Category: Howard’s Writing

The Birth of a Writer

On By Rob RoehmIn Biography, Howard's World, Howard's Writing, PublishingLeave a comment

[By Rob Roehm. Originally published in Onion Tops #79, REHupa mailing 280.]

(When I was asked to write the article about Robert E. Howard that became “Robert E. Howard and the Later Weird Tales,” I did a bit more than I was asked to do and ended up rewriting the opening portion. Not one to waste any effort, I present those opening pages here. If you’ve already read the complete, 19-page piece in The Weird Tales Story: Expanded and Enhanced, you probably don’t need to go any further.)

In the summer of 1921, Robert E. Howard, the fifteen-year-old son of a country doctor, discovered the pulps—at least, that is when he started buying them:

I well remember the first I ever bought. I was fifteen years old; I bought it one summer night when a wild restlessness in me would not let me keep still, and I had exhausted all the reading material on the place. I’ll never forget the thrill it gave me. Somehow it never had occurred to me before that I could buy a magazine. It was an Adventure. I still have the copy. [Letter to H. P. Lovecraft, ca. July 1933]

That initial thrill ignited a spark in Howard. While he had already been writing little stories for his high school English classes—standard fare with titles like “A Twentieth Century Rip Van Winkle”—his discovery of Adventure in 1921 gave birth to a writer. He told H. P. Lovecraft, “at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen.” It would take a few years of practice and the birth of a new magazine, Weird Tales, before Howard had any success in that profession.

At first, inspired by the stories he read in the adventure pulps, Howard produced humorous western adventures. Before the end of 1921, he was already submitting stories to the magazines he’d been purchasing, starting with “Bill Smalley and the Power of the Human Eye,” which was submitted to, and rejected by, Adventure. This was Howard’s first series character, though his high school English teacher was probably the only one to know it. Howard produced at least two other tales starring Smalley and turned them in for credit: “Over the Rockies in a Ford” (dated November 15, 1921) and “The Ghost of Bald Rock Ranch” (December 13, 1921). During the next two years, Howard submitted at least five other stories, all rejected. Three of those titles he sent off to top tier pulps Adventure, Argosy All-Story, and Cosmopolitan; the other two went to a new magazine named Weird Tales.

Dated March 1923, “The Unique Magazine” appeared on newsstands in February, but based on ads in the local newspaper, probably not in Cross Plains, the small community in Central West Texas where Robert E. Howard attended high school. Luckily for Howard, in 1922 the Cross Plains school system only went as far as the 10th grade. To be college eligible, students had to pick up another year of schooling somewhere else; Robert E. Howard went to the high school in nearby Brownwood for that “senior” year. Brownwood was (and still is) a larger community than Cross Plains and its selection of magazines included Weird Tales.

Between submitting stories to the adventure pulps and writing humorous yarns for his school newspaper, The Tattler, Howard must have stumbled onto one of the early issues of the new magazine and decided to try his hand at a weird tale. In a circa February 1929 letter to Tevis Clyde Smith, Howard included a list of submissions he’d made from 1921 up to that point; this includes his first try at Weird Tales, “The Mystery of Summerton Castle,” which was rejected by editor Edwin Baird. Following his 1923 graduation, Howard returned to Cross Plains and began working at various odd jobs, he also continued to write. A July 7, 1923 letter to Smith, mentions his second attempt at the new magazine: “I sent a story to the Weird Tales, ‘The Phantom of Old Egypt’ which I suppose they will turn down.” He was not wrong. Both of these submissions are lost, though the 1929 list provides a bit of detail regarding the second tale: “Orient. Lit. & Legends—slight.”

In 1924, Howard finally saw his name in the pulps, though not as he probably wished. Two of his letters to Adventure were published, one in the March 20 issue and the other in the August 20 edition. Both letters contain questions Howard had on different cultures. The answers, no doubt, were to be used as details in stories he was writing for that same magazine. But Howard would receive even better story advice later that year when the December issue of Weird Tales hit the stands.

Howard had returned to Brownwood in the fall of 1924 to attend the Commercial School at Howard Payne College. Back in the larger town, he could have picked up the December issue on the day it came out, November 1. Discovered by Howard scholar Patrice Louinet (see his “The Wright Hook“), that issue’s Eyrie has a request from new editor Farnsworth Wright. Tired of rejecting “manuscripts dealing with fights between dinosaurs and pterodactyls on the one hand and cavemen on the other,” Wright specifically asks for the following:

Our learned friends among the anthropologists tell us that the legend of ogres dates from cavemen tribes. The Neandertalers were so terrible and primitive and brutish, they tell us, that the Cro-Magnon cavemen never interbred with them, but killed them without mercy. And when a Cro-Magnon child strayed alone from its cave, and a cannibalistic Neandertaler stalked it, that was the end of the child; but the memory of those brutish and half-human people remains in our legends of ogres; for the Cro-Magnons were not exterminated by the nomadic tribes that afterwards entered Europe and peopled it, but intermarried with them, and retained some of their legends.

How would you like a tale of the warfare between a Cro-Magnon (say one of the artists who painted the pictures of reindeer and mammoths which still amaze the tourist) and one of those brutish ogres, perhaps over a girl who has taken the fancy of the Neandertaler; and the Cro-Magnon artist follows the Neandertal man to his den, and… But we have no room to tell the story in “The Eyrie”. We wish one of our author friends would write it for us.

And, apparently, Robert E. Howard did just that. He must have read Wright’s request early in November and written his tale in just a few days as, according to his semi-autobiographical novel, Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, the story had been accepted by November 27, 1924. Wright’s suggestion perfectly describes Howard’s first professional sale, “Spear and Fang,” for which he would receive $15 (or $16, depending on the source) upon publication.

