Cabell and the Rabble

I have written previously about the unknown source of the couplet that tells how to pronounce correctly Cabell's surname ("Tell the rabble / My name is Cabell").  Some recent digging has produced some interesting further information. 

Burton Rascoe (1892-1957) discovered Cabell's The Cream of the Jest in the fall of 1917, and early the following year he serialized parts of Cabell's next book, Beyond Life (published in book-form in January 1919), in The Chicago Tribune. This began a bit of controversy, summed up by H.L. Mencken in The Smart Set for August 1918 ("A Sub-Potomac Phenomenon"). But ancillary to the main commentary there appeared a bit of verse by Bert Leston Taylor in his Chicago Tribune column, "A Line o' Type or Two": 

The Seething Question

 

In all literary gabble

Concerning Mr. J.B. Cabell

No one has yet got up to tell

If it be Cabell or Cabell.

To which, Burton Rascoe (himself by that time a correspondent of Cabell's) replied: 

You may slip it to the rabble

That his name is James B. Cabell. 

This appeared in the 27 May 1918 issue of The Chicago Tribune.

Dunsany Himself on Film

The photograph of Dunsany reproduced at right comes from a magazine from 1950.  Dunsany looks, at age 72, a bit scruffier than in most other contemporary photos, with a longer and less-artfully trimmed beard.  But what is especially interesting to me is the caption, with the information that Dunsany is reading one of his Jorkens stories before the BBC television cameras. I know of audio recordings of Dunsany's voice (he occasionally read stories over the radio in the 1930s), and I wrote about one here. But the possibility that he was filmed reading a story is new to me. If anyone knows any further details about such things, please let us know via the comments. 

The only time (currently) that I know of when Dunsany was filmed was for a ten-minute segment of the long-running  BBC Television show "Speaking Personally," which ran from November 1936 through April 1964. Dunsany's segment was broadcast at 9 pm, on Tuesday, 7 June 1938. Likewise, I do not know whether it, or any filmed footage of Dunsany, still survives.

Dunsany's headstone

In perhaps the oddest scene of Digby Rumsden’s frustrating one-hour documentary on Lord Dunsany, Shooting for the Butler (2014), the filmmaker himself looks for Dunsany’s gravestone in grounds of the St. Peter and St. Paul Church in Shoreham, Kent. Unable to find it, he concludes that it is no longer there. But others have not only found it, but photographed it.

Mike Barrett (a Kent resident) wrote about visiting it in “Dunsany: The Final Resting Place” in The New York Review of Science Fiction for December 2008. He noted that “the unpretentious grave is easy to find.” In Roy Bateson’s The End: An Illustrated Guide to the Graves of Irish Writers (2004), there appears the below photograph. Bateson notes that he “found the grave almost immediately. Go up the path and stand in front of the church, The grave is about 30 paces to the left of the church and about four metres back towards the road.” 

 

 Both Barrett and Bateson transcribe the headstone:

IN
LOVING MEMORY OF
EDWARD JOHN MORETON DRAX
18TH LORD DUNSANY
DIED 25TH OCTOBER 1957
AGED 79 YEARS
'NATURE I LOVED AND NEXT TO NATURE ART'
BEATRICE, LADY DUNSANY
DIED 30TH MAY 1970
AGED 89 YEARS

Barrett identified the qute from Walter Savage Landor’s four-line poem, “Dying Speech of an Old Philsopher” (1849):

I strove with none; for none was worth my strife;
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

There is a poem (presumably by Lord Dunsany, but it has no known publication) on the plaque at the bottom, reading:

I, THAT HAVE LOVED THE SUN, LIE HERE, AND LOVED
THE GREAT GREY SHADOWS OF THE CLOUDS THAT PASS
OVER THE EARTH, THE SOFT CRISP ENGLISH AIR,
THE GREY SEPTEMBER DEW THICK ON THE GRASS.

