A week before [Robert E. Howard] killed
himself, he wrote to Otis Adelbert Kline (his literary agent except for sales
to Weird Tales): “In the event of my
death, please send all checks for me to my father, Dr. I M. Howard.” His father
found two stories on which he had typewritten: “In the event of my death, send
these two stories to Farnsworth Wright, Editor of Weird Tales, 840 N. Michigan Avenue, Chicago.” (IMH 84)
Robert E. Howard had made preparations for his death; Kline
confirmed in a letter to Carl Jacobi that:
About three weeks ago he wrote me a
letter saying that, in case of his death I should get in touch with his father.
(IMH 68)
Kline’s letter is praiseworthy, both of Howard's and Kline’s
ability to market him, noting that despite caring for his dying mother, Howard
“has been doing a lot of brilliant writing, and we have opened a number of new
markets for him with character-continuity series.” (IMH 68)
As a client from May 1933 to July 1936 (38 months), Robert
E. Howard had cleared at least $2150 through Kline’s sales—and almost assuredly
more, when you consider the stories that don’t appear in the ledger or Otto
Binder’s commissions list. The Kline agency for its part probably cleared about
$250-300 in commissions (at least the standard 10% of Howard’s sales, possibly
15% for sales before 1935). By the numbers, this wouldn’t make Howard the Kline
agency’s best client; in 1936 John Scott Douglas “was good for at least thirty
to forty dollars a month commissions in New York alone.” (OAK 16.1) However, Kline also stated that:
I send back for keeps approximately 80%
of the material I receive [...] Of the other twenty per cent, I accept perhaps
a fourth, and sometimes as high as a half, depending on how the stuff runs. The
balance is returned to the writers for revision, some if [sic] it again and
again, until they have done as well as they can do with it. Only then is it put
on offer, and of course not all of it goes to New York. Some goes to Canada,
England or other foreign countries. I select the markets to which it seems best
suited. (OAK 16.2)
By this standard, at least, Howard seems to have been ahead
of the pack: the only story Kline is known to have sent back without trying it
on the market was “Wild Water” (IMH 19),
and while Kline initially struggled to market Howard’s fiction, and advised him
on revising his work and breaking into new markets, as the years went on Kline
was selling a greater and greater percentage of the work that Howard sent him;
Binder’s commissions list for the New York end of the business in 1935 lists
more commissions from sales of the Texan’s work than any other client. (OAK 5.18) If Howard was not Kline’s best
client, he was at least a steady one, and an appreciative one, as Kline uses a
statement from Howard in the brochure for his United Sales Plan:
Top~Notch October 1934 |
ROBERT E. HOWARD, popular author of
stories in ARGOSY, ACTION STORIES, TOP NOTCH, WEIRD TALES, etc., says: I have
the highest regard for Otis Adelbert Kline’s ability as a practical critic, and
his knowledge of market requirements and current literary trends. His advice
and sales service have been very valuable to me. (OAK 5.12)
News of Howard’s death propagated by mail, in a letter from
Binder to Kline dated 27 Jan 1936, we see that Kline confirms the worst:
Just last night, as chance would have
it, I heard from Frank Long, Jr. of the suicide of Howard. He had got it from
Donald Wandrei. But Lovecraft said it might be an unfounded rumor, and I was
hoping it was till I received your letter this morning. Quite a shock, any way
you look at it, and it doesn’t make sense to me, in view of the promising
outlook for Howard in the near future. (IMH
61, OAK 5.16-17)
After Robert E. Howard’s death, the copyrights to his
stories (those he had not sold) and remaining manuscripts rested with his
father, Dr. Isaac M. Howard; as the estate was settled, Kline continued to act
as REH’s agent for manuscripts already in circulation, and Dr. Howard offered
to keep Kline on as the agent for all of his son’s remaining manuscripts in all
markets—including Weird Tales, which
still owed Robert E. Howard over $1,000 at the time of his death—and Kline
appears to have accepted. (IMH 80) The
details of REH’s estate, and the pulp business, were more complicated than Dr.
Howard anticipated, as explicated by a flurry of often somewhat ornery and
demanding letters from elder Howard (IMH 86-92,
107-113, 115-119, 122, 125, 127-129, 135). The stress of the loss of his loved
ones, and associated financial burdens are well documented; as Dr. Howard put
it in a letter to Farnsworth Wright:
I turned Robert’s business over to Mr.
Kline because I did not feel like carrying it on. [...] Mr. Kline will carry on
my business, and since you have given me an inkling of your financial condition
I think I shall be more patient about things in the future; but just now it is
hard sledding with me. (IMH 106)
Dr. Isaac M. Howard |
The Kline agency continued selling the work of Robert E.
Howard, included projects realized and unrealized. Yet before Dr. Isaac M.
