A major (and, sadly, perennial) discussion has broken out across several of the online Howard forums in the past six weeks regarding de Camp’s controversial role in the promotion of Conan and the study of Robert E. Howard. In the ad nauseum back and forth that has ensued at the redoubtable website, www.conan.com, one of the points that I tried to make is that de Camp’s misinformation continues to poison the waters of literary relevance by distracting people with the surface reflection of Howard’s life, and a distorted vision, at that, causing them to ignore all of the nourishing fish that swim in the deep waters underneath. Okay, not my best metaphor ever, but you get the idea. These charges were met with a resounding, “Nuh Uh!” from Gary Romeo and a number of other de Campistas.

Lest anyone think that, just because L. Sprague de Camp has joined the choir invisible, his shadow doesn’t fall across the biographical details of Robert E. Howard anymore, may I present to you Mr. Arnie Fenner, a gentleman who was a minor somebody on the Howard Fanzine Scene of the 1970s and who now dines out solely on the fact that he actually knows Frank Frazetta.

To be fair, Fenner and his wife also collect and edit the Spectrum series of yearly fantastic artwork, and a wonderful collection it invariably is. Having no problem with their editorial efforts nor their eye for art, I will confine my bile-spewing to the fact that Tim Underwood let Fenner have a crayon and a few sheets of Big Chief to write an introduction to the forthcoming book, And Their Memory Was a Bitter Tree: Queen of the Black Coast and Others. Despite that redolent and Byzantine book title, this hefty tome will be of interest to maybe the nine or ten people on the planet who don’t have all eight Frazetta Conan paintings yet, or the dozen or more people who haven’t bought the three Del Rey Conans and wish to own eight of Howard’s stories about the legendary Cimmerian. That’s right, eight stories. Eight paintings. All for a mere one hundred dollars.

It’s this fact and this fact alone (meaning, the book is only going to appeal to the completist) that keeps me from issuing a Jihad on Arnie Fenner. Not because he knows Frank Frazetta, but because of the hatchet job he did on Robert E. Howard in the introduction to the book. Sure, this guy was a fanzine person back in the heyday of Howard publishing, but he’s been out of the loop for far too long, relying instead on his thumbworn copy of “The Miscast Barbarian” instead of checking out the publishing that’s been happening in Howard Studies in the past ten years. Some of that publishing is even available on the Internet! How very late 20th century.

Fenner’s intro is titled “Whispers of Immortality,” which sounds nice until you realize he’s talking apparently about Frazetta and not Howard. Here’s a juicy quote that starts the ball off right, and really puts the reader in the proper frame of mind to read some Robert E. Howard stories.

…more questionable are his own claims… of having to carry a pistol to ward off a host of unnamed “enemies” or of being an unbeaten participant of back alley “iron man” fights. Friends disputed Howard’s tales of being bullied in his youth, no one has been able to support any of his assertions regarding “assassins” waiting in ambush, and photographs of Robert show him as an unscarred, well-fed and not terribly muscular young man — certainly not the bare-knuckle brawler he alleged to be in his correspondence. He was the only one who seemed to be aware of his “reputation for toughness.”

First off, let’s take the old “imaginary enemies” bit off of the table, okay? In Texas, everyone has a gun in their car. In Cross Plains, in oil country, in the 1920s and 1930s, everyone had a gun. It was the culture, not paranoia. I found an instance of thieves ambushing a woman in an automobile, just like Howard described to Ed Price (the source of the “unseen enemies” speculation that de Camp cheerfully ran with), which I published in Blood & Thunder, a book that Fenner either hasn’t read, or dismisses completely. In fact, there’s a lot that reading B&T would have done a world of good for both Fenner and his nattering little introduction, but let’s move on for now.

Furthermore, Howard boxed. We’ve now got several eyewitness accounts of him doing so at the Ice House. I’m sorry that Clyde Smith and Truett Vinson weren’t in town when Howard did such things, but Dave Lee was and that’s who Robert was running with on those particular nights. By all living eyewitness accounts (and a couple of dead ones), Howard was a capable, if not accomplished, amateur boxer and frequently held his own amongst the roughnecks. When Robert discussed his fights, it was usually to list his injuries. Hardly bragging. But don’t let that stop Fenner from getting it wrong.

Regarding the bullying — who exactly disputed that, Arnie? Which friends? There are three sources that Howard was bullied as a boy (Novalyne Price, Isaac Howard, and Clyde Smith), and no one seemed to dispute the claim. The controversy over the bullying involves to what degree that Howard was bullied, and whether or not it was the psyche-scarring, soul-shattering event that de Camp made it out to be. Rusty’s article lays it all out quite nicely. You know, the interwebs can be a marvelous tool, should you choose to use them.

And finally, the photographs. I published one photo of Howard, roughly 17 or so, skinny as a rail with boxing accouterments on. The next chapter, some four years later, shows Howard filled out and squaring off with Dave Lee. Again, these photos are all available online at www.rehupa.com and I assure you, the quality of them prohibits seeing any kinds of scarring or any circumstantial bruising that may have occurred during the time that Howard was a regular at the ice house.

That whole paragraph that Fenner wrote is so chock-full of misinformation and flat-out wrongness, it makes me wonder why on earth it was even included. What does this have to do with Conan? Or Frazetta? Or the two together? Doesn’t it sound rather like Fenner is just slightly contemptuous of Howard, if not judgmental? He sure hasn’t taken any cues from the introductions to the Del Rey volumes, which actually manage to introduce and comment upon the texts featured without abject character assassination or snarky asides about the author.

But let’s get to the heart of the matter, shall we? Here’s that famous old hairshirt, slightly rewoven to give it a fresh new look:

…his co-dependent relationship with his mother — a relationship that prompted him to live at home at an age when his friends were marrying and raising families — reinforced the self-destructive feelings that surfaced whenever her health deteriorated.

