E. R. Eddison's THE WORM OUROBOROS remains one of the greatest of all fantasy books. Reading it for a third time, I find my reaction as it was before: I wish I could love it.
Eddison brings to his work a strong style, a keen eye for costumes and settings, and an ear for dramatic dialogue, all in the service of epic fantasy -- but I have never liked epic fantasy. The nightmares of Clark Ashton Smith and C. L. Moore, yes; the eccentric, highly-personal fantasies of Mervyn Peake and E. T. A. Hoffmann, yes; the waking dreams of Bruno Schulz, Murray Gilchrist, and Marcel Brion, yes; but voyages and quests and battles have always left me cold.
What drew me to the book in the first place, and what has always drawn me back, is Eddison's respect for dramatists I love, John Webster in particular. Then again, I would rather spend my time with Webster, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ford, and all the other playwrights who influenced THE WORM. I would also rather spend my time with Thomas Browne, from whom Eddison steals blatantly in Chapter VII; there can be no excuse for this.
Still, I have to praise Eddison for his writing style. He understands the power of a brief description:
"And as they stood in the court-yard in the torch-light there came forth on a balcony the Lady Prezmyra in her nightgown, disturbed by this ransacking. Ethereal as a cloud she seemed, pavilioned in the balmy night, as a cloud touched by the exhalations of the unrisen moon."
Elsewhere, I find the style undeniably vivid, yet static. He loves costumes, preferably on mannequins:
"Like a black eagle surveying earth from some high mountain the King passed by in his majesty. His byrny was of black chain mail, its collar, sleeves, and skirt edged with plates of dull gold set with hyacinths and black opals. His hose were black, cross-gartered with bands of sealskin trimmed with diamonds. On his left thumb was his great signet ring fashioned in gold in the semblance of the worm Ouroboros that eateth his own tail: the bezel of the ring the head of the worm, made of a peach-coloured ruby of the bigness of a sparrow’s egg. His cloak was woven of the skins of black cobras stitched together with gold wire, its lining of black silk sprinkled with dust of gold. The iron crown of Witchland weighed on his brow, the claws of the crab erect like horns ; and the sheen of its jewels was many-coloured like the rays of Sirius on a clear night of frost and wind at Yule-tide."
Certain descriptions bring to mind stage settings:
"And now were all gathered together in the great banquet hall that was built by Gorice XI., when he was first made King, in the south-east corner of the palace; and it far exceeded in greatness and magnificence the old hall where Lord Juss and Lord Brandoch Daha were held in duress. Seven equal walls it had, of dark green jasper, specked with bloody spots. In the midst of one wall was the lofty doorway, and in the walls right and left of this and in those that inclosed the angle opposite the door were great windows placed high, giving light to the banquet hall. In each of the seven angles of the wall a caryatide, cut in the likeness of a three-headed giant from ponderous blocks of black serpentine, bowed beneath the mass of a monstrous crab hewn out of the same stone. The mighty claws of those seven crabs spreading upwards bare up the dome of the roof, that was smooth and covered all over with paintings of battles and hunting scenes and wrastling bouts in dark and smoky colours answerable to the gloomy grandeur of that chamber. On the walls beneath the windows gleamed weapons of war and of the chase, and on the two blind walls were nailed up all orderly the skulls and dead bones of those champions which had wrastled aforetime with King Gorice XI or ever he appointed in an evil hour to wrastle with Goldry Bluszco. Across the innermost angle facing the door was a long table and a carven bench behind it, and from the two ends of that table, set square with it, two other tables yet longer and benches by them on the sides next the wall stretched to within a short space of the door. Midmost of the table to the right of the door was a high seat of old cypress wood, great and fair, with cushions of black velvet broidered with gold, and facing it at the opposite table another high seat, smaller, and the cushions of it sewn with silver. In the space betwixt the tables five iron braziers, massive and footed with claws like an eagle’s, stood in a row, and behind the benches on either side were nine great stands for flamboys to light the hall by night, and seven behind the cross bench, set at equal distances and even with the walls. The floor was paved with steatite, white and creamy, with veins of rich brown and black and purple and splashes of scarlet. The tables resting on great trestles were massy slabs of a dusky polished stone, powdered with sparks of gold as small as atoms."
Even his most vividly-conveyed people often seem like portraits:
"Gorice the King stood up and went to the south window. The casement bolts were rusted : he forced them and they flew back with a shriek and a clatter and a thin shower of dust and grit. He opened the window and looked out. The heavy night grew to her depth of quiet. There were lights far out in the marshes, the lights of Lord Juss’s camp-fires of his armies gathered against Carcë. Scarcely without a chill might a man have looked upon that King standing by the window; for there was in the tall lean frame of him an iron aspect as of no natural flesh and blood but some harder colder element; and his countenance, like the picture of some dark divinity graven ages ago by men long dead, bore the imprint of those old qualities of unrelenting power, scorn, violence, and oppression, ancient as night herself yet untouched by age, young as each night when it shuts down and old and elemental as the primaeval dark."
