Another Dunsany Spotting (and Cabell too)

So, continuing my slow slog through Edmund Wilson's fiction* I came across an unexpected mention of Dunsany and Cabell that I thought I'd share.

The passage in question comes in Edmund Wilson's 1929 novel I Thought of Daisy, a dismal roman a clef about life in Greenwich Village featuring characters based on EW's friend John Dos Passos, the love of his life Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wilson himself, and an idealized flapper who is the girl of his dreams. In one scene the point-of-view Wilsonian narrator finds himself in an unfamiliar flat and, characteristically, checks out the bookshelves:

". . . on the shallow mantlepiece, a plaster cast of the Winged Victory; and between two narrow windows, which looked down on the Thirty-fourth Street car tracks, a book case containing, I noted, volumes of D. H. Lawrence, Cabell, Dunsany, and Shaw; George Moore's Memoirs of My Dead Life; Freud's Interpretation of Dreams; Frank Harris's Oscar Wilde; several volumes of Levy's Nietzsche and a whole shelf's array of Dostoevsky."

[1995 paperback edition, page 103]

It's not entirely clear (to me, at any rate) what Wilson means by this assemblage, who seem merely to be popular authors of the time, representing what was fashionable to read in the previous decade. It may be intended as characterization of the apartment owners, the Micklers', but this seems somewhat unlikely: we never do meet Mrs. Mick, who's locked herself in the bathroom, while her husband Larry turns out to be drunken lout, given to waving a pistol around and taking pot-shots at things (like the aforesaid Winged Victory).

More likely, it's simply local color: these are the sort of books you'd find on the shelves of a typical apartment belonging to the sort of folks Wilson hung out with back in the day, a detail transcribed from his notebooks for verisimilitude (of which his 'novel' is full).

Of the nine authors mentioned, Lawrence, Shaw, and Wilde are now firmly ensconced in the canon --which was not necessarily the case when Wilson wrote this passage. Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Freud had already come into their own as major thinkers. George Moore is lesser know today but secure in the second tier (authors you hear about when studying for a degree but probably never actually read).

That just leaves Cabell, whose vogue peaked in 1917 with the banning of JURGEN but whose stock remained high throughout the twenties, and Dunsany, who became famous during the war years as a playwright and who reached the height of his renown around 1919-1920 at the time of his U. S. tour. Interestingly enough, a latter-day sign of their lingering cachet can be found in the fact that the volumes of Cabell and Dunsany in C. S. Lewis's library, the remnants of which are now at the Wade, are American editions formerly belonging to Joy Gresham, who was a native-born New Yorker of the next generation (she wd have been in her early teens about the time Wilson's book on Greenwich Village appeared).

Next up: Dunsany and Fitzgerald.

--John R.

*my advice to anyone thinking of reading I Thought of Daisy? Don't.

An Invented Language (1954)

So, in 1954 a man born in the 1890s and widely known as a critic, despite having a few literary pieces appear over the years, published a fantasy in a medieval setting which included passages in an invented language.

I refer, of course to --- Edmund Wilson.

The work in question, a play called CYPRIAN'S PRAYER, was inspired by a Frank Stockton story. It's a sort of 'sorcerer's apprentice' story, and while on the whole I think best left in its well-deserved obscurity, the passages in his invented language add an interesting touch. The main character, having made a pact with the devil, finds himself saddled with three annoying imps as assistants. From time to time, they or some of the other infernal characters speak in what Wilson describes as "their native diabolic language". Here's a sample:

The Little Devils, emboldened now, come out and

begin to jeer at him in their native diabolic language.

BONGO. Mákka-nánya oónya gígna-weésta!

STINGO. Mákka-nányi gánzi gleésta-gleésta!

SLINGO. Gánza wíddi-wíddi skímba-nímbi!

ALL (pointing and prolonging the vowels

in a final intensive insult).

Nímba-nambáyanyi-neeésta neeésta!

(They break into derisive laughter.)

and here's another

JEZEBEL (to the Little Devils).

Gyench-gónchamyank-gónya-gyench!

and another.

LUIGI (hypnotic and soothing).

Abátha amátha-náthas.

(Per-emptorily and sharply)

Jezebel, amákkin-tákkyulak knáthas!

Now, for all I know this might be a real-world language,* though I doubt it (when Wilson tells us in a stage direction that the word "strúmpstharso" should be stressed on the syllable "strúmpsth" that seems to be pretty clearly a slightly garbled version of 'strumpet' (particularly since the line's addressed to Jezebel). Similarly, "Zoop-zoop!" as a scornful dismissal sounds suspect to me. And it might be a pre-existent artificial language, though again I doubt it. I suspect it's simply highly detailed gibberish, which Wilson has gone to some pains to spell as phonetically as possible.

So, any created-language linguists out there interested in taking on the challenge of deciphering Wilson's 'diabolic' speech?**

--John R.

*according to the Poe Principle, as set down in The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the very fact that it sounds like language helps confirm that it is gibberish.

**of which there are several more examples in dialogue.

Final Thoughts re. Wilson

So, three more scattered tidbits that might (or might not) be worth sharing.

(1) Wilson thought so highly of his attack on Tolkien ("Oo Those Awful Orcs") that he sent a copy to Cabell, asking his opinion of Tolkien's book. [EW to JBC, Apr 12 1956; LETTERS ON LITERATURE AND POLITICS, p. 542-543]. There's no record of Cabell's response (I even once asked Leon Edel to help me find if there was one, but to no avail), other than that Wilson found it "a delightful surprise" [EW to JBC, May 16th 1956; ibid p. 543].

