sure to put off many

If ER Eddison ever did suffer the comprehension that I assigned to him two posts ago, that vitality is inhabiting the structure, then is he correct; a question that questions the word ‘inhabiting’: is the vitality inherent or is it interpreted? Interpreted. It’s too easy to find comments from people who either struggle with him* or else feel afraid that other readers won’t get him. “Most importantly, the reader must be prepared for the novel’s Elizabethan language,” says a Goodreads writer named Edward Butler. “Written in a style that is sure to put off many,” says Jesse at Speculition. “[I]t is written in sixteenth century English and requires effort to understand” -- from a writer at a website called Skulls in the Stars. What I learn from these reviews is that a person who has read Eddison will often worry that other people will not be able to imitate them. To read him is to have this fear: I am lonely.

He said he would rather be read over again by hundreds than once by thousands. With the words, “be prepared,” “requires effort,” the reviewer is recounting the danger of their own escape. They were nearly weeded out by the language but they made the required effort and got through. The trophy is this: they can write a review.


*“I kept having trouble getting into the rhythm of the forcibly archaic language,” from a Goodreads reviewer named Eero.

hold by the material

So that was volume two. In volume three he does, Eddison, in fact, make lists of objects in the real world, but always for the sake of loveliness, loveliness, until I want to suggest that this formula itself is loveliness to him; it is the flesh of his impressions, and I think about the satisfaction that he might have felt as he wrote it out once again, and the objects moving almost bodily past his senses as he spelt their names, each instance of the lovely listing motion reinforcing every other instance by reminding him of it -- "green lawns and flower-beds and trim deep-hued hedges of clipped box and barberry and yew: long rows of mullioned windows taking the sun, whose beams seemed to have fired the very substance of the ancient brickwork to some cool-burning airy essence of gold" – the author feeling as if vitality was inhabiting the structure, which, like music, is expected to uphold the substance of its lyrics by transcending them.

I want to say that his books are elegies that refuse to be elegies, they will not give in, the author reaches the end of the story in Ouroboros and decides that there will be no end; a wish is granted, and the characters in chorus decide that they want to have it all again in a cycle and on and on forever. Which places a contextual weight on the phrase “nobody wants” in that sentence from his letter, “A very unearthly character of Zimiamvia lies in the fact that nobody wants to change it.” The society in Brave New World has that "unearthly character" too, and the same goes for 1984 – Eddison and Orwell and Huxley were publishing within a few years of one another – oh – but -- in Orwell and Huxley the disruptive force, when it comes, is heroic and singular, in Eddison it is misguided, habitual, thoughtless, wrong, bad, and en masse.

Here is a problem that he has created for himself: Eddison wants his characters to be active and free.

Yet, at the same time, static in Valhalla.

Choice, freedom; he needs them to choose freely to stay, just as the characters in Ouroboros choose their revolving fate. So! The king invites a number of people to dinner (“All the company were in holiday attire”) and asks them what they would do if they could build a new planet from nothing. The response from the first several of them is: I would have it like this one. “I, too, hold by the material condition. This world will serve. I’d be loath to hazard it by meddling with the works.”*

It’s not until one of the people at the table teases him by taking up the challenge, “and some bell of mockery chimed in her lazy accents,” that the real world is created. “Much like [Zimiamvia] but crooked.” They try it out. And Eddison can go on to say that the real world is one that the best of them (the god-monads) don’t want.

Eddison, Orwell and Huxley agree on the desirability of choice but not on the purpose of it. 


*The presence of the king complicates their assertions because it would sound like treason if they told him they wanted a change, but when the Vicar (normally a liar, and definitely plotting) says “this world fits, I ask no other,” he is telling the truth in spite of himself.

stag-headed men, winged lions

Will, will ... and now I'm re-reading E.R. Eddison -- the second of the Zimiamvia books -- whose characters have a more basic and elevated sense of will; they are kings and ladies waging war bravely, and very ruthlessly and gaily, staring calmly at death; and they are a little like Malory but less fallible, much less fallible, because the fall in this fantasy world, the end of this one form of the social order, is not the collapse of a loving clique. It is betrayal by someone whose utter nature is betrayal, as we have known ever since he was introduced, and the person he betrays knows it too, and ditto the betrayer’s sidekick, his family, other members of the nobility, the people he has made treaties with -- nobody trusts him -- and so you cannot say that it is a shock. And yet Eddison makes a similar point to Malory, that what he calls "beatitude" can't survive in the world as it is. His fantasy world "is like the sagatime, there is no malaise of the soul." So he said in a letter. "A very unearthly character of Zimiamvia lies in the fact that nobody wants to change it."

