The Mezentian Gate. E. Eddison R.
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Название: The Mezentian Gate
Автор: E. Eddison R.
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Сказки
isbn: 9780007578184
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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
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
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
It may be thought that such dark and predatory personages as the Vicar, or his uncle СКАЧАТЬ