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.
It is easy to see why a figure like Dunsany would have had an immediate appeal for Lovecraft: his yearning for the unmechanized past, his purely aesthetic creation of a gorgeously evocative ersatz mythology, and his ‘crystalline singing prose’ (as Lovecraft would memorably characterize it in ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’) made Lovecraft think that he had found a spiritual twin in the Irish fantaisiste. As late as 1923 he was still maintaining that ‘Dunsany is myself … His cosmic realm is the realm in which I live; his distant, emotionless vistas of the beauty of moonlight on quaint and ancient roofs are the vistas I know and cherish.’16 And one must also conjecture that Dunsany’s position as an independently wealthy nobleman who wrote what he chose and paid no heed to popular expectations exercised a powerful fascination for Lovecraft: here was an ‘amateur’ writer who had achieved tremendous popular and critical success; here was a case where the aristocracy of blood and the aristocracy of intellect were conjoined.
The string of Dunsanian pastiches that Lovecraft produced in 1919–21 are scarcely worth studying in detail. Their actual debt to Dunsany—except in several surface features and, of course, in overall style and otherworldly content—has perhaps been exaggerated, and many of them do reveal concerns central to Lovecraft’s own temperament; but on the whole they are not among his finest tales, even of his early period. ‘The White Ship’, written in October 1919 and superficially based on Dunsany’s ‘Idle Days on the Yann’ (in A Dreamer’s Tales), is an interesting allegory on the loss of hope. Somewhat similar, and considerably more poignant, is ‘The Quest of Iranon’, perhaps the best of Lovecraft’s Dunsanian tales. ‘The Cats of Ulthar’ (written on 15 June 1920) is one of his most celebrated tales, and remained one of his own favourites in its portrayal of how the cats of the mythical city of Ulthar avenged the death of a kitten at the hands of a cruel couple in that town. ‘Celephaïs’ (written in November 1920) is somewhat embarrassingly derivative of Dunsany’s ‘The Coronation of Mr. Thomas Shap’ (in The Book of Wonder), in which a man takes to imagining himself a king of a mythical region of the imagination, to the degree that his work in the real world suffers and he is put in a madhouse. In ‘Celephaïs’ much the same thing happens: an unsuccessful writer dreams of the realm of Celephaïs, a realm that he had in fact imagined as a boy; later he occupies the realm permanently, while his body is found washed up by the tide.
Several stories written during this time that have not been considered ‘Dunsanian’ in fact owe something to Dunsany. ‘The Terrible Old Man’ (written on 28 January 1920) is set in the real world (the Massachusetts town of Kingsport, invented for this tale), and deals with the comeuppance of three potential robbers of a seemingly decrepit individual of excessively lengthy years. It recalls many of the tales in The Book of Wonder, which similarly deal with owlish gravity of attempted robberies which usually end badly for the perpetrators.
‘The Street’ was written in late 1919, and may have been inspired by some of the war parables in Dunsany’s Tales of War (1919). The basic plot involves the transformation of some unspecified street (but clearly one in New England) from one occupied by ‘men of strength and honour’ to one inhabited by foreigners. The entire history of the United States is encapsulated in obvious allusions. Finally the Street itself rebels against its occupation by a band of foreign terrorists by blowing itself up.
Lovecraft supplies the genesis of the story in a letter—a strike of the Boston police for much of September and October 1919, during which time the state militia had to be called on to patrol the streets.17 No doubt it was a very disturbing event, but at this time unionisation and strikes were almost the only option available to the working class for better wages and better working conditions.
‘The Street’ is nothing more than a prose version of such early poems as ‘New England Fallen’ and ‘On a New-England Village Seen by Moonlight’: there is the same naive glorification of the past, the same attribution of all evils to ‘strangers’ (who seem to have ousted those hardy Anglo-Saxons with surprising ease), and, remarkably, even a gliding over of the devastating economic and social effects of the industrial revolution. It is among his poorest works.
What, then, did Lovecraft learn from Dunsany? The answer may not be immediately evident, since it took several years for the Dunsany influence to be assimilated, and some of the most interesting and important aspects of the influence are manifested in tales that bear no superficial resemblance to Dunsany. Perhaps Lovecraft’s most perceptive account of Dunsany’s influence on him occurs in a letter of March 1920: ‘The flight of imagination, and the delineation of pastoral or natural beauty, can be accomplished as well in prose as in verse—often better. It is this lesson which the inimitable Dunsany hath taught me.’18 This comment was made in a discussion of Lovecraft’s verse writing; and it is no accident that his verse output declined dramatically after 1920. There had been a dichotomy between Lovecraft’s fictional and poetic output ever since he had resumed the writing of stories: how could tales of supernatural horror have any relation to the empty but superficially ‘pretty’ Georgianism of his verse? With the decline of verse writing, that dichotomy disappears—or, at least, narrows—as the quest for pure beauty now finds expression in tales.
More to the point, Lovecraft learned from Dunsany how to enunciate his philosophical, aesthetic, and moral conceptions by means of fiction, beyond the simple cosmicism of ‘Dagon’ or ‘Beyond the Wall of Sleep’. The relation of dream and reality—dimly probed in ‘Polaris’—is treated exhaustively and poignantly in ‘Celephaïs’; the loss of hope is etched pensively in ‘The White Ship’ and ‘The Quest of Iranon’. Lovecraft found Time and the Gods ‘richly philosophical’,19 and the whole of Dunsany’s early—and later—work offers simple, affecting parables on fundamental human issues. Lovecraft would in later years express his philosophy in increasingly complex ways as his fiction itself gained in breadth, scope, and richness.
In spite of his own assertions to the contrary, Lovecraft’s ‘Dunsanian’ fantasies are far more than mechanical pastiches of a revered master: they reveal considerable originality of conception while being only superficially derived from Dunsany. Interestingly, Dunsany himself came to this conclusion: when Lovecraft’s work was posthumously published in book form, Dunsany came upon it and confessed that he had ‘an odd interest in Lovecraft’s work because in the few tales of his I have read I found that he was writing in my style, entirely originally & without in any way borrowing from me, & yet with my style & largely my material’.20 Lovecraft would have been grateful for the acknowledgment.