He lists lovely things in the fantasy world but not the real one (when his characters are in the real one):

Hedgehogs in little coats he beheld as household servants busy to bear the dishes; leopards, foxes, lynxes, spider-monkeys, badgers, water-mice, walked and conversed, or served the guests that sat at supper: seals, mild-eyed, moustachioed, erect on their hind flippers and robed in silken gowns, brought upon silver chargers all kinds of candied conserves, macaroons, fig-dates, sweet condiments and delicate confections of spiceries; and here were butterfly ladies seen, stag-headed men, winged lions of Sumer, hamadryads and all the nymphish kind of beck and marsh and woodland and frosty mountain solitude and the blue caves of ocean: naiad and dryad and oread, and Amphitrite’s brood with green hair sea-garlanded and combs in their hair fashioned from drowned treasures of gold.

And wants to enchant you with precision, which opposes him to the "always" that Dorothy Richardson was criticising in that quote a few posts ago. The always in his work is a now. Now there is a hedgehog. Now there is a hawk and it is hovering over a field where there are poppies. Now there is a diamond on a column. And seems to grasp hold of this presence so desperately, with these rows of notations, like gravestones passing by me as I read. So that it is like walking through a cemetery.

Richardson, on the other hand, wants to integrate a beautitudinous frame of mind into the world as it is, or perhaps I'll say that the fantasy is just better disguised in her book and not naked; Eddison's books with their longing on display are naked in that sense but not naked in other ways; the characters are invulnerable. They’re inclined to the fastidiousness that is a sign of will in Richardson as well, that casually hyperattentive ability to feel that a certain XYZ is right and therefore it must occur. One man, Lessingham, released from a dungeon, tells a servant to take his shirt away and burn it, because a shirt that he has worn in a dungeon is not a shirt that should exist. This is in the middle of a thousand other things that are going on and you’d think they were more important than the shirt but the detail of that shirt is necessary to his well-being – not just thrown away but eliminated. And these wills are holistically perpetual, and they need to endure as they are for the authors' peace of mind.

(How can I guess that? Because they both reinforce them so often, and they are both so aware that they are fragile events that need to be protected. The real world, in Eddison's book, exists in a zoo-cage bubble that can be popped with a hairpin, but the reader knows that this is the opposite of the truth. It is the book itself that can be closed away, and that will exist only in the memories of the people who have experienced it.)

In Villette though (going back to that), the invulnerable will is in danger of being melted and that is deeply exciting, not bad nor good but both and neither -- which in Eddison would be an unambiguous disaster, I think you can say, after reading that letter -- the will, in Vilette, is embattled from the inside of the body it lives in – it – may – concede to the outside – and then – some miracle -- the fall is not a fall but a swooping-up. (Will, character, and worldly pressure, are going to war in that book.)

enigmas which we all in our innocence believe

I didn't know that I was going to end that last post with a question about Prufrock's soul; the sentence didn't come to me until I'd finished the one that's now before it, and then it presented itself intact and was written down as presented, a sentence that came through trance --

-- (though if I had stopped to reason out an idea I might have said that his creator hadn't given him a soul to ignore, and that was one difference between a Browning and an Eliot, or a Victorian and a Modernist, etc, etc in other words my opinion would have been a simpler and more received opinion, since it would have come more or less from vague memories of places where I'd heard that Victorians were more religious than the Modernists -- and that T.S. Eliot was that thing known as a Modernist -- and Browning a Victorian -- and so forth -- and I have seen what these sort of vague crusts of received thought are worth, I saw it two weeks ago in fact, when I was talking with someone who said that certain smart people in Israel were identifying prophetic codes in the bible with computers and working out the messages therein, himself being serious about this as does one who knows information pertaining to the matter, but when I said, The way they do in kabbalah, he looked blank -- he had never heard the word kabbalah -- and he repeated strongly, You have to know Hebrew, no, you have to know Hebrew -- on reflection I felt myself like a veneer most of the time -- or wing of moth, easily obliterated by brighter fires -- but he was not embarrassed or extinguished and explained that these methods had prophesised famines. Which famines? I asked, but he said, Just famines.

