Long a footnote in our literary history, Dunsany’s fine body of work deserves to be rediscovered

IN spring, 1912, a 24-year-old road worker in a labourer’s cottage in Slane, Co Meath, tentatively posted a handwritten notebook of poems to a famous writer living in a majestic castle 20 miles away, asking if his lordship might find merit in the poems.

Every young unknown poet knows the agony of waiting for validation, some words of approval when they nervously first send out their work. For months no reply came. The unknown road worker, Francis Ledwidge, imagined that his aristocratic neighbour, Lord Dunsany, had dismissed his precious notebook as worthless.

In fact, the notebook hadn’t yet reached Dunsany. Ledwidge could not have imagined the life his neighbour – an Irish chess and pistol-shooting champion who hunted big game in Africa – was leading. Dunsany was idling away the spring in Cannes before enjoying casually “wasting June” in London, unaware of any parcel.

Dunsany was no dilettante, however, but a serious, generous writer who, when Ledwidge’s notebook finally reached him, recognised his neighbour’s lyric brilliance. Without poetry, Ledwidge and Dunsany would have led segregated lives, 20 miles and yet a million miles apart. But Dunsany generously started a friendship that caused suspicion on both sides of a rigid class divide.

One evening Ledwidge cycled home from work to find Dunsany’s letter awaiting him. He opened it and it opened up a new world for him. It contained an invitation to visit Dunsany Castle. When Ledwidge cycled those 20 miles in 1912, he wasn’t just crossing a class divide – he was cycling across the fault lines between national identities in an Ireland and a Europe soon to be torn apart by war.

Although born in London and educated in Eton, Lord Dunsany

– or Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett – saw Meath as his home, just like Ledwidge did. Dunsany’s family could trace their line back to St Oliver Plunkett, the Catholic Archbishop martyred at Tyburn in 1681.

When Ledwidge dismounted his bike outside Dunsany Castle in 1912 to stare up at the windows of the library where he was soon given free rein, what sort of future did he imagine? He never imagined that, within a few years, he would be soldiering in rat-infested trenches near where dying men screamed for release from their agony in ‘no man’s land’, or that, in 1917, his shattered limbs would be buried in a bomb crater in Flanders, with Dunsany – his fellow-writer who offered the hand of friendship – falsely blamed by some for Ledwidge’s death, because this was easier for examining why committed Irish nationalists like Ledwidge and Tom Kettle had enlisted.

Dunsany never encouraged Ledwidge to enlist and was annoyed when Ledwidge did so, though Dunsany himself joined up in 1914. What Dunsany did was take his neighbour under his wing, provide him with an allowance when unemployed, and persuade major literary journals to publish this unknown poet.

In 1916, in a supreme irony, Ledwidge, who longed to fight for Ireland, was wounded in Serbia, while Dunsany, who longed to fight the Germans, was wounded in the 1916 Rising. Shot in the face when insurgents commandeered his car, Dunsany lay in a Dublin hospital while Dublin blazed. It sums up Dunsany’s character that, when Ledwidge immediately wrote laments for the executed 1916 leaders, Dunsany praised their merits despite being left with a permanent scar partly paralysing his face.

I suspect Ledwidge would be astonished to know that this year saw numerous events staged to mark the centenary of his death in Flanders in 1917. But I suspect he would also be astonished – and hurt for his friend – to discover how forgotten a figure Dunsany has become.

When Dunsany is remembered today in Ireland, it is as an appendix to the Ledwidge tragedy

Dunsany outlived his protégé by four decades, dying in 1957. Ledwidge was not the only writer he influenced. Jorge Luis Borges references Dunsany in his ‘The Library of Babel’. The science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke corresponded with Dunsany for decades and fantasy writers like Michael Moorcock and David Eddings cite him as a major inf luence.

For decades, he wrote books and plays that reached an audience Ledwidge could never have imagined. Yet when Dunsany is remembered today in Ireland, it is as an appendix to the Ledwidge tragedy. Ledwidge and Dunsany were both victims of class prejudice, with Dunsany encountering reverse snobbery. Writers were meant to starve in garrets, not wander off to play chess internationally. If some people doubted if true literature could spring from a labourer’s cottage, others felt it could not spring from a castle either.

Wednesday marked the 60th anniversary of the death of this deeply original Irish writer, who never scaled the heights of Joyce, but left behind an important body of work that deserves to be rediscovered, especially Dunsany’s great fantasy novel, ‘The King of Elfland’s Daughter’, and his semi-autobiographical, ‘The Curse of the Wise Woman’.

Oliver St John Gogarty mockingly nicknamed Ledwidge as Dunsany’s “pet harper”. Time has proven that the road worker who posted those handwritten poems was far more than just Dunsany’s protégé. We honour Ledwidge in his own light.

Similarly, Dunsany was far more than just Ledwidge’s patron. Maybe it’s time we again see him in his own light and salute this masterful fantasy author who died in Dublin, aged 79, 60 years ago, leaving behind a legacy of not just friendship and generosity but of books. Some books (like some of Ledwidge’s weaker poems) haven’t stood the test of time, but Dunsany’s best works still shine, waiting to intrigue a new generation of lovers of fantasy literature.