The Mezentian Gate

For Eddison, gardening was not welcome physical exercise after stiff-backed hours of concentration at the writing table. Rather, gardening was his major occupation during these years; it was the work of duty that had to be done before the work of his heart’s desire. Gardening is, of course, a seasonal work, and the hours Eddison spent at it surely fluctuated, but during the autumnal harvest it took up many hours every day. Eddison told Gerald Hayes in the autumn of 1943 that gardening took 42 hours per week, ARP work took 10 or 11 hours, and that he was also trying to work on The Mezentian Gate every day even if he could only give it one half-hour.

Eddison devoted himself to gardening because the wartime food rationing in England created discomforting shortages, and Eddison wanted to be as self-sufficient as possible so that the rations could be supplemented without having to be relied on. Gardening became more important after the birth of Eddison’s granddaughter Anne in November 1940, because then Eddison had another person to feed besides his wife, Winifred, his daughter Jean, his mother, Helen, when she came to visit, and himself. For Christmas in 1941, Edward Abbe Niles sent the Eddisons food parcels from New York, and on 18 December, Eddison thanked him in a letter: ‘On the whole we don’t do too badly for food … One gets used (though I won’t say reconciled) to short commons in things like bacon and sugar: eggs would be a severe deprivation if one had to depend on a ration, but we have six hens who keep us going with their contributions, and very lucky we are, and wise, to have started keeping them last summer.’ Eddison’s strenuous efforts in the garden, and the clucking efforts of the hens, seem to have been successful in allowing the family to live comfortably. However, Eddison’s daughter Jean says that it was eventually necessary to eat all of the hens, even the ones they had become attached to as household pets.

Although Eddison’s many hours of gardening and ARP work filled his days and sometimes his nights, his letters from the first year and a half of the war do not have a strong tone of frustration over his lack of time for writing. Perhaps the reason is that he was between books during these months. He was busy with matters relating to A Fish Dinner in Memison: rewriting the cricket scene in Chapter III for an American audience unfamiliar with the game, and sending many letters to Niles in regard to the contract with Dutton. These things occupied his writing hours well into the first months of 1941. Also, perhaps he was not frustrated because he was enjoying the sweetness of having finished a work that pleased him well, and he was happily anticipating the publication of A Fish Dinner in Memison in May 1941.

But Eddison was never a dawdler, especially when new ideas arose like breezes to fill the sails of his imagination: only three months after A Fish Dinner in Memison was published, he began working on The Mezentian Gate. A cluster of letters from late in 1941, the period in which Eddison was working on the opening sections, shows his careworn tone and his frustration with the ability of these mundane tasks to balk his efforts to have time for writing. The two most potent letters are enough to show this wearied tone. On 27 November 1941, Eddison wrote to his Welsh friend Lewellyn Griffith:

I too am the sport and shuttlecock of potatoes, onions, carrots, beets, turnips, and – for weeks on end – after these are laid to rest – of autumn diggings and sudden arithmetical calculations aiming at a three year rotation of crops scheme for our kitchen garden, to enable me to get on with these jobs without further thought, and learn perhaps to garden as an automaton while my mind works on the tortuous politics of the three kingdoms and the inward beings and outward actors in that play, over a period of eighty years.

The second letter is to Eddison’s American friend Professor Henry Lappin and was written one month after the first:

Forgive a brief letter. I have no leisure for writing – either my next book or the letters I badly owe. For I am already whole time kitchen gardener, coal heaver, and so on, and look likely to become part time cook and housemaid into the bargain, this in addition to my part-time war work; and these daily jobs connected with keeping oneself and family clean, warm, and nourished, leave little enough time for the higher activities. Perhaps this is good for one, for a time; anyway it is part of the price we all have to pay if we want to win this war.

Eddison is tired of his domestic tasks, and in both letters he stresses the time they take up. He also makes a clear separation between these chores and his writing by calling his writing a ‘higher activity’ in the second letter and by stating his mental detachment from gardening in the first letter.

Part of Eddison’s frustration must have stemmed from the sheer size of The Mezentian Gate. The plot of Mistress of Mistresses covers fifteen months; that of A Fish Dinner in Memison, one month. Had he completed the sagalike Mezentian Gate, the plot would have extended over seventy-two years. Considering the number of episodes alone, Eddison’s working on the ‘tortuous politics of the three kingdoms’ over a period of seven decades was the most ambitious goal of imaginative contriving he ever attempted.

