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
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.