Yesterday was Robert E Howard’s birthday, and tomorrow is C. L. Moore’s. Will Oliver provides another guest post about their correspondence. Thanks will.

C.L. Moore’s P.S.

By Will Oliver

C.L. Moore (Catherine Lucille Moore, January 24, 1911—April 4, 1987) was a fan of Robert E. Howard’s writing. As she once explained to R. H. Barlow in an April 1934 letter, “I’d like to read everything Robert E. Howard has ever written. The first story of his I read was WORMS OF THE EARTH, and I’ve been a fanatic ever since.” Moore had a brief correspondence with Howard toward the end of his life and one of the early extant letters is dated January 29, 1935. She addresses a wide array of topics, praises Howard’s writing, and then signs-off. However, she added an interesting postscript that read:

P.S. I just wanted to remark that

‘We pinned our hope

To a rotten rope

And the Man from Galilee.’

In the faint hope that you’ll recognize it. Those three lines are another of my pet ha’nts, and absolutely anonymous so far as I’m concerned.

I liked the three lines of poetry and was curious as to where they came from. So, I did what every good researcher does today, I Googled it. It must have been a bad day for Google because I found absolutely nothing attributing those three lines. I did find some connections to several songs, but not one of them featured the three lines in the song’s lyrics. Still, that gave me the idea they may actually have come from a song and not a poem. So, after going down a dizzying path of dead-ends and loose connections too numerous to recount, I finally found the source, but it was not what I was expecting. The three lines came from the album, Folk Songs of New York City compiled and sung by June Lazare Folkways Records, New York City, 1966.

Although some of the songs on the record and in the accompanying book were popular throughout the country, most of them were likely relegated to folks from the city itself. Many of the songs did not include the dates they were either written or published but fortunately this particular song did. The book/record states it was released on July 4, 1923, and the song was titled “The Castle by the Sea.” How C.L. Moore learned of this song, we’ll probably never know, but perhaps she heard it when it first came out, the year she turned twelve. One other thing we will probably never know is whether or not Howard knew the lines’ source.

Anyway, for the curious of Howard and/or Moore esoterica, here are the lyrics to the folk song:

The Castle by the Sea

Silence in the castle,
The cons were fast asleep,
For it was well past midnight
When Donnelly made the leap.

Inside, and out, and all around,
With sentries on patrol,
While through the cell bars we counted the stars,
And heard the briny roll.

‘Twas the midnight hour by the old clock tower,
And the moonbeams played on the sea,
So we pinned our hope on a rotten rope
And the Man from Galilee.

The old fort’s wall was smooth and tall,
And sixty feet below,
The sentry on his nightly beat
Was pacing to and fro.

Day by day we sawed away,
With hacksaw we did hew
At the bars so tough that were old and rough
Till our task was through.

From the gunport’s floor, we gloated o’er
From servile sentry’s fate,
When at early dawn we’d both be gone
And we cursed them in our hate.

Then said my friend, “Give me the end,
The end of the rope I mean.
With all our might we’ll tie it tight
We’ll beat this old fort clean.”

He made his boats, then like a ghost
He vanished from my sight.
Down, down he went like a meteor sent
From some tremendous height.

The devil himself must have sent the elf
To cut our rope apart,
And when it broke, the grisly joke
Sent shivers through my heart.

Then and there I said a prayer,
For I surely thought him dead.
But I saw him crawl to the old sea well
While the moon shone on his head.

Up the stairs they mount to take a count
In the cells where we lay like mice,
But the ones who had a name, ‘cause they couldn’t play the game,
Were the ones that they counted twice.

It was thus down the line till they come to number nine,
That was called the politician’s cell.
They searched it high and wide, and then they ran outside,
And what they found out there I’ll tell.

Gunport on their left, bars broken and bereft,
Bars that had seen a century through
And a space two-foot square he had left behind there,
When he turned to me and said, adieu.

Well I had not time to study ‘cause they knew I was his buddy.
They landed me in solitary cell.
I still had hop and faith that my friend had made it safe,
But the way he hit the ground was hell.

Alas, for hope and faith, when the moon was shining bright
They captured him on the Brooklyn ferry.
He was bruised and shaken from the fall he had taken,
But they rushed him into solitary.

After all that’s gone and past, will he try again, you ask?
Will he try again for his liberty?
On this I have no doubt, if they do not let him out,
He will some day beat the Castle by the sea.