Mistress of Mistresses. E. Eddison R.
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surviving to scheme again another day – is worthy of the most diabolical of devils.
Lessingham’s Dionysian qualities – magic, art, and madness – are found in Duke Barganax, bastard son of King Mezentius and his mistress Amalie, the Duchess of Memison. Barganax takes counsel in the aged yet ageless Doctor Vandermast, a mysterious Merlin who is given to spouting Spinoza and minding his lovely shapeshifting nymphs, Anthea and Campaspe. ‘My study,’ says Vandermast [in A Fish Dinner in Memison], ‘is now of the darkness rather which is hid in the secret heart of man: my office but only to understand, and to watch, and to wait.’
With the deaths of King Mezentius and his only legitimate son, Styllis – in which Parry’s perpetually bloody hand is suspect – the crown descends to the beautiful and doomed Queen Antiope, with whom, inevitably, Lord Lessingham will fall in love. The struggle for power, by wile and war and witchery, enwraps Zimiamvia in a web of passion and violence that is tangled by strange shifts of time.
‘Time,’ Eddison tells us, ‘is a curious business’, and in Zimiamvia it grows more and more curious. ‘Is this the dream?’ his characters ask, ‘or was that?’ [A Fish Dinner in Memison]. These tales are not simply written backwards, they defy most novelistic notions of time. Eddison was exceptional in his embrace of the fantastique; in his fiction there are no logical imperatives, no concessions to cause and effect, only the elegant truths of the higher calling of myth. Characters traverse distances and decades in the blink of an eye; worlds take shape, spawn life, evolve through billions of years and are destroyed, all during a dinner of fish. These are dreams made flesh by a dreamer extraordinaire.
Ten years: ten million years: ten minutes. One and the same, says Eddison, and in Zimiamvia we journey beyond the pure heroic adventure of The Worm Ouroboros into an existential-romantic quest, a speculation on the nature of woman and man, Goddess and God, reality and dream: ‘It was in that moment as if he looked through layer upon layer of dream, as though veil behind veil: the thinnest veil, natural present: the next, as if a dumb-show strangely presented by art magic’ [Mistress of Mistresses]. Eddison’s characters exist beyond time, beyond dimension, woven into a tapestry that circles and circles on itself, as abiding and eternal as its central image: the worm Ouroboros, that eateth its own tail.
‘If we were Gods, able to make worlds and unmake ’em as we list, what world would we have?’ [A Fish Dinner in Memison]. Here is the central dilemma of Zimiamvia: the nature and means of creation. Worlds within worlds, stories within stories, characters within characters, phantasms within phantasms – this is a majestic maze of mythmaking, a fiction that questions all assumptions of reality. Eddison thus proves more than a dreamer; like the very best writers of the fantastique, he saw this fiction of (im)possibilities as the truest mirror of our lives, one that shines back brightly the depths of the human spirit as well as the surfaces of the flesh.
Eddison’s prose is archaic and often difficult, an intentionally affected throwback to Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. His characters are thus eloquent but long-winded; they speak not of killing a man, but of ‘sending him from the shade into the house of darkness’ [The Worm Ouroboros]. In his finest moments, Eddison ascends to a sustained poetic beauty; listen, for example, to the haunting premonition of the renegade Goblin Gro:
‘For as I lay sleeping betwixt the strokes of night, a dream of the night stood by my bed and beheld me with a glance so fell that I was all adrad and quaking with fear. And it seemed to me that the dream smote the roof above my bed, and the roof opened and disclosed the outer dark, and in the dark travelled a bearded star, and the night was quick with fiery signs. And blood was on the roof, and great gouts of blood on the walls and on the cornice of my bed. And the dream screeched like the screech-owl, and cried, Witchland from thy hand, O King!’ [The Worm Ouroboros]
At other times the reader is virtually overwhelmed with words. Palaces and armoury were Eddison’s particular vices; he describes them with such ornate grandeur that page after page is lavished with their decoration. The reader should not be deterred by the density of such passages; like a vintage wine, a taste for Eddison’s prose is expensively acquired, demanding the reader’s patience and perseverance – and it is worthy of its price. These are books to be savoured, best read in the long dark hours of night, when the wind is against the windows and the shadows begin to walk – books not meant for the moment, but for forever.
The Zimiamvian trilogy inevitably has been compared with J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, but apart from their narrative ambition and epic sweep, the books share little in common. (Eddison, like Tolkien, disclaimed the notion that he was writing something beyond mere story: ‘It is neither allegory nor fable but a Story to be read for its own sake’ [The Worm Ouroboros’ preface]. But as the reader will no doubt observe, he proves much less convincing.)
If comparisons are in order, then I suggest Eddison’s obvious influences – Homer and the Icelandic sagas – and that most controversial of Jacobean dramatists, John Webster, whose blood-spattered tales of violence and chaos (from which Eddison’s characters quote freely) saw him chastised for subverting orthodox society and religion. The shadow of Eddison may be seen, in turn, not only in the modern fiction of heroic fantasy, but also in the writings of his truest descendants, such dreamers of the dark fantastique as Stephen King (whose own epics, The Stand and The Dark Tower, read like paeans to Eddison) and Clive Barker (whose The Great and Secret Show called its chaotic forces the Iad Ouroboros).
Eddison would have found this line of succession, like the cyclical popularity of his books, the most natural order of events: the circle, ever turning – like the worm Ouroboros, that eateth its own tail – the symbol of eternity, where ‘the end is ever at the beginning and the beginning at the end for ever more’.
Welcome to that fabled paradise, Zimiamvia: Once you have entered these words, this world, you may never leave.
DOUGLAS E. WINTER
1991
in memory of Phil Grossfield
THE UNSETTING SUNSET • AN UNKNOWN LADY BESIDE THE BIER • EASTER AT MARDALE GREEN • LESSINGHAM • LADY MARY LESSINGHAM • MEDITATION OF MORTALITY • APHRODITE OURANIA • A VISION OF ZIMIAMVIA • A PROMISE.
LET me gather my thoughts a little, sitting here alone with you for the last time, in this high western window of your castle that you built so many years ago, to overhang like a sea eagle’s eyrie the grey-walled waters of your Raftsund. We are fortunate, that this should have come about in the season of high summer, rather than on some troll-ridden night in the Arctic winter. At least, I am fortunate. For there is peace in these Arctic July nights, where the long sunset scarcely stoops beneath the horizon to kiss awake the long dawn. And on me, sitting in the deep embrasure upon your cushions of cloth of gold and your rugs of Samarkand that break the chill of the granite, something sheds peace, as those great sulphur-coloured lilies in your Ming vase shed their scent on the air. Peace; and power; indoors and out: the peace of the glassy surface of the sound with its strange midnight glory as of pale molten latoun or orichalc; and the peace of the waning moon unnaturally risen, large and pink-coloured, in the midst of the confused region betwixt sunset and sunrise, above the low slate-hued cloud-bank that fills the narrows far up the sound a little east of north, where the Trangstrómmen runs deep and still between mountain and shadowing mountain. That for power: and the Troldtinder, rearing their bare cliffs sheer from the further brink; and, away to the left of them, like pictures I have seen of your Ushba in the Caucasus, the tremendous two-eared Rulten, lifted up against the afterglow above a score of lesser spires and bastions: Rulten, that kept you and me hard at work for nineteen hours, climbing his paltry three thousand feet. Lord! And that was twenty-five years ago, when you were about the age I am today, an old man, by common reckoning; yet it taxed not me only in my prime but your own Swiss guides, to keep pace with you. The mountains; the unplumbed deeps of the Raftsund and its swinging tideways; the unearthly