I would have been drawing my conclusion more or less from rumourish info and would have not considered the idea of a concealed soul in Prufrock, even though Eliot converted devoutly to the Anglican faith in 1927 and was therefore, as I should have guessed, interested in the correct mode of spiritual perpetuosity -- liking the Catholic side of Anglicanism, he said -- for he possessed, in his opinion, "a Catholic cast of mind" (On Poetry and Poets, 1957).

Think of Prufrock's guilt, I could have said to myself. Think of that sense of sinning and being punished and of pinnacles unreached. "I am not Prince Hamlet," he says. My own memory of Anglicanism is mainly the paint splatter machine at church fetes along with the Sunday School teacher who confiscated my rubber kangaroo; a long time ago but the desire for vengeance lives in me, lives, lives, lives, which places me I believe temperamentally in the Old Testament rather than the New, though I did get my kangaroo back and so there was no hammering of tent pegs through anyone's head as per Jael, wife of Heber, Judges 4: 21. "Then Jael Heber's wife took a nail of the tent, and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died." King James version, and makes me think of E.R. Eddison, who was large on the violence and the smoting, yet more about castles than tents; in fact no tents whatsoever but rather stone and gardens, the hard and the soft, peg versus head, and much, as I said, of the smoting. Anglicanism involves cake said Eddie Izzard and that was pretty much my experience.

Then reflect that I don't know anything about Modernism besides reading bits of it, then reflect that I don't know anything about most things, forests, deserts, trees, ovens, etc, which reminds me of a sentence I saw months ago in a post at the good tumblr named Writers No One Reads: "Amongst so many strange things: the predictable sun, the countless stars, the trees that resolutely put on the same green splendor each time their season mysteriously comes round, the river that ebbs and flows, the shimmering yellow sand and summer air, the pulsating body which is born, grows old and dies, all the vast distances and the passing days, enigmas which we all in our innocence believe to be familiar, amongst all these presences that seem oblivious to ours, it is understandable that one day, in the face of the inexplicable, we experience the unpleasant feeling that we are just voyagers through a phantasmagoria" -- from The Witness, by Juan José Saer, translated out of Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa and the translation published by Serpent's Tail in 1990) --

-- end of parenthesis --

a statue in each corner

Reading Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture last night, I came across a sentence that made me think, "Oh Proust," and "Oh, E.R. Eddison," and finally, "Oh, Anne Radcliffe." The sentence was this:

The rolling heap of the thunder-cloud, divided by rents, and multiplied by wreaths, yet gathering them all into its broad, torrid, and towering zone, and its midnight darkness opposite; the scarcely less majestic heave of the mountain side, all torn and traversed by depth of defile and ridge of rock, yet never losing the unity of its illumined swell and shadowy decline ; and the head of every mighty tree, rich with tracery of leaf and bough, yet terminated against the sky by a true line, and rounded by a green horizon, which, multiplied in the distant forest, makes it look bossy from above; all these mark, for a great and honoured law, that diffusion of light for which the Byzantine ornaments were designed; and show us that those builders had truer sympathy with what God made majestic, than the self-contemplating and self-contented Greek.

I'll add the next three sentences as well, because they're beautiful together:

I know that they are barbaric in comparison; but there is a power in their barbarism of sterner tone, a power not sophistic nor penetrative, but embracing and mysterious; a power faithful more than thoughtful, which conceived and felt more than it created; a power that neither comprehended nor ruled itself, but worked and wandered as it listed, like mountain streams and winds; and which could not rest in the expression or seizure of finite form. It could not bury itself in acanthus leaves. Its imagery was taken from the shadows of the storms and hills, and had fellowship with the night and day of the earth itself.

The Radcliffe connection was the easiest to work out. Ruskin's rolling heap had reminded me of the clouds at the beginning of Udolpho.

To the south, the view was bounded by the majestic Pyrenees, whose summits, veiled in clouds, or exhibiting awful forms, seen, and lost again, as the partial vapours rolled along, were sometimes barren, and gleamed through the blue tinge of air, and sometimes frowned with forests of gloomy pine, that swept downward to their base. These tremendous precipices were contrasted by the soft green of the pastures and woods that hung upon their skirts; among whose flocks, and herds, and simple cottages, the eye, after having scaled the cliffs above, delighted to repose.

As for Eddison -- I'd finished his Worm Ouroboros a few days before, with its Ruskinian way of tying the personal and moral qualities of an object to its appearance, and its Ruskinian enthusiasm for things that are beautiful and noble, and its sentences that are sometimes long and always grand.

