer legend is certainly helped along by Jurgen's vision, no matter Cabell's broad hints that Manuel's miraculous departure was invented by the boy Jurgen to avoid a beating from his father, Coth, for staying out too late. On the other hand, no corpse of Manuel is embalmed in his tomb, and the ending of Figures of Earth, which describes Manuel's passing, is exceedingly mysterious. Where does the truth lie? Cabell is ambiguous.
The Silver Stallion ends also with Jurgen, who is now a middle-aged pawnbroker. Jurgen’s comment here about his “extensive and disturbing dream” upon Walburga’s Eve, the previous month, apparently refers to the story in Jurgen, which places the events of this latter book just before the time of the end of The Silver Stallion.
The Silver Stallion follows the stories of the nine Lords of the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion, those warriors who fought under Count Manuel when the latter was establishing his realm of Poictesme, Cabell's invented province in the south of France. With Manuel included, the Fellowship membership amounts to ten—it being a law that all things should go in ten's forever in Poictesme. One of those lords is that creator of dreams, Miramon Lluagor, who makes a welcome reappearance following his role in Figures of Earth.
The Silver Stallion reads like a series of short stories, as Cabell deals with each lord in turn. Holden and Anavalt do not have chapters of their own, but Gonfal, Miramon Lluagor, Guivric, Kerin, Ninzian, and Donander each have one chapter, and Coth has two chapters. The opening chapter deals with Jurgen's vision and the choosing of each lord's doom by the mysterious Horvendile; the tenth and final chapter is devoted to the Countess Niafer, Manuel's now elderly widow, and the middle-aged Jurgen. All things in Poictesme go in ten's!
What glues the individual stories together is that each of these lords is, as it were, an unwitting apostle of Manuel the Redeemer. The truth of Manuel, as we know from Figures of Earth, is that he is unheroic and self-serving. Yet, unerringly, he makes his way to become Count Manuel of Poictesme, loved and respected by the Lords of the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion, for all his failings. Then, following his death and helped along by the stories of Jurgen, Manuel is transformed into the embodiment of perfection and the object of worship by the cult of Manuel the Redeemer. Characters in The Silver Stallion expect the imminent second coming of Manuel.
One can see how Cabell may be regarded as disrespectful of established religion. Nevertheless, it is better to think of Cabell's approach to religion as pragmatic rather than dismissive. The cult of Manuel the Redeemer makes people happier and better, although it is but a dream, an invention. At the end of The Silver Stallion, Cabell has Jurgen say,
Let us wildly imagine the cult of the Redeemer, which now is spread all over our land, to be compact of exaggeration and misunderstanding and to be based virtually upon nothing. The fact remains that that this heroic and gentle and perfect Redeemer, whether or not he ever actually existed, is now honored and, within reason and within reach of human frailty, is emulated everywhere, at least now and then. His perfection has thus far, I grant you, proved uncontagious; he has made nobody anywhere absolutely immaculate: but none the less,—within limits, within the unavoidable limits,—men are quite appreciably better because of this Manuel’s example and teachings. (Chapter LXIX, p. 339)
Horvendile, who may be regarded as the alter-ego of Cabell himself in his works, appears at the start, as I mentioned, but also at the end of the novel. At the end, Horvendile summarizes the meaning and significance of the Redeemer figure:
So does it come about that the saga of Manuel and the sagas of all the Lords of the Silver Stallion have been reshaped by the foolishness and the fond optimism of mankind; and these sagas now conform in everything to that supreme romance which preserves us from insanity. For it is just as I said, years ago, to one of those so drolly whitewashed and ennobled rapscallions. All men that live, and that go perforce about this world like blundering lost children whose rescuer is not yet in sight, have a vital need to believe in this sustaining legend about the Redeemer, and about the Redeemer’s power to make those persons who serve him just and perfect. (Chaper LXVII, p. 333)
In similar vein, the Gander, in Kerin’s story says, “Nothing, nothing in the universe, is of importance, or is authentic to any serious sense, except the illusions of romance. For man alone of the animals plays the ape to his dreams” (Chapter XLV, p. 229). The final sentence, another relatively well known Cabell quote, expresses the core of Cabell's message. Likewise, Manuel’s motto, and one suspects it is Cabell’s, too, is “Mundus Vult Decipi,” the World Wants to Be Deceived.