Emboldened by that initial sale, Howard sent in two more stories while in Brownwood: “The Lost Race” and “The Hyena.” Not wanting to stay in school, Howard returned to Cross Plains at the Christmas break. There, a letter awaited accepting “The Hyena,” but asking for a rewrite of “The Lost Race.” According to Post Oaks, Howard “doubted his ability to make the tale come up to standard, even with the editor’s remarks to guide him, and dreading a second refusal, delayed several days before he made the changes, and sent off two more stories with it when he returned it.”

The turnaround must have been quick as, by January 7, 1925, Howard was able to report to Smith, “I sold two more stories to Weird Tales, one for $25 (“The Hyena”) and the other for $30 (“The Lost Race”). However, they sent back what I consider my masterpiece thus far, with sarcastic remarks.” The identity of his “masterpiece” is not known, but the 1929 list contains several titles that are now lost, including “The Trail of the Single Foot,” “The Crimson Line,” and “Windigo! Windigo!” In Post Oaks, Howard describes “The Lost Race” as “a wild tale of early Britain,” and “The Hyena,” as “a story of East Africa and native superstition.”

Following this success, Howard deluged Weird Tales with stories, but “To his dismay five weird tales of his were rejected in a row. He could not understand. Something was wrong here. The editor sometimes pointed out faults which seemed minor to [Howard], but usually said briefly that it did not suit.” Some of these titles (from the 1929 list) may have been “Drums of Horror,” “The Street of Grey-beards,” and “The Last White Man.”

Following this string of rejections, Howard submitted “In the Forest of Villefere,” and “was jubilant when the editor accepted it—intensely flattered when that worthy remarked that in his opinion it was a ‘gem’” (Post Oaks). The 1929 list describes the story as “Superstition; Action, were-wolves, medieval France,” for which he would receive $8.00 on publication.

Finally, more than six months after it was accepted, Howard’s “Spear and Fang” hit the stands on June 1, 1925, in the July issue of Weird Tales. This was “a pinnacle” in Howard’s life: “He sat and stared at his name in print for hours at a time, thrilling to his finger ends” (Post Oaks). The very next month, “In the Forest of Villefere” appeared. The September issue has a letter of comment in “The Eyrie,” written by a cousin at Howard’s request, that boosts “Spear and Fang”; otherwise, there are no reader responses to Howard’s first two professional appearances. [. . .]

The Vinson Papers — Part 2

On By Rob RoehmIn Biography, Contemporaries, Howard's Writing, Lone Scouts, Tevis Clyde Smith, Truett VinsonLeave a comment
From the 1924 edition of The Pecan, Howard Payne College’s yearbook.

[By Rob Roehm. Originally posted July 3, 2011 on the REH Two-Gun Raconteur blog. This version updated and lightly edited.]

Part 1 is here.

Shortly after graduating from Brownwood High School in May 1923, Truett Vinson enrolled in the commercial school at Howard Payne College. In the past, there has been some confusion between Howard Payne’s Commercial School and its Academy. Before we continue, let’s see if we can clear that up.

As most of this blog’s readers probably know, to be eligible for college entry in Texas in the 1920s, students needed 11 years of schooling. The problem was that many schools at the time, especially “country” schools, only went as far as the 10th grade—Cross Plains High School, for example. So, many rural students needed a place to go to pick up that extra year. There were a couple of options available in nearby Brownwood: Robert Howard completed his 11th year at the public high school there and, a couple of years later, his friend Lindsey Tyson chose option #2, the Howard Payne Academy.

The Academy at HP offered a complete high school education, all four years (8th grade to 11th), with special attention paid to preparing students for the rigors of college coursework. It had its own principal (in 1924 it was A. Hicks, who also taught Science and Spanish), teachers, and facilities separate from the regular college campus. Students could take as many classes as they needed to complete the college requirements. The following excerpts from the Academy section of the June 1924 college catalogue should help clear things up:

Housed in the Academy building, but not limited to Academy students, was the Commercial School. Academy students were encouraged to take commercial courses to help them in college (typing, penmanship, etc.), but more in-depth coursework was available for anyone wishing to pursue a career in bookkeeping, stenography, banking, etc. This was the option Truett Vinson (and, later, Bob Howard) chose. See the following from the same catalogue:

Vinson attended the Commercial School from the fall of 1923 through the spring of 1924, taking instruction from J. E. Basham. While enrolled, he was a member of the college’s Brownwood High School Club with others from his BHS class, including C. S. Boyles and Claude and Travis Curtis, all of whom may be in the picture that heads this post. Vinson graduated on May 21, 1924, with a diploma for bookkeeping. Unlike his friend Bob Howard, Truett would use his.

Above: Vinson on April 21, 1924. Photo courtesy of Christopher Oldham, by way of Todd Vick.

At least by April 1925 Vinson was employed, possibly with the Walker-Smith company in Brownwood. In a letter to Clyde who was vacationing in the South, Vinson wrote, “Starting next Saturday, I get off at one o’clock instead of five.”

At least two Vinson letters from the above exchange survive. The first, dated April 15 [1925], reveals Truett’s interest in the muckraking of Upton Sinclair—an interest that went on for many years—as well as his interest in the ladies: “a certain young lady by the name of Z— B—- still lives on Center Avenue!” (This must be Zana Brown, who was a freshman at BHS when Truett was a senior and lived at 800 Center Avenue.)

It appears that the whole crew (Vinson, Smith, Howard, and even Herbert Klatt) were under the spell of Sinclair. Vinson wrote the following in the April 15 letter:

Mr. Howard, the noted muck raker, has not countered, again, with a “Right Hook,” but I expect that when he does, we will think it is a right hook and left hook put together! You will probably note with interest that Robert is laying off so much of that “Easturn Bull” and is writing in true Sinclair style now. I am certainly glad to know it, and I believe he will make a good muck raker!