What I miss, here, is the technique of description-in-motion used consistently and well by Clark Ashton Smith:
"So, all that night, and throughout the day that followed, Gaspard du Nord, with the dried slime of the oubliette on his briar-shredded raiment, plunged like a madman through the towering woods that were haunted by robbers and werewolves. The westward-falling moon flickered in his eyes betwixt the gnarled, somber boles as he ran; and the dawn overtook him with the pale shafts of its searching arrows. The moon poured over him its white sultriness, like furnace-heated metal sublimed into light; and the clotted filth that clung to his tatters was again turned into slime by his own sweat. But still he pursued his nightmare-harried way, while a vague, seemingly hopeless plan took form in his mind." [The Colossus of Ylourgne]
"The doors on either side of the hall, with cunningly mated valves of ebony and ivory, were all closed. At the far end, Tiglari saw a rift of flaming light in a somber double arras. Parting the arras very softly, he peered into a huge, brightly illumined chamber that seemed at first sight to be the harem of Maal Dweb, peopled with all the girls that the enchanter had summoned to his mountain dwelling over a course of decades. In fact, it seemed that there were many hundreds, leaning or recumbent on ornate couches, or standing in attitudes of languor or terror. Tiglari discerned in the throng the women of Ommu-Zain, whose flesh is whiter than desert salt; the slim girls of Uthmai, who are moulded from breathing, palpitating jet; the queenly amber girls of equatorial Xala; and the small women of Ilap, who have the tones of newly greening bronze. But among them all, he could not find the lilied beauty of Athlé." [The Maze of the Enchanter]
"Crossing the threshold, he was engulfed instantly by a dead and clammy darkness, touched with the faint fetor of corruption, and a smell as of charred bone and flesh. He thought that he was in a huge corridor, and feeling his way forward along the right-hand wall, he soon came to a sudden turn, and saw a bluish glimmering far ahead, as if in some central adytum where the hall ended. Massy columns were silhouetted against the glimmering; and across it, as he drew nearer, several dark and muffled figures passed, presenting the profiles of enormous skulls. Two of them were sharing the burden of a human body which they carried in their arms. To Phariom, pausing in the shadowy hall, it appeared that the vague taint of putrescence upon the air grew stronger for a few instants after the figures had come and gone." [The Charnel God]
In a story by Smith, visual descriptions are never paintings, as they are in Eddison, but moving images that propel the story. His details are discovered, uncovered, revealed. This method is driven by a need for economy (books have space and time for stillness, while stories demand compression), but I suspect, as well, that the pressure of imagination took different forms in these two writers. Eddison stood at arm's length and watched his events, a spectator, while Smith prowled through his dreams, a participant.
Being a spectator can bring another limitation. For all of the dramatic influence on his book, Eddison's detachment can hinder the drama. This rarely gets in the way of his villains from Witchland, who remain from start to finish a vivid crowd, but it does make his heroes of Demonland one-dimensional. This limitation shows up especially in the final chapters, where Eddison reveals himself at his best and worst.
Unlike a participant, a spectator can look away; Eddison falls into this trap at precisely the wrong moment. When characters succeed against impossible odds, I want to know how they did it, but when Eddison pits his heroes against Laxus and a sea-fleet that outnumbers them drastically, in a fight they cannot win, all he can offer is this:
"O I’ll tell thee the tale to-morrow, madam. I’m surfeited with it to-night. The sum is, Laxus drownded and all that were with him, and Juss with his whole great armament northward bound for Witchland."
Unforgivable!
The best, however, is a climactic chapter that shows the dread of the Witchlanders in the certainty of their defeat, and their confusion when the deed is done.
Unlike our heroes, the Demons, the Witches actually care about the loss of their kingdom, and when the spells of Gorice XII fail to protect them (in an eerie scene of livid light and thunder, a sorcerous Chernobyl), their shock and anger is dramatized with a conviction that I could not find elsewhere in the book.
Mourning for her husband, Corund (a soldier whose decency and sense of honour have impressed even his enemies), Queen Prezmyra becomes a tragic figure: someone on the wrong side, full of scorn for the victors, yet loyal to her loved ones and dignified in her bitterness. Shown to be an actual human being, she makes the heroes look shallow and ridiculous in comparison:
"It was ever the wont of you of Demonland to eat the egg and give away the shell in alms."
I can be critical of many scenes and aspects of this book, but I have to give Eddison credit for a superb climactic chapter.
For all that I respect this book, and for all that I recommend it, I prefer to be "inside" a story. Readers who come to THE WORM OUROBOROS with a different set of aesthetic principles might fall in love with it -- many have -- but I love other stories, and they live elsewhere.
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