We should be grateful, I suppose, that the word Oedipal wasn’t trucked out. I would love it if, just once, someone could somehow mention the suicide without linking it to his mother. Howard was Hester’s caregiver, that much is true, and they were close, in the very same way that Howard and his father weren’t. But the old theory about him being distraught is over twenty years out of date. Pick your favorite scenario: depression, despondence, altered state of consciousness from a lack of sleep, an accumulation of stress, or mix and match them all. But please stop peddling the town gossip, circa 1936. Howard was his mother’s primary caregiver. There is ample evidence to suggest that Howard was clinically depressed for as long as eight years. His mother’s deteriorating condition certainly contributed, it wasn’t the primary, nor the only factor in his decision to end his life.

Regardless, all of this is purely academic, and not worth mentioning while you are introducing eight stories about a character who embraces life with both arms and cuts a swath through his world in wide, vibrant arcs. Why keep bringing up mom and the suicide? It’s because Fenner doesn’t have anything meaningful to say about Conan, so he’s filling the space to get to the end of the page. And when he does have something to say about Howard’s writing, this is what we get:

…while Robert certainly was a tremendously gifted storyteller with a wholly original voice, capable of spinning an exciting yarn in first draft that could capture his reader’s imagination…he simply wasn’t a great writer.

…his writing is more rudimentary than lyrical and there is very little variety in his fiction. His characters are essentially very similar, regardless of the setting or time period…and he often recycled his plots and repeated situations, phrases, and descriptions. Attention to detail never got in the way of the story Howard wanted to tell….

Nice backhand. I’ve never met Fenner in person, so I have no idea what the shape of his head actually resembles, but let me just float this thought out there into the void: when you’re writing an introduction to a book by a famous author, you should at least pretend to like what you’re introducing. “Wasn’t a great writer?” Okay, Jack, you’re the expert, I guess. Not quite sure what you’re basing that on, but Jeez Louise, keep it to yourself, lest someone stray across that line in the intro and put the $100 book back on the shelves. “Wasn’t a great writer?” The Del Rey books haven’t gone out of print since they started publishing the trade paperbacks. Tens of thousands of people are coming to REH from the comics, the role-playing games, and now the MMORPG. And every new fan gets online and says, “Holy smoke! Where was I all these years! What else has Howard written that I don’t know about?” Never mind the generations of writers he inspired, nor the enduring presence of Conan in popular culture. If Arnie Fenner, the art expert, says Howard wasn’t a great writer — in an introduction to a book full of Howard’s writing — I suppose we should take him at his word.

As for that second paragraph, let me just confirm it for you: Fenner’s an imbecile. Either that, or he is willfully ignorant of the handful of significant critical advances that have occurred in the two decades when he was warming up to Frazetta and forgetting that he used to publish Robert E. Howard fanzines. Either way, this man has no business waxing intellectual about Robert E. Howard.

Howard’s use of poetical style is well documented by nearly everyone who’s written critically of the man in the past two decades (even de Camp noted it, Arnie; this is REH 101, here). For anyone to charge that there is little variety in Howard’s fiction tells me, among other things, that he hasn’t read any of Howard’s humorous writing. In other words, he’s basing that opinion on Conan and maybe some of the desert adventures that were turned into Conan stories. Giving Howard’s stories more than a cursory glance would reveal that they are, in fact, very different in tone and timbre, and that ridiculous excuse was part of de Camp’s defense for turning unsold Howard action stories into Conan yarns. Again, let me ask the Powers-That-Be at Underwood: Did Rusty Burke turn you down? Could you not find one of the websites that would have led you to, oh, I don’t know, ANY of us who could turn in an inspired, emotionally connected introduction without all of that hackneyed and tiresome crap cluttering it up.

I’m asking Underwood this because there is a responsibility here, one that the Howard scholars are taking seriously, and that is to present REH in the best possible light — especially in projects such as this. What Fenner did is little better than vomiting up the exact same whackjob sentiments that de Camp used to kick off the Lancer books — and it’s highly probable that’s where Fenner got his template from, at that. After all, it was okay for de Camp to point out Howard’s shortcomings in all of his Conan introductions. So, too, then, should Fenner air what he feels are Howard’s personal character defects. See, folks, when all you’ve read is de Camped Conan, some twenty to thirty years ago, and then get asked to write something about Robert E. Howard, this is what they come up with.

What’s worse is that Fenner refrained from doing all of this when he wrote the text pieces for the Frazetta books that Underwood published several years ago. Why do all of this now? Is Frazetta under attack by the Howard community? I very much doubt it. We all liken him unto a god. There’s no badmouthing. Howard fans readily acknowledge Frazetta’s part in the success of Conan. So, where does Fenner get off? Is he somehow embarrassed that he was involved with Howard fandom? Is this a bridge-burning exercise to show us that he’s now above it all? I honestly don’t know, but if Arnie somehow thinks that his introduction is going to reel in the Howard fans, he’s got another think coming. There’s not any more room on my bookshelf for the same old party line. Tell me something new, offer your own observations on the material being presented, or shut the hell up and pass the next time someone asks you to write an introduction to a Robert E. Howard collection, because you’re doing it wrong.

For a fraction of the cost, you can buy those eight Conan Frazetta paintings, along with a comic book adaptation of the REH story in question, from Dark Horse Comics. At least you’ll be supporting a group of people who are enthusiastic and positive about what they are publishing.

MARK ADDS:
I have been informed by several people that there will also be a $25 hardcover edition available. This is wonderful news for the nine or ten people who don’t own Frazetta’s Conan paintings. The one hundred dollar slipcased edition will remain the lofty prize of the fan who must own one of everything, no matter how flawed or corrupted.