Eddison’s progress on The Mezentian Gate crawled doggedly through 1942 and through most of 1943. On 6 November 1943, Eddison wrote to his new friend C. S. Lewis and said that he was feeling joyful about the new progress he was making on the novel. This letter signals the beginning of a nine-month period of fruitful productivity. Though he had been at work on Chapter II, ‘Foundations in Fingiswold’, since he had finished ‘Foundations in Rerek’ in October 1942, Eddison completed Chapters II–VI between December 1943 and 14 February 1944.

Eddison’s constant rule of composition was that he worked on whatever part of the novel made his imagination sail most confidently; he did not hold himself to a course bearing determined by the plot’s chronology. In early 1944, Eddison decided to work on the end of the novel, and he wrote to Gerald Hayes on 22 February about his intention:

I am getting on with The Mezentian Gate, being now about to write the last five chapters which in the last two weeks I have roughed out on paper in scenario form, or synopsis, or by whatever absurd name it should be called. When they are written there will be in existence at least the head and tail. That is a stage I shall be glad to have reached and passed; not only because there will then be cardinal points fixed, by which to build the body of the book, but also because if I were then to be snuffed out there would remain a publishable fragment able to convey some suggestion of what the finished opus was to have been.

The clause ‘because if I were then to be snuffed out’ is a curious one because it most obviously refers to the threat of the German bombings, but it could also refer to the questionable state of Eddison’s health, a matter that he held in close privacy. In any case, the sentence helps to explain why Eddison, several months later, composed such a meticulously complete synopsis of the middle twenty-six chapters.

Writing steadily over the spring and summer of 1944, Eddison completed the four final chapters and Chapter XXXIV, nearly 31,000 words, in six months. He was especially proud of the climactic chapter, ‘Omega and Alpha in Sestola.’ Eddison told Hamilton that he had spent 290 hours upon the chapter, and that it had cost him more energy than anything he had written previously. By late January 1945, Eddison had completed Chapters XXVIII and XXIX, which concern Fiorinda’s first appearance on the Zimiamvian stage and her ill-fated marriage to Baias. Then Eddison worked extensively on Chapter XXX, which he designed to show Fiorinda’s entrance into society after the death of Baias, and especially to show the responses of the other characters to her and her somewhat tainted reputation. Many of Eddison’s unfinished pieces for the chapter have a light-hearted humorous tone which is refreshing after so much Zimiamvian solemnity. The chapter’s best scene shows Zapheles falling in adoration at Fiorinda’s feet only to become a plaything for her amusement. In Beroald’s words: ‘it is but one more pair of wings at the candle flame: they come and go till they be singed’. Eddison never completed the chapter, and it is the last part of the book that he worked on. It is a sad thing to read the unfinished pieces of this chapter, for they are confidently and sometimes exquisitely written, yet some of them date to within two weeks of his sudden death.

Another sad thing is that just before his death, Eddison was discovering a basis for a new Zimiamvian book. ‘I foresee the 4th beginning to shape itself,’ he wrote to his friend Christopher Sandford in May 1945. ‘I think if it materializes it will really be the fourth – an exception to my habit of writing history backwards.’ But the book would never get its chance, for the end came quickly and unexpectedly on 18 August. Winifred Eddison tells the story to George Hamilton:

I cannot be anything but thankful that he went so quickly. He and I had been sitting outside after tea last Friday, talking most happily. I felt so strongly at the time how happy he seemed. We fed the hens together and those of our neighbours, who are away. At about 6:30 I came in to prepare supper and at 7:00 p.m. gave the usual whistle that all was ready. There was no answer, but often the whistle didn’t carry. On searching for him, I found him lying unconscious and breathing heavily-Jean came almost at once and has been the greatest help and support. The doctor said it was ‘a sudden and complete blackout’ for him. He could have felt nothing and that is what makes me so glad. He never regained consciousness.

The suddenness of the fatal stroke makes me wonder whether it was caused by a gradual period of declining health or by the strenuous work impressed upon Eddison by the war. If his war work brought him to his unfortunate and untimely end, he would not have changed events if he could have. He declared his views on his war service on 24 November 1942, in a letter to an American writer named William Hurd Hillyer:

When the civilized world is agonized by a Ragnarok struggle between good and evil; when everything that can be shaken is shaken, and the only comfort for wise men is in the certitude that the things that cannot be shaken will stand; poets and artists are faced squarely with the question whether they are doing any good producing works of art: whether they had not better put it by and get on with something more useful. That is not a question that can with any honour be evaded. Nor can any man answer it for others.