Cabell's married couples usually consist of a nagging wife and a harried and misunderstood husband and are very stereotyped in this respect. Cabell could certainly be accused of sexism. However, the term "sexism" was coined only as early as the 1960's. While Cabell's contemporaries could take issue with his indecency and lack of respect for religion, they would not have taken him to task for his sexist stereotypes. One hundred years later, perhaps we shouldn't judge Cabell by our own standards, he was a man of his time.
Even here, however, Cabell is ambiguous. At root, his men all love their wives and are gently affectionate with them. Coth is devastated when his wife passes, and dies not long after himself. On the distaff side, side, Niafer pines sorely for her departed Manuel, despite all the failings she would have attributed to him during their life together. For all his cynicism, Cabell does have a heart, and a pragmatic respect for the benefits of the institution of marriage.
The Silver Stallion is perhaps the most advanced and complete presentation of Cabell's basic philosophy. Perhaps I prefer both Figures of Earth and Jurgen, because of their single-focused investigations of a single character. And, as I mentioned, it's better to read Figures of Earth first—although Carter republished Figures of Earth after The Silver Stallion in the Ballantine series. Moreover, despite republishing four further Cabell novels under the Sign of the Unicorn, Carter does not give us Jurgen—I suspect because the latter, as Cabell's best known book, was already in print by another publisher.
In any case, Cabell writes beautifully crafted sentences, with a ubiquitous sense of wry amusement. As I mentioned, he is irreverent and makes use of sexual innuendo, while never being explicit. He is sardonically humourous, the epitome of droll, a brilliant stylist.
The Silver Stallion, particularly as part of the trilogy as I have described it, is a treasure of early fantasy. There's nothing else quite like Cabell, and The Silver Stallion is one of his very best books.
After [b:Domnei: A Comedy of Woman-Worship|2971151|Domnei|James Branch Cabell|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1267410037s/2971151.jpg|3001389] (1913), [b:Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice|1110887|Jurgen|James Branch Cabell|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1181086089s/1110887.jpg|1598851] (1919), and other novels set in the fictional medieval province of Poictesme, comes this 1926 tale, subtitled "A Comedy of Redemption". Here, as in Jurgen, James Branch Cabell gave full rein to his taste for low comedy, much of it misogynistic. I find paragraphs about nagging wives and stupid but sexy princesses quite stale; I was just waiting for the mother-in-law to put in a tiresome appearance (she eventually does). That apart, though, there's a lot in this book that's quite brilliant, as Cabell subtly takes apart the pieties associated with the posthumous elevation of Count Manuel to the status of Redeemer. Cabell heartily dislikes hypocrisy, and in all of his books he shows up the lies that people tell to one another and to themselves. Yet he doesn't have some great idealism to promote himself. He's a thoroughgoing skeptic, a doubter, and that (besides his splendid control of language) is the best thing about his stories.
Originally published on my blog here in May 2003.
Many readers of fantasy today basically assume that it is a genre which originated with J.R.R. Tolkien; this is not at all the case, and the best of the earlier writing is, in my opinion, well worth resurrecting. James Branch Cabell is today almost completely unknown, even with the occasional cheap reprint in some "fantasy classics" series, and he has a charm and humour almost totally lacking in most post-Tolkien fantasy. In the second half of the twenties, he wrote a loosely connected trilogy set in the kingdom of Poictesme, of which this is the second. It was attacked at the time as blasphemous and indecent, two charges which would hardly be made today even though it is still just about possible to understand why people reacted in this way.
The Silver Stallion is the best of the volumes in the trilogy. [b:Figures of Earth|385811|Figures of Earth|James Branch Cabell|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1174354372s/385811.jpg|375509] lacks the ingredients which mark out The Silver Stallion from just about every other fantasy novels, and [b:Jurgen|1110887|Jurgen|James Branch Cabell|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328865792s/1110887.jpg|1598851] sometimes reads as though Cabell is trying too hard to shock the reader. The reason this novel is different is that it is about what happens after the end of the quest, during the living "happily every after". It starts with the death of Dom Manuel, central character (if not exactly hero) of Figures of Earth. The fellowship of nine companions who fought under the banner of the Silver Stallion ("rampant in every member") is disbanded, and his widow sets about turning his reputation as the liberator of Poictesme into that of a national saviour and redeemer, sort of a cross between Christ and King Arthur. (It is Cabell's appropriation of Christian ideas and even Biblical quotations to his manifestly false redeemer and particular what is said about the survival of any religion in Part IX which provoked the charge of blasphemy.) The Silver Stallion is about both how the cult of Dom Manuel becomes established and the ageing of his former companions. These nine men find it hard to fit in with the changes in Poictesme, partly because they remember better than anyone else what Dom Manuel was really like, and partly because they miss the old days of fighting and wenching.