Day was fading as they stood above the cliff. All the forest land was blue with shades of approaching night: the river was dull silver: the wooded heights afar mingled their outlines with the towers and banks of turbulent deep blue vapour that hurtled in ceaseless passage through the upper air. Suddenly a window opened in the clouds to a space of clean wan wind-swept sky high above the shaggy hills. Surely Juss caught his breath in that moment, to see those deathless ones where they shone pavilioned in the pellucid air, far, vast, and lonely, most like to creatures of unascended heaven, of wind and of fire all compact, too pure to have aught of the gross elements of earth or water. It was as if the rose-red light of sundown had been frozen to crystal and these hewn from it to abide to everlasting, strong and unchangeable amid the welter of earthborn mists below and tumultuous sky above them. The rift ran wider, eastward and westward, opening on more peaks and sunset-kindled snows. And a rainbow leaning to the south was like a sword of glory across the vision.

In order to reach the "deathless ones", which are mountains, Juss and his friends have to work their way through a forest inhabited by tigers, dormice, ravens, unicorns, lemurs, and wombats. "It is very pleasant," says Lord Brandoch Daha. Seven pages later he is smacked off a cliff by a manticore. Juss fights the manticore to a terrific end. The comparisons to everyday lemons and wasps give the animal a wonderful actual meatiness. Eddison's philosophy of life is inhumane, but there is no denying the man's manticores.

So when that noisome vermin fell forward on him roaring like a thousand lions, Juss grappled with it, running in beneath its body and clasping it and thrusting his arms into its inward parts, to rip out its vitals if so he might. So close he grappled it that it might not reach him with its murthering teeth, but its claws sliced off the flesh from his left knee down ward to the ankle bone, and it fell on him and crushed him on the rock, breaking in the bones of his breast. And Juss, for all his bitter pain and torment, and for all he was well nigh stifled by the sore stink of the creature's breath and the stink of its blood and puddings blubbering about his face and breast, yet by his great strength wrastled with that fell and filthy man-eater. And ever he thrust his right hand, armed with the hilt and stump of his broken sword, yet deeper into its belly until he searched out its heart and did his will upon it, slicing the heart asunder like a lemon and severing and tearing all the great vessels about the heart until the blood gushed about him like a spring. And like a caterpillar the beast curled up and straightened out in its death spasms, and it rolled and fell from that ledge, a great fall, and lay by Brandoch Daha, the foulest beside the fairest of all earthly beings, reddening the pure snow with its blood. And the spines that grew on the hinder parts of the beast went out and in like the sting of a new-dead wasp that goes out and in continually.

Proust, of course, loved Ruskin, and translated Ruskin, and, according to Wikipedia, which footnotes this fact back to a book called Proust as Interpreter of Ruskin: the Seven Lamps of Translation, by Cynthia J. Gamble, he knew The Seven Lamps of Architecture by heart. When I looked for Proust as Interpreter I found parts of it at Google Books. Gamble dedicates a page to the question of cathedrals* --

Luc Fraisse and Richard Bales both stress the importance of cathedrals in Proust's attraction for Ruskin. Fraisse suggests that Proust had a pre-existing, keen interest in cathedrals in 1895, which his encounter with Ruskin reinforced: "his interest in Ruskin had its roots in his study of cathedrals." However this contradicts Maurois, who believed that Proust discovered cathedrals because of Ruskin: "It was as a result of his love for Ruskin that he discovered the treasures of our Cathedrals."

-- which sent me off to Monsieur Proust, a reconstruction, by the French journalist Georges Belmont, of an interview with Céleste Albaret, the woman who served as Proust's confidant-housekeeper for the last ten years of his life. Barbara Bray translates.

One night he said to me: "You know, Céleste, I want my work to be a sort of cathedral in literature. That is why it is never finished. Even when the construction is completed there is always some decoration to add, or a stained, glass window or a capital or another chapel to be opened up, with a statue in each corner."

Monsieur Proust is a loving book, a fact that sends me back to Gamble again, and a letter that she quotes. Proust wrote to Georges Goyau about his Ruskin translation:

You know how I love Ruskin. And since I believe that each of us has a responsibility for the souls he particularly loves, a responsibility to make them known and loved, to protect them from the wounds of misunderstanding and darkness, the obscurity as we say, of oblivion, you know with what scrupulous hands ... I handled that particular soul.

