Lord of the Trees (2 page)

The source of Grandrith’s and Caliban’s strength, intelligence, physical perfection, and extraordinary abilities differs from that of Greystoke and Wildman. The latter two are inheritors of the Wold Newton gene, reinforced in them by generations of intermarriage.

As for half-brothers Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban, their amazing capabilities and talents derive from their grandfather, the immortal member of the Nine called XauXaz, inserting himself into the family line many times over. Since Grandrith and Caliban are the grandsons of a Cro-Magnon man, their bones are much larger and have a much greater surface area for muscle attachment.

Grandrith also believes that XauXaz’s brothers, Ebn XauXaz and Thrithjaz, contributed to the Grandrith family line in a similar fashion, and that Castle Grandrith may have been used by the Nine, or some members of the Nine, as a breeding farm. It is strongly implied that the Grandrith lineage is the result of an elaborate eugenics program, carried out by the Nine over the millennia.

Grandrith’s and Caliban’s genealogies also differ from those of Greystoke and Wildman.

Lord Grandrith’s father is actually the man known to
the world as his uncle: John Cloamby. His legal father, James Cloamby, Viscount Grandrith, is actually his uncle, although the Viscount was married to Grandrith’s mother, Alexandra Applethwaite. John Cloamby, in the madness brought on by the Nine’s elixir, raped his sister-in-law Alexandra, resulting in pregnancy and the birth of Lord Grandrith, the jungle lord. The mad John Cloamby also became the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper.

Later, the madness subsided and John Cloamby escaped to America, changed his surname to Caliban, became a doctor, and fathered James Caliban.

The real father of John and James Cloamby, and their brother Patrick Cloamby, was XauXaz of the Nine. Patrick Cloamby was the father of Trish Wilde; he preceded his brother John to America after assaulting and almost killing a teacher (presumably under the influence of the elixir), also became a doctor, and changed his surname to Wilde in order to escape his past. Trish Wilde was born in 1911.

We know much more about Greystoke’s and Wildman’s genealogies, which have been extensively traced by Philip José Farmer and documented as the Wold Newton Family in two essays: “A Case of a Case of Identity Recased, or,
The Grey Eyes Have It
” (published as an addendum to
Tarzan Alive
) and “The Fabulous Family Tree of Doc Savage (Another Excursion into Creative Mythography)” (published as an addendum to the biography
Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life
).

The Wold Newton Family genealogy is far too extensive and tangled to cover in depth here, but from these tracts we know that Greystoke and Wildman are kin (they are cousins,
sharing the same great-grandfather, among other relations), and are also closely related to many other crimefighters, adventurers, geniuses, and criminal masterminds. These extraordinary people all share the Wold Newton gene, which is reinforced to different degrees based on the amount of intermarriage in their backgrounds.

The Wold Newton mutation occurred when the Wold Cottage meteor struck on December 13, 1795, exposing seven couples and their coachmen to the ionized radiation of the meteor. They “were riding in two coaches past Wold Newton, Yorkshire... A meteorite struck only twenty yards from the two coaches... The bright light and heat and thunderous roar of the meteorite blinded and terrorized the passengers, coachmen, and horses... They never guessed, being ignorant of ionization, that the fallen star had affected them and their unborn.” (
Tarzan Alive
, Addendum 2, pp. 247–248.) This was “the single cause of this nova of genetic splendor, this outburst of great detectives, scientists, and explorers of exotic worlds, this last efflorescence of true heroes in an otherwise degenerate age.” (
Tarzan Alive
, Addendum 2, pp.230–231.)

Farmer discovered that many other well-known people are part of the Wold Newton Family. A short list includes: Solomon Kane (a pre-meteor strike ancestor); The Scarlet Pimpernel (present at the meteor strike); Fitzwilliam Darcy and his wife, Elizabeth Bennet (present at the meteor strike); Sherlock Holmes and his foe Professor Moriarty (aka Captain Nemo); Phileas Fogg; A.J. Raffles; the evil Fu Manchu and his archrival, Sir Denis Nayland Smith; Sir Richard Hannay; Lord Peter Wimsey; The Shadow; Sam Spade; Doc Savage’s friend and
associate Monk Mayfair, his cousin Pat Savage, and his daughter Patricia Wildman; The Spider; Nero Wolfe (the son of Sherlock Holmes); The Avenger; Philip Marlowe; James Bond; Travis McGee; and many others.

