By
a strange coincidence, three books fell into my lap over the last two weeks
and, in reading them, I began to see a curious set of parallels forming. All
three books concern themselves with supernatural forces emerging from the
darkness of Ancient Egypt, but there was more than this going on to make me
think of them as somehow connected.
The
first was The Bat Flies Low by “Sax Rohmer” (Arthur Henry “Sarsfield”
Ward, 1883-1959). The book was originally written in 1935 and deals with industrial
espionage and Ancient Egyptian knowledge, a decidedly unusual combination.
“Sax
Rohmer” (Arthur Henry “Sarsfield” Ward), The Bat Flies Low, Caxton House,
New York NY, 1939.
Octavo; hardcover, spine titles on a red label; 314pp., top
edges dyed red. Moderate wear; slightly rolled; spine extremities mildly
softened; boards a little scuffed with a glass ring to the upper board; text
block and page edges mildly toned; previous owner’s contemporary ink
inscription to the flyleaf. Dustwrapper rubbed and edgeworn with light chipping
to the spine panel extremities and flap-turns; a small tear to the bottom edge
of the lower panel with associated creasing; a few spots to the flaps; now
backed by archival-quality white paper and professionally protected by non-adhesive
polypropylene wrap. Very good.
The
story involves a wealthy American – Lincoln Hayes - lured by a mysterious
Oriental woman, Hatasu, on a quest to obtain information stolen from the Book
of Thoth (but not THAT Book of Thoth!). En route, he
encounters a mysterious stranger to whom his beloved is in thrall who seeks to
thwart him, and learns that not only is he, Lincoln, intent upon the secrets
from the Book, but that a competitor in the energy business back in New
York is also after it. The secret knowledge involves a powerful light source
which uses unending energy from the sun (which sounds a bit ho-hum nowadays but
work with them here). Repeatedly attacked by enemy agents at every turn,
Lincoln and his band of trusty friends are finally convinced to act on the side
of Good and help bring things to a satisfying conclusion.
The
story is replete with all of the things for which Sax Rohmer is known, but
interestingly, he tones down his usual bigoted agenda and strives to keep
things straight for once, at least as far as describing foreign civilizations
is concerned – there are no kris-wielding Manchus here! The women are
all on-point as far as Rohmer’s material goes – all frail things to be
protected, or vampish pawns of evil Svengalis – but the main feature of his
writing here is simply how lazy he is. From the outset, he tells us that
Lincoln Hayes is deathly taciturn, unreadable as far as his emotions are
concerned, and prone to dropping articles and subjects when he speaks: this
frees Rohmer from the exigencies of having to craft any sort of interiorality
for this character and causes Lincoln to come across as a mere block of wood –
except for when Hatasu gets her claws into him. As well, Rohmer introduces us to
the bizarre character of Ulric Stefanson, bespectacled scientific wunderkind
with a photographic memory and a soft spot for Liebfraumilch, who is
also saddled with a stutter until about halfway through the book: our Egyptian
nemesis hypnotizes this trait away for no particular reason. I guess Rohmer got
sick of wr-wr-writing it in t-t-too! Having ploughed through this pulpy
extravagance, I turned to my next windfall:
Lovecraft,
H.P. (Margaret Ronan, ed.), The Shadow over Innsmouth and Other Stories of
Horror, Scholastic Book Services/ Scholastic Magazines Inc., New York NY, 1971.
Octavo; paperback; 255pp. Moderate wear; covers rubbed and
lightly edgeworn; staple holes to the front cover, penetrating through about the
first third of the text block. Very good.
No
surprises here, but it’s always good to find a copy of Lovecraft’s stuff that I
don’t already have in my collection, especially when the cover art has been so
deliberately poached from F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu”. My main interest in
this collection was the editor – Margaret Ronan – who was one of HPL’s circle
of correspondence and one of many writers whom he encouraged to pursue the art.
I was keen to see how she’d speak of him in her Introduction and muse over the
stories she’d chosen to present. Seeing that “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”
was here, and having just finished with Rohmer, I turned to it pretty much
straight away. Bells began to ring almost immediately.
Now,
this is not my favourite Lovecraft tale by any stretch of the imagination; in
fact, it’s one I don’t really like at all. It’s fairly obvious to see where
Houdini leaves off and where HPL begins. For my money, it’s too cute and, since
it was designed as a promotional jag for Harry Houdini, I can never read it without
hearing axes grinding in the background. This time though, there were all of
these familiar terms jumping off the page – places, things, people – that I had
just been reading about in Rohmer’s book and I began to look at the whole piece
askance. Had HPL ripped off Rohmer in writing this piece for Houdini?
