Faulkner's Vampire Screenplay

I bought the Winter 2002 (#42) issue of Oxford American when it had just come out, and as I was packing my book collection to move. Most of my books and papers were soon unpacked in the new house, but the magazines were only gradually sorted over the years.  I bought this issue because it published an extract from a screenplay by William Faulkner entitled "Dreadful Hollow," commissioned in 1945, towards the middle of Faulkner's Hollywood script-writing years.  One Faulkner scholar, Bruce Kawin in his Faulkner and Film, argues that "Dreadful Hollow" is something of a masterpiece.

I've now read the extract, and can't see how anyone could call it a masterpiece.  It is a patchwork of cliches, with a nineteen-year-old girl taking up a position as companion to the elderly Countess Czerner (of eastern European descent), whose housekeeper Sari makes sinister and cryptic remarks (wink wink).  They live outside of town in the Grange, a grim house like a castle that is shunned by all the village folk. The town is some two hundred miles away from London. You can count the cliches adding up, and this is only the first nineteen or so pages out of 159. 

If this screenplay would have been made into a film in 1945, it would have been perfect fodder for the talents of the folks behind Mystery Science Theater 3000 in the 1990s.  But it was never made into a film, and though Oxford American doesn't tell you, it's not an original Faulkner screenplay either, but it's based on a novel of the same title from 1942 bylined "Irina Karlova."  The novel and its pseudonymous author are well dealt with by John Norris in a illustrated post at his Pretty Sinister Books blog, so I'll merely refer the reader to it here. 

The Oxford American also noted that "Dreadful Hollow will be produced as a motion picture by Lee Caplin's Picture Entertainment Corporation."  Fortunately this came to nought.  Or perhaps unfortunately, as most of what Hollywood produces nowadays is unmitigated crap. Perhaps done today as a retro-picture, or a period piece, filmed in black-and-white, it could be released, and flop, and yet turn up again re-contextualized by the able hands of the folks at Mystery Science Theater 3000. One can hope.   

New Evidence on the Posthumous Editing of Robert E. Howard’s ALMURIC

In the April 1939 issue of Weird Tales, under the heading “Coming Next Month,” there was an announcement by editor Farnsworth Wright of the forthcoming publication of a new story by Robert E. Howard, who had killed himself nearly three years earlier.  It reads, in part:

Weird Tales, April 1939 blurb

Robert E. Howard, at the time of his tragic death, was working on a new novel for Weird Tales. He had completed a rough first draft, and nearly completed a revision which was to be his final version. . . .  So engrossing is this story, Almuric, that Weird Tales would not be playing fair with you, the readers, if we did not let you see it. Therefore we have pieced together the nearly completed final draft that Howard wrote with the final pages of Howard’s rough first draft, which contains a smashing denouement.  (page 152)

This statement leaves open several questions. Who did the editing?  Why?  And what precisely was done to Howard’s texts? 

The two manuscripts of Almuric—like those of all of Howard’s contributions to Weird Tales—do not survive.  The mysterious situation of Almuric has been explored by a number of Howard scholars, and the consensus opinion seems to be that expressed by Mark Finn in his Blood & Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard (updated and expanded second edition, 2011), when he writes of Almuric that it was “unfinished when Robert was alive and most likely completed by legendary pulp writer and friend of Otis Kline [Howard’s agent], Otto Binder” (page 379). The argument leading to this conclusion was made by Morgan Holmes in his invaluable article, “The First Posthumous Collaborator,” published in the final issue (December 2008) of The Cimmerian (pages 17-24).

Holmes makes many significant points—that Wright is probably guilty of editorial fabrication when claiming that Almuric was being written for Weird Tales (according to Holmes’s analysis it probably dates to early 1934, two years before Howard’s death); and that  the ending seems “almost criminally anti-Howardian” and that it exhibits “a sudden sea-change of style and theme of a sort unique in all of Howard’s work—the last chapter blithely undoes it all, giving us a finale filled with peace, brotherhood, and eternal friendship among formerly fierce, barbaric enemies” (page 17).  Holmes argues that the person who edited the text was unlikely to be either Farnsworth Wright (perhaps due to advancing Parkinson’s), or Otis Adelbert Kline (who took only a ten percent commission as agent, and not the fifty percent commission he would have taken had he done the job), and considers some other authors, settling at last on Kline’s friend, Otto Binder, primarily for stylistic reasons. 