I LOVED THE COOL STRANGE LIGHT THE RAINBOW GIVES,
THE DEEP NOTE OF THE BEES UP IN THE LIME,
THE SMELL OF HONEYSUCKLE & SWEET BRIAR,
AND THE HOT SCENT, UNDER MY FEET, OF THYME.

LATE SUNLIGHT SLANTING ON THE IRISH PLAIN,
THE LINE OF LOW BLUE HILLS AGAINST THE SKY
I LOVED WHILE SIGHT & MEMORY WERE MINE
OTHERS WILL LOVE THEM STILL WHILE HERE I LIE.

Dunsany on Politics and Art

Dunsany was a candidate for political office in 1906. He lost. He quickly decided that his loss was a good thing. And he seems never to have written much about his political views. But in 1919, Norman MacDermott was founding the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead, and he solicited a statement from Dunsany for his new (short-lived) journal, Theatre-Craft: A Book of the New Spirit in the Theatre. Dunsany's commentary, though brief, touches on both politics and art, and is nonetheless quite interesting.  I copy it below. 

Reconstruction

I am a Tory. That is to say, I believe in leadership by the class whose leisure and opportunities give them the best chance of thinking rightly.

Yet if it happens that this class, in spite of its opportunities, fail to lead rightly, I do not then believe in the continuance of their leadership merely for the sake of old romantic traditions.

Our age lives; live people must lead it.

To what depths animal life descends, and whether there be any­thing lower than the sponge, I do not know; but at the top of life the highest manifestation is the arts. We are not more powerful, nor hardier, than many of the beasts, nor do we endure wounds as well; it is in our intellect that we are superior to the beasts, and of the intellect the arts are the supreme flower.

What of the arts in England? Especially what of the theatre?

A struggle upwards is taking place among the people of England for better homes, better wages, better conditions of life. Will the workingman be content in his better conditions with no pictures upon his walls, no music in his house, and no thoughts in his head? I doubt it. Hence the revolution against the holy places, the autocratic playhouses of the West End.

A theatre is soon to be set up in Hampstead in which it will be possible to see plays that touch on the affairs of man without re­stricting their scope to the crudest emotion of all; for though we be cousins of the ape, we have also had dreams of the angels.

I have heard it said that they will not get people to go as far as Hampstead. But are there no people there already?

I have no bitterness against any community and no axe to grind; but I live in a great age, and when for the first time after four and a half years I enter what should be the temples of human thought, I come away depressed and sometimes disgusted. . . .

Of course, there are exceptions. But if reverent and decent ser­vices were exceptions in cathedrals religion would be in a bad way.

How will Hampstead take it? If they welcome and keep a better theatre than there is in the West End, they will have done more for the prosperity of their district than if they raided Bond Street and looted all the jewellery that was there and displayed it in windows of Hampstead. The West End of London has almost been a centre of civilisation. The situation goes begging!

Dunsany's Famous Story Ledger

In the 1919 "new and revised edition" of Edward Hale Bierstadt's Dunsany the Dramatist (originally published in 1917), Bierstadt printed a sample year from Dunsany's record book of what he wrote and when.  Dunsany had sent this sample year, 1912, to Bierstadt in the autumn of 1917, noting "I send you a sample year from the record I have kept of all the tales I have written since the end of 1906." Dunsany readers have been salivating over this record ever since. Here is the transcription, from pages 212-213 of Bierstadt's book (click on the illustration to make it larger). 

Especially intriguing are the tales marked "unpublished." And of course the hints of publication entice the bibliographer, like the entry for "The Food of Death":  "Saturday Review? Some chatty book about the stage; name forgotten and immaterial."  ("The Food of Death" did appear in the Saturday Review of  30 August 1913, and the "chatty book about the stage" was The Era Almanack and Annual for 1913.) One really, really wants to see the whole of this record!  

Oddly, I recently happened upon a reproduction of the handwritten version of this year that Dunsany sent to Bierstadt, reproduced in a periodical just prior to the publication of the new edition of Bierstadt's book. Bierstadt's transcription of Dunsany's handwritten copy of the record is pretty accurate.