Major Magus
Dan Clore
MINOR MAGUS
by LAURA MILLER
The fantastical writings of Lord Dunsany.
Issue of 2004-12-06
Few things troubled the sunny complacency of Edward John
Moreton Drax Plunkett, the eighteenth Baron Dunsany, but the
prospect of being considered a dilettante and a small talent
stood foremost among them. He had reason to hope that it
would be otherwise. After knocking around for the first few
years of the twentieth century, engaging in the typical
pursuits of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy—hunting, soldiering,
cricket, and an unsuccessful run for Parliament—he'd tried
his hand at writing. He had to pay to put out his first
book, in 1905, a sui-generis work of invented,
quasi-Oriental mythology titled "The Gods of Pegna," but he
had no trouble finding publishers after that. W. B. Yeats,
then the leader of the Irish Renaissance, described him as
"a man of genius," and produced his plays at the Abbey
Theatre. Most of Dunsany's plays were popular, and his verse
was once such common currency that young Amory Blaine, the
hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "This Side of Paradise," takes
to reciting it to the accompaniment of graphophone music
during his "decadent" phase at Princeton.
By the nineteen-thirties, however, Dunsany's sort of writing
had fallen drastically out of favor, and his reputation --
unlike that of Oscar Wilde, another passion of Amory
Blaine's freshman year—has never recovered. He became
estranged from Yeats, and when the poet co-founded the Irish
Academy of Letters, in 1932, Dunsany was offered only an
associate membership. Full membership, he was told, was
reserved for those who wrote about Ireland and the Irish.
Dunsany's settings tended to be imaginary, the bejewelled
domains of scimitar-wielding warriors, kings, beggars,
thieves, and prophets answering to pagan pantheons that bore
scant resemblance to the Celtic legends that Yeats loved.
Dunsany was upset, and the Irish poet and literary gadfly
Oliver St. John Gogarty would later joke that the Academy
had been "founded to keep Dunsany out." Gogarty, like
Dunsany, saw it as a personal snub. (Dunsany was admitted as
a full member only years later.)
The decades between Dunsany's promising start and his
exclusion from Ireland's literary élite had seen the nation
split on the question of home rule. While many
intellectuals, like Yeats, became increasingly committed to
the cause of Irish independence -- a goal largely achieved
with the creation of the Irish Free State, in 1922 --
others, like Dunsany, supported continued union with
England. And yet, despite the pitch of feeling surrounding
Irish nationalism and home rule, Yeats hadn't quarrelled
with Dunsany over politics. No one did, really. Even
Dunsany's nationalist neighbors in County Meath overlooked
his reactionary rantings. This, more than the judgment of
the Academy, should have been a warning. If his political
views weren't taken seriously in the Ireland of the
nineteen-twenties and thirties, could anything else about
him be?
The journey to obscurity, when it starts from a vantage as
eminent as Dunsany's, is often as idiosyncratic as the path
to glory. How did a writer of talent -- a writer whom Yeats
compared to Baudelaire, and who once had five plays on in
New York at the same time -- wind up nearly, if not quite,
forgotten? Dunsany continued to write and publish stories,
poetry, memoirs, and novels until his death, in 1957. He
never felt that he got the recognition he deserved,
something he attributed to the vagaries of literary fashion,
especially the ascendancy of such "frightful nonsense" as
the verse of T. S. Eliot. He became, as Mark Amory, in a
1972 biography of Dunsany, says, "an Edwardian survival out
of tune with the times." If not for contemporary advocates
of fantasy fiction, who see him as a pioneer of the genre, a
new selection of his tales, "In the Land of Time," from
Penguin Classics ($14), would surely never have appeared. It
is too easy, however, to blame Dunsany's disappointments on
the fickleness of public taste. Modernism happened for a
reason, and so did Dunsany's slow drift to the margins of
literary renown.
Too much good fortune can derail an artist, and few writers
are born as fortunate as Dunsany. He was as handsome,
clever, and rich as Austen's Emma Woodhouse and equally
lacking in troublesome self-knowledge. He was born in 1878,
the eldest son of the seventeenth Lord Dunsany. In "Patches
of Sunlight," the first of three volumes of memoirs, he
gives the impression of having been a somewhat lonely boy.