Howard died on 17 November 1944, he would at least see at least one of his
son’s novels, A Gent from Bear Creek,
and story (“The Black Stone”) between hard covers, in the Arkham House
anthology Sleep No More (1944). (IMH 226) On his death, the rights to
Robert E. Howard’s writings were willed to his friend P. M. Kuykendall, who
appear to have kept much the same arrangement with Kline—whose business had
declined so badly during World War II, due to the stoppage of foreign sales,
that he had to work in a wartime production plant. As E. Hoffmann Price would
put it:
Few of us realized what fortitude and
hard work and keen vision OAK must have had, to launch his venture, and to make
it pay off. And, just as it began to look good, the war bitched it up. Foreign
exchange was frozen. The Unified Sales Plan was dismembered as a war time
casualty. OAK, nearly as I know, maintained his domestic-and-Canadian sales
program. What I did not known until years after his death, was that much of his
time during the war was devoted to working in war production plants. Came V-J
day, and OAK was reorganizing. (OAK 7.6)
Otis Adelbert Kline would pass away on 24 Oct 1946. His
friend Price would eulogize him:
Wright—Howard—Lovecraft—they were
equally well wishers, each in his way and according to his ability—but Otis was
the most able to reinforce his wishes with action, and this he did, effectively
and generously, and with a zeal far beyond that of the most earnest paid
advisor. (OAK 7.12)
With the death of Otis Adelbert Kline, his agency was not
dissolved, but passed into the care of his daughter Ora.
After my father died, I took over the
agency for 1 ½ years. I had an infant daughter, born 2 months after his death,
and my then husband was being transferred to Texas. It would have been
impossible to take the agency with me. We turned over everything to Oscar
Friend, including material published and unpublished, records, files, etc. I do
not know what all was there, but I know there was an unpublished Mars novel.
Oscar Friend ran the agency under the Otis Kline Associates name, and was to
handle all material on behalf of my mother, for future sales of OAK material. (OAK 2.10)
Glenn Lord |
Friend continued working as agent with the Kuykendalls as
administrators of the Howard Estate, and even as agents for H. P. Lovecraft’s
material in the United Kingdom in the late 1940s. As Glenn Lord tells it:
“Friend died around 1963 and at the end of 1964, his wife and daughter decided
to dissolve the agency. That was when I became the Howard agent.” (OAK 1.3)
This is largely the end of Conan and the OAK—except for a
few little mysteries. On 17 Jan 1940, Kline wrote to Dr. Howard:
As you know, editorial needs change
from year to year, and it frequently happens that stories which would have sold
readily from five to ten years ago, although they may be as good or even better
from a literary standpoint than current published material, as not suited to
current editorial requirements. It is sometimes possible, however, by making
revisions, to make such stories fit modern requirements. All of Robert’s
material now on offer is from several years to a dozen years old, and while I
have not entirely given up hope of placing it, just as it is, it is possible
that we might be able to speed up sales by having some of these revised and
brought up to date, when and if current market possibilities have been
exhausted. Naturally, such work could be entrusted only to the best writers.
And I have an idea I might be able to get some or one of these to work on a
50-50 contingent basis, taking 50% if the story should sell, or nothing if it
should not. (IMH 171)
There has been some dispute about to what extent the Kline
agency had a hand in revising some of REH’s works posthumously. Glenn Lord
noted:
Four Elkins tales appeared several
years after Howard’s death. The first of these, “Texas John Alden,” appeared in
1944 in Masked Rider Western under the pen name Patrick Ervin. This was
originally a Buckner J. Grimes tale entitled “A Ringtaled Tornado,” and someone
connected with the Otis A. Kline literary agency—which was handling Howard’s
work—revised the story into an Elkins tale. I suspect that Kline himself was
responsible for this. In 1956, a second Elkins tale, “While Smoke Rolled,”
appeared in Double-Action Western. This was originally a Pike Bearfield
story, and again someone connected with the Kline agency—either Kline before
his death in 1946, or Oscar Friend, his successor-had revised this into an
Elkins tale. (CS 29-30, OAK 10.13)
Weird Tales May 1939 |
There is an annotation in the ledger regarding “Ring Tailed
Tornado”/”Texas John Aldon” that is is a “rewrite,” and the figures would
suggest it sold for $55.00; the figures don’t all add up, but appear to be
attempting to factor in a 50-50 split plus agent’s commission; figures for the
“While Smoke Rolled” are not available. (IMH
372) The degree of Kline’s hand in these revisions, or whether he got
someone else to do it, is difficult to determine.
A more interesting problem is the science-fantasy novel Almuric, which was sold to Weird Tales in 1938 and paid for in
installments in 1939—before any record of Kline making an offer to revise
Howard’s stories (although the correspondence is spotty); the question of
whether Almuric was revised is too
long to go into here, but it’s worth noting that the Kline ledger does not note
any splitting of fees—if the story was revised or completed by someone else,
they don’t appear to have received a cut.
________________________
Works Cited
BOD Book of the
Dead: Friends of Yesteryear: Fictioneers & Others
CL Collected
Letters of Robert E. Howard (3 vols. + Index & Addenda)
CS The Conan
Swordbook
FI Fists of
Iron (4 vols.)
IMH The Collected
Letters of Dr. Isaac M. Howard
MF A Means to
Freedom: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard (2 vols)
OAK OAK Leaves: The
Official Journal of Otis Adelbert Kline (16 issues)
WT50 WT50: A Tribute
to Weird Tales
"letter from Binder to Kline dated 27 Jan 1936"
ReplyDeleteDid you mean 27 June 1936?
I did. Good catch.
ReplyDeleteDid the non-payments from Weird Tales factor into his decision to kill himself?
ReplyDeleteAB, the non-payments were one of the many factors that led to that decision. Non-payments were probably a small factor, but they did play a factor.
ReplyDelete