This philosophically minded man was dutiful and responsible; he placed the interests of his family and his community above his own. Eddison exhausted himself in the garden to ensure that his family had enough to eat. In doing this, one could say, Eddison was doing only what was necessary and what he was obliged to do as the head of the household. True, and yet the ARP work was neither necessary nor obligatory: he volunteered for it, it seems, as an alternative form of service when his doctor forbade his joining the Home Guard. His sense of duty made the service obligatory.

Looking at the whole of his retired years, I wonder whether Eddison took too much upon himself. He viewed his wartime tasks as work that could not be evaded without dishonour. But writing was his real work. He would have written more, and he would have lived less strenuously had there been no national crisis impinging on his retired life. Perhaps he would have lived longer, too. Part of me wants to see him as a victim, but I know that he would not want to be thought of in that way; his Scandinavian heritage was too ingrained in him for that. I think he would rather it be said that he thought of death as did Prince Styrbiorn, the hero of his historical novel Styrbiorn the Strong: when the Earl Strut-Harald predicts that Styrbiorn will live a short life, Styrbiorn replies, ‘I reck not the number of my days, so they be good.’

PAUL EDMUND THOMAS

July 1991

PREFATORY NOTE (#ulink_55382847-5048-5260-b3e8-9ae35dd14cf5)

BY COLIN RÜCKER EDDISON (#ulink_55382847-5048-5260-b3e8-9ae35dd14cf5)

MY brother Eric died on 18 August 1945. He had written the following note in November 1944:

Of this book, The Mezentian Gate, the opening chapters (including the Praeludium) and the final hundred pages or so which form the climax are now completed. Two thirds of it are yet to write. The following ‘Argument with Dates’ summarizes in broad outline the subject matter of these unwritten chapters. The dates are ‘Anno Zayanae Conditae’: from the founding of the city of Zayana.

The book at this stage is thus a full-length portrait in oils of which the face has been painted in but the rest of the picture no more than roughly sketched in charcoal, As such, it has enough unity and finality to stand as something more than a fragment. Indeed it seems to me, even in its present state, to contain my best work.

If through misfortune I were to be prevented from finishing this book, I should wish it to be published as it stands, together with the ‘Argument’ to represent the unwritten parts.

E. R. E.

7th November, 1944

Between November 1943 and August 1945 two further chapters, XXVIII and XXIX, were completed in draft and take their place in the text.

A letter written in January 1945 indicates that in the writing of Books Two to Five my brother might perhaps have ‘unloaded’ some of the detail comprised in the Argument with Dates. In substance, however, there can be no doubt that he would have followed the argument closely.

My brother had it in mind to use a photograph of the El Greco painting of which he writes at the end of his letter of introduction. I am sure that he would have preferred and welcomed the drawing by Keith Henderson which appears as a frontispiece. The photograph has been used, by courtesy of the Hispanic Society of America, as a basis for the drawing.

We are deeply grateful to my brother’s old friend Sir George Rostrevor Hamilton for his unstinted help and counsel in the preparation of The Mezentian Gate for publication. We also warmly appreciate the generous assistance given by Sir Francis Meynell in designing the form and typographical layout for the book. The maps were originally prepared by the late Gerald Hayes for the other volumes of the trilogy of which The Mezentian Gate is a part.

COLIN RÜCKER EDDISON

1958

LETTER OF INTRODUCTION (#ulink_4a6b8f47-9a43-5e77-9bb2-2924236ee6a2)

TO MY BROTHER COLIN (#ulink_4a6b8f47-9a43-5e77-9bb2-2924236ee6a2)

DEAR Brother:

Not by design, but because it so developed, my Zimiamvian trilogy has been written backwards. Mistress of Mistresses, the first of these books, deals with the two years beginning ‘ten months after the death, in the fifty-fourth year of his age, in his island fortress of Sestola in Meszria, of the great King Mezentius, tyrant of Fingiswold, Meszria, and Rerek’. A Fish Dinner in Memison, the second book, belongs in its Zimiamvian parts to a period of five weeks ending nearly a year before the King’s death. This third book, The Mezentian Gate, begins twenty years before the King was born, and ends with his death. Each of the three is a drama complete in itself; but, read together (beginning with The Mezentian Gate, and ending with Mistress of Mistresses), they give a consecutive history, covering more than seventy years in a special world devised for Her Lover by Aphrodite, for whom (as the reader must suspend unbelief and suppose) all worlds are made.