His mother was moody, and his father worsened his already
poor health by experimenting with drugs and
self-administered X rays. Dunsany's father died in 1899,
leaving his twenty-one-year-old son in possession of a
venerable title, a comfortable fortune, a country house in
England, and the family castle in County Meath.
Indifferently educated at Eton and the Royal Military
Academy at Sandhurst, Dunsany nevertheless acquired undying
admiration for the Romantic poets and the cadences of the
King James Bible. In 1899, he joined the Coldstream Guards
and sailed off to South Africa to fight in the Boer War. It
was the beginning of a lifelong enthusiasm for mortal peril,
a condition that Dunsany embraced with the blithe physical
courage of someone who never expects that he will be the one
to be injured. Of his initiation under a hail of Boer
bullets, he coolly wrote, "I have no wish to say anything
critical of anyone's shooting, or to belittle some rifle
that may be dear to its owner, but I cannot see why they did
not get the whole lot of us." The African landscape, with
its vast, parched stretches of unpeopled wilderness, sunk in
more deeply; lonely deserts became one of his favorite
fictional settings.
Out of the Army and at loose ends, Dunsany, at twenty-six,
had the luck, or sense, to marry well. His wife, Beatrice
Villiers, was a daughter of the Earl of Jersey, and for the
next fifty-three years she lovingly tolerated his
eccentricities, even as they blossomed into full-fledged
crankishness: the elderly Dunsany would hold forth at length
on the evils of "adulterated" commercial table salt (he
carried his own supply of rock salt everywhere) and forbade
the use of furniture polish in his home (it had to be
applied when his back was turned).
It was during his courtship of Beatrice that Dunsany began
to dabble in writing. Through his uncle, a politician, he
had already encountered members of the Irish literary scene,
including Yeats and George William Russell, a poet of the
Celtic revival who wrote under the pseudonym Æ. The prestige
of Dunsany's title and his occasional offers of cash to
support literary projects certainly helped make him welcome,
but his work was genuinely admired as well. Today, when
writers churn out mass-market paperbacks of generic fantasy
fiction by the crate, it's easy to forget how original
Dunsany's phantasmagorical lands and mythologies must have
seemed. His contemporaries marvelled at his knack for
coining evocative names and at his style, praised by Gogarty
for being "as pure, fabulous and as rare as the unicorn."
Dunsany's first book, “The Gods of Pegana” (included in its
entirety in the Penguin volume), related the cosmogony of
the imaginary island nation of Pegana in a prose style that
mimics the archaic cadences of the Bible. This imitation is
so persuasive that few have noticed how little understanding
of religious feeling its author shows. Pegana has gods of
dust, of silence, and of "little dreams and fancies" but no
gods or goddesses of the harvest, of war, or of love --
pretty much the core curriculum for heathen deities.
Dunsany's creation is a sumptuous pageant of Symbolist
exotica that lies closer in spirit to Aubrey Beardsley and
The Yellow Book than to any actual sacred text. The myths
that Dunsany concocted elaborate on the futility of human
ambitions and even the ephemerality of the gods themselves,
who will vanish into nothingness on the awakening of a still
older creator, called Mana-Yood-Sushai. "We are the gods,"
these divinities chant. "We are the little games of
Mana-Yood-Sushai that he hath played and hath forgotten."
Dunsany, himself an atheist, seemed indifferent to the needs
that religions arise to answer: for hope, or meaning, or a
sense that the universe is directed by entities not unlike
ourselves. What Dunsany liked about gods was their empyrean
vantage point, remote from the world and amused by human
striving.
This fatalistic irony hints at Dunsany's subterranean
influence on some canonical modernists and postmodernists.
Jorge Luis Borges, compiling a list of thirty-three
"prologues" to his seminal story "The Library of Babel,"
included Dunsany's story "Idle Days on the Yann" alongside
works by Kafka, Henry James, and Voltaire. Like many of
Dunsany's stories, "Idle Days on the Yann" largely neglects
character and plot in favor of mood and what Dunsany would
call "wonder." The narrator obtains passage on a boat named
Bird of the River. The rest of the story is an account of
the fabulous cities that the ship's company visits on its
journey seaward. In Mandaroon, for example, "the ways seemed
untrodden, and moss was thick on the doorsteps; in the
market-place huddled figures lay asleep. A scent of incense
came wafted through the gateway, of incense and burned
poppies, and there was a hum of the echoes of distant
bells." A sentinel chases off the visitors, warning that
"when the people of this city wake the gods will die."