In a follow up letter on April 26, Vinson told Clyde the following:

When I take a trip to the wicked city, I too, am certainly going to see all there is to be seen in the way of legs! I suppose legs are my one weakness! They’ll probably put this inscription on my tombstone: “Here lies a fool. He was not a thief; he was not a murderer; he was not a libertine; BUT he had one weakness—-LEGS!”

And this:

I wrote another letter to U. Sinclair a few weeks ago, asking him for his opinion of Christ and what he thought of Papini’s “Life of Christ.” He answered by saying that he considered Papini’s book a pitiful production, and that he was sending me a copy of his book, “The Profits of Religion.” It arrived OK and I have finished reading it. He rather shocked me, as he took some “muckraking” cracks at nearly every religion in the world! He sure jumped on Billy Sunday, Gypsy Smith, Thomas Dixon, Dr. Lyman Abbot and Roman Catholicism! But I find that he is really more of a real Christian than most church members, and that he regards Jesus in a far more worthier way.

Besides girls and Upton Sinclair, the boys were all experimenting with amateur journalism. At the same time that Clyde Smith was producing The All-Around Magazine, Vinson had his own paper going. No issues of his The Toreador survive from 1923, but Robert Howard mentions subscribing to it in his October 5, 1923 letter to Smith. This is right around the time Howard was producing his own Golden Caliph. All of these publications appear to have ended before 1923 was over, but in 1925 The Toreador made a comeback with at least two issues (June 1925 and July 5, 1925); Bob Howard, too, revamped his publication into the aforementioned Right Hook. The boys’ correspondent, Herbert Klatt, contributed to both, and all of them exchanged letters fairly regularly.

The Cross Plains Review for Friday, May 22, 1925 reports that “Clyde Smith and Truett Vinson of Brownwood spent Saturday night and Sunday with Robert Howard.” Perhaps they were discussing their amateur papers.

In the April 26 letter mentioned above, Vinson gives us a peek at what was going on behind the scenes:

H. Klatt is now corresponding with Robert, and he tells me in his last letter that Robert advises him to read Talbot Mundy for some real thrills. Robert tells him that you and I don’t agree with him on the subject of T. Mundy, and so I write Klatt and tell him that we don’t.

Klatt appears to have been a level-headed young man. Putting such minor differences as described above aside, Klatt pitched his plan for the future to Clyde Smith in a May 27, 1925 letter:

Truett tells me about your trip to Cross Plains, its attendant incidental experiences. I wish I could have been with you in that talk on books and other things that lasted till 3 o’clock in the morning. It must have been interesting. [. . .] I have an idea: Since the four of us being more or lees “Men of letters” and so-called radicals, we should be able to form an interesting and mutually helpful company. The Fiery Fearless Four. We could have some letterheads with our heading printed. And then what about jointly publishing an official organ? By each contributing $2.00 per month we could make The Toreador an interesting little six or eight page paper. Truett could manage it, mail the subscription copies and divide the rest among us to keep or mail as samples. We could make it our very own channel of expression. What do you think about the plan in general? I have a lot more plans in connection with it.

On July 10, 1925, Robert E. Howard spent the night at Clyde Smith’s house in Brownwood. The next day, he was on the receiving end of a practical joke engineered by Smith, and apparently with Vinson’s assistance. The Brownwood boys knew that Howard was girl-shy, so it was arranged for Smith’s girlfriend, Echla Laxson, to come on to Howard while they rode around in the back seat of Smith’s car. Howard turned the tables on his friends, however, by returning Laxon’s advances, even going so far as to kiss the girl. According to Howard’s semi-autobiographical novel, Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, this caused a brief falling out between himself and the Brownwood boys.

In a circa September 1925 letter to Robert E. Howard, some of which was used in Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, Vinson continues the themes from his letters to Smith:

I have just been thinking about girls and marriage today! Funny subject isn’t it? I like girls and some day I’d like to get married to one of them—but, ye gods! Which one? I’ve never seen a girl yet that would make an ideal wife for me. Is it because I’m so plague taked different? Tell me! “I like girls but they don’t like me!”

And . . .

I note that Upton Sinclair is nominated for Governor of the noble state of California by the Socialist party. What do you think of it, anyway? Upton has a new book now—“Letters to Judd” is the title of it. I’ll send you a paper bound copy this week. Be sure to read it.

Lest people think that Vinson was a two-trick pony, it is important to note that he, and everyone mentioned above, was above all things a Reader. Practically all of his letters mention something he has read; this, plus the fact that he was a book dealer on the side, serve to portray him as a pretty well-rounded fellow, with a healthy interest in the opposite sex, and an equally healthy interest in the world around him. In the four letters mentioned in this and my previous post (all from Texas A&M’s Cushing Memorial Library and Archives), Vinson mentions having read the following titles: Desert of Wheat by Zane Grey, Tarzan the Terrible by Burroughs, Life of Christ by Papini (see excerpt from The Toreador below), The Profits of Religion by Sinclair, Autobiography of Benito Cellini, and Letters to Judd by Sinclair; he also mentions authors Talbot Mundy and Arthur B. Reeve, though no specific work is named. All this in just a little more than four typed pages.

With the summer of 1925 over, Smith enrolled at Daniel Baker College, Howard tried to make a living in Cross Plains, and Vinson continued at his job. Their amateur journals ceased publication, but a new one was coming.

Go to Part 3.

Post Oaks and Football–Revisited

On By Rob RoehmIn Biography, Contemporaries, Howard's WritingLeave a comment

[By Rob Roehm. Originally posted on September 10, 2011, at rehtwogunraconteur.com. This version lightly edited and updated.]

