AFTERWORD

E XCESSIVELY D IVERTED , O R , C OMING T O P EMBERLEY H OUSE :

A F URTHER E XCURSION I NTO C REATIVE M YTHOGRAPHY

O n July 4, 2005, I met Philip José Farmer for the first time. That, in and of itself, would have been—and was—sufficient to render me mute and senseless. Contrary to the popular cliché, one should always try to meet one’s hero; the experience just might turn out to be better than one could ever have hoped.

Something else happened that day, though. In addition to the invitation from Mike Croteau, webmaster of The Official Philip José Farmer Home Page , to come to the mountain, I was invited into the deep caverns below the mountain containing many hidden treasures: The Basement. Little did I know at the time, but in The Basement, just behind the library in the den, which was decked out with many awards and original cover art for various Phil Farmer books, was located what is now affectionately—and reverentially—called The Magic Filing Cabinet. Mike and I spent several engrossing hours poring over files, clippings, and memorabilia, in an effort to locate more previously unpublished material for Farmerphile: The Magazine of Philip José Farmer .

And boy, did we find some unpublished material.

Fans of Farmer’s work with Tarzan, Doc Savage, and the Wold Newton Family know that Farmer gave us several tantalizing hints of Lord Greystoke’s fate after Edgar Rice Burroughs ceased chronicling his exploits. Greystoke visited Opar one last time and dismantled it ( Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke ); he granted an interview with Farmer just prior to faking his death and assuming a new identity (“An Exclusive Interview with Lord Greystoke”); he traveled back in time ( Time’s Last Gift ) and lived forward 14,000 years, even making brief appearances in prehistoric Africa ( Hadon of Ancient Opar , Flight to Opar , and The Song of Kwasin ).

However, until July 4, 2005, we didn’t know that Farmer also had information on the post-pulp career of Doctor James Clarke “Doc” Wildman, Jr. In fact, the source of Farmer’s information for the partial manuscript and outline of The Evil in Pemberley House was Patricia Wildman herself; she also supplied Farmer with some of the information he needed to complete the biography of her father entitled Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life .

It is worth noting, however, that sources other than Farmer have also purported to reveal information on the post-canonical careers of Greystoke and Doc. Some of these also provide information about other children and even grandchildren of the two supermen. If they did have other descendants, then why was Patricia Wildman identified as the sole heir to Pemberley House?

Greystoke and his descendants are fairly easy to explain. Most of them participated in the jungle lord’s overall plan to fake their deaths, or at least disappear, and assume new identities. They all had access to the wealth the ape man had discovered in an African hidden city, and they all had partaken of the life-extension elixir he had discovered. None had any need or desire for the wealth of the Greystoke estate, and the peerage title was mostly a burden rather than an honor, especially for those who were effectively immortal.

Greystoke and Jane had three biological children, Charlotte Clayton, b. 1911 (mentioned in Burroughs’ non-series book The Man-Eater ); John Paul “Jack” Clayton, b. 1912 ( Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke ); and Penelope Alice Clayton, b. 1919 5 (see Chuck Loridans’ “The Daughters of Greystoke,” Myths for the Modern Age: Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe , Win Scott Eckert, ed., MonkeyBrain Books, 2005). The first two faked their deaths at different times and eventually reunited with their parents and family, along with Jack’s son John Clayton (b. 1943) and his own family. Penelope had long since changed her name when she moved to America in the mid-1930s, but she too, along with her husband, Mr. Smith, eventually disappeared from public view and reunited with the larger Greystoke clan.

There were also two adopted sons. One’s story was actually told in Burroughs’ The Son of Tarzan (for the full story of the biological son Jack Clayton vs. the adopted son John Drummond-Clayton, see Farmer’s “The Great Korak-Time Discrepancy” in Myths ). John Drummond-Clayton (b. 1898) would not have been entitled to the Greystoke title. In any event, he and his descendants—with one exception to be noted below—joined the Greystoke clan in faking their deaths and disappearing in, or before, 1972. 6

The other adopted son’s tale was recounted by J. T. Edson in a series of four novels beginning with Bunduki (and a couple of short stories that take place very shortly before the first novel). In Bunduki , which can be dated to 1972, 7 James Allenvale “Bunduki” Gunn (b. 1949), a second adopted son of Lord Greystoke, is mysteriously transported to the planet Zillikian, a “counter-Earth.” Also transported is Bunduki’s cousin, Dawn Drummond-Clayton (b. 1950), the granddaughter of John Drummond-Clayton, who was the first adopted son of Lord Greystoke. The inexplicable disappearances of Bunduki and Dawn removed them from consideration for inheriting Pemberley; neither would have been eligible to inherit the titles.