Love is one of the reasons why I blog.









* Later in the book Gamble provides us with a passage from The Lamp of Memory, an excerpt from the Seven Lamps of Architecture. This excerpt, she says, was Proust's "first catalyst … for translating Ruskin." It catches my eye because Ruskin is surveying mountains at sunset, just like Lord Juss. Any moment now they'll be off together into the forest of tigers and wombats.

The quote she gives us in the book is a shorter version of this:

Among the hours of his life to which the writer looks back with peculiar gratitude … is one passed, now some years ago, near time of sunset, among the broken masses of pine forest which skirt the course of the Ain, above the village of Champagnole, in the Jura. It is a spot which has all the solemnity, with none of the savageness, of the Alps ; where there is a sense of a great power beginning to be manifested in the earth, and of a deep and majestic concord in the rise of the long low lines of piny hills ; the first utterance of those mighty mountain symphonies, soon to be more loudly lifted and wildly broken along the battlements of the Alps. But their strength is as yet restrained ; and the far reaching ridges of pastoral mountain succeed each other, like the long and sighing swell which moves over quiet waters from some far off stormy sea. And there is a deep tenderness pervading that vast monotony. The destructive forces and the stern expression of the central ranges are alike withdrawn. No frost-ploughed, dust-encumbered paths of ancient glacier fret the soft Jura pastures ; no splintered heaps of ruin break the fair ranks of her forest ; no pale, defiled, or furious rivers send their rude and changeful ways among her rocks. Patiently, eddy by eddy, the clear green streams wind along their well-known beds ; and under the dark quietness of the undisturbed pines, there spring up, year by year, such company of joyful flowers as I know not the like of among all the blessings of the earth. It was spring time, too ; and all were coming forth in clusters crowded for very love ; there was room enough for all, but they crushed their leaves into all manner of strange shapes only to be nearer each other. There was the wood anemone, star after star, closing every now and then into nebulae ; and there was the oxalis, troop by troop, like virginal precessions of the Mois de Marie, the dark vertical clefts in the limestone choked up with them as with heavy snow, and touched with ivy on the edges ivy as light and loyely as the vine ; and, ever and anon, a blue gush of violets, and cowslip bells in sunny places ; and in the more open ground, the vetch, and comfrey, and mezereon, and the small sapphire buds of the Polygala Alpina, and the wild strawberry, just a blossom or two, all showered amidst the golden softness of deep, warm, amber-coloured moss. I came out presently on the edge of the ravine : the solemn murmur of its waters rose suddenly from beneath, mixed with the singing of the thrushes among the pine boughs ; and, on the opposite side of the valley, walled all along as it was by grey cliffs of limestone, there was a hawk sailing slowly off their brow, touching them nearly with his wings, and with the shadows of the pines flickering upon his plumage from above ; but with the fall of a hundred fathoms under his breast, and the curling pools of the green river gliding and glittering dizzily beneath him, their foam globes moving with him as he flew. It would be difficult to conceive a scene less dependent upon any other interest than that of its own secluded and serious beauty ; but the writer well remembers the sudden blankness and chill which were cast upon it when he endeavoured, in order more strictly to arrive at the sources of its impressiveness, to imagine it, for a moment, a scene in some aboriginal forest of the New Continent. The flowers in an instant lost their light, the river its music ; the hills became oppressively desolate ; a heaviness in the boughs of the darkened forest showed how much of their former power had been dependent upon a life which was not theirs, how much of the glory of the imperishable, or continually renewed, creation is reflected from things more precious in their memories than it, in its renewing. Those ever springing flowers and ever flowing streams had been dyed by the deep colours of human endurance, valour, and virtue ; and the crests of the sable hills that rose against the evening sky received a deeper worship, because their far shadows fell eastward over the iron wall of Joux, and the four-square keep of Granson.

the colour of black grapes

Yesterday evening, that is, New Year's Eve, I was on the platform of the local railway station waiting to go into the city when an immense dark storm rolled in and we were all soaked. The boys in white going to the Sensation rave were soaked and the man with a curly brown beard who stood in the open eating an ice cream in the rain was soaked and the older private-smiling Lebanese woman in the grey-blue dust-coloured coat by the fence was soaked and oh we were all soaked soaked soaked - it was glorious - I was dripping - and after the train reached the city I spent the new few hours being even more soaked until it was impossible to be soaked any more without actually dissolving, and by the time I took my shoes off at half past twelve that night, fireworks over, waiting at a different station for the train to take us home, my toes were white and shrivelled as little sets of fetuses waiting for their jars and the formaldehyde bath.

