In the Land of Time Read Free Page A

liar, I felt that at least there could be nothing boastful about my stories. 8
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    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