STEVE ADDS:
Nicely done, Mark. I’m sure Our Reason for Blogging is looking down from Valhalla and thinking, “I want that Finn guy for my shield-wall.”

Notice how Fenner’s “tremendously gifted storyteller with a wholly original voice” butts heads with his “simply wasn’t a great writer”? And it would be helpful if he’d tip his hand by listing some of those he is willing to anoint as great writers, but apparently that’s asking too much.

“His writing is more rudimentary than lyrical” — Really? Rudimentary? Even with the tremendously gifted storytelling and wholly original voice? Howard’s poetry is the blood in the veins of his prose; too bad the batteries are dead in Fenner’s lyricism-detector.

Here’s another blog lamenting the failure of the D for de Camp group to remember Big D’s centennial. I especially like the comment someone posted below the main post. Yep, Darrell’s excuses were L for Lame, no question.

Over at the D for de Camp Yahoo! discussion group, November 27, 2007 was like any other day. A few posts griping about this or that, nothing much going on. Astoundingly, in that disturbing silence quietly passed the centennial of the man that the group was ostensibly created to honor. L. Sprague de Camp would have been a hundred years old today — and not a single one of his most ardent fans noticed. Contrast that with REH’s dynamic 2006 centennial chock full of a solid year’s worth of celebratory events, honors, and journalism, and one begins to perceive how empty the de Campian gas tank has become. There’s simply no excuse for such a collective, stinging slap applied to the face of a late science fiction grandmaster. Pathetic doesn’t begin to adequately describe it.

Well, just because the milch cows who serve as his modern admirers have nothing to say is no reason for The Cimmerian to remain mute. De Camp had a hand in Robert E. Howard publishing and fandom for decades, and even accepting the harsh critical judgments of history doesn’t preclude honoring him for the vast amount of indisputable good he accomplished in the field.

I can recommend de Camp’s autobiography Time and Chance, for it clears up a lot of questions about the man and his motivations. Years ago, the first thing I was struck by after wading through its 400+ often charming pages is how barren de Camp was of any inclination towards the pose of artist. As he rolls through his life, highlighting what he thinks is important, we get hundreds of facts, jokes, anecdotes — but not a single expression of writing as a passion or a high calling, of wanting to use his stories to express something important to him. Compare Time and Chance to the collected thoughts of writers like REH and HPL, men who obsessed agonizingly over What It All Meant and how they would be judged (or ignored) by posterity, whether they would ever make their mark as an artisan of real merit, especially judged by their own rigorous standards, the standards of fiercely literary and individualistic prophets of imagination.

To de Camp, writing was a fun and fulfilling job, playtime, and he wasn’t the least bit interested in agonizing about any aspect of the creative process. Indeed, he thought the very idea absurd. About the closest he came to fathoming a purpose greater than a paycheck was when researching and publishing The Great Monkey Trial, still a valuable entry in the debate over evolution versus divine creation — Time and Chance shows de Camp eager to sock it to people he perceived as ignorant fundamentalists. His disdain for Scientology also prompted him towards genuine caring for getting somewhat heartfelt ideas on paper and out to readers. But overwhelmingly writing was a paycheck and nothing more. Howard used to make the same sorts of claims, that he was only in the writing game for the money and the freedom — the insincerity of those protestations is still glaringly apparent today. Howard cared, and deeply. He hacked it out when tired or capitalizing on a hot character, but always he came back, was dragged back, to his passions and themes. In de Camp’s long and detailed biography there isn’t a single attempt by him at addressing his career on this level. It’s all contracts and deadlines and what characters were inspired by what real-life personages met on trips to Europe or the Middle East. This lack of the deeper creative impulse is central to any understanding of the man and his legacy.

De Camp often was amazed that Howard and Lovecraft fans were so enraged by his commentary when all he was doing was analyzing facts and telling the unvarnished truth, to his mind exactly what a good biographer should do. For those readers who are only familiar with Dark Valley Destiny, one comes away from Time and Chance seeing that de Camp’s constant backhanded belittlement of REH had its roots not so much in a anti-Howard vendetta but in the unalterable personality of the biographer. It’s illuminating to see how, throughout its pages, de Camp psychoanalyzes himself and his friends and family with all the pedantic zeal and superior airs that he brought to his studies of REH and HPL. Phobias, personality faults, insignificant mistakes and misunderstandings — are all dissected in the detached, psuedo-scientific, hypercritical fashion that readers of his REH writings are so familiar with.

In the end, one understands why de Camp was so mystified at the rage expressed by his critics: this mode was simply the way he thought and operated. The apparent scorn and disdain for Howard’s life and times was, aside from a general aversion to Texas and the gun-totin’ south it represented, merely the byproduct of de Camp’s intelligent but often myopic mind. I came away from Time and Chance thinking about the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, specifically the memorable statement that Ferris’ buddy Cameron, “is so tight that if you stuck a lump of coal up his ass, in two weeks you’d have a diamond.” Sprague did the best he could with the tools God granted him, and if we are to sympathize with and strive to understand Robert E. Howard’s many faults and foibles, we must grant de Camp the same courtesy.

What too often goes unmentioned these days is that de Camp’s best was often quite good indeed. Even if the Lancers are anathema to you, it’s nigh impossible not to admire de Camp’s many trips around Texas and indefatigable letter writing, all part of his quest to amass an invaluable collection of scholarship about REH, most of it stuff that would have been lost forever had he not made the effort. Thus, left to us are hundreds of pages of material containing priceless vignettes of Howard in his element and among his friends. A number of de Camp’s current detractors were (unlike me) adults and in the Howard fandom/scholarship arena during those years, yet none went as far as de Camp, who not only gained all of this knowledge but delivered it to fans in the form of a legitimate, full-length biography. In his own imperfect (and, admittedly, often infuriating) way, he helped drag Howard out of the mists of the forgotten past and into the heads and hearts of modern fantasy readers.

