Endnotes

Chapter Three

1 That is, the man calling himself the seventh Duke, William Cecil Arthur Clayton, apparently died in late 1972 at age eighty-one. The real William Cecil Arthur Clayton died in 1910. He was the “William Cecil Clayton,” the cousin of the jungle lord, seen in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels Tarzan of the Apes and The Return of Tarzan . Upon William Cecil Clayton’s death, John Clayton, the ape man, was legitimately entitled to become the eighth Duke of Greystoke; however, he so resembled his late cousin that he decided instead to adopt his cousin’s identity, in order to avoid the inevitable publicity which would accompany the revelation that an English lord, a peer of the realm, was a feral child raised in the wilds of Africa by “apes.” Farmer knew this, or deduced this, based on his “An Exclusive Interview with ‘Lord Greystoke’” which took place on September 1, 1970, or else from the extensive research which formed the basis of his biography, Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke . Or both. Lord Greystoke persuaded Mr. Farmer to suppress certain details, such as his impersonation of his late cousin. From 1910 until 1972, when Greystoke faked his death and that of his wife, the ape man refused to see his late cousin’s mother, the Dowager Duchess, since she was the only person still living who could easily penetrate the impersonation. The “death” of the jungle lord—the ostensible seventh Duke of Greystoke—in 1972, leaving no other heirs, left Patricia Wildman as next in line of succession to inherit Pemberley House and the associated estate. When, in 1974, a lost manuscript by Doctor John H. Watson , The Adventure of the Peerless Peer , was released as a limited edition hardcover and revealed that Sherlock Holmes had discovered the impersonation in 1916, Greystoke initially appeared to be unconcerned. In fact, he freely admitted to the deception in memoirs which he provided to Farmer (“Extracts from the Memoirs of ‘Lord Greystoke,’” Mother was a Lovely Beast , Philip José Farmer, ed., Chilton, 1974; Tarzan Alive , Bison Books, 2006). However, in 1976, he reversed himself. Acting through a series of trusted middlemen, he used his influence to have the 1976 mass market paperback edition of The Adventure of the Peerless Peer suppressed. Farmer, who edited the Watson manuscript for publication, received a friendly warning letter from Greystoke, now residing in parts unknown under an assumed name. (Farmer was not surprised at receiving the letter, since the jungle lord had indicated in their 1970 interview that he would soon fake his death and disappear.) The ape man was also aware that Farmer, in the course of interviewing Patricia Wildman for the biography of her father, Doctor James Clarke Wildman, Jr. (first published in 1973 under the title Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life ), had learned of Patricia’s adventure in England when she came to investigate the Pemberley estates. In the event that Farmer decided to publish Patricia Wildman’s story, Greystoke strongly encouraged him to alter and fictionalize any details about his own impersonation of the seventh Duke. Obviously Farmer intended to comply, although he never ended up completing Patricia’s story. It can hardly matter, some forty years later, if the truth about Greystoke’s impersonation is noted here, especially in light of the fact that the jungle lord was not entirely successful in suppressing Peerless Peer , back in 1976; that he himself admitted it in his memoirs; and that he has apparently approved of its recent republication in the collection Venus on the Half-Shell and Others (Christopher Paul Carey, ed., Subterranean Press, 2008) and as a standalone novel ( The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Peerless Peer, Titan Books, 2011). It should also be mentioned that more recent editions of Burke’s Peerage now reflect the correct information: “ SIR WILLIAM CECIL ARTHUR, 7th DUKE, b. 18 May 1891, educated Eton, Cambridge, d. unm. 1910 in Gabon, the marquessate of Exminister, the viscountcy of Passmore, and the baronetcy becoming extinct according to the limitations of heirs male of the body, and was succeeded by his cousin, JOHN CLAYTON, 8th AND PRESENT DUKE, who was discovered alive in Gabon, having been raised after the death of his parents by the aborigines.”

Chapter Four

2 The Dowager Duchess of Greystoke (Edith Jansenius) still being alive in 1973, at age 103, contradicts Philip José Farmer’s Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke ; Farmer quotes Burke’s Peerage as citing her death in June 1907. The mystery behind the error in Burke’s remains unsolved.

Chapter Eight

3 As we now know, this is not technically true. The fifth Duke’s son, John Clayton, and his pregnant wife Alice Rutherford Clayton were lost at sea when the Fuwalda went down off the shores of the island of St. Helena in 1888. However, John Clayton and his wife survived on the coast of French Congo for several more months, into the year 1889; they lived one day past the date of the fifth Duke’s death. Their son, John Clayton, was later immortalized in novels and stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs as “Tarzan of the Apes.” As noted earlier, after the death of William Cecil Clayton, the seventh Duke of Greystoke, his cousin John Clayton, the jungle lord, was legitimately the eighth Duke of Greystoke; Greystoke adopted his late cousin’s identity and became the seventh Duke in order to avoid publicity.

