DUNSANY'S DICTATOR (1934)

So, as part of my re-acquainting myself with Dunsany, I've been re-reading some of his more obscure works. While I made a good-faith effort between 1987 and 1990 to read everything Ld D wrote, there were some things that I only read once and others not published until after I'd finished the dissertation and moved on to other projects.

 

One such obscure item is IF I WERE DICTATOR, a small (107 page) booklet from 1934 that was part of a series of at least eight authors. It's not a serious treatise but more a listing of pet peeves and what he'd do about them if he were put in charge. Writing very much tongue in cheek (he names his dictator The Grand Macaroni and his minions the 'gold shirts'), he restrains himself for the most part.

 

There's not much here that's memorable, but he does let himself go when he devotes a brief section to the issue of why people not overtly evil nevertheless do evil in the world —for example, food adulteration*—but the words cd just as easily apply to environmental degradation:

 

p.11: 

The men who do these things are not the public's enemies because they hate their kind, but because of the limitation of their vision. They cannot see farther than the means that make them and their families rich; they cannot see the harm that they are to the community, and to their own families which are part of the community. 

 

p. 57: 

On a completely different topic, another passage states in passing that

The last war was won with a fortnight or so to spare, the people of the now Disunited Kingdom having been as close as that to starvation.  

 

I don't know if this is or was a widely held opinion,** but it's interesting, esp. when we remember that Dunsany served in that war, writing official wartime propaganda.

 

--John R.

current reading: Dunsany (misc)

 

*a topic he addressed several times in his works, perhaps most directly in the play CHEESO. For Dunsany at his most unabashed on this topic, see my next post, featuring his short piece 'The Reward', from Fifty-one Tales.

**My thinking being more along the lines of Mosier's MYTHS OF THE GREAT WAY.