With football season getting started, I was reminded of my first post on the Two-Gun Raconteur blog, “Post Oaks and Football.” In that post, I talked about how accurate the opening scene of Howard’s semi-autobiographical novel Post Oaks and Sand Roughs is. This got me thinking, so I pulled the Grant edition from the shelf and read the chapter again. [The text is the same in the new edition put out by the REHF Press.] The following conversation between Steve Costigan (Howard) and Clive Hilton (Tevis Clyde Smith), which takes place right after the football game discussed in my first post, grabbed my attention:

“That was sure a great run Franey made, wasn’t it?” remarked Steve.
“Yes, it was,” Clive acquiesced.
“Guess you’re here writing the game up for The Rattler?”
“Yes. I guess the student body’ll read it, on account of Franey.”
[. . .]
“I guess I’ll have the title lines in ten point type,” Clive said suddenly. “I think I’ll try a new style for the front page this week. The students won’t know the difference but a man appreciates his own work.”

Given how accurate Howard’s description of the football game had been in this fictional work, I wondered if he had played fast and loose with the post-game conversation or kept mostly to the facts. Luckily, I had a way to fact check it.

At Texas A&M’s Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, they’ve got Smith’s collection of The Tattler, including the edition that came out right after the November 27, 1924 game between Howard Payne and Simmons. Both of my questions are answered on the front page.

First, “Clive” says he’s writing an article about the game for the paper. In the real world, Clyde Smith was editor-in-chief of The Tattler for the 1923-24 school year. The paper’s staff box does not list a sport’s editor, so I guess we can’t be certain who wrote the following story, but my money’s on Clyde:

After that, “Clive” says he’s going to experiment with a new style for the paper that week. Clyde Smith did exactly that:

Written in 1928, Post Oaks and Sand Roughs is presented as fiction, but it’s sure got a lot of fact included. If nothing else, this underlines how good Howard’s memory was. I can’t remember a conversation from last week, never mind four years go.

Contact Without Friction!

On By Rob RoehmIn Biography, Contemporaries, Howard's Writing, LettersLeave a comment

[by Rob Roehm. Originally posted at rehtwogunraconteur.com on September 4, 2012. This version slightly expanded.]

In 1928, Robert E. Howard was looking for contacts outside of the small town he was living in. A reader of the E. Haldeman-Julius publications, it seems likely that he encountered an ad for a correspondence club in an issue of The Debunker or Haldeman-Julius Weekly.

At least as early as the mid-1920s, a Pennsylvania chemist named Merlin Wand had started a list of “intellectually marooned” pen-pals. By 1927, he had acquired enough names to start a “one-man operation called ‘Contacts’ [which] was a clearinghouse for isolated book-lovers and neophyte writers.” (*) He began placing ads in various publications—The Survey, Haldeman-Julius Weekly, etc.—where, for the cost of a stamp, interested individuals would receive the “Contacts Listing Form.” Once the form was completed, applicants sent it and one dollar back to Wand to be listed in Contacts, “the only correspondence club for the mentally marooned.” (**) A typical ad appears below:

Contact Without Friction!

Are you mentally isolated? “Contacts,” literary correspondence club, introduces you to versatile, unconventional minds. No Formalities. Books loaned free to members. Registration fee $1.00. Particulars, stamp: Merlin Wand, Manorville, Pa.

Thanks to the Glenn Lord Collection, we now know that in the spring of 1928, Robert E. Howard mailed in a stamp and was sent the “Contacts Listing Form” on May 26 (see The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard: Index and Addenda). He filled out the personal information, indicating that his general attitude was “Liberal,” that he was “young” and “single” and that his occupation was “Magazine writer, prose and rhyme.”

Based on how Howard filled out his Contacts Listing Form, it appears that he was more interested in gathering information than in obtaining pen-pals. Under a list of 28 subjects including Mysticism, Sexology, Art, Literature, etc., Howard chose only three: Poetry, Anthropology, and Psychology (he typed “Abnormal” after the last). Then, in the “subjects not mentioned” area, he added Criminology and “Obsessional dementia.” In the additional information slot, Howard wrote the following:

Especially would like to hear from anyone having had experiences with cases of compulsory and criminal insanity; information will be treated as confidential. Also interested in devil worship, human sacrifice, anything unusual, grisly or strange.

The fact that this form remained with Howard’s papers shows that he didn’t send it in with the dollar membership fee. One wonders what type of pen-pal he’d have met if he had sent it in.

*Wixson, Douglas. Worker-Writer in America: Jack Conroy and the Tradition of Midwestern Literary Radicalism, 1898-1990. University of Illinois Press: 1998.
**Sears, James Thomas. Behind the Mask of the Mattachine. Psychology Press: 2006.

Found Poems

On By Rob RoehmIn Howard's Writing, LettersLeave a comment

[by Rob Roehm. Originally published April 6, 2013, at rehtwogunraconteur.com; this version lightly edited.]

While digging through Robert E. Howard’s letters to Tevis Clyde Smith, I stumbled onto two poems that didn’t make it into The Collected Poetry volume. Both poems are embedded at the end of prose paragraphs and not easily distinguished from them. Easy to miss if you’re scanning for lines of verse. Anyway, both of the items are in The Collected Letters, volume 3, page 489.

I found one of them a while ago and reported it to Paul Herman. That poem appears on the Howard Works website as “Untitled (‘Deep in my bosom . . .’),” but the other poem I just noticed today, a few lines above the other one. Neither has been published as a poem, only as part of the letter (and the wrong letter, at that, but that’s a story for another time).

The first new poem is in this paragraph:

I speak scathingly of vice—bad women, bad liquor and profanity. Hell. Let me dream by a silver stream till I sight my vision’s gleam, then let me sigh for the days gone by when I dreamed of a golden dream.

