This may be known to some of you, but apparently the Howard poem “Black Chant Imperial”, which was accepted by Weird Tales in June of 1930, and published that September, was a kind of first draft to another poem, “Empire: A Song for All Exiles”. The Complete Poetry makes this glaringly apparent by placing the poems back to back on pages 123-5, while inexplicably leaving off the subtitle. And Steve Eng calls the latter a “variant” of the first in his intro (page xlv), while also naming it a “howling ballad in thudding trochees.” Trochees are metric feet in which a stressed syllable alternates with an unstressed one. Wikipedia notes that trochaic form is rarely perfect in English, aside from “The Song of Hiawatha”, but notes also “The Raven” as an example.  Howard no doubt was familiar with both.

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Much as I enjoy the work of Robert E. Howard, he does occasionally write in such a rush that he makes a mistake.  One such mistake occurs in “The Hour of the Dragon” when he learns the true nature and origin of Xaltotun.

 “Acheron,” he repeated. “Xaltotun of Acheron — man, are you mad? Acheron has been a myth for more centuries than I can remember.”

 Which raises the question, how many centuries does Conan remember? Obviously Howard meant that Acheron had been a myth for so long no one knew how many centuries ago it was known to be real; instead he gives the impression of a centuries-old Conan, who seems a pretty feisty guy for someone that aged.

In the latest The Dark Man, Charles Hoffman’s “Elements of Sadomasochism in the Fiction and Poetry of Robert E. Howard” has some interesting comments on “The Hyena“, a very early Howard story written while Howard was still in his teens.
It is interesting to find that he also used this setting with two other tales, “The Slayer“, and “The Wings of the Bat“, both unprinted until The Last of The Trunk. Both tales also involve Ju-Ju men, or witch-doctors, plotting mayhem against the whites. One would conclude that “The Slayer“ is a direct sequel to “The Hyena“, as the narrator refers to having killed Senecoza previously. But we are told by Hoffman that “The Hyena“ was written in 1924, and the editor of Trunk tells us the other stories are “pre-1924″. So either Howard wrote the sequel first, or more likely someone is in error. In a homage to the Alan Quatermain stories, the king of the Zulus in “Bat“ is named Umslopogas. It still amazes me that out of all the material available to him, August Derleth included “Hyena“ in the second Howard collection, The Dark Man and Others.

DEUCE ADDS: A couple years ago, over at conan.com, Patrice Louinet had this to say about “The Slayer”:

REH actually began a sort of sequel to the story, featuring the same hero and mentioning Senecoza. This fragment, tentatively titled “The Slayer” by Glenn Lord, will be included in The Last of the Trunk, the book collecting the immense majority of as-yet-unpublished Howard fiction, forthcoming from the Robert E. Howard Foundation.

“The Wings of the Bat,” to my ear, definitely sounds like it was partially a riff on Sax Rohmer’s Bat-Wing, a book we know REH read. Rob Roehm blogged about it here.

As for Derleth selecting “The Hyena” for The Dark Man, I’m not particularly surprised, considering Derleth’s blinkered and untrustworthy taste in regards to REH’s fiction. On the other hand, just before The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard was released, there was a certain REH fan shambling about the blogosphere who practically called Rusty Burke a Howardian anti-christ for leaving ”The Hyena” out. He cited Derleth’s unerring judgement for support.

I so love having The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard in my collection. After years and years of collecting Howard, I can literally open this book at random and find material I’m not familiar with. An example of this is “Arcadian Days”, found on pages 256 through 258. There’s a typo at the start: “Mape-limbed” is, in context, obviously supposed to be “ape-limbed.” The narrator is a blacksmith, who swears by Zeus and Jove, and meets a woman who is Dion’s — Dionysus? -– own (also referred to as an acolyte of Pan, who is Dionysus’s equivalent), “when the world was wild with Youth.” An interesting poem in many ways, and one I’d never seen before.

Just a quick note to those of you digging into the new issue: on page 18 of Steve’s essay appears the following quote from the REH story “Wild Water”:

Now he could see the headlights glinting through the trees like a pair of angry eyes. The eyes of the Law, he thought sardonically, and hugged himself with venomous glee.

Unfortunately Steve’s follow-up line, “The throwback has been thrown forward, into a dispiriting present that barely masks a dystopian future,” was inadvertently formatted to look like a part of the REH quote rather than separate from it. So when you hit that line, make the necessary mental adjustment. “The throwback…” is Steve talking, not REH.

