The Weird Tale, page 8
The non-fantasy novel His Fellow Men (1952) is Dunsany’s last exhaustive statement on religion. Here we are presented with a hopelessly naive and idealistic young man, Mathew Perry, who roams the world searching for a religion that practices “tolerance”; of course, he finds it nowhere—certainly not in the Ireland he is compelled to flee because he cannot accept the conventional enmity of Catholic and Protestant, and not in Africa, Arabia, India, or England. Although Dunsany commits the aesthetic mistake of supplying a contrived happy ending, we are left with the impression that Perry’s quest was doomed to failure.
We have reached the end of Dunsany’s career, but we have by no means finished discussing his early work. In particular we must demolish the notion that all his early collections, from The Gods of Pegāna to Tales of Three Hemispheres, represent a uniform body of work. It is not merely that the Pegāna mythos is not sustained after Time and the Gods; it is that Dunsany’s attitude toward his work changes, and does so rather early on. I think it would have been impossible for Dunsany to have maintained his biblical prose or his otherworldly subject matter for very long, and sure enough we find exceptions as early as the third collection, The Sword of Welleran (1908). “The Kith of the Elf-Folk” is the first tale that actually acknowledges the existence of the “real” world and presents the conflict between the “Wild Thing” of the title and the conventional human beings who do not understand what she is. “The Highwayman,” later in the collection, is Dunsany’s first tale set entirely in the “real” world.
Further curious things happen in A Dreamer’s Tales (1910). By now much of the biblical archaism of style has slipped away, and the sense of fantasy is created almost wholly by exoticism of setting (“Idle Days on the Yann,” “Bethmoora”). “The Hashish Man” is a somewhat disturbing tale, and not entirely for the reasons Dunsany intended: it is a conscious sequel to “Bethmoora” and signals the beginning of a strain of self-cannibalisation that would reach a height in Tales of Three Hemispheres.
With The Book of Wonder and The Last Book of Wonder something disastrous has occurred. Dunsany can no longer summon the perfect naïveté that made us marvel at The Gods of Pegāna, and his growing sophistication (or, more likely, his increasing disinclination to suppress his sophistication) leads him to mar his creations with ever-increasing doses of whimsy, irony, and deflation. The first two paragraphs of “The Quest of the Queen’s Tears” (The Book of Wonder) tell it all:
Sylvia, Queen of the Woods, in her woodland palace, held court, and made a mockery of her suitors. She would sing to them, she said, she would give them banquets, she would tell them tales of legendary days, her jugglers should caper before them, her armies salute them, her fools crack jests with them and make whimsical quips, only she could not love them.
This was not the way, they said, to treat princes in their splendour and mysterious troubadours concealing kingly names; it was not in accordance with fable; myth had no precedent for it. She should have thrown her glove, they said, into some lion’s den, she should have asked for a score of venomous heads of the serpents of Licantara, or demanded the death of any notable dragon, or sent them all upon some deadly quest, but that she could not love them—! It was unheard of—it had no parallel in the annals of romance.
I think it is passages like this that led Lovecraft to rue the passing of Dunsany’s early manner: “As he gained in age and sophistication, he lost in freshness and simplicity. He was ashamed to be uncritically naive, and began to step aside from his tales and visibly smile at them even as they unfolded. Instead of remaining what the true fantaisiste must be—a child in a child’s world of dream—he became anxious to shew that he was really an adult good-naturedly pretending to be a child in a child’s world.”[61]
Lovecraft is, I suspect, right as to the result but wrong as to the motive: I believe Dunsany simply found the Gods of Pegāna vein running dry, so that the only thing to do was to poke fun at it. This comes out especially well in an exquisite self-parody, “Why the Milkman Shudders When He Perceives the Dawn” (The Last Book of Wonder), where we are never given the answer to the question implied in the title. In both “The City on Mallington Moor” and “The Long Porter’s Tale” we find that it is possible to get to the Edge of the World with a ticket from Victoria Station—a ticket “that they only give if they know you.” There is complete deflation at the end of “The Long Porter’s Tale,” where we are told flatly that the “grizzled man” who told it is “a liar”; while the interminable “A Story of Land and Sea” concludes with a pompous “Guarantee to the Reader,” whose final paragraph reads: “Meanwhile, O my reader, believe the story, resting assured that if you are taken in the thing shall be a matter for the hangman.”