Interestingly, Bunduki reveals that the rest of the Greystoke clan is living in Pellucidar, the inner world described in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ series starting with At the Earth’s Core . When the Greystokes faked their deaths, they must have traveled to Pellucidar to cover their tracks. 8 The savage inner world would have suited Lord Greystoke perfectly, but for reasons yet untold, by the late 1980s he and Jane had returned to the surface world, using new identities.

The jungle lord also had two other children, although he didn’t know it. 9 Chuck Loridans uncovered the story behind one child, conceived with a priestess named La when Greystoke was suffering from amnesia. The child, born in 1938, eventually became known as “Modesty Blaise,” although she never knew who her parents were (“The Daughters of Greystoke,” Myths ).

The other child was Jean Raoul de Coude; he was conceived with Countess Olga de Coude during the events of Burroughs’ The Return of Tarzan , before Greystoke reunited with Jane, and was born in 1910. By 1988, Greystoke had long since faked his death and taken a new identity, but de Coude managed to get to him nonetheless, tormenting the jungle lord before finally being killed ( Tarzan the Warrior , Malibu Comics, 1992). Perhaps if de Coude had known that Pemberley House was up for grabs in 1973, he would have made a claim for it, but it would have been rejected due to his illegitimacy.

Moving on to Doc Wildman, the man of bronze, it will be most instructive to begin with a set of documents pertaining to him; specifically, an essay, a transcript, and some reproduced newspaper clippings, all of which appeared in Farmerphile no. 6 (October 2006) in a piece I titled “Doc Wildman: Out of Time.” Much of the documentation refers to Doc under a name he was known to use on occasion, particularly when operating in Europe, “Doctor Francis Ardan.” 10

The information provided in “Doc Wildman: Out of Time” reconciles the other children and grandchildren of Doc Wildman with the existence of Patricia Wildman by explaining that Doc went back in time several decades and then lived parallel to himself in a second time-track; it doesn’t explain why the other descendants were not identified as his heirs in The Evil in Pemberley House .

Doctor Justine Ducharme (b. 1928) was never publicly revealed as Doc’s daughter. Both Doc and Justine’s mother felt, despite Doctor Natas’ discovery of the familial relationship as described in the tale “The Vanishing Devil,” 11 that it was nevertheless best to maintain as much secrecy as possible in order to protect Justine against further threats aimed at getting to Doc.

Doc’s son in time-track #1, Clark III, was portrayed as being killed in 1966 in the miniseries “The Heritage of Doc Savage” ( Doc Savage , volume 1, issues 1–4, DC Comics, 1987; collected as Doc Savage: The Silver Pyramid , DC Comics, 2010). Brad Mengel’s essay “The Incredible Adventures of Clark Savage III” 12 proposes that Clark III faked his death and became a vigilante under the alias Richard Joseph Camellion. Either way, Clark III was not available as an heir.

Clark III left behind a son who was born in 1967, Clark IV, nicknamed “Chip.” After the tragic events surrounding Clark III’s apparent death, Doc’s remaining aides felt it wisest to quit New York and raise the child in secrecy at one of Doc’s arctic fortresses. The world never knew of Clark IV’s existence until long, long after the 1973 events of Pemberley House .

