Bradbury on Dunsany (and Sime)

So, Ray Bradbury's passing reminds me of his brief account about the time he went to see Lord Dunsany on one of the latter's trips to America near the end of his life, in the mid-1950s.

"The Seeming Unimportance of Being Sime"

At UCLA some 25 years ago* Lord Dunsany stood before a mob of students and was about to name the finest writer of English during our century.

He hestitated before giving us the answer. My mind flashed authors at me. Aldous Huxley? Thomas Hardy? Writer of English? Well, after all, Hemingway did write English, yes, and what about Faulkner, or even Steinbeck? Then back to the English -- English: Shaw. Yes, Shaw must be it!

No.

Lord Dunsany waited on himself, and made us wait as he gathered the name like a dry wisdom in his mouth. Then he uttered it.

Rudyard Kipling.

A gasp ran through the crowd. A shocked laugh knocked itself out of my throat. Good old Ruddy Rudyard, of course. An old love of mine, lately gone out with the tide, but perhaps now coming back.**

Indeed, Kipling has come back. Not all the way, but he will survive because he is truly excellent.

Meanwhile, Lord Dunsany himself went out with the tide. But as with all things of varying quality, especially fantasy writers, he is re-appearing in our midst.

And Someone named Sime with him.

--at this point, Bradbury goes into an discussion (interesting, but tangental to our purposes) of how the young generation were teaching their teachers the value of science fiction and fantasy: "Heinlein and Tolkien and Clarke", while at the same time rediscovering for themselves "the imaginative calligraphies of Escher, the storm-wracked arthritic landscapes of Rackham, the shadowed haunts of Dore, the delightful animal and bug frolics of Grandville, and perhaps now into such territory as Sime seems to have inhabited". He concludes with the possibly rhetorical query: "Can you name another time in history when such a literary and artistic rediscovery rused and fired by teenagers -- existed or existing -- succeeded and prevailed? I can think of none."

--Introduction to SIDNEY H. SIME: MASTER OF FANTASY, cmp Paul W. Skeeters [1978]

*this was written in 1978 --JDR

**given that folks have been predicting Kipling's come-back since 1939 at least (cf. Auden's poem on Yeats' death), I'm thinking it's time we stopped waiting for that Godot. Ain't gonna happen. --JDR

So, an interesting little glimpse into a great writer of one generation coming all too briefly into contact with a great writer of a previous generation. I'm glad we have this little vignette; wd that we had more like it.

--John R.

Illustrating the Hobbit

So, one of the great things about being a guest of honor at the recent LEOCON I in Commerce, Texas was that I got to attend the presentations of my fellow speakers, and see Doug Anderson's slide-show* of HOBBIT art. I'd seen this twice before, most recently when the second edition of his superb ANNOTATED HOBBIT came out in 2002. But it's an ever-evolving presentation: there were pieces he showed that were new to me, as well as old ones I'd forgotten and many more I'm simply happy to see again.

One of the newer features was the inclusion of Maurice Sendak's sample illustration from the mid-sixties, at a point when he was mooted to produce an illustrated edition (that ultimately came to naught, aside from this one piece),** and he also mentioned a Frazetta HOBBIT piece I hadn't heard of before.*** It's fascinating to see different artists' interpretations, yet I agree with Doug that Tolkien himself is the best illustrator of his own works.

Afterwards, I had a question. If you could have anyone illustrate THE HOBBIT, who would it be? It has to be an artist who was actually alive at the time and theoretically could have done the job -- i.e., not Tenniel or Van Gough, who both died long before the book was published, but someone like Mucha (d.1939) or B. Potter (d. 1943) wd be fair game.

Doug, when I put the query to him, had an inspired choice: S. H. Sime doing Mirkwood. I can't compete with that choice, but after mulling if over a while I opted for Edward Gorey as someone who wd do an interesting, distinctive, and yet somehow possibly get-it-right set of illustrations. As a back-up, it'd have been fun to see what Tolkien's world wd have looked like as illustrated by Hugh Lofting.