Tales of Three Hemispheres continues the lamentable tendency, with abrupt shattering of the atmosphere by direct addresses to the reader, transparent social satire, and, on occasion, an intentionally flat and pedestrian style used for comic effect. Self-cannibalisation continues with two moderately interesting but ultimately vacuous continuations of “Idle Days on the Yann.”
Accompanying this shift of attitude is a shift in Dunsany’s whole conception of fantasy. In The Gods of Pegāna, aside from a curious mention of Olympus and Allah on the very first page, one would have no idea that the “real” world ever existed. Indeed, this mention—“Before there stood gods upon Olympus, or every Allah was Allah, had wrought and rested Māna-Yood-Sushāī” (my emphasis)—obviously states a chronological priority of Pegāna to the real world. Although this conception is maintained in a few other stories—note the reference to “the days of long ago” in “The Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth” (The Sword of Welleran)—it is not consistent in Dunsany. Indeed, Dunsany has singularly little concern with the relation of his invented realms to the “real” world. Babbulkund was known to Pharaoh and Araby and received gifts from Ceylon and Ind. There were Europeans in Bethmoora before its desertion. The narrator of “Idle Days on the Yann” comes “from Ireland, which is of Europe, whereat the captain and all the sailors laughed, for they said, ‘There are no such places in all the land of dreams.’” So at least Yann is in a dream world. And we have seen how it is possible to get to the Edge of the World from Victoria Station. I wonder which way the route lies. North? Does Dunsany think, with Samuel Johnson, that the Hebrides are the Edge of the World? I don’t know, and it hardly matters. There is, of course, no reason why Dunsany should be consistent in the establishment of his fantasy lands: he is not writing a connected epic like Eddison or Tolkien, and he would be the first to scorn the notion that trains, maps, or any such appurtenances of the rational world have any application to his realms.
But what is more important than the precise location of Pegāna is why it and similar imaginary realms gradually disappear from Dunsany’s work. A glancing reference in The Queen’s Enemies to “fairy Mitylene,” uttered by Queen Nitokris of Egypt, may be our starting point: it does not take a classical scholar to know that Mitylene was a very real city in ancient Greece, and this is our first suggestion in Dunsany that the realm of fantasy is dependent upon perspective and imagination. The Last Book of Wonder brings this point home emphatically. In “A Tale of London” London is spoken of in the same exotic terms as any fabled Eastern city; in “A Tale of the Equator” a Sultan finds greater satisfaction in hearing his court poets describe a wondrous city than in actually building it. ‘The Last Dream of Bwona Khubla,” in Tales of Three Hemispheres, completes the circle: here again a mirage of London seen in the depths of Africa inspires all the awe and wonder that Babbulkund or Sardathrion ever did.
Later works continue to develop and enrich the idea. The King of Elfland’s Daughter, if stylistically a striking resumption of Dunsany’s early biblical manner, is thematically quite different. One would think that this tale of a mortal man winning the hand of Lirazel, the daughter of the King of Elfland, would provide an opportunity for contrasting the prosiness of the “real” world with the wonder of an imaginary realm; but in large part the reverse is the case. To be sure, Elfland is a place of magic; but the very name of the “real” country involved—Erl, the German for “elf”—already signals a very tenuous distinction between our world and fairyland. Similarly, the names of characters in Erl—Narl the blacksmith, Guhic the farmer, Oth the hunter, Vlel the ploughman (chap. 5)—remind us pointedly of certain inhabitants of Pegāna and its congeners. And to Lirazel and the other denizens of Elfland, the real world is just as much a source of wonder as their realm is to us:
He [a troll] told of cows and goats and the moon, three horned creatures that he found curious. He had found more wonder in Earth than we remember, though we also saw these things once for the first time; and out of the wonder he felt at the ways of the fields we know, he made many a tale that held the inquisitive trolls and gripped them silent upon the floor of the forest, as though they were indeed a fall of brown leaves in October that a frost had suddenly bound. They heard of chimneys and carts for the first time: with a thrill they heard of windmills. They listened spell-bound to the ways of men; and every now and then, as when he told of hats, there ran through the forest a wave of little yelps of laughter. (chap. 24)