A little tweaking yields the following quatrain:

Let me dream by a silver stream
Till I sight my vision’s gleam,
Then let me sigh for the days gone by
When I dreamed of a golden dream.

The poem I’d found before is at the end of the next paragraph:

I am composed of two elements, intellect and animal instinct. Both are above average. My intellect tells, and proves logically that there is nothing to life, that it is a barren and empty bauble to which to cling. My animal instinct commands that I live in spite of Hell and damnation. My intellect sees, knows, and realizes; my instinct gropes blindly in the dark, like a blindfolded giant, seeing nothing, knowing nothing except the tremendous urge to exist. It does not reason, it does not weigh cause and result, nor seek the why and wherefore. All that it knows is Life and toward life it grasps and clutches as a tree gropes to the light. Deep in my bosom I lock him, the giant that grips me to life the floods of Eternity rock him, his talons drip red with the strife. He in the shadows is brooding, away from the light of my brain, but his hands are forever intruding, he anchors my soul with a chain.

Some more tweaking and we get these two quatrains:

Deep in my bosom I lock him,
The giant that grips me to life,
The floods of Eternity rock him,
His talons drip red with the strife.

He in the shadows is brooding,
Away from the light of my brain,
But his hands are forever intruding,
He anchors my soul with a chain.

I would not be surprised if there are more undiscovered bits of verse hiding in Howard’s correspondence. Let the hunt begin!

The Kline Connection

On By Rob RoehmIn Biography, Fandom, Howard's Writing, PublishingLeave a comment

OAK header

[by Rob Roehm. Originally published May 1, 2011, at rehtwogunraconteur.com; this version lightly edited.]

Born in Chicago on July 1, 1891, and author of at least thirteen novels (most appearing as serials in the pulps), not to mention all the short stories, articles, letters, and even poems, Otis Adelbert Kline is perhaps best-known to readers of the Two-Gun blog as the author of The Swordsmen of Mars, and as the one-time agent for Robert E. Howard. In the 1920s, Kline hobnobbed with Farnsworth Wright and E. Hoffmann Price at his Chicago home. A successful pulp writer himself, Kline started agenting for others in 1932 or 1933. At the suggestion of Price, himself a client of Kline’s, Robert E. Howard joined the stable of authors that Kline served.

OAK pic

The earliest Kline-Howard connection that I’m aware of is Kline’s May 11, 1933 letter to Howard. In that missive, Kline mentions having at least four Howard stories already on hand: “The Yellow Cobra,” “The Turkish Menace,” “The Jade Monkey,” and “Cultured Cauliflowers.” Not only did Kline attempt to place Howard’s fiction in different markets, he offered tips and strategies to more effectively produce those stories.

According to the Kline Agency ledger, “Wild Water” was received on June 15, 1933. The very next day Kline returned it, saying that while it was loaded with “excellent local color, powerful characterizations and fast action,” he was afraid he couldn’t sell it “because the plot is not powerful enough to support a story of this length.” While I don’t agree with Kline’s assessment, he apparently knew what he was talking about at the time. Howard rewrote the story and sent it back that October. It was shopped around by V. I. Cooper, who sent it to Fiction House, Wild West Stories, and others, to no effect. The story remained unpublished long after Howard’s death.

And so it went; Kline continued to place, or not place, Howard’s work. In 1935, business must have been going well, as Kline enlisted the aid of Otto O. Binder. Binder went to New York late in 1935 to be closer to the publishing scene than Kline’s Chicago offices allowed. And he had some success, placing several of Howard’s “Spicy” stories with Trojan Publications, as well as other items, like “Black Wind Blowing” and “The Curly Wolf of Saw-Tooth.” After a rough start in New York, when things started picking up, Binder wrote the following to his brother Earl on June 7, 1936:

The business is beginning to pick up a bit at that, though. I wish all our authors were like Robert E. Howard. Since I’ve been here, I’ve sold $700 worth of his stuff, getting him into Argosy, and into Star Western, and Complete Stories S&S. He’s thirty years old and has sold 22 different magazines and over 125 stories altogether. I’ve seen his picture—he’s a rough and ready Texan and claims he wears no underwear because there’s no sense to it!

Howard’s suicide a few days later certainly negated that “wish.” Binder sent a postcard to Richard Frank, a friend in Pennsylvania, mentioning the suicide. Rich responded in a July 9, 1936 letter:

Give me more dope on the suicide of ROBERT E. HOWARD. Funny thing about my hearing of the tragedy. Your card arrived telling me of the suicide and while I was waiting at the post office I saw a magazine thrust into my box. I pulled it out and it was the July issue of WEIRD TALES with Howard’s latest story, “Red Nails,” featured on the cover. It gave me a peculiar feeling to hear of an author’s death and then, in the same mail, receive his latest tale.

And while there would be no new Howard items to show, Kline Associates got first crack at the fabled trunk, and Kline continued to represent Howard through his father, Doctor I. M. Howard. During this time, A Gent from Bear Creek was published, and the foundations for Skull-Face and Others were laid. This stormy relationship would last until the doctor’s death in November 1944, but that was not the end of Otis Kline Associates’ relationship with the works of Robert E. Howard.

OAK Letterhead

In his will, Doctor Howard left “all property, both real and personal” to his friend Doctor P. M. Kuykendall. This included the literary rights to Robert’s work. And, while the actual items—typescripts, clippings, letters, etc.—were shipped off to E. Hoffmann Price in California, Dr. Kuykendall received royalty checks from Kline. Business was slow.