The them of the ageing heroes makes The Silver Stallion pretty unusual in the fantasy genre, even today. (In this era of debunked heroes, fantasy has generally continued to depict the old fashioned superhuman goodies.) The closest parallels I can think of are the world weariness of some of [a:Michael Moorcock|16939|Michael Moorcock|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1222901251p2/16939.jpg]'s heroes, the character of the aged Bilbo in T[b:The Lord of the Rings|33|The Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings, #1-3)|J.R.R. Tolkien|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347257199s/33.jpg|3462456] and Cohen the Barbarian, who has a minor role in several of the Discworld novels. Reading the novel reveals, however, that stylistically Cabell is not like these authors stylistically, reminding me instead of [a:L. Sprague de Camp|3305|L. Sprague de Camp|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1218217726p2/3305.jpg] and [a:Tom Holt|9766|Tom Holt|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1246502762p2/9766.jpg]. It is a pity that Cabell is not still widely known, and this trilogy at least is well worth seeking out.
Many readers of fantasy today basically assume that it is a genre which originated with J.R.R. Tolkien; this is not at all the case, and the best of the earlier writing is, in my opinion, well worth resurrecting. James Branch Cabell is today almost completely unknown, even with the occasional cheap reprint in some "fantasy classics" series, and he has a charm and humour almost totally lacking in most post-Tolkien fantasy. In the second half of the twenties, he wrote a loosely connected trilogy set in the kingdom of Poictesme, of which this is the second. It was attacked at the time as blasphemous and indecent, two charges which would hardly be made today even though it is still just about possible to understand why people reacted in this way.
The Silver Stallion is the best of the volumes in the trilogy. [b:Figures of Earth|385811|Figures of Earth|James Branch Cabell|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1174354372s/385811.jpg|375509] lacks the ingredients which mark out The Silver Stallion from just about every other fantasy novels, and [b:Jurgen|1110887|Jurgen|James Branch Cabell|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328865792s/1110887.jpg|1598851] sometimes reads as though Cabell is trying too hard to shock the reader. The reason this novel is different is that it is about what happens after the end of the quest, during the living "happily every after". It starts with the death of Dom Manuel, central character (if not exactly hero) of Figures of Earth. The fellowship of nine companions who fought under the banner of the Silver Stallion ("rampant in every member") is disbanded, and his widow sets about turning his reputation as the liberator of Poictesme into that of a national saviour and redeemer, sort of a cross between Christ and King Arthur. (It is Cabell's appropriation of Christian ideas and even Biblical quotations to his manifestly false redeemer and particular what is said about the survival of any religion in Part IX which provoked the charge of blasphemy.) The Silver Stallion is about both how the cult of Dom Manuel becomes established and the ageing of his former companions. These nine men find it hard to fit in with the changes in Poictesme, partly because they remember better than anyone else what Dom Manuel was really like, and partly because they miss the old days of fighting and wenching.
The them of the ageing heroes makes The Silver Stallion pretty unusual in the fantasy genre, even today. (In this era of debunked heroes, fantasy has generally continued to depict the old fashioned superhuman goodies.) The closest parallels I can think of are the world weariness of some of [a:Michael Moorcock|16939|Michael Moorcock|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1222901251p2/16939.jpg]'s heroes, the character of the aged Bilbo in T[b:The Lord of the Rings|33|The Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings, #1-3)|J.R.R. Tolkien|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347257199s/33.jpg|3462456] and Cohen the Barbarian, who has a minor role in several of the Discworld novels. Reading the novel reveals, however, that stylistically Cabell is not like these authors stylistically, reminding me instead of [a:L. Sprague de Camp|3305|L. Sprague de Camp|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1218217726p2/3305.jpg] and [a:Tom Holt|9766|Tom Holt|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1246502762p2/9766.jpg]. It is a pity that Cabell is not still widely known, and this trilogy at least is well worth seeking out.