A
quick check of dates sorted this out fairly quickly – HPL’s ghost-written short
story appeared in 1924; Rohmer’s book was first published in 1935, two years before
HPL popped his clogs. I admit, when I started reading The Bat Flies Low
I hadn’t checked the publication date at all, but I have a bunch of first
edition Rohmers that date from around 1917, so I sort of knee-jerk drop his
stuff into a between-the-Wars mental category which is simply not justified –
Rohmer was still pumping out his pulp well into the 50s. So, correcting myself,
instead of thinking that HPL plagiarized another writer, it looked as though
Rohmer had copied HPL. Here’s my evidence (which is completely shaky, but bear
with me):
First,
Rohmer’s tale reads as though it was meant to be something else. As a narrative
about two energy magnates vying for control over a revolutionary power source
(the Sun! Incroyable!) it could have been a straightforward tale of
industrial espionage along the lines of Rohmer’s Re-enter Fu Manchu
(1957), which is a Bond-esque story of agencies trying to seize control of an
advanced missile shield as the Cold War intensifies, all the while being
manipulated by the Devil Doctor. There’s no need for the story to shift gears
and jump to Cairo in the middle of everything, and the secret cabal of Egyptian
mystery-protectors feels a bit tacked-on and spurious. I have to say though,
that Rohmer needs little encouragement to hop over to the Mysterious East – Re-enter
Fu Manchu also starts off in Cairo for no discernible reason. It feels as
if Rohmer - with The Bat Flies Low - was trying to capitalize on the fact that “The Mummy”
had just jumped off the silver screen in 1932 and that he was cashing in on all
the Mummy-mania that followed afterwards. Even here though, the story is
bog-standard “Sax Rohmer” with little to differentiate it from his usual
material.
Next,
take a look at the locales within Cairo that both authors focus on. As a heads
up, HPL lets us know (writing as Houdini) that a copy of Baedeker was
crucial in the planning of the Cairene trip:
“Guided by our Baedeker, we had struck east past the Ezbekiyeh Gardens
along the Mouski in quest of the native quarter…”
This
travel guide was indispensable for any European traveler beginning in 1827 and was
issued in huge print runs every year and in fact continues to do so. Originally
published in German, the company saw a significant benefit in publishing their
guides in English and did so from about 1859. To this day, the word ‘Baedeker’
is synonymous with the term ‘travel guide’. We can be fairly secure in the
knowledge that, if he said - as Houdini - that he had a Baedeker guide
to Egypt, then HPL certainly had one beside him as he wrote this tale.
What
we can therefore also be fairly certain about is that Sax Rohmer had a copy
nearby as well – or, if not, he had a copy of “Weird Tales” (May, 1924)
containing “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” somewhere to hand. We can tell
because both stories mention the exact same places. Now, this is quite likely
because foreign travelers in the 20s and 30s were a cliquish lot and they all
went to the same places, saw the same sights and stayed in the same hotels, but
it’s just as likely that Rohmer just copied the territory in HPL’s work,
perhaps checking it with his own Baedeker volume. We know that Houdini
came up with the basic plot of “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” and it was
passed along to HPL by J.C. Henneberger, editor of “Weird Tales” at the
time, and we can assume that some autobiographical details were provided as
well. Certainly HPL works the story into the real facts of Houdini’s travels –
in 1910, the escapologist did travel to Australia to enthuse his fans
and tear up the skies in his aeroplane; here’s a shot of him taken on February
19th, 1910, being chained up and pushed off Queen’s Bridge into the
Yarra River in Melbourne:
Accordingly,
there are references to all the same locales in Cairo. Lovecraft says:
“We stopped at Shepheard’s Hotel, reached in a taxi that sped
along broad, smartly built-up streets…”
Rohmer
gives us:
“On the terrace of Shepheard’s the following evening, just as
dusk was falling…”
Lovecraft
says:
“The road now rose abruptly, till we finally reached our place
of transfer between the trolley station and the Mena House Hotel.”
Rohmer
says:
“He stared in the direction of the steps. Paddy Rorke and Ann
Wayland were saying good-bye to a party of three leaving for Mena House…”
Rohmer
goes on:
“The crickets were very audible in the garden outside, and
also the croaking of the frog. But human interference was distant and muffled.