That so much of his work is in need of reinterpretation and rebuttal is unfortunate, granted. But again: de Camp did the best he could given his personality and mental makeup, and he left all of that raw data to later biographers so that they may use it to form their own evaluations. Everyone who writes about Robert E. Howard owes de Camp a major debt of gratitude for the Herculean efforts he undertook on behalf of REH scholarship. I don’t use the word “Herculean” here lightly — as someone who has traveled to Texas on Howard-related research expeditions numerous times, I know firsthand how expensive, exhausting, and difficult they can be. I also know how sad it is to barely miss out on getting an interview because of death cheating us out of it. Whenever I contemplate the cache of materials de Camp methodically collected, or sift through the small percentage that I’m lucky enough to have copies of, I am quietly impressed and forever thankful for the crosses he bore. For this alone, de Camp deserves a place of honor among Howardists.

But over the years de Camp did much more. He was instrumental in attracting a collective of Howard fans that centered around the magazine Amra, and that met at various cons and gatherings throughout the ’50s and ’60s. Over the years he lured all sorts of people, many of them revered professionals, into going on record about REH in various contexts. It’s hard to resist the notion that this helped firmly anchor REH at the center of the burgeoning fantasy market of the 1960s. The exact degrees and results of these ministrations are endlessly arguable, but the list of magazines, anthologies, book introductions, and fanzine articles that de Camp impregnated with a Howardian presence is formidable. I also appreciate that he was an honorary member of REHupa for so long, as during his lengthy tenure in that position he wrote many letters explicating his thoughts on a host of issues that continue to fascinate modern Two-Gun scholars. With his REHupan critics hammering him on a number of fronts throughout the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, the old warhorse continued to slug it out, providing us with lots of information that would otherwise never have come to light.

Then of course there is his enormous non-Howard production in the science, historical, and science fiction fields. Like most authors, the majority of de Camp’s literary output is destined for obscurity. Few scriveners achieve what Howard has, where every scrap of writing — even the junk — is considered precious (at least on a thematic, scholarly level) and hence gets preserved in print in omne tempus. In de Camp’s case several of his non-fiction volumes, such as the ones about Atlantis and ancient history and mythology, will remain useful and exciting to lovers of real-life adventure and discovery. A few of his science fiction novels like Lest Darkness Fall will remain memorable (albeit dated) classics. His Incompleat Enchanter stories may yet achieve a sort of semi-immortality in various reprintings. Regardless of the publishing specifics, he’ll always be remembered as a standout member of the Campbellian pulp era, and no one can ever take the awarded title of sci-fi grandmaster away from him. All of that is far more than most of us will ever accomplish in the fantasy or sci-fi fields, and collectively it’s an achievement that demands no small amount of respect.

The feeble protestations of his partisans notwithstanding, de Camp’s grip on the Howard field is long gone. For well over a decade now Howard publishing has been dominated by what can loosely be referred to as an anti-de Camp faction. These are a group of guys who endured thirty years of his near-stranglehold on the perception of Howard in the broader fantasy marketplace, and who are now intent on methodically undoing the damage wrought over decades of judging REH by oftentimes reductive, frivolous, and catty standards. Whenever there is a call for someone to step up and say something about the creator of Conan, it is inevitably the new guard who now gets contacted, with de Camp’s old acolytes relegated to an embarrassing, impotent bystander status. But now that de Camp’s objectionable machinations have been put to the sword and buried in unmarked graves, it’s important to preserve the good he brought into the field and give it its proper place and measure.

There will likely be no centennial celebration, aside from whatever sparsely attended rogue con panels get assembled by caponized de Camp cultists. But perhaps the more mature and less vindictive among us can see fit to raise a glass this cold November evening to a man who had one of the all-time longest careers in fantasy, a veteran now resting in Arlington, who made the most of a long fruitful life. He left us with a lot to lament, alas, but also a lot to admire and appreciate. Happy 100th birthday Sprague, you wily old pulpster.

Meanwhile, we still have the embarrassing spectacle of de Camp’s biggest fans forgetting to mark his centennial with anything greater than utter silence. This has put me in a somewhat uncharitably sour mood: not since I quit the board of The Dark Man in December of 2003 have I been so disgusted at the hapless, witless performance of a group of colleagues. I’m so thoroughly revolted, in fact, that I’ve come to an ad hoc decision, one that feels not only appropriate but strangely purifying, like a good flea bath or delousing: I’m going to remove the D for de Camp group from my list of links on TC‘s blogroll. I originally put it up as a tangential link to REH, mostly out of a sense of charity towards my good buddy and frequent Cimmerian contributor Gary Romeo. But damn — friendships aside, I see no reason to funnel Cimmerian readers towards a congregation that reeks of such bovine stupidity that it misses the most important de Camp milestone of this century. If they can’t even work up the energy to mention his centennial, what good is the forum at all? Maybe D is for dumbasses? For shame, halfwits, for shame.

AND: for a short but reasonable analysis of de Camp’s influence on Lovecraft fandom, visit this post at the Grim Reviews blog.

UPDATE: more de Camp opinions can be found at NRO’s The Corner, at Instapundit, at CoolSciFi, and at Light Seeking Light. I can’t disagree with Glenn Reynolds’ take: had I known anyone outside of Robert E. Howard fandom cared, I would have certainly skewed my post for a more general audience. But in the end that’s the point: none of the people out there who claim longstanding fondness for de Camp’s writing bothered to remember his centennial, not even the fans who populate the lone discussion forum dedicated to his work. It took a Robert E. Howard scholar — still nursing wounds from de Camp’s shoddy editing and risible biographical treatment of the Texan — to step up and give him a shout out. Pretty sad.