Kline died in October 1946, but his agenting business lived on. His daughter, Ora Rossini (later Rozar), took over the practice for a year and a half, but when her husband was transferred to Texas, of all places, she “turned over everything to Oscar Friend, including material published and unpublished, records, files, etc.” Oscar Jerome Friend was a veteran writer himself, as well as editor of Thrilling Wonder Stories from 1941 to 1944. Upon purchasing Kline’s business, he set out to fatten it by contacting various authors, including Binder and British science fiction writer Eric Frank Russell, and asking them to let him represent them. The Howard items were probably not very high on his priority list. Things change.

In 1950, a small specialty publisher purchased the rights for Howard’s The Hour of the Dragon—Gnome Press. Conan the Conqueror, as the novel was re-titled, was the first in a series of books covering the Cimmerian’s exploits. From all accounts the series wasn’t exactly lucrative, but it did show some possibilities. Enter L. Sprague de Camp.

According to de Camp’s introduction to Gnome’s King Conan (1953), he had been acquainted with Oscar Friend and, when he learned from Donald Wollheim that Friend had “a whole pile of unpublished Howard manuscripts,” he rushed right over. This was November 30, 1951. Upon his arrival, he met Harold Preece, and then Friend “hauled out the carton of manuscripts—about twenty pounds of them.” Among the stash, three Conan tales were discovered, and “it was agreed that [de Camp] should rewrite these stories—not, however, to turn them into typical de Camp pieces, but to create as nearly as possible what Howard would have produced if in his later years he had undertaken to rewrite them himself with all the care he could manage.”

Meanwhile, Doctor Kuykendall had decided that he’d had enough of the literature business and made Friend an offer: “We would consider a sale price of three thousand dollars for all rights, and a complete release of any claim to future royalties that might accrue.” Friend responded on March 14, 1954, saying that the property wasn’t really worth that much, and offered $1,250, instead. The reasons for this reduction in price seem quite reasonable, for the time. There was, after all, no guarantee that the Conan name would take off.

Friend described his efforts to continue the Conan series, and the amount of work that would entail:

Now let us consider the future prospect of a continuation. In the first place, I have to guide, cajole, help plot, supervise, etc., the future books, and keep a firm rein and control—or the project would go completely haywire and finally bog down in complete ruin. There is one rather smart writer now who has been doing some work for us in rewriting several Howard stories, and he keeps pressing for a larger cut and keeps slipping in side remarks to the effect that if he wants to he can and will go ahead on his own and write about Conan as the author is dead, etc., etc. And I’ve warned him that I’ll sue the pants off him if he makes one silly move of this nature before the CONAN material runs out of copyright (56 years).

We all know how that worked out.

Sometime later, Kline’s daughter recalled that “Oscar moved to another place and I suspect disposed of practically all OAK material, records, and files.” This may be when the Howard items listed on the Kline lists disappeared. Items like “The Phantom Tarantula” and “Footprints of Fear,” which are listed on the list, but no copies have ever turned up.

Young GL

Friend enlisted the aid of his wife, Irene M. Ozment, as vice president, and his daughter, Kitty F. West, as early as 1955, with West acting as secretary for Kline Associates and sending letters to the above-mentioned Eric Frank Russell. Around this time, also, a young Howard fan named Glenn Lord secured the rights to Howard’s poems and published Always Comes Evening (1957) with Arkham House. Friend’s health began to fail in the early 1960s, and he died on January 19, 1963. His wife and daughter continued the agency through 1964. In the interim, Dr. Kuykendall had also died, leaving the rights to Robert Howard’s works to his wife and daughter. With the Kline agency closing up shop, the heirs were in need of a new agent.

In Costigan #7 (REHupa mailing #9, May 1974), Glenn Lord explains what happened next: “The Howard heirs asked Mrs. West to find another agent to handle the Howard material, and L. Sprague de Camp was asked, but turned it down due to his own writing. De Camp suggested that I might be a good possibility.”

The Kuykendalls apparently agreed and, in the winter 1965 issue of The Howard Collector, Lord made the announcement: “Otis Kline Associates, the agent for the Howard Estate, went out of business at the end of 1964. I have accepted the handling of the Howard material for the Estate.”

The rest, as they say, is history.

[Note: Most of the information used to write the above came from the forthcoming collection from the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press, The Collected Letters of Doctor Isaac M. Howard. Ora Rozar’s information is from OAK Leaves #2, Winter 1970-71, edited by David Anthony Kraft. The letters to and from Otto Binder are unpublished; copies were provided by the Cushing Memorial Library at Texas A&M. Binder’s list of sales appeared in OAK Leaves #5, Fall 1971. Letters from Kline Associates to Erick Frank Russell are unpublished; they are housed at the University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives.]

Footnotes #2

On By Rob RoehmIn Biography, Howard's Writing, Letters, PublishingLeave a comment

masthead-sm

Now the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, the old Baylor College for Women in Belton, Texas, ran an annual high school poetry contest starting in 1922. When they opened the contest up to boys in 1923, Robert E. Howard submitted “The Sea.” I wrote about this contest a few years ago in “The Poetry Contest.” For that article, I had to rely on community newspapers for the bulk of the information regarding the contest in which Howard won an Honorable Mention. Now I’ve found a better source.

In his June 22, 1923, letter to Clyde Smith, Howard doesn’t mention the Honorable Mention, but he does describe the fate of his poem:

I got a letter from the assistant editor of The Campus, S.M.U. He said he saw my poem “The Sea” in The Baylor United Statement [sic.] and he asked me to contribute to The Campus. I sent him a poem.

Moved to action by this reference, several years ago I spent an afternoon in front of the microfiche reader at Southern Methodist University in Dallas looking through old issues of their newspaper, The Campus. I didn’t find any Howard poems. I have also been on the lookout for issues of The Baylorian and The United Statements, especially the issue containing “The Sea,” which, as far as I know, no one has ever seen. If Howard hadn’t mentioned it to Smith, we wouldn’t know about that appearance. Not long after visiting SMU, I contacted the library at Mary Hardin-Baylor and learned that they did have some issues of those papers, but not the ones I was looking for. So, I put those papers on the back burner and moved on to the next thing.