The recent discovery of a typed letter settles the question of who, and some of the reasons for  why. In brief, it was Farnsworth Wright who did the editing.  On January 4, 1939, Wright wrote to Sam Moskowitz, giving information on future stories in Weird Tales, noting:

Beginning in the May issue, we are printing a posthumous interplanetary novel by Robert E. Howard, entitled “Almuric.” At the time of his death, Mr. Howard had completed a first draft of the story, and had done the greater part of the second draft. The novel is so striking that I thought it would be unfair to our readers if we did not give them a chance to read this. So I pieced together an ending from the first draft and used it to complete the second draft to make a complete story.

So there we have it. Who?  Farnsworth Wright.  Why?  Ostensibly to share the story, which Wright apparently admired, with the Weird Tales readership, but doubtless also to be able to parade Robert E. Howard’s name and writing in the magazine once more.

What precisely Wright did to Howard’s text will likely never be known.  Howard often wrote multiple drafts of his stories, so the idea of a second draft being a final draft is not necessarily true.  Howard seems to have abandoned the story himself, for whatever reasons, and moved on to other things.  One aspect of the ending (the strong-man-gets-the-pretty-girl) is at least foreshadowed throughout the text as published.  Almuric as a story is somewhat indebted to the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and such an ending is not unlike what is found in Burroughs (and also found in the pastiches of Burroughs by Howard’s agent, Otis Adelbert Kline). Perhaps Howard originally wrote such an ending in his rough first draft, and as he worked on his second draft he could not see his way to a more typical Howardian ending, and thus the story was abandoned. 

The easy solution would be to blame the editor for the ending, as Holmes does primarily on stylistic points, but there is no actual evidence that Wright wrote or tampered much with the text.  By Wright’s own words there was a complete first draft, and a “nearly completed” (per the note in Weird Tales) second draft, or one with “the greater part” (per Wright’s letter to Moskowitz) of the second draft being written.  In both sources Wright states that he “pieced together” an ending from the first draft to complete the second draft. On the other hand, Holmes’s stylistic analysis of the final chapter is cogent and persuasive. Unfortunately the facts of whatever actually happened in the editing process are apparently lost to history. 

With Hide So Tough . . .

A few months ago I came across an interesting quotation:

Breathes there a man with hide so tough
Who says two sexes aren't enough?

It was attributed to one one Samuel Hoffenstein (1890-1947), whom I discovered to be remembered primarily as a screenwriter, having worked on the scripts for many movies, some credited to him like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931, directed by Rouben Mamoulian) and Phantom of the Opera (1943), others uncredited, like The Wizard of Oz (1939).

I came to this quotation in some commentary on a Clifford Simak short story, "Mirage"  (variant title "Seven Came Back"), first published in Amazing in October 1950, because Simak's story concerns a race of aliens with seven sexes. I wondered whether the poem from which these lines came might be more interesting in full context.  Alas, that is not true.

Dorothy Parker approved; over 100,000 copies sold

The couplet is a complete poem in itself, number III. in a series of "Love-Songs, at Once Tender and Informative--An Unusual Combination in Verses of This Character," which is a section comprising some twenty-three poems in Hoffenstein's collection, Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing (New York:  Boni & Liveright, 1928), which went through a number of printings and editions. I can't see why the book was successful, as the poetry is quite tedious and there is a lot of it.  The first stanza of the opening "Proem" gives a fair sample:

How exquisite my sorrows look
Neatly marshalled in a book,
Hung on the iambic line
In an orderly design! 

I was not inspired to read further, so I cannot say whether Samuel Hoffenstein deserves to be remembered alongside of John William Burgon as a poet who is remembered for only a short line or two.  Burgon (1813-1888) won the Newdigate Prize at Oxford in 1845 for his poem Petra, which described the place of the title in an immortal line as "a rose-red city half as old as time."  (There is nothing else remotely interesting in the poem Petra, which I read years ago.  Burgon even lifted part of his line "half as old as time" from an earlier poet, Samuel Rogers.) 

"We Care" --Hah!

This happened last year, but I just happened on the photographs I'd saved so I thought I'd share them here.  Most of the stuff I send through the U.S. Postal Service, or the stuff that gets sent to me, comes through fine, but occasionally there comes one of those obnoxious "We Care" bags (see below), with the packaging or contents damaged (to varying degrees) in transit.  This issue of VII seems to have had deliberate malice practiced upon it. My mind can't conceive what was done to the package to cause this sort of damage. I couldn't even open the pages.