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Reading Diary: A Fish Dinner in Memison
Jun. 7th, 2023 04:15 pmby E.R. Eddison.
7/06/2023
I was read The Worm Ouroboros and Mistress of Mistresses as a teen, but this is the first time I've read one of these books myself, silently. It has a wonderful speaking rhythm; there's nothing more likely to make me put off starting a book or hasten to finish it once properly started.* For about the first half I was thinking 'Why did I wait? This is so beautiful. Why do I ever read prose that isn't like this?' - thus mistaking as I am wont to do a passing mood for a general truth of my experience, because in the second half I did begin to get moments of 'This house has been being described for awfully many lines' and 'Do these people talk about nothing except Time?' which are two of the things I'd expect a reader who hated this book to hate. (For the third thing, see below).
This book, like the other Zimiamvia books, moves between an Earth on which the book's hero, Lessingham, lives like a man out of his native time and ideological context, and Zimiamvia, a land of willful lords and ladies like unto the dawn. Lessingham woos Mary, who loves him yet resists the love; the folk of Zimiamvia spar, adulterize, and talk at evening. The question is which of these worlds is primary, which, if either, real. Elswhere Eddison writes wonderful action set pieces (mountain-climbing, military clashes), but more than the other two, this is a book of peacetime - action is smaller. Here is cricket, courtly love, philosophy. If pain, suffering, and oblivion are not the final reality, then why are they a temporary reality? If Time is a Gordian knot, why does God not cut it?
I once wrote about Phillip Mann's Wulfsyarn that it seemed oddly heroic rather than systemic in how it saw the world, its tragic plot the working out of one flawed soul given complete remit for action. Implicit in my dissatisfaction was a sense that the book could have been otherwise, that if the hero had stopped being the be-all and end-all, there would have been some book left. That is not true of A Fish Dinner in Memison. Here, all relevant women are Aphrodite,** and no great man ever fell save by internal causes; if those facts were removed, you'd be left with blank pages and a dusting of punctuation. In fact, the whole matter of the book is stated in the author's Letter at the start: the same themes which characters will dwell on for pages is there, and the worth of the book is how much one likes their orchestration. Luckily, see again re. prose style, I like it a lot.
Content notes: racial slurs in two places, hero is good British colonial man, gender binary is metaphysic absolute. This last one cannot be stressed enough. I recall vaguely that it's true in both the earlier novels, but this one draws closest to Earth and so perhaps shows it more starkly. In his working through of 'why is there a point to experience?' and 'what is beauty?' Eddison says a lot I find congenial, but wrapped up so tightly in 'The name for the thing that motivates experience is Woman, the name for the thing motivated is Man' that I want to throw bits of modernity at him. Only I think they'd bounce.
*Started as bracket but got too long and became footnote: I have only read two Virginia Woolf novels and seldom had two reading experiences so immersive. For one of them I sat down next to the bookshelf thinking 'I'll read a few paragraphs of Mrs Dalloway to myself' and had finished it before I stood up again. The same conversation my class had about readers by ear or inner eye had a mix of people finding the Woolf excerpt completely absorbing or completely deflecting, and it would be neat if I could say that corresponded precisely with what kind of reader people identified as, but I don't recall that it did. It's because I'm someone who doesn't necessarily see things in my head when reading that a few bits of Orlando were so powerful for me, because I did see those - one blue kingfisher, one smooth green tide of lawn. Have I written this on Dreamwidth before? Quite possibly.
**not entirely true: there are nymphs.
7/06/2023
I was read The Worm Ouroboros and Mistress of Mistresses as a teen, but this is the first time I've read one of these books myself, silently. It has a wonderful speaking rhythm; there's nothing more likely to make me put off starting a book or hasten to finish it once properly started.* For about the first half I was thinking 'Why did I wait? This is so beautiful. Why do I ever read prose that isn't like this?' - thus mistaking as I am wont to do a passing mood for a general truth of my experience, because in the second half I did begin to get moments of 'This house has been being described for awfully many lines' and 'Do these people talk about nothing except Time?' which are two of the things I'd expect a reader who hated this book to hate. (For the third thing, see below).
This book, like the other Zimiamvia books, moves between an Earth on which the book's hero, Lessingham, lives like a man out of his native time and ideological context, and Zimiamvia, a land of willful lords and ladies like unto the dawn. Lessingham woos Mary, who loves him yet resists the love; the folk of Zimiamvia spar, adulterize, and talk at evening. The question is which of these worlds is primary, which, if either, real. Elswhere Eddison writes wonderful action set pieces (mountain-climbing, military clashes), but more than the other two, this is a book of peacetime - action is smaller. Here is cricket, courtly love, philosophy. If pain, suffering, and oblivion are not the final reality, then why are they a temporary reality? If Time is a Gordian knot, why does God not cut it?
I once wrote about Phillip Mann's Wulfsyarn that it seemed oddly heroic rather than systemic in how it saw the world, its tragic plot the working out of one flawed soul given complete remit for action. Implicit in my dissatisfaction was a sense that the book could have been otherwise, that if the hero had stopped being the be-all and end-all, there would have been some book left. That is not true of A Fish Dinner in Memison. Here, all relevant women are Aphrodite,** and no great man ever fell save by internal causes; if those facts were removed, you'd be left with blank pages and a dusting of punctuation. In fact, the whole matter of the book is stated in the author's Letter at the start: the same themes which characters will dwell on for pages is there, and the worth of the book is how much one likes their orchestration. Luckily, see again re. prose style, I like it a lot.
Content notes: racial slurs in two places, hero is good British colonial man, gender binary is metaphysic absolute. This last one cannot be stressed enough. I recall vaguely that it's true in both the earlier novels, but this one draws closest to Earth and so perhaps shows it more starkly. In his working through of 'why is there a point to experience?' and 'what is beauty?' Eddison says a lot I find congenial, but wrapped up so tightly in 'The name for the thing that motivates experience is Woman, the name for the thing motivated is Man' that I want to throw bits of modernity at him. Only I think they'd bounce.
*Started as bracket but got too long and became footnote: I have only read two Virginia Woolf novels and seldom had two reading experiences so immersive. For one of them I sat down next to the bookshelf thinking 'I'll read a few paragraphs of Mrs Dalloway to myself' and had finished it before I stood up again. The same conversation my class had about readers by ear or inner eye had a mix of people finding the Woolf excerpt completely absorbing or completely deflecting, and it would be neat if I could say that corresponded precisely with what kind of reader people identified as, but I don't recall that it did. It's because I'm someone who doesn't necessarily see things in my head when reading that a few bits of Orlando were so powerful for me, because I did see those - one blue kingfisher, one smooth green tide of lawn. Have I written this on Dreamwidth before? Quite possibly.
**not entirely true: there are nymphs.
