In the Land of Time (2 page)

Dunsany went on to produce, over the next decade and a half, perhaps the most remarkable body of fantasy literature that the twentieth century can claim: the story collections
Time and the Gods
(1906),
The Sword of Welleran
(1908),
A Dreamer's Tales
(1910),
The Book of Wonder
(1912),
Fifty-one Tales
(1915),
The Last Book of Wonder
(1916), and
Tales of Three Hemispheres
(1919), and two collections of dramas,
Five Plays
(1914) and
Plays of Gods and Men
(1917). These volumes are, however, far from constituting a uniform or monolithic body of work. It is true that, as Dunsany remarked,
Time and the Gods
is an avowed sequel to
The Gods of Pegaāna,
elaborating upon the Pegāna mythology and emphasizing the transience of the gods themselves in the face of the unrelenting scythe of Time; and several tales in other volumes—notably “The Sword of Welleran” and “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth”—could be said to have initiated the subgenre of “sword and sorcery,” in which heroic battles in fantastic lands are the focus. But in a substantial majority of other tales the “real” world begins to encroach insidiously upon the realm of pure imagination, and it is this dynamic fusion of reality and fantasy that frequently engenders some of the most evocative and poignant moments in Dunsany's early work.

And yet, that “real” world was never absent from Dunsany's imagination, if we are to take him at his own word. In noting how, at an early age, he saw a hare in the garden of Sir Joseph Prestwich, Dunsany goes on to remark in his first autobiography,
Patches of Sunlight
(1938):

 

A little later he writes more generally:

 

Many of Dunsany's devotees, who have cherished his early work precisely because of its otherworldly remoteness, will be startled by these passages; but these words will gain still more relevance when we consider the long course of Dunsany's later writing.

The most remarkable feature of Dunsany's early tales and plays is their prose style; but the essence of that style has frequently been misconstrued. Dunsany's style is not nearly as dense or adjective-laden as of other writers of poetic prose—John Lyly, Sir Thomas Browne, William Morris, Oscar Wilde (especially in his fairy tales), Arthur Symons, Clark Ashton Smith, and others. Instead, Dunsany's most powerful effects are engendered by a daring use of symbol, metaphor, and simile. In “In the Land of Time,” an army quixotically seeks to beard Time in his lair, but Time hurls a handful of years at them—“and the knees of the army stiffened, and the beards grew and turned grey.” In this sense much of Dunsany's work aligns itself with the tradition of the fable, especially in its use of a transparent moral and its paring away of all extraneous narrative features (including, in many cases, character or landscape description) that do not bear upon the tale's outcome. An important feature of Dunsany's style is his singularly felicitous invention of imaginary names—names not devised at random, but carefully coined to create dim echoes of Greek, Arabic, Asian, or other mythologies, and so to convey implications of antiquity, holiness, and exotic beauty.

Although the books of Dunsany's first fifteen years as a writer established his fame throughout the English-speaking world—especially after his tales began appearing in the London
Saturday Review
and in H. L. Mencken's
Smart Set
—one can also detect a certain shift in Dunsany's own attitude toward his work. This shift becomes most evident in
The Book of Wonder.
The stories in this volume—inspired by paintings by Sidney H. Sime, whose imaginative illustrations to Dunsany's early books were in no small part responsible for their popularity—reveal a wry, owlish humor that constitutes a virtual parody of the “gods and men” scenarios that had enraptured his early readers. In story after story, characters of dubious honesty receive a fitting comeuppance at the hands of the gods. It is a matter of taste whether one likes this development in Dunsany's manner. One of those who did not was H. P. Lovecraft, whose appreciation for Dunsany's work generally bordered upon the idolatrous. In a letter he commented astutely:

 

It is also possible that the outbreak of World War I had something to do with this evolution. The preface to
The Last Book of Wonder
suggests that Dunsany—who had already seen action in the Boer War at the turn of the century and had enlisted in the Coldstream Guards—did not expect to survive the conflict. He did indeed have a close brush with death, but it occurred during the Dublin riots of 1916, when his car was ambushed and he was hit in the face by a rebel's bullet. In the end Dunsany did not get sent overseas, but his visits to some of the battlefields in France were recorded in the poignant and lugubrious volume
Unhappy Far-Off Things
(1919).

After the war, a change seemed to be in order. Following
Tales of Three Hemispheres
Dunsany wrote almost no short stories for the next five or six years. A spectacularly successful American lecture tour in 1919-20 cemented his reputation—a reputation, incidentally, that now rested largely on his plays. His early dramas had been staged in both Ireland and England to great success, and in 1916 a Dunsany craze swept the United States, as each one of the
Five Plays
was simultaneously produced in a different off-Broadway theater in New York.
The Gods of the Mountain
remained Dunsany's most popular play, and it may well be his greatest; in its depiction of seven beggars who boldly strive to pass themselves off as the green jade gods on the top of a mountain, it comes close to capturing the gravity of Greek tragedy, but not without a certain Nietzschean awareness of the passing of the divine from human affairs.
If
(1921), his only full-length play, is an exhilarating meditation on time and chance. Later volumes—
Plays of Near and Far
(1922),
Alexander and Three Small Plays
(1925), and
Seven Modern Comedies
(1928)—also contain outstanding work.