Sometimes he could hear the trams over by the Esbikeyeh Gardens…”
And:
“True that the Mûski has lost much of its Oriental character,
but yet it retains, and can never lose, while those narrow ways and overleaning
houses remain, some faint perfume, now growing a little vague, of the great
days of the Caliphs.”
…referencing
places HPL has name-checked in the quote above and lending them more than a touch
of Lovecraftian flavor what with the overhanging-gable thing that HPL enjoys
so much.
As
noted, all of these places are famous in Cairo and notable also for being
hang-outs for travelers in the 20s and 30s. The Mena House Hotel started life
as a hunting lodge in 1869 before being converted into a swanky hotel in 1886.
It was named “Mena” after the Egyptian King Menes. In World War One the place
was requisitioned as accommodation by Australian troops and they liked it so
much that they took it over again in 1939, eventually converting it into a wartime
hospital. It was restored to its former glory as an hotel in 1972 and is still
going strong. Shepheard’s Hotel was opened in 1841 as the Hotel des Anglais by
Samuel Shepheard and a Mr. Hill who sold his interest to Shepheard in 1845, allowing
it to be re-named as “Shepheard’s”. Shepheard himself sold the Hotel in 1861
and retired to Warwickshire leaving the place in capable hands: it was a
booming business all the way up until 1952 when it was burnt to the ground. A
new Shepheard’s was opened later, but at a new location in the city.
The
Mouski, or Mûski, is actually the Sharia Al Muski (more
formally known as the Sharia Gawhar Al Qaid) and is as busy today as it
ever was. Both writers whistle up a fairly convincing word-picture of the place
although HPL, writing a short story rather than a novel, is a bit pressed for
time. They both also mention the Esbikeyeh as well, once an ornamental
garden and site of Cairo’s first opera house, now (under a different spelling)
an upmarket residential suburb of the city.
You’ll
notice that both authors mention trees at some point too:
“The next morning we visited the Pyramids, riding out in a
Victoria across the island of Chizereh with its massive lebbakh trees… we drove between great
rows of lebbakhs and past the vast Zoological Gardens” (HPL)
“As they left the avenue of lebbekh trees and neared the outskirts
of Cairo, all became silent.” (Rohmer)
These
are (despite the variation in spelling) members of the Albizia lebbeck
species, as far as I can make out. I can only assume that there was a
significant stand of mature representatives of these trees noted in a Baedeker
of the time, since – while these trees do grow in Africa – I can’t find
a source that tells me that they’re native to Egypt. It’s possible that they
are some other type of tree, a local variety with a local name. Still, HPL and
Rohmer both took the time to note them down.
Finally,
there’s another telling detail. Writers writing about places they’ve never been
to - and are unlikely or unable to see firsthand - often rely on reference material
– sometimes images – to spur their creative imaginations. Both scribes here
mention a ‘bazaar of the Coppersmiths’ in passing:
HPL
gives us:
“The native crowds were thinning, but were still very noisy
and numerous when we came upon a knot of reveling Bedouins in the Suken-Nah-hasin, or bazaar of the
coppersmiths”
While
Rohmer says:
“And then the clatter of the market of the Coppersmiths, with
clinking of numberless hammers; very, very old men whose eyes appeared to be
quite sightless tapping out intricate patterns upon vases and caskets.”
Why
should this be? Well, from what I can tell, both of them went in search of
inspiration and found the same engraving somewhere and latched onto it. That
image is David Roberts “Bazaar of the Coppersmiths, Cairo” executed in
1838 and still selling today. Here it is:
Any
word search in Google Images will bring up scores of these Victorian
Orientalist images of romanticized Cairene communities and it’s clear that both
of our authors stumbled onto the same image somewhere, or that HPL found it and
Sax Rohmer copied him. Interestingly, if you search for the name of the place
which HPL provides, the only results you get are for this particular short
story, so I’m guessing he had a dodgy translator helping him, or that he just
took a wild stab at it himself.