Bear with me for this first paragraph. Most people who are fascinated by Alexander the Great know that Mary Renault wrote an Alexandriad, a trilogy of novels about the conqueror’s life and the succession wars that raged after his death: Fire From Heaven (1969), The Persian Boy (1972), and Funeral Games (1981). But some might not be aware that Alexander first appeared in the final chapter of a fourth book, The Mask of Apollo (1966). Renault’s narrator, Nikeratos, a Greek actor who has watched, and narrowly escaped with his life from, Plato’s doomed attempt to bring an ideal city-state into being in Sicily, meets the young prince at the Macedonian court in Pella, and they discuss whether Achilles should have killed Agamemnon and what an alliance between the Achaeans and Trojans for the purpose of eastward expansion might have achieved. Once back in Athens, Nikeratos muses “He will wander through the world like a flame, like a lion, seeking, never finding, never knowing (for he will look always forward, never back) that while he was still a child the thing he seeks slipped from the world, worn out and spent.” What Renault is getting at is that time and chance have denied Alexander exposure to Plato’s poetry, leaving him only the far more prosaic Aristotle. The Mask of Apollo ends this way:

All tragedies deal with fated meetings; how else could there be a play? Fate deals its stroke; sorrow is purged, or turned to rejoicing; there is death, or triumph; there has been a meeting, and a change. No one will ever make a tragedy — and that is as well, for one could not bear it — whose grief is that the principals never met.

On page 57 of Paul M. Sammon’s Conan: The Phenomenon, Frank Frazetta is quoted (by way of frankfrazetta.com) as saying “I feel a certain sense of loss that Howard isn’t alive to appreciate what I’ve done with Conan.” A certain sense of loss; for me that loss is quite similar to Mary Renault’s even-more-unbearable form of tragedy in which the principals are divided by circumstance or chronology.

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The Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith has long since figured in a first-rate post by Leo, but acquisitions for my weird fiction library sometimes require me to pinch the first and best Republican president right off the face of every penny, and it wasn’t until last month that I lucked into an affordable copy at Addall.com. The book really is a garden of unearthly, flower demon-type delights, so many thanks to editors Scott Connors and David E. Schultz. CAS shows that the baleful late Thirties zeitgeist is not lost on him with this fine Howardian sentiment near the end of a September 9, 1937 letter to Robert Barlow: “Incidentally, the word ‘civilization’ would make a jackal vomit in view of the general situation.” And another aside to Barlow in the same letter is as amusing as Howard’s sly suggestion that Lovecraft should fictionalize one of his own “sex adventures” in order to crack the spicies:

HPL, however, should have written [a story about the Last Sabbat] himself. I can’t hope to compete with him when it comes to New England setting and atmosphere; though perhaps the actual orgies of the Sabbat would be a little more in my line.

But what really caught my eye were several letters that may well have been discussed to death in Esoteric and Dagonian precincts; S. T. Joshi certainly cites one on page 639 of his Lovecraft biography. Still, it seems to me that the cumulative impact of the letters in question and a possible extra resonance for Howardists just might justify a blog-post. I’m referring to nothing less than an early attempt by CAS to save Derleth from himself — and more importantly, save Lovecraft from distortion and dilution.

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Last weekend, hours before learning of the simultaneous Herron and Burke Black Circle inductions, I had occasion to look something up in the second zine I ever contributed to a REHupa Mailing: #135, back in October 1995. My offering shared Section One of the Mailing with not only a letter from L. Sprague de Camp (wherein he directed “Mr. Tompkins” to his “Barbarians I Have Known” article) but also Rusty Burke’s Seanchai #76, in which he returned from an absentee phase to find that “the state of his beloved REHupa” was “NOT GOOD” (The fall of 1995 was a Time of Troubles — no staplers went missing, but a good deal of perspective did — that almost culminated in a breakaway APA; imagine the Seventies absorption of the Hyperborian League, only in reverse).

Seanchai #76 makes for interesting reading in 2007. While de Camp is nowhere accused of pontiff-buggering, Rusty does have this to say in his Mailing comments to the Tritonian Ringbearer: “The only explanation I can think of for the quite substantial changes you made to ["The Frost Giant's Daughter," "The Black Stranger," and "The God in the Bowl"] is that you thought they weren’t very well written and you could do better.” There’s an endearing outburst about Milius’ Wheel of Pain — “An utterly stupid conception. What the hell was the damned thing for? It didn’t appear to do anything” — and another about the Marvel Conan’s being “largely responsible for the popular misconception of Conan as a fur-clad hulk, and for making pimply-faced, snot-nosed, greasy-haired, whale-bellied subliterate adolescents think they’re Conan and/or REH fans.” Rusty didn’t know the half of it; as we’re now aware, Marvel’s non-Roy Thomas stories even made some of them into staunch supporters of the unsinkable armada that is the Nemedian navy, ready to burst into “Anchors Away” every time the state-of-the-art shipyards of Belverus and Numalia turn out another dreadnaught.

Most striking of all was this, after a denunciation of the incorporation of the post-Howardian bridging paragraph from the 1967 King Kull in the actual text of the 1978 Bantam and 1995 Baen versions of “Exile of Atlantis”: “Until some enterprising publisher decides to make me the editor of the definitive REH editions, such mistakes will continue to be propagated, no doubt.” Marcelo Anciano didn’t become a member of REHupa until months later, so Rusty can’t have already been in secret talks with the Wandering Star bibliomancer…Another comment that jumped out at my 2007 self was this, to James Van Hise: “I really don’t know why it’s so hard to get literate REH fans to write about his work. The comments I get from guys like Don Herron, Dick Tierney, etc., is that they’ve pretty much said what they have to say about REH and unless they were to suddenly get inspired, well, they’ve moved on.” One Barbaric Triumph, multiple articles, and one Doom of Hyboria later, it is clear that inspiration took its own sweet time, but did show up eventually.

