I was initially hesitant to comment on the latest offering from the print-on-demand quagmire that is Lulu.com, considering that I’m the most recent biographer of Robert E. Howard. However, after perusing The Supreme Moment, I feel I would be remiss if I didn’t weigh in on what Mr. DiPietro has produced. After all, it’s not as if we weren’t waiting for another biography. The more, the merrier, I always say. And after reading DiPietro’s efforts, I’m afraid we’re still waiting for another biography.

I had hoped that Mr. DiPietro (who claims to not be a lurker on the various REH-based fan sites, but clearly knows his way around the Internet and can not only chase down message board conversations about writing an REH biography, but can reply to questions asked about him on message boards he claims to not frequent), despite being someone that no one in the REH Community has heard of before, might be able to bring a fresh perspective on Robert E. Howard’s life and writing. Unfortunately, he chose instead to mainly focus on Howard’s suicide in a 203-page rambling screed, making only so many detours to speculate on (ultimately baseless and unsupported) possibilities of drug use and homosexuality by Howard.

What rankles the most wasn’t the misappropriation of pre-existing material, re-written so as to constitute a “new” biography, but rather that there’s not enough material in the book to actually be a book at all. What new perspectives DiPietro has (and there are a couple of decent ideas in the book that, sadly, DiPietro fails to follow up on) would make for two or three entertaining essays. That’s it. The rest of the “book” that’s holding those decent ideas together is nothing more than personal anecdotes about what a fan DiPietro is, reprinted poetry and letters (and perhaps most out-of-place, the entire text of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Silver Key”, apologetic speculation of the worst kind, and running commentary about the actual people involved in REH scholarship. To top it all off, the entire document is extremely unorganized, owing, no doubt, to the author’s dislike of editors who he says in his Afterword clearly don’t know what they are doing and who just don’t “get” him.

I was not infused with confidence when I turned to the introduction and the first words I encountered were, “Who the hell am I and where do I get off writing a new biography of Robert E. Howard?” This is a question, by the way, that he more or less answers the first part of, but fails to answer the second half completely. He then follows up his apology, the first of many, with, “I can assure you that I would sooner not write a word than attempt a Howard biography without my full earnestness, diligence, attention, and heart.”

That assurance rings hollowly in the ears by the end of the document. DiPietro makes a point of mentioning his non-linear style, which I initially assumed meant that he’d be jumping from one point in Howard’s life to another, out of sequence. I later realized that this would be applied on a paragraph by paragraph basis. DiPietro feels that knowing what comes next isn’t very advantageous to the reader. If that’s the case, is there any reason why he deliberately and overtly themed his document around the concept of suicide?

Next, DiPietro name drops, and makes it sound as if he’s in tight with Rusty Burke, Frank Coffman, Gary Romeo, and Leo Grin. He ends his introduction by reproducing two pages of email during the Cross Plains wildfires of 2006 to show everyone that he cared enough to send money. It’s nice, I guess, but this kind of thing is typical throughout the entire book; his digressions never connect or reconnect to a larger point, leaving you with a “What did I just read?” sensation.

In chapter one (“A Vague Writhing Shape”, we are treated to a page and a half of Texas history. While DiPietro gets points for talking about Texas at the beginning of his biography (like I did in Blood & Thunder), he has them immediately taken away for failing to come anywhere close to the time period that Robert E. Howard was alive. We go straight from there to brief write-up of Catherine Howard, a cousin of Anne Boleyn, who was beheaded in 1542, after which, DiPietro makes the statement:

It is not known what precise ancestral relation Robert E. Howard may have had to Catherine Howard, but the presence of possibility merited the following description. It would be interesting if the pretensions to ancestral royalty which his mother sometimes exhibited were actually more solidly grounded on Howard’s paternal [I think DiPietro meant "maternal"] side.

The above is a great example of the kind of speculation that DiPietro engages in throughout the book, with little regard as to whether or not he should have speculated in the first place. But this is not the only molehill that DiPietro mistakes for a mountain.

After placing too much stock in Post Oaks & Sand Roughs by assuming that everything Howard wrote about happened exactly as written, something that no other biographer has ever done before, and then discussing Herbert Klatt in some detail, DiPietro offers up his first biographical insight: “Among his small group of local friends, Howard’s personality was often a stabilizing force.” Seeing that sentence was like watching a magician pull a squid out of his nose. Where the hell did that come from? Says who? Where’d he come up with that? Maybe it was true, and maybe it wasn’t, but it’s not cited, and it’s just another example of how unfinished the document really is.