So, if you cd pick anyone to illustrate THE HOBBIT, who wd it be?

--John R.

*although, as I think he observed in these days of no more actual slides, it'd probably more properly be called 'a multi-media presentation'. For me, who still dials a phone, 'slide show' will still do.

**cf. my earlier blog post about this one,

http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/2011/03/sendaks-hobbit.html

***here's the link to a handful of Frazetta Tolkien designs; I think he showed us the one of Gollum paddling his boat with his great big-toed feet. http://frankfrazetta.org/tolkien0001.php

I'm pretty sure I've seen at least one more years back at The Tolkien Shop's online site, but it was of Gandalf & the Three Walkers meeting with King Theoden at Edoras.

WORMWOODIANA

So, while I'm on a Doug Anderson kick, I wanted to celebrate the recent launching of Doug's collaborative blog. Doug is not just a superlative scholar but better than anyone I know in finding out things about obscure dead authors (we were once on a panel together of that name at Wiscon along with several other people, and his author was more obscure, though not more dead, than any of the other offerings).

A while back Doug starting doing reviews in a little journal called WORMWOOD. Now, as of sometime in June, he's started a blog to which he and other contributors make postings similar to the fare in the journal, although so far there seem to be fewer reprints of old impossible-to-find stories from decades ago and more articles and notes about such works--which seems to me to make the blog a good complement to the physical journal.

I haven't read all the posts yet, the blog having been already in progress when I discovered it, but already there's been at least one real gem: Sidney Sime's colour illustration of the first JORKENS story back in 1926, which features Sime's portrait of Dunsany himself as Jorkens. So far as I know, this is Sime's only portrayal of his longtime partner. It thus makes a nice accompaniment for Dunsany's intensely moving word-portrait of Sime, which he wrote upon learning of Sime's death in obscurity and poverty in the early days of World War II, the first and last sentences of which read

"We have lost, in a time of losses, when loss is nothing out of the ordinary, a genius, whose stupendous imagination has passed across our time little more noticed by most people than the shadow of a bird passing over a lawn would be noticed by most of a tennis party."

"And now that vast imagination has left us, having enriched our age with dreams that we have not entirely deserved."

(THE GHOSTS OF THE HEAVISIDE LAYER [1980], pages 168-175)


I first saw this illustration in Edinburgh during a research trip in May 1987 but have never been able to get a copy (the Milwaukee Public Library's records state that they have one, but it's in storage in their sub-sub basement, and I was never able to retrieve it on mulitple efforts). Thus, I am delighted to find it posted here (https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW8IRexvyuHZYwdv5ZzFI36OvtDbazx7Yj_i1tNMjq0ljndPItUE3iWbUAzi5Xyo2mN_tOtfvKixr9cyiWUNvj2A1k5-4XaPDiDiZYlhbYAZYxltT20JRuWySEtfWw90Zwlt6n2t8IKfc/s1600-h/Sime+Jorkens+1926.jpg). Quite aside from its associational value, it has intrinsic interest in that it reveals that by 1926 Dunsany had already gone entirely grey, if not white -- I suspect from the stresses of the war years, particularly his harrowing experiences of 1916 (which had such an impact on his work that I devoted a whole sub-section of a chapter to it in my dissertation). I had always assumed that the pictures of Dunsany that appear as frontispieces to the three volumes of his autobiography -- PATCHES OF SUNLIGHT [1938], WHILE THE SIRENS SLEPT [1944], & THE SIRENS WAKE [1945] were contemporaneous with those books' publications. I now believe they are instead pictures of Dunsany as he appeared during the years covered by those volumes, so that (for example) the photograph of Dunsany that appears in the middle volume -- my favorite image of him, the only one which makes him look like an author -- probably shows him as he was at age forty, when the book opens, rather than nearing sixty, as he was when it was published.

And all this from just a single post from a newly launched blog. WORMWOODIANA promises great things, and I've already added it to my short list of sites I check regularly; when I have time, I'll have it added to the list of recommended links on my website. Well done Doug (and associates)!

--John R.


In the meantime, here's the link:

http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/