The trilogy will, as I now foresee, turn to a tetralogy; and the tetralogy probably then (as an oak puts on girth and height with the years) lead to further growth. For, certain as it is that the treatment of the theme comes short of what I would, the theme itself is inexhaustible. Clearly so, if we sum it in the words of a philosopher who is besides (as few philosophers are) a poet in bent of mind and a master of art, George Santayana: ‘The divine beauty is evident, fugitive, impalpable, and homeless in a world of material fact; yet it is unmistakably individual and sufficient unto itself, and although perhaps soon eclipsed is never really extinguished: for it visits time and belongs to eternity.’ Those words I chanced upon while I was writing the Fish Dinner, and liked the more because they came as a catalyst to crystallize thoughts that had long been in suspension in my mind.

In this world of Zimiamvia, Aphrodite puts on, as though they were dresses, separate and simultaneous incarnations, with a different personality, a different soul, for each dress. As the Duchess of Memison, for example, She walks as it were in Her sleep, humble, innocent, forgetful of Her Olympian home; and in that dress She can (little guessing the extraordinary truth) see and speak with her own Self that, awake and aware and well able to enjoy and use Her divine prerogatives, stands beside Her in the person of her lady of the bedchamber.

A very unearthly character of Zimiamvia lies in the fact that nobody wants to change it. Nobody, that is to say, apart from a few weak natures who fail on their probation and (as, in your belief and mine, all ultimate evil must) put off at last even their illusory semblance of being, and fall away to the limbo of nothingness. Zimiamvia is, in this, like the saga-time; there is no malaise of the soul. In that world, well fitted to their faculties and dispositions, men and women of all estates enjoy beatitude in the Aristotelian sense of

(activity according to their highest virtue). Gabriel Flores, for instance, has no ambition to be Vicar of Rerek: it suffices his lust for power that he serves a master who commands his dog-like devotion.

It may be thought that such dark and predatory personages as the Vicar, or his uncle Lord Emmius Parry, or Emmius’s daughter Rosma, are strangely accommodated in these meads of asphodel where Beauty’s self, in warm actuality of flesh and blood, reigns as Mistress. But the answer surely is (and it is an old answer) that ‘God’s adversaries are some way his owne’. This ownness is easier to accept and credit in an ideal world like Zimiamvia than in our training-ground or testing-place where womanish and fearful mankind, individually so often gallant and lovable, in the mass so foolish and unremarkable, mysteriously inhabit, labouring through bog that takes us to the knees, yet sometimes momentarily giving an eye to the lone splendour of the stars. When lions, eagles, and she-wolves are let loose among such weak sheep as for the most part we be, we rightly, for sake of our continuance, attend rather to their claws, maws, and talons than stay to contemplate their magnificences. We forget, in our necessity lest our flesh become their meat, that they too, ideally and sub specie aeternitatis, have their places (higher or lower in proportion to their integrity and to the mere consciencelessness and purity of their mischief) in the hierarchy of true values. This world of ours, we may reasonably hold, is no place for them, and they no fit citizens for it; but a tedious life, surely, in the heavenly mansions, and small scope for Omnipotence to stretch its powers, were all such great eminent self-pleasuring tyrants to be banned from ‘yonder starry gallery’ and lodged in ‘the cursed dungeon’.

The Mezentian Gate, last in order of composition, is by that very fact first in order of ripeness. It in no respect supersedes or amends the earlier books, but does I think illuminate them. Mistress of Mistresses, leaving unexplored the relations between that other world and our present here and now, led to the writing of the Fish Dinner; which book in turn, at its climax, raised the question whether what took place at that singular supper party may not have had yet vaster and more cosmic reactions, quite overshadowing those affecting the fate of this planet. I was besides, by then, fallen in love with Zimiamvia and my persons; and love has a searching curiosity which can never be wholly satisfied (and well that it cannot, or mankind might die of boredom). Also I wanted to find out how it came that the great King, while still at the height of his powers, met his death in Sestola; and why, so leaving the Three Kingdoms, he left them in a mess. These riddles begot The Mezentian Gate.

With our current distractions, political, social and economic, this story (in common with its predecessors) is as utterly unconcerned as it is with Stock Exchange procedure, the technicalities of aerodynamics, or the Theory of Vectors. Nor is it an allegory. Allegory, if its persons have life, is a prostitution of their personalities, forcing them for an end other than their own. If they have not life, it is but a dressing up of argument in a puppetry of frigid make-believe. To me, the persons are the argument. And for the argument I am not fool enough to claim responsibility; for, stripped to its essentials, it is a great eternal commonplace, beside which, I am sometimes apt to think, nothing else really matters.

The book, then, is a serious book: not a fairy-story, and not a book for babes and sucklings; but (it needs not to tell you, who know my temper) not solemn. For is not Aphrodite

– ‘laughter-loving’? But She is also

– ‘an awful’ Goddess. And She is