As I noted in the afterword to Farmer’s
The Other Log of Phileas Fogg
(Titan Books, 2012), his researches are extremely well-sourced, including a personal interview with the jungle lord and countless hours spent poring over
Burke’s Peerage
. Following the Greystoke and Wildman biographies, Farmer related adventures of the Wold Newton Family in the guise of fiction, similarly sourced from newly discovered, or unpublished, manuscripts and diaries.

Which brings us to the conundrum I noted at the beginning of this introduction.

The prior publication of the Nine novels
A Feast Unknown
,
Lord of the Trees
, and
The Mad Goblin
have created the idea in some readers that the Wold Newton biographies, novels, and stories are all works of fiction. After all, the first two novels are also sourced from the memoirs of Lord Grandrith, and edited for publication by Farmer.
The Mad Goblin
was written by Doc Caliban in the third person singular, though again it is autobiographical and Farmer edited it for publication.

Farmer claims, in essence, that both the Wold Newton stories and the Nine novels are true. They are all—or almost all—based on the accounts of the men and women who experienced the adventures and survived to tell the tales. Or they are sourced from manuscripts, memoirs, and diaries left behind by those who lived through amazing exploits.

However, some readers have concluded that it all must
be fiction—make-believe, the result of Farmer’s overactive imagination—because the Wold Newton tales and the Nine novels appear to be mutually exclusive, based on the differing accounts and histories as outlined above.

There are several potential explanations for the apparent discrepancies. Perhaps the Nine novels are highly fictionalized adventures of the real Greystoke and Savage. Farmer published the books before discovering and revealing the true backgrounds of these men in
Tarzan Alive
and
Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life
. In this scenario, Wold Newton novels such as
The Other Log of Phileas Fogg
,
Time’s Last Gift
,
The Peerless Peer
, the Khokarsa series (
Hadon of Ancient Opar
,
Flight to Opar
, and
The Song of Kwasin
),
Ironcastle
,
Escape from Loki
,
The Dark Heart of Time
, and
The Evil in Pemberley House
are truer reflections of the lives of these heroes.

In this set-up, Farmer’s initial meeting with “James Claymore” (the putative John Cloamby) at the home of a mutual friend in Kansas City, Missouri, as recounted by Farmer in his “Editor’s Note” to
A Feast Unknown
, is a falsehood created by Farmer to lend legitimacy to his manuscript. Perhaps Farmer had stumbled upon rumors and half-truths regarding the events of
A Feast Unknown
,
Lord of the Trees
, and
The Mad Goblin
, and had crafted these into a rousing adventure trilogy. If so, Farmer may have been embarrassed when he actually met the real Greystoke a few years later, although it’s not clear from their interview that the two men discussed the incident.
¹

Alternatively, Lord Grandrith’s and Doc Caliban’s escapades could have occurred much as Farmer documented them, based on these supermen’s memoirs. In this scenario, the two heroes coexist alongside their more famous analogues in the Wold Newton Universe. Farmer scholar Dennis E. Power is a proponent of this theory, and has outlined his thoughts in an intricate series of interconnected articles on his website,
The Wold Newton Universe: A Secret History
(
pjfarmer.com/secret/index.htm
). Briefly, Power suggests that Grandrith and Caliban are the result of an elaborate plan by the Nine to create doppelgängers of Greystoke and Wildman.

Power, discussing Grandrith and Caliban vis-à-vis the Wold Newton Family, suggests that, “Although the characters of Doc Caliban and Lord Grandrith can be placed in the Wold Newton Universe, we must ask if they were members of the Wold Newton Family. I would doubt that they were immediately related to the Wold Newton line, but a relationship possibly exists. Farmer claimed that [Greystoke] was descended from Odin. In all three of the Doc Caliban/Lord Grandrith novels, the claim is made that XauXaz was Odin. If not all of XauXaz’s families and progeny were designated for the Nine’s breeding programs, then it is a possibility that he was a distant ancestor to Greystoke and [Doc Wildman].”

Under this scenario, Farmer met Cloamby (as “James Claymore”) much as described in
A Feast Unknown
, and was later put in touch with Caliban, serving as the editor of their manuscripts. A few years later he met and interviewed Greystoke.