Chapter Nine

4 Lord Greystoke took pains to keep the existence of his children—natural and adopted—hidden from the world at large. He didn’t care about passing on his titles to them and they had all the income they needed from the gold reserves at Opar. He even carried the deception forward in his “Extracts from the Memoirs of ‘Lord Greystoke’” when he indicated that his natural son Jackie had died in infancy. This contradicted the information Farmer had discovered and presented in Tarzan Alive , namely that the natural son, John Paul “Jackie” Clayton had indeed lived, married Alice Horatia, and had a son of his own in 1943. Greystoke lied in his “Memoirs” to muddy the waters and protect his family from unwanted investigation in the wake of the publication of Tarzan Alive . Farmer felt partially responsible and agreed to be complicit in publishing some of the untruths or half-truths in the “Memoirs” to help the ape man and his family cover their tracks. Which is not to say that everything in Greystoke’s memoirs is false; far from it, most of it is true, but key pieces are misdirection. In any event, given the lengths the jungle lord had gone to conceal knowledge of his children, and grandchildren, from the world at large, he could hardly leave them to the public’s eye after he faked his and his wife’s deaths. In fact, Tarzan Alive , which Farmer wrote in 1970–71, indicated that Greystoke was then planning to arrange a false death for himself, Jane, John Paul (the biological son), John Drummond-Clayton (the adopted son), and Drummond-Clayton’s wife Meriem. "Young John Armand [the son of Drummond-Clayton and Meriam] would then become the ninth Duke of ‘Greystoke.’” John Armand would arrange his own faked death at a later time.

However, it’s not hard to postulate that upon the 1972 publication of Tarzan Alive and the resultant attention, the family amended the plans and agreed that John Armand would join the rest of the family in faking their deaths and taking new identities. They had all the wealth they needed and no need to maintain their interest in the peerage, which in some ways was a liability as a driver of unwanted attention—unwanted, because all the family members had access to and were using an anti-aging elixir Greystoke had discovered. The jungle lord and his family, as they made the decision to have John Armand also fake his death, did not realize this would cause the extinction of the Greystoke peerage, but if they had it wouldn’t have changed their decision. As it happened, nearly simultaneous with the faked deaths of Lord Greystoke and family came the very real, tragic, and mysterious death of Sir Beowulf William Clayton, Bt. Sir Beowulf was the great-grandson of Sir William Clayton, who was the younger brother of the fourth Duke of Greystoke. Upon the mass “extinction” of the ape man, his sons, and grandsons, the Greystoke title would have passed to Sir Beowulf, but for his untimely and unexplained death. It is fortunate that Sir Beowulf translated approximately one-third of a particular diary and, just before he died, furnished it and a set of notes to Philip José Farmer, which enabled Farmer to reconstruct the true story behind Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days . Farmer titled his account The Other Log of Phileas Fogg . Sir Beowulf left no sons, and the Greystoke title went extinct.

Afterword

5 Although only male heirs can inherit the peerage, female children could inherit the Pemberley estate, and so all descendants, male and female, are included here.Although only male heirs can inherit the peerage, female children could inherit the Pemberley estate, and so all descendants, male and female, are included here.

6 Wold Newton scholar Dennis E. Power disagrees with me to a certain extent, maintaining that the immortality elixir eventually ran out and that John Drummond-Clayton died at an old age. See “The Royal Jelly Problem: An Exploration of the Causes and Prevalence of Immortality in the Wold Newton Universe” at Power’s The Wold Newton Universe: A Secret History website, www.pjfarmer.com/secret/Immortal/royal-jelly.htm.

7 In “Ouroboros, Part II” ( Farmerphile no. 5, Christopher Paul Carey and Paul Spiteri, eds., July 2006), I dated Bunduki as occurring in 1974; subsequent research has revised the date, placing it and the following three novels in the series in early 1972.

8 Farmer dismissed Burroughs’ crossover novel Tarzan at the Earth’s Core as complete fiction due to the physical improbability of the inner Earth described in the Pellucidar series. Perhaps Pellucidar was not exactly as described in Burroughs’ books, with an eternal sun hanging in the center of a hollow globe, but rather was a series of interconnected underground caverns teeming with primitive and prehistoric life. Those whose credulity is strained in this regard are free to reject Edson’s assertion that the Greystokes moved to the inner world after faking their deaths in 1972.

9 Dennis E. Power maintains there is a third child: Diana, Princess of the Amazons, conceived while Lord Greystoke/John Gribardsun was posing as the historical Hercules, after he traveled back in time in Farmer’s Time’s Last Gift . See “Marvelous, Fantastic Tales of the Wold Newton Universe: Wonder Woman” on Power’s website, www.pjfarmer.com/secret/marvelous/wonderwoman.htm. Gribardsun fathered countless children while living from 12,000 BCE to the present (see also “Sahhindar through the Centuries” by Eckert and Power in Farmerphile no. 13, Paul Spiteri and Win Scott Eckert, eds., July 2008; revised as “Gribardsun through the Ages: A Chronology of Events Pertinent to Time’s Last Gift ” in the Titan Books edition of Time’s Last Gift , 2012); since estate laws undoubtedly do not account for potential heirs conceived while time-traveling, we can safely ignore Diana and the rest, at least in terms of their right to inherit property or titles.