"Idle Days on the Yann" often anticipates the imaginary
travelogues of Italo Calvino. In one interlude, the narrator
flees the doomed city of Perdondaris when he sees that one
of its gates is made of a single enormous piece of ivory and
suspects, correctly, that the beast it came from "was
perhaps even then looking for his other tusk." Dunsany,
however, usually balanced his extravagant fantasies with
attentive observations of the natural world:
And now the birds of the jungle came flying home far over
us, with the sunlight glistening pink upon their breasts,
and lowered their pinions as soon as they saw the Yann, and
dropped into the trees. And the widgeons began to go up the
river in great companies, all whistling, and then would
suddenly wheel and all go down again.
In 1909, at Yeats's urging, Dunsany wrote his first play,
"The Glittering Gate." Free of the brocaded trappings of
"The Gods of Pegana," it exhibits the author's fatalism all
the more starkly. Two recently deceased thieves stand before
the locked gate of Heaven. One has been there for a while,
opening an endless series of beer bottles, each of which
proves to be empty. The other manages to jimmy the lock on
the gate, expecting to find "orchards full of apples," a
host of angels, and his beloved mother on the other side.
The gate swings open to reveal "empty night and stars," and
a "cruel and violent laugh" rings out over the scene.
This bleak comic parable became a hit when it was first
staged, a month after it was written, at the Abbey Theatre.
Read today, it seems a jovial foretaste of existentialism --
music-hall Beckett. For all his artistic conservatism,
Dunsany had more than an inkling of the void that the
modernists tried to map. Borges, in particular, was drawn to
this, and in his essay "Kafka and His Precursors" he finds
some of Kafka's "idiosyncrasy" in the Dunsany story
"Carcassonne." It tells of a king who vows to defy a
prophecy that he will never come to Carcassonne. The king
marches his army off to find the city, but after many years
the king and his minstrel are all that remain of the army,
and they fail, as prophesied, to reach the city, which can
only ever be glimpsed on the horizon.
These scenarios sound like the product of a reserved,
depressive personality -- someone like Kafka. Dunsany,
however, the vain, antlike struggles of his characters
notwithstanding, seemed to regard his own life as a most
amusing game, made of equal parts theatrics and
sharpshooting. He wrote with a quill pen in the tower of the
castle that his family had occupied since 1190, and carried
a gold-handled walking stick given to him by the Nabob of
Rampur during a visit to India. He pursued big game in
Africa, at a time when an ambitious expedition into the bush
required having seventy-two African bearers and hiring a
guide who, he wrote Beatrice, was sought "by the police of
so many countries." While staying with the Maharaja of
Gwalior in the nineteen-twenties, he insisted on shooting a
tiger face to face, instead of from the top of a stone tower
thoughtfully provided for that purpose.
In the opinion of Mark Amory, "it was never to be finally
decided whether Dunsany was a writer who shot or a sportsman
who wrote." Or, for that matter, a chess champion who shot
and wrote. (Dunsany was proficient enough to play
Capablanca, the Cuban world champion, to a draw.) Like many
members of his class, he was a consummate amateur. If not
for his unusual facility of composition, Dunsany might not
have bothered to write at all: he dashed off "The Glittering
Gate" in a single afternoon, and then only after Yeats
threatened to give the idea to somebody else. Yeats spotted
Dunsany's indolence early on and blamed it on his station in
life, writing to a friend in 1911:
"He is a man in whose genius I believe, though I am very
doubtful whether it will ever come to anything. . . . I am
trying to make a dramatist of him. But he doesn't know how
to revise his work, and he has little patience. He is
splendid for a scene and then it all goes to pieces. . . .
It is a great misfortune to be born in the Peerage, life is
too pleasant for him. Fifty pounds a year and a drunken
mistress would be the making of him."
Dunsany, for his part, wrote, "The greatest barrier over
which my dreams have had to climb appears to have been the
belief that titled dilettantes trying to write, in order to
take the bread out of the mouths of honest men, should be
discouraged by every man of independent spirit." Nothing
irked him more than intimations that he had paid or used his
title to get his work published or staged.