DiPietro reprints a portion of a letter by REH to HPL, regarding the incident with his saddle and the cut leather stirrup. DiPietro follows this up with: “This nearly solid proof of enemies, coupled with the general regard of the locals as previously described, contributed much to Howard’s practice of carrying a pistol, usually discretely in the glove compartment…” That jaw-dropping statement turns into a needless quibble about who’s correct about the make and model of the car, de Camp, or Burke and Roehm.

And so it goes. The first chapter jumps around from paragraph to paragraph, going from Howard’s various pets to his visit to Scott and White for a physical, then over to boxing, complete with the great quote about Howard’s most sublime moment, boxing at the ice house until he was exhausted. What immediately follows is a paragraph about vasculitis. DiPietro then implies that some of Howard’s fight injuries may have influenced his boxing stories. In the middle of that stunner, he parenthetically notes that I do a great Sailor Steve Costigan impression.

It’s scrambled eggs. It’s runny, and it’s all over the place. Pinballs don’t get the workout that a reader does going through DiPietro’s document. At the end of the first chapter, we find that all of the above was supposed to point to a rationale for Howard’s suicide. Of course, he reprints “The Tempter.” Of course he does.

In the middle of chapter two (“Old Names” we find the first thesis statement in the document, and it would have made a wonderful speculative essay all by itself, had DiPietro not cluttered it up with a bunch of other junk. Here’s the paragraph in question:

In that quote we have the trifecta of potential Howard problems: 1.) He believed he had a variocele as well as a problem with his heart and had briefly taken digitalis after a car accident; 2.) He spent his life living with his mother’s infectious pulmonary condition; 3.) He was often separated from his home during his mother’s illness and he was often separated from his mother due to hospital visiting hours. One or more of these factors may have crept into his dreams. The passage from Our Dreaming Mind continues, “In his second study, Smith obtained dreams from forty-eight patients who were undergoing cardiac catheterization. Most of these patients had cardiac problems, but a few had cancer or diabetes. He found that the severity of cardiac dysfunction was related to the number of dream references to death for males and to separation for women.

However, DiPietro either doesn’t have, or doesn’t apply, all of the information regarding much of the above, to his thesis statement. He ignores the fact that there is no evidence that Howard’s night terrors occurred after he was twenty years old, and that there was six or seven years between the sleepwalking and the car crash. It’s too bad that DiPietro isn’t plugged into the Howard Community at Large, where someone, say, in REHupa, could have talked to him about this — but that relationship veers closely into someone being an “editor” over his work.

To add insult to injury, the document is riddled with a mild case of Zoomisms; not just in the head-scratching conclusions, but in the general, good old-fashioned writing style sense of the word: “While in the grips of the Great Depression Howard had put his savings into two local banks, only to see both of them fail.” I guess technically Howard, like everyone else, was, um, gripped, by the Great Depression, but there are better ways to write that sentence so that it doesn’t sound as if the Great Depression is a forty foot tall monster that seizes people who are going into banks. In the very next paragraph, we get another: “Later authors have often wondered exactly what it was that could grip Howard into taking his own life, just as his writing career was ever-rising and the promise of his future readers and admirers numbering in the millions was in its infancy of materialization.” Wow.

The part of this document that really irritates me, however, is in the middle of chapter four (“Confounded by the Crowd” — if DiPietro wanted to bounce around through Howard’s timeline, then he should have, at the very least, used simple chapter names so that we know where we are going next), wherein DiPietro spends three pages discussing the amount of bullying Howard did or did not receive. Here we go:

It would have been easier if Howard had not been such a thin and rather sickly child, bound to suffer the malicious jabs of his peers. But in some accounts he is portrayed as not being this way (childhood friend Earl Baker of Burkett reported Howard “was comparatively big and strong for his age,” so it is with caution that we should wholly believe some of de Camp’s admitted speculation on Howard’s childhood. It is more solidly believed (as told by Kate Merryman) that Howard may have been unwell between the ages of one and two. Dark Valley Destiny extrapolates liberally: “Frail, introverted, and looking to his mother for protection, Robert was a natural butt for bullies. . . He could not leave his yard for fear of being set upon.” He did not enter the first grade until he was eight, and it is strongly suspected he had suffered childhood tuberculosis, which differs from the adult disease as it is more likely to attack the bones and joints. It was often misdiagnosed as rheumatic fever.

My question for Mr. DiPietro is this: if you feel that de Camp stretched the truth about Howard’s childhood, then why on Earth would you reprint the offending passages? Even when, in the course of the next two pages, you present the counter-argument? Verbatim, from Rusty Burke, no less? The answer is, because you personally don’t know, and don’t want to weigh in on the subject, so you just inserted every scrap of debate and dialogue and offered no authorial guidance as to what we, the reader should believe (which is, by the way, something that a real biographer would have done).