In Don Rodriguez and The Charwoman’s Shadow Dunsany solves—or, rather, evades—the problem by setting the tale in a half-fantastic historical time—the “Golden Age past its wonderful zenith” (The Charwoman’s Shadow, chap. 1), whenever that is—but the matter is taken up again in The Curse of the Wise Woman and later novels. Wise Woman is, strangely, the first of Dunsany’s novels to deal explicitly with Ireland; and with its two companions, Rory and Bran (1936) and The Story of Mona Sheehy (1939), we reach the culmination and resolution—a very curious one—of Dunsany’s approach to fantasy.[62] Has Dunsany here merely replaced Pegāna with Ireland? The answer is not quite as simple as that. Certainly Dunsany’s lyric descriptions of Ireland in these novels create a certain sense of shimmering fantasy, but his approach is really subtler than this. In all three novels we are quite clearly dealing with a real Ireland of farmers, tinkers, and estates. The contrast to this reality is provided, first, by the dialect speech put in the mouths of the Irish characters and, second, by the allusions to names out of Irish folklore or topography—the half-imaginary realm of Tir-nan-og in Wise Woman, the mountain Slievenamona in Rory and Bran and Mona Sheehy. The first replaces Dunsany’s archaistic prose, the second his resonant, imaginary place-names. The Wise Woman’s ponderous utterances now supply the only escapes into prose-poetry that Dunsany allows himself:
“We walked down the river, Mother,” said Marlin.
“Aye, the river,” said she, “and one of the great rivers of the world, though it’s small here. For it widens out on its way, and there’s cities on it, high and ancient and stately, with wide courts shining by the river’s banks, and steps of marble going down to the ships, and folk walking there by the thousand, all proud of their mighty river, but forgetting the wild bog-water.” (chap. 10)
The Story of Mona Sheehy seems to represent a dramatic shift in Dunsany’s attitude to fantasy: here we are concerned with a young girl who believes herself to be a child of the fairies, when in fact Dunsany makes it abundantly—almost excessively—plain to us that she is merely the product of an illicit liaison between Lady Gurtrim and Dennis Flanagan. The opening and closing sentences are identical—“‘I never saw a more mortal child’”—and Dunsany never tires of reminding us that Mona’s belief in her magical birth is all a delusion. It is not merely that fantasy has become relative, as in the “fairy Mitylene” reference: fantasy here is explicitly denied. I am not sure that this novel is not the sole representative of an anomalous new class, which might be called “psychological fantasy,” analogous to “psychological horror.” Just as psychological horror is horrific but non-supernatural (Bloch’s Psycho, Campbell’s The Face That Must Die), so in psychological fantasy the fantasy does not exist except in the mind—here, in the mind of Mona Sheehy and the many townspeople who share her delusion. Dunsany even provides some simple-minded anthropology to account for the phenomenon: “the story of many a fairy, many an elf, is probably but the history of the small things dwelling in woods, altered a little by the eye of man, for he saw them in dim light, altered again by his mind as he tried to explain them, and altered again by frailties of his memory, when he tried for his children’s sake to remember the stories that his grandmother told him” (chap. 20).
I think, though, that this climax to Dunsany’s fantasy work has some possible antecedents. Thematically Mona Sheehy is very similar to Lirazel in The King of Elfland’s Daughter: both are outcasts from conventional society, Lirazel supernaturally, Mona non-supernaturally. In The Curse of the Wise Woman the role of the supernatural is highly problematical: Dunsany leaves entirely open the question of whether the titanic storm concluding the novel is a natural occurrence or the result of the Wise Woman’s curses. Some highly significant passages in Rory and Bran also anticipate the renunciation of fantasy in Mona Sheehy: “The world is full of wonders, and all the wonders that our imagination paints are but the mirages of them” (chap. 2). And note the constant use of similes when fairyland is invoked: “the notes of thrushes [seemed] like notes from the horns of Elfland” (chap. 20). What in the early Dunsany would have been a bold metaphor explicitly identifying the thrushes with Elfland has now become a mere simile that precisely negates such an identification. Mona Sheehy, then, has its predecessors.
