The Mezentian Gate. E. Eddison R.

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