But Dunsany himself felt the need to strike out in new directions. He abandoned the short story for a time and turned to novel writing. After producing a charming but insubstantial picaresque tale,
The Chronicles of Rodriguez
(1922), he wrote the gorgeous otherworldly fantasy,
The King of Elfland's Daughter
(1924), in a splendid return to his early manner. Both
The Charwoman's Shadow
(1926) and
The Blessing of Pan
(1927) have their distinctive charms; the latter in particular is a lost jewel of fantastic literature in its simultaneous depiction of the triumph of nature over modern civilization and the triumph of paganism over Christianity. While these novels represent, in their greater emphasis on character portrayal and the complexities arising out of a sustained narrative, a development from his early fantasy work, Dunsany made a still clearer break with that work when, in 1925, he sat down to write his first tale of the clubman Joseph Jorkens, “The Tale of the Abu Laheeb.”

On the most superficial level, Dunsany found in the Jorkens tales a convenient means of recording the impressions he gained on his far-flung travels, chiefly in Africa and the Middle East, and chiefly for the purpose of big-game hunting. In his second autobiography,
While the Sirens Slept
(1944), he makes this motive explicit, telling of the aftermath of an expedition to the Sahara:

 

The Jorkens tales—nearly 150 of which were written over a thirty-year span—brought Dunsany more widespread popularity than even his early tales and plays or his recent novels. They were published in the most widely circulated magazines both in the United States (
Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Vanity Fair, Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan
) and the United Kingdom (
Pall Mall Magazine, Spectator, Strand Magazine, John O'London's Weekly
), and were collected in five volumes from 1931 to 1954; a sixth volume was assembled before Dunsany's death but not issued.

Dunsany's blunt statement that Jorkens was a “liar” belies the actual scenarios of the stories; for their cleverness resides exactly in the reader's inability to detect any overt falsehood in them, however grotesque, implausible, or even preposterous they may appear. The secret of the Jorkens tales is their presentation of bizarre, fantastic, even supernatural incidents that resolve themselves in such a way that their outcomes remain secret or become nullified. Hence Jorkens, in “The Tale of the Abu Laheeb,” comes upon a creature in Africa who shares with humanity the use of fire; but this bond prevents Jorkens from shooting him and bringing his carcass back as proof of the creature's existence. In “Our Distant Cousins,” a friend of Jorkens has made a trip to Mars—but has regrettably lost the one bit of proof (a tiny elephant the size of a mouse) that would have confirmed the fact of his journey. In many tales Jorkens makes and then loses a fortune, while in others he faces almost certain death but narrowly escapes—and after all, isn't the fact that he lived to tell the tale proof of its veracity?

The Jorkens tales, lighthearted and even frivolous as many of them are, nevertheless manage to underscore several of Dunsany's central concerns. One particular concern that began to develop around this time was what might be termed the conflict of humanity and nature. Even his early, otherworldly fantasies could be said to have as their focus the need for humanity's reunification with the natural world; but with the passing of the years Dunsany felt he had to convey the message more forcefully. Mankind in the twentieth century was heading in the wrong direction—a direction that might, in the end, lead to its destruction, or what is worse, its merited overthrow by the rest of the natural world. Industrialization and commerce (with its accompanying prevalence of advertising, one of Dunsany's bêtes noires) were threatening to rob the world of its stores of wonder and fantasy, and both the animal and the plant kingdom (see “The Walk to Lingham”) were within their rights to throw off the shackles that subjugated them to a race that no longer merited its superiority.

One of the chief ways Dunsany conveyed this topos was by the use of a nonhuman perspective. At its most innocuous, this means the attempt to capture the world as viewed through the eyes and minds of an animal; hence we have the delightful short novel
My Talks with Dean Spanley
(1936), in which a clergyman, when sufficiently plied with wine, speaks of his firm belief that in a past life he was a dog. Years later this novel was writ large in another lost classic of fantasy,
The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders
(1950), in which a bluff, no-nonsense British officer, having offended an Indian swami in his club, finds his spirit lodged in a bewildering succession of nonhuman bodies—a fox, an eel, a cat, a mountain goat, even a jinn. The wondrous felicity with which Dunsany seems to capture the exact sentiments of the animals in question makes this work a delight in spite of its seemingly random structure.

A sharper edge, however, is found in many other of Dunsany's works of this kind. In the play
The Old Folk of the Centuries
(1930) a butterfly who is magically turned into a little boy quickly finds the life of a human being far too constricting for comfort, and he finds a convenient witch to transform him back to a butterfly. Another play,
Lord Adrian
(written in 1922-23 but not published until 1933), comes close to misanthropy. Here an elderly nobleman is injected with the glands from an ape and, rejuvenated, produces an offspring, Lord Adrian; but Adrian's partial animal ancestry leads him to plan an overthrow of the human race, since “I regard the domination of all life by man as the greatest evil that ever befell the earth.”
⁹
Even the otherwise mild-mannered Colonel Polders, like Gulliver, gradually gains a “distaste for the human race”
¹⁰
after repeated deadly encounters with humans. Perhaps the greatest of all instances of this misanthropy occurs in a short play,
The Use of Man
(in
Plays for Earth and Air,
1937). Here the spirit of a hapless and not very bright young man is summoned to a council of the spirits of animals somewhere in space, and he has an extraordinarily difficult time justifying the “use” of the human race in the natural scheme of things. He finds that no animal, aside from the slavishly devoted dog, will stand up for his species: the crow doesn't like man's guns; the bear resents the fact that he is locked up in zoos; the mouse hates man's traps. At the very last a single animal comes to man's rescue: the mosquito finds a “use” in man—he is its food.