The shift, of course, is not irrevocable, and with many later short stories and the novel The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders we are back in the realm of the supernatural; but the manner in which Dunsany now approaches the supernatural is very different and must be discussed when we study the notion of belief in Dunsany’s later work.
Human Beings versus Nature
A curious coherence can be noticed in Dunsany’s novels, stories, and plays of the late twenties and thirties, a coherence whose central theme is what might be called the non-human perspective of life. The plays The Old Folk of the Centuries (1930), Lord Adrian (l933), Mr. Faithful (1935), and The Use of Man (1937) and the novels My Talks with Dean Spanley (1936), Rory and Bran (1936), and the very late The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders (1950) all focus around the conflict of human beings with the animal world. But in truth the theme is broader than this, and the use of non-human perspective—seeing the world as, say, a dog or a fox might see it—is merely a vehicle for Dunsany’s wholesale criticism of modern society and the industrialised civilisation it has erected. The focal point for this criticism is nothing less than the very brief play The Evil Kettle (in Alexander and Three Small Plays, 1925).
This powerful little play recounts the familiar anecdote of the young James Watt as he notices his mother’s teakettle boiling and begins to realise the awesome potential of steam. Later the Devil comes to him and shows him apocalyptic visions of the future with the familiar “dark, Satanic mills” marring the natural environment. The symbolism of this play is very obvious (steam = factory smoke = the fires of Hell), but it nevertheless lays the groundwork for two fundamental and related principles in Dunsany’s later work: first, the tragic and increasing separation of human beings from their natural environment; and, second (evidently the cause of the first), the dominance of the machine in modern civilisation. The first theme is developed in a much more interesting and dynamic way than the second, and it is worth studying in detail.
The Blessing of Pan and The Curse of the Wise Woman, two of Dunsany’s strongest novels, portray the cleavage between civilisation and nature very poignantly. In The Blessing of Pan it is clear that the elfin tune played by Tommy Diffin, a tune that ultimately summons the inhabitants of an entire town to follow him up the hills and reenact ancient rituals, is a means for reintegrating himself and his listeners with primal nature. In an early scene Tommy finds it impossible to take a game of chess seriously: chess presents merely an artificial problem and solution. Lovecraft once remarked in a letter that games are pointless because “after I solve the problem . . . I don’t know a cursed thing more about Nature, history, and the universe than I did before.”[63] In Dunsany the game is a symbol for the meaningless artificiality of modern civilised life: it is too far from nature. Such a simple thing as taking off one’s shoes holds great significance for Tommy: “Somehow in bare feet he felt a little closer to that mystery of which the pipes were the clue” (chap. 6). And the ending leaves no doubt of Dunsany’s message: “Tommy Duffin’s curious music . . . seems to have come at a time when something sleeping within us first guessed that the way by which we were then progressing t’wards the noise of machinery and the c1amour of sellers, amidst which we live today, was a wearying way, and they turned from it. And turning from it they turned away from the folk that were beginning to live as we do” (chap. 35).
Similarly, The Curse of the Wise Woman particularises the conflict of human beings versus nature in the struggle of the Wise Woman to defeat a development company that plans to drain an ancient bog—the precise theme, curiously enough, of Lovecraft’s early story “The Moon-Bog” (1921). Here the Wise Woman herself is described as “something akin to those forces that ruled, or blew over, the bog, and that cared nothing for man” (chap. 3); and the storm that in the end destroys both her and the development project points to the bitter and perhaps mutually destructive conflict in which the human being dares to take on nature. And, however repulsive it may be to modern sensibilities, we must admit that the narrator’s hunting expeditions across the face of Ireland—the bulk of the novel deals with them—reinforce the harmony that can be established between the human and the natural worlds. Yes, the narrator—he is perhaps the only significantly autobiographical character in all Dunsany—kills and kills frequently, but in some strange way he establishes a bond between himself and the world around him. Many of us perhaps find Dunsany’s enthusiasm for hunting very repellent; but he never made apologies for it and never regarded it as an aberration. It is true that the narrator of The Curse of the Wise Woman kills principally for food, not for sport (fox hunting is defended on the ground that the fox is a menace to sheep and poultry); but, more important, his hunting compels him to learn the ways of nature, and in the end he is no more or less predatory than the animals he hunts and shoots.