Anyway, I mention this because tonight, reading E.R. Eddison's The Mezentian Gate for the first time, I came across - a storm.

That way thunder-storms were brewing. A murky darkness of vapours, which, leaden-hued, and oily, swoll and shouldered and mounted and spread upward till that whole quarter of the sky, east and south-east up to the zenith, was turned to the colour of black grapes ...

There was no wind now in the lower air, but a great heat and stillness: and, with the stillness, a silence. It was as though all sound had been emptied out till not even (as in ordinary silences) the unemptiable exiguous residue remained: fall of leaf, or, immeasurably far away, in immeasurably faint echo, the unsleeping welter and surge of the sea, or stir of the market-place below. Even such shadows of sound had drowsed away to nothingness. There was left but that simulacrum of audability born of the pulsing of living blood in the hearkening ear as it strains to catch the extreme unvoiced voice of the silence.

as if it could hurt nothing

Writing about The People With the Dogs a few days ago made me think of ER Eddison, the author, most famously, of The Worm Ouroboros, and, less famously, of Mistress of Mistresses and A Fish Dinner in Memison and an unfinished fourth book, The Mezentian Gate. Dead in 1945, he was writing epic fantasy before Tolkien, and the two men, although they had similar interests (Icelandic legends, old languages: Eddison also published translations of both Egil's Saga and Styrbjörn the Strong), were not sympathetic. Tolkein visited the older author and came away distressed by his tolerance of "arrogance and cruelty."* Eddison, who went to Eton, like Captain Hook, adored Great Men and despised democracy because it was the government of little people who would not (in a nutshell) let a Great Man take over and do whatever he liked. "Writers like Tolkien take you to the edge of the Abyss and point out the excellent tea-garden at the bottom," wrote Michael Moorcock scornfully in Wizardry and Wild Magic, but Eddison does a different thing: he celebrates aristocratic brutality and trampling willpower, he likes the Viking idea that heaven is a place where you can wage war forever. He likes sex too. "When I kiss you it is as if a lioness sucked my tongue," says one of his characters to another. He would likely have found Tolkien's hobbits and their tea-garden Shire contemptible.

It was Stead's language that made me think of him: that, and a recent Theodore Dalrymple article about Le Corbusier, which I found linked to Arts & Letters Daily. "Le Corbusier," Dalrymple wrote, "extolled this kind of destructiveness [ie, knocking down old cities, replacing them with reinforced concrete buildings] as imagination and boldness, in contrast with the conventionality and timidity of which he accused all contemporaries who did not fall to their knees before him." I thought: it's Eddison's Great Man as an architect. In 1935 Corbusier praised "strong ideas," in 1935 Mistress of Mistresses was published. A bad time to be revelling in strong men, Dalrymple suggests. Six years later, when Fish Dinner came out, was an even worse time, and this is the book in which the worship becomes obtrusive.

It wasn't Stead, though, that reminded me, and it wasn't Eddison as a whole, it was the long sentence in the opening of Dogs and a long sentence in Mistresses. She didn't remind me of him, those two long sentences reminded me of one another. Eddison's style is a pastiche of older English styles, going back, like William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites, to a less modern Britain, and at first glance it looks like the standard Ye Olde that makes people roll their eyes and say, "Fantasy authors!" (Although the yearning itself was in the air at the time, and not always a fantasy yearning: Brideshead Revisited came out in 1945, and T.S. Eliot in 1923 was "all for empires" and emperors.**) But Eddison is strict with himself, he knows the effect he wants, and he knows his languages well enough to control them, even if his characters do come out with some unintended funny lines: "Come hither, my mopsy!" "O hold your clack!" By Fish Dinner he's honed himself down, indulging less in descriptions of samite and ivory (this new cleanness made the Great Manism even more of a betrayal: it was as horrifying as Lawrence Durrell poisoning The Avignon Quintet with schoolboy sneers at greengrocers and the Cockney accent, referring to one of his characters as "a lower class ferret", as if ferretry and the British lower classes were inextricable - and compare this to generous Dickens' treatment of his own "lower class ferret", Uriah Heep, his great moment of dignity at the end when he snatches the steering wheel of the book out of David Copperfield's hands and for a few triumphant moments the other man's biography is allowed to become his -). The introduction of Queen Antiope in Mistresses has a sweetness that transcends the potential heaviness of Ye Olde, alchemising the calcified into the epheremeral and making the Lady seem witty, intelligent, and potentially pitiless - but why should she feel pity for idiots when she is not one herself, Eddison would like to know? At moments like this the author's snobbery seems vindicated: it's snobbery made radiant.