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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As Leo pointed out a few posts ago, mistakes in publishing “come with the territory”; Howard’s Haunts is no exception. Shortly after the first people started receiving their orders, I started getting emails about my mistakes. There were a very few typos, like artist Stephen Fabian’s name being spelled “Fabien” on page 98, and that doesn’t bother me much, but errors of fact stick in my craw. So much so that I felt a Blog post was in order. As soon as time permits, I’ll make the necessary corrections to my files, upload the new content, and have a corrected Third Edition available at lulu.com.

The biggest mistake, in my opinion, is misidentifying the Hemphill House on page 61. I don’t know if I’d been enjoying too much Howard Days cheer to follow directions correctly or not, but I was sure that the home pictured there was Novalyne Price’s former rooming house. However, both Jim Keegan and Rusty Burke have shown me the error of my assumption, and I bow before their vastly superior knowledge of all things REH. Jim was gracious enough to supply a photo of the actual Hemphill House which I’ve placed below.

Moving down the scale of oopses, I also misidentified the gentleman standing next to REH in the photo taken in Lincoln (top of this blog post and page 108 of Howard’s Haunts). Howard was traveling with Truett Vinson at the time, and perhaps it is he who took the photo, but the man with REH is not Vinson. Both Rusty Burke and Jim Keegan (again) say that this man is probably Ramon Maes. Howard and Vinson were in Lincoln to explore “the old courthouse whence Billy [the Kid] made the most dramatic escape ever made in the Southwest.” Howard explains further in a letter to H.P. Lovecraft, ca. July 1935:

We explored the exterior [of the courthouse], found it locked, and went across the street to the La Paloma Saloon, which bears a sign that claims existence in the Kid’s day. The owner is one Ramon Maes, grandson of Lucio Montoya, “Murphy’s Sharpshooter” as he told us with pride — a supple, well-built man, tall for a Mexican and broad shouldered, with a thin-nostrilled Mountain Indian look about his face. The name of Montoya is woven into the Kid’s saga. He took part in the three-day fight in which McSween was killed; he lay on the mountain that commanded the Montana House, with Crawford, firing from behind a boulder. Fernando Herrera, firing from the Montana House with a buffalo gun, killed Crawford, and broke Montoya’s leg. The range was nine hundred yards, but Herrera was a crack shot. All day Montoya lay in the glare of the sun, with his splintered leg, until, when night fell, his friends dared a sortie to get him. I did not speak of this to his grandson. To him the feud seemed like something that happened yesterday. He was very courteous and eager to point out interesting spots, and answer our questions, but when he spoke of the fighting and the killing, a red flame came into his eyes.

So, Howard may have asked Vinson to take a picture with Maes in front of the courthouse, for posterity.

Besides correcting future printings, I hope to make amends for this next boo-boo by buying the man a beer. On pages 72 and 74 I identified Project Pride stalwart Johnny Adams as Tom Stephenson. I’ve always been horrible with names, but that’s no excuse. I should have used Leo’s crack proofreading team before going to press. Thanks to Bill Cavalier and Rusty Burke for pointing this out to me.

Finally (I hope), Jim Keegan has taught me to never take an historical marker at face value, a fact I should have known based on the incorrect birth date given for Howard on the marker at Greenleaf Cemetery (below left). Keegan informs me that the information regarding former Peaster resident John Alexander Fox, which I used on pages 10 and 16, is wrong. According to Keegan, whose knowledge of such things far surpasses mine, Fox did not create the Buster Brown character: this accomplishment goes to comic strip artist Richard F. Outcault. I’ll try harder next time.

Roughhousing with Slasher in “Beyond the Black River” the other day, I came across this on page 51 of The Conquering Sword of Conan (the Cimmerian is balking at the prospect of the forest demon absconding with Tiberias’ head): “I never liked the fat bastard, but we can’t have Pictish devils making so cursed free with white men’s heads.”

Once the gigantic mirth subsided I started checking the story’s previous appearances. Conan the Warrior has “I never liked the fat fool.” Hans Stefan Santesson’s 1970 anthology The Mighty Swordsmen has “I never liked the fat fool.” Red Nails, the 1977 Berkley volume edited by Karl Edward Wagner, has “I never liked the fat fool.” So does Robert Adams’ 1985 anthology Barbarians. So obviously “fat fool” is from the Weird Tales text, whereas “fat bastard” must have been reinstated by Patrice Louinet from Howard’s final draft. It would be interesting to know what Farnsworth Wright’s SOP was for minor or single-word emendations like this. He couldn’t fax or e-mail Howard, and even telephoning might have busted the WT budget, so presumably he went full speed ahead and changed the wording himself.

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