A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

By the time Lovecraft discovered him, Dunsany had published much of the fiction and drama that would gain him fame, even adulation, on both sides of the Atlantic: Time and the Gods (1906); The Sword of Welleran (1908); A Dreamer’s Tales (1910); The Book of Wonder (1912); Five Plays (1914); Fifty-one Tales (1915); The Last Book of Wonder (1916); Plays of Gods and Men (1917). Tales of Three Hemispheres would appear at the very end of 1919, marking the definite end of this phase of his work. By this time, however, Dunsany had achieved idolatrous fame in America. In 1916 he had five plays simultaneously produced in New York, as each of the Five Plays appeared in a different ‘little’ theatre off Broadway. His work was appearing in the most sophisticated and highbrow magazines—Vanity Fair, The Smart Set, Harper’s, and (a little later) the Atlantic Monthly. By 1919 Dunsany would probably have been considered one of the ten greatest living writers in the Englishspeaking world.

An examination of Dunsany’s early tales and plays reveals many thematic and philosophical similarities with Lovecraft: cosmicism (largely restricted to The Gods of Pegana); the exaltation of Nature; hostility to industrialism; the power of dream to transform the mundane world into a realm of gorgeously exotic beauty; the awesome role of Time in human and divine affairs; and, of course, the evocative use of language. It is scarcely to be wondered at that Lovecraft felt for a time that Dunsany had said all he wished to say in a given literary and philosophical direction.

Lovecraft could hardly have been unaware of Dunsany’s reputation. He admits to knowing of him well before he read him in 1919, but he had passed him off as a writer of whimsical, benign fantasy of the J. M. Barrie sort. The first work he read was not Dunsany’s own first volume, The Gods of Pegana, but A Dreamer’s Tales, which may well be his best single short story collection in its diversity of contents and its several powerful tales of horror. Lovecraft admits: ‘The book had been recommended to me by one whose judgment I did not highly esteem.’¹² This person was Alice M. Hamlet, an amateur journalist residing in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and probably a member of Winifred Virginia Jackson’s informal coterie of writers.

Lovecraft would repeatedly say, even late in life, that Dunsany ‘has certainly influenced me more than any other living writer’.¹³ The first paragraph of A Dreamer’s Tales ‘arrested me as with an electrick shock, & I had not read two pages before I became a Dunsany devotee for life’.¹⁴

Hamlet had given Lovecraft A Dreamer’s Tales in anticipation of Dunsany’s lecture at the Copley Plaza in Boston on 20 October 1919, part of his extensive American tour. Lovecraft attended the lecture in the company of Miss Hamlet and her aunt. The group secured seats in the very front row, ‘not ten feet’ from Dunsany; it was the closest Lovecraft would ever come to meeting one of his literary idols, since he was too diffident to meet or correspond with Machen, Blackwood, or M. R. James.

Dunsany must at this time have agreed to act as Laureate Judge of Poetry of the UAPA for the 1919–20 term. In this function he probably read some of Lovecraft’s poetry published during that period, but in his letter to UAPA President Mary Faye Durr announcing his decision he makes no reference to any work by Lovecraft. Hamlet, however, presented Dunsany a copy of the Tryout for November 1919, which contained one of two poems written on Dunsany by Lovecraft. ‘To Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany’ must have been written very shortly after Lovecraft’s attendance of the lecture; it is a dreadful, wooden poem that starkly reveals the drawbacks of using the Georgian style for subjects manifestly unsuited to it. Dunsany, however, remarked charitably in a letter published in the Tryout that the tribute was ‘magnificent’ and that ‘I am most grateful to the author of that poem for his warm and generous enthusiasm, crystallised in verse’.¹⁵ A few months later Lovecraft wrote a much better tribute in three simple stanzas of quatrains, ‘On Reading Lord Dunsany’s Book of Wonder’ (Silver Clarion, March 1920). Dunsany apparently never read this poem.