Considered
by many as the creator of the fantasy genre (as opposed to fairy
stories), Lord Dunsany (1878-1957) wrote without revision or rewrites -
in other words, his first draft served as his final draft. Oh, yes, as
incredible as it might seem, Dunsany penned his tales straight through
with a quill of his own making and then wife Beatrice would type out his
stories and off they'd go to the publisher. What a stylist! What a
natural storyteller!
I plan to post reviews for a number of Lord Dunsany tales. The Hashish Man is one of sixteen brief stories included in A Dreamer's Tales. The story is available online via a simple Google search.
THE HASHISH MAN
Like Dunsany himself, the story’s narrator is a writer of the fantastic, as in Bethmoora,
a tale of a beautiful desert city suddenly abandoned by all its
inhabitants. One evening at dinner in London, the man in the next seat
informs the narrator of his mistake as to the reason why all fled
Bethmoora. Astonished, the narrator/author asks, “Why! Have you been
there?” To which the man answers: “Yes; I do it with hashish. I know
Behmoora well.”
As if to prove his point, the man takes a small
box of black stuff that looks like tar out of his jacket pocket and says
he got it from a gypsy. The narrator will not be distracted; he asks
why every woman and man ran from Bethmoora. The man replies: partly the
Desert's fury and partly due to ferocious Thuba Mleen, emperor of the
region, who advised all to leave.
Thuba Mleen. S.T. Joshi, one of
the foremost scholars of supernatural fiction, notes that Lord Dunsany
gave particular attention to names, many of his characters' names
bringing to mind the exotic Far East or Middle East. Turns out, right up
to our own day, Thuba Mleen, sometimes called the King of Yellow, is a
name used by contemporary fantasy writers and creators of computer
games.
The man continues, relating how he met the sailor with a
black scar from the narrator's story, met him in a tavern where the
sailor told him how he witnessed the population's flight from Bethmoora
but the sailor didn't know the reason why they all fled and vowed to
return to Bethmoora to find out.
Can you imagine what an author
would think if someone told him/her that they had an actual conversation
with a character from the author's fiction? And not only that, if the
character provided more information about the story than the actual
author? Mind blowing! We certainly can agree Lord Dunsany has a good
feel for what hashish can do to a user's perceptions.
At this
point the man shifts to the wonders of hashish, how with hashish one is
taken out of oneself, as if on wings. "You swoop over distant countries
and into other worlds." He goes on to say that once he discovered the
secret of the universe but has since forgotten it (ah, a hashish man!).
Likewise, he knows the Creator of the universe doesn't take Creation
seriously; rather, the Creator sits out in space with His work in front
of Him and laughs (of course, laugh, laugh, laugh, hashish man!).
Does
it end there? No! The hashish man is on a roll. He tells of his time
out in the ether realm: he met a battered, prowling spirit belonging to a
man killed by drugs hundreds of years ago, a spirit who led him to
regions unimaginably remote. And once in those far out distant lands, he
faced a quandary since his parting with that ancient spirit was far
from pleasant - isolated, he couldn't use his imagination to find his
way back.
Help! Help! He desperately needed help. Finally a huge
grey shape, the spirit of some great people, maybe even the spirit of an
entire star, pointed him in the right direction of our sun and solar
system. Somehow (sigh), our hashish man managed to get back and just in
time: he body began stiffening as he sat in his chair before his
fireplace. After some moments, his arm and fingers thawed out enough
where he could pull the cord to summons his servant to call the doctor.
The doctor informed him that he had a case of hashish poison but all
would have been all right on his travels if only he didn't have the ill
fortune to meet that nasty, prowling spirit. Sidebar: as readers we can
ask if our hashish man is an entirely reliable narrator.
But the
question posed by the narrator/author remains: why exactly did all of
the Bethmoorans flee their city? To answer this most important question,
the hashish man tells of his future travels to the city of Bethmoora
itself, his catching sight of the sailor strolling down the sandy
streets, the sailor peering into empty houses, the sailor singing songs
before leaving through the city gate. But just then three men on camels
appear. They overwhelm the sailor and bind him in ropes. Meanwhile, the
hashish man admits he could do nothing since he Bethmoora presence was
entirely of the spirit, his body remained in Europe.
Those three
men haul the sailor to the palace of horrible Thuba Mleen. Ghastly
tortures and other gruesome happening transpire under the gaze of the
Yellow King. The hashish man provides us with all the lurid details
including the hallucinogenic, dramatic climax. We read:
"Then
two men of the spear-guard slipped from the room, and each of them
brought back presently a golden bowl, with knobs on it, full of hashish;
and the bowls were large enough for heads to have floated in had they
been filled with blood. And the two men fell to rapidly, each eating
with two great spoons - there was enough in each spoonful to have given
dreams to a hundred men. And there came upon them soon the hashish
state, and their spirits hovered, preparing to go free, while I feared
horribly, but even and anon they fell back again to their bodies,
recalled by some noise in the room. Still the men ate, but lazily now,
and without ferocity. At last the great spoons dropped out of their
hands, and their spirits rose and left them. I could not flee."
Did
I say dramatic climax? Actually, what happens in the hashish man's
story is only one climax leading up to an even greater and more tragic
climax back in the dinning room with the narrator.
Quite the
provocative tale. Lord Dunsany poses a number of important philosophic
questions: Who has greater access to the worlds of imagination, a
hashish man or an author of fantasy? What are the possible dangers
associated with taking powerful drugs? What separates interior dreams
and creative flights of fancy from our ongoing dream of waking reality?
Anglo-Irish
author Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany, or,
more commonly, the name he used for all his many books - Lord Dunsany
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