A
final indicator of Rohmer’s possible indiscretion springs from the following
quote from Lovecraft’s ghost-written tale:
“I was in the grip of a great and horrible paw; a yellow,
hairy, five-clawed paw which had reached out of the earth to crush and engulf
me. And when I stopped to reflect what the paw was, it seemed to me that it was
Egypt. In the dream I looked back at the events of the preceding weeks and saw
myself lured and enmeshed little by little, subtly and insidiously, by some
hellish ghoul-spirit of the elder Nile sorcery…”
There’s
no direct parallel in Rohmer’s book, but what happens in the novel is a direct reflection
of it. In the course of The Bat Flies Low, our team of heroes is
skillfully embroiled by our sneaky Egyptians; small incidents and seemingly
inconsequential happenings all snowball into a final resolution (in fact, to be
fair, it’s also Lincoln’s commercial opponents who do a lot of this stuff as
well). It reads much as if Rohmer had read HPL’s text here and said, “Our hero
enmeshed little by little, subtly and insidiously? I can do that”. And so, he
did. The party’s nemesis in the tale also seems to have been inspired by
Lovecraft’s work:
“This man, a shaven, peculiarly hollow-voiced, and relatively
cleanly fellow who looked like a Pharaoh and called himself Abdul Reis el
Drogman, appeared to have much power over others of his kind; though
subsequently the police professed not to know him, and to suggest that reis is merely a name for any person in
authority, whilst ‘Drogman’ is obviously no more than a clumsy modification of
the word for a leader of tourist parties – dragoman.”
Mohammed
Ahmes Bey, leader of our Egyptian cabal, is a similarly noble-seeming and
powerful figure, also strangely unidentifiable by agents of the law. At one
point too, a dragoman dupes the party allowing one character to be drugged.
Lovecraft
has a good deal of negative press to retail about the Great Sphinx of Giza too
and Rohmer is also willing to jump on that bandwagon. Unlike HPL though, rather
than having the thing come to some kind of mocking hideous unlife, he suggests
mystical and hidden purposes behind the monument and ladles on the
superstition:
“The Arabs are insanely superstitious. To this day they call
the Sphinx ‘the Father of Terror.’ Fortunately, Hassan ès-Sugra is more
up-to-date…”
And
later:
“It is told, sir,” said Hassan ès-Sugra, “that the Path of
Harmachis ends at the foot of these mountains. It is an old superstition – like
the name of the path. I cannot say where it comes from, but they say that the
Sphinx watches over the path to these mountains; that here – and not Gizeh –
lies the secret of the Father of Terror.”
This,
incidentally, is sort of true. In Arabic, the name for the Sphinx is Abū
al-Hawl, or “Father of Terror.”
This
brings me to that third book I mentioned I’d discovered recently. It’s this:
Bloch,
Robert, “The Opener of the Way”, Panther books Ltd./Granada Publishing
Ltd., St. Albans Herts. UK, 1976.
Octavo; paperback; 172pp. Mild wear; covers lightly rubbed; light
toning to the text block edges. Very good.
“Imprisoned
with the Pharaohs”, by all
accounts, is what really turned Robert Bloch into a Lovecraft fan and compelled
him to get into contact with the author. The Egyptian influence is strong in
much of his Mythos work as such stories as “The Opener of the Way”, “Beetles”,
“The Dark Demon” and “The Faceless God” reveal. This last story
especially plays off references in the Lovecraft narrative and toys with the
notion that HPL dangles temptingly before the reader in “Imprisoned” as
to what the face of the Sphinx might have looked like before Khephren had his
own face carved there instead.
*****
The
upshot from all of this is pretty inconclusive. Sax Rohmer’s book is a fairly
close parallel to Lovecraft’s short story in some ways, but did he pillage it
for inspiration? It’s probably a question that will never have an answer, and
the only halfway strong piece of evidence is that “coppersmiths” engraving,
which is also pretty flimsy. That being said however, Rohmer wrote a history of the occult in
1914 entitled The Romance of Sorcery, after which Houdini contacted him
and they became best friends; Rohmer invented a magician-detective character
called “Bazarada” based upon him. If Rohmer did plagiarize Lovecraft, he
certainly couldn’t have confessed the fact to Houdini (who died in 1926), but
you can probably bet that Houdini told Rohmer about the short story he ‘wrote’
for “Weird Tales” magazine. So there’s that.
And,
if you’re going to copy from someone, best to do it from a someone who’s (almost) dead,
and who was known for their meticulous attention to detail:
“I went the limit in descriptive realism in the first part.
Then when I buckled down to the under-the-pyramid stuff, I let myself loose and
coughed up some of the most nameless, slithering, unmentionable HORROR that
ever stalked cloven-hooved though the abysses of elder night.”
-Lovecraft, writing about putting together “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”