Despite taking Post Oaks and Sand Roughs at face value, just as De Camp did, DiPietro has an interesting take on the ending of the book. This, in effect, is the cornerstone for another speculative essay and one I would suggest he pull out and expand upon.

DiPietro also has some problems with Blood & Thunder. He thinks I made too much of Texas as a source of inspiration for Howard, and he doesn’t seem to agree with a few of my conclusions. In a couple of places, it seems as though he’s trying to argue with some of the points raised in my book — or there’s perhaps a bit of a dismissive tone in his commentary that I find grating. For instance:

When Howard got his first story accepted, Spear and Fang, Tyson was there to witness how he knelt down beside his bed and remained there in a moment of solemn silence. Biographer Mark Finn likes to say that when he arose, the literary Robert E. Howard was born. Tyson reported him saying, “I’m so grateful, not just for this story, but because now it won’t be so hard for me to sell. Now that I’ve finally broken in, it’ll be easier.”

That didn’t stop him from swiping the photo of Hester in her Sunday Best with no thought to the source credit or anything like that or cribbing ideas that met with his fancy. Consider my take on Dark Valley: “Dark Valley, as recorded in poetry and related in Robert’s letters to Lovecraft, is Hester’s depression, not Robert’s,” and compare it with DiPietro’s statement: “His mother’s times of sorrow, hardship and reflection (again the term despondency has been used) would be impressed upon Howard to the point of him later attributing the melancholy to Dark Valley itself, a case of psychological transference.”

However, to be fair, DiPietro also cribs from Dark Valley Destiny and apparently defers to it, except when it’s convenient for him to refute it. And while Rusty Burke’s Short Biography of Robert E. Howard is cited, it gets very little play in DiPietro’s document — presumably because it doesn’t deal exclusively with suicide. And while the thesis of DiPietro’s theory of Howard’s suicide is liberally spread over about 150 pages in single paragraph bits and pieces, he does actually manage to bring up a few interesting observations. DiPietro bewilderingly places the most stock in Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, going so far as to use passages that Howard wrote as fiction to represent events that actually happened (as de Camp did.) To date, every single biographer has cautioned that the reader can’t trust Post Oaks because so much of what’s in there can’t be verified, but DiPietro offers no such warning, because he’s mostly in agreement with the book. Except when it doesn’t fit with something else he’s thinking.

I’m going to skip over the chapter wherein DiPietro reprints “The Silver Key,” but not before stating the legal reasons why he can do so, and then following the story with what would otherwise be an essay’s worth of material on why REH may have liked the story (territory that has, incidentally, been covered before). We’re also going to skip over the parts where DiPietro makes it seem like he’s in the InnerCircle by stating that Rusty Burke and Don Herron look alike — and if that’s not your cue to pull the ejector switch right there, I don’t know what is — and recounting their contributions to Howard scholarship. We’re also going to skip over the parts where DiPietro regales us with his experiences playing the Hyborian Age Play-By-Mail game, to his mental anguish.

Instead, we’re going to zoom over to the part of chapter 9 (“What Else Was There in Life?” and look at DiPietro’s focus on the hashish dream in Skull-Face, followed by the description of the opium pipe in “Alleys of Peril,” and then finally noting that Howard could have had access to marijuana in Texas, being so close to Mexico and all that. What follows are a bunch of if-then statements that end with the idea that IF Howard were to have built a little cabin out on the shores of Lake Brownwood, THEN he could have smoked a lot more dope.

Despite the presence of hashish and opium smoking paraphernalia in two of Howard’s stories, there is absolutely no evidence of any kind that Howard smoked pot. No mention in any letters, no anecdotes handed down to us from friends, no bong water on the corners of any Conan typescripts, no roach clips in The Trunk — Nothing. Speculate all you want to, Francis, but as a “biographer,” you have a responsibility to not mislead your readers. But enough of that. Let’s get to the last thought in the document.

What did Lindsey Tyson ever do to Francis DiPietro, I wonder? In a few pages, DiPietro recounts all of the major events in Howard’s life in which Tyson was present, right down to the fact that it may have been Tyson’s gun which Howard used to end his life. From this, DiPietro wonderingly extracts an intimate relationship, even as he’s brushing aside Howard’s involvement with Novalyne Price. Using an interpretation of Howard’s poem, “Surrender,” as the basis for this speculation, he specifically states:

Many things are veiled by degrees which vary. Howard not being true in the poem may indicate his perennial split between his mother and the rest of his life. It may even indicate a fondness for Lindsey Tyson of which no documentation exists. After all, with a fierce pride in his family history, it is somewhat incongruous of Howard to draw up a will in which he left everything to Tyson.