Not long ago I reopened the investigation and discovered several digital copies of the college’s publications from the right time period, including the issue of The Baylorian that contains the rules for the 1923 poetry contest. At the bottom of that page, partially obscured by their “Courtesy of . . .” watermark, is the following publication information:

Announcement of the awards, together with the publication of the poem winning first place, will be made through the press of the state; and all poems winning prizes or honorable mention will be published in the May issue of the Baylorian.

1923 03-00 v8n2_Page_45

The May 1923 issue of The Baylorian is available, and it does contain a lot of poetry, but none of it is from the poetry contest. So, it seems that at some point it was decided to publish the poems in The United Statements, instead. News of the contest winners started appearing in state newspapers as early as May 9, 1923. Presumably, “The Sea” must have appeared in The United Statements around then. There are two 1923 issues available at the website, but neither the March 31st nor the May 19th edition has a poem by Robert E. Howard.

And the search continues.

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What’s in a Name?

On By Rob RoehmIn Howard's WritingLeave a comment

2018 09-24 Dead Remember

[by Rob Roehm. Originally posted October 25, 2007, at thecimmerian.com; this version lightly edited.]

The process by which Robert E. Howard named his settings and characters has been a topic of discussion since H. P. Lovecraft chided him for using thinly disguised historical names in his fantasies. L. Sprague de Camp disapproved of this practice as well and, in Dark Valley Destiny, added, “Because of his linguistic naiveté, or perhaps because he simply refused to take the time and trouble, [Howard] tends to give his characters names that are often unpleasing and confusingly similar.” Modern scholars give Howard a bit more credit, saying that he was purposeful in selecting vaguely historic names for the connotations they would convey. I’ll leave this discussion to the Big Brains, but I do have some fuel for the fire.

Back in “Curly Elkins of Bear-Tooth Creek” (The Cimmerian V3n4), I discussed the differences between “A Elkins Never Surrenders,” a Breckinridge Elkins tale, and its rewritten form, “A Elston to the Rescue” (aka “The Curly Wolf of Sawtooth,” Star Western, September 1936), starring one Bearfield Elston. The changes went beyond simple Elkins to Elston switches, affecting the characterization of the main character. A simple curiosity, or so I thought.

Recently, I had the opportunity to examine some early drafts of various Howard stories; one of them being “The Dead Remember” (Argosy, August 15, 1936). I received two different typescripts for the story: one was an early draft, the other, stamped “copy,” was almost identical to the published version. Amidst various punctuation changes and minor word alterations was an interesting name switch—Elkins to Elston.

Now, maybe I’m the only Howard-head who finds these little items interesting—probably not, but the discovery that “John Elkins,” the trail boss in the early draft of “The Dead Remember,” had been changed to “John Elston” in the later version was quite intriguing. Was Howard working on “A Elkins Never Surrenders” at the same time as “The Dead Remember”? Did he change “John Elkins” to “Elston” to avoid confusion? What? I guess we’ll never know.

Voodoo and Bat Wing

On By Rob RoehmIn Howard's Writing, InfluencesLeave a comment

[by Rob Roehm. Originally posted March 4, 2007, at thecimmerian.com; this version lightly edited.]

I have definitely abandoned the detective field, where I never had any success anyway, and which represents a type of story I actively detest. I can scarcely endure to read one, much less write one.

— Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft: May 13, 1936

Many fans of Robert E. Howard’s work who wish to follow in his literary footsteps have taken to acquiring and reading the books that Howard once read. One of Howard’s favorite authors was Sax Rohmer. This master of the “Oriental Menace” story is best-known for his many tales of Fu-Manchu, the Asian mastermind bent on world domination. Howard had several of the Fu-Manchu books on his shelf; their influence is most clearly seen in Howard’s novella “Skull-Face.”

Besides the Fu-Manchu books, Howard also owned several other titles by Rohmer, including Bat Wing. This novel was first published in 1921 by Doubleday and was reprinted in 1925 and again in 1930. A Victorian murder-mystery, it tips its hat several times to the genre’s creator, Edgar Allan Poe, with the main character’s repeated references to Poe’s pioneering sleuth Auguste Dupin, as well as a character in the novel who resembles Poe himself. Despite Howard’s claim that “I actively detest” this type of story, there were plenty of works belonging to the genre on his shelf, including works by Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle. Indeed, despite its numerous Poe references, Bat Wing seems more derivative of Conan Doyle than Poe.

The story centers on Paul Harley, a connected Londoner with ties to Scotland Yard. With his faithful companion Mr. Knox, Harley travels to Cray’s Folly, a country estate, at the request of Colonel Menendez, who has spent considerable time in Voodoo-haunted Cuba. Harley has been summoned to prevent the murder of Menendez himself, which will, of course, take place on the night of the next full moon. Menendez tells Harley of the Obeah curse laid upon him, in the form of a bat wing nailed to his door. I don’t want to ruin it for future readers, but rest assured, the novel is full of dead-end leads, false assumptions, and characters which have become stereotypical of the genre: a bumbling police detective, a pipe-smoking amateur, and the clueless side-kick.

The most striking similarities between Bat Wing and Howard’s work come with the short story “The Hand of Obeah.” According to Rusty Burke’s Robert E. Howard Fiction and Verse Timeline, “The Hand of Obeah” was submitted to Adventure in 1925; upon reading the tale, it’s easy to see why it was not accepted: while entertaining, it is clearly not Howard’s best.