If one believes my outlandish theory that Doc’s archenemy, “Jean Lumière du Soleil,” was also his son, 13 then he would be a potential heir, but for the fact that he died in 1937 in the pulp novel The Devil Genghis (or, if one prefers, a year later in the Doc Savage pastiche miniseries The Monarch of Armageddon , Millennium Comics, 1991). In Doc’s time-track #1, Lumière du Soleil was briefly resurrected in 1989 in the DC Comics story “Sunlight Rising” ( Doc Savage , volume 2, issues 11–14, DC Comics, 1989), but that cannot have had any impact on Patricia’s inheritance in 1973. 14

It’s worth mentioning that Doc had other grandchildren, although he didn’t know it. In 1949, the nefarious Doctor Natas briefly kidnapped Doc’s daughter Justine Ducharme and extracted samples of her DNA. A few years later he succeeded in cloning Justine, and then one of his henchmen, Pao Tcheou, impregnated the clone as a test. A successful pregnancy ensued, and the daughter, Ducharme, became Natas’ concubine in the 1970s.

Natas then impregnated the clone; Natas’ son, Shang Chi, was born in 1951; his adventures in the 1970s and ’80s were documented in the pages of the Marvel Comics series The Hands of Shang Chi: Master of Kung Fu .

Even if Shang Chi had known he was Doc’s biological grandson, he wouldn’t have been interested in the Pemberley estate.

Finally, it should be noted that Doc’s cousin (called “Pat Savage” in the pulp novels and later known under the name Patricia Hazzard after her marriage to Captain Rex Hazzard, as seen in Lin Carter’s Prince Zarkon novel The Earth-Shaker ) and her granddaughter Pamela Hazzard (from the DC Comics series) have no claim to Pemberley; they are descended from the brother of the woman who had an affair with the sixth Duke of Greystoke, which resulted in the illegitimate birth of “James Wilder,” aka James Clarke Wildman, Sr.

Eliminating noncanonical descendants from consideration might seem like an over-the-top exercise, but it is part and parcel of The Game. It’s literary archaeology—or rather the Wold Newtonian brand of it, Creative Mythography.

As always, the blame and the credit for my obsessions in this area rest with Phil Farmer.

Documenting the historical events in Pemberley House required much research and a bit of well-educated speculation to ensure that I correctly documented the proper passage of the Pemberley Curse from generation to generation. Juggling the various descents of the Curse, the Greystoke title, and the Pemberley estate, and ensuring that all the players were accounted for in all three regards, led to headaches on more than one occasion.

A reconciliation of the family tree as laid out in the manuscript and Farmer’s notes with the established Wold Newton Family tree was also necessary. There were slight differences, indicative that Phil may have made his initial notes before his research on the genealogy of the Greystoke lineage was solidified in Tarzan Alive . Of course, Phil’s sometimes contradictory notes are easily explained when one remembers that he conducted his own research before meeting Lord Greystoke and Patricia Wildman, and Phil confirmed that my various researches and reconciliations were, to the best of his recollection, accurate.

One example of a contradiction is that when Farmer wrote the initial short synopsis of Pemberley House , he thought the Claytons and the Darcys were of the same lineage. His deeper research into the dukes of Greystoke in Tarzan Alive showed this not to be the case; although a female Darcy married the fifth Duke of Greystoke, this marriage did not cause the Pemberley estate to transfer to the Greystoke/Clayton line. Phil discovered that Sir Gawain Darcy sold the estate to a member of the Clayton family.

Despite the fact that Pemberley House and the associated estate came into the Claytons’ hands through purchase from a Darcy, rather than inheritance, Patricia Wildman is still a lineal descendant of the Darcys. As Farmer outlined in Tarzan Alive , Ursula d’Arcy was married to Ralph Arthur Caldwell-Grebson in about 1667. They are ancestors of both the Greystokes and the Darcys.

There were a few other minor reconciliations, such as changing the date of death of Patricia’s grandfather from 1932 to 1931 in order to be consistent with Farmer’s “Doc Savage Chronology” which he put together for the 1973 publication of Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life . A reference to the sixth Duke of Lambton was changed to the sixth Duke of Greystoke, and William Cecil Darcy was changed to William Cecil Clayton; these were relics of Farmer’s original theory that the Darcys and the Greystokes were one and the same. Beyond these slight changes, the corpus of his research for Pemberley House hangs together and synchs up with Tarzan Alive amazingly well.

Or perhaps not so amazing. We are talking about Philip José Farmer, after all.