In the Land of Time (3 page)

From the very earliest of his works, Dunsany occasionally took pleasure in envisioning the eventual extirpation of the human race. Several of the exquisite prose poems in
Fifty-one Tales
have this as their focus, although in many cases it seems part and parcel of the “cosmic” perspective that Dunsany had adopted at this juncture. In later works it is industrialism that will bring a fitting doom to our race, ridding the world of a dangerous menace and leaving the earth free for the animals to resume their sway. The potent one-act play
The Evil Kettle
(in
Alexander and Three Small Plays
) may be Dunsany's most effective embodiment of this idea. Here the well-known anecdote of the young James Watt looking at a steaming teakettle and envisioning therefrom the awesome power of steam is given a nightmarish twist: at night the Devil comes to Watt and forces him to glimpse a hideous vision of the future with its “dark, Satanic mills” and the earth's natural beauty corrupted by mechanization. But the Devil casts a spell over him and makes him forget what he has just seen, and we are left with a haunting sense of historic inevitability. Dunsany's later treatments of this theme—notably his late novel
The Last Revolution
(1951), which depicts machines revolting from humanity's control—are, regrettably, much inferior to this concentrated bit of venom.

One of the subtlest of Dunsany's treatments of the man-versus-nature theme occurs in what is probably his finest novel,
The Curse of the Wise Woman
(1933). This work, set entirely in Ireland, brings to the fore the vexed issue of Dunsany's relations with the land of his ancestors. There had been Plunketts in Ireland since the eleventh century, and Dunsany produced some of his greatest work there; but would he ever abandon his otherworldly realms of dream and fantasy to write about it—its landscape, its people, its rich stores of history and myth? For the first three decades of his career the answer seemed to be a resounding no; although some of his early stories had appeared in such Irish periodicals as the
Shanachie
and the
Irish Homestead,
Dunsany himself frequently admitted that he preferred to invent his myths out of whole cloth rather than to adapt existing ones. And yet, he could hardly be unaware that a literary revival was going on in Ireland at exactly the time he began writing. His early plays had been produced at the Abbey Theatre, and he himself was enthusiastic about the plays of J. M. Synge and others. He was well acquainted with James Stephens, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and other prominent figures in Irish literature. Yeats assembled a slim volume,
Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsany,
for publication by the Cuala Press in 1912, in the introduction to which he expressed the following pensive regret:

 

This is remarkably on target, and it proves also to have been prophetic: Yeats seems to have sensed that Dunsany would have to renounce his devotion to otherworldly fantasy before he could treat the real world of Ireland in his fiction. There is a gradual decline of the purely fantastic element throughout the entire course of his work, to the point that such later novels as
Up in the Hills
(1935),
Rory and Bran
(1936),
Guerrilla
(1944), and
His Fellow Men
(1952) have nothing fantastic or supernatural in them, although they nonetheless retain that ethereal delicacy that remained Dunsany's keynote.

But
The Curse of the Wise Woman
did not emerge from nowhere; it had decided antecedents, and Yeats was at the center of them. In 1932 Yeats and Lady Gregory established the Irish Academy of Letters. The members chosen for inclusion were to be divided into two categories, “academicians” and “associates”; Yeats and Bernard Shaw explained the distinction: “the Academicians must have done creative work ‘Irish in character or subject'; an Associate need not fall within this definition though he must be of Irish birth or descent.”
¹²
Dunsany was mightily insulted that he was chosen only as an associate (in some of his writings he actually suggests that he was not chosen at all), but as a matter of fact he had up to this point done very little writing “Irish in character or subject,” so his placement in that category (along with such figures as T. E. Lawrence and Eugene O'Neill) was understandable. Nonetheless, Dunsany seems to have been inspired by this perceived slight to write
The Curse of the Wise Woman,
a poignant novel that explores the numerous conflicts in Irish life—Catholic and Protestant, city and country, progress and tradition, political stability and violence—in a scenario in which the supernatural is reduced to the vanishing point, and may not come into play at all: a “wise woman” (witch), enraged at the threatened destruction of a bog by a development company, seems to summon up the power of nature and bring about a ferocious storm that wipes out the company's machines and saves the bog. After the publication of the novel, Dunsany was elected as an “academician” member of the Irish Academy of Letters.

The Story of Mona Sheehy
(1939) is another superb Irish novel, touchingly describing the fate of a young woman who thinks she is a child of the fairies and finds herself working unhappily in a factory far from the fields and bogs she loves. It is perhaps the chief example of what might be called Dunsany's late renunciation of fantasy. At the very outset we know clearly that Mona is not a child of the fairies but the offspring of an illicit sexual encounter between Lady Gurtrim and an Irish laborer; but the strength of Mona's belief creates a kind of ersatz fantasy atmosphere as distinctive as it is compelling. Other tales written around this time—including numerous short skits written for
Punch
in the 1940s—are much less flattering to Irish self-esteem, and may have had some role in what appears to be a deliberate avoidance of Dunsany's work on the part of Irish writers and critics. The culmination is reached in “Helping the Fairies” (1947), whose plot twist is too cleverly nasty to reveal here.