Again, here’s an example of there being no evidence whatsoever, and so DiPietro is going to run with it, anyway, because he’s such a fan, see, that he would be remiss not to bring it up. Well, two can play at this game, Francis. Is it possible that Howard saw Tyson as the one friend who Howard thought he could trust to take care of his estate? Is it possible that he didn’t want his father to get it, and that’s why he left it to his oldest friend in town who knew enough about his situation that he would understand what was going on?

There’s no smoking gun, here; hell, there’s no gun. Not even any bullets. There’s a place on the mantle where a gun COULD be placed, but it’s a mantle that could also hold a hundred other decorative objects. And the rule of Chekov’s Gun states that if you put the pistol on the mantelpiece in Act One, you’ve got to fire that pistol by Act Three. Well, DiPietro gleefully fires the pistol, and then in his afterword, accuses Howard fans of not being able to handle the truth, which is a great disservice to everyone, most especially the sixteen or seventeen folks who will buy this book to have a complete collection. He also offers up more excuses as to why the document looks like it does, throws in an ad for his other books, an anecdote about why editors don’t like him. And it’s not a flattering anecdote, either. It may be the truth, and if it is, it’s completely unprofessional and embarrassing, and I’m stunned that DiPietro included it.

Well, DiPietro is right about one thing: I couldn’t handle it. The rampant speculation, that is. Nor the slapdash way in which paragraphs discussing a single thesis point were spread out, sometimes over the span of several chapters. DiPietro may have been a fiction writer for twenty years, but he sucks canal water as a non-fiction writer. He needs an editor, despite his protestations to the contrary. And finally, if he’s going to write about REH, he needs to more deeply research and survey the field and not merely rely on the research that other people have done.

There are a multitude of facts in The Supreme Moment that are wrong, based on DiPietro’s assumption or mis-interpretation. He gives Howard no credit when he implies that “Blow the Chinks Down!” was a title Howard gave to his story, “House of Peril.” I also like that DiPietro has his own axe to grind: “Even in the case of his first accepted story by Weird Tales, “Wolfshead,” Howard became depressed when he got the galleys and saw the inevitable editorial corrections (and errors) which so many underpaid underlings tend to emit like an acrid haze, proffered to their boss as evidence that their small salaries are justified and their low places on the totem pole of literature regrettably secure.” Moreover, DiPietro gets a workout with all of his jumping to conclusions, and he fails to stick the dismount when he lands. Howard’s alleged cut stirrup=pistol in the glove compartment of his car is a fine example, but there are a number of others, as well.

Despite my evisceration, there were some bits that I thought weren’t bad; certainly fuel for some good essays. But that’s all they are. Essays. Not a book. Not even close. It’s unclear as to whether or not DiPietro will read this review, but here’s my unsolicited advice to him. I would suggest that DiPietro yank that “book” off of Lulu.com as fast as he can, and then I would invite him to get involved with the REHInnerCircle, or subscribe to The Cimmerian and enter The Lion’s Den, or join REHupa, where these speculations and theories can be tested on folks who might be in a better position to refute them gently and politely before they see print.

The REHupans would, at least, give him constructive feedback on what parts of his essays work and don’t work, and suggest how to fix them. I’m confident that he could place at least one of the polished essays in The Cimmerian. Of course, he would have to submit to the editorial process, which may be his downfall. There was another kid with a lot of energy that didn’t think there was anything wrong with his work, too — Ben Zoom. In many ways, DiPietro reminded me of Ol’ Ben: obviously an invested fan with lots on his mind, eager to share with the world at large, but not quite able to focus on the mechanics of presenting logical thoughts in a sequence so as to persuasively argue a point — and unable to take any criticism regarding same.

In the end, DiPietro is just another Howard fan — albeit with enough on the ball to write down his musings, speculations, and one-sided observations into a two hundred page long document. He did what every Howard fan does; he made Howard’s work personal and, to his way of thinking, unique. What makes Howard’s work so personal for fans is also what makes it so hard to write about. Fans tend to tie much of themselves up in Howard’s writings, and will thus defend their viewpoints as if their religion or political affiliation were under fire. So, in the end, we’re left with a guy who threw his “fan-statement” up on Lulu and made a cover for the express purpose of selling it to other fans. To put this “book” on the same shelf as the other critical texts on Howard does a disservice to them all. This is one project that the completist collector can do without.

LEO ADDS: DiPietro has posted a bit more about himself and his Robert E. Howard interest at his website.