Obituary: Paul Edwin Zimmer
Posted on December 31, 1997
Swordsman and Poet
16 October 1943-18 October 1997
(This obituary originally appeared in Mythprint 34:12 in December 1997.)
By David Bratman
Paul Edwin Zimmer could read poetry as if the very words were on fire. He taught me to appreciate dramatic and epic poetry. That was a kingly gift. (As a child I thought I hated poetry.) Tolkien’s “The Nameless Land” (in The Lost Road), which I read during my paper at Mythcon this year, is the kind of poem that Paul’s voice has taught me to appreciate and to deliver effectively. I read it at a Bardic Circle at Mythcon many years ago, to his approbation.
Paul and Diana Paxson brought the Bardic Circles to Mythcons. That was an even greater gift, for many people. I forget how I came to be invited (they were obscure little things held informally in his dorm room in those days), but I attended my first Bardic Circle at my first Mythcon, at Sacramento in 1976. Later they grew larger and more public, and became one of the oldest surviving Mythcon traditions, newer than the Drunken Hobbit but a lot older than the Not-Ready-for-Mythcon Players or the Food Sculpture. Paul had been convening Bardic Circles for some time at Greyhaven, the Berkeley home he shared with his family and other writers, and felt that Mythcons would be an appropriate venue to extend them. They have the advantage of being wholly democratic: in a circuit through the room, everyone who so wishes has the chance to be a bard, reading a poem of one’s own or a favorite by another author, or sometimes a song or a bit of prose. (Bardic Circles are not song sessions, although science fiction filksingers have picked up the term via Mythcons.)
Besides his marvelous voice and his magnificent heavy beard (his daughter’s friends called him “the shaggy earthquake”), Paul had two standard accouterments: his kilt and his cigarette. Even more than most of us, he was a man born out of his time. He wanted to live in a time and place of heroes of old, but since he could not do so he wore their clothes (he was so at home in a kilt that on the rare occasions he wore trousers it looked odd), worshipped their pagan gods, practiced with their weaponry (he was a founder of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and one of its most skilled swordsmen, versatile in both European and Asian traditions), and most especially he read their literature, and wrote more like it. He was a heavy smoker, but like most such in the Mythopoeic Society, always very courteous about it.
One day at the second Long Beach Mythcon, Berni and I were out walking in the morning. It must have been fairly late in the morning, because off across the lawn in the distance we spotted the famously late-rising Paul, stalking along with his usual cigarette in hand. Berni leaned over to me. “Look!” she said. “It’s Smokey the Bard!” It was all I could do to keep from breaking into hysterics as we neared him and made our greetings. In fact, it was all I could do to keep from giggling for the rest of the con.
It may have been at the same Mythcon that a woman came across Paul in his usual dress and asked him, “So what does a Scotsman wear under his kilt?” Paul grinned and gave what must have been his standard answer to this question: “Etchings, my dear; etchings.”
Paul’s poetry typically was alliterative verse with a heavy beat that throbbed under the control of his voice. Many of his poems were hymns to the gods, of a wide variety of cultures, and I remember “The Complaint of Agni” in particular, with its mighty cries of “Rama! Rama!”, as his most characteristic and effective work. Another less typical but delightfully versatile poem was “The True Critics,” a skeptical history of modern poetry written by turns in the various styles it described. (It’s excerpted in the coffeehouse-poetry scene in Chapter 9 of Diana Paxson’s Brisingamen.)
Paul also wrote fiction. His first notable published work was a novella called Woman of the Elfmounds, issued as a small-press chapbook by a then little-known Canadian named Charles de Lint. (The year that de Lint was Guest of Honor at Mythcon, Paul wrote the appreciation for Mythprint, a good example of the almost burbling – if one can use such a word for the likes of he – enthusiasm he could show for his favorite authors. Check out his loosely-focused but passionate and learned defense of Tolkien¹s poetry in Mythlore 72.) He helped his sister Marion (Marion Zimmer Bradley: you’ve heard of her) with the battle sequences of a science-fantasy adventure novel called Hunters of the Red Moon, and did so well that he formally co-authored the sequel, The Survivors. This made him the first commercially-published novelist to come out of Greyhaven after Marion herself (others were to follow, most prolifically Diana Paxson). I remember the publication party for The Survivors as one of the liveliest Greyhaven events I’ve attended, and I have always enjoyed attending readings there, and Bardic Circles, sometimes more than the books in cold print.
Paul also published Blood of the Colyn Muir in collaboration with Jon DeCles (also of Greyhaven); and four novels on his own: The Lost Prince, King Chondos’ Ride, A Gathering of Heroes, and Ingulf the Mad, the first two of which form a diptych (in an age of trilogies, Paul’s cry upon their publication was “There is no third book!”, which became a Mythcon catchphrase for a while), and all four of which share an invented setting called the Dark Border, whose content was that of a deadly-serious sword-and-sorcery epic but whose style was not generic Howard but something of Paul’s own with a poet’s sensibility. The basic concept of a desperate battle by the heroes against an encroaching Shadow with a very specific and distinct borderline (thus the series title) gave Paul plenty of opportunity for dramatics, in particular detailed and lovingly described swordplay. I was most taken with the intensity of some of the human interaction: a lot of raw emotion comes through in the dialogue. He recently completed a fifth Dark Border book, The King Who Was of Old, keeping up the tradition he maintained since the diptych of each book being a prequel to its predecessor.
Finding Paul’s books these days might be more difficult than reading them even if they were less readable than they are. I can¹t call them major works of fantasy, but picking them up and dipping at random, I find I can still hear the author’s voice ringing out, and without worrying about the larger plot I can enjoy the moment, just as if I were back at Greyhaven, sitting on a cushion and listening to Paul in the reader’s chair, sorting through a well-thumbed manuscript and telling us the tale.
Paul was at Albacon, a convention in Schenectady he attended regularly, partly for its own sake (he once recommended it to me) and partly as it gave him the opportunity to visit friends and family where he grew up nearby. At a party late Friday night he suddenly toppled over with a major heart attack. CPR was applied and 911 was called, but there was no hope. He was cremated and his ashes scattered on the farm that was his family home.
On Saturday the 25th, there was a “Bardic Wake” at Greyhaven. The attendance was simply tremendous; I have never seen so many people there. Several Mythies were present. Tim and Bonnie Callahan drove up from LA. The gathering opened with a memorial service that Paul wrote himself, invoking the four elements, the gods and the goddess; and then the drinking horn was passed around the room and all had a chance to speak who chose to. Even though everyone was very brief, it took some three hours. But for those of us moved enough to be there, it was well worthwhile.
Some had known him for thirty years or more (not just Greyhaven and family), some had been first invited to the Bardic Circles very recently. Many spoke of what Paul’s love for poetry had meant to them. More than a few read short memorial poems, some quite effective and even funny. Many others were SCA swordsmen who had been taught by him, and spoke of that. Several women described how much Paul loved to waltz, and how good he was at it. I was surprised at the number of people who confessed how intimidating he could be. This was never my experience. Potentially fearsome in appearance and manner, to be sure, but although at the time I met him I was easily intimidated by my seniors, he was always very friendly and patient with me. I’m more apt to remember his favors, like the time he used his herald’s voice to announce to the entire neighborhood my impending Mythcon paper the year the committee forgot to put it on the schedule, and the hour he spent with me in a corner at a Greyhaven party enthusiastically going over the contents of a Celtic literature anthology he’d just discovered, sharing his evaluation and seeking mine. I counted him as a friend, and I am touched by how many others did likewise. In the words the mourners spoke together after each reminiscence at the Wake,
Hail Paul!