Burke and Herron (Sequenced thusly the names sound too close to Burke and Hare for comfort, don’t they?) are now right where they belong. With Glenn Lord enjoying the emeritus lifestyle (and perhaps reflecting on how living longer is the best revenge where grande dames and their dismissive references to “truck drivers” are concerned), the two junior Black Circlers can get to work on stationery, T-shirts, podcasts, and maybe even a microbrewery. This was definitely the preferable outcome — had their rivalry continued vote after vote, they might have become the Howard Studies equivalent of the black/white guy and the white/black guy in the third season Classic Trek episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” locked in unending combat on an otherwise dead world.

Congratulations to Don and Rusty. But why was it spelled “Hyperborian” instead of “Hyperborean” back when the League and its REH/CAS agenda were around?

Well, a few days ago I finally received my Deluxe edition of The Children of Húrin — arch-collector Doris Salley will be horrified to learn that Amazon mailed it to me with a slight ding in the slipcase, and I kept it. It has taken all of my willpower not to take a week off from work and read it from cover to cover. I have dipped into the Introduction and Appendices, and spot-checked some of my favorite moments from parts of the tale I have read before. It has the feel of a DVD director’s cut, with new passages that are fine in their own right but feel tacked on and a bit superfluous because of how well I know the original. Still, there’s a lot of new material, and I’m really looking forward to getting the time to read this.

If I got my copy, then Steve Tompkins must have got his, which means he’s likely read it several times by now, with a mental highlighter covering the pages in neon notations for use in the new essays already percolating within the supercomputer he calls a brain. I think we can assume he won’t be posting here for the next few days, until the Tolkien fever wears off. Rob is likely in the middle of the horrendous last few weeks of the school year, wrapping up his teaching duties in time to head down to Howard Days. Mark is off at the movies, probably running around the corridors of his new movie theater decked out in zombie makeup and scaring the kids attempting to sneak into the matinée for Twenty-Eight Weeks Later. Which leaves me taking a bit of time away from finishing the June issue of TC to point you to a few things of interest.

Over at Black Gate magazine, there is a new interview with a guy who has been kind of important to some members of the inner circle of Howard fans: writer David C. Smith. A former fantasist who penned a number of Howard pastiches in the late 70s and early 80s, Smith also had a stint in REHupa and is still friends with several members of that organization. In the Black Gate interview, you can read a bit about his career, how he managed to snag the Howard gigs, his writing style that pays homage to Howard’s pulp roots, and more. Check it out.

In other news, frequent Cimmerian contributor Gary Romeo has started a new Yahoo! group called “D is for de Camp.” This is a forum to discuss the work of the late science fiction grandmaster, including his intimate association with Howard publishing. Gary already has a few dozen people posting over there, and is looking for more posters and readers. I imagine a lot of the postings will relate to REH in some way, so put it into your Howardian online reading rotation.

Finally, there’s a few new posts over at REHupa.com, both by Morgan Holmes, who has been away from blogging for awhile but is now back with a vengeance. One post is about the version of the Prose Edda that Howard owned and read, and the other is Part II of his personal history of his involvement with REH fandom.

Not much else going on save for frantic preparations for Howard Days. Every year I try to get ahead of things and every year I end up rushing at the last minute to get everything finished. Still, it’s been worth it — the June TC is shaping up to be a real hot issue, with some great articles that will keep you turning the pages. It’s one of those issues that has a little something for everyone.

Guest Blogger Fred Blosser adds his two cents to Steve’s recent post on The Star Rover.

FRED: I appreciate Steve’s tip of the hat in his posting today. The other guy who should be mentioned in regard to connecting the dots between The Star Rover and Howard was de Camp. I believe he was the first observer — at least, the first in print, via Dark Valley Destiny in 1983 — to remark on the similarities between The Star Rover and concepts in the Conan and James Allison stories.

With a little more luck and persistence, I might have beat Sprague to the punch by fifteen years, but to paraphrase Robert De Niro, I blew it.

I noticed the proto-Howard details in the London book when I first read it in 1968, and at that time, I asked Glenn if evidence existed that Howard had read the novel. Glenn supplied me with Howard’s “book that goes to my head like wine” comment, and I built on that in writing a college freshman English paper that I titled “Jack London and the Hyborian Age.” Before the fall semester was over that year, I revised the paper a bit and submitted it to Amra. Over Christmas break, I received a card from George Scithers accepting it for publication — but it never appeared, as far as I’m aware.

When I signed with Ted Dikty and FAX in 1976 to write a book about Howard’s weird fiction, I covered the Little People stories and salvaged a bit of “Jack London and the Hyborian Age,” particularly noting the references to Il-Marinen by both authors. I started writing my book in October 1976 and delivered the final portion of the manuscript to Dikty in February 1977. Dikty said he liked it, and sent me a galley of the first chapter to proofread, along with a xerox of artwork by Alex Nino that he said he’d use for the cover.

I proofed the galley and sent it back to Ted. Around this time, unfortunately for me, Ted decided to put my book on the back burner and first publish a big, expensive map of the Hyborian Age, along with his wife’s accompanying Gazetteer. I never heard from him again, and I presume the single galley chapter was the only one set in type. My book, like several other promised titles, never saw the light of day. (Not from FAX at least. One of the books that Dikty advertised as in the works, Glenn’s The Howard Collector anthology, later found a home at Ace.)

Looking around for something to submit to The Dark Man in the ’90s, I performed another salvage job and turned the unpublished section about the Little People stories into the article that Steve graciously mentioned. At that point, my product wasn’t exactly groundbreaking, since de Camp, in the meantime, had published his observations about Howard’s debt to The Star Rover in the background to the Allison stories, in the genesis of the Æsir and the Vanir, etc. But I’m glad that Steve seems to have liked it, and I was interested in how he picked up many, many other parallels that I hadn’t noticed.

