While on the subject of fantasy fans and writers making the pilgrimage to see Dunsany when, after decades, he resumed his visits to America in the mid-1950s, here's what Lin Carter had to say about the time he saw Dunsany in person:
I met him in 1954, on what must have been his last speaking tour of America.* (During an earlier tour, in November of 1919, a deeply moved young member of his audience was the then amateur writer, H. P. Lovecraft, who was still years away from becoming the most celebrated American author of supernatural tales since Edgar Allen Poe.) When I saw him, on the evening of February 24th, 1954, at the Theresa L. Kaufmann Auditorium of New York's YM-YWHA Poetry Center, Dunsany was tall, slender, erect, and vigorous for a man then in his seventy-sixth year. He had ruddy apple-cheeks, sparkling frosty blue eyes, a trim little spike of snowy goatee, and was dressed in a sloppy, baggy suit of nondescript grayish tweeds, with a soft-collared white shirt and a loosely tied old-fashioned foulard instead of a tie.
--Foreword by Lin Carter to the Adult Fantasy Series edition of THE KING OF ELFLAND'S DAUGHTER [June 1969]
*actually, no; according to his biographer, Mark Amory, Dunsany made lecture trips to America in 1953 (as described by Hazel Littlefield Smith in her memoir LORD DUNSANY: KING OF DREAMS), after a gap of decades; in 1954 (when Carter saw him), and in 1955; a planned 1956 trip didn't materialize, and he died in 1957.
--It's a pity that with so much detail about the time and place and exactly how Dunsany was dressed, Carter fails to mention a single thing Dunsany said. Alas. Rather as if someone were to visit Tolkien and leave behind a detailed account of the weather that day and exactly what flowers were blooming outside the house on Sandfield Road. Still, nice to know he made the pilgrimage to see the legended figure and pay homage when he had the chance.
--JDR
