In the Land of Time Read Free

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:
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    It was from material gathered on this journey that on the 29th and 30th March, 1925, I wrote a tale called The Tale of the Abu Laheeb. There was in this tale more description of the upper reaches of the White Nile or of the Bahr-el-Gazal than I have given here; indeed the whole setting of that fantastic story may be regarded as accurately true to life, though not the tale itself. I mention this short story and the date, because it was the first time that I told of the wanderings of a character that I called Jorkens. He was my reply to some earlier suggestion that I should write of my journeys after big game and, being still reluctant to do this, I had invented a drunken old man who, whenever he could cadge a drink at a club, told tales of his travels. When in addition to his other failings I made him a