I’ve seen a couple of new trade paperback editions of the London book in the past few years, including a moderately priced Modern Library version. I hope Steve’s article will prompt new fans to seek it out.

Steve adds: Drat. Had a survey of Howard’s weird fiction possessing the customary Blosserian seriousness of purpose appeared in 1977 or 1978, coinciding with Karl Edward Wagner’s game-changing forewords and afterwords to the Berkley Conans, that would have done a lot to improve the locust years that preceded The Dark Barbarian. I’ll have to file this one next to the history of heroic fantasy Leiber once intended to write on my Should-Have-Been Bookshelf.

Correction: Don Herron, far more knowledgeable about Fritz Leiber than are certain antipodean resurrection men I might mention, has informed me that Leiber hoped to tackle not just our favorite subgenre of fantasy but the whole genre, which leaves me yearning even more to read what was mostly never written.

The above photo is well-known to those of us who have read and reread Dark Valley Destiny. In that book, the caption states: “Robert E. Howard, Dr. Isaac M. Howard, Dr. and Mrs. Solomon R. Chambers, Galveston, Texas, probably 1918.” It’s a photo that has always intrigued me, mostly because of the amazing pose REH is caught in, gazing wistfully up at the sky as if daydreaming his first stories, so distracted by the tales floating around in his mind that he can’t bring himself back to reality long enough to pose properly for the photo being taken. Dr. Howard and the Chamberses do their part to make the photo interesting, too, with Isaac standing imperiously and confidently as the nexus of attention while the others almost recoil from the towering man dominating the center of the composition.

Over the years I have been in Howard fandom, I’ve often wondered what the provenance of this photo was. Dark Valley Destiny says:

Late in 1917, Dr. Howard delivered the Chamberses’ new baby, Norris, and thereafter Dr. Chambers became restless. As he had earlier discovered that the active practice of medicine kept him away from home more than he liked, so now he found his duties at the drugstore too confining. After the Armistice of November 11, 1918, he decided to move his family to Galveston, on the Gulf of Mexico, and take up truck farming.

Of course, Dark Valley Destiny also calls the newborn Norris “Robert’s schoolmate,” and then debunks one of REH’s childhood memories by saying that schoolmate Norris didn’t remember it, so Howard probably made it up. But as we just read in the DVD excerpt above: Norris was born in 1917, making him a full eleven years younger than Howard, and so couldn’t possibly have been his schoolmate. Call me wild and crazy, but it’s small wonder he didn’t remember anything about the incident Howard wrote of considering he might not have been born yet when it happened.

Until recent years Dark Valley Destiny was the first and only place this photo was published, albeit severely cropped compared to the raw version above. I suppose de Camp got this and most of his other photos from Glenn Lord, who had been patiently hunting down and securing copies of such photos for decades. The copy above is the one Glenn has in his files, with the names written across the top like that. Glenn in turn must have got a copy from Norris, or from one of the other Chamberses.

In June of 2005, Don Herron and I went to White Settlement, Texas and interviewed Norris Chambers at length (the results of which can now be read in TC V3n10, with a further tantalizing excerpt available in V3n6). During the course of that interview I learned that Norris’ sister’s name was Deoma, which immediately set off alarm bells in my mind, because the name written on the photo above also says “Deoma.” Norris’ Mother’s name was Martha. Hmmmm. (in case you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of opportunities to say “hmmmm….” in REH scholarship).

When I got home from Texas, I looked up Deoma in the Social Security Death Index, and she is listed under Deoma E. Morgan (according to this genealogical listing on Norris’ website, Lilburn Morgan was her second husband, Lonnie Triplitt was her first). That record tells us that she was born in 1899 and died in 2000 (she was 101 years old!) That would make her around nineteen at the time of the above picture. Hmmmm — come to think of it, the lady (girl?) in that picture has always looked a little young to be the wife of the then fifty-year-old Solomon Chambers (1868-1950).

It appears, then, that de Camp assumed that Deoma Chambers was Mrs. Solomon (Martha) Chambers and wrote his caption accordingly. But now twenty-three years after the fact we finally know that the woman in the picture in not Solomon’s wife but his daughter, and hence Norris’ older sister. Those of you who already own TC V3n10 knew this already, of course — one of the perks of subscribing.

During my interview of Norris in 2005, I asked him whether he had the original of this photo, in the hope that it perhaps had some writing on the back that might pinpoint the date a bit better, or provide any additional information. He said that he didn’t have it and wasn’t sure who did, but he suspected that Deoma’s only daughter Marjorie Leeton — who is 84 years old and still living in Texas, might know where it went off to, along with several other photos Norris recalls were taken with the Howards on that Galveston trip.

Well, I contacted Marjorie, and sure enough she does have the original photo, although there are no others that she is aware of. According to her, the splotches you see on the print reproduced above are there on the original, too, perhaps caused by dripping photo developer or something at the time it was made. And most importantly, on the back of the photo itself is written the names of the subjects along with the following additional information: “Feb 1918 near Alta Loma, Texas.”

Alta Loma is a very small town in the Galveston area — you can read about its history here at the Handbook of Texas Online. Note that in recent years it’s been swallowed up and incorporated into the larger town of Santa Fe. Cimmerian readers have read all about how the Chamberses moved down there to farm and sell fruit door-to-door. Reading the Handbook of Texas entry brings home how difficult a life that must have been during those years.