Dunsany remained vigorous to the end, both as a man and as a writer. The onset of World War II found him too old to fight, but not too old to be a part of the Home Guard, watching for incoming German planes from his home in Kent. In 1940 he accepted the Byron Professorship of English Literature at Athens University, but had to be evacuated the next year when Hitler invaded Greece; the long and circuitous trip home is described in a long poem,
A Journey
(1944). Jorkens continued to appear in story after story. In 1932 Dunsany had created another serial character, the amateur detective Linley, whose adventures are narrated by the self-effacing Smethers. The first story, “The Two Bottles of Relish,” was rejected by several magazines because of its gruesomeness (Dunsany remarks with perverse pride that “my literary agent was unable to get any man in England or America to touch it”
¹³
) before appearing in
Time and Tide,
thereafter becoming one of the most frequently reprinted stories in modern literature. Although praised by Ellery Queen, Dunsany's other mystery tales as collected in
The Little Tales of Smethers
(1952) seem insubstantial. Plays continued to be written with vigor and panache, and
Plays for Earth and Air
(1937), containing several one-acters written for broadcast on BBC radio, feature some of his cleverest dramatic work. Lord Dunsany died on October 25, 1957.

How did a writer so well known in his time, and so showered with critical acclaim, lapse so far into obscurity? A number of factors having nothing to do with the merit, or lack of it, of Dunsany's work conspired against him. First, fantasy has always been relatively restricted in its appeal, and in the course of the twentieth century it gradually dropped out of mainstream fiction and became a narrow “genre” somewhere between science fiction and horror fiction, and incurring the critical disdain that those literary modes suffered. Second, Dunsany's ambiguous involvement with his Irish literary compatriots—to say nothing of his Unionist sympathies at a time when most leading Irish writers were Nationalists—caused his work to be either scorned or deliberately ignored by those who should have been acknowledging it as a distinctive contribution to the national literature. And third, Dunsany, like so many writers, wrote too much. Although to my mind he maintained a remarkably high consistency over a lifetime's work, he had the misfortune to write what many regarded as his best work quite early in his career—those tales of bejeweled fantasy that we designate by the adjective “Dunsanian”—so that even his devotees, such as H. P. Lovecraft, found his later work not entirely to their taste and failed to champion it.

But Dunsany's presence as an influence upon contemporary literature is not entirely insignificant. His plays may have fallen out of fashion, but they were appreciated by no less a figure than Pirandello; as late as 1950 Brooks Atkinson, reviewing a New York revival of
The Gods of the Mountain,
was noting that Dunsany's dramatic work was by no means deserving of the oblivion that had overtaken it.
¹⁴
The sword-and-sorcery tradition he had initiated was developed by Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber. And Lovecraft's worshipful discussion of Dunsany in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927) did much to inspire interest in his work among later devotees of Lovecraft, so that such editors as Lin Carter and Darrell Schweitzer strove to bring some of the best of it back into print.

Dunsany was, however, not one to confuse popularity with merit. To the end of his life he remained convinced of the high calling of the genuine artist, and he knew that artists must sometimes toil in obscurity, and in the face of prevailing public opinion. In the early essay “Nowadays” (1918) he speaks of the poet's function:

 

By these criteria, Dunsany, although doing his best work in prose, was a poet indeed.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Mention has been made of Dunsany's early short story collections, from
The Gods of Pegaāna
(1905) to
Tales of Three Hemispheres
(1919). Two early omnibuses from the Modern Library—
The Book of Wonder
(1918), containing
The Book of Wonder
and
Time and the Gods,
and
A Dreamer's Tales and Other Stories
(1917), containing
A Dreamer's Tales
and
The Sword of Welleran
—are noteworthy. My edition of
The Complete Pegaāna
(Chaosium, 1998) contains
The Gods of Pegaāna, Time and the Gods,
and a few other stories.
Tales of War
(1918) is a lackluster collection of war stories. Later collections include
The Man Who Ate the Phoenix
(1949) and
The Little Tales of Smethers and Other Stories
(1952), but many stories remain uncollected. Some of these are included in Darrell Schweitzer's edition of
The Ghosts of the Heaviside Layer and Other Fantasms
(Owlswick Press, 1980). Lin Carter edited three selections of Dunsany's early work as part of the Adult Fantasy Series published by Ballantine (1972-74), and E. F. Bleiler assembled a meritorious selection,
Gods, Men and Ghosts
(1972).

Dunsany's Jorkens tales are collected in five volumes:
The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens
(1931),
Jorkens Remembers Africa
(1934),
Jorkens Has a Large Whiskey
(1940),
The Fourth Book of Jorkens
(1947), and
Jorkens Borrows Another Whiskey
(1954). Night Shade Books is preparing, under my editorship, a three-volume reprint of the complete Jorkens tales, which will include the sixth Jorkens volume, which did not appear in Dunsany's lifetime.

Dunsany's novels have all been cited in the introduction. His shorter plays are gathered in
Five Plays
(1914),
Plays of Gods and Men
(1917),
Plays of Near and Far
(1922),
Alexander and Three Small Plays
(1925),
Seven Modern Comedies
(1928), and
Plays for Earth and Air
(1937). Several plays appeared separately:
If
(1921),
The Old Folk of the Centuries
(1930),
Lord Adrian
(1933), and
Mr. Faithful
(1935).

Dunsany wrote many essays, but few have been collected. Some are gathered in
The Ghosts of the Heaviside Layer.
Of his three autobiographies,
Patches of Sunlight
(1938),
While the Sirens Slept
(1944), and
The Sirens Wake
(1945), the first is by far the best, being a poignant account of Dunsany's early years; the latter tend to be rather monotonous chronicles of his travels. See also the volume
My Ireland
(1937).
The Donnellan Lectures
(1945) contains some significant passages on prose style and dramatic technique.
A Glimpse from a Watch Tower
(1946) is a trenchant series of essays on the prospects for civilization following the end of World War II.