There is no flexibility in his people, only in his prose: emotionally the characters are immobile noble objects, like chairs or tables, for his language to play across. Eddison's characters are really Beauty and Nobility, and a futile ache for something that never was, except in fiction, and not a soft nostalgic ache, but a stern Vikingish one, armed with semi-colons and commas that break the sentences into segments, like this -

Lessingham was in his shirt, tennis-racket in hand; he smote her with the racket, across the fore-leg as she sprang: this stopped her; she gave way, yowling and limping.

- so that each action is surrounded by a little clear space, not like Stead's charge-ahead style in that Dogs sentence, and yet it gives him the piling-up effect that Stead's sentence also has. I wonder if he kept the rhythm of the sagas in his head when he wrote.

Then Bur's sons lifted | the level land,
Mithgarth the mighty | there they made;
The sun from the south | warmed the stones of earth,
And green was the ground | with growing leeks.

(an extract from the Eddas, translated by Henry Adams Bellows)

Substitute breaks for commas:

Lessingham was in his shirt | tennis-racket in hand
He smote her with the racket | across the fore-leg

Why did he write prose at all, I wonder, when he already had a form here that would have suited him? The long sentence from Mistresses comes along at a point near the end of the book when civil war is starting to rage, everything is uncertain, the characters are in danger, everyone is fretting, roaring, and slaughtering, then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, this sentence steps onto the stage like a ballerina and rolls off into pirouettes (a comparison that came to me yesterday, so it was startling to come across an online Eddison biography this morning and discover that he had "interests in … music, ballet, the theatre"). This is that moment in a ballet when the lead spins around the stage for ages and the audience waits for her to fall down. When she doesn't, they cheer. In conclusion she sinks to the floor and bends her hands over her ankles.

And her eyes that had been green seemed grey now, like far sea horizons. Lessingham felt the peace of her mind enfold him like the peace of great flats of tidal bird-haunted marsh-land in a June morning looked on with the sun behind the looker: no shadows: the sky grey of the dove's breast toning to soft blues with faint clouds blurred and indefinite: the landscape all greens and warm greys as if it held within it a twilight which, under the growing splendour of the sun, dilutes that splendour and tames it to its own gentleness : here and there a slice of blue where the water in the creeks between wide mud-banks mirrors the sky: mirrors also boats, which, corn-yellow, white, chocolate-brown, show (and their masts) clear against the sky in those reflections but less clear, against land, in nature,: so, and all the air filled, as with delicate thoughts, with the voices of larks and the brilliant black and white of martins skimming and white butterflies: drifts of horses and sheep and cattle, littler and littler in the distance, peopling the richer pastures on the right where buttercups turn the green to gold: all in a brooding loveliness, as if it could hurt nothing, and as if it scarce dared breathe for fear of waking something that sleeps and should be left to sleep because it is kind and good and deserves to be left so.

I think this is the only place in the book where kindness and goodness are described as virtues, or, perhaps, mentioned at all. It's not obvious here, on the screen, but part of this line's power, when I came across it, lay in the placement: Eddison lets the reader think that they're about to embark on a rush to the finale, all war and swords, when this long object comes out from behind its rock and fixes itself on you like a moray eel, not letting you go, and ending with that note of gentleness, such an odd note to strike before the final battle, so strange, so unpredictable, and so right. This is a kind of writerly genius, when the author is so deeply into the work that they can do something like this, that looks so utterly unplanned and unplannable, that shouldn't work and yet does, in fact in retrospect seems to be the most correct thing they could possibly do.


*


* "Arrogance and cruelty" is borrowed from one of Tolkien's letters, cited in a footnote on this page. My point about Eddison despising hobbits is theirs too.

** From Michael Wood's review of Eliot's published letters:

I’m prepared to believe the editors of the letters when they say Eliot was being ‘jocular’ when he said he was ‘anxious to see the Hapsburgs restored’. But when (in 1923) he claims he is ‘all for empires, especially the Austro-Hungarian empire’, you begin to think he is just hankering for the old days and another life ...