So that confirms de Camp’s guess (probably a guess Norris gave him) of “probably 1918.” But it brings up another problem with the dating. If, as de Camp states, the Chamberses didn’t move down to Galveston until “after the Armistice of November 11, 1918,” then how could this photo have been taken the previous February, a full nine months before they moved? Doesn’t make sense. Perhaps they went down on a scouting trip of sorts with the Howards in February? Or perhaps de Camp’s information about them moving in November of 1918 was wrong, and they actually moved a year earlier? Norris sounded a bit vague on exactly when they moved down there, and he himself was far too young to have any memories of the years the family spent down south, so it’s possible he misremembered to de Camp. Someday I’d like to spend enough time at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, where the de Camp papers are kept, to get to the bottom of this and many other mysteries.

I’m having Norris make me a scan of the photo, both sides, so I’ll know more information directly, and will report any updates here. It will be interesting to see how much more detail is in the original photo, if any. I dearly wish the other three or four rumored photos had survived — who knows what they would have shown us? A group photo of the entire Howard trio at that age would be wonderful to see. Maybe they are still out there somewhere, waiting to be found. Stranger things have happened — Rusty Burke and Patrice Louinet found the photo of REH outside his house with Patch a mere few years ago, at the house of another old lady who knew the Howards in her youth. I’ve got to get Rusty to write up that interview and experience in The Cimmerian, it’s a doozy of a yarn.

Thank God for people like Norris Chambers and Marjorie Leeton, keepers in their own small way of the Howard flame, both via their memories and by way of a most miraculous photograph.

Guest blogger Morgan Holmes offers his own take on the pros and cons of the Lancer series….

MORGAN HOLMES: Leo’s post contrasting the Lancer and Del Rey editions was the latest in an ongoing debate of what is or was the best Robert E. Howard edition. I had been thinking for some time why the Lancer paperbacks had such an impact that later book editions never were able to duplicate.

There were advantages that Conan the Adventurer had in 1966. First was suppression of Sword-and-Sorcery fiction. It was something new to most people in 1966. Sword-and-Sorcery fiction was rare for fifteen years. In the early 1950s, you could still find Robert E. Howard influencing stories in pulps such as Poul Anderson’s “The Virgin of Valkarion” in Planet Stories. The pulps were meant to be cheap entertainment. In the early 1950s a copy of Planet Stories cost $.25, thus within the reach of a young reader. The last pulp science fiction magazines also died in 1955 when the distribution system collapsed. Science fiction was also king in the 1950s, driving fantasy and horror figuratively underground.

The Gnome Press editions of Robert E. Howard started in 1950, but Gnome was a small press. Most of its business was direct mail order or from specialty mail order book dealers. Plus the Gnome Press hardbacks were $3.00-$4.00. In today’s dollars, $3.00 would be $22.65. These books were aimed at older fans wanting the stories in book form. The small print runs would prevent creating many new ones. A teenager would have to save up in order to get a Gnome Press book in the 1950s, provided he knew of them or ever heard of Robert E. Howard.

The baby boom started in 1946 and ended in 1964. That means you had a growing population in their teens — the prime group for buying fantasy fiction. The mass-market paperback had stepped in as the replacement for the pulps as a source of inexpensive fantastic fiction. There was a massive rebirth of Edgar Rice Burroughs in paperback in 1963 when it was discovered copyright was not in effect for those stories. Ace Books published wonderfully packaged books with covers by Roy Krenkel and Frank Frazetta.

Just months before the release of the Lancer Conan was another important event that helped prime the pump. Ace Books discovered a copyright loophole and published The Lord of the Rings with Jack Gaughan covers. Ballantine Books published the authorized editions in 1966 with the psychedelic flamingo covers. Burroughs and Tolkien were major factors in preparing the scene for Howard. Plus you had two of the L. Sprague de Camp edited anthologies, Sword and Sorcery (1963) and The Spell of Seven (1965) that would have introduced some readers to Robert E. Howard for the first time. There were no trade paperback science fiction books, as trade paperbacks were mainly meant for the college market.

The Lancer paperbacks were for the most part sold in drugstores and some grocery stores. You did not have the bookstore chains like you do today. There were regional distributors who supplied paperbacks to the places that sold the books. A regional distributor knew that one place might sell more westerns and mysteries while another might move science fiction paperbacks. In some ways, the Lancer paperbacks may have been available in more places than the average paperback would today. Someone going to the drugstore to get the newest issue of Eerie or Creepy would have stumbled across the now iconic image of Conan as created by Frank Frazetta.

Then there is the question of cost. The first Lancer paperbacks were $.60, going to $.75 and then $.95 in 1968. Sixty cents in 1966 would convert to $3.81 today! That is incredible — science fiction and fantasy paperbacks are $7.99 today. That would convert to $1.25 in 1966. So the Lancer paperbacks were a great deal. More so, the minimum wage in 1966 was $1.25 an hour. That converts to $6.83 an hour today. Western writer and Robert E. Howard fan, James Reasoner, once told me that mass-market paperbacks should cost one hour at the minimum wage. Paperbacks are often an impulse item. The higher the cost, the more a potential buyer has to agonize if that book is worth it. In 1966-67, a teenager working a few hours a week could stop at the local drug store and pick up a Lancer paperback and still have money to pick up the latest 45 record like “Strawberry Fields Forever” or “Ruby Tuesday.”

There were some other factors — horror had made a comeback by the 60s after having a low profile in the 50s. Our theoretical teenage buyer could see the latest Hammer horror flick before picking up Conan the Adventurer. What impact did the Italian sword & sandal movies have, the ones starring Steve Reeves or Gordon Scott, and all those Hercules/Maciste/Samson/Goliath movies?

So, you have an intersection of demographics, cost, distribution, interest, and of course the Frazetta look that combined to create something that will probably never occur again. The nearest you could get today to recreating what the Lancer Conan paperbacks would be to have Leisure Books publish Robert E. Howard at $4.99 (price of their westerns) with distribution to truck stops and grocery stores. Plus you need an artist to create something totally new, and there is only one Frank Frazetta. Why are western paperbacks $4.99 but science fiction and fantasy paperbacks $7.99?