(2) There's no record, so far as I know, of Wilson's ever having read C. S. Lewis (I suspect he wdn't have considered any of CSL's fiction "literature"*), but as an equal-opportunity insulter, he did once make a passing slap at Charles Williams, in the poem "The Mass in the Parking Lot"

. . . And whom should we meet there, on the loose,

But Andre Gide in a big burnoose.

What were his words of wisdom? Damn it,

He was whooping it up for Dashiell Hammett.

More correctly garbed, we encountered later

T. S. Eliot, the Great Dictator.

Having just awakened from troubled sleep,

He told us Charles Williams was terribly deep.

And Wystan Auden, with rigorous views

But his necktie hanging around his shoes,

Expounded his taste for detective stories,

Which he reads to illumine the current mores . . .

[NIGHT THOUGHTS, 1961, p. 181]

(3) Finally, yesterday I found out that Edmund Wilson's son with Mary McCarthy was named . . . Reuel Wilson.

Can't make this stuff up.

--JDR

-----------------------------

*what with the trilogy being science fiction, and the Narnia books children's books. TILL WE HAVE FACES might have interested him, but that book of Lewis's didn't do v. well and there's no reason to think Wilson ever heard of its existence. Plus, of course, Wilson disliked Xianity, and CSL's apostlizing was the single best-known thing about him.

Well, This is a Weird Twist

So, pursuant to crossing a few 'i's and dotting a few 't's, as it were, re. Edmund Wilson and Tolkien, today I found a strange one.

I was already aware of the passing reference in a 1966 letter [LETTERS ON LITERATURE AND POLITICS, 1912-1972, p.660] where he notes his daughter's fondness for THE HOBBIT ("[she] read it or had it read to her innumerable times")* and concedes it must be a pretty good children's book, though noting he'd never read it himself (apparently he did not see reading aloud to the young daughter as one of his parenting duties).

Today I found a few new ones, all minor and all dating from the 1960s, but one came in such a strange context, and with odd connotations, that it floored me. Musing in old age (1967-68) on how much fuss sex has caused, good and bad, he suddenly veers (as Thorne Smith's Mr. Owen wd put it) into the following remarkable observation/assertion:

"Yet homosexuals don't seem to

have flowered and borne fruit,

don't seem to have fully matured:

Auden with his appetite for Tolkien."

(Edmund Wilson, THE SIXTIES, p. 642)

[posthumously published, 1993]

So, when in his famous Tolkien-bashing review back in 1956, when he concluded that "certain people, in England at least, have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash", was this code for homosexuals, conceived of like Waugh's Sebastian Flyte carrying his teddy bear around Oxford? I don't like to think it, but that seems to be the implication here.** By that interpretation, he approves of writers who by contrast include plenty of old-fashioned philandering, like JURGEN or (I'm told) many of the characters in MEMOIRS OF HECATE COUNTY, uncensored tales about traditionally male seducers of a long string of all-too-willing maidens, (other people's) wives, &c.

In any case, V. odd.

--John R.

*this wd be the same little girl who at age 7 loved THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

**in any case, he's quite wrong: LotR has never been a book adopted by and championed by the gay community, so far as I can tell. There have been one or two gay Tolkien scholars over the years, but that's far fewer than we might reasonably expect.

Edmund Wilson: wrong about everything

So, I was recently re-reading Edmund Wilson's piece on H. P. Lovecraft ("Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous", 1945), and found I'd missed his ding of Lord Dunsany that occurs in this piece in passing. In his discussion of SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE ("a really able piece of work"), Wilson says that Lovecraft "writes about [his special field] with much intelligence". He then nonetheless uses Lovecraft's admiration for Dunsany as evidence of his innate second-rateness:

"He shows his lack of sound literary taste in his enthusiasm for Machen and Dunsany, whom he more or less acknowledged as models".

While I wasn't aware of this Dunsany reference in Wilson, it's thoroughly in keeping with what I wd have expected. The only fantasy author I know of whom Wilson approved was James Branch Cabell, whom he admired for the satirical and salacious parts.

However, it turns out this was not always the case. In an earlier piece on H. L. Mencken [1926], he had taken Mencken to task as someone who "is never tired of celebrating the elegances of such provincial fops as Lord Dunsany, Hergesheimer, and Cabell, who have announced -- it is, I think, Mr. Cabell's phrase -- that they aim to 'write beautifully about beautiful things'." Here Wilson lumps Dunsany and Cabell (and the unknown-to-me Hergesheimer) among the dilettantes unworthy of serious attention.*

The same Dunsany-&-Cabell-among-the-goats attitude holds in the only other reference to Dunsany I've found so far among Wilson's reviews: this time in a 1928 piece on Thornton Wilder. Here he praises Wilder by contrasting him to Dunsany and Cabell: "he [Wilder] has a hardness, a sharpness, that sets him quite apart from our Cabells, our Dunsanys, our Van Vechtens and our George Moores. He has an edge that is peculiar to himself".

So, that Wilson wd disparage Tolkien was entirely in keeping with his decades-long disparagement of fantasy, even as practiced by the greats, like Dunsany and Tolkien. Which makes his changing his mind on Cabell all the more interesting: having attacked him when he was popular, he began to champion him after he'd slipped into obscurity. Partly this was Wilson's contrariness, which grew on him towards the end of his life, and partly it was due to his seeing his role as one who puffed the unjustly neglected and took down a peg those who were being praised more than he felt they deserved.

More on this later.

--John R.

*Mencken was well-known for promoting Dunsany and played a large part in introducing him to an American audience.