Dunsany's remarkable good fortune stuck with him in the
First World War; he narrowly escaped being sent to Gallipoli
in 1915 and survived a brief stint in the trenches in France
in 1917, gathering information for propaganda purposes.
However, in 1916, during the Irish nationalists' Easter
Rebellion, Dunsany suffered the only serious wound of his
long romance with danger. When news of the rebellion reached
him in his castle, he rushed to Dublin and blundered into
twenty nationalist riflemen. He was shot at and a fragment
of lead lodged under his left eye. He was hospitalized
behind enemy lines, and, despite his unionist sympathies,
his connections insured good treatment; an anonymous admirer
had a "dainty chop" sent over every day. Nonetheless, the
wound left him with a facial scar and perhaps an emotional
one, too. For several months, he was plagued by dreams of
his own death.
Such thoughts were in keeping with the times, for the Great
War had already assumed its role as his generation's
nightmare. The ruling classes had sent their young men off
to fight on the front lines, and, although Dunsany himself
escaped the carnage, both he and Beatrice lost many close
friends. The war's toll is the only real shadow to cross the
militantly cheerful pages of "Patches of Sunlight." The war
precipitated a vast project of self-examination among
European and British artists and intellectuals. The old ways
of life, everyone felt, had vanished. Even those writers who
preferred, like Dunsany, to set their fiction in wholly
imaginary worlds -- Tolkien is the best-known example --
felt their work shaped by the war's horrors. Dunsany had
some sense of what was called for; he published a collection
of wartime sketches that he had written for the propaganda
office. But even the title of the book, "Unhappy Far-Off
Things," suggests that the old detachment remained in place.
Most writers have a pet word or image, one that finds its
way again and again into the work and provides a key to its
author's temperament. For Dunsany, that word was "little."
He wrote of little gods, little tales, little dreams, little
fancies. The people in his novels and stories are little,
too, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, and
he was unwilling, or unable, to bring them up to life-size.
The public's appetite for the dandified art of the turn of
the century faded in the wake of the First World War, but
Dunsany's opinion of his own work hardened into a stance of
defiant aestheticism. Ideas were anathema to him. Dunsany
considered himself a high priest of Beauty, an advocate of
art for art's sake. Oscar Wilde died before his poses and
proclamations began to look silly; Dunsany, so much luckier
in life, if not in fame, lingered on.
As Dunsany got older, his fiction became less exclusively
fantastical. He regarded this, ruefully, as a falling off.
(The American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, who was
powerfully influenced by Dunsany, agreed.) Nonetheless, he
revealed a flair for epigrammatic social comedy of the type
perfected by Saki. He worked his travels into a series of
stories narrated by a character named Jorkens, a member of a
London club who can be persuaded, when plied with whiskey,
to relate tall tales about his exploits in distant lands.
Dunsany thought the Jorkens stories inferior to his more
high-flown fantasies, but "The Collected Jorkens," a
three-volume edition from Night Shade Books ($35 each),
reveals them to be funny, inventive, and at times -- by
Dunsany's standards -- even moving. As diversions, they have
a happy, Wodehousian appeal; but they hardly seem the work
of a once celebrated "genius" (an informal designation that
Dunsany clung to till the last).
Hunger and some collegial competition might have prompted
Dunsany to push his gifts further, but he was too
comfortably situated to be motivated by either. "Genius," he
pronounced in a letter to a friend, "is in fact an infinite
capacity for not taking pains." In other words, "genius" was
another kind of aristocracy, nurtured by similar policies of
avoidance. To work too hard or too earnestly at any
profession would amount to questioning the premise
underlying Dunsany’s own excellent position in life: the
idea that exalted status is a matter of blood rather than
sweat. He found it easier to settle into a modest literary
career and to gripe about the laurels he was denied than to
apply his gifts to the contemplation of difficult and
possibly disappointing truths. Once he started, where would
it end? For a moment, perhaps, he considered it, but the
moment passed. According to Amory, in 1919 Dunsany took out
a new notebook in which he intended to answer the challenge
of the day and pasted into it a line clipped from a
newspaper: "It is a great responsibility to have survived
the war." The book remained blank.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
"It's a political statement -- or, rather, an
*anti*-political statement. The symbol for *anarchy*!"
-- Batman, explaining the circle-A graffiti, in
_Detective Comics_ #608