A third explanation is that Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban exist in a universe which is parallel, but very similar, to the Wold
Newton Universe. This alternate universe may share a common past with the Wold Newton Universe, but perhaps diverged from it at some point in the distant millennia. Or perhaps the two universes have always been parallel and coexistent.

The parallel universe theory is supported by Farmer’s fragment of a fourth Nine novel,
The Monster on Hold
. The fragment was introduced by Farmer at the 1983 World Fantasy Convention, and was published in the convention program.
²
During a series of adventures in which Doc Caliban continues to battle the forces of the Nine, he “begins to suffer from a recurring nightmare and has dreams alternating with these in which he sees himself or somebody like himself. However, this man, whom he calls The Other, also at times in Caliban’s dreams seems to be dreaming of Caliban.”

Later, when Caliban has descended below the surface into a labyrinthine series of miles-deep caverns, in search of the extra-dimensional entity known as Shrassk, a being which had been invoked and then imprisoned by the Nine in the eighteenth century, Caliban has another vision of The Other: “The Other was standing at the entrance to a cave. He was smiling and holding up one huge bronze-skinned hand, two fingers forming a V.”

“One huge bronze-skinned hand.”

The Other is Doc Wildman, communicating to Caliban across the dimensional void.

Dennis Power takes a different view: “In this fragment, Farmer seemed to indicate that Doc Caliban and the Nine lived in an alternate universe from [Doc Wildman]. While Shrassk, the... monster, was most likely extra-dimensional, Doc Caliban of course was not, although he may have become trapped in other-dimensional space by the machinations of the Nine. I think that Farmer may have made the assertion that Doc Caliban, Grandrith, etc., resided in a different universe for a few reasons. First of all was the safety of his family. Having learned that the Nine were not entirely wiped out, he wanted to demonstrate that he was not a threat to them. By placing them in another universe, it is as if he was saying that not only were they fictional, but also that no true life counterparts ever existed in the real world. Also, he may have been trying to forever end the controversial theory that Grandrith and Caliban were [Greystoke] and [Doc Wildman]. This theory still raises the hackles today among casual readers of Farmer’s works who have only read
A Feast Unknown
,
Lord of the Trees
, or
The Mad Goblin
, and not his biographies or authorized novels about the real [Greystoke] and Doc.”

Nonetheless, if one disagrees with Power, the parallel universe explanation begs the question how Farmer came into possession of Grandrith’s memoirs.

Could Farmer have received Grandrith’s and Caliban’s manuscripts from an alternate universe? Assuming that Farmer’s recounting of meeting Grandrith in Kansas City is accurate—at least from Farmer’s perspective—how might this have occurred? And how did Grandrith subsequently deliver Volume X of his memoirs (which became
Lord of the Trees
) to Farmer? How did Farmer receive Doc Caliban’s manuscript for
The Mad Goblin
?

Perhaps Grandrith learned how to cross the dimensional gate and delivered his manuscripts and that of Caliban to a noted writer of science-fiction in an alternate universe who would understand it? Probably not, as Doc Caliban does not seem to have any knowledge of the parallel universe in 1977 and 1984 (the dates of the two known fragments of Caliban’s further adventures, “Down to Earth’s Centre” and
The Monster on Hold
); presumably, if Grandrith had learned to traverse the dimensions in the late 1960s, he would have informed his half-brother Caliban.

Could someone else have passed through the dimensional gate and given the manuscript to Farmer? It would not have been hard to pose as Lord Grandrith (or rather, “James Claymore”) during their one meeting, since Farmer had never met him, and indeed had never heard of him. But Farmer, with his fascination with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ tales of a jungle lord raised by “apes,” would have been instantly hooked by the story of a real-life feral man brought up under such unusual circumstances, and it would not have been hard to convince him that Grandrith was the real-life inspiration for Burroughs’ tales—which, in fact, was largely true; they just happened to be Burroughs’ tales in an alternate universe.

Much later, when Doc Caliban conveyed to Farmer the events of
The Monster on Hold
—presumably Caliban later learned how to travel across the dimensional nexus held open by Shrassk—Farmer realized he had been duped back in the late 1960s. Or at least partially duped. For the man who had delivered the manuscripts to him had not been Lord Grandrith, but someone who had had other reasons for making the manuscripts public in Farmer’s universe.