Dunsany in California

Lord Dunsany visited the United States five times, the final three times in the 1950s when he went to California. There he stayed with friends, including Hazel Littlefield Smith, who lived in Palos Verdes Estates, a coastal town established in 1923 as a planned community to the south and west of Los Angeles. According to the 1950 US Census, its population was less than two thousand people (though that climbed to nearly ten thousand by 1960). It is now one of the wealthiest cities in the United States. 

The exact dates of his visits are difficult to ascertain, but his first trip in 1953 was from around mid-March to sometime in early June. The second and third trips were in 1954 and 1955, probably around the same late-winter-spring dates. Another trip was planned for 1956 but had to be cancelled. Dunsany traveled by himself, without his wife, certainly for the 1953 visit, and likely for the other two trips. 

His primary hostess was Hazel Littlefield Smith (1889-1988--she died about a week shy of her 99th birthday), the wife of Dr. Dennis V. Smith (1887-1975). She was educated at the University of Michigan (B.A. 1913), and after her marriage she and her husband, an opthalmologist who was a medical missionary, spent thirteen years in Peking, from 1915-1928. They settled in Palos Verdes Estates in 1930, and lived until 1962 in a house they named Ming Manor, reflecting their interests in Chinese life, which remained a considerable focus.

As Hazel Littlefield, Mrs. Smith published through a vanity press in 1959 a memoir Lord Dunsany: King of Dreams, which recounts her friendship with Dunsany. The first trip of 1953 gets the most coverage. The book also has a nice selection of photographs, and I reproduce a few of them below, augmented by a few others to show Dunsany in the last five years of his life (he died in October 1957 at the age of 79). 

The above photo (by Al Frederic) shows Dunsany in the library at Ming Manor. The shelves behind his head are filled with a set (24 volumes) of the 1929 fourteenth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Of the books on the top shelf, I can discern H.G. Well's The Outline of History, among a few others.

This photo (also by Al Frederic) shows Dunsany in the garden at Ming manor.

This photo is by the well-known photographer Sanford Roth (1906-1962), and appears in his posthumous Portraits of the Fifties (1987), compiled by his widow. There is no date attached to it, but a place:  "Palos Verdes, California."  One suspects it was possibly taken at Ming Manor, but Roth is not mentioned in Hazel Littlefield's memoir.

Another photograph (credit unknown) of Dunsany, though I'm uncertain where it first appeared. (Anyone know? A cropped version appears without any credit in August Derleth's Thirty Years of Arkham House 1939-1969, published in 1970.) The exotic decorations again suggest Ming Manor.

Dunsany seems to have been a fastidious dresser in these photographs. Always in a suit and tie, with a waistcoat, and a fresh flower on his lapel (and sometimes with a pocket square in the chest pocket). All of these photographs taken in California must date from 1953-1955.

Some Offtrail S.H. Sime illustrations for Lord Dunsany, Part 2 of 2

In the early 1920s, G.P. Putnam's Sons became Dunsany's publisher on both sides of the Atlantic. Most of the books had different dust-wrappers in each territory (and the US books were accordingly printed in the US). The London office utilized new art by Sidney H. Sime, first on the limited editions (discussed in Part 1of 2, see here).

Putnam's gradually acquired the rights to the collections of Dunsany's plays, as previously published by other publishers. And besides the hardcover collections, Putnams published acting editions in wrappers which had Sime illustrations on the covers. There are three different Sime covers.

The first shows Skarl the Drummer from The Gods of Pegana.

The second is a new Sime, a wrap-around illustration somewhat out of his normal style, but definitely Sime. 

 The third is Sime's Pegasus in the stars.

Sime's Pegasus reappeared on other Putnam's (London only) dust-wrappers, from The Charwoman's Shadow (1926) through The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens (1931), after which Putnam's New York ceased to be Dunsany's US publisher, and Putnam's London took on only two further titles, a poetry collection titled Mirage Water (1938), and the third collection of Jorkens stories, Jorkens Has A Large Whisky (1940), both of which had Pegasus on the dust-wrapper. (Putnam's did not published the second collection, Jorkens Remembers Africa, 1934.) 

image John W. Knott

 

Sime's final illustration for Dunsany while at Putnam's was the frontispiece for The Blessing of Pan (1927).

Sime produced his final illustration for Dunsany as the frontispiece of the Heinemann edition of My Talks with Dean Spanley (1936).

"Breakfast Makes Us Britons": A William Hope Hodgson Letter Discovered

William Hope Hodgson married Bessie Gertrude Farnworth in Kensington, London, on 26 February 1913, and the newlyweds soon settled in Sanary, Var, on the south coast of France. First they stayed at a villa called Les Mimosas, but by July they had settled in the nearby Chalet Mathilde, where they would remain until after War broke out in August 1914, when around October they removed to England. Bessie settled in Borth, in Wales, joining Hodgson's mother and his younger sister Lissie. Hodgson went to London to join the Officers Training Corps. 

