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

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.