A View From Corona #11 - Feedback

Jeremy Lassen | January 30th 2003 at 12:37 pm

“The solitary, steep hill called Corona Heights was black as pitch and very silent, like the heart of the unknown. It looked steadily downward and northeast away at the nervous, bright lights of Downtown San Francisco as if it were a great predatory beast of night surveying its territory in patient search of prey.”

- Fritz Leiber, Our Lady Of Darkness

I received a very interesting email in response to A View From Corona #11. Mr. Paul Herman, a noted Robert E. Howard scholar and editor took the time to share some of his knowledge about the Conan texts, and Robert E. Howard’s work in general. I thought his letter would be of interest to the readers of Corona, and asked him for permission reprint it. Mr. Herman graciously agreed.

—–Original Message—–
From: Paul Herman
Sent: Thursday, January 30, 2003
To: ‘jlassen@nightshadebooks.com’
Subject: Robert E. Howard

Hey, Got to read your #11, enjoyed it. Wanted to fill in a few things for you. Note that I am a HowardHead, one of those hardcores, and likely the world’s leading expert on REH copyright and ownership matters, and hopefully the co-editor of the next great REH biblio with Glenn Lord. It’s in process, maybe later this year, maybe next. I’ve already published a couple volumes of PD material, with several more in the works.

One of the great problems is first deciding what is “pure” text. It’s easy when a writer says “THIS! This is my perfect text!” REH rarely if ever got to do that. Standard practice was REH would write a draft, then rewrite it one or more times, till he finally got to what he thought was a finished text, then he’d send it off to the pulps, who would edit it to their tastes, then trash the typescript. REH kept copies of some of his stuff, but not nearly enough. And various pages missing, lots of partial drafts, etc. He’d retype on the back of pages, to save having to buy more paper, on occasion.

Folks tell you how evil LSDC was in his editing, and I certainly don’t choose to read his edited versions. There is no way they could have found anyone even more wrong than he to get involved with Conan. But did you notice, when you read the Ace/Lancer books so long ago, how the REH material stood out? Even with LSDC’s meddling, and surrounded by so-so writings of others, the power and wonder shined through, and hooked you, just like it did me. So, to me, LSDC didn’t do anything THAT horrific in his editing, more senseless and minor, in general. Now his business practices are a story for another day.

(Short aside: The home I lived in for years in Plano, TX, was only a mile from where LSDC lived, and about halfway in between us was a cross street called “Cross Plains”. Something allegorical to that.)

Then along came KEW, good egg. He went back to the pulp versions, so they were certainly closer to “pure”, but still included the edits from Weird Tales, which generally were not too significant, I hear. Note the various pages of typescripts that are still extant, almost all are in the hands of Glenn Lord, and they have never been released for general perusal. Oh, he’ll send copies to folks that have a good story, but they are not generally available, so how much was changed by WT, you’ll just have to take some folks word on that. So you ain’t going to go look up somewhere how much editing WT did, its never been published, though a few folks have done some investigating.

Then the Grants, which you didn’t mention, also restored back to pulp, though in my editing work I have found that Grant liked to follow the earlier text verbatim, for page after page, then suddenly completely rewrite a paragraph. No substantive change, just move the words around. I assume this was so he could identify HIS version, in case someone was copying it without permission. He would also alter anything he thought was racially insensitive. I’ve almost finished restoring Black Vulmea’s Vengeance, a lengthy pirate yarn, from Grant back to pulp, “nigger” became “black” four times with Grant. That kind of stuff. Likely wasn’t too much of that editing in the Conan stories, though maybe some.

With Fantasy Masterworks, at least Jones got it all in there, and these are now my primary Conan books for reading. He could have gotten better sources, but he had to do the books in a huge hurry, amazing he did as well as he did in the time allowed. But of course, even these have their own edits, though minimal, one would hope. He also had a couple flawed sources to start with.
Wandering Star’s rendition is being edited by Patrice Louinet and Rusty Burke, neither professional editors, they’re fans, though very important fans. Patrice has copies of all the original pages, where available. Rusty is more anal than me about not changing anything unless absolutely sure it should be. The WS edition will be an interesting mix of pulp and typescript sources, both draft and later draft, even within the same story. Is this “pure”? Some typescripts are clearly Final, some not so clear, so what are they to do? They’re just going with whatever they think best. For The Scarlet Citadel, they are using a later draft REH worked up for a proposed hardback sale to the UK that didn’t come through. That is, REH took the published version, and rewrote it slightly, to try and improve it. Never before published version, that’ll be interesting to see. Though I doubt anyone will really be able to tell the difference without footnotes.

So yeah, we all want “pure” text, but no one can define it, and no one can put their hand on it. We want it to be that Golden Fleece hanging in the tree, we’ll know it instantly when we see it. But that just ain’t reality. Wish it was that simple. Me myself, I go back to pulp, and footnote all my edits, which tend to be darn minimal. At least give folks the option to decide if I made a good choice. One wag correctly stated the only acceptable form would be to take all the draft pages extant, and xerox them, in color, so you can more readily catch overstrikes, whiteout, etc. Then each person can be their own editor, and create what they truly believe to be the most pure text. If you’ve never seen REH typescripts, they are always full page, side to side and top to bottom, virtually no margin, hammered out on a typewriter, with lovely things like hypenated words that wrap around the end of a line, did REH mean for the word to be hyphenated, or did he just do it because it was the end of the space available? Ol’ Bob had a horrible time with compound words, and would write them different ways (one word, hyphenated, two words) different times, sometimes even within the same story. Oy. He also apparently either didn’t have a dictionary, or didn’t like to crack it very often, he has all sorts of typos on hard-to-spell words. Sometimes it’s a preference for archaic or British spellings (”surprize”, “valour”), but figuring out whether the incorrect spelling was intentional is a bitch. And more fun, some pulps appeared to have left his stuff alone, touching it almost not at all, so you get to see all the compound word and spelling weirdnesses, and some used a heavy hand, changing characters, names, places. REH himself said that Farnsworth Wright, the editor for WT, “cut the guts” out of Black Canaan. And no typescript to see what the hell he was talking about. Sigh.

So all the talk about who was a good editor and who was evil, etc., while a great story, easy to hear, and to repeat, and appealing, not sure how much all that really matters, or how good and evil the editing really was. No matter who has done the edits, REH has shone through. And will continue to do so, in my opinion. Now that the truth about the PD status of much of REH’s work is finally coming to light, his works will get much more readily available in the years to come, with at least some folks like me getting it as “pure” as we can, cause we care. When you’re bored, check out www.robert-e-howard.org/AnotherThought4ws02.html

Now why REH gets no respect from the literati, I think we got comic book and bad movie-itis, but that’s a story for another day.
And thanks for writing about my Man. It is appreciated.

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