10 See Doc Ardan: City of Gold and Lepers by Guy d’Armen, adapted and retold in English by Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier, Black Coat Press, 2004. The novel, in which Ardan battles the nefarious Doctor Natas, can be interpreted as an early adventure of the man of bronze versus Doctor Fu Manchu.

11 A short story by Win Scott Eckert in Tales of the Shadowmen, Vol. 1: The Modern Babylon , Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier, eds., Black Coat Press, (2005).

12 Available at An Expansion of Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe website, Win Scott Eckert, ed., www.pjfarmer.com/woldnewton/Pulp2.htm.

13 Briefly, the theory goes that in April 1919, nine months after Doc’s escape from the prison camp Loki (see Farmer’s Doc Savage novel, Escape from Loki ), a child is born to Lili Bugov, the Countess Idivzhopu. The child is raised as the son of Baron Karl von Hessel (Doc’s grandfather, aka Wolf Larsen, who will go by the moniker Baron Karl by the time of the Doc Savage novel Fortress of Solitude ). However, given young Clark Savage’s intimate encounter with the Countess Idivzhopu in July 1918, there can be little doubt as to the true parentage of this child, who will grow up to menace the world, not to mention his own hated father, as “John Sunlight.”

My colleague Christopher Paul Carey, in his article “The Green Eyes Have It—Or Are They Blue? or Another Case of Identity Recased” ( Myths ), gathers and documents an incredible amount of evidence about the Countess, von Hessel, and Doc’s archenemy “John Sunlight.” Carey concludes that John Sunlight is either Lili Bugov posing as a man, or that she underwent a sex-change operation to become Sunlight. Carey evocatively points out both Bugov’s and Sunlight’s unusually long fingers. Keeping in mind all the physical similarities between Bugov and Sunlight that Carey documents, as well as the behavioral differences, I am led to a different conclusion. I believe Sunlight is Lili Bugov’s son.

However, if Sunlight were born in April of 1919, he would be only eighteen years old in August of 1937 ( Fortress of Solitude ). This could pose a problem, in terms of his believability as a villain. On the other hand, Baron von Hessel/Baron Karl has been mentoring him in the ways of evil for those eighteen years. And Doc made a believable hero at age sixteen, just as many other Wold Newton Family members started their careers early in life. It is stated in Fortress of Solitude that, “He was not a young man...” but I believe this to be blatant misdirection on writer Lester Dent’s part, in order to help Doc conceal the terrible secret of Sunlight’s parentage. In short, Sunlight’s age is not an insurmountable issue. (It is interesting to note that, based on textual evidence in Fortress of Solitude , Sunlight escaped from the Siberian gulag at approximately age sixteen or seventeen—the same age at which his father escaped from a similar reputably inescapable prison camp.)

Further, I do not believe that Farmer would have noted the sexual encounter between Clark and Lili without reason. Sunlight, like Doc, emits a strange sound in times of excitement or stress, although Sunlight’s takes the form of a low, evil growl, rather than Doc’s cool, exotic trilling. Sunlight’s inhuman strength, derived from unspecified sources, and his incredible stamina and will power, a result of his magnificent brain, are extensively described in Fortress of Solitude . The derivation of Sunlight’s formidable intelligence is easily understood once it is revealed that he is possibly of the Moriarty lineage (per another theory promulgated by Dennis E. Power, which holds that Wolf Larsen was a son of Professor Moriarty; this theory was adopted in my “Who’s Going to Take over the World When I’m Gone (A Look at the Genealogies of Wold Newton Family Super-Villains and Their Nemeses)” in Myths , but was contradicted in my tale “The Wild Huntsman” in The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 3: Portraits of a Trickster , Michael Croteau, ed., Meteor House, 2012; Tales of the Wold Newton Universe , Eckert and Carey, eds., Titan Books, 2013; nonetheless, if “The Wild Huntsman” is correct, then Sunlight’s lineage via his grandfather Wolf Larsen is still extraordinary), as well as of the Wildman and the Clayton lines. In my estimation, the physical similarities between Countess Idivzhopu and Sunlight, coupled with Sunlight’s Wildman-like strength, vocal habits, and brain power, undoubtedly point to a familial relationship, one made possible by Doc’s indiscretion with the Countess.

In any event, whether one agrees with my theory, Chris Carey’s, or neither, it has no bearing on Sunlight’s ability, or rather lack thereof, to inherit Pemberley House.

14 In the five years since this essay was written, there have been two additional Doc Savage comic series. DC Comics incorporated Doc into their 2010 First Wave series; the stories took place in an alternate DC universe where Doc interacted with The Bat-Man, The Spirit, and other characters. Next, Doc tales were published by Dynamite Comics. This series, like the 1980s DC stories, brought Doc forward to the modern day, but in a completely different continuity from the 1980s DC version. Reconciling these alternate continuities with the Wold Newtonian history of Doc Wildman and Pat Wildman would not be instructive and is beyond the scope of this afterword.