Richard Bleiler recently discovered a letter from Hodgson, published in The Daily Mail for 16 October 1913, sent by Hodgson from the Chalet Mathilde in Sanary. Thanks to Richard for letting me share it here.

The humorous note has little literary value, beyond telling us that Hodgson read the Continental edition of The Daily Mail, but the snarkiness is at least diverting.

Some Offtrail S.H. Sime illustrations for Lord Dunsany, Part 1 of 2

S.H. Sime's full-page illustrations for the books of Lord Dunsany run from The Gods of Pegana (1905) through My Talks with Dean Spanley (1936), some of which were produced in glorious photogravure. But in the 1920s, after Dunsany had secured G.P. Putnam's Sons as his publisher on both sides of the Atlantic, the London office celebrated Sime's work in ways no previous publisher of Dunsany's had. 

First there were the sumptuous oversized limited editions, signed by both Dunsany and Sime, of The Chronicles of Rodriguez (1922),  Time and the Gods (1923), and The King of Elfland's Daughter (1924). For these, Sime drew new emblematic illustrations for the fronts of the dust-wrappers. Here are each of the three.

[end of part one]

Where do You Get Your Ideas? Lloyd Alexander responds

It must have been in the late 1970s that I read Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles (five novels, plus occasional shorter pieces collected in The Foundling and Other Tales of Prydain in 1982). I liked them, but wished they were a little less juvenile. Soon afterwards I also read his early novel, Time Cat. (This was before I declared the subgenre of cat fantasies verboten.) And I think I read a few others, but didn't persist as I preferred fantasies written for adults rather than for children.  

Recently, I ordered from ILL a children's book Where Do You Get Your Ideas? (1987) by Sandy Asher. It includes some original replies by writers to whom Asher had sent her question in advance.  I was after one author's reply in particular, but I was pleased to see the following comment from Lloyd Alexander, which stirred memories.

Ideas, I think, come from two places. Outside—that is, everything we see and do, and everything that happens to us. And inside—when our own special imagination starts mixing with the outside.

Some years ago, my beloved orange cat, Solomon, gave me the idea for a book called Time Cat. Solomon had a way of suddenly appearing in my workroom, then disappearing before I noticed that he had gone. This made me pretend that he was magically able to visit any of his nine lives whenever he felt like it. Time Cat was my first fantasy for young people and I have Solomon to thank for it. (p. 11)

Ray Bradbury on Tolkien and C.S. Lewis

In 2023, Jonathan R. Eller edited and published a thick volume Remembrance: Selected Correspondence of Ray Bradbury, which I'm just getting around to reading.* Not much on the Tolkien and C.S. Lewis front, but there is one interesting and relevant exchange. 

Russell Kirk wrote to Bradbury on 12 September 1967, asking: 

have you been influenced at all by William Morris, George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien? (p. 153)

Bradbury replied on 16 September 1967:

No, I haven't been influenced by Morris, MacDonald or Tolkien, though I have read and enjoyed Lewis' Screwtape Letters; however he has not been any influence that I know of. (p. 154-155)  

Kirk had already written on Bradbury in his 4 April 1967 column in the National Review, "From the Academy: Count Dracula and Mr. Ray Bradbury"--according to Eller, this column was reworked in Kirk's book Enemies of Permanent Things (1969). But Kirk's questions in this letter were for another piece, "The Revival of Fantasy", which appeared in Triumph, May 1968, and which was itself revised for Enemies of Permanent Things. Despite Bradbury's disavowal of influence, Kirk repeatedly compares Bradbury with Lewis and Tolkien and others. Kirk even quotes from an earlier passage out of the same Bradbury letter, but does not even hint at Bradbury's disavowal. 

* The book is very oddly arranged, and the footnotes at the back are keyed to twelve different chapters, none of which are designated in the page headers, making the reader look back to the contents page to see which chapter contains page, say, 153, and then on to the back of the book to find where the Notes to that chapter begin (again, there are no designations in the page headers to help). I can think of many punishments the designer should endure--the first being unemployment. That the copyright page credits one Ruth Lee-Mui as interior designer, as though her work is something to be proud of, is mind-boggling.

Dunsany on His Early Stories

In 1917, the John W. Luce Company of Boston published a "Gift Edition," a boxed edition of six volumes of his early stories. One set he inscribed (probably during his 1919 US tour), and it was put up for auction by Swann Galleries in 2011. Their catalog entry here shows the handwritten poem by Dunsany that he inscribed in The Gods of Pegana. I transcribe it here.

In a dream I must have gone,

  In a dream and sleeping fast, 

To a city never known,

  In a land that cannot last.

Thence these stories I have brought

  For your cities mad with steam,

That a dream from skies unthought

  May be mingled with your dream. 

Dunsany