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On 25 July 1941, E. R. Eddison wrote to George Rostrevor Hamilton and told of the birth of The Mezentian Gate: ‘After laborious lists of dates and episodes and so on, extending over many weeks, I really think the scheme for the new Zimiamvian book crystallized suddenly at 9 p.m. last night.’ On 2 September Eddison was still excited about his progress and wrote to Hamilton again: ‘You will be glad to know that about 1500 words of the (still nameless) new Zimiamvian book are already written.’ The opening sections, the Praeludium, which he first called ‘Praeludium in Excelsis’ (literally, ‘a preface set in a high place’), and ‘Foundations in Rerek’ alternately filled the sails of his imagination, but he decided to finish the voyage to Rerek before turning his prow toward Mount Olympus, the original setting for the Praeludium. Seven months later, on 2 April 1942, another letter to Hamilton shows that Eddison’s initial swift sailing had quickly carried his imagination into the doldrums:

I am still struggling with the opening of the new book. The ‘Praeludium in Excelsis’ which I had written dissatisfies me: seems to be ornamental rather than profound. So I’m changing the mise en scene from Olympus to Lofoten, and think it will create the atmosphere I’m sniffing for. But, Lord, it comes out unwillingly and painfully.

Evidently, Eddison abandoned his resolve to finish ‘Foundations in Rerek’ first, and his imagination tacked toward Rerek and Olympus in turns, but without gaining much momentum toward either destination. Eddison eventually completed the Praeludium in July and sent it to Hamilton for a critical reading with this qualifying statement attached: ‘it has given me infinite trouble.’ He did not complete ‘Foundations in Rerek’ until 1 October 1942, fourteen months after he began it.

The two opening sections add up to about ten thousand words, and Eddison spent about 420 days composing them. On a strictly mathematical level, Eddison’s average daily rate of composition was about twenty-five words. Surely a turtle’s pace across the page. Such meticulous slowness seems to mark Eddison’s composition: he once told Edward Abbe Niles, his consulting lawyer in America, that the ten thousand words of the thickly philosophical Chapters XV and XVI of A Fish Dinner in Memison took him ten months of 1937.Yet in 1937, Eddison had little free time for writing because he was fully occupied with civil service as the Head of Empire Trades and Head of the Economic Division in the Department of Overseas Trade. One would expect that in 1942, three years into retired life, Eddison would be composing at a faster rate than during his working life, simply because he had more time for writing, but that is not the case. The explanation lies in our understanding the intrusion of World War II upon Eddison’s life and the response of his dutiful nature to the home effort in the war.

On 10 September 1939, one week after Britain and France had declared war on Germany, Eddison speaks of his domestic preparations for wartime:

ARP curtains, ‘Nox’ lights, and so on have occupied most of my waking hours since the trouble began. We are well blacked out – but what a bore it is, night and morning.’

The annoyed tone of the last sentence is notable. Eddison’s ‘motto’ as he declared it in one letter, was ‘anything for a quiet life.’ After spending most of his years in London, Eddison moved to the countryside near Marlborough to live this desired quiet life in which the breezy hours of sunshine and birdsong could be devoted to writing and reading and happy companionship with his wife and family. To have the bright hope for this life, in its first months, tangibly darkened by blackout curtains, and intangibly darkened by the fear of bombing or invasion, must have been bitterly discouraging. Time was out of joint for Eddison’s retired life.

Some people in Eddison’s position would have ignored the home effort in the war. Eddison could not do this: his long career in government, his interest in history and politics, his patriotism, and his keen sense of responsibility would not allow this in him. In the same letter in which he speaks of hanging the blackout curtains, Eddison tells Hamilton of his volunteering for war service:

I’ve offered my services in general for any local work here that I can tackle: nothing doing so far, but that is hardly surprising. I was going to stage a ‘comeback’ in Whitehall if war burst out a year ago; but fear it would quickly end me were I to attempt it, and that would help nobody. So, I propose to carry on to the best of my ability till a bomb drops on me, or some other form of destruction overtakes me, or till the war comes to an end.

Here is a man fifty-seven and well beyond the age parameters of active military duty, a man recently retired from public life and settled into a new house, a man who retired to devote himself to his personal literary goals, a man not in his best state of health: this man volunteers for war service during the first days of the war. Surely his action reveals a mind instinct with duty.

Only those who lived through the war years in England can truly speak about the anxieties and frustrations of carrying on daily life under the constant danger of the air raids. Living in London, Hamilton felt the German threat closely. On September 13, 1940, he wrote to say that his wife’s mother had come to live at his house, for bombs had fallen perilously near to hers. Plus, Hamilton had gone to work that morning and found the floor of his office covered with shards of window glass shattered by a bomb’s concussion during the previous night. Because he and his family lived in Wiltshire, Eddison did not feel the threat so imminently, and he told Hamilton on September 15, 1940, that although several bombs had fallen in the countryside and one in Marlborough itself, the ‘total casualties and material damage is so far precisely three rabbits!’

Even though the danger was not as grave in Marlborough as it was in London, Eddison’s work as an air raid patrol warden continually interrupted his consciously regular life, a retired life that nevertheless maintained the structure of his working life. On 27 October 1940, Eddison told Hamilton of one incident that exemplifies these interruptions:

I had a complete nuit blanche last Sunday: siren went off and woke me from my first sleep [at] 11.15 p.m.: dressed in five minutes, got here 11.25, and here we were stuck – 3 men and two girls – till 5.50 a.m. Monday, when the siren sounded ‘raiders passed’. No incidents for us to deal with, but they had it in Swindon I gather. Home to bed for ¼ hour, and up, as usual, at 6.30. But, by 9.30 a.m. I was so dead stupid I went to bed and slept till 12.00 and even so pretty washed out for the rest of the day. I don’t know how you folks stick it night after night: I suppose the adaptability of the human frame comes blessedly into play.

Eddison’s coming home to sleep for fifteen minutes and then rising ‘as usual’ at 6.30 seems silly. He was living in retirement without professional responsibilities, and the scheduled hour of his rising from sleep was a demand self-imposed. The consequence of maintaining such rigid regularity on this occasion produced only weariness and inefficiency in the morning. And yet the disciplined Eddison surrendered to the needs of his body reluctantly, for he did not return to bed until three hours later.

Eddison’s ARP work affected the whole of his six years of retired life, but although it was wearying and annoying to him, the ARP work was not the most demanding of the daily tasks that kept him from his writing desk. He begins the 27 October ‘nuit blanche’ letter with a paragraph about gardening:

I’m writing this in the ARP control room: my Sunday morning turn of duty. I boil my egg and have my breakfast about 7 a.m., and get down here by 7.45 and take charge until 11. I like it, because after that my day is free to garden; which at the moment, is a pressing occupation. I’m cleaning the herbaceous border of bindweed, a most pernicious and elusive pest: it takes about 2 hours of hard digging and sorting to do a one foot run, and there are sixty feet to do. And the things are heeled in elsewhere and waiting to be planted when my deinfestation is complete.

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