The story centers around a teenager (I assume) named Steve and his young friends Skinny and Chub. After some tom-foolery with a black worker, Steve and Skinny follow him and observe a Voodoo ritual. This is followed with murder, intrigue, and mistaken identities. The story itself is quite different than Rohmer’s Bat Wing, but there are many similarities:

Both have a Chinese servant: Rohmer’s “Ah Tsong” and Howard’s “Tong.”

Both have Spanish mulattoes: Rohmer’s “Ysola de Valera” and Howard’s villain whose real name is not revealed, but who is disguised as “Lopez da Vasca.”

While the Voodoo meeting and location are background material in Rohmer’s novel, they take center stage in Howard’s story. Both, however, are described similarly:

Rohmer: In the neighborhood of the hacienda [. . .] there was a belt of low-lying pest country [. . .] which was a hot-bed of poisonous diseases. It followed the winding course of a nearly stagnant creek. From the earliest times the Black Belt—it was so called—had been avoided by European inhabitants, and indeed by the colored population as well. Apart from the malaria of the swampy ground it was infested with reptiles and with poisonous insects of a greater variety and of a more venomous character than I have ever known in any part of the world. [. . .]

On the following evening, suitably equipped, [we] set out, leaving by a side door and striking into the woods at a point east of the hacienda, where, according to his information, a footpath existed, which would lead us to the clearing we desired to visit.

Howard: The Haunted Brakes are kind of freakish, in a way. They’re about a half square mile of cane brakes, surrounded on all sides except one by a narrow strip of swamp. The swamp just swarms with snakes and that’s where it gets its name [Moccasin Swamp]. A long time ago they found a strange Negro there with no head onto him. And no Negro would go near that swamp afterwards [. . .] nobody cared to be around there after dark.

The swamp and the brakes lie about five miles south and a little east of the town, with about a quarter-mile of marshy swamp-ground between the brakes and the river. But on that side a strip of solid high ground runs from the brakes clear to the river bank. Some say there was an old road there once.

The narrators of both stories reach similar clearings in the Black Belt/Haunted Brakes where they observe similar Voodoo rituals:

Rohmer: [W]e saw the light of many torches amid the trees ahead of us [. . .] in which naked figures danced wildly, uttering animal cries. [. . .] This was a meeting-place of Devil-worshippers, or devotees of the cult of Voodoo! One man only could I see clearly so as to remember him [. . .] He seemed to be a sort of high priest or president of the orgies.

Howard: [T]he cane had been cleared away for a large space and at the center a large fire was blazing. All around the fire were seated Negroes [. . .]. Most of all the ones we knew and about a hundred we’d never heard of.

And standing by the fire, waving his arms and talking, was ‘Lisha!

The stories diverge significantly after these Voodoo rituals take place. Rohmer’s evolves into a finely crafted murder-mystery with a decent, though fairly obvious, twist at the end. Howard’s, well, he was trying hard.

Bat Wing is available here, or the other usual places.

“The Hand of Obeah” can be found in Sentiment: An Olio of Rarer Works, put out by the Robert E. Howard Foundation, or one of the publications mentioned here.

Hawkshaw & Howard

On By Rob RoehmIn Howard's Writing, InfluencesLeave a comment

2018 02-02 1 Hawkshaw

[by Rob Roehm. Originally published March 18, 2010, at rehtwogunraconteur.com.]

The February 15, 1923 issue of Brownwood High School’s student newspaper, The Tattler, introduced readers to one of Robert E. Howard’s very first (maybe, the first) series characters, Hawkshaw the Detective. With the Colonel, his blundering sidekick, Hawkshaw appeared in three stories: “Unhand Me, Villain!” “Aha! or The Mystery of the Queen’s Necklace,” and “Halt! Who Goes There?”; this last published in The Yellow Jacket, Howard Payne College’s newspaper, in 1924. For those not familiar with the tales, they are detective parodies along the lines of the Fu Manchu spoofs that appeared in some of Howard’s letters, though these poke fun at Sherlock Holmes and Watson, instead. At least I thought that was where the idea came from.

I was thumbing through an old copy of the Comic Book Price Guide the other day, looking for comics I used to have, when the following title caught my eye: The Adventures of Hawkshaw. “Huh,” I muttered, and then read the following note: “See Hawkshaw the Detective.”

First published in 1917, Hawkshaw the Detective is a 48-page collection of “Sunday strip reprints” by Gus Mager. In 1994 it was worth $160 in near mint condition. A print-on-demand version of this is available at lulu.com.

Robert E. Howard would’ve been eleven years old in 1917, seventeen in 1923 when his first Hawkshaw story appeared in print. I don’t doubt that Howard was reading things in 1917, but would he have remembered a comic book six years later? Well, he didn’t have to. According to Don Markstein’s Toonopedia, Hawkshaw the Detective, the newspaper strip, ran from 1913 to 1922; so, if Howard had access to one of the newspapers that ran the strip, he’d easily remember it a few months later.

The term “hawkshaw” was fairly prevalent in the 1920s and was synonymous with “detective,” so it would be easy to write these two Hawkshaws off as a coincidence, but when you throw in the sidekick Colonel, it becomes unlikely. Have a look and see if the comic strip posted here doesn’t match Howard’s description of the duo from “Unhand Me, Villain!”: “One was a tall, thin man and the other a short stocky man.”

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I think it’s safe to assume that Howard, as well as readers of The Tattler, were familiar with the characters from the comic strip long before they appeared in the stories mentioned above. Add Gus Mager to the list of Howard’s influences.

Oh, and Hawkshaw’s fame is enduring, apparently. Hawkshaw the Detective: A Morally Uplifting Melodrama by Tim Kelly was published in 1976 by Hanbury Plays and was recently performed at the Golden